Overture (Earth Song) (19 page)

Agent
Masciler took her by the arm, an indignity that she bore without comment, and led her out into the office. A short distance away he opened another doorway and gently urged her inside, closing the door behind her. This was a conference room identical to the one she had used on her first visit. There was no one waiting for her, no camera and no one-way glass. The scrambled telephone on the ornate wooden conference table was patiently blinking one of its lights.

Mindy
shrugged and sat down in front of the phone. She put the computer down and picked up the receiver. “Mindy Patoy,” she said.

“
You remember how to scramble?” asked the familiar voice of her longtime friend Leo Skinner. She laughed with relief and said she did. He gave her the codes at each step and in no time they were talking with that curious echo effect.

“
I got your message about ten minutes ago, I'm so sorry. Did they give you the run around?”

"Run
around? Well, they tried to arrest me, if that counts."

“
What?!”

”
Yep, let me tell you what happened.”

“
It’s getting out of hand,” Skinner said after she'd told her tale. It was hard to tell over the tinny sounding line but Mindy thought she heard worry in his voice. “Were you able to get an answer to that puzzle?”

“
Not yet.”

“
Damn, I was hoping that was the reason you wanted this meeting. What is it you wanted to talk about then?”

“
The price of my discovery of that answer,” she told him coolly.

“
I though you said you didn’t have an answer yet.”

“
I don’t yet. But I do have my first clue.”

“
Most professional astronomers are above base desires.”

“
What gave you the impression that I was interested in something as simple as money?” Quiet answered from the other side for some time.

“
What is it that you want?”

“
To see the Portal, to watch it in operation, to study the stars directly through it? I do my best work on the spot, and to get a chance to be one of the ones to go through.”

“
I’m afraid it’s not that easy. This is a highly classified operation, as I’m sure you have figured out. There are only a few people ‘in the bag’ as we call it, and a few more crawl in every day. There is an NSA sector chief riding the whole thing real hard. He had a cow when I let myself in without being invited, and I’m afraid he’d have a whole herd if you came in out of the blue.”

“
Well, then you have a problem. You see, I’m working on the new SETI web page today. ‘Alien Intelligence Found in Central Park, Government Intelligence Still Missing and Unaccounted For’ is the headline.”

“
Cute.”

“
You like it too? Some of my best work.”

“
You wouldn’t do that to me, with as big a risk as I’ve taken.”

There
was a tone of betrayal in his voice that made Mindy feel shame deep down inside. But she continued onward anyway. “Don’t you bet on it. This kind of bullshit attitude is what got my career ruined. I’ve already told the director of SETI, and he’s mighty excited. Let me put the pieces together for you. We receive a signal from outer space seven years ago. We’ve only just discovered the basic structure to that signal. A couple months ago a formerly friendly stellar neighbor of ours called LM-245 suddenly goes off course, very dangerously off course. Then these Portals appear. They are a way for us to escape off the planet, only we don’t know where they go. I would humbly suggest you get me ‘in the bag’, if you want my help.”

“
Sounds an awful lot like blackmail to me.”

“
Dragging me into this and getting me arrested by the FBI sounds an awful lot like entrapment to me!”

“
How dare you, young lady? I’ve been in this business since long before you were born!”

“
I respect that, but you must also respect the situation we are all in and realize that if I do not look out for mine and SETI’s own interests, no one else will. So what will it be?”

“
Come to New York. I’ll give you a number to call when you get here, and we’ll work out the details then.”

An
agent she had never seen before met Mindy outside the door and escorted her out. There was no sign of agent Masciler, and for that she was grateful. As she drove quickly back to Renton, she thought about what she was going to tell Harold. He was filling a cup of coffee when she walked in and Mindy came up short.

“
You’re going there, aren’t you?” he accused her.

“
I have to. I need to see it for myself. That signal is linked with the Portal, and it changed my life, for better or worse.”

“
What do you want me to do?”

“
Get everything I have collected ready to publish. It’s our leverage to make them let me, and ultimately us, into the inner circle. They may have found the Portal, but we got the phone call before the delivery man ever showed up.”

