Olympus Device 1: The Olympus Device (36 page)

Sergei didn’t know what exactly was going on. His analytical mind quickly sorted through several possibilities, eventually settling with the logical assumption that the authorities had finally caught up with Mr. Weathers. He didn’t care.

Walking boldly from the stack of pallets, he brandished the rail gun for all to see, and then pointed the device at the Ship Channel Bridge. Yelling at the top of his lungs, “Cease fire and back away, or I will drop the bridge with this weapon.”

The law enforcement officers approaching the parking lot had been briefed on the rail gun’s potential – a few of the team having been
eyewitnesses to the destruction at the Medical Center. The man in charge of the closest assault group keyed his mic. “Sir, the suspect is threatening to shoot the Ship Channel Bridge with the super weapon if we don’t back down. Instructions?”

Monroe was already on his way, the lead agent wanting desperately to be present when Weathers went down.
The transmission reporting the huge bridge was now a hostage surprised him, the scenario not something they had anticipated. Now, as he sped across the parking area, it seemed so obvious. “Close down the bridge! Right now – both directions!” He ordered over the radio.

Dusty, still hiding back in the
pallets, turned on the real rail gun, the glow of the green LED boosting his confidence. His angle and position provided a small window through the forest of pallet-stacks, enough where he could see the Russian who was now joined by his two colleagues. The trio of foreigners was retreating toward the cover of the pallets – probably not wanting to chance a sniper’s bullet. They came closer, slowly backing away from the visible cops, the rail gun steady and pointing at the bridge.

“Sir, where are we going?” asked the nervous SPETZ captain
, his sidearm scanning in brisk motions trying to cover their retreat.

“Move toward the ship docked over there,” replied his boss
, motioning with his head toward a tanker docked further down the shoreline. “We’re going to hijack that vessel. It will be our ride out of here. They won’t dare fire on it while it is so close to all of these people, the explosion would kill many innocents.”

Dusty had planned to
appear with the real rail gun, holding the Russians off until Monroe’s men captured them. Using the bridge as insurance hadn’t occurred to him, but now that he saw the effect it was having on the pursuing lawmen, he conceded it wasn’t a bad idea.

He was just about to step out of his pallet-cover when a female voice rang out from the parking lot. “Dusty! Dusty!” yelled Grace, running to a man wearing the familiar cowboy hat. She didn’t realize the misidentification until it was too late. The meaty Russian
intercepted Grace as she ran to Sergei, pointing his pistol at her head. “Insurance,” he announced to his boss.

Dusty stopped dead in his tracks, the whole situation quickly getting out of control. A low thumping sound bouncing across the
channel added to the confusion.

The two Longbow Apache gunships pulled up and hovered just over the
center of the channel, their undercarriages bristling with missiles and mini-guns. Looking like angry, giant wasps, each military helicopter carried more firepower than a World War II naval destroyer. The multi-barreled cannon under the nose followed the pilot’s line of sight, which at the moment was clearly focused on Sergei’s party.

“Surrender
, and no one will get hurt,” sounded a loud speaker from across the lot. “This is Special Agent Monroe of the FBI, lay down all your weapons, and you will not be harmed.”

Dusty watched, the enormous firepower represented by the military attack aircraft freezing his soul. Even if he did step out to free Grace and show the FBI the real rail gun, the missiles under the wings of the two
war birds left no doubt of the outcome of any gunfight. While he could knock down one of the gunships with the rail, the other would blast the entire area into oblivion.

It was a standoff. While Sergei had stopped his retreat, he still held the bridge and all the commuters on its surface hostage. The FBI was confused, not sure who the people were in their sights. Grace stood amongst the foreigners, a pistol held against her head while her body was used as a shield.

“Suspects have a hostage! Suspects have a hostage!” sounded the exited voice in Monroe’s earpiece. “Negative on that,” came another call, “That is an officer taking Grace Kennedy into custody.”

