BRAINSTORM

by Gordon Kessler

  Hoping it has not ruptured a vital organ, I continue the twisting into a spin, getting out of my assailant’s aim, then leaping toward the initial gunman.

  The entire group begins to bring their guns to bear on me.

  I reach the leader’s gun barrel and push it away, just as he lets fly a volley of three rounds.

  His back foot leaves the floor. I know it will be directed at my groin. I bring my leading foot up to block it, at the same time I wrench the assault rifle out of his hands. He is off balance, and I shove him into his nearest two accomplices before they can fire at me. I duck and throw my body sideways into the two remaining guards on the other side of him, bowling them over in surprise.

  Getting to my feet quickly, I use the first gunman’s rifle like a pugil stick, knocking the weapons out of each of the guards’ hands. I have to wrestle the last gun from the guard farthest away as he fires, the heat from the muzzle flash burning the side of my face but the bullets passing harmlessly.

  Sharp pain from my side finally reaches the receptors in my brain, but I continue my battle. With their weapons knocked from reach, I face the five guards mano-a-manos and they rush me. Seeing each fist coming, each arm reaching, each foot rising—each flinch—from my five adversaries, in my mind I have time to prioritize their individual attacks as they surround me. I deal with them coolly: my knuckles into the nose of the first; blocking a kick from the second, then swinging him by the leg into the man beside him; my forearm, avoiding a roundhouse punch, grabbing the arm and pulling the attacker past and into the wall; a punch and a toe to the groin of another.

  The leader steps up to me after being blocked away. Anger and frustration fills his face. His words come from his mouth slower than audible, but I can understand. “Let me have him.”

  The others obey and watch, and I think I’m going to enjoy this.

  My adversary throws a right. I block. A left. I block. A right again. I block and slap his cheek. He pauses, face reddening, eyes glaring. He launches a kick. I grab his foot and spin him around. He finds his balance and jabs. I redirect and spin him the opposite direction.

  He cuts loose, his fists flailing. Six punches. I block each one. Take him by the back of the helmet and pull his face within inches of mine.

  I smile and wink. “Boo-Boo, have we had a ba-ad da-ay?”

  Enough being nice—I kick my knee as high and hard as I can against his protected groin. His face is furious until contact—then blank and dumb as my knee raises him from the floor and he falls back. Even with the body armor, it has to hurt.

  Now, all the others’ eyes are on me, and they have regained their weapons.

  The leader raises up, still in intense pain, and one of his men throws his assault rifle to him.

  “Son of a bitch!” he says in anger and embarrassment, and takes aim.

  No more showing off. Now, it’s serious. “Don’t try it,” I bluff, “or I’ll have to kill you.” It will take a miracle for me to escape death, now.

  And the miracle comes. Before he can squeeze the trigger, a tremor shakes through the entire structure, and it brings me back to real time.

  * * *

  The guards were stunned when the doorways cracked and the floor buckled, and I realized they thought I was responsible for the earthquake.

  “Forget it, Top,” the first guy said. “Let’s get out of here!” With that, his comrades sprinted through the stair doorway. With the door swung wide, I could see them diving and tumbling as they passed my group, rolling down the steps in the gooey trash. It was obviously easier for them going down than up.

  My bluff seemed to work. The leader paused, seeming to have second thoughts, as he sat aiming at me. I was sure in his mind’s eye, he was imagining the next bullets he fired somehow redirected and returned to him, me making his gun explode, or causing the floor to open up and swallow him.

  As a steel beam broke through the ceiling and landed a few yards beside us, I waved my finger at him.

  The anger on his face transformed to terror, and he swiftly got to his feet and dashed away.

  The guards’ threat banished, nevertheless, I knew we were about to go through hell, as the world around me shook tumultuously.

  * * *

  “Follow me,” I said to my silent army, and I raced by them along the outside of the stairs. When I reached the basement, I trotted through the large double doors of the emergency room/ambulance garage. My group followed slowly, and I was glad of no more stairs to descend.