“
I guess we don’t have anything else to do. Money is starting to dry up again. I think people might be figuring out what’s going on, either that or it’s fear of the asteroid.”

“
Keep working on the signal.”

“
Why bother? It’s like trying to decipher a telegram informing you that aunt Matilda is coming to visit, after she had already arrived, and left.”

“
You might be right, but if you can break the code it could still prove useful.”

“
Just as our backers say, you are very convincing. We’ll keep working on the signal. There's enough funding for that. We even have a few new hints of the signal origins!”

“
Awesome,” she said, but already her thoughts were turning to New York and what she would find when she got there.

As
soon as Mindy could gracefully get away she used her new laptop computer to book the flight that evening. Next she sent an e-mail to her mysterious contact at the Followers of the Avatar and passed along her itinerary. The computer communicated via its wireless card and the transaction was completed in minutes.

Like
most people who used wireless portable devices, Mindy didn't bother watching what sort of connections the machine used as long as it did what she wanted it to. She didn’t notice a quick communication session that took place after her transactions were done. It happened in the seconds before she shut the machine down and headed to her apartment to pack. In three hours she was snoring at thirty thousand feet.

Early morning in Portal City found Mark Volant in his trailer having already been up for hours. He picked up a file that had been left in his inbox the previous night. It was clear that they were losing containment on the Portal. The story of a crashed satellite had lost credibility weeks ago, and the local press was hot on the story of something big. The group called the Followers of the Avatar was new to him, and the file told a disturbing story. He was stunned by the detail of the drawings from the website. They had the Portal down to a T. More important were the drawings of the alien 'Avatar' they claimed to have delivered it. He’d heard a couple descriptions and seen a police composite drawing but this was much better. The website picture was so detailed it seemed almost alive. If these creatures were on the other side of the Portal, why hadn’t they shown themselves to the team yet?

Local
containment breaches could be dealt with, national or international ones could not. In the file were several pages detailing a breach in progress. Useful information could be gleaned, even though the cost seemed far too high. However, if the strings could be cut, the information could be harvested at only the cost of one additional person in the bag. Breaking those strings would mean getting messy, not that he hadn’t gotten his hands dirty on plenty of occasions. But never domestically, and not quite to this scale.

He
signed the order with surprising ease and scanned it off in time for lunch. That onerous task finished, Volant hopped down from his trailer and headed toward the lunch wagon. His thoughts were on a ham sandwich and the delicious apple pie. That was probably why the first two popping gunshots didn’t register in his conscious mind. There was a screech of tires followed by a long string of shots that brought him around in a snap. The alarm siren went off an instant later.

Volant
set off at a dead run for the source of the disturbance. A few yards from his trailer he ran into a group of scientists standing around with confused looks on their faces. “It's an alarm!” he yelled at them as he approached. They looked even more confused. “Someone is attacking the compound. Get into a secure area!”

He
slowed just enough to shove one of them in the direction of a security trailer before leaving them behind. “I hope Osgood has enough common sense to keep his egghead down,” he growled as he ran.

Volant
came around one of the huge hydrogen fuel cell generator trailers and into view of the West 97
th
Street checkpoint just as two soldiers dropped to their knees and opened fire. Their M-4 carbines spoke in short, controlled bursts as they stitched a rapidly approaching NY City bus. The windshield was punched through over and over as rounds found there mark, still more bullets whining off the grill and bumper.

“
Get the tires!” Volant screamed at the men when they paused to slap home fresh magazines. He was still a good fifty yards away but he'd made himself heard. The soldier in charge, a sergeant, nodded and yelled the order to the man next to him.

The
next burst of automatic fire tore up the road around the front tires. Volant had his sidearm out as he ran but he knew he was still too far away to be effective.

Both
front tires were hit repeatedly, deflating with popping sounds and making the bus much harder to steer. The driver was not visible and Volant wondered if there was one. Then the bus tried to swerve back on course only to slam into one of the phalanx of concrete barriers that flanked the entrance with a thunderous crash. A shower of glass and plastic flew into the air, toppling the first barricade and bringing the bus to a shuddering stop on top of the second.

