Phantom ah-7

by Ted Bell

  “What the hell?”

  “I’ve got eight, I repeat eight, unidentified objects traveling west to east at twenty thousand miles per hour, altitude one hundred miles.”

  “Ain’t an ICBM in the whole damn world that fast. Estimate time of atmospheric reentry at nine minutes and counting. GBR plotting their course now… fuck me… they’re all headed this way!”

  “Sir,” Portis said to his watch commander, adjusting his lip mike, “request permission to arm all eight ABM missiles!”

  “Request granted. Light ’em up, Lieutenant. Shoot first and apologize later.”

  “Hey, wait a second,” Speed said, staring wide-eyed at the rapidly moving dots converging on his screen, “nobody kills me till I say so.”

  “Code sheets, Speed, now!”

  Both men ripped open the sealed red manila envelopes and pulled out the code sheets.

  “Code!” Portis said.

  “Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu,” Midge said, keying in the code. “Response?”

  Portis responded with the code on his own sheet. “Alpha. Alpha. Whiskey. Bravo. Zulu.”

  Portis reached forward and toggled the switch that put the entire ABM site on a war footing.

  Portis nervously readjusted his lip mike. “We have code match, sir. With your authorization we will now key in and initiate arming sequence.”

  “Roger that. Affirmative.”

  The two men inserted their keys into the twin arming mechanisms arrayed in panels before them and turned the keys simultaneously. A low, beeping tone could now be heard over every loudspeaker in the underground complex. The country was under attack. Hell, Greely was under attack.

  “Missiles one through eight now armed and ready to launch, sir, awaiting GBR upload.”

  “Affirmative, Guardian… incoming enemy missiles, or whatever the hell, now entering atmosphere. They should start slowing… Good God… they’re not slowing, they’re bloody well accelerating!”

  “Roger that, sir, GBR readouts calculate speed increasing rapidly to thirty thousand… fifty thousand… now traveling on course zero-one-forty at one hundred thousand miles per hour!”

  “What the hell?” Midge shouted. “U fuckin’ Os?”

  Portis could hear his watch commander speaking heatedly to his superior officers at the Pentagon. “Yeah, Charley, we got incoming traveling at speeds in excess of 100K and climbing. UFOs is all I can say, sir. Request permission to take them out.”

  “Permission granted.”

  “Portis. We’ve acquired a sat fix on these birds. Never seen anything like it. What the hell are they, Guardian?”

  “God knows, sir.”

  “Maybe he knows, maybe not.”

  “Take them out, sir?”

  “Hell, yes, take them out!”

  Portis said, “Silo crews, we are going to launch mode with all eight missiles. You are authorized to open all eight blast doors. Hatches open now!”

  “Portis,” Speed suddenly said, “they’re gone! Screen is clear!”

  “Gone?”

  “Yeah. Disappeared. Wait a second. Jesus, now they’re back. Descending from eighty thousand feet… coming this way… decelerating…”

  Portis stared at his screen in disbelief. He said:

  “UFOs are now located directly overhead… uh, Command, and they, uh, they appear to be hovering. Just above us at twenty thousand feet. They are… I don’t know how to tell you this, sir… they appear to be stationary.”

  “UFOs? I don’t believe in UFOs!”

  “I don’t either, sir, but I swear to you that what I’m looking at are objects, they’re flying, and, by God, they are completely fucking unidentified.”

  “Launch, goddamit! Light the candles! Pull the trigger. Blow those bastards out of the sky.”

  “Confirm. Launching…” Portis said, fingers flying across his control panel, flipping open the red protective covers over each of the eight red toggles that would send eight of the most powerful antiballistic missiles on earth skyward. He thumbed each one in sequence, an act he thought he’d never live to see.

  Portis watched his multiple display screens transfixed. There were live video feeds from inside each of the silos. The umbilicals detached themselves from each missile and dropped down against the inside of the silo walls. Brilliant fire and white smoke appeared at the base of the missiles.

  “Abort, abort!”

  “What?”

