Ragnarok cta-4

by Kane Gilmour

  Good, Deep Blue thought. Be angry and use that in Norway if you get a chance.

  Each man was from the 10 ^th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, and there were no better men for an arctic or alpine assault force than 10 ^th men. The White team was specifically tasked with duties at the Endgame base, and these men were tasked with keeping the base secure. In any other circumstance, they would be staying behind, protecting Fiona and Sara, keeping support team members like Lewis Aleman and even himself safe from any attack by hostile forces. What the Chess Team field members-King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Rook-did out in the world was difficult enough, without having to worry about the people you loved or the sanctity of your home. But this situation was desperate; the entire world was in danger, and Deep Blue had two members of Chess Team already missing and presumed dead. Another two members were already on site in Norway, but he had no idea if they were alive, captured or in the thick of things. Anna Beck, callsign: Black Zero, and Deep Blue’s covert operative, Black Six, were en route to Norway now.

  The newly christened Endgame organization was scattered, and he didn’t yet know what to expect from this stabilized portal in the Arctic. He wanted every resource close and readily available. As he approached the hangar door, which he’d had to have refitted after a security incident earlier in the year, he saw Matt Carrack approaching him. Carrack, callsign: White Zero, was the head of base security and Deep Blue’s right hand in all things since his promotion to the role the previous summer. The man looked the part of his callsign, with his all-white Arctic gear and his weapons covered in white cloth wraps as well. Like the other security team members, Carrack wore the white version of the experimental impact-resistant armor. He carried his helmet under one arm as he approached Deep Blue.

  “Sir. We’re just about ready to go. King is inside with Jet and Professor.” Carrack was referring to Sara Fogg by her security codename of Jet-a sly reference to her spiky black hair, likening her to the rock singer Joan Jett. Fiona had a security codename of Professor, because of her linguistic abilities. Neither woman was aware of the names, chosen by Carrack. The men studiously avoided using the names around the two.

  Deep Blue looked at the man and nodded. He understood. King was saying goodbye. Just in case. “That’s fine, Zero.” In the field now, Deep Blue would refer to Carrack by his callsign, where he would normally refer to the man as Matt-one of the few team members with whom he would be so personal.

  “The pilots and Black Five are aboard, as is Aleman. Rome-” Carrack had deemed George Pierce, callsign: Rome, “-is staying behind with Jet, Professor and the rest of Black Team. I’d prefer to have at least one security member with them, but I understand it’s not possible.”

  Deep Blue nodded. “It’s not.”

  Carrack continued. “Black One and Two will rendezvous with us just past Iceland. I’m ready to seal the base on your word. I have all the equipment you’ll need waiting for you on the plane.”

  “Okay, just give me a minute with King.” Deep Blue left the man standing on the pavement and stepped into the dim hangar.

  Deep Blue looked into the glassed-in office at the back of the hangar, just in time to see Fogg and Fiona unwrap their arms from around him. A group hug. The man was lucky. Tom Duncan had always been single, even as President. And he hadn’t had time to think about dating since.

  No one in the office was speaking. Deep Blue walked up to the door and stuck his head inside the room.

  “Am I interrupting?” He could see that their faces were drawn and tight.

  Fogg wiped a stray tear from her eye. She looked at Deep Blue and said, “If you come back without him, I’ll-”

  “Won’t happen,” Deep Blue said with forced confidence.

  To his surprise, Fogg wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed him tight. “Be careful, Sir.”

  He felt pressure on his waist and looked down to find Fiona squeezing him. He smiled at King. They were both lucky men.

  “Enough of that,” King said. “We’ll be fine.” He leaned down to Fiona and spoke three words Deep Blue didn’t understand.

  Fiona’s reply was just as mysterious. But then King kissed her forehead, kissed Fogg hard on the lips and headed to the door without another word.

  Deep Blue followed, asking, “What did you say?” Though he had a pretty good idea.

  “She’s teaching me to speak Siletz,” King explained. “I told her if you came back without me to keep Sara away from you.”

