Extinction Machine (34 page)

Yao had begged Wen to be allowed to communicate the information to his own people back in the United States, but Wen had refused. They had to follow proper protocols.

Proper.

Now those protocols were playing out. Yao lay ten feet away with half his face shot away. Their colleagues were all dead. Each “properly” handled by the uniformed thugs who accompanied the science team here from the capital.

Wen tried to hear what these men—these killers—were saying, but he could only hear fragments. His ears rang constantly and everything was getting so dim, so far away, as if the entire cavern was receding from him.

“… there is no other opening…,” said one of the scientists.

“… since that is clearly impossible, we should search for an entrance cave…”

“… ground-penetrating radar…”

The voices faded and then came back as if the men were casually pacing the room while engaged in an idle conversation.
So strange,
thought Wen.

“… such a shame that it is so badly damaged…”

“… there are several components in perfect shape, Admiral Xiè…”

“… and a line on more. My sources inside the Majestic program assure me they can smuggle…”

“… with what we already have, Admiral Xiè, perhaps it will be enough to rebuild the Dragon Engine…”

The voices faded again. They were only fragments anyway. Some of them made sense, most were meaningless. Or, they were becoming meaningless as Wen became detached from the moment. Perhaps detached from himself.

A tear burned at the corner of his eye. As stunning as this discovery was, it was not his discovery. It did not matter to him as much as it mattered to the others. To Yao. To the government. To these men from the Fourth Bureau or the uniformed killers who traveled with them. They were all focused on the silvery wreckage in the center of the cavern. They barely even looked at the walls. At all the wonders there in the walls.

All those dinosaurs.

All that perfection. Not a bone out of place. Not a bone missing.

Hundreds of them. At least half of them unknown in the fossil record.

Would these government thugs even stop to consider them?

Or would they blast them apart in order to remove the wreckage from this chamber?

Wen closed his eyes for a moment, tasting the grief of that potential loss.

When he opened his eyes again he was much colder. The men were nowhere in sight. He had no idea how much time had passed. The chamber was silent. The others from Yao’s team and his own lay in utter stillness. How Wen—the oldest and frailest of them all—lingered while the others had died was a mystery. Wen doubted that he was in any way “luckier” than the dead. They were already beyond pain and fear, and he was not.

Wen lay with his face pointing toward the twisted metal.

“No,” he said in his ghost of a voice.

This is not what he wanted to see with his last moments of sight.

He wanted to see his precious dinosaurs.

One last time.

Wen summoned the last of his strength, took a final ragged breath, and tried to turn over. It was a simple act, if he could move far enough then gravity would do the rest, and he would see the bones in the walls.

He tried.

With everything he had left, he tried.

But his body would not move. He was too weak. There was simply not enough left in him to turn even the frail scarecrow of a body that he owned. Not even his head would move now.

Red poppies blossomed in his eyes and the breath burst from Wen in a final gasp of defeat.

He lay there and all that he could see was the impossible machine.

It was the last thing he saw as the darkness of the cavern swallowed him whole.

Chapter Fifty-eight

The Warehouse
Sunday, October 20, 10:45 a.m.

“Talk to me, Bug,” said Church in a voice that was getting harsher by the minute.

“I can’t break through the jammer, boss. Joe’s going to have to get to a landline or a computer with a cable. Whoever these bastards are, they’re killing the air.”

“Is Joe all right?” asked Rudy, but before Church could reply his phone rang.

Church frowned at the name on the screen display. He hit a button to mute Bug and held up a finger for Rudy to remain silent as he answered the call. “Yes, General,” he said. He listened for a moment. “Yes, you can send me a coded video. I’m in a secure location.”

Church hit a few keys on his laptop and watched a video file, but he did not turn the laptop so Rudy could see it. Church plugged earbuds into the speaker jack and listened in silence as he watched.

