Ragnarok (18 page)

But that wasn’t what had caused Bishop’s comment.

Despite the lousy overcast weather, the ride—one of the largest tourist attractions in Europe that saw 3.5 million visitors a year—had been full when the portal appeared out of thin air. As the
Crescent
moved the men into position above the wheel, they saw hundreds of passengers from the remaining egg-shaped capsules around the edges of the wheel. A storm of brightly colored tourists attempted to climb down the superstructure after having freed themselves from their steel-and-Plexiglas prisons. Some were still trapped in their capsules. They frantically hammered on the glass as they watched the immense sphere of pulsing light engulf the wheel like Pac Man gobbling up tasty snacks. Bishop noted that some of the people were leaping to the river far below them from the upper reaches of the rim, almost 400 feet above the water.

Others leapt off the ride on the other side—to the concrete pedestrian path and the trees, which were turning dark red from the frequent human impacts.

The panicked tourists fled in terror as the portal disgorged its swarm of milky white occupants. Hundreds of dire wolves leapt out of the yellow wall of light. Many of them lunged up the London Eye’s struts and scampered across its surface like manic children on a playground.

“Get me close, Black One. Now!” Bishop shouted into his helmet microphone to the pilot of the
Crescent
and readied a rappelling line at the door. Their plan had been to keep the creatures at bay as much as possible while the Ministry of Defense arranged to get a small nuclear device to them. Domenick Boucher had handled convincing the US President of the plan to drop a nuclear device inside a portal with a timer. The device would be shut off by remote control if the timer ticked down and the portal hadn’t shut. If it did close, as all of the portals had done so far, then the device would detonate, hopefully stopping the dire wolf incursion. A device would be attempted both here in London and in New York. The US President convinced the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom only an hour before the
Crescent
arrived. As far as both the US and the UK were concerned, Bishop and Knight were US Delta members, acting on US orders—not independent operators.

No one liked deceiving the President, but all involved agreed that a typical Special Forces unit would be a liability. While other soldiers would still be reacting to the freakish events unfolding around them and the dire wolves trying to tear them apart, Chess Team would be
acting
. They had grown accustomed to the strange and horrible, and weren’t distracted by it. Deep Blue and General Keasling had agreed that they would deal with the political ramifications after this event, if they lived through it. Boucher had concurred and the plan was set in motion. If Bishop and Knight failed, King and Deep Blue would attempt the same strategy in New York or in the next event location.

But after seeing the chaos up close, Bishop was not content to sit and wait for the device to arrive with its British couriers.

Knight squatted in the open doorway, one arm looped through a nylon safety strap on the door’s edge. He knelt to the floor of the doorway and began picking off targets. He was using a new rifle—a Barrett M82 he had snagged from an armaments closet on the
Crescent
after they had boarded in Shanghai. He knew he wouldn’t find a better vantage point for sniping the dire wolves than right where he was—above them on the gently hovering troop transport plane.

Even with the new helmet he wore, equipped with sound dampener technology to protect him from hearing the roar of the dire wolves, Bishop could still feel a vibration every time Knight took a shot with the .50 caliber rifle. The climbing creatures moved slower than they did on the ground; Knight had no problem executing them one by one. Still, no matter how quickly Knight fired, more of the dire wolves darted from the portal. Bishop was tempted to open fire with his newly replaced XM312-B as well, but he couldn’t risk hitting tourists. He needed to get down onto the Eye.

Bishop looked down at Knight, who wore one of the impact-absorbent suits. It seemed to double his size.
If Knight looks big, I must look like the Goodyear Blimp
.

Bishop hated the helmet. The sound dampener allowed him to hear nothing but his own breathing and he found the faceplate’s view limiting. With more time, they could have had helmets that only blocked certain frequencies, but time was short, so they blocked everything, and it just about drove him nuts. Still, he wore it for protection against the fear-inducing roar. Better to have limited eyesight than to bolt in fear from a dire wolf only to realize, like Wile E. Coyote, that he had run off a cliff—or in this case, off the top of the London Eye.

