[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (69 page)

Jim looked at him. He had just been chastised by a White House science advisor and now he was being offered political advice by an air force colonel. But he wasn’t foolish enough to miss the fact that said advice was sound. He had no intention of being the man that stood in the way of the people who had just orchestrated the destruction of the single greatest threat humanity had ever faced. Nor had he gotten where he was by allowing pride to get in the way of taking credit for someone else’s good ideas. And so the White House chief of staff looked at Colonel Barrett Milton with surprisingly genuine deference and asked politely how he could be of assistance.

Across the room, Neal came to rest at the admiral’s shoulder and looked at him. The senior man looked discomforted, like he had just heard that he had a terminal disease and the incongruity of the expression on a man such as the admiral made Neal uneasy. Neal’s first thought was that something had gone wrong with the attack on the satellites, and that somehow one of them had survived. But no. This was not a face of despair, it was a face of regret. The admiral had done something wrong and it was clear that whatever the consequences were they were shaking the man very deeply indeed.

Only a truly significant loss of life could perturb a man with the admiral’s extensive combat experience. But what could the admiral have done that would have cost people their lives?

It came to Neal in a moment and he shook his head. Both he and Ayala had worried that they would not be able to control Tim Hamilton once he was on the team, and they had been right. Looking at the senior officer, Neal knew that the man had gone after Lana Wilson, his rage at her having come into his home, and her use of his son as a pawn in her scheme, it had all been too much for him to overlook. And by the looks of things, whatever he had done had gone horribly wrong.

“Admiral, what did she do?” Neal said quietly.

The senior man looked at the scientist and tried to assess how much the man knew. Then he looked around the room. The colonel and Neal had established clear ground rules when they had brought him into their conspiracy, but he was the most senior officer of the United States Navy and he did not take orders from a colonel, let alone an air force colonel. But now he knew that he had betrayed their trust. More than that he had done so at huge risk, and the results had been worse than he could have imagined.

He drummed up his strength and readied himself for the other man’s righteous anger, “Neal, I … I was very discreet, and I listened to everything you said. I prepared the team using all the knowledge we had about them. I told them all her …”

Neal didn’t judge, but he was not gentle either, “Admiral, you went after Lana, didn’t you? You sent a team after Agent Wilson.” the other man did not nod, but he did not deny it either, his eyes were firm. Neal carried on, “What happened to them, Admiral? What did she do to them? No, wait, don’t answer that. I know what she did to them.” He shook his head, “How many did she kill, Admiral? What are we dealing with here?”

“More than you can imagine, Neal, more than you can imagine.”

Neal stared at him a moment finding himself unable to be angry in the face of the violent distress the admiral was clearly suffering. After a second’s pause, Tim Hamilton took a very deep breath, composed himself, nodded to Neal, and then stepped past the scientist into the center of the room. Neal looked after him wondering what he was doing. His answer came when the admiral, speaking with the full force of his authority, took the floor.

“Excuse me. Everyone. Everyone, can I have your attention, please?”

The room fell silent at the admiral’s booming voice. Neal, standing behind him, noticed that several worried-looking aides were handing out sheaves of papers to key people in the room. Whatever news the admiral had, it was clearly starting to come through official channels as well. That did not bode well.

The admiral spoke to the attentive faces staring up at him in a clear contralto, “The brief given earlier highlighted that the satellites we have just overcome were only one part of the team that was sent to subdue us. Well, while they were by far the most lethal part from a destructive point of view, they were, in fact, only the minders of the real team. We had one of that ‘team’ among us here in the United States.” The room reacted predictably, glancing instinctively at their neighbors, but the admiral held up his hands in a calming gesture, “No, no, not in this room, though if she had have been left unattended she would almost certainly have ended up here in good time. The Agent assigned to America was named Lana Wilson, and up until an hour ago, she was a lieutenant in the United States Navy.”