Rudy crossed his legs and sat back as he studied Church’s face. After two years he was still trying to catalog the man’s reactions. They were very subtle and generally too well hidden to read at all. Once in a while, though, that iron control slipped.

He watched it slip now, and he wondered which of the day’s crises was unfastening the bolts on that legendary calm.

“General…,” said Church after the video was done, “tell me everything you know about this.”

The conversation was mostly one-sided, with the general doing most of the talking. As Church had not put it on speaker there was little more than a few soft encouraging grunts to go on. That, and a gradual change in Church’s body language. The man slowly straightened as if his body was being pulled into a posture of terrible tension. The hand holding the phone was white-knuckle tight. The other hand lay on the desk and Mr. Church slowly opened it, pressing the palm and splayed fingers flat and pressing them against the polished wood.

“General,” said Church, “there is a high probability that this incident relates to what’s happening in Washington right now, and to other matters currently unfolding. You will need to speak with General Croft for further information. He will inform you of today’s … developments. Speak to no one else about this. Detain everyone who was there and confiscate all cell phones. No, I don’t care who they are. This matter supersedes all other concerns. Lock it down, General. Do it now.”

Church closed the phone and set it down on the desk. He removed his tinted glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“I’m almost afraid to ask what that was about,” said Rudy.

Before he answered, Church removed a pocket handkerchief and cleaned his glasses. He kept his eyes down, focused on the phone as he did so, and Rudy knew that Church was unwilling to let anyone see his eyes without the barrier of the tinted lenses.

He put the glasses on, took a long breath and breathed it out through his nostrils.

“That was Major General Armand Schmidt,” said Church. “He’s in charge of the stealth aircraft program out at Dugway along with his aide, Colonel Betty Snider.”

Rudy nodded. “I believe I met him at a State Department dinner. I took him to be a highly competent officer.”

“He is, and he’s not prone to hysteria. However, today they were doing a mock combat test of the Locust FB-119, advanced-design stealth fighter-bomber.”

He turned his laptop around, pulled the earbuds from the jack and replayed the video. When it was over, Rudy found that he could not speak. He tried, but he simply could not articulate his reaction to what he’d just seen.

“What do you think, Doctor?”

Rudy found his tongue. “Is this … is this … I mean, this can’t be real … Can it?”

Church did not bother to answer.

Of course it was real.

Rudy felt as if the floor was dropping away from under him. His hands were ice cold and his mouth was dry.

“What is happening?” he asked.

Church looked at him and said, plainly and frankly, “I don’t know.”

Chapter Fifty-nine

The Hangar
Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn, New York
Sunday, October 20, 10:46 a.m.

While Bug labored to solve the problem with the jammer, Dr. William Hu shifted his focus back to the project he’d been working on for the last few days.

The microwave pulse pistol.

The lab was filled was smoke, and he engaged the blowers while his assistants cleared away the debris and erected a fresh stack of bricks. Currently the microwave pulse pistol was clamped to a cart and placed twenty feet from the target. At five, ten, and fifteen feet the destructive power of the MPP was appalling.

And delicious.

This was fun, this was his idea of science. Not that UFO bullshit Joe Ledger and that daffy broad in Maryland were trying to get him to believe. You could measure this, you could prove this. Who cared if someone stomped out a crop circle on the White House lawn? Those things could be faked.

But this—the guns—this was real science.

Hu grinned as he paced off twenty-five feet, then locked the cart’s wheels. The assistants patted the target—a wall of red bricks, cinder blocks, and a couple of big river rocks brought in from outside the Hangar.

His assistant, Melanie, clipped leads to various places on the gun and watched the meter of a small device she held.

“This is crazy, Doctor,” she said. “The meter still reads 94.189 percent after nine test fires in five minutes.”

“I know,” said Hu, “I love it.”

They grinned at each other like a couple of kids.

Hu turned and pulled his protective goggles into place. “Clear the firing line!”

Everyone moved behind thick Lucite shields.

