The blood samples taken by Fischer and her team had come back negative for viral and bacterial antibodies. But Sergeant Pitcher was still in a fuguelike state, and that was a source of concern. He and Corporal Wayne were scheduled for CT scans and examination by a neurologist this morning, and Legend was anxious to learn the results.
His gaze ticked from monitor to monitor to monitor—twelve in all, streaming live imagery of the secure space designated for the “opening ceremony,” as it had been dubbed. The cavernous underground room, rectangular in shape with concrete walls, floor, and ceiling, was known affectionately as the BRIG (Ballistics Research Information Gathering). It was a forced acronym, Legend decided—the name chosen before the constituent words were defined because, well, it sounded cool. The BRIG was equipped with recirculating HEPA-filtered ventilation, a fire-suppression system, and a video-observation room nearby that allowed real-time viewing of the events inside from a safe and isolated position. According to Malcolm, this space had been specifically designed to test ballistic weapons systems, incendiary devices, and just about any device or invention that could pose a danger to human life. Evidence of these past tests was apparent as numerous sections of the concrete floor and walls were stained, black charred, and chipped. The BRIG was battle hardened, and this gave Legend at least a modicum of confidence that no matter what was trapped inside that steel box, it wasn’t going anywhere without his permission.
Legend turned to Cyril Singleton. “The checklist is complete. Everyone is in position. I’m ready for the green light whenever you are.”
Cyril studied the monitors for a beat, then turned and met his gaze from behind her trademark red-framed eyeglasses. “Let’s do this.”
With a nod of acknowledgment, he said, “All right, everyone, it’s showtime.”
The sequence of events, which had already been briefed, would essentially duplicate those conducted last night at Hanger 306. This time, however, the layers of hermetically sealed shrink-wrap would be cut away, and the steel box would be opened, permitting the direct sampling, measuring, and observation of the object itself. First up were Major Fischer and her biohazard security team. Against her wishes, Legend had insisted that one of the operators from Bagram, the red-bearded Harris, don a biosafety suit and accompany her into the BRIG armed with an M4 just in case something went terribly wrong.
“Wish me luck,” she said to him from behind the transparent face shield. Her hair was pulled back into a bun, she wore no makeup this morning, and she had bags under her eyes, but the smile she flashed him was electric. She was a girl on Christmas morning; she was a musician walking onstage at Carnegie Hall; she was the world’s preeminent biohazard expert about to open a container that could define the rest of her career.
“Good luck,” he said, beaming back at her. “And, Beth, be careful in there.”
She winked and turned to leave with a coy smile on her face. The two other orange suits followed her out, Harris and a USAMRIID technician she’d brought with her named Dixon. Legend turned his attention to the video monitors and adjusted the volume on the speakers. When the trio of orange moon suits appeared on the closed-circuit TV monitors, he tested the two-way intercom system. Pressing the talk button at the base of a microphone stalk on the control panel, he said, “Bravo team, this is Control. How do you copy?”
“We hear you, Lima Charlie, Control,” Fischer’s voice came back.
“Roger that, Bravo.”
Upon reaching the sealed box, Dixon knelt beside the crate and set a tool kit he was carrying on the deck. He opened the zipper compartment and retrieved a box cutter and went to work excising the industrial shrink-wrap and then peeling it off in sections. Once the steel box was exposed, Harris recited the combinations for the two padlocks securing the lid to the box. Dixon, despite his heavy gloves, deftly managed to enter the combos and unlock the hinged, articulating blocking straps securing the lid.
“This is it,” Fischer said. “Control, Bravo team requesting permission to open the lid.”
Legend took a deep breath, exhaled, and gave the order: “Bravo team, Control, open the lid.” Then, putting a hand on the shoulder of the facility technician seated at the control panel in front of him, he said, “Can you zoom in with that overhead camera? Yeah, like that . . . Okay, good, hold there.”
Fischer turned to Dixon. “Bravo Two, stand by for rad survey.”