  Try high gear, Harvey said.

  “Step quickly,” I told them, and to my amazement, they did, yet still not as fast as I would have liked. I was afraid of what might happen if I said run. Would I have a group of dominoes falling all over the place, taking too long to recover? I didn’t chance it.

  Pieces of the ceiling tile fell as we went. A sign that pointed to our left and said Ambulance Garage on it tumbled from the ceiling as we came to a narrower corridor branching off from the main one we were in. Finally, we passed through a last set of double doors and into the parking garage. Before us waited an ambulance loaded with boxes, its front end pointed at a twelve-foot-wide overhead door.

  “Stop, here,” I told my group and went to the palm pad beside the doorway. However, after placing my hand upon it, the door wouldn’t raise.

  The earthquake continued. The floor shook. The walls cracked and buckled. I sprinted to the ambulance, got in and found the keys in the ignition. It seemed years since I’d driven a car as the engine started with a roar.

  Abruptly, someone sat up in the back like on a springboard.

  The person had a familiar accent. “My goodness! We are on the road once more!”

  In the rearview mirror, I saw one of the boxes shift to one side and Rajiv’s smiling face shown from where it had been.

  “But where is the femme fatale, Sunny?”

  The words are difficult to speak. “She’s dead.”

  Neither of us spoke further for a moment. Then Rajiv said, “I am truly sorry, my friend.”

  I nodded. “Hold on, Rajiv,” I told him, relieved to have found at least one true friend.

  I slammed the shift lever to drive and stomped the accelerator. The ambulance’s tires squealed on the sealed concrete floor, and we busted through the fiberglass doorway and stopped. Ahead of us, a long lighted tunnel lay like a mysterious pathway. Would it lead us to salvation or more hell?

  “We are running out of time, my good friend,” Rajiv said. “It is now four-forty. We have less than an hour to get our donkeys out of here.”

  I stuck my head through the window and looked back at my passive mob.

  “Follow me!” I yelled out. “Hurry. Run!”

  Again, I was surprised when the group of automatons began hurriedly, yet clumsily, into the tunnel entrance and over the smashed door. They tumbled and tripped over one another, but recovered quickly and kept moving.

  After driving down a slight incline, a second tunnel met the one we were in, and I guessed it led from the basement. Less than an eighth of a mile farther, we came to the other end of the passageway and saw before us the last of the Orientals who had been held captive inside the facility. The whites of their striped pajamas shone bright in the ambulance headlights. They ran to the left once they got out into the open. I stopped at the tunnel’s opening and watched them as they trotted, the five hundred poorly clothed men, women and children in an all-out bid to save themselves, down a snowy, narrow pathway.

  Then, I remembered the jumbo jets, and I looked to the brightly lit airfield below us. An eight-foot-wide blacktop lined with boulders, scrub brush and half a foot of snow meandered the quarter of a mile to the airstrip. The big Boeing 747s were being loaded with cargo and personnel, as in my premonition. However, Xiang’s jet had yet to take off. And there were three snowplows clearing the field of snow.

  * * *

  In the Oval Office, Mason considered the alternatives, frantic for a solution. He was now inclined to believe the
remote viewers—that incredible changes were to come, biblical in proportions. He was just off the phone with Dr. Ultar, who’d passed on the RV’s prediction clearly—within two hours the terrible mechanism would be in place, a sequence of events would begin that could not be stopped. The only alternative was a nuclear response.

  Chief of Staff Thurman burst into the Presidential Office. “We’ve tracked them down, Mr. President. We determined that Major Jackson had requested satellite photos from the U.S. Geological Service and had a SatScan done of the area. And intelligence sources are telling us there’s been an unusual amount of EMP activity in that area. It’s undeniable. You’re not going to believe it. A surgical nuclear strike is imperative.”

  “Where?”

