by Jack Du Brul
That’s when he saw a man pass just beyond a nearby clump of shrubbery. Mercer couldn’t be sure in the uncertain light if the man was friend or foe. The man was armed, but it was impossible to see whether the weapon had the distinctive banana clip of an AK, or the boxier magazine for the M-4s. Mercer watched him for a moment and realized the silhouetted figure was stalking another man who was even farther away, and who was angled so that he would never see the approaching hunter.
He had seconds to react, but no idea what to do. He could end up saving one of his own, or giving them all away. He worked his arm back underground and popped the flap for his holster. He thumbed off the Beretta’s safety even as he yanked it back out of the earth.
The distant figure didn’t move. The stalker was coming at an angle. Mercer decided a warning shot would be the best he could do, and hope his guy had better reflexes than the Afghani.
A wave of altitude-induced pain passed through Mercer’s skull, and in its wake he had an instant of clearer vision. He saw the stalker was pulling a knife and that his target’s face was too uniformly black for it to be mere shadow.
Mercer drew down his pistol and fired, the bullet taking the Taliban in the throat. The pistol crack echoed for a brief second before the air erupted in the deadly chorus of another firefight.
Sykes whirled, not seeing Mercer, who was half in and half out of the ground, but he must have spotted another target because his assault rifle came up and he cooked off a three-round burst before dropping to a knee behind some rocks. Tracer fire carved slashing lines through the mist.
Desperate now because he was as much a target as he’d been earlier on the cliff, Mercer fought to free himself. He kicked and pried at the loose stone, chipping away at his rocky prison, until without warning great chunks of earth broke away and the chimney collapsed under him. Had he not lunged for the trunk of a hardscrabble tree, he would have plummeted back down the chute. Mercer pulled himself the rest of the way out of the ground, and found he was ringed by shrubbery, in a depression that had been blasted out by the highly charged onslaught of a million years’ worth of lightning.
Twenty yards away, Booker checked out the figure through the scope mounted on his rifle. He let the barrel drop when he realized it was Mercer, ragged and covered in dirt, who had somehow materialized like a zombie crawling out of his own grave to kill Sykes’s stalker.
Sykes caught Mercer’s eye and motioned to him, then laid down cover fire for Mercer to make a break for the rocks. Mercer didn’t waste the opportunity, although his vision was so poor from darkness and altitude sickness that he tripped over a root and went crashing to the ground just shy of the rocks. Sykes had to haul him the rest of the way by his belt.
“Someday you’ll have to explain how you managed to outflank us,” Book said. Mercer could see that the other team members were positioned to cover each other, even if he couldn’t tell which of Sykes’s Seven Dwarfs was which.
Mercer gave in to a tearing coughing fit that left him pale and shaking and spitting pink saliva. “Proverbial bad penny. What’s the situation?”
“Thirty Talibs ambushed our ass,” Sykes said, watching for movement out in the murk. Rain fell in a light haze that swayed with the wind like silvery gossamer. “We got lucky their mortar wasn’t zeroed dead nuts or we’d have been swatted like flies.”
“The chopper?”
“Airborne but it’s too hot and too rugged here. We need to break off and run like hell.”
Mercer opened his mouth to tell his friend that he was in no condition to run like hell or any other way, when a lightning bolt shot out of the storm and hit fifty yards away, splitting a gnarled tree in a burst of fire and blue arcing strands of pure electricity. The boom of thunder hit like a cannon shot and came almost instantly. The air filled with the stench of ozone, and a fighter still clutching his AK staggered out from behind the tree, a smoldering hole in the back of his jacket showing where the bolt had entered his body. A bloody stump where his hand had been was the exit. He fell dead before any of the Americans could take aim.
Seconds later another crooked fork of lightning blasted from the sky, landing a little farther away but producing a ball of seared plasma that raced across the ground like a top, swaying and dancing but always coming closer. It hit a stunted pine tree and vanished in a blaze of singed needles.