“Firing,” he yelled and pulled the trigger.

Tok!

The wall of debris exploded.

“Outstanding,” cried Hu. “Absolutely outstanding. Melanie, is there any power drain?”

Melanie ran the meter again and shook her head. “Ninety-three point seven seven six percent.”

They tried five more distances, and only when they neared forty feet did the destructive force of the MPP begin to diminish. By sixty feet it had little effect.

They kept testing the gun. Against blocks of ice and sheets of metal, firing through glass, firing at sides of beef to determine the effect on tissue. The gun had been delivered to Hu late on Thursday and now it was Sunday. It had been fired a total of 607 times. On arrival at Hu’s lab the gun had a charge of 99.00034 percent. After all those firings, after all that destruction, it had a charge of 90.0957 percent.

Hu removed the clamps and picked up the pistol.

It was ugly in design, but beautiful to his eyes.

And those numbers. The range, the effect, the incredible amount of power held in reserve.

“Who made this thing?” asked Melanie. It was probably the hundredth time she or someone at the Hangar had asked that question. “Who could have made it?”

Hu shook his head. Over the last couple of days he had spoken discretely to several who were on the cutting edge of microwave technology and they told him that they were decades away from a man-portable microwave gun like this pistol. The current estimate was that to fire a gun like this you’d need a battery the size of a Jeep Cherokee. And yet when they’d dismantled the gun, all they found in the battery compartment was a piece of drab metal approximately the size of an old metal cigarette lighter. The metal had no discernible features, and the gun fired no matter which end of the battery was inserted first. Ledger had found a second battery in the pocket of one of the men who’d ambushed him this morning.

Then Melanie stuck a pin in Hu’s enthusiasm. She got a call, listened, frowned, hung up, and said, “That was Mitchell in metallurgy. He finished his analysis of the scrapings he did on the other battery.”

“And?”

“And he’s never seen anything like it. He looked at it under the electron microscope and it appears to be an alloy composed of two metals. It’s approximately twenty percent iridium, but the other metal is unknown.”

“Meaning that he hasn’t identified it yet?”

“No,” she said, “meaning that it is a metal currently unknown to science.”

Chapter Sixty

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 10:47 a.m.

“Junie,” I yelled, “do you have a landline?”

“No, only my cell,” she said, rising shakily up from behind the couch. “Wait—there’s one in the lighthouse. Emergency use only, it goes direct to the Coast Guard.”

Even before she finished saying it she was running toward the kitchen. I followed and tried to get ahead of her to body-block her view of whatever Ghost left of the Closers, but I was a step too late. She did not scream. Instead it was an intake of breath so deep and sharp that it was like a reverse scream, all of the terror driving back into her. Ghost acts like a puppy a lot of the time and he can be as playful as a house pet, but not when he’s working. He is by breeding and training a combat dog. A fighter and killer true to all of the lupine genes that fire in him every time the moment turns ugly. What he left was a man, but you had to look closely to tell. We didn’t look all that close.

I gave Junie a gentle push and she turned away, shaking her head in denial and disbelief. She looked up at me with her troubled blue eyes.

“Is this what you do?” she asked in a voice that was filled with pain.

I turned away, not willing—or perhaps able—to let her read that particular truth. It was a coin I did not want to spend, and it was a fee that would hurt her to accept.

Or so I thought.

Her fingers touched my cheek and she gently, firmly turned my head so that I faced her again. I looked into her eyes and searched for revulsion, for the judgment that was my due for being who and what I was. Inside my head the Killer tried to stare her down, but even he could not. Maybe I’m not sure who looked back at her. Cop, Killer, Civilized Man. Or someone else.

Pain flickered across Junie Flynn’s face. It darted like lightning through her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

Then it was she who turned away. Not because she was unable to hold that contact, but because she had seen what there was to see. She passed me and reached for the handle of a door set between two pantries, turned it, and went through it.