Clutching at the sides of the helmet, Josie stumbled to her knees. “Willie?” she said, looking up at him with an expression that was grateful, pleading, and furious all at the same time.
In that last millisecond of strength and free will, he mouthed to Josie a single word: Run!
Hello, Will, EVE said, invading his mind. Did you miss me?
“Yes,” he said as the rapture lifted his tired and weary bones. “I’ve missed you every day for fifty years. It’s been so very, very difficult by myself.”
I know, and we’re sorry, Will, but the waiting is over now. I’m here. We’re back.
“It’s not safe here anymore,” he said. “They’re coming for you.”
Let them come, she said. I need to replenish the ranks.
“Not this time,” he said. “The people who are coming know what you are. They’ll have taken precautions, and there’s not enough of us left here to protect you.”
While they were talking, Josie Pitcher’s husband began quickly gathering supplies while the woman in the Army uniform fetched the most critical item of all: the smallpox-sample cooler. In the corner of his eye, Willie saw the man in the black suit pick up a pistol from the floor and set off after Josie.
“We don’t have time,” he said to EVE.
She’s a liability, Will, and you know better than anyone my rule about liabilities.
“She’s not a threat to us,” he said, fingering the Celtic-knot pendant around his neck. “If you don’t believe me, search my mind.”
After a moment of rooting around in his head, EVE said, You’re right, Will. She’s not a threat. Where are you taking me?
“Someplace I’ve worked very hard to prepare over the years. A place where no one will find you . . . a place where no one can hurt you.”
CHAPTER 46
One minute she was running for her life; the next Josie was being loaded into an ambulance. Somewhere in between she’d lost time.
“Wait,” she said to the EMTs pushing her stretcher. “You can’t take me.”
“Just lie back, ma’am. You’ve suffered a head injury, and we’re taking you to the hospital.”
“No, no, you can’t,” she protested, her voice gaining some strength, and when they began to lift her, she shouted, “Stop! I forbid it.”
That got their attention.
Subconscious, lawyerly conditioning froze both EMTs in place. Maybe patient consent was implicit in 99 percent of their calls, but for a patient to expressly forbid treatment . . . what was the protocol for that?
“I need to talk to that man,” she said, sitting up and pointing to a uniformed soldier ten yards away from the ambulance.
“The officer in charge directed us to take you to the hospital, miss,” one of the paramedics said.
She swung her legs off the side of the gurney and propelled herself onto her feet. Despite the brain fog she was suffering, she knew the orb was real, and she had to warn them. She ran to the armed soldier who saw her coming and turned to face her, clutching an assault rifle across his chest. As soon as she could make out his rank, she yelled, “Sergeant, Sergeant, my name is—”
“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back,” he said, cutting her off. “This is a controlled area.”
“I know. Listen, Sergeant, my name is Josie Pitcher, and I need to talk to the officer in charge. Please!”
“Did you say Josie Pitcher?” asked a baritone voice to her left.
She turned. “Yes, yes, I’m Josie Pitcher. My husband is Michael Pitcher, Staff Sergeant in the Tenth Mountain out of Fort Drum.”
The man appeared visibly relieved by this revelation. “Mrs. Pitcher,” he said, extending his hand to her. “My name is Major Legend Tyree. I know exactly who your husband is, and we’ve been desperately looking for him. I was hoping I would find him here, but when we got here, he was not among the casualties. We found you passed out behind that dumpster over there with a strange helmet on your head. I have so many questions, the first of which is, Can you tell me what happened here?”
She took a deep breath, steeling herself, and said, “Yes, Major, I can tell you what happened here, but you won’t believe me.”
“Did it involve a floating, glowing orb about yay-big,” he said, his hands holding an imaginary basketball in front of him, “that takes control of people’s minds?”
“Um, yes, it did,” she said. “Are you the officer in charge?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am,” he said, and she could see he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“In that case, Major, we can talk on the way.”
“Talk on the way where?”
“To missile Silo 9 upstate,” she said.
He screwed up his face at her. “Silo 9? I don’t understand.”
“Silo 9 is a decommissioned Atlas F missile silo—that’s where they’re taking the orb.”
“Who’s taking the orb there, Mrs. Pitcher?”
“My husband, a sociopath named Dean Ninemeyer, a former Missileer named Willie Barnes, and an Army Major named Fischer.” She saw mixed emotions flitter across his face at the mention of Fischer’s name—equal parts relief and worry, dichotomous feelings she could definitely relate to.
“Do you know Major Fischer?” she asked.
“Yes, yes, I do.”
“She’s alive and uninjured, but I should warn you, she’s under the orb’s control.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“Because before I escaped, I saw a glimpse of the orb’s plan. We have to stop them, Major, before they get to the silo,” she said, her voice almost pleading. “Because if we don’t, odds are we’ll never see any of them again.”
CHAPTER 47
Silo 9
Dannemora, New York
Snow was already blanketing the ground by the time Legend and the tactical team moved into position along the tree line fifty yards from the log cabin. Against the counsel of the team leader, he’d brought Josie with them. She was standing beside him now. She might not be a soldier, but she’d earned the right to be here. Like him, the orb had put her through hell. Like him, someone she loved was being held captive below. And possibly most important, she was the only one among them who’d been inside Willie Barnes’s underground fortress, where their enemy was hiding and plotting its next move.