“Kennedy? Who’s the other woman if Kennedy is being held? I thought the lawyer was the first woman?”
questioned one of the snipers.

Monroe looked at Shultz, frustrated at the obvious confusion surging through his teams. He clicked his mic to issue orders, but the words never left his throat.

From the water a horn sounded, the deep-pitched alert overriding the whining jet engines and rotor wash of the helicopters. A wall of steel appeared, a huge container ship barreling down the channel – the unaware Apaches directly in its path.

Again, the ship’s captain
blew the ear splitting air horn, but the pilots couldn’t hear it. Dusty watched, stunned as the behemoth of moving steel raced directly at the hovering craft. The boat was attempting a turn, probably reversing its engines, but he knew it couldn’t avoid the choppers. Big ocean going ships required miles to stop, almost as much distance to turn. Even with emergency maneuvers, there was no way to avoid the collision.

The ship struck the
closest Longbow, the hull of the juggernaut slamming into the tail rotor just below the vessel’s anchor chain. Everyone ashore watched in horror as the now-tiny looking war machine spun slightly before its fuselage was flattened against the ship’s hull like a bug on a speeding car’s windshield. A ball of boiling flame erupted, a deafening explosion tearing across the area.

Dusty was already moving, realizing the distraction caused by the
collision might be his only chance to rescue Grace. Three steps to Mr. Muscles, the rail gun pointing right at the Russian’s head. His message was clear. Bewildered and distracted by the freighter, exploding chopper, and the approaching lawmen, the big Russian didn’t put up a struggle, actually shoving Grace toward Dusty like he was glad to be rid of her.

Dusty
was pulling her back toward the pallets, screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” at the top of his lungs.

The remaining pilot saw the expanding ball of fire where his wingman had been just a moment before.
Having been briefed on the power of the weapon he might be facing, the Army Warrant Officer was already on edge. Seeing the destruction of his friend pushed him over. He squeezed a button, launching a Hellfire missile just as the approaching freighter impacted his tail.

The Hellfire had been designed to kill thickly armored battle tanks. The
100-pound, rocket-propelled weapon jumped from its launch rail and wobbled for just a fraction of time before beginning its acceleration. The 20-pound, high-explosive warhead flew directly at Sergei’s chest.

Everyone was in motion.

The Russians were scattering, Dusty and Grace running away at full speed through the pallet-canyons. Monroe was trying to issue orders over the radio. None of them had much time.  It took the Hellfire less than two seconds to travel the 600 meters to its target.

The warhead impacted four feet behind the Russians, the
Centex core expanding at 8,000 meters per second. A ball of white-hot fire enveloped the SVR personnel, the heat killing Sergei and his team instantly, their bodies shredded by shrapnel and shock a microsecond later.

The blast wave slammed into the wall of pallets with enough force to shred internal organs and collapse lungs. Grace, motivated by D
usty’s push, hit the ground, and the whole world went black. She never felt Dusty’s body land on top of her.

For a moment, everyone watching the scene froze
– the destruction and chaos of such a scale, the human brain struggled to process it all.

The silence was broken by
the sound of the tanker’s horn thundering across the water, somehow resonating panic and desperation with its bellow. Again and again, the captain of the big ship let loose with his warning.

Dusty was pulling Grace up from the debris, pushing aside scraps of wood and kicking away pallets. He lifted the stunned woman to her feet, checking her up and down for injury. She appeared dazed, but unhurt.

Lifting the duffle with one hand, he began tugging her along with the other, “We’ve got to go. Come on, Grace. We’ve got to get out of here.”

She didn’t seem to comprehend at first, her gaze unfocused, her eyes darting back and forth between the tanker’s blaring horn and Dusty’s blaring voice. Her legs began to
cooperate, finally moving through the pallets away from the impact of the missile.

Something about the repeated sounding of the tanker’s horn drew Dusty’s attention. Burning fuel and bits of the destroyed helicopters remained stuck to the hull, the flames and smoke making the huge ship appear like a giant dragon rolling smoothly across the water. Again and again the horn sounded.