  “This is Silo Control, you must abort! Silo hatch cover malfunction. Blast doors not responding to my commands…”

  “We have ignition…”

  “Abort! Abort! Abort!”

  “Say again, Silo Control Center!” Portis said. Was this guy insane? It was too late to abort. If the silo hatches wouldn’t open, all eight missiles would explode in place and-”

  “Abort! The fucking silo blast doors won’t open. A malfunction. They are still shut! Manual override dysfunctional.”

  “What?” Portis said, feeling the needle in the crown pierce the top of his skull. “What do you mean? The hatch covers won’t open?”

  “I mean the hatch covers won’t-”

  He was thinking of Margie and the twins in the moments before he died. He knew the explosive power of the eight ABMs was enough to blow a hole in the earth’s crust half a mile deep and two miles across. No one living inside the perimeter of Camp Greely could survive this.

  No one.

  The very last thing Lieutenant Colt Portis saw before the multiple explosions vaporized Fort Greely and every living soul was the eight enemy intruders shooting straight up into the heavens. Traveling… at the speed of light.

  What were these things? What the hell were Oblivion.

  Twenty-four

  Iran, Present Day

  “Can’t sleep,” Darius said to his captain of the Guards in passing. “Nightmares, you know.” He nodded at the surprised uniformed guards lining either side of the approach to his boudoir as he floated swiftly by them. He giggled at the looks on their faces. Usually the master of the house didn’t appear in the morning until the crack of ten.

  The “Special Division” uniformed Revolutionary Guards snapped to attention in sequence but the lord and master was already long gone from the residence. Dawn was just breaking as he raced along under the vast open air portico, finally making an abrupt ninety-degree turn and careening through one of the long rows of tall, south-facing portals opening directly onto the Persian Gulf.

  The air was full of sound: the cries of gulls riding the winds, the hiss of waves crashing and receding on the rocks below. Above, a few small clouds chased across the skies like dark-grey riders. Darius threw back his head and sucked down great lungfuls of sea air. It was going to be, he believed, a lovely day.

  Especially, he thought, if you were lord and master of all you surveyed. L amp;M, he thought, not the cigarette but the God who ruled this citadel. He giggled again to himself, thinking what a pity it was that no one around him was clever enough to appreciate his sense of humor. No one, that is, save mighty Perseus, whom he was on his way to meet.

  Clamped to his shiny bald head, Bluetooth headphones were providing a sound track for this private morning movie. It was Wagner today, but always Wagner or Rachmaninoff or Schubert, and this morning he was grooving to Ride of the Valkyries, one of his favorites. He’d listened all night to Schubert’s Impromptu op. 90 no. 3 to help him sleep, finally said to hell with it, popped one or two Ambien, and cranked up the Wagner.

  Darius’s mode of transportation was unusual, to say the least. Technically, it was a wheelchair. But, technically, it was like no other wheelchair in existence: for starters, this particular wheelchair had no wheels. It floated on a cushion provided by controllable gas nozzles. It was powered by a cold-fusion system of Darius’s own invention. The mother of this particular invention was his birth defect, an infirmity that caused the loss of use of his legs.

  Darius was nothing if not inventive. He was blessed (some might say “suffer
ed”) with a condition known as synesthesia, a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in other sensory pathways. Say a number, and Darius could not only “taste” it, he could locate and see that number in space, in color, and actually “hold” it in his hands.

  He had put his extraordinary capabilities to good use since childhood, building ever more complex computers, mastering sixteen languages, creating one of his own, and solving complex problems of physics at a level few but Einstein himself could appreciate. In addition to his experiments in the field of artificial intelligence, his current interests involved study on two fronts: cosmology, the study of the universe on the grandest scale, and particle physics, the study of the universe on the tiniest scale.

  Both scientific fronts were derived, ultimately, from the work of his god, Albert Einstein: cosmology was based on the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s rewriting of our understanding of gravity, while particle physics had evolved from quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the universe on the atomic and subatomic scale. These abstractions were his playgrounds, and this was where his mind spent most of its time.

