by Cindy Dees
“It’s Carter. Bertha’s yours at 10:04.”
She glanced at her watch. “Got it. I’ll be there.”
“Do you want something to eat before then? The cook kept the kitchen open for you.”
“No. I’ll just meet you on the big floor.”
“Uh, all right.” He sounded perplexed. Tough. She wasn’t spending any more time with him than she had to until she got out of here and as far away from him as she could humanly get.
She paced her tiny room until she was half-crazy, and then she got on the internet again and read a few more of the damning articles. Most of them seemed based off that first article and quoted it more or less verbatim. The pictures were all the same ones with piles of children’s bodies, staring in reproachful death at the photographer. When the main articles petered out, she ran into a second set of articles mentioning the journalist for a possible Pulitzer Prize for his exposé.
About twenty minutes before her window of opportunity to do the run on Bertha, she made her way down to the main cave. Thankfully, a number of technicians were there to witness the real run and she didn’t have to be alone with Carter. Jennifer Blackfoot was present, along with a tall, grim-looking man who introduced himself quietly as Brady Hathaway. Carter’s boss.
Lily avoided looking at Carter as she approached his desk. The images of what he’d done to those children fresh and sickening in her mind, she half turned away from him and did her best to put him entirely out of her mind so she could actually work.
She took one last look through her equations and plugged in her latest information on the asteroid. And at 10:04 p.m. exactly, Carter pointed to her from his desk. She hit the send button. Here went nothing.
Chapter 7
Carter was a mess. He prayed Lily’s calculations were wrong, but feared they weren’t. He desperately hoped that the projected damage from this particular asteroid wouldn’t be severe enough to trigger the doomsday machine. But even more than that, he wanted to know why in the hell the only time Lily had made eye contact with him since she’d gotten down here she’d looked at him like he was the anti-Christ.
As if that weren’t enough to drive a guy half out of his mind, he damn well didn’t want to have the conversation that was waiting for him after this run of Lily’s simulation was complete. Brady had cornered him on the way in here and murmured that he wanted to chat about Carter’s performance up on the bluff last night when the Russians had jumped him and Lily.
Not only was the boss going to ream him out completely for sleeping with the astrophysicist, but Brady must have seen the footage of him having to hand one attacker over to a civilian—and totally unprepared. Any self-respecting operator ought to be able to defend against two aggressors. He was done both as a Special Operator and as an officer.
And then there was Lily herself. He’d been furious with himself last night, but he feared he’d taken it out on her. Unfairly. He owed her an apology. She was so quick to blame herself for everything. He’d have to work on her self-confidence— He broke off. That implied a long-term relationship between them. Was he ready to commit to that? Was she?
And one thing he did know: he wanted to make love with Lily again so badly that he could hardly see straight. But he was not some randy teen who couldn’t think past his fly. Damned if the only thing he saw every time he closed his eyes was Lily, writhing on top of him like some magical spirit of the night, Lily wiggling her tush at him and daring him to do naughty things to her, Lily’s eyes closed in ecstasy as she keened her pleasure to the stars above.
Appalled, he yanked his attention back to the blank screens high on the wall in front of him. Any minute now.
An outline of the Earth popped up on the jumbo TV. Everyone gathered around him and Lily inhaled sharply. Here it came. A white dot arced down toward the slowly spinning image of the planet, its course traced by a red line. An outline of the Asian continent spun into view. The asteroid sped across the Earth’s surface and plowed into central Siberia exactly as Lily had forecast. His gut clenched in horror as the computer began generating seismic wave lines, a powerful electromagnetic shock wave, and an oblong crater in the permafrost.
It was exactly as she’d predicted. Every last condition necessary to set off the doomsday machine was going to be met.
“Looks like your girl was right,” Brady commented from behind him.
“Uh, gentlemen?” Lily spoke up grimly from beside him. “We’ve got a little problem.”
“What’s that?” Brady asked.
Carter looked over at her, and she was staring fixedly at her computer screen. Mathematical computations sprawled across it. When she glanced up at him, her face was ghostly white. Alarm blossomed in his gut. He might not have known her long, but he knew her well enough to be dead sure that she was a courageous woman. It took something bad—really bad—to put that kind of terror in her big brown eyes. He half rose out of his seat. “What’s wrong, Lily?”
“I was wrong about when the asteroid’s going to hit.”
“How wrong?” he asked evenly, his stomach churning all of a sudden.
“We don’t have two weeks. We have more like a week. Maybe less. I’ll need to get a really accurate magnetic scan to pinpoint a time frame.”
Carter sat down hard. Brady took an involuntary step forward. It went dead silent all around them as everyone stared, frozen.
“Come again?” Jennifer finally choked out.
“The asteroid’s going to hit Earth in a week or less.” As the thunderous silence continued around her, Lily added somewhat desperately, “I was wondering how you were managing to get such good pictures of the asteroid. I mean, I know your satellites are powerful and all, but I work with some pretty hefty telescopes myself, and I haven’t even come close to getting images like you all were able to pull in.”
“How is this possible?” Brady half whispered.