He leaned down and placed his hand on Knight’s shoulder, then rocked the man slightly—a tap to the shoulder would do no good with the armor. Knight quickly retracted from the doorway, allowing Bishop to exit the craft.

With two MP5 submachine guns stretched across his chest and the XM312-B across his broad, armored back, Bishop leapt out the door, splaying the 11 mm black rappelling rope out his titanium belay device at his waist. The rope ran through his gloved fingers. He cleared the
Crescent
and began his drop toward the Eye.

Black One piloted the transport ship just above the wheel’s curvature. As Bishop descended, controlling the rappel with one hand, he swept an MP5 up and began pummeling dire wolves with bullets.

In thirty seconds, he was down on the top of one of the abandoned capsules that sat parked hundreds of feet above the river. Most of the passengers were below him now, so Bishop took the opportunity to fire wildly, taking out dire wolf after dire wolf, sometimes with only a grazing shot, but enough of an impact to send the target tumbling.

The rain wasn’t helping either. Bishop lay down on his stomach on top of an abandoned capsule to cut the wind and rain against his body. He hadn’t detached from the rope yet, and decided not to. Instead, he crawled forward to the end of the egg-shaped passenger compartment’s roof and began to slide over its end toward a precipitous fall. With one hand on the rope, he allowed some slack to spool out. He grabbed the lip with his other hand and swung down and into the empty carriage, dropping to the floor. The rain spatting on the faceplate of his helmet and the wind pushing his armored body let up immediately. The view was fantastic, and Bishop knew that on a clear day you could see almost 25 miles. Today the visibility was not that good, but he could still see several more of the glowing portals that had opened in various parts of the city.

The center of the capsule had a white roof, but the ends of the egg shape were all windows. The end he’d come through had a set of double doors that retracted to the sides like in an elevator. A designer wooden bench filled the center of the space. Bishop knew from a previous visit in calmer times that the egg-shaped air-conditioned capsule rotated as the wheel moved, but at such a minimal speed that passengers barely felt the rotation. In fact, it moved so slowly that the huge Ferris wheel never stopped turning—tourists simply stepped into and out of the slow moving capsules at ground level. One complete revolution of the wheel took about a half an hour. But now the wheel wasn’t turning at all. Bishop guessed the operators must have hit an emergency stop before fleeing from the spectacle of the besieged Ferris wheel.

He was glad the wheel wasn’t moving, because it made aiming at the dire wolves easier. He lay down on the floor of the capsule, sliding his body next to the bench, with the barrel of his XM312-B pointing at one of the lower side windows under a pane with a huge British Airways logo in red and blue. His view was down the arc of the wheel to the next two lower capsules. He fired once, blasting the window out. Then he started obliterating any dire wolf in his field of fire. It was so easy that he started to wonder why the dire wolves kept pouring down that direction, as if they couldn’t see where he was in his capsule. As if they were afraid of the height themselves. He watched the limber creatures swing and slide their clawed grips along the white metal struts to the next lower capsule, and he realized there was something wrong with the dire wolves. These were not the same creatures he had faced in Shanghai a few hours earlier. Those beasts had moved with a surety and speed he had never seen before.

Bishop stopped firing for a moment and rolled to look up through the clear ceiling of his capsule, back toward the portal where even more dire wolves were emerging. There were far more of them in this attack than in Shanghai, but they were moving much slower. Pausing to tilt their heads, as if looking for something or smelling the air. Sometimes darting their heads from side to side, like a startled dog, when it hears a far off noise. His observations were interrupted when one of the creature’s heads exploded into white mist as Knight continued his barrage from the still hovering
Crescent
.

Bishop detached his rappelling line and turned to fire on the dire wolves that made their way past his shattered window, heading toward the passengers below. He fired a few volleys and then two things happened.

The first was that the rain intensified to a full-on deluge. His visibility reduced significantly.

