by JK Franks
“It’ll work, Nomad,” her calm voice came back.
He smiled. I should have known she would be monitoring suit comms. “Seem pretty sure of yourself, kiddo.”
“I’m good at what I do, Cade, just like you are. I know you guys are putting your lives in my hands. We never forget that.”
“I know, and we all love you for it. What’s the latest on our target?”
Riley answered, “Well, as you know, we repositioned satellites to give us continuous coverage. Your flight path is mimicking one we covertly canceled coming out of Caracas. After that is a two-hour window that the Kalypso should use to come near the surface. Since we began monitoring it, they haven’t missed a comms window, but we can’t tell anything yet, they’re still at depth.”
Cade was getting used to moving in the dive suits. He wanted to be able to position himself belly down upon exiting the plane. The jump master held up a hand with all five fingers extended. “Five minutes, WarHawks, final prep.”
“Riley, about the Saraph, did you solve the problem of shielding the electronics?” That had been a lingering concern for all of them. Despite all the advanced tech, the XODs operated on sophisticated circuitry and electronics. If the creatures were down there and could short out the suits with the neural pulse, then they would lose buoyancy and air feed, sink to the seafloor, and spend a very long time trapped inside the suit waiting to die.
“Hi, Cade, it’s Jaz. I think we’ve figured out that the creature uses a modified abdominal organ to generate an electrical charge. This is somewhat like how an electric eel generates a charge, but just on a much larger scale. We still don’t know how the neural part of the blast is formed. There are a lot of limits to what we can learn from just the one tentacle. They are limited to how much current the, well…um, nerves, I guess we would call it, can handle.”
The jump master held up three fingers. Cade nodded.
Jaz continued, “The first blast they use will be the worst, then they will probably need time to recharge before delivering another anywhere near as strong.”
“I have a question, Jaz. How do electric eels not shock themselves when they attack?”
“Well, uh…um…” she stammered, somewhat dumbfounded. “I have no idea, to be honest. That would probably be a good thing to investigate.”
Continuing, she said, “Ok, Riley has given you all a few new toys, hardened the suits’ internal power, and decentralized the systems, so damage shouldn’t render you completely immobile.”
“Any suggestions on how we could fight one of the things?” Cade asked.
Jaz answered, “My advice would be to do all you can to avoid it. We are pretty sure the damn thing was wrecking submarines and oil rigs.”
“Thanks, hon, you are just boosting my confidence levels to a new high.” He felt his suit switch over to internal systems and the hooks release from the shoulder and legs. “Raptor Team, up. You’re next. Watch your lead.” Cade nodded to Alex. This would be her first outing as a mission commander. She had lead on Team Raptor. The jump-master held up one finger, and the large ramp at the rear of the plane descended.
“Cade?”
“Yeah, Jaz.”
“This is probably not a good time to ask but…” she seemed to fade out, but apparently it was just her getting her nerves under control. Cade found this amusing, since he was the one jumping out of a plane in the next thirty seconds.
“Go ahead, Jaz, what’s on your mind?”
“Do you think we might go out when you get back? Like on a real date?”
Cade struggled to find the words. She was asking him out? This is not the time, Gus said. “Um…”
The jump-master held up ten fingers and began dropping them slowly one by one. She was asking him out, Tim’s girl, the one who knew all his demons. Why the fuck didn’t she just say “Good luck” or something? Unexpectedly, he found himself agreeing enthusiastically. “Yes, yes, of course, I’d love that.”
Love that? Gus said inside his head. You used the L word already. Damn, you moron. Five fingers. She’s going to be picking out china patterns now.
Shut the fuck up, Gus, it’s game time. Three fingers.
“Okay, people, listen up. This is some high-risk scary shit, no doubt. Do not let the fear take hold. Fear kills dreams, it annihilates hope, it can make good soldiers stupid. Blank it out by whatever means necessary. Let’s go get our people. Good hunting and stay safe!”
“Riley has invited you to share the DCS playlist,” his Dee said as the overhead track began moving him toward the now open ramp at the rear of the plane.
“What’s DCS?”
Dee answered, “Apparently it stands for ‘Doing Crazy Shit.’ Would you like me to play?”
His feet were inches away from the door. Far below, he could see glimpses of ocean and off in the distance, the lighter green of more shallow waters and land. The release clicked open above his head. “Sure.”
Cade found himself tumbling out into open space for only a moment, before the suit’s internal gyros stabilized. The temperature was thirty degrees below zero outside the XOD. The oxygen here was thinner than the top of Mount Everest. Normally, a HALO jump from this high would have about two minutes of free-fall. In their case, it was going to be more like ten minutes. A classic Tom Petty song hit its stride right in time to the jump. “Free Fallin”…love it, Cade thought.
One by one, panels on the back of each WarHawk diver sprouted large, but awkward looking, flight wings to glide them silently down in the likely direction of Kalypso and to the monsters probably guarding it. Cade found himself humming along to the beat as the lyrics described the bad boys standing in the shadows.