Mercer realized what was happening and knew he had seconds to find a solution, or risk killing them all. It was at that moment he remembered the copper box next to the ruined cloud chamber in the Leister Deep Mine, and understood its function. Fishing into his pocket he shouted to Sykes because he knew he had been deafened by the thunder and was sure Sykes had been too. “Give me an ammo clip.”
Booker Sykes had temporarily lost his hearing in enough firefights to have developed the ability to read lips to a limited degree. His vocabulary was little more than oaths of varying intensity and simple military-themed expressions. Mercer happened to hit on one of the latter, and Book pulled a magazine from a chest pouch and tossed it over, never wondering why Mercer would need ammo to a gun he didn’t carry.
Mercer caught the clip and began thumbing the slender 5.56mm bullets onto the ground next to where he crouched. The Taliban fighters recovered from the initial shock of the two lightning strikes and the gruesome death of their man, and renewed firing.
Once he had a pile of shining brass cartridges, Mercer pulled out a field dressing pack from his pocket, and tore it open with his teeth. He scooped up a handful of shells and dumped them onto the dressing. Then he added the lump of crystal and covered it with the rest of the brass shells. He bundled it all together, making sure the dull bit of brown gemstone was completely covered by the ammunition.
The principle was simple; he just didn’t know if the physics were the same. He had constructed a Faraday cage around the crystal shard, in order to negate its bizarre electric potential. In theory, the conductivity of the zinc and copper in the brass shell casings should shield the crystal from the lightning that seemed to seek it out, or at the least make the surrounding trees a more appealing conduit. Abe had shielded his original sample in a hinged copper box. He must have discarded the wax paper before leaving his office, after stuffing packing peanuts or bubble wrap around the crystal for its journey to Minnesota.
Mercer used surgical tape to secure the bundle and thrust the whole ball inside his shirtfront.
Another blast of lightning hit close enough to energize all the hairs on his body and make it feel as though every inch of his skin were covered with crawling insects. The accompanying thunder was too much for one of the assaulting Afghan fighters. He broke cover a hundred yards off and started running for the trail to take him back into the valley below the cave. They let him go.
“You good?” Sykes shouted over the ringing in Mercer’s ears.
He nodded. He had no choice. As awful as he felt, he couldn’t give in, not yet. Not this close. Sykes made some hand gestures to the others and en masse they opened fire in a deliberate attempt to engulf the assault force in sheer weight of shot. Before the last clip ran dry, Booker grabbed Mercer by the upper arm, and together they ran back, away from the valley. Seconds later the others would be following, but they would pause every dozen paces and provide covering fire to slow the Taliban’s advance, in this way letting Book, and their client, clear the area.
Mercer’s lungs were on fire, and each breath brought up flecks of bloody saliva that ran unnoticed down his chin. His legs were unsteady as well, and without Book practically holding him up he would have collapsed into the dust. Book’s meaty hand was digging into Mercer’s arm, taking so much of his weight that Mercer felt like a child. Behind them the sound of autofire diminished, swallowed up by the storm. It seemed the threat of a deadly lightning strike had faded because bolts of twisting electricity were now passing harmlessly from cloud to cloud.
They moved forward, from tree to rock to shrub, finding cover wherever they could. They had to find someplace where Ahmad could se
t the chopper long enough for them to jump aboard, and that meant they needed distance from their pursuers. But the locals wouldn’t give up. They had the scent of blood in their nostrils now that the Americans had taken flight, and would run them to ground the way a jackal hunts a hare.
The lump of brass in his shirt bobbed painfully with each flagging footfall. Sykes was taking more and more of Mercer’s weight even as they slowed. Mercer’s body wasn’t getting the oxygen it needed to keep going. He never should have made it out of the cave, let alone covered more than a mile of uneven terrain, but he was quickly coming to the end. His muscles needed rich red blood to function, and his lungs couldn’t provide the needed oxygen.