“Standing by,” Dixon said.
“Bravo Three, stand by for fire support.”
“Standing by,” Harris said, leveling the barrel of his M4 at the box.
“In three, two, one . . .” Fischer opened the lid and gasped.
Legend’s heart skipped a beat. “Bravo, report,” he said.
“You’re not going to believe this, Control, but the box is empty.”
“Empty? How is that possible?”
“I watched that fucking thing get loaded in this box,” Harris growled defensively, as if Legend were already assigning blame for the mishap. The operator stepped up and looked in the box, his helmet bumping into Fischer’s as he did. “What the fuck is going on?”
Legend’s emotional state ran like a roller coaster over the next three seconds: shock, followed by denial, then disappointment, finally settling on anxiety. Had the object been stolen during the night and replaced with an empty box? Westfield D was a secure facility, but what other explanation was there? Unless the boxes had been switched in Bagram. Maybe this box was a decoy and the crate containing the object had been shipped off to another secret facility. But why? That didn’t make any—
“Hold on” came Harris’s voice. Legend could see him poking the barrel of his M4 inside the box. “There’s something in here. I can feel it.”
“He’s right; I see something,” Fischer said. “It’s transparent, almost like a bubble . . . Wait . . . It’s changing . . . It’s taking shape . . . I can see it now. It’s growing pearlescent . . . It’s beautiful . . .”
Fischer and Harris simultaneously pulled their heads back, giving the overhead camera a good view into the box. As the object materialized, what Legend saw matched Fischer’s real-time commentary.
“I see swirling light. It’s taking shape now. Ohhhhh, starting to float . . . Legend, it’s coming out of the box,” Fischer said, her voice laced with both excitement and fear.
“Give it space,” he heard himself say, which was absurd advice, but on the video monitor, he watched the three orange suits backpedal as a glowing orb ascended from its steel prison.
“Control, what do you want us to do?”
Legend tasted bile in his mouth. No wonder General Kane had wanted to get rid of this thing. What Harris had said about the object floating had been true. This didn’t feel right. This sort of tech didn’t exist. His mind started racing. What the hell was this thing? He looked at Cyril, and her expression of incredulity matched his own.
“Establish a perimeter, and perform a radiation survey,” he said, returning his gaze to the monitors. “And be ready to evacuate.”
“Roger” was all Fischer said as the three orange suits drifted to equally spaced positions, forming a triangle around the floating orb, which was now hovering two feet above the box and rising.
“Radiation levels match background,” Dixon reported. “It’s not radioactive.”
“Copy,” Legend replied, his gaze fixed on the monitor with a wide-angle feed showing the scene floor to ceiling with the orb in the middle. He watched, awestruck, as the swirling ball of light ascended: three feet, four feet, five . . . Up it rose and stopped at what looked like nine feet in the air. The trio in the BRIG stood transfixed, their helmets tilted back, faces gazing upward.
“It’s soooo beautiful,” Fischer said, her voice hypnotic.
Legend looked at Malcolm, who hadn’t said a word the entire morning. The scientist’s gaze was transfixed on the same monitor Legend had been watching. “What do you think, Dr. Madden?”
“I think,” Madden said, his voice forebod
ing, “you should get them out of there.”
Legend looked back at the video feed, the evacuation order poised on his lips, when the orb pulsed, emitting a brilliant flash of light. Everything in the observation room went out—the lights, the video feeds, the LED indicators on the control panel—all dark.
“Bravo team, this is Control. Do you copy?” Legend shouted in the dark.
“We’ve lost all comms, Major,” said the control room tech seated at the control panel. “Everything’s down.”
Legend heard a click, and a flashlight beam carved a swath through the darkness. A circle of light traced across the control panel as the technician tried to assess the failure.
“Can you reboot?” Legend asked.
“Attempting that now,” the technician said, frantically trying to restore the control panel. “It’s not working. Maybe we lost main line power . . . Let me check.” The flashlight beam dropped to the floor as the technician got to his hands and knees to work underneath the console.