  Deep Blue laughed. He had always appreciated the team’s ability to find humor before entering a lion’s den, or in this case, a dire wolf den.

  Aleman approached, his face grim.

  All the humor Deep Blue felt quickly drained out of him. He had worked with Aleman for a long time now and could read his facial expressions and body language with ease. “What is it?”

  Aleman met the two men and looked at the floor, his lips twitching. “Casualty reports from the Exxon Building portal and collapse.”

  Deep Blue frowned. Casualty reports with just one name on the list were hard to deal with. He knew this report would be far more difficult. But he needed to know. “How many?”

  “Two thousand civilians, mostly taken by dire wolves. Despite being in New York, the number is lower than other areas because it appeared so far above the surface.”

  “Military casualties?” Deep Blue asked.

  “Two hundred and climbing. They’re still digging through the rubble. But…” Aleman squirmed. “They were able to confirm… Sir, General Keasling-he was below-he…”Aleman shook his head, then met Deep Blue’s eyes and used Keasling’s first name. “Michael is dead.”

  THE SOUND OF FURY

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Fenris Kystby, Norway

  4 November, 0100 Hrs

  Anna Beck shot out of the sky at 700 mph, in a speed dive. The great thing was, she didn’t feel the effects of the jump on her body beyond the sensation of falling-no wind resistance or lack of oxygen. She was plummeting to the Earth from a temporarily retrofitted and recommissioned SR-71 Blackbird, from an altitude of 80,000 feet.

  Even in a spacesuit, she wouldn’t have wanted to do a high-altitude low-opening (HALO) jump from such a height. But she had something much better than a spacesuit: the high-altitude, low-opening personnel orbital deployment vehicle-or HALOPOD. Resembling a very skinny egg of heat-resistant ceramic, titanium and reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC), which gave the nose of it the same black-snout look that the space shuttle had, the pod was a tiny capsule for a human to ride in. It was nose heavy, and had no motor, so it was basically a bomb.

  With a human payload.

  Inside the pod, Beck was cushioned in impact foam and a harness that barely allowed her to breathe. The pod performed one duty only. It protected the HALO jumper from the extremes of atmospheric heat. When she hit an altitude of 15,000 feet, the pod would deploy its own parachute, which would jolt her speed down to a reasonable pace. She had had to sit in a special oxygen chamber with Black Six for hours before the drop, on board the SR-71, while they traveled over the Atlantic. Six was now in his own pod, dropping a hundred feet away from Beck. But she couldn’t see him. She couldn’t see anything. The HALOPOD had no windows. Even if it did, it was the middle of the night in the high altitude Arctic sky. It was just as dark outside the pod as it was inside. She had only one thing to look at.

  She eyed the digital altimeter on the inside of her black helmet’s faceplate, inches from her eye. The red LED numbers whirred in a countdown. 30,000 feet. Her speed was 753 mph. A new world record, she thought. Although she realized that was only compared to known and recorded feats. That the US Air Force still had commissioned and fully functional SR-71s was news to her, and she had never heard of the HALOPOD either. She wondered how many records had been covertly broken and never reported.

  She didn’t mind the drop. It was strange to fall for so long, but she was packed in so tightly that she was comfortable. All she had to do was wait. 20,000 fee
t.

  At 15,000 feet, the HALOPOD deployed its parachute and the unpowered vehicle jolted to what felt like a stop in mid air. Beck felt her stomach attempt to crawl out of her throat, but then her mind was on other things. The pod hissed around her. Then small charges set in a seam around the egg vertically, detonated, shooting the two elongated halves of the pod safely away from Beck’s body, and leaving her free falling again.

  Now free to move her limbs, Beck pulled her arms from her sides and spread her legs, tearing open the Velcro that had kept her limbs glued to her sides. Between her armpits and her legs, the parachute fabric of the wingsuit’s wings deployed, giving her the ability to glide in her second descent. The wings scooped the air, and Beck pulled her left arm in a few degrees, adjusting her trajectory. She could see Black Six ahead of her in the distance, spinning in his yaw axis, because of the lack of any vertical stabilizer on his wingsuit.