He seemed to catch his breath a moment and then went on, “I myself actually had the displeasure of meeting her, and I can tell you that she would have had no trouble fooling each and every one of us if the good Colonel Milton, Neal Danielson, and their team had not warned us.” Some folks glanced at Barrett and Neal, but for their part Neal and Barrett’s eyes remained fixed on the admiral.

“With the destruction of the satellites, I took it upon myself to attempt to apprehend this Agent, assuming that she would go into hiding once the satellites were destroyed and we may never get as good a chance to take her.

“At this point, I would like to stress that neither Neal nor Colonel Milton had any knowledge of the operation. Only myself and the head of the navy Seal team I dispatched to apprehend her were aware of it.”

The room was silent. The president looked concerned, and in any other room the chief of staff or one of the joint chiefs might have silenced the admiral so he could be debriefed in a controlled environment. But this was the Situation Room. The only person who could silence the admiral was his only superior—the commander in chief himself—and the president had no intention of cutting the report short.

“No doubt we will be receiving more detailed reports shortly, but at this time I can tell you that the team attempted to apprehend the Agent as she departed a Z Berth shed in King’s Bay submarine base just under an hour ago.” There were several gasps and a couple of whispered expletives as the location sunk in. “Details are sketchy but it is clear that only one of the thirty-person team survived. The rear comms man contacted me from a car on a highway, heading north. He had been in charge of comms relay and thus had not been part of the actual team that engaged Ms. Wilson. From his report, the team was actually partially successful in suppressing the woman, but …” he paused, obviously emotional, then pulled himself together and continued, “but as they closed in to engage her at close range she apparently somehow managed to set off some kind of explosion aboard one of the Ohio Class submarines docked at the base.”

Several people spoke at once, but the president’s voice soon trumped them and he asked the question everyone was trying to vocalize: “What kind of explosion, Admiral? Those ships carry … Jesus, Tim, they carry enough firepower to destroy half of Florida.”

The admiral looked at the president. As they both well knew, each and every Ohio Class submarine carried twenty-four ballistic missiles, each of which was armed with a 475-kiloton warhead. By comparison, the missile that destroyed Hiroshima was only 22 kilotons. But the admiral did not feel like correcting the president by saying that each Ohio Class submarine in fact carried enough firepower to destroy the Western Hemisphere, and instead set the room somewhat at ease by saying, “While my man reported that there was no thermo-nuclear detonation, an observation his survival definitely supports, it is clear at this point that the radioactive material aboard at least two Ohio Class submarines, including that in their onboard reactors, was compromised.”

The president found a nearby seat and lowered himself slowly into it, stunned into silence, trying to catch his breath as he stared at the floor, “Jesus h. fucking christ.” he whispered.

While the room considered the ramifications of the admiral’s comments, Neal glanced at the colonel, and then spoke to the room as whole, “OK, ladies, gentlemen, may I suggest we reconvene this meeting immediately? Let’s take our seats and get some more information in front of us. We have a lot to discuss.”

The room responded instantly, protocols kicking in as well-rehearsed roles came in to play. Reports had already started to come through and for a couple of minutes no one spoke as aides shuffled and copied briefs, and superiors got updates and prepared to answer questions. The president stayed in the chair he had collapsed into and the room arranged itself around him, setting the scene for the second part of the most extraordinary meeting of the United States joint chiefs in history.

As the room reacted to the crisis, directing the country’s mammoth military and governmental machine as it went, Neal kept a part of his thoughts on his two friends flying silently, unseen, on the other side of the planet. America may be focused on the fires burning in southern Georgia, but any moment now Martin and Jack would be starting fires of their own. And the people they were trying to save would probably not be grateful.

“Jack. Jack!” Martin shouted from his seat at the controls.

“Yes, Martin, I’m coming. Is everything OK?” said Jack, wiping sleep from his eyes.