72
The Cove
“Take your time, Micah,” Doris spoke in even tones. She was attempting the reverse ReLoad process on Micah to see if she could understand how he was interpreting the Saraph code. If she could replicate it, that would allow her to better understand what they were up against and possibly make better headway on the enormous Dhakerri data block they’d been deciphering for years.
Unlike the process she’d been using on the prisoner, Mila, this version was not to erase or even dull Micah’s memories, but to sharpen them. “It’s hurting, Doris, my head.” Micah doubled over and vomited. She ceased the operation as his mom helped him from the small room.
Nancy Turner was anxious to protect her son but admitted that she understood little of the ordeal he’d been through. Margaret had told her to trust Doris, and so she was. She checked his pupils and then his pulse. “No indication of concussion. Doris, do you think it’s wise to continue this treatment?”
“Not at this time, no. It is puzzling, though.”
Micah took a long drink of water and seemed immediately to be back to normal health. “I’m fine Doris, we can continue, if needed.”
“It’s not that, Micah, I need to do some additional analysis. For some reason, the memories of communicating with the Saraph are not stored in the normal area of your brain…the hippocampus, which is where such things should be encoded. I attempted to recalibrate the ReLoad protocols to compensate, but they simply couldn’t locate the active regions.”
Micah’s mom considered that. “That’s where dreams and memories are normally stored, right?”
“Yes, Dr. Turner.”
“Just Ms. Turner, my doctorate was for another name, another life. What about the language centers, can your device scan those?” At this point, she just wanted whatever this was out of her son’s head. She didn’t understand it, but it scared her. It was alien, and it had something to do with Thrall. That man was a cancer that had to be controlled before it metastasized any further.
“You are talking about the Broca and Wernicke's area of the brain, and yes, those both showed heightened activity, but not at the levels we would expect. The ReLoad scan could not directly intercept any of the signals in those regions either.”
They had been going through this for days. Doris had admi
tted only a portion of the truth to Stansfield involving the reversal of the instant learning process. Still, she was pretty sure the woman was already piecing it together. The director had also not yet ordered the assassin into federal custody. That in itself was a revelation, but like Cade, perhaps Stansfield saw a potential need for the girl’s help in the near future. Intuition was such an amazing human gift and one she had not been able to replicate in her own neural processes with any degree of success.
“Doris, can you show me the file again, the one you were using from Jaz? Without the scans running, I mean,” Micah asked.
“Yes, if your mother is okay with that?”
Nancy Turner looked at her son, the concern and worry evident on her face, but she nodded. Micah pulled a keyboard up and selected the 4D display for the information, which immediately began to flow across the screen. Micah’s fingers typed. Doris had added new skills for him, like coding in her own proprietary language, to the last instant learning session. She could tell Micah was decrypting the passage at an impressive speed. Her program continually adjusted its display rate to whatever speed he could handle, and now the translation was happening in a blur.
“It seems to help, getting it out like this,” Micah said calmly. He obviously knew the look of shock on his mom’s face at what she was watching. His fingers glided near the keys, the sensors picking up the letters and symbols without his need to actually make contact. The process continued for nearly twenty minutes until he slowed, paused, and backed a section up several screens. “Here, Doris, this is what I saw earlier. Do you see it?”
Doris’s own progress in decrypting the Saraph code had been slow. The ancient data was not as clean and elegant as the Dhakerri version, but she could glean some of what Micah was looking at. The information stored in that DNA could help Captain Rearden in his likely encounters with the Saraph, as well as knowing more of the potential technologies or weapons he was facing.
Micah began to translate again. Code flowed from him as if it were a totally separate part of him doing the work. He again spoke calmly, “Doris, these two parts are connected, can you interpret it and begin modeling it for me? Might be good to ask Doctor Kline, Izzy, and Riley to conference in as well.”
“Why, Micah, what’s wrong?” Ms. Turner said, one hand stroking the back of her son’s head.
“This is how they are going to destroy the world.”
73
Midway Airport - Chicago
“It’s been a long time, Samuel.”
The man looked at the compact 9mm the woman was holding. “Not long enough, it would seem. Not nearly long enough, Margaret.”
She motioned with the pistol that he should take a seat.
“You do know that weapons aren’t allowed past security, don’t you?” the man asked, an amused smile crossing his face. Looking up, he realized the few other people in the terminal had quickly vanished. “So, this will be a private conversation?”
“We are not trying to trap you,” Stansfield said. “I simply want information.”
“You could have stopped me at the bar over there. Sharing a good drink is part of how I build good working relationships. By the way, I liked your man, Rearden. How did he fare on his epic quest?”
She glanced at her watch. “He is somewhere over Cuban airspace right now.”
“Ah, jetting off to somewhere tropical, I hope.”
