Alien Hunter: Underworld

by Whitley Strieber

Miguel didn’t hesitate. He headed off and intercepted Bernie. They both stood about fifty feet away, watching.

  “You take that Citation, you are going to your death.”

  “What?”

  “I’m tellin’ you, man, you gotta get your head around this. Morris will waste you the first chance he gets.”

  “What about, like, in the next ten seconds?”

  “If he knows we’re here, it’s possible.”

  Mac looked down and hunched his shoulders, closing in on himself.

  “Once we’re in the air, he will definitely find us and will definitely strike. If we’re going to make it, it’s going to take some fancy flying.”

  Mac ripped off his hat and threw it down.

  “We need to do this, Mac. Now.”

  He grabbed up the hat. “I know it.”

  They got into the plane.

  Flynn looked over the controls. “Beautiful. This puppy can fly itself.”

  “I hope so, because if you’re as good as you used to be, there won’t be anybody else involved who can.”

  Flynn did the checklist, turned on the engine, and taxied across to the runway. The plane was light on the touch. A powerful little aircraft, probably capable of flying rings around most World War II fighters.

  “Here we go.” He pushed the throttle forward and felt the airframe shudder into life as they sped down the runway. He didn’t know the exact rotation speed, but the plane made it very clear when it was ready to take off.

  Once airborne, he turned east.

  “Why is it tilting? What’s going on?”

  “Take it easy, we’re okay.”

  He pointed the nose into the hard and unforgiving sun.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  FLYNN FLEW low with his radios and as many of his instruments powered down as he could safely manage.

  Mac twisted in his seat. He peered out his window, then turned a pleading face toward Flynn. “Something wrong with the plane?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Then why do I see trees going by?”

  “We’re flying under FAA radars, which means we need to stay below five hundred feet.”

  “Damn.”

  Flynn was flying with only the gravitational and magnetic instruments, primarily the compass. Keeping a low signal profile probably wouldn’t deceive Morris, but it wouldn’t help him, either. He dropped the nose a little more.

  “Water tower!”

  They skimmed it so close that the plane’s wind stream buffeted them as it compressed against the white-painted surface.

  Mac screamed and threw his head back, clutching his fists to his forehead.

  “Guess you didn’t see what town that was.”

  “Town? What town? Where are we?”

  “Better if you watch the sky,” Flynn said. “Any gleam, no matter how tiny.”

  “What do we do then?”

  “Find out if your airplane’s any damn good.”

  They flew on, keeping as low as Flynn dared, between three and four hundred feet. He kept a close eye out for radio masts and more water towers.

  An hour passed.

  “Flynn, will you answer me a question?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Be honest.”

  “If I can.”

  “I think we both know I can’t shoot the disk down, no matter how well I understand its design. I mean, we’re talking about a seam a millimeter wide.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  If he had been enhanced at Deer Island—and he was reasonably sure that was the case—maybe Mac could have been, too. But he wasn’t going to say that. He knew his friend. Mac was unlikely to be comfortable, at least not until he knew what was involved, and right now, Flynn could not answer that question.

  They flew on through the empty morning sky, powering across the great, flat expanse of Texas, small towns, long roads, and a bleak landscape passing below in majesty.

  When they were still about twenty minutes from their destination, Mac said, “There.” He pointed.

  There was nothing there, just blue sky.

  “Closing fast,” Mac snapped. “Eight o’clock.”

  Flynn saw it, then. He pushed the throttle to the firewall and put the plane into a skidding roll, then dived almost straight down, forcing the disk, which had been coming up under the plane, to dart up past them.

  “Shit, Flynn!”

  Now at an altitude of perhaps fifty feet, he was flying along a highway, jinking across overpasses. He shot straight down the main street of a town with the disk close behind. Once out in the countryside again, he took the plane up to fifteen hundred feet as fast as he could make it go, then did a tight Immelmann turn and angled back down, passing under the disk, then doing another evasive turn at crop duster altitude over a field.

  “Bag,” Mac croaked. “Bag!”

  “Glove box.”

  Mac yanked out a brown airsickness bag.

  The small cockpit began getting hot. “They’re gonna burn us!” Mac shouted.

  “They’re going to try to take the plane. They need me alive.”

  “What about me?”

  “They don’t care, buddy, but I sure as hell do.” He pulled the throttle back and dropped the flaps, then pulled the nose up, causing the plane to pancake almost to the ground.

  Now he grabbed for airspeed and turned, heading south. They needed a more populated area, and fast.

  The plane began to shake. The stall horn started peeping.

  “What’s that?”

  “Stall horn.” Again, he pushed the throttle to the wall. As he did a series of barrel rolls, Mac screamed.

  “Can it, I need to concentrate here.”

  “God, oh God, help me, help me now!”

  Ahead, Flynn could see a shimmer of water on the horizon. They were no more than thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. “We’re ditching in about five minutes.”

  “Ditching?”

  “If we can hang in there that long.”

  The disk, maneuvering effortlessly, dropped down in front of them. For a second or so, had he been in a fighter, Flynn would have had a shot at its flank, but not at that all-important lower fuselage seam. At an altitude now of just three hundred feet, he had little room to maneuver. Climbing would be certain death.

