by Jack Mars
She reached into her pocket for the two small bean-shaped objects there. “Ear plugs,” she told Mischa. The men followed suit. Two of them lifted the large rectangular cardboard box that stood in the center of the truck’s rear, the bottom cut from it, and revealed their weapon.
In moments they would activate it. The Americans would be aware immediately that there had been a new attack on another seemingly random place. They would draw their parallels between this and the other attacks. If all went according to plan, police and investigators would assume that the perpetrators had already fled, as they had twice before. Hurried to another state, or onto a plane or a boat.
No one would suspect they were a mere eight miles away. Hiding in close proximity.
Prince Frederick. Samara smirked to herself as she powered up the sonic weapon. What a strange name for a place.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Zero paced the narrow aisle of the Gulfstream. It had been sixteen minutes since Bixby’s call, but they hadn’t yet been connected to OMNI. He worried that the engineer had changed his mind. Or been caught in the act. Or that someone had been listening in on the call. Any number of things could have gone wrong—or perhaps nothing. Maybe it was just taking longer than Bixby expected.
The jet was at twelve thousand feet, staying low to keep out of commercial flight paths and on its second lazy circle of the DC Metro area, careful to avoid planes coming into Ronald Reagan or Dulles.
Maria fidgeted. Strickland cracked his knuckles. Everyone was anxious. No one had answers.
The shrill sound of a ringing phone made Zero start. He was jumpy.
“This can’t be good,” Maria murmured as she answered the call. “Johansson.”
She put it on speaker in time for the back half of Director Shaw’s statement. “—think you’re doing, but you are to land that plane and report back to Langley, now.”
“No,” Maria said plainly.
There was a moment of stunned silence. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry,” Maria replied quickly. “I meant to say, no sir. We have a lead. A way to find these people. We’re going to see it through. Unless, that is, you’re going to dispatch someone to shoot us down?”
“I have half a mind…” Shaw growled.
The intercom crackled. “FAA is demanding that we land.” It was the maverick pilot from the cockpit. “Shall I tell them to kindly bend over a barrel?”
“This will cost you your badge, Johansson,” Shaw threatened.
“Management hasn’t been suiting me all that well anyway,” Maria muttered.
We’re not going to pull this off. They were out of time. Shaw might not have known about their plans with OMNI yet, but he knew they were up to something and defying orders. The FAA knew they didn’t have flight clearance. Zero was all too aware that further defiance could even mean jail time for all three of them.
“I need a heading or something back there,” the pilot said. “I can’t keep circling.”
“You are refusing a command that came from the President of the United States,” Shaw said firmly.
The screen of Maria’s tablet lit to life. She snatched it up and smiled broadly, turning it to show her teammates. It was a map, a GPS map of the entire lower forty-eight states. In the lower-left corner was a yellow blip moving in a tight, slow circle. Indicating a scan, it seemed. And in the upper-right corner were four tiny white letters: O-M-N-I.
“I’m sorry, Director Shaw,” Maria said. “But we have a job to do, and we’re going to see it through.”
“You failed,” Shaw retorted. “It was transferred to other hands because you failed—”
“No.” There was a hard edge to Maria’s voice. “We didn’t fail. We just didn’t finish yet.” She ended the call. “So. That went well. What do you think he’ll send to shoot us down? F-16? Maybe an F-22?”
“Hello back there?” the pilot’s voice came through the intercom.
Maria pressed the intercom button. “Need a minute.”
“They’re making some pretty interesting threats up here,” the pilot replied. “I’m not sure we have a minute.”
Zero shook his head. The pilot was right; they were out of time. “I appreciate you back me up on this, Maria. But it’s over. We should land, hand over the tablet to the FBI. Tell Shaw what we’ve done. Or else this is going to get worse for all of us.” If it was just him, he would gladly defy orders and keep fighting the fight. But it wasn’t just him; Maria, Strickland, and even their pilot would all go down for his idea.