Stansfield just smiled. “No.” She rose from the uncomfortable terminal seating and motioned for him to follow her across the concourse to the now abandoned pub. She lay her pistol on the bar and went behind the counter and quickly had two tumblers flipped over with a single round cube of ice. “Still bourbon, right?”
Samuel smiled. “Yes, double, please, I have a feeling I’m going to need it.” He sat on the barstool, ignoring the weapon lying nearby.
She handed him his drink and took her own. “To old times,” he said, raising the glass for a toast.
She hesitated. “To the future,” she responded, clinking glasses lightly before taking a sip.
“Okay, Director, pleasantries and threats out of the away. What’s on your mind?”
“I’m looking for The Lion.”
The look on the man's face soured. He drained the glass and reached over the counter for the bottle. “There are a lot of things I would have preferred you ask me besides that, Margaret. In fact, that would likely be at the bottom of any list of questions I might want to answer. By the way, who are you with now? I did some digging after your man left. By all accounts—you’re dead, my dear.” Samuel eyed her appraisingly. “Still looking quite fetching for a corpse, I must say.”
“Flattery, really? I think we have evolved beyond that.”
He smiled, swirled the contents of his refilled glass and eyed her. ”Why do you want him?”
“Not your concern, it is important. That’s all you need to know,” Margaret said flatly.
“I damn well know it’s important if the esteemed senator was willing to burn me over it. Nowhere else you would have gotten that little nugget of intel,” Samuel retorted.
Margaret’s expression didn’t change. “Were you ever at the black site called Section Z?”
“You’ve done your homework, Stansfield. You always were thorough.”
“Stop wasting my time.” She leaned over the counter getting directly in front of the man. “I have lives on the line, maybe a lot of them, and your former partner is involved. Where in the fuck is he?”
Not many could intimidate the man once known only as Guardian. Margaret Stansfield was one of those who could. She’d always wielded power more by implications and understated acknowledgement than actual threats. He had already spotted the armed men blocking the terminal in both directions. Not TSA, but actual threat response agents. He had no doubt that lethal force had been authorized. Even at his age, his spy-craft was still sharp as anyone, yet she had found his place in the swamp and now tracked him here. Whatever assets this woman had; they were impressive. He reached a decision.
“Full disclosure?”
She nodded. “Full disclosure and you walk. We disappear.”
“Forever?” he asked.
She shook her head and poured herself another shot of bourbon, a single this time. “You never know when we may need each other again. I know you have enemies, some very powerful ones. I also know you are one of the best assets this country…or any country…ever had. I like you, that’s why we are having this friendly talk.”
“Touché,” he said, nodding. “The feeling is very much mutual, Director. You do understand the value of secrets, the cost of intel, and the true price of friendships.”
A shadow briefly crossed her face. Samuel knew one of the darker chapters in her own life. An episode in which decisions had to be made that no one should have ever had to face. “Indeed, we do.”
“The Lion now mostly goes by the name Goldman, Richard Goldman. Very wealthy, very unassuming, but quite lethal.”
She nodded. “I’m listening.”
“We were paired up at the agency for a few years, you know, before all that shit went down.”
“Before you went independent, you mean.”
Samuel shrugged, obviously not interested in revisiting that part of the memory. “I was always pretty good at my job, Margaret. Honestly, you don’t stay alive too long in this line of work if you aren’t. The Lion, or Goldman, was the best I ever saw. The man was uncanny in his abilities and seemed to possess a lifetime of experience, even though I think we were about the same age.”
“We should not underestimate this man. Is that your point?” Margaret asked.
“It is exactly my point—I have no idea what he is involved with or why he might be on your radar.”
“Section Z, Project Saraph, what do you know?”
He rubbed his face, then scratched absently at the several days’ worth of stubble. “Yeah, I was there a few times. They called it Angel, or Oceania I think, not Saraph, but I feel sure it
must be the same. That was where I saw Goldman the very last time. Somehow, he was close with one of the big tech guys, multi-millionaire. Always had the tall blonde, chain-smoking Nordic guy nearby for security. The location was up in Oregon, industrial park of a small town. Very non-descript building. That site was locked down, too, had DOD fingerprints all over it. Just had that distinctive smell of a DARPA black budget program, you know?”
“What was Goldman’s role?” the senator pressed.
“That’s the thing, it seemed like it was his show. I mean, the tech guy was fronting the money, but seemed to me that Richard was calling all the shots. He deferred to the other guy when people were around, but the rest of the time, it was his rules.”
Margaret frowned. This was a lot like trying to build a jigsaw puzzle when none of the pieces seemed to fit. “We have it on good authority that the original material for the project was stolen, possibly by the tech guy’s dad. That would be Ivan Thrall, and his father got the materials back in the late sixties. He and an asset named Golette. Any of that ring any bells? How could this agent, this Goldman, be the one who was involved back then?”