  Jacob Banks pushed through the doorway past Thurman. “God, no, Mr. President. We need to support them!”

  “Tell me where they are!”

  “There’s not much time, Mr. President,” Thurman said, as Carl Winston stepped in, Secretary Coates shadowing. “You must make your decision now!”

  “Not so fast,” Winston said. “Jackson’s turned on his transponder so we can pinpoint his exact location, and he’s asking for help. Say’s it’s they’re only hope.”

  “Good God!” Mason yelled. “Would somebody please tell me where in the hell they are!”

  Chapter 35

  From the bushes to our right emerged a dark figure in the predawn light.

  It was Dr. Yumi running all out through six inches of snow cover.

  “Get out of here,” Yumi said. “They are directly behind me. We have been found out!” She was terribly disheveled, blouse torn, lipstick smeared across her face, beautiful hair tousled.

  I rolled out of the ambulance as several bullets struck it and the tunnel entrance. I brought my M-16 up and answered with a volley of my own, then yanked Rajiv from the back door as he opened it. The three of us ran toward the safety of the concrete lined tunnel entrance and pressed against one side. Bullets ricocheted through from the direction Yumi had come.

  “Stop!” I yelled at my mindless mass as they approached, now only fifty feet away but still inside the tunnel. “Get down!” I commanded and they did. I nodded toward the gunfire and asked Yumi, “Who are they?”

  “Wu and eight guards,” she said. Her eyes were moist and bloodshot. “While hiding, I heard Xiang give him twenty minutes to kill us and return with proof, or he said he would not let them leave.”

  “He’s quite the motivator. What are we going to do? You got any ideas?” I asked her, the bullets whining and zipping by.

  “Die, I would guess,” Yumi said.

  But then came the now familiar sound of rotor blades. The whoosh of the acoustic cannon filled the air, and the ground shuddered. Another shot of sound, and boulders rolled down the hill from in front of us. In the single remaining ambulance headlight, I could see several men stricken to the ground.

  The chopper descended before us, a DPV suspended fifty feet underneath. The chopper placed the vehicle gently about forty yards down the small, blacktop that led to the landing strip. Two men rappelled from the helicopter to the DPV and released its cables. The helicopter then shifted back toward us and landed clear of the tunnel.

  “This is it,” I said. “This is our only chance!” I stood up and yelled to the blanks behind us, “Get up. Run this way!” And they came like a stampede of kneecapped cattle.

  Six of Major Jackson’s men jumped off the back ramp of the chopper. Behind them, Gunny Sampson, Sarge, Chief Dailey and Major Jackson, himself. Although I hadn’t seen his face without goggles before, I knew it was him, something deep inside was sure of it.

  Jackson waved and called out, “Let’s go, let’s go!” and within ten seconds the entire bunch of us met midway to the helo.

  I told my thoughtless horde to stop.

  “Good to see you, sir!” Jackson said.

  “Likewise, Major Jackson,” I said, giving the Major as much of a smile as I could muster.

  “Call me Jax,” he said, and I nodded to him as three of his men helped a few of the blanks and Rajiv to the chopper and aboard. The other three and Sampson were binding the hands of the security force that had attacked us.

  I could not see Wu.

  “Be careful,” I told Sampson as I watched our disabled enemy. “There’s a real bad one still out there.”

  The major was looking around expectantly. “Where’s Sunny?”

  Sarge nuzzled my hand and barked twice.

  As I patted the dog, my voice cracked with emotions. “She didn’t make it.”

  “Oh, Damn it!” Jax said, and the grimace this hard-core military man displayed surprised me. His lean, tall body swayed from the news. “I’m so, sorry.”

  I told him, “I know, Jax—about Sunny and me. She told me.”

  Jax clutched my shoulder in condolence. He shook his head but said nothing.

  “I think her husband is among these people.” I pointed to the white, night-shirted blanks.

  Jax only frowned.