“It’s not over,” Maria said adamantly. “Not yet. And I’ll decide how bad I want things to get for me, thank you very much.”
Strickland shrugged. “Spent my whole life following orders. It’s kind of fun to see how you do things for once.”
Zero smirked. How often he’d found himself here, against the world with little to no support but for a few good friends. It made all the difference—
Ding. Maria’s tablet made a noise, a digital chime like a single small bell. It was so disconcertingly euphonious that for a moment, none of them could place what it was or what it might mean. It was not a blaring alarm, or a siren, or a shrill red-alert.
But the map on the tablet was zooming rapidly.
“Jesus,” Maria murmured. OMNI zoomed onto the Eastern seaboard. “We’ve got a hit.”
“On the weapon?” Strickland asked as he stood from his seat.
The map zoomed farther, faster. On… Annapolis? No. It swung south, pinpointing the location of the frequency it tracked.
“It’s close,” Maria breathed. She frowned. “In Maryland. Some town called… Prince Frederick? Just off the western shore of the Chesapeake.”
The map zoomed even further, and then stopped.
“A shopping center, it looks like.” Maria blinked at the screen, seemingly in awe.
“This is in real time,” Zero prodded. “It’s happening. Right now.”
Maria snapped out of it. She smashed her hand on the intercom’s button. “Prince Frederick, about thirty-eight miles southeast of here. You know it?”
“I do.” The plane’s wing dipped suddenly as it turned, so suddenly that Zero had to grip the back of a seat to keep from stumbling. “ETA six minutes. Maybe less.”
“These attacks don’t usually last more than a few minutes,” Strickland noted.
“And we’ll have to find a place to land,” Zero added. Even with their devil-may-care pilot and a suitable strip to land on, descent and taxi could add ten minutes to their arrival time.
“So we jump,” Strickland said. He suggested it as simply as someone might say, Hey, let’s go out for dinner tonight.
So we jump.
“We jump,” Maria agreed.
“Sure,” Zero muttered. “We jump. Why not.”
*
“This is insane,” Zero remarked as he secured his chest strap.
“You mentioned that once or ten times.” Strickland grinned. The younger agent already had his rig on and secured. He double-checked his leg straps. “Make sure your harness is snug first before the leg straps, or else they’ll ride up on descent.”
“Thanks for the tip.” Zero was nervous. He’d done this before, jumped out of airplanes. But it had been quite a while, and he wasn’t exactly in a rush to do it again.
“Todd, stow my straps,” Maria said as she tapped on her phone. Her rig was on, parachute container high and tight against her back as Strickland knelt to tuck the hanging strap ends. “We need to tell someone what’s happening and give a precise location. I won’t be able to contact Rutledge, since he’s been moved to a secure site.”
“Two minutes,” the pilot told them.
“FBI is likely already aware, but they won’t get there as fast as we will,” Zero noted. “Same with local PD.” According to OMNI, the frequency was still ongoing. The assault on the small town of Prince Frederick had lasted four minutes now—which was roughly the length of the attack on Springfield, Kansas. They had preci
ous little time to get there.
“We’re closest. We’ve got protection. We’ve got weapons.” Strickland secured his gear bag to his chest by the straps to keep it from interfering with the parachute on his back. “There’s no one to call. It’s up to us.”
The jet dipped in altitude, suddenly and significantly. Zero felt the sensation in the pit of his stomach.
“One minute!” the pilot said over the intercom. “I’ll give the go-ahead when we’re over the coordinates you gave me. On my mark, make the jump!”
This was really happening. They were going to leap out of a speeding Gulfstream and try to land in a shopping center in Maryland during an ultrasonic attack in the hopes of finding the weapon and detaining the people responsible.
Just another day at the office.
“Ear plugs in!” Maria ordered. “We won’t be able to communicate, but they’ll protect your hearing against the frequency. Let’s keep it tight and get there in one piece!”