“Does anyone else have a flashlight?” Legend asked.
“I do,” said the operator who’d accompanied Harris on the plane. Unger, Legend remembered. He clicked on the light.
“Unger, you’re with me,” Legend said. “Something just happened in there, and we need to get Bravo team out.”
Flashlight in hand, Unger sidestepped Legend and headed for the door. Legend followed the operator into the hallway outside. Battery-powered emergency-light strips lit the passage well enough to see without a flashlight, but Unger kept his light on anyway. They sprinted to the BRIG entrance. Access to the BRIG was via one of two doors—a heavy steel slider, twelve feet wide and designed to accommodate large equipment, and the personnel door. The slider weighed nearly a thousand pounds and required an electric actuator to operate—no way in hell they were getting that open. The personnel door was equipped with a biometric access point, and Legend had a sinking feeling that for security purposes the lock had failed in the locked-shut position. The operator, Unger, headed straight for the personnel door and tried the handle.
“Shit,” he barked, pulling with everything he had. “It won’t budge, Major.”
Legend looked at the biometric security box on the wall beside the door. All the indicator lights were dark. Short of breaching the door, they weren’t getting in. Legend’s mind was racing, and his heart was pounding with a cadence he’d not felt since the last time he was in combat.
Those were his people trapped in there, and he had to get them out.
“Options?” he said, turning to Unger.
Unger was grim-faced. “Way I see it, we can either use the manual handwheel on that electric actuator to open the big door, or we breach the personnel door. By the time we round up the equipment we need to breach, I bet we’d have that big door open enough to squeeze through.”
“Agreed,” Legend said, and he stepped up to the electric operator for the slider door and started turning the wheel hand over hand. After ten revolutions, the massive door had moved by maybe an eighth of an inch. “Screw this,” he hissed, turned sideways, and changed to a one-handed grip using the spoke-mounted T handle. He pumped his arm around and around in a tight circle as fast as his muscles would go. “This thing is geared so low, by the time we get this fucking door open, it will be over in there,” he huffed.
Unger moved up beside him. “We’ll tag-team it. When your arm’s on fire, I’ll take over.”
Legend cranked the eight-inch-diameter handwheel at eye-blurring speed, his arm a tornado of fury. He could feel the door ease off its seal as there was a small but noticeable drop in the drag on the wheel. After several minutes, the lactic burn in his shoulder and forearm reached a crescendo. He gritted his teeth and fought the pain, but biology trumped willpower, and his speed began to slow.
“You’re burned up,” Unger said. “Let me take it now.”
With a primal growl, Legend pushed through several more revolutions before forfeiting the wheel to Unger.
Breathing heavily, Legend turned to look at the two-inch gap he’d opened up for all his effort. A blue-white light streamed through the crack, dancing and modulating like the aurora borealis in the night sky. He walked to it and peeked through the slowly expanding gap between the edge of the mighty door and the heavy steel frame. Twenty-five feet away, he saw them, still dressed in their orange biosafety suits, standing eight feet apart in an equilateral triangle, heads tilted up, backs arched, arms in the air reaching for the glowing orb of light just out of their grasp. A chill snaked down his spine at the bizarre, almost ritualistic scene unfolding inside.
“Hurry,” he shouted, turning to Unger, who was spinning the wheel with everything he had. “We’ve got to get in there before it’s too late.”
CHAPTER 12
Westfield Dynamics
Every muscle fiber in Legend’s right arm, from his fingertips to his shoulder, was on fire as he spun the manual handwheel opening the BRIG’s steel slider door. He pushed on until the cramping started up again.
“Switch,” he said, and Unger jumped back in to take a turn. Just another inch and he’d be able to squeeze through the gap.
A small crowd had gathered around them now, including Malcolm Madden.
“What are you planning to do when you go in there?” the DARPA genius asked him.
