The Rift (28 page)

Which meant the interior of the boat was shredded, along with the lone man left behind for guard duty, who’d been running around throwing every switch he could trying to regain control.

The explosion did make enough holes in the hull, though, that the yacht quickly began to settle.

Another Firefly down.

Eagle had the crane barge in his IHADSS. The crane was rotating, the steel claw swinging, but once more it was short of Nada’s Zodiac.

So far, in Eagle’s convoluted media way of thinking, they’d gone through
PT-109
with Moms’s Zodiac being plowed under and cut in half and the sinking of the HMS
Hood
with the M177 taking out the yacht. He couldn’t come up with a parallel for the barge, so he just said, “Frak it,” and relayed the firing command to the surviving Apache.

The 30-mm chain gun fired, but more importantly, one Hellfire missile launched from the pod on the left side of the attack helicopter. Eagle adjusted slightly and a second Hellfire came off the right side.

The first Hellfire hit the crane, blowing it to pieces. The second hit the barge, ripping out the front right portion. Given the weight on board, it did a mini-
Titanic
as the crane slid off and into the water, and the barge went vertical and then down.

Two Fireflies dissipated.

And then there was silence.

Burns stood on the roadway that crossed the Loudoun Dam, above the intakes for the turbines. He could see the golden glow approaching in the water. He checked his watch. He’d heard explosions in the distance and knew the Nightstalkers were coming. They were nothing if not persistent.

Something to count on. As regular as time.

“Armorflate?” Roland said. “Really? False advertising, I say.”

“Keep pumping,” Nada ordered Roland. “It’s for bullets, not cranes.” He had Moms, Ivar, and Roland on board, along with his original crew of Mac and Doc. The barge had sliced open two of the air compartments on the Zodiac and damaged two others. Roland was battling the leaks using the foot pump, while Doc worked on bandaging the boat.

Scout and Kirk were on their Sea-Doos, now in tight formation, less than five feet off to each side, their engines almost idling as they kept pace. The flotilla, not even close to being an armada, came around a curve in the river and the waterway widened. A couple of miles ahead, lights glowed in an even line, slicing across the river: the Loudoun Dam.

Moms spoke over the team net. “Eagle?”

“Roger?”

“Get an uplink to FPF.”

There was a short silence. “Roger.”

The B-52 was lazily circling at forty thousand feet when the alert light flashed on the pilots’ control panel and in the lower deck battle station.

Lazy became focused as the crew readied all weapons systems.

Neeley touched down on the road above the dam. Support had already sealed off the road, Route 321, with roadblocks, far enough away from the dam to keep civilians out of eyesight. As she unbuckled her harness, Neeley looked about. It was eerily quiet other than the roar of the water pouring through the spillways, tumbling down to the continuation of the Tennessee River below, to the west.

That roar began to decrease and Neeley readied her MP5 as she walked over and peered down.

Someone was closing the spillways, forcing more water into the intakes for the three generators. She headed for the powerhouse.

A Firefly was inside the control for the gate mechanisms, closing them off. Burns was inside the power station on the northern end of the dam, watching the power levels begin to spike while the outtakes from the powerhouse gained force.

The entire dam vibrated for a moment as the golden glow reached it, being forced through the intakes and then wrapping itself around the three generators, eating the energy they produced.

Inside the Can, there was no power outage this time as the clicking alert sounded and the lights flashed.

“We have pre-Rift!”

Alarms went off in power stations all over TVA as the power output from Loudoun Dam suddenly ceased. Relays were automatically thrown, power was diverted, but blackouts rippled across the Tennessee countryside.

At the Ranch outside Area 51 and in the Cellar underneath the NSA, both Ms. Jones and Hannah watched the developing situation on their computer displays. The pre-Rift warnings came in from Russia and Japan, but it was no surprise that they pinpointed the location at the power station on Loudoun Dam.

They were helpless at the moment to do anything other than observe. Their forces were in place and this was going to play out on the ground, as combat always had since the first caveman picked up a club.