Zero fit the tiny, kidney bean–shaped ear plugs into each ear. Instantly all sound was drowned out by a slight whine, a high-pitched frequency that felt as if it was coming from inside his own head.
Maria opened the cabin door. Wind whipped about, tearing at his clothes, stinging his eyes. He was certain that it was deafeningly loud, but he heard none of it. Only the whine in his ears. It was remarkably eerie.
Suddenly the lights went out in the plane’s cabin. They wouldn’t be able to hear the pilot’s voice; this was his mark. Go-time.
Strickland leapt out without hesitation. Maria followed on a two-count. Zero edged to the door. The world looked very far away.
You’ve done this before. It’s just been a couple years.
That didn’t make it any easier. But somewhere down there, very far away, people were being hurt and worse at that very moment.
He took a breath, and he jumped.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
Zero was floating.
At least that’s how it felt. With skydiving, there wasn’t that sensation of plummeting as there was with shorter drops, like the first hill of a roller coaster or, say, leaping out of a helicopter and onto the top of a box truck. He held the arch position as he fell: elbows out, hands flat in front of his face, knees slightly bent and head back. Without looking at the rushing ground and without the sound of the wind tearing at him, he could have been floating in place.
It was oddly serene. Any fears or anxieties he had a few moments earlier, back on the plane, were gone. But then he did glance down at the oncoming Earth. He had to remind himself that he was aiming for ground zero of a new attack.
He kept his left arm out for stability, to keep him from spinning, as he reached back with his right for the deployment cord. His fingers closed around it. In the instant before he pulled, he saw a parachute open below him and slightly to his left, what he presumed was just a bit west. It blossomed like a flower, though he couldn’t tell if it was Maria or Strickland beneath it.
Then another opened, white in color but a disconcerting distance to Zero’s north. How had the three of them gotten so scattered so quickly? It must have been the speed of the Gulfstream, and the few seconds of hesitation before he made the jump.
Zero tugged the cord. Again there was no sound as the shadow billowed out over his head. His shoulders were tugged upward as his descent slowed. He didn’t know where Maria or Todd would land and there was nothing he could do about it. He could only concern himself with his own landing. Glancing around to get his bearings, he saw the vast and glistening Chesapeake Bay to his right—which meant he was facing north. He gripped the control lines and brought himself down steadily as he scanned the oncoming ground. This place, Prince Frederick, was a lot of green, dotted with homes on sprawling rural properties. He looked for a downtown, for the commercial shopping center.
He spotted an L-shaped arrangement of beige, flat-topped buildings. A wide parking lot beyond it. And… was that smoke? Even from his height he could see it, a dark plume rising up from the lot. A car accident, perhaps, in the wake of the sonic weapon’s effects.
Zero tugged on the control lines, steering the chute as best he could to land him at the far edge of the lot. As he touched down on asphalt, he kept his legs slightly bent and broke into a jog upon impact, slowing himself as the parachute landed behind him.
He tore at the chest harness and leg straps as quickly as he could and swung his gear bag over a shoulder. Then he glanced around.
It didn’t look like anyone had noticed his arrival, that a man had mysteriously parachuted into the parking lot. They were, it seemed, more preoccupied with surviving.
People ran across the lot. Some winced as if they were in great pain; others had their mouths opened in a silent, yawning scream that Zero did not hear. He was right about the source of the smoke; there was at least one, perhaps more, minor collisions around him. Across the parking lot he could see people falling over, writhing in pain. Some not moving at all.
Near the buildings, the strip mall stores, people clambered and fought to get inside, thinking erroneously that it might help alleviate the ill effects they were feeling. It wouldn’t, and the people already inside were thinking the opposite, fleeing and getting to the outdoors. Fists flew and arms shoved and legs trampled.
Zero noticed all of this in seconds after landing, though it was entirely silent to him. He heard nothing but the high-pitched whine in his ears. It was unnatural and chilling. Without sound, he felt detached from it all, as if he was merely watching a disaster film on mute.