The question irritated Legend. As if it were a buzzing fly, he wanted to swat it away. “I’m going to pull our people out.”
“That might not be the best idea.”
“What do you mean? You want me to leave them like that?” he fired back, gesturing to their three entranced team members inside.
“Major Tyree, have you ever disconnected an external USB drive from a computer while it was in use?”
“Yeah, sure. Why?”
“And what happened?”
“An error message popped up. Something about the disk was in use and that I may have corrupted data on the drive, blah, blah, blah. Get to the point, Malcolm.”
“My point is that I don’t understand what is going on in there, and neither do you. There’s some sort of connection between the object and those three people. It could be some sort of hypnotic trance they’ve fallen into, or it could be something else altogether—a direct neurological link between their minds and that floating orb.”
“There’s no such thing with current technology,” Legend said, his gaze going to the gap. It was almost wide enough that if he turned his head and exhaled all the air from his lungs, he might just be able to squeeze through.
“True, but that is not current technology,” Malcolm said, grabbing him by the shoulder to get his attention. “That is unknown technology.”
“Are you saying by forcibly pulling them out we could fry their brains or something?” Legend asked, turning back to face the scientist.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. You saw Sergeant Pitcher’s condition on the plane last night. How do you know that when you run in there to pull them out the same thing won’t happen to you? What’s to stop the object from slurping your brain up into la-la land with the rest of them?”
Legend met the other man’s gaze. He didn’t like the counsel he was getting, but it was the counsel he needed to hear. Madden was right. A panicked, reactionary response could be dangerous for the rescuers and those they were attempting to rescue. “Assuming you’re right, I need options. How do I disable this thing? How do we shut it down?”
“I don’t know,” Madden confessed.
“I’ll tell you how: by letting me blow it out of the sky, that’s how,” Unger huffed, still cranking the handwheel with everything he had.
“It might just come to that,” Legend said to Unger. Then, turning to Malcolm, he said, “Is there an armory here?”
“I’m not sure,” Malcolm replied. “Cyril would know.”
Then, as if summoned by a genie, three men in security uniforms came sprinting down the corridor and stopped in front of Legend. Two were armed with shotguns and one w
ith an assault rifle. The lead guard’s gaze scanned the group and settled on Legend. “Are you the OIC?”
“Yes, I’m Major Tyree,” Legend answered.
The bulky guard introduced himself as the Deputy Chief of Security at Westfield D and said, “Director Singleton sent us. What’s the SITREP?”
“I have three people in the BRIG who are currently . . . How do I explain this? Ah hell, it will be faster if you just take a look for yourself.”
The guard walked to the gap and gazed inside. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What in the good Lord’s name is that?”
“That’s what we were trying to figure out,” Legend said. “Now listen up, people. We’re going in as a six-man team: you three plus me, Unger, and Dr. Madden here.”
“What?” Malcolm protested. “I can’t go in there.”
“You can and you will. You’re my systems expert; I’m counting on you to figure out how to disable that thing so we can get our people out.”
“Somehow I don’t think it has an off switch, Major,” the DARPA scientist said, his voice oozing with cynicism.
“I need solutions, not sarcasm,” Legend snapped.
“Look, I’d say we could try an electromagnetic pulse to disable it, but that is what it used on us. And an EMP is not something I happen to carry around in my pocket. Hacking into its operating system would be an option, if we knew that it even had an operating system. What I’m trying to say, Major, is that by my thinking, you only have two viable options.”
“Which are?”
“Attempt to communicate with it verbally.”
“And option two?”
“Let Mr. Unger here blow it out of the sky.”
Legend groaned, but he didn’t have time to argue. On a practical level, he knew Malcolm was right. He turned to the security team. “Listen up, guys. This is not a weapons-free scenario. No one fires without my express order. I’m going to try communicating with the object. If that fails, then we disable it, but when I say disable, that does not mean destroy. We use only enough force to achieve the objective. Understood?”
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