  Amateur, she thought. So much for the sexy secret agent.

  As she watched, Black Six, simply pulled his legs and arms together to get out of the spin, and after a second or so, his body repositioned in a straight vertical plunge. He moved his arms and legs out again to scoop the air with his wingsuit, and this time, his movements were perfect.

  Huh, Beck thought. Nice recovery.

  Beck dipped and dove down a little lower and closer to Black Six, then leveled out again. It wasn’t as dark as she had expected it would be at this time of night. She couldn’t see any auroras, but the sky was a deep blue in places and black in others. The net effect was that visibility was far better than she could have hoped.

  The counter in her faceplate kept speeding down and as it reached 5000 feet, she readied herself for the end of her flight. At 4000 feet, she moved her hand toward the pull ring for her parachute. She was supposed to pull at 3000 feet, but when she reached it, she saw that Black Six hadn’t pulled his chute yet. She wanted to fall longer than him. She didn’t know why she felt competitive toward the man she had only met earlier that day, but she did.

  2000 feet and he still hadn’t pulled his chute.

  At 1000 feet she almost chickened out, but she saw his parachute start to deploy. She gave herself ‘one Mississippi’ and then pulled her cord. Her parachute yanked her descent into a slow fall. The sky was clear, the stars shone brightly and from the harness of her parachute, Anna Beck began examining the snow-covered ground of her landing site. But then she thought she saw something and she blinked to clear her eyes. She stared at the snow below her, squinting to see if she could spot it again. Movement. Lots of movement.

  As she came down to within 100 feet of the snow-covered hillside, she heard Black Six’s terrified whisper in her earpiece, breaking the radio silence they were supposed to observe.

  “Mother of God, there must be a hundred of them.”

  He was right. Tearing through the snow 70 feet below her, in the direct path of her landing, there was a small crowd of about ten dire wolves, swarming in one location, jostling and fighting for a spot at the center and being repeatedly shoved back. The other ninety or so streaked through the snowdrifts and tried to get to the crowd from several directions. When Beck got to 50 feet, she thought the dire wolves were fighting, like in a schoolyard brawl.

  At thirty feet, she recognized the combatant at the core of the brawl, punching, kicking, flinging and cussing out one dire wolf after another.

  “Damn,” she said. “That’s Queen.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  Over the Arctic Ocean

  4 November, 0100 Hrs (Norway Local Time)

  The Persephone raced through the night sky, ripping a sonic boom over the northern coast of Greenland. Deep Blue sat back in his chair at a computer desk and rubbed his eyes. While he had given up being President of the United States, he found it difficult to give up some of the perks. As President he had been spoiled by the office furniture aboard Air Force One. When he had stepped down, he made sure to kit out the Crescent with a luxurious office, complete with all the computing power he would ever need as Deep Blue.

  But the Air Force’s Persephone, the similarly designed ship he rode in now, was more utilitarian. It had bunks for sleeping and cargo-net type chairs for sitting in. The desk he sat at now was a small modular one that Aleman had gotten the White security team to carry aboard. His chair was a cheap office chair from Staples with no armrests. Plus, the ship had a smell to it. A smell he would always associate with the military after his days as a Ranger. Sweat, dirt, rubbing alcohol…and something else he couldn’t place. That odd something else was always around in every military space he had ever been in, whether buildings, ground vehicles, ships or planes. Over time, he had come to think it was the smell of impending death.

  He leaned back in the feeble chair a little further, and twisted his back to get comfortable. Lewis Aleman sat across the room from him at a similar desk with two laptops and a tablet computer arrayed on the small particleboard desk. Deep Blue had tried to get the man to take some sleep, but he had claimed insomnia. Looking at Aleman now, he could believe it. The man had changed into white BDUs like everyone else, and he had showered and shaved, which Deep Blue hadn’t bothered to do, but he looked exhausted. Aleman looked more alert than anyone else at this point. Only a few of the others aboard were even awake. Matt Carrack remained awake, while his men slept in the bunks. Even King was asleep.