They ran out from under the storm’s edge, the sky brightening enough for Mercer to see they had been running toward a prow-like promontory of rock that fell away several hundred feet on its three sides. They had raced into a dead end. That was why the Afghanis hadn’t pushed the pursuit too hard. They were merely shepherding their prey into a kill zone so they could mow them down in an orgy of hot brass and ruined flesh.
Ahmad must have been waiting for that exact moment, because he rounded a hilltop five miles off and started in for the only spot he could possibly land. Sykes knew they hadn’t opened a big enough lead, and that an RPG would blast the Mil from the sky the moment his pilot flared in for touchdown.
Sykes looked behind him. His three men were just emerging from the curtain of the storm. Sleep looked like he’d been hit because Sneeze had a shoulder under one arm and was helping him on. Grumpy had shouldered his sniper rifle, most likely because he was out of ammo, and fired at the unseen swarm of Taliban with his pistol, triggering off evenly spaced, almost unhurried shots that kept the advancing fighters back in the mist.
There were fifty or sixty yards of separation between Grump and the native fighters, and Ahmad determined it was the best he was going to get. He had kept the chopper screened by the mountain’s edge and a stand of trees that he’d had to peer through to see his people. He popped up when he thought he could do the most good, and as soon as the wheels cleared the tallest of the trees he fired the contents of a rocket pod attached to the chopper’s right side. A dozen unguided rockets almost as slender as arrows streaked just a few feet over the men’s heads and hit in a solid wall just in front of the tangos. The concussion knocked the three Americans to the ground, but the wall of fire and blooming vortices of dirt and smoke consumed half the shooters chasing after them.
Unseen behind the curtain of destruction, the remaining natives broke ranks and fled, not knowing the helicopter had fired its one and only weapon and was now defenseless.
Sleep, Sneeze, and Grump hauled themselves to their feet and ran while Ahmad came thundering in, the big Mi-2 kicking up a maelstrom of dust that rivaled the rocket explosions. Sykes all but carried Mercer the last twenty yards and tossed him bodily into the chopper before turning and motioning his men to push it even harder. Sneeze dumped the injured Sleep into the chopper and Book was yelling at the pilot to take off even as Grump, the last man, was still being dragged through the door.
In all it took just seconds. Ahmad threw the helo into the air and as soon as the wheels cleared the ridge, he dropped it down into the next valley, using gravity to build up speed in order to get as far away from the scene as possible.
Sykes grabbed a supplemental oxygen bottle from stores kept in a bin behind the pilot seat, fitted the mouthpiece over Mercer’s face, and turned the tap on full. Within just a few seconds, Mercer started feeling the effects. His chest still heaved and his head felt like it had split open, but nowhere near as badly. After a minute he was back from death’s door…and just felt like he had the worst hangover of his life.
Sykes had turned his attention to his wounded man. Sleep had taken a round to the thigh that hadn’t hit the femoral artery, but it would require surgery to remove. The men had it bandaged and pumped him with morphine over his protests. Only when Book was satisfied they were all okay did he look back at Mercer and finally ask, “What was all that voodoo with the lightning?”
“Hell if I know.” Mercer pulled the oxygen mask from his mouth. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, but I think that phenomenon is what this whole thing’s all about.”
15
Roland d’Avejan took to the podium accompanied by a rousing round of applause. This was a sympathetic audience, so d’Avejan wasn’t surprised, but knowing a crowd was energized made giving speeches a much less odious task.
“Merci, merci,” he called into the microphone, trying to quiet the two hundred or so. “Thank you very much. I am honored to be here today, even if it cost me five million euros just to say a few words.” The crowd filling the auditorium laughed at his joke, knowing it was true. On an easel next to the lectern was the oversize mock check he had just presented to the Earth Action League’s president.
“I must say that it is I who should be applauding all of you. You are on the front lines of the climate war, fighting the apathy of people who don’t recognize the peril that our planet faces. And more importantly, you fight the deniers funded by fossil fuel interests who put short-term profit above the long-term health of the environment.”