“
What started this?” Volant demanded as he came to a stop behind the two men who were again reloading their weapons. The sergeant pointed to an upturned and burning cab a dozen yards away.

“
That hack tried to run the barricade. When we stepped out to challenge the driver, the guy capped a couple rounds at us. Per the ROE, we lit it up.” Volant nodded his head; he'd written the Rules of Engagement for this OP.

"Let
’s find out what or who was driving this thing..."

Volant
reached for the double doors and was immediately sent sprawling as the doors were slammed open. A man leaped from the doorway and raced back toward the street. “Freeze!” yelled one of the soldiers; “Don’t move!” cried another one. The man was running away from them in an erratic pattern and their training said that you never fire at a fleeing man’s back. Volant rolled to a sitting position, and he had no such compunction. His .40 caliber Sig Sauer P250 came up into a sitting Weaver stance. He took careful aim and double-tapped the man in the small of the back.

The
fleeing man staggered but continued to run, if somewhat slower. Volant fired twice more; the first shot to the upper back and the second caught him in the pelvis and sent him to the ground. “He’s down,” Volant said and got to his feet, the SIG still held at the ready. “Go secure him,” Volant ordered. He could see the man was still alive and reaching into his coat pocket. Volant brought his weapon back up, thinking it was a gun, then he recognized it. “Oh fuck!” he yelled and spun. “Get down!” He dove behind the closest concrete barricade just as the bus exploded.

The
shock wave picked up the portly agent and tossed him twenty yards where he landed in the well-worn Central Park grass. The shock wave stunned him, and the impact knocked the wind from him as debris from the bus rained down all around.

Volant
groaned and rolled to his knees. His vision was swimming and he couldn’t hear a thing. With shaky hands he took inventory. There didn’t appear to be any missing parts. He moved to stand and searing pain made him stoop back over. Looking down he could see a piece of curved steel protruding from his stomach, blood dripping from its length. “Sloppy,” he admonished himself even though he couldn’t hear a word, “after all the terrorist training camps you’ve been through, you make a rookie mistake like that?”

He
placed a hand on the metal object and gave it a tentative tug. He screamed. The pain was like nothing he'd ever felt, and it dissuaded him from any further attempt to remove it. This was one for the medics. From his knees he looked around and found his weapon, and just in time too. From around the crater of what had once been a city bus, poured dozens of poorly dressed commandos.

Many
were empty-handed, but others carried rifles, pistols, or shotguns. One man even had a samurai sword. “I think we’ve lost containment,” he said to himself and managed with eye-popping effort to get back to his feet.

One
of the invaders noticed Volant. The man pointed and shouted. Volant put him down with two rounds to the chest and began staggering toward the nearest trailer. A hail of shotgun pellets tore up the ground to one side and a bullet whizzed through his jacket on the other side. The compact Sig found the shotgun-wielding man, a huge guy that required three shots to put down. Then he dropped a wild-eyed woman who had shaved herself bald and was racing at him with a pair of vicious-looking daggers. She tried to get up and Volant put one more into her face, blowing the top off her bald head.

He
was drawing attention now and rounds bounced all around him. Volant fired in rapid order, hitting someone with each shot. Basic agent’s training drilled in the skill to count rounds as you fired. As the last round went out, and the slide locked closed, he was ready.

With
no time for finesse, he swapped the gun to his left hand, thumb tripping the ambidextrous magazine release. The stainless steel mag dropped away as Volant’s other hand reached around the back of his belt and snagged one of the two full ones carried in a holder there. With a move practiced a thousand times over the years, the magazine found the opening in the gun’s butt as if it had a mind of its own. With one smooth motion it slid home and the slide release was tripped to fly forward, stripping the first round to load the chamber. He fired point-blank, killing a guy coming at him with a double-headed ax.

The
same hand that had supplied the new magazine reached into his pocket and produced his holdout gun, a Smith & Wesson model 640-3 .357 magnum. The gun was made for police backup and was hammerless.

It
took only two seconds to finish reloading and he did it as he surveyed the flowing crowd, looking for the best targets. The Smith & Wesson held only six rounds, and he had no reloads for it. He still had one more thirteen round magazine for the Sig. Thirty-two shots, he thought, as part of the crowd split off and headed toward him. “I’m dead,” he said and raised both guns.