  On a far more humble scientific level, the hover-chair that now transported him was one of his most primitive inventions. Still, it was not without its attractions. In addition to being surreally speedy and completely silent, it was also heavily armored-and heavily armed. Unusual for a wheelchair, perhaps, until you considered that Dr. Darius Saffari, with good reason, was hyperparanoid about his safety every second of his life.

  It was only because of his intense relationship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, that none of his countless enemies within the Artesh (Persian for army) or the secret sect known as PMOI (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, sometimes known as MEK) had yet to succeed in assassinating him. MEK, he knew, was providing intelligence about Iranian nuclear capability to the Americans and, worse, the Israelis. He had shared this information with authorities in Tehran. Hundreds of PMOI had been killed and three thousand arrested. For this, they wanted his head.

  He controlled his flying machine with twin joysticks located at the front of each armrest. Atop the control sticks were buttons, triggers, just like on a Sukhoi jet fighter. Two laser-sighted 9mm machine guns faced forward, two aft, all swivel mounted. When the mood struck him, he would zoom out to the terrace just beyond his bedroom doors, maneuver up close to the parapet overlooking the sea, and blaze away at the shrieking and diving and shitting seagulls that were constantly annoying him. To this day, he’d never managed to hit one but that didn’t stop him from trying.

  If a man’s home is his castle, certainly that was true of Darius’s. His large compound was located about fifty miles southeast of the port city of Bandar-e Bushehr, Iran, on a high cliff overlooking the Persian Gulf. It had been built entirely within the monstrously thick walls of an ancient Persian fortress known as the Ram Citadel. Built sometime before 500 B.C., the citadel is surrounded by walls six or seven meters high. It had withstood the fierce Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. The Ottoman-Persian wars had raged on for nearly three centuries, but never once had the great fortress succumbed to siege, nor had its mighty walls been breached.

  Much remains from antiquity. Inside the most internal wall of baked clay bricks stands the citadel, the barracks, the mill, a forty-meter-deep water well, and stalls for two hundred horses. Houses for the rulers and the ruled-over still stand. There are as many as thirty watchtowers including the two “stay-awake” towers for which Ram is famed. People inhabited the Ram until the mid-nineteenth century when they mysteriously disappeared. The Iranian army kept a presence there until 1932, and then the structure was wholly abandoned until a wealthy grandee purchased it, began construction of a lavish palace, and made it the family compound.

  Now, of course, it all belonged to Darius.

  The new palace had been built of limestone and white Carrara marble to Darius’s exacting specifications. The towers and domes of stone shone a brilliant pink as he emerged into the daylight, hurtling across a vast walled plaza dotted with gardens, Renaissance Italian sculpture, and fountains. The various structures, laboratories, domed residences, and minarets surrounding the plaza were just now catching the first rays of the sun rising above the mountains to the east.

  Atop the highest point within his compound stood one of the world’s ten most powerful telescopes. It was called a Large Binocular Telescope, and, to use the language of astronomy, it had “seen first light” in October 2005. The LBT’s two twenty-eight-foot mirrors worked together to provide as much resolution as would be derived from a single thirty-foot mirror, and they were ten times more powerful than Hubble’s. Darius had traveled to places in the universe where no man had been before.

  And, he chortled, he had the pictures to prove it.

  Darius’s home base was a mighty fortress, but Darius, being deliberately quaint as was his wont, always referred to the huge, fortified complex as his “little cottage by the sea.” There were large block dormitories for scientists, guards, a massive bioengineering laboratory and servants, and a massive power plant to supply the unusually high-energy requirements of Darius’s latest creation, Lord Perseus.

  Few “cottages” in the world were as highly secure, in terms of radar-guided antiaircraft systems, armed guards, dogs, sonic sensors, and sophisticated radar and sonar installations. The Ram Citadel was known to the mullahs in Tehran only as “the Rocks.” Darius was a secretive man. And few places had hidden within them so many secrets, so many, as it would turn out, dark and potentially catastrophic secrets.