The second thing was completely bizarre. The dire wolves—all of them, as if receiving a cue telepathically—simply stopped moving. Wherever they were on the Eye, on top of one of the capsules below Bishop’s vantage point, on the white metal frame or just emerging from the portal, they just…stopped. Frozen where they stood.

“What the hell?” Knight’s voice sounded in Bishop’s headset inside the helmet and it startled him. He had become so used to hearing only his own breathing inside the helmet, that any external sound was freakishly loud by comparison.

“No idea, man. It’s like they’re afraid of something.” Bishop replied, and then he began mowing down any stationary targets he could sight through the curtain of rain. Knight’s fire from above resumed and soon they drastically reduced the number of dire wolves on top of the wheel.

Bishop stopped firing when he ran out of targets lower than his side of the capsule. He stood and clambered over the bench to the other side of the capsule. He knew there were thirty-two capsules—one for each borough of London—from his previous visit as a tourist. He glanced out past the twin BA logo on this side, and he could see only two capsules above him, before the wall of the portal engulfed the frame of the wheel. Those two capsules were completely empty. The doors to one were open. The capsule furthest from him still had its doors shut, but the dire wolves had smashed in windows on top and the inside of the capsule was painted in a dark red hue.

Bishop shuddered.

Those people had been first. That explained why the others had panicked and jumped to their deaths. More dire wolves squatted on the frame above Bishop’s capsule, unmoving. He counted thirty of them.

Make that twenty-nine
. Bishop smiled as Knight continued to obliterate the stationary targets.

The rain let up as he watched for a few seconds. Something nagged at the back of Bishop’s mind as he watched the frozen beasts succumb one by one to the devastating fire from Knight’s Barrett. Then, again as if controlled by one mind, they all twitched and moved their heads. Several of them stood from their crouches, and the rest swiveled and tilted their heads, their strange tennis-ball-sized eyes roaming.

Oh shit
. Bishop shattered the glass on this side of the capsule and began firing the big .50 caliber rounds at the dire wolves again, still laying down a line of slaughter, but he wounded more than he killed.

The remaining creatures rushed his capsule as another wave of forty or so muscular, gleaming white beasts lunged out of the portal and onto the white steel trusses. Many of them climbed onto the roof above Bishop.

This was a fight he could not win.

Bishop heard a noise at the end of his capsule and turned to see two huge, eight-foot tall dire wolves. The first had dropped into the open doors, just as Bishop had done. The second had climbed into the compartment on the upright metal hinges of the open door on the right and grabbed the safety rail, squatting laterally on the wall of the capsule’s glass as if gravity didn’t affect it.

There was no time to pull the barrel of the XM312-B out of the shattered window on the side of the capsule to aim at these two, ten feet away from him on the capsule’s end. Then the thought that had been tickling his subconscious came through to the front of his mind like a Japanese bullet train.

“Knight! It’s the rain! They can’t see in the rain!”

The dire wolves, each outweighing Bishop by a few hundred pounds of muscle and menace, charged.

TWENTY-NINE

Midtown, New York, NY

3 November, 0830 Hrs

KING WAS SWEATING profusely inside the body armor and helmet. Although the suit contained a state-of-the-art liquid cooling system, it wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been. Each time he took a step and the armor between his legs rubbed, he was reminded of the corduroy trousers his mother had gotten him at Goodwill when he was ten. He hated those things. With the sound dampener technology in the helmet activated, he couldn’t hear the noise of the armor rubbing, but he could feel the vibrations on his skin.

He knew he wasn’t sweating because he was hot, though. No, he was certain the cause of his dampened skin was the small suitcase nuclear device he wore on his back.

“How you doing, King? I’m sweating like a pig in this thing,” Deep Blue’s robust voice came through King’s helmet microphone as they rode the elevator to the 40
^th
 floor of the Exxon Building.

“Thank God, I thought it was just me.” King looked at their reflections in the shiny brass elevator doors.

Deep Blue grunted a laugh. Still, King could tell the humor was forced. Neither one of them liked the current plan, but it was all they had.