“The initial calculations of mass, density and velocity made by the astronomers who discovered the asteroid were wildly incorrect. I analyzed your spectroscopic images and realized the entire asteroid is made of iron, not just ice as was originally assumed. The astronomers thought the tail coming off it was ice vapor. But it’s iron particles. And the tail isn’t white. It’s gray metal reflecting sunlight back at us. This thing weighs close to twenty times what we thought it did. Which means it’s coming in much, much faster than anyone previously guessed, and it’s going to make a much bigger bang when it hits.”
“How big?” Carter demanded, his heart in his throat.
“It’s not an extinction-level event, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said hastily. “We’re still talking only regional effects from this thing. It’s just that the blast radius, EMP pulse and seismic effects are going to affect an area roughly a hundred times as large as I originally forecast.”
Carter leaped to the next logical conclusion for her. “So even if our intelligence about the exact location of the doomsday machine is off a bit, we’re now pretty much guaranteed to set the thing off if we’re even in the ballpark as to where it’s located.”
Lily looked at him miserably. “That’s correct.”
“Translation?” Jennifer asked tersely.
Lily replied, “If the doomsday machine were in, say, Denver, we originally believed the asteroid would have to hit somewhere in the Denver metropolitan area to set it off. But we were wrong. Given how big the impact’s actually going to be, the asteroid only has to hit somewhere in the state of Colorado to set off the doomsday machine. Or possibly only somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.”
Another heavy silence fell around them.
“Crisis team to my office. Now,” Brady said quietly.
Carter stood and looked down at Lily. “That’s us.”
“I’m on a crisis team now?”
“You are the crisis team, sugar.”
She winced when he used the endearment and her gaze slid away from him. What was up with that? She might have been mad when he g
ot all huffy at himself after last night’s fiasco, but this was a whole new level of distance in her reactions to him.
He led her up the metal stairs to Jennifer’s office and through it into the conference room that sat between her office and Brady’s. Carter managed to maneuver so he could murmur in her ear, “You okay?”
“No, I’m not okay,” she muttered back.
He got the impression she was referring to more than the disastrous estimate of impact time. But what?
Brady didn’t waste time dithering. When the squad leaders of the two Special Forces teams in the bunker were seated, along with Jennifer, a couple of lead technicians, Lily and himself, Brady said simply, “Now what do we do?”
Bravo Squad leader said grimly, “There’s not enough time to deploy a team to Siberia to disable the doomsday machine.”
“We’ve already been over that,” Jennifer retorted. “My source was clear on the subject—the odds of you disabling it without kicking off some sort of fail-safe device were nil anyway.”
Alpha Squad leader leaned forward. “I don’t think we have any choice. We have to talk to the Russians.”
Carter bit out, “You mean the same Russians who are doing everything in their power to kill Lily and silence her?”
“Yes,” the soldier replied tersely. “Once we tell them what we know, they’ll realize it’s too late to silence Dr. James. The fox is already in the hen house, as it were.”
“It’s a hell of a risk. With her life,” Carter retorted.
The guy shrugged. “How many people die if we don’t convince the Russians to turn off their machine while this asteroid makes landfall?”
Carter all but growled like a wolf. “She’s a civilian.”
“She’s a human being,” the guy snapped. “We’re talking about possible extinction of the human race here, Boudreaux.”
It was all he could do to stay in his seat, not to jump up and pace, not to put his fist through the nearest wall in sheer frustration. And then the unthinkable happened. His leg muscles started to clench up. His back started to go rigid. Quickly, he placed his hands in his lap in what he hoped looked like a natural position. His shoulders began to lock up. He looked up and saw Lily staring at him fixedly.
She stunned him by saying to Brady, “I don’t mean to be rude, and it’s probably some terrible breach of protocol, but could I have a moment alone in here with Captain Baigneaux? I need to run something past him. It’s devilishly complicated math and the rest of you will distract me.”
Everyone stared at her blankly.
“Please?” she insisted politely. “It’ll take just a minute. Indulge the crazy professor.”
Brady stood up, frowning. “You heard the lady. Everyone out.”
When the door closed behind the last person, Lily turned to him quickly. “Is this room soundproof?” she demanded.
“Yes. Why? You planning to jump my bones in plain sight of everyone downstairs?”
“No, you many-colored creep. I’m planning to tell you exactly what I think of you before you unfreeze.”
He watched her warily. So far only large muscle groups were affected. She turned to face him. “I read about your little mission in Africa. No wonder you said you’re going to hell. After what you did, I sincerely hope you do go straight there.”
Comprehension broke across him like scalding water. Ah, God. That damned article. Surely the nastiest piece of yellow journalism ever printed. Twisted half truths and lies. All of it. Yes, they’d killed a bunch of boys, but those boys were vicious psychopaths, raised practically from infancy to be brutal, inhuman killers. The original Lost Boys of Sudan were grown up now and training a possibly even more sick and psychopathic generation of boy soldiers to do their terrible work. Those were the boys he and his men had killed. But that bit got completely left out of the article of course.