The flight deck of the B-2 was split into two small sections. With the long patrol missions the B-2 was designed to fly, often taking upwards of twenty to thirty hours, the crew needed some basic amenities onboard. There wasn’t much, a small cot, a bathroom, and several small lockers packed with dried foods, an extensive medicine cabinet, and plenty of powdered Gatorade. These pleasantries were located in a small compartment aft of the cockpit, with the access hatch through which the pilots entered the plane coming up between the two.

For this particular flight, the space was made even more cramped by the addition of the two unconscious pilots on the floor of the rear section of the flight deck. The dart gun that they had used to sedate the plane’s real pilots was only designed to last ten minutes or so, so Martin had administered an intravenous sedative soon after takeoff and every five hours since then to keep them under, a timer on his wristwatch warning when the two bound pilots needed to be re-dosed.

Martin had done his best to arrange the two sedated people as comfortably as possible while Jack had taken the plane up to its cruising altitude of 40,000 feet. As the attack on the satellites raged above southern Florida, they had flown southeast over the US to the Atlantic, where the plane was supposed to fly a patrol pattern over the Mid-Atlantic and Caribbean.

The US had spent billions of dollars in order to make the B-2 Spirit Bomber virtually invisible to radar and they had been so successful that they had actually had to install a beacon that made it visible to air traffic control while it was in US airspace. Theoretically, they were supposed to use it in Allied airspace as well, but typical mission parameters required that the beacon be turned off when leaving US airspace unless otherwise directed, a policy that suited Jack and Martin’s purposes just fine.

After a rendezvous with a KC-135 tanker plane about three hundred miles off the coast of Florida, they had begun their long flight east. Flying high over northern Morocco, they had been careful to stay out of sight of the extensive NATO military presence at Gibraltar, and then they had angled north up to the Mediterranean so they could trace a long path east over the sea, bypassing the airspaces of Southern Europe and Northern Africa all the way to Cyprus. Preferring to risk a flight over Turkey than either Israel or Egypt, they had then flown up over western Turkey, and from there they had entered the final part of their convoluted journey to the skies over Tibet and far northern India.

After eight hours in the air, Jack had finally acquiesced to the pleas of both his copilot and nature’s call and taken a break, leaving a nervous but resolute Martin to mind the plane’s systems and autopilot. Jack had insisted that he not be allowed to sleep more than an hour, and then he had clambered over the sleeping pilots into the bathroom.

The bathroom was a small cubby, three feet by two feet, with small seat built into the wall. Like a commercial airplane bathroom, only distinctly less luxurious. There was no sink, no running water of any kind, in fact, only some disinfectant wipes in a dispenser attached to the wall. Because of their two unwitting passengers, there was no way of closing the door to the toilet anymore, making the process even more demeaning, but military people were not known for their coyness, so Jack had matter-of-factly dropped his pants and done what he had to do before stepping back over the comatose captives and into the cot that ran the length of the small rear section of the flight deck.

Nearly three hours later, Martin felt he had gone as long as he could without Jack’s input. Reports had been coming over the radio of the conflagrations above Florida, Hawaii, and Singapore, and if their information was correct, then they should be approaching the first pod deployment area soon. When, after thirteen hours in the air, the plane’s powerful radar system started to pick up the first of the virus pods entering the atmosphere over the former soviet state of Turkmenistan, Martin knew he had given his friend as long as he could. He needed him on deck.

Though the satellites were now destroyed, they had left a terrible legacy. In their final minutes, they had begun deploying the viral pathogen that Madeline and Ayala had worked so hard to counteract. As the team had predicted, their antigen to the super-virus had not spread as quickly as it needed to in some of the more sparsely populated areas of the world. John had described to the team the way the aliens’ virus would be deployed using viral cluster pods launched in a wide spread pattern to either side of the orbital path of the satellites. The pods would then fall to Earth in two bands three thousand miles apart, sweeping east to west. Once the pods were in the lower atmosphere, they would break apart, releasing their deadly cargo, which would then filter slowly to the ground to seed the world with a plague of biblical proportions.