  He looked back at Aleman and sighed. “Anything new?”

  “Packers are doing okay.”

  Deep Blue chuckled. “You’re a Green Bay fan?”

  “No, I could care less about football.” Now it was Aleman’s turn to smile. But the smile spoke volumes on how grim the situation was. “But you wanted to know what was new. Most of what I’ve been seeing here indicates that the basic problem I told you about-the world ending soon from being turned into Swiss cheese by the portals-hasn’t changed.”

  “What’s our timeframe look like?” Deep Blue tried to sound unconcerned, like he was asking about the weather. But he had hired Aleman because the man was smarter than anyone he had ever known. He was unlikely to be fooled.

  “Two to four days, but probably closer to the two.” Aleman’s face was grim, all traces of smiles and jocularity gone.

  “What? Why? What’s happened?” Deep Blue sat up straight in his chair. If he had felt sleepy before, he was wide-awake now.

  “Seismic activity around the world suggests the existence of portals that we’re not seeing. You saw for yourself that some are opening far above the surface of the Earth.”

  “Oh God, inside the Earth.” Deep Blue shook his head. “How deep?”

  “No way to know, but a portal in the wrong place could set off massive earthquakes, floods or worst-case scenario, a mega-volcano like the one in Yellowstone park. If that happened, we wouldn’t have to wait for the portals to finish chewing up the planet.”

  Deep Blue could see that Aleman wasn’t quite done. “What else?”

  “Well, going with the theory that whatever is causing the portal in Norway to stabilize is of human origin, there must be some kind of a receptor. Possibly in the shape of a bowl or a cage. Something that would regulate the size of the portal. Contain it. We won’t know what that is until we get there. Also, if the thing is being powered locally, it would take one hell of an energy source too. With that in mind, I checked Arctic satellite scans for the last few weeks, and looked for heat sources. Rook’s little town of Fenris Kystby has a huge power plant on the edge of town. I’m guessing that’s the target. The Crescent is due to rendezvous with us over the Svalbard Archipelago, before we get to the mainland. They’re still carrying the nuclear device the UK was going to provide to Bishop and Knight. Their man got there just before Black One was ready to leave. I think if we can’t shut this thing down on the ground, we have the Crescent nuke the site, destroying the stabilization mech-anism and the power plant all in one go.”

  Deep Blue looked at Aleman for a minute before he spoke. “This is crazy.” Aleman looked down at
the laptop screen as if his idea had been ridiculed. “No, no. It’s a solid contingency plan. Let’s just hope we don’t have to resort to it. I’m not sure the Norwegians would ever forgive us.”

  “I’m not sure the Norwegians aren’t behind this.”

  Deep Blue laughed hard. Aleman joined in with him.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Fenris Kystby, Norway, 4 November, 0100 Hrs

  Rook activated the LED backlight on his wristwatch and saw that it was just after one in the morning local time-he’d been down in the pit with the dead for hours.

  “Fuckity McFuck Sauce,” Rook hissed through his teeth, not for the first time.

  He understood that the pheromones from the big energy doorway were controlling Asya the same way the other scientists working for Fossen had been. He also realized that she must have been fighting the pheromone control to some degree. She had given him the little LED flashlight and told him to hold it tightly. He just wished she had been able to stop herself from kicking him down into this hellhole.

  He sat on the heap of dead dire wolves and fondled the little plastic light in his hand. He didn’t activate it. He had already seen the pit and the bodies. He had scoured every part of the pit looking for a way out. He had tried scaling the walls too, but his bulk was all wrong for delicate rock climbing, and his center of gravity didn’t help. Every time he got a few feet up from the pile of mashed dire wolf corpses, he would fall off the wall, landing in the spongy mass. The last time he had cracked his head on the side of the pit, too, and that had put an end to any further climbing attempts.

  He sat on the pile with his back against one of the lumpy walls. His head hurt, he was ravenously hungry and his mood was as dark as it ever got. Fossen was up there, opening a freeway for monsters from the outer limits to come destroy the world. Rook’s team was on the other side of the planet. He was trapped and helpless.