This remark elicited a few catcalls and hisses, as though this was some silent film and the mustache-twirling villain had just appeared on-screen. They were like good-hearted children in their naïveté.
D’Avejan continued, “Despite efforts by you and other like-minded campaigners, carbon continues to increase in our atmosphere.” He preferred the more evocative sobriquet “carbon pollution,” but marketing studies were showing that informed listeners realized it was a bit overwrought and inaccurate, although leaving out the dioxide part of the gas continued to make people think it was something filthy. “The alarm was sounded as far back as the 1980s, but as we know, nothing was done to curb greenhouse gases. Where once the threats were in the far distant future, we now realize to our horror that the future is here. There can be very few in this audience who did not know someone who perished in the terrible heat wave of 2003. France alone lost nearly fifteen thousand people, mostly our elderly. Or what about the terrible summer in 2010 that claimed fifteen thousand Russians. These were some of the first victims of global warming, but they won’t be the last when such extreme events become the new normal.
“Sea levels continue to rise, the pace has accelerated, and soon entire Pacific island nations will disappear beneath the waves, adding millions of climate refugees. Hurricanes and tropical cyclones have become stronger and will only get worse. If the United States, the richest nation in the world, could not stop Katrina or Superstorm Sandy from destroying so much property and life, what chance did the Philippines have when Typhoon Haiyan struck and washed thousands of people out to sea? Death tolls are already climbing, ladies and gentlemen, not in fifty or a hundred years, but now. Polar ice is vanishing. Ancient glaciers around the world are in record retreat, and scientists are speculating a catastrophic collapse of some of Antarctica’s pristine ice shelves. As thermometers around the globe inexorably rise, it may trigger massive releases of even more potent greenhouse gases trapped in frozen tundra across Russia, Alaska, and far northern Canada.”
Roland paused. He had given them the litany of doom and gloom peddled repeatedly by some United Nations scientists and the compliant media. It was well worn and familiar, and for the most part his examples were all either outright lies or localized weather events, or unverifiable computer projections that were little more accurate than darts flung at a board. And yet it had all been touted as evidence of anthropogenic global warming for long enough that people no longer questioned it.
“I need not remind you of the consequences we are experiencing now that Mother Nature has decided to fight back against humanity’s wanton disregard for the environment. People who join the Earth Action League understand the crisis we face and have common cause to see it solved. That is why I have pledged such a large amount of money today
. I am tasking you with the job of informing the rest of the world of the urgent need for action. We have an ever-diminishing window to save our planet, to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to renewable sources of power. Wind and solar can light our future but only if we start now.
“Many here in Europe have called for a greater reliance on bountiful, naturally produced power”—that was a new marketing term, “naturally produced,” and it trended well with the antifracking element of the environmental movement—“but there are still many who don’t realize our time is limited. You need to go out and educate them so that they see a wind farm in their town as an asset and not a liability. We must change attitudes from ‘Not in my backyard’ to ‘Please in our backyard.’
“We need the political will to make the hard choices. But that is what you here understand and those out there do not. There are no longer any choices, only inevitabilities. We must stop burning fossil fuels. We must turn to renewable energy or we will simply fail as a sustainable society, and I see by the bright eyes out there and eager anticipation that you will not let that happen. Not on your watch. Not when the EAL has something to say about it. Not now. Not ever!”
That’s what this was about, d’Avejan thought as he listened to their thunderous approbation. He needed to get the great unwashed majority off their collective fat asses so they would elect politicians ready to listen to the UN and others and tackle the problem head-on. For the cameras, he shook hands once again with the president of the Earth Action League, a man untroubled by his own body odor, though he had at least put on pressed slacks for the event. Seconds after getting offstage, d’Avejan had his hands slathered in waterless purifying gel as a stopgap until he could properly wash them.
“Thank you once again, Roland,” Jean-Batiste Reno said, “both for the extraordinary financial support and for taking the time to speak with us today.” A clutch of supporters stood nearby. Roland noted that many were female, and some were not unattractive.