Running
was not an option, not with several inches of steel embedded in his stomach. It was sheer agony just to stand fully upright. His only chance was to hold his ground until reinforcements arrived.

His
armed resistance had already left six dead on the ground. The nearest group was hesitating, unsure how to handle their first obstacle. Volant had already spotted one man who held an expensive and probably new MP-5 machine gun. He fired his Sig and shot the man dead with one shot, then started marching in that direction. “Kill the pig!” a man screamed from somewhere, and suddenly there was gunfire everywhere.

Volant
held both weapons at arm’s length, firing one then the other. A guy with a baseball bat had half his face blown away by the booming Smith & Wesson while the Sig dropped first a housewife wielding a machete then a sailor still in his smart white uniform who held a single-shot rifle as if he had no idea how to use it. Four men dressed in gang colors rushed him fast and low, all firing handguns. Volant felt the warmth of a bullet pass his cheek just as another bit into his leg. The pain was nothing compared to his stomach. He leveled his guns and put the four ’bangers down with three more rounds from the Sig Sauer and two from the Smith & Wesson.

One
man had come in from the side while he was occupied with the gang members and made a diving leap at his waist. Volant brought the heavy Smith & Wesson down on the man’s face, ripping flesh and breaking bones. When he cried out in pain and stabbed at Volant with a bayonet, the Smith & Wesson finished the job. He continued to move forward and used the last round from the Smith & Wesson on a man so obese Volant was surprised he could walk. The gun went into his waistband and he swapped the Sig back to a two-handed grip.

Infuriated
by the casualties they were taking, the crowd began to turn on him in mass, at least twenty strong. Volant marched right into them firing steadily. “One shot, one kill”, he vowed. The count reached thirteen and he had a magazine ready for the Sig, this time reloading in less than a second. Shoot, step, shoot, step, he moved at them with single-minded intensity. By the time the crowd reached him, he had killed eleven of them and broken their will to fight. The other nine turned and fled. He shot three of them in the back before the Sig locked empty a final time. He had no more reloads for the handgun, but now he'd reached his objective.

Volant
cried in searing agony as he bent over and snatched up the MP-5 machine gun and the bag the dead man had been carrying over his shoulder. The crowd poured into the camp and he became the center of attention. They knew he wasn’t one of them. Another group charged in screaming.

In
his career he’d handled just about every type of firearm made and knew them by feel. Volant searched the weapon’s receiver with his hands and found what he had hoped for. The previous owner was a fine connoisseur of firearms and had paid top dollar for an illegal weapon. Volant flipped the lever he’d found and racked the bolt back. A loaded bullet flew by his peripheral vision telling him it had already been loaded. He didn’t bother aiming, just held it against his hip and opened up.

He
needed space to work, so he swept the gun back and forth like a fire hose. The machine gun spoke in one long, ragged burst, spending what Volant guessed to be half of the thirty-round magazine and sending a half-dozen of the screaming attackers spinning. A dozen or more were only steps away from him. Volant cut loose again but with more discipline. He fired one after another three-round bursts into groups of the charging men and women. They came closer and closer to him, their faces twisted into a terrifying twisted image of fanatic rage. His off hand had already found a fresh magazine from the shoulder bag and as the current one ran empty he swapped them. “This is how it ends,” he thought as they rushed him. He flipped the bolt release to load the new magazine and held the trigger down.

Volant
screamed a visceral battle cry as all thirty rounds burned from the weapon in a long, horrendous burst. The gun jumping against his hip sent jolts of agony through his wounded stomach. As the MP-5 ran empty, he rammed the smoking barrel of the gun into the face of the first man who reached him, and then the world exploded.

An
invisible force picked him up and tossed him through the air. He had a single upside down glimpse of the hydrogen fuel cell power trailer turned into a miniature mushroom cloud before the ground came up and slapped him.

The whole of central Manhattan was alive with the wail of sirens. September 11
th
2001 lay more than a decade in the past, but hearing explosions and thick smoke in the sky brought it all back with stark clarity for many New Yorkers.