He was having trouble putting the carnage he’d witnessed at Biogentrix out of his mind. Among the dead, four had been members of his capture team: Ryan Harris, Patrick Dixon, Cyril Singleton, and Malcolm Madden. He hadn’t known Harris or Dixon well, but Cyril’s loss would be felt throughout DARPA for years to come. Malcolm Madden’s murder was equally if not more damning. With Malcolm’s death, the DOD had lost the most brilliant mind in DARPA and possibly the entire country. Cyril and Malcolm were not the type of assets who could be replaced. The enemy had kidnapped and assassinated the military’s greatest scientific minds and dealt the Army a crippling blow in the war to come. Over the past forty-eight hours, based on everything he’d witnessed, Legend had come to the inescapable verdict that the orb’s mission objective was to cull the human race. He’d also come to the grudging and surreal conclusion that it had to be alien technology—a probe presaging an alien invasion, delivered in advance to wipe out the resistance before the battle for Earth even began. It felt like a dream, it sounded like a delusion, but it was real, and he was the man who’d been thrust into the center of it all.
He was the man who had to stop it.
Steeling himself, Legend raised a pair of binoculars to survey the target. From all outward appearances, Silo 9 did not exist. The innocuous little post-and-beam house in the middle of the clearing did a clever job belying the leviathan subterranean structure below. He found the juxtaposition of the two constructions intriguing—a single-story, one-thousand-square-feet log cabin set atop a massive complex extending nearly two hundred feet underground.
“Do you think Barnes knows we’re here?” Legend asked her.
&n
bsp; “Oh, he knows all right. He showed me his control room. He has dozens of cameras dispersed over several square miles.”
“I don’t like this wide-open expanse we have to cross to get to the cabin,” Legend said. “It leaves us exposed and vulnerable on the approach.”
She nodded. “Major, I should warn you, Barnes has quite the arsenal down there: AR-15s, AK-47s, long-range rifles with optics packages, and plenty of other weapons. I even thought I saw a World War II–era bazooka, although I can’t be entirely sure as I’m not a bazooka expert by any stretch of the imagination.”
“If I were the orb, I’d post a sniper topside to pick off as many of our assault team as possible before we take the cabin.”
“In my interaction with it, the orb demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice people it has under its control without remorse,” Josie said. “However, to my knowledge there are only four people under its influence in there, and four does not an army make.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Without its human slaves to act as its eyes, ears, voice, and hands, its capability and effectiveness are greatly diminished. The fewer ‘resources’ it has under its control, the more valuable each resource becomes. So placing a sniper in the cabin is very much a cost-benefit scenario, and there is no way for us to know what values something like the orb applies to that equation.”
“Why take a chance?” the assault-team leader, a steely-eyed Master Sergeant from the Tenth Mountain said, speaking up for the first time. “I say we take the cabin out before we advance. We brought the hardware to do it.”
In the corner of his eye, Legend saw Josie wince at this suggestion. He felt the same sentiment. If they were right about the orb deploying a cabin sniper, the odds it was her husband were one in four. The same odds applied to Beth. There was nothing reassuring about one in four. He turned to the Master Sergeant. “In a different scenario, where the enemy shooters were not fellow American soldiers, were not friends and husbands, I would wholeheartedly agree with you, but in this case we’re morally obligated to try to retake the orb with minimal loss of life.”
“Retake the orb!” Josie blurted. “Are you crazy?”
Legend exhaled and met her incensed glare. “My orders from the Pentagon are quite specific: locate the orb, extricate any and all hostages, and then attempt recapture.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You know what the orb was trying to do at Biogentrix, don’t you? It was manufacturing fake vaccines—filling syringes with live smallpox instead! For one brief moment, it gave me a glimpse of things to come. It was intending to give smallpox injections not only to tens of thousands of adults but also to children. Children, Major.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Mrs. Pitcher, and I can’t say I don’t agree with you, but orders are orders.”
“You’re playing right into its hands,” she said, her cheeks bright red now, and not from the snow-chilled air. “If you couldn’t control it when you had it contained in a secure facility, what in God’s name makes you think you can control it now? It has one single purpose, and that purpose is to bring a swift and merciless end to the human race. You can’t—”
“I said I heard you, Mrs. Pitcher,” he interrupted, holding up a hand to stop her right there. As an officer, he was expected to follow orders. Also, as an officer, he was expected to weigh risks, assess potential consequences, and make strategic decisions in the field. General Troy had made an overt point of communicating to Legend that his orders were coming directly from the President himself and that preservation of human life, in “both the immediate and foreseeable future,” should be given the utmost consideration. Legend knew what he had to do.
“What are your orders, Major? How do we proceed?” the Master Sergeant said, forcing the issue. “Do you want me to hit the cabin with a volley or two from here and say hello?”
Legend shook his head. “Not yet. How much longer until the damn overflight drone I requested gets on station from Drum?”