“Why is he riding that horn?” Dusty questioned. “The helo’s are already toast.”

As Dusty and Grace cleared the pallets, they continued walking
, quickly crossing an open area along the shoreline. He glanced up again at the tanker, still wondering why the captain kept blasting away with his obnoxious signal. Then he saw why.

The
ship, as long as two football fields, had executed an emergency turn in a vain attempt to avoid the hovering war birds. Now, it was pointed directly at the main support of the bridge, closing the distance at such a rate that a collision was unavoidable.

Dusty looked up at the
bridge’s road deck, finding it still full of cars, trucks and… his blood went cold… a school bus. His mind raced, plotting the tanker’s course, speed and momentum. Even if the big ship wasn’t moving fast enough to collapse the support, there was a good chance the roadway would be damaged, perhaps opened to the water below.

Looking down at the rail, he made a de
cision. He and Grace were most likely free and clear. The FBI would find the toy rail gun, and it would take them weeks to figure out it wasn’t the real deal – if ever. The small, charred bits of Russian flesh would make identification of the recovered bodies difficult.

Yet, he couldn’t let the
cargo ship kill everyone on the bridge. There were hundreds of lives at stake. He shouldered the weapon and scanned the roadway above. The school bus was filled with small faces, plastered against the windows, drawn to the action below. He adjusted his aim to the water, settling on a spot a few feet ahead of where the bow plied through the channel.

He
pulled the trigger.

Like the biblical Mos
es parting the Red Sea, a narrow, empty corridor of black void split the channel. The effect was temporary as the dimensional opening pushed the dense liquid aside with incomprehensible force, and then collapsed into a vacuum.  A wall of water rose from the 65-foot depths of the passage – a Tsunami moving faster than the speed of sound. Striking the bow of the container ship, the kinetic energy of the liquid battering ram crushed the hull, abruptly halting the mega-tons of steel and cargo. The entire ship shuddered from the impact, containers flying from the deck and splashing into the waterway.

Dusty was pulling on Grace again, convinced he had saved the bridge and wanting to
expedite their escape. “GO! GO! GO!” he screamed, not sure if the dazed woman could comprehend his urgent commands. Regardless of her state, somehow his message got through and she began to run.

The tidal wave of water moved quickly across the channel, flooding the opposite shore in a few seconds
, the surge expanding in multiple directions. With the closing of the dimensional portal, normal, known physics again came into play. The laws of fluid dynamics required the displaced water to return, and return with a vengeance it did, rushing back across the waterway after ricocheting off the banks and bends of the curvy waterway. The now-crippled cargo vessel was directly in its path.

Dusty and Grace were running
, legs pounding and blood racing, trying to put distance between themselves and the carnage they’d left behind. A quick glance at the waterway froze Dusty’s soul.

He watched wide-eyed as t
he returning tidal wave lifted the disabled ship, raising it like a cork in the surf. The oncoming wall of water continued rushing toward the shore, the huge freighter looking like a surfer riding the crest of a wave, barreling down on top of them.

He couldn’t pull his gaze away, watching over his shoulder
as the image of the tanker grew larger and larger. It was going to crush them, pulverize their bodies into smears of blood and flesh on its great hull.

At the last moment, Dusty reached for Grace’s belt, holding on for dear life.
The chasing water hit their bodies first, a swirling roar of black liquid lifting them like driftwood debris, suspending their bodies in a pool of raging darkness. Dusty held onto Grace, the torque feeling like his arm was being ripped from his body as they were tumbled head over heels by the force.

And then he was slammed into the ground, the momentum of the current suddenly reversed. As the wave drained away, he came up c
oughing, choking and spitting muddy liquid. Dusty made it to his feet first, spotting Grace as she tried to make it to her knees. Cursing and shaking her head, she managed to stand. Both of them turned to look at the massive ship, lying on its side not 20 feet away.