  Again, the plane began to heat up.

  “Is it on fire? What’s happening?”

  “I think they’re pulling us into the thing.”

  “Shit, Flynn!”

  Below them was a stretch of Interstate 10. He saw a series of underpasses. He headed down. If he had to choose between becoming Morris’s captive or slamming into a concrete pillar, he’d have to choose the pillar.

  They shot through an underpass, Flynn working the controls with breath and feather.

  “Goddamn!”

  They went through another. Overhead, the disk was pacing them.

  The third one was narrower, coming up fast. Coming toward it from the other direction was an eighteen-wheeler. Closer. He could see the driver, his eyes practically popping out of his head, his hand hammering his horn.

  A second later, it was all behind them. Then came another underpass. They made it through, and Flynn yanked the stick into his stomach, passing over an oncoming bus, then banking and heading once again toward the water, which was now spreading blue, covering half the horizon.

  “Sailboats,” he said to Mac. “Nice.”

  “You’re insane!”

  The disk was nowhere to be seen, but that meant nothing. He kept heading toward the water. “I think that’s Brazoria down there. You can see Galveston out my window.”

  “Are we gonna ditch?”

  “We’re gonna stay within flopping distance of the water.”

  Where was the disk? Backed off, maybe, because they were over a populated area. Morris wouldn’t want it to show up on YouTube.

  He turned on his radios and navigation system and took the plane up to fifteen hundred feet. Somewhere, a traffic
controller was going to be wondering where he came from, but with general aviation aircraft, they expected any damn thing.

  They flew along the beach until he saw the Gulf Freeway, which he followed north. He called for clearance into Pearland Airport, and, to his private astonishment, they were on the ground a short time later.

  They opened the gull-wing doors and climbed out. Mac looked back at the plane, shook his head, and practically ran into the airport’s small terminal.

  There was a pay phone, and Flynn called for an Enterprise car. Then, almost fearing to do so, he called Eddie.

  “Flynn! You in Houston?”

  “We made it. How are you?”

  “All quiet on the western front.”

  “Just remember what I said, Eddie. Get the hell out of there for the duration.”

  “We’re going to—”

  “Don’t tell me, I don’t even want to know.”

  “You’re all set with my bro. His name is John Shelton.” He gave Flynn a cell phone number. “He’s waiting for you, they’ll get you into radiology immediately.”

  In the rental car, Mac said, “I sure would like to polish off a bottle of bourbon and do some smoke.”

  “You and me both.” There were eleven texts from Diana on his phone. The first four were stern, the next five concerned, the last two frantic. He called her.

  “Oh, God, Flynn!” Then, to another party he assumed was Geri, “It’s him.”

  “Hey. I’m in Houston with Mac.”

  “And you’re all right?”

  “At the moment.”

  “When are you coming in?”

  “Working in that direction.” Until he was certain he could not be tracked, he had no intention of going anywhere near the office. “Listen, you stay careful. I’d live in the suite.”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing. Both of us.”

  “Good. Stay far away from your house, your friends. Just completely isolate yourself.” If he was being tracked, it wasn’t beyond possibility that she was, too, or any of them.

  “I’ll do my best, Flynn.”

  “Any more on that blocked number?”

  “No, and it’s odd. Your cell phone records don’t show any calls from a blocked number.”

  “So it’s still a mystery.”

  “It is. I’m sorry.”

  Saying nothing of his suspicions about what the calls meant, he hung up.

  “What did she say?”

  “Not a lot.”

  According to the car’s GPS, the Department of Neurosurgery was on Holcombe. He drove into the massive hospital complex and found the structure without incident. Once they were deep in the parking garage, he felt himself relax a bit. When they found a parking space, Flynn said, “We’ll need to leave our weaponry in the car.”

  “That doesn’t sound wise.”

  “I don’t like it, either, but guns and hospitals don’t tend to mix.”

  “Let’s live in here,” Mac said as they walked through the gray concrete mass of the parking structure. “We could have furniture brought in, and just set up housekeeping.”

  “It’s tempting. Now I’m going to tell you exactly why we’re here.”

  “You’ve got an alien implant you want taken out because Morris is using it to track your every move.”

  “They took something out of my leg in Fort Stockton, but I think it was intended to be found, so I’d get rid of it and think I was clean. Morris probably anticipated that I’d figure out he had to have some kind of a tracking device on me, and he was trying to set up a deception.”

  “Smart.”

  “But not smart enough. I hope.”

  They got to the elevator. Flynn looked for stairs, but seeing none, he pushed the button. Out of long habit, he listened to the motor as the car moved toward them. Being in places with no escape routes always bothered him. Elevators, always troubling, were potential death traps now.

  They got to the seventh floor without incident, however. The waiting area was crowded. He called Dr. Shelton.

  “Flynn Carroll.”

  “I’ll meet you in Radiology. It’s in the basement—there are signs.”

  Flynn hung up. This time, he found stairs, and they used them to descend to the lower basement, where the MRI scanner was kept.