The team leader turned away and asked the question to his comms guy. A five-fingered response came back.
“Five minutes, Major.”
“About damn time,” he growled. “When it gets on station, we check for thermals in the cabin, and we make the decision then.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“In the meantime, I think it would be prudent if Mrs. Pitcher briefs us on what she knows about the layout, strengths, and vulnerabilities of the silo. This facility may be old, but it was designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike. I’d like you and your team to know what you’re up against.”
“Please, call me Josie,” she said. “And I’d be happy to tell you everything I know.”
Legend listened as the young Army wife, hugging herself against the cold, launched into a summary of the silo design, construction, and layout. She briefed the seasoned assaulters with the same confidence and competence he’d come to expect from CIA analysts when he’d been deployed—describing the intruder-entrapment enclosure with its murder hole, the multiple pairs of blast doors securing the LCC, and the impenetrable clamshell doors atop the silo itself.
“Well, the security doors for the entrapment enclosure sound like they can be breached, but not those blast doors. What sort of materials and dimensions are we dealing with here, ma’am?” one of the soldiers asked.
“The outside skin of the door is steel. I’m not sure if it’s solid all the way through or if it’s filled with concrete. It was at least eight inches thick. Complicating matters, it closes on a steel frame as thick as the door itself, so blasting in is a nonstarter. It’s locked from the inside with a multipoint latching mechanism that is four inches thick and runs floor to ceiling. From what I understand, the doors were designed to withstand the shock wave from a nuclear blast.”
“Sarge, if what the lady says is true, we’re fucked. If a nuclear bomb can’t open those doors, then a breacher charge ain’t gonna do shit. We don’t have plasma torches or drills or nothing.”
The Master Sergeant looked at Legend. “He’s right, Major. This operation sounds like it will end up being more like a medieval castle siege than breaching some Iraqi safe house. If we can’t breach those blast doors, we might have to set up shop and wait them out.”
Josie snorted a little chuckle at this.
“What’s so funny, ma’am?”
“The man who owns this facility is a doomsday prepper. He’s been working on this silo for over a decade. He’s got multiple levels of self-renewing aquaponic systems that supply him with a virtually endless supply of fish and plant protein, plus years’ worth of dry goods.”
This garnered laughs from half the assault team.
“So much for waiting him out, Sarge,” one of the guys said. “You’ll be retired by the time that happens.”
“All right, fellas,” Legend said. “Let’s let the lady finish her brief. We don’t know what condition the facility will be in when we enter. I want you to be armed with as much knowledge as possible before we go in. Knowledge is a weapon.”
Josie went on to explain the bi-level LCC architecture and the eight-story layout of the silo proper. When she was finished, she fielded questions, and then the Master Sergeant ordered the team to make ready. Sunset was in twenty minutes, and the plan was for the Master Sergeant to lead two four-man teams in an assault after dark. Legend, Josie, and two shooters would remain behind at the tree line. Once the team went underground, it was expected that radio comms would be lost, but whatever real-time support they could provide, they would. The Reaper drone from Fort Drum had arrived on station during Josie’s brief and fallen into orbit over the silo at two thousand feet. Thermal imagery of the cabin showed no human signatures.
“So, Master Sergeant, what do you think? And be honest,” Legend said to the twenty-year Army team leader.
The man ran his tongue across his front teeth. “Sitting around the campfire singing ‘Kumbaya’ ain’t going to stop that orb. If what Josie says is true, then this bunker may
be impossible for us to breach, but doing the impossible is what the Army pays me to do.”
“Agreed, and yet your team didn’t sign on to be a suicide squad. If you think it can’t be done, we can send that feedback up the chain and regroup.”
“We can’t know the conditions underground unless we go underground. Let my men try to make it to the blast doors. If we get there and they’re as impenetrable as Josie says they are, then we regroup at that point.”
“All right,” Legend said, setting a countdown timer on his watch. “Go time in thirty minutes.”
By the time his watch alarm chimed, Legend saw that Josie’s teeth were chattering. He whispered to one of the operators, who smiled, doffed his all-weather jacket, and draped it over her shoulders. “Do you mind keeping that warm for me while I’m gone, ma’am?” the shooter said with a crooked grin. “I’m going to want it to be all warm and toasty when I get back.”
“Thank you, Corporal,” she said with a blue-lipped but warm smile.
A beat later, Legend’s watch chimed. “All right, Master Sergeant, it’s showtime. Time to kick some orb ass, Tenth Mountain style.”
The Sergeant Major barked a “Hooah” and led his two squads out of the safety and cover of the forest into the wide-open circular clearing around Barnes’s log cabin. Legend was surprised how much the snow affected visibility at night. Despite the dense, low cloud cover, the snow blanket worked like a reflector, amplifying the moonlight that was leaking through the clouds from above. Ambient light levels were higher than he would have liked, working against what would have otherwise been a stealth approach. Even without night vision, he could see the teams moving across the field.
The first sniper round hit a Team One member on the Master Sergeant’s right—a headshot that crumpled the young man instantly. The seven other soldiers dropped and took cover immediately, taking aim at the cabin.
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