  “At least we might be able to save him. But I don’t know if any of these people’s mental, or psychological states are salvageable.”

  I couldn’t decide what Jax was thinking as he looked at me, keeping his frown.

  I nodded. I began to have those flashes of memories again, brief, dark memories of a firefight. Of men dying under fire. Of a helicopter crashing. Of pulling a man out. Of carrying that man on my back, down a hill, through trees to a beach.

  Jax looked toward the blanks. “There’s no way we can take all these people. We’ve only the one helicopter. We’ll have to pick and choose.”

  I glanced back at the three-hundred-plus pairs of notion-less eyes. “Let’s save who we can,” I told him, but I didn’t tell him that I would stay behind with the rest.

  “Roger that,” he said back.

  “We’ve got lots of proof of what’s been going on here in that ambulance,” I told Jax, pointing to it.”

  Jax said, “If we leave the DPV, we might be able to lift it.”

  “Can you give it a try?”

  Jax nodded, and grabbed his helicopter’s crew chief to instruct him about the ambulance.

  As the soldiers pulled the emergency vehicle out farther onto the road so they could attach the lift cables, Yumi trotted back past the entrance of the tunnel and toward the small trail on which the captives had departed.

  “Yumi,” I called out after her. “Where’re you going?”

  “Back to my home,” she said. “Kill Xiang. Not for me—but for my people.” She turned and disappeared into the snow and shadows.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Jax said. “Our margin of safety is shrinking rapidly.”

  Dailey stood back, protecting his hat from the rotor wash. A static squawk came from his radio. “Chief, this is Prater.”

  He smiled at me as Jax gave the chopper pilot the signal to shut off his engines. Dailey said, “Found a couple walky-talkies that were turned off and worked down at the hanger.” He then answered the call with the helo’s engines winding down. “This is Dailey. Go ahead.”

  “The bridge is down and it looks like one hell of a rockslide. There’s no way in hell we’re going to get out of here in cars. We got women and children here. It’ll take hours to climb over the rocks and cross the stream.”

  Dailey looked to me. “That bastard. Xiang got wise to the evacuation. He must have had some of his boys blow the bridge. They’ll all die. The entire town.”

  “Not so fast, Chief,” I told him. “Tell Prater to turn around.”

  “Hold on Prater,” he said into the mike staring at me. He shifted his chewing tobacco to the other cheek. “We’re working on it.”

  I turned to Jax and said, “Somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand innocent people aren’t going to make it if we don’t do something.”

  “Even if that’s true, there’s nothing we can do. It’s too late for them—hell, it’s probably too late for us.”
/>
  Chief Dailey stepped up to us. “But he’s right. The rest of the POWs, their families, quite a few abductees.”

  “POWs?” I said, confused.

  “I’d guess you folks would call us MIAs,” Dailey said.

  Jax placed his hand on Dailey’s arm and looked at him as if awestruck. “My sweet God. Then it’s true? What our remote viewer told us wasn’t some sort of red herring?”

  “No red herring, major,” Dailey said. “Most of the citizens of Gold Rush are either POWs of Vietnam or Korea—or their descendants. They’re over three hundred Americans from the Vietnam War and two dozen from Korea. We’ve got another two hundred Canadians, Australians, French, English, South Koreans, and South Vietnamese. Besides a couple hundred of Xiang’s people, the rest of the folks are my fellow POW’s families, mine included. I’d guess you’re correct, close to four thousand.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Jax said. He looked at his watch.

  “What about the planes?” I asked, pointing to the two jumbo jetliners on the tarmac.

  “No good,” Jax answered. “I doubt if they’re rigged to hold any more than three-hundred fifty, four hundred each, at most.” He faced the horizon to the East. “We have exactly fifty minutes to get as many people as we can over that ridge five miles away.” He pointed to a saddle in a mountain crest. “That means this helicopter must, without question, be airborne and heading in that direction in forty-seven minutes.”

  Chapter 36