  “If we find anything, you’re doing this, too,” he told Mac.

  “Not a problem. I sure as hell don’t want that horror show in my head. What’s he look like, anyway? I haven’t seen him since Austin.”

  “Same general features, only a lot younger.”

  “Younger?”

  “They can control a lot of things we can’t. You’ve never seen one of them in person. I have. His name was Oltisis. He was in a safe house in Chicago until it turned out not to be so safe.”

  “What happened?”

  “Morris did him. Burned down half a neighborhood in the process.”

  They arrived in a long, brightly lit hallway, which led to a smaller waiting room in which there were three people. Flynn would rather they hadn’t been there, but the technician took him and Mac directly into the MRI chamber.

  The enormous machine filled most of the space. Flynn said quietly to Mac, “Watch my back, I’ll watch yours.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  A tall man with an enviable mane of black hair came into the room. “I’m John Shelton,” he said.

  “Flynn Carroll. This is—”

  “I’m Frank James,” Mac said.

  Flynn let it ride. Mac’s paranoia was legendary and, in this case, probably entirely justified.

  “What are we looking for?”

  “You understand that this is a national security emergency and it’s classified.”

  “Ed explained that, yes.”

  “You and your technician will need to sign security agreements. There’ll be someone here at the hospital to take you through that process tomorrow.” Or maybe not. He hadn’t told Diana a thing about any of this yet.

  He lay down on the gurney and let himself be rolled into the machine. With the ceiling of the tube just inches from his face, he had to fight back claustrophobia. He closed his eyes. Anything could happen now. Whatever was in him might be designed to kill him if it was affected by a magnetic field. Or, if it was metallic, maybe it would move and destroy brain tissue. Maybe it was even designed to do that, on the theory that if Morris couldn’t have him, nobody could.

  The machine started. He’d had MRI scans before, the time he blew out his left knee falling while giving chase, and the time an irate husband had cracked him in the head with a frozen chicken.

  The thudding and clattering of the magnets seemed to continue on for hours, while he drifted in and out of sleep. He reflected that he was like a fox being chased down by dogs. He’d started out in Mountainville full of confidence. Now here he was in Houston, desperate and exhausted, knowing that if he couldn’t throw off his pursuer soon, he was caught.

  In the machine, he lost track of time. His mind wandered. Again, he slept.

  “Sir? Mr. Carroll?”

  A tinny voice kept calling him. He been flying in a bright sky, peaceful, sunny and blue. “Yes?”

  “Sir, you need to remain still. We have about twenty minutes more.”

  “Yes. Sorry.” He waited then, forcing himself to stay awake, until finally they pulled him out.

  “Sir,” the technician said, “can you come with me?”

  “Mac—er, Frank—come on.”

  They went into a smaller room, dimly lit and full of glowing computer monitors. Dr. Shelton stood before one of them. On it was an image of a brain. Flynn’s brain. He stared at it, and into himself.

  “Good news is, you have no sign of any cancer or any other health issue. This is a normal brain with an intact vascular system.” He took a pencil up off the desk and pointed at a part of the brain. “This is the cerebral white matter.”

  “Yes.”

  “This area of high signal intensity? See the bright sp
ot?”

  Flynn felt sick. He felt angry. But above all, he felt a quiet sense of triumph. “I see it.”

  “That one, and this one here.” He moved the pencil to another, similar bright area. “There are two of them, located bilaterally in the cerebral white matter of the frontal lobes. They are not natural formations, and they should not be there.”

  “What are they?”

  “Small objects of some kind. Metallic, or they wouldn’t look like this.”

  Bingo.

  “Can you get them out?”

  “I would think so. They’re right on the surface, so all we’d need to do is make a couple of small incisions. We’d go in through your skull and pull them right out. It’s a matter of a couple of hours. But I’d need you to answer some questions, first, because I’m flying blind here. I’ve never really seen anything like this.”

  “You’ve agreed to sign the security documents?”

  “I have.”

  “So you understand that there would be serious penalties if you told anybody about this?”

  “I do.”

  “Then I pronounce us doctor and patient. What you are looking at is a tracking system installed in my brain by a scientifically sophisticated enemy of the United States. I work in terrorism intelligence, and this device has compromised my freedom of action and endangered my life. So let me ask you, are you certain you can remove it?”

  “If there are no unexpected problems, I would say so with a high degree of confidence.”

  “There may be problems.”

  “You sound like you’ve got some specific ideas.”

  “I do. The objects may be able to maneuver. They may be able to elude your removal attempt. Also, when you do remove them, I may suffer severe brain damage or even death.”

  “But they’re just little bits of metal. Not even the size of BBs. Almost like grains of sand.”

  “Are you willing to attempt surgery?”

  Dr. Shelton gazed for some time at the MRI image on the computer. Finally, he said, “If you’re willing to take the risk.”

  “Doctor, I have no choice. And I have to tell you, this is a very dangerous situation. I don’t want you to talk about it, not ever. Try not to even think about it. And please utilize the minimum number of personnel you can in the operating room. Now I’d like you to do the same analysis on my friend Frank here.”