And then—he felt it.
At first it didn’t feel like much of anything other than the vague sensation of knowing that he wasn’t quite right. Then it was the thundercloud of an oncoming headache in his skull. Then a bad hangover after a night of heavy drinking.
His head swam with dizziness. Nausea roiled in his stomach. Zero knew all too well what this was; he had parachuted directly into the range of the ultrasonic weapon.
His vision blurred and he stumbled forward. A pedestrian ran by, a hazy and silent shape that whirled him. His balance was thrown; his equilibrium was off. He lurched and put out both hands to steady himself.
Now he understood keenly why the weapon was not only dangerous, but terrifying. He had no idea which direction it was coming from. No way to tell where it might be hidden.
But that’s not true, he reminded himself. The sonic detection meter was still in his gear bag. But it might as well have been locked away in Bixby’s lab in Langley for all the good it would do him now.
Zero hit the asphalt with both knees. He couldn’t see anything but fuzzy shapes and colors that bled into one another. The infrasound was vibrating his eyeballs in his skull. He couldn’t stand. Bile rose in his throat. He didn’t dare try to move. An attempt to get out of the weapon’s range might accidentally bring him closer to it, and Bixby had warned about the effects at the closest ranges.
Ruptured organs. Internal bleeding. Death.
He could do little but ride it out like a storm, and hope against hope that Maria and Strickland had landed a safe distance away, that they weren’t dealing with the same as him at that moment.
And then—if by some miracle, the sensations waned. The dizziness subsided. The nausea faded. He could see again, his vision returning to focus as if someone had slipped a pair of eyeglasses over his forehead.
They stopped.
The attack, by his best guess, had lasted less than two minutes since he’d landed in the parking lot. But it had felt much longer.
They stopped.
He was grateful for it. But he also panicked. If the attack had ended, he and his team had little chance of finding them again. They would escape. They would run again. Unless they were actively using the weapon, they wouldn’t be able to track them.
Zero reached for his gear bag. As he did he wobbled unsteadily on his feet. He was still dizzy. He was still off-kilter. The realization struck him swiftly as he yanked out the yellow and black
handheld device and powered it on.
The effects were slight. Zero hadn’t moved, but still what he felt suggested that he was in the longest-range zone of the weapon. Maybe the attack hadn’t stopped. Maybe the attack had simply waned. And that meant…
Yes. The sonic detection meter had a signal. A blip, barely a reading—but it meant the device was still powered on. Zero whipped the meter left and right in a semicircle, pointing the plastic dish in various directions, trying to lock onto a location.
There. A digital number flashed on the small screen at the rear of the device, behind the handle and above Zero’s thumb. It read “270.”
The perpetrators, and their sonic weapon, were two hundred seventy meters to the southeast. The number vanished, a moment later replaced by another: 290.
Then it, and the blip of the signal, was gone. He wasn’t sure whether they had shut the weapon off or had moved beyond the detection meter’s range. But he knew they weren’t far. And he knew the direction in which they were heading. And he knew that they would need a vehicle large enough to transport their team and the weapon.
He had to find something smaller and faster.
Zero dared to tug his earplugs out and sucked in a breath as he was instantly and unceremoniously reintroduced to the world of sound. The aftermath of the sonic attack on the parking lot of a strip mall in Prince Frederick was horrifying. Pained moans, confused shouts, and terrified shrieks filled the air, an accompaniment to the sirens of various emergency vehicles that converged on the lot.
But Zero had no time to waste. He couldn’t linger and help anyone here; he had to make sure this didn’t happen anywhere else. He spotted a motorcycle on its side, a classic chopper in black and silver, and ran to it, pushing it upright with a groan. He let out a small sigh of relief as he saw that the keys were in the ignition, and a quick murmur of thanks to the patron saint of stupid luck when the engine turned over and nothing was seriously damaged.