  At the sight of his rapid approach, guards manning the massive steel gates adjacent to the marina quickly opened them. He zoomed right through them, a wide smile on his cherubic face. He was happy.

  He was going to see his best friend, Perseus!

  Darius, a quadriplegic since birth, sped out along the great steel pier that jutted into the pale blue waters of the harbor. At the end of the pier, a gleaming white yacht was moored. It was large, nearly a hundred meters in length overall, three hundred feet, and had formerly belonged to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last ruler of the Persian Empire.

  After the Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini had bestowed it upon Darius in honor of his scientific achievements in nuclear physics on his twentieth birthday. This was for public consumption. The truth was, he’d discovered a new star in the Alpha Centauri system and named it after the nation’s religious leader. Darius was not a religious man (he was secretly an atheist), but he was not stupid, either. Khomeini and the mullahs who succeeded him had ruled Iran since the 1980s, and therefore, to some extent, they ruled him.

  But no longer. No one ruled him. Not anymore.

  Not since Perseus.

  Darius was excited about this morning’s meeting with his closest friend and companion. He had lain awake all night, restive, tossing and turning, his mind roiling with troubling questions for Perseus. He’d been thinking about the origins of the universe, too. And about the wondrous possibilities of exceeding the speed of light, about parallel universes, about Damnable companion, his mind.

  Had been all his life, since boyhood. Questions, questions, questions: What makes that clock tick? How did the music get inside the radio? Why, when I drop my ball, does it fall straight to the ground? And what about all those billions of stars out there in the night sky above the vast deserts of his forefathers? How did they get there? Who made them? How?

  Now, of course, the questions were much more specific. They came from the government of Iran. Tehran’s secret demands had military implications. Worldwide military implications. His crowning achievement, Perseus, had been working literally twenty-four hours a day on some of the questions put to Darius by Abu Assiz, an old classmate now grown very powerful in the government. Abu had some notion of what Darius was up to, but his knowledge of the progress already accomplished was severely limited in scope.

  The
plain fact was, no one in Tehran or even on earth had the faintest notion as to what Darius and Perseus had achieved, nor would they ever, until it was too late for anyone to do anything about it.

  The unceasing and sheer number of questions from his government and a secret cadre of mullahs were far beyond Darius’s mental capacity to absorb. But no question on heaven or earth was beyond his creation, Lord Perseus the Magnificent.

  Many times in his long life he’d felt like putting a bullet through the damn thing (his mind), just put it out of its misery. But then the questions: What happened to his soul, his animus, then? Where did it go? Would he go with it? Would his bullet have been wasted? Would his “soul,” God forbid, prove his eternal undoing, condemn him to the cacophonous prison dwelling inside his head?

  These, of course, were questions he could only discuss with his friend. But first, they’d have to deal with the latest military demands made on him and his team of AI scientists.

  And thus this visit at the glorious crack of dawn. A spirited discourse with the only intellect he had recourse to that was superior to his own. That august entity whose existence was known only to him and who was known only as Perseus.

  H e gently reversed the thrusters when he reached the end of the steel-decked dock, coming to a gentle stop two feet short of the water. There was no boarding ladder up to the yacht’s deck, nor was there need of one. No one save Darius was allowed to board this vessel, and the guards who kept watch over it had orders to shoot to kill any intruder.

  He touched a remote switch on his armrest keypad and a large section of the yacht’s white hull slid back hydraulically. It revealed a stainless-steel room about the size of a large elevator. In fact, that is just what it was. He nudged the joysticks forward and whooshed inside. Then he pulled back on the left control and rotated 180 degrees, so that he was now facing the door, hovering about three feet off the polished steel floor.

  This once luxurious yacht, which he’d renamed Cygnus, was not at all what it appeared to be. A decade earlier Darius and a team of naval engineers had totally gutted the vessel, removing the engines, fuel tanks, interior bulwarks, mahogany furnishings, everything, thus turning it into an empty shell. Working underwater to avoid the prying eyes of American satellites, divers had then sliced Cygnus ’s keel open from stem to stern with acetylene torches and winches.