“And those villagers,” Lily continued, her voice thick with disgust. “How could you?”
But they hadn’t! He and his men had come upon the village after the boy soldiers had gone through the place and wreaked their despicable brand of chaos upon those poor people.
“It’s not what it seems. I swear.” Hey! He could talk! And if he wasn’t mistaken, the leg cramps were already easing. Hallelujah. Was he finally beating the seizures?
“So here’s the deal, Carter,” Lily snarled. “I know your dirty little secret. And I’ll never forgive you for it. But I have a job to do, and like it or not, you’re the best person in this joint to help me. I’m going to set aside my contempt for your homicidal tendencies for the next two days and work with you. But once this thing is over, I never want to see or hear from you again as long as I live.”
He’d felt pretty helpless during a few of his episodes. He’d thought that had been as bad as it could get. But this was worse. To have her think this of him…not to be able to explain…not to be able to set the record straight…to see the hatred and revulsion in her eyes…no, this was worse.
“It’s not true, Lily,” he rasped. “None of it.”
“I do not want to hear it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want any of your lies or lame explanations. There’s no justification for killing children. Ever.”
He froze, stunned. In an instant it hit him with the power of a revelation that, in his heart, he agreed with her. There was no justification for killing children. There had to have been another way to deal with that violent child army besides mowing down a bunch of horribly misguided kids. Maybe they could have been saved. Rehabbed. Given a chance at a new life somehow. But no one would ever know because he’d given his men the order to fire and then unloaded his own fully automatic weapon into those cherubic faces. His head told him he’d made exactly the right call, but his heart didn’t buy it.
“What calculations did you need to discuss?” he asked tiredly. Suddenly he felt a hundred years old. His body ached all the way down to his soul.
“There are no calculations. I saw you start to freeze up and thought you might need some time to thaw.”
“That’s me,” he commented wryly. “The human popsicle.”
She pursed her lips but made no reply. The ready humor that had spiced up their interactions before was gone. She turned away and opened the door to Brady’s office. “Okay, folks. You can come back in.”
The group filed back into the room while Carter tried to think up some impressive equation to scribble on the whiteboard by way of explanation for that past few minutes locked in here alone with Lily. But she startled him by speaking up first.
“Carter and I have run the odds, and there’s really only one option. He has to take me to the Russians. Together, we have to convince them to turn off their doomsday machine. I doubt they’ll leave it turned off, but this asteroid’s got to get safely to Earth before they bring it back online.”
Jennifer sighed. “The Russians steadfastly refuse to admit that the machine exists, let alone that a necessity might exist that requires it to be disabled.”
“Then I guess we’ll just have to convince them we’re right,” Lily replied, “whether they want to admit it to us or not.”
Brady added, “What you’re suggesting could be dangerous.”
“Whereas sitting around doing nothing and just letting this thing kill us all isn’t dangerous?” Lily retorted.
“I’m not the guy for the job,” Carter interjected. “You need someone who can take care of you—”
“It’s you or I refuse to help,” she snapped back.
“Why me?” Carter challenged. Surely after her earlier accusations she would want someone else to take over bodyguard duty for her.
“Better the known evil than the unknown one,” she snapped back.
Jeez. Not only did she think he was a baby killer, apparently she thought all soldiers were baby killers. He sighed and reminded himself grimly that she was an American citizen entitled to believe whatever she wanted.
Brady frowned back and forth, obviously perplexed by the
complex dynamic vibrating between them at the moment. Special Operators were astute judges of people and their behavior, and he was obviously having a hard time figuring out what was up with them. Hell, Carter was confused, and he was part of the whole mess.
“Who do you propose to talk to?” Brady asked Lily.
“I don’t know. The powers that be. Someone in the Russian executive branch, I suppose. I could approach some of my astronomer counterparts and let them work their way up through the system to whoever controls the doomsday machine, but a week may not be enough time for that if I understand their academic bureaucracy correctly.”
Brady snorted. “To say nothing of the layers of government bureaucracy you’d have to wade through.”
“How about we arrange a meeting at the Russian Embassy in Washington?” Jennifer suggested. “Ambassador Dogorovich can get the ear of the prime minister quickly if he needs it.”
“It’s worth a try. If nothing else, maybe we can pull some strings at the Pentagon and open up a back channel through their military. Whatever we do, it has to happen at light speed,” Brady replied.
Jennifer nodded. “I think our best bet is to get these two to D.C. At least we’ll have access to the highest levels of our own government if need be to make something happen.”
Brady turned to one of the men down the table. “How soon can we have a plane ready to fly to Washington?”
“An hour.”
And so it was for the second time in a single day, Carter found himself climbing onto a business jet with Lily and whisking up into the night this time. He waited until the plane was safely airborne and she was a captive audience.
“Listen, Lily. About that article. That reporter didn’t tell a fraction of the real story. He took what happened and twisted it wildly out of proportion.”
“I saw the pictures, Carter. Are you telling me he faked those?”
He huffed. “No. Those were real. Although it was fascinating how all of the weapons those kids were pointing at me and my men disappeared before the pictures were taken.”