“An extra six and a half knots. That makes eleven and a half knots.”
Morris was slowly increasing speed. In other words, he was running. That meant two things: First, they had the right boat. Second, Morris was vulnerable.
“He’ll be at the mouth of the harbor,” Diana said.
“How many yards ahead of him?”
“Fifteen hundred and fifty.”
“Too far. What port is it?”
“A little community called Easterly. Couple of marinas, a fishing fleet of maybe five boats. He’s up to twelve knots.”
Unless Flynn increased speed, he would never come into Mac’s range at all, because Morris would reach port first.
He gripped the throttle. But then a realization came, which was that, if Morris had enough speed available to him, he was already close in enough to beat the Donzi.
Morris had won again, as always by thinking farther ahead. No matter what Flynn did, he wasn’t going to catch the psychopath.
“Chopper’s up,” Mac said.
“I don’t see it.”
“You will. Two minutes.”
“He’s at thirteen knots. Four thousand one hundred yards ahead of us. Opening the gap now.”
Flynn held steady.
The seconds practically crawled—five, ten, twenty.
Flynn watched the dark shore.
Two minutes came and went.
“We’re losing him,” Diana said.
A spear of light came down from the sky above Easterly, then ran along its shore. A moment later, another, farther down, appeared. Then a third one up the coast a few miles.
Three helicopters instead of one.
“Slowing. Ten knots. Five. Dead slow now.”
Was he buying it? Or just being cautious?
The Long Island shore was dark.
Five searchlights now swept up and down the Connecticut coast, centering on Easterly.
Diana said, “He’s increasing speed. Fourteen knots.”
“What in hell?”
“No, wait he’s going dead slow—no—oh, Jesus, it’s a turn, a tight turn. He’s heading this way! He’s still turning. Now he’s going for the opposite shore.”
It had worked—maybe. Flynn held steady.
Diana said, “On his current heading, he’ll be in range in two minutes.”
Mac went back up to the front of the boat. Flynn held the boat absolutely steady, still on the same heading, now closing rapidly with Morris, who would cross their bows at 2,200 feet.
Without warning, without a flash or a sound, there came a tremendous shock wave, invisible until it hit the boat. Flynn was knocked back off the helm, sprawling into the seating behind him. Diana, whose head was below the level of the cockpit dash, lurched with the boat but kept her footing.
Flynn scrambled to his feet, grabbed the helm, and righted the lurching boat. “Mac!”
“I got it, I’m okay.”
“Hold on, it will come again!” Then, “Di, you okay?”
“I’m good.”
“I hope it’s the same shock wave weapon Geri used, because it didn’t work worth a shit.”
Twenty seconds to go. Ten.
“It’s speeding up, it’s coming straight at us.”
Mac fired. A second time. A third.
Flynn pushed the throttle to the dash, and the Donzi leaped to life.
Mac came down, sliding into the cockpit. Flynn said, “We gotta stay up on plane—the bow’s full of burst seams.”
Flynn swerved the boat so he could see ahead. The fishing vessel was dead in the water. In it, he could see slumped forms.
“Di, crack the grenades.”
“We can’t set off grenades in the middle of Long Island Sound.”
“Maybe you can’t,” Flynn said.
When they came up beside the fishing boat, which was wallowing in the water, Flynn surrendered the controls to Mac and jumped aboard at once. “Give me some light!” he shouted up at Diana, who turned one of their floods on the scene in the craft.
A figure lay sprawled on its back. It looked entirely human. “Jesus,” Flynn muttered. He turned over a second figure.
The face was not the same as that of the first, but its shape was. Flynn pulled out his flashlight and lifted one of the eyelids, and there staring up at him was the unmistakable steel gray of Louis Charleton Morris’s eye. In his temple, there was a hole oozing blood. Geri’s weapon was in the bottom of the boat, floating in the bloody water.
Morris’s only mistake had been to trust it.
Flynn picked up the pulse weapon and put it in his pocket. Might be of some use to somebody. He’d turn it in to the tech team at HQ.
The third and last body had a human form as well, but the face of a biorobot. It stared, but not sightlessly.
“This one’s rejuvenating fast,” Flynn said.
Diana handed down the grenades, and Flynn thrust one in each mouth, breaking jaws to ram them in. Morris seemed to be resisting, so Flynn used his knife to also cut back the muscles at the hinges of the alien’s jaws, then rammed the grenade farther down, into his throat.
Morris began spasmodically attempting to regurgitate it.
Mac cut into Morris’s thorax and put in another grenade.
They got back into the Donzi and pulled out, planing away at high speed. When they were a mile out, Flynn detonated the grenades by radio.
Modern hand grenades were not small explosives, and the boat burst apart in a deafening explosion that slammed from the Connecticut shore to the Long Island shore and back. In the distance, car alarms along both coasts began sounding. A deeper siren, perhaps a volunteer fire department, joined them.
“There are going to be water patrols from ten sheriffs’ departments out here within half an hour, not to mention the coast guard,” Flynn said as they headed back to Deer Island at full throttle.
“Did we do it?”
“Mac, you’re one of those guys who’s going to get a medal you can’t tell anybody about, because the answer is yes, we did it. We have sterilized our planet of a psychotic alien and his deranged posse of biorobots.”
As the boat ran on, Flynn looked up at the half moon now hanging in a deep purple predawn sky, and at the stars beyond, fading now. He thought of the scourge that Aeon had unleashed, and what must be happening there now, and of Geri gone on her perilous journey, taking with her the last echo of Abby that he would ever see.
Diana leaned against him for a moment. Nothing was said, and then she was gone from his side, back to her seat.
He drove the boat onward, staying up on plane to reduce leakage, toward the dark bulk of Deer Island and the life of the future, whatever might come, whatever lay beyond.
Tor Books by Whitley Strieber
Alien Hunter
Hybrids
The Omega Point
Critical Mass
2012
The Grays
The Wild
Catmagic
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Whitley Strieber is the bestselling author of more than twenty-five books, including the legendary Warday, Nature’s End, and The Coming Global Superstorm, the basis of the movie The Day After Tomorrow. His most recent books, The Grays and 2012: The War for Souls, are both being made into films. His website, www.unknowncountry.com, is the largest of its kind in the world, exploring the edge of science and reality.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ALIEN HUNTER: UNDERWORLD
Copyright © 2014 by Walker & Collier, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Cover photographs by Getty Images
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Strieber, Whitley.
Alien hunter: Underworld / Whitley Strieber.
p. cm.—(Alien Hunter; 2)
ISBN 978-0-7653-3154-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-2274-6 (e-book)
1. Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. 2. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 3. Alien abduction—Fiction. 4. Secret service—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Underworld.
PS3569.T6955A793 2014
813'.54—dc23
2014015431
e-ISBN 9781429922746
First Edition: August 2014
Alien Hunter: Underworld Page 27