SecondWorld

by Jeremy Robinson

  Nausea slammed Miller as a violent shudder shook his body. Darkness loomed again.

  “Sir!” Hammaker said as he approached. He took Miller’s arm and threw it over his back. “Put your weight on me.”

  Miller held the flash drive up. He would have preferred to keep it, but knew it probably wouldn’t survive a dip in the river. “Everything depends on this. Keep it safe.”

  Hammaker took the flash drive. “Yes, sir.”

  As darkness reduced his vision to pinpoints, Miller asked, “How long?”

  “What?”

  “How long have we—”

  The kid understood and said, “I waited five hours, sir. Spent another hour looking for you.”

  Six hours.

  Brodeur could be halfway around the world with Adler by now if he really did have access to a modern-day foo fighter. Miller was about to ask the kid to make sure he woke him up soon. The world didn’t have time for him to be unconscious. But the darkness claimed him before he could open his mouth.

  He woke just minutes later, screaming, as searing heat consumed his body.

  48

  Miller thrashed as liquid fire enveloped him. The burn stung his skin like a thousand bees. His heart raced. Stabbing pains pierced his limbs. He fought to free himself, but a tight pressure on his shoulders held him down—someone held him down. He reached up to grab his attacker, but found his arms too weak.

  “Stop fighting!” a voice said close to his ear. “The water only feels like it’s burning because you’re so cold.”

  The voice sounded familiar.

  His vision cleared and he saw water. It bubbled from below.

  Boiling!

  He fought again, but this time the voice shouted at him. “Stop moving, sir! You need to warm up!”

  Sir.

  The word identified the voice.

  Hammaker.

  The kid.

  Miller trusted the kid. Remembered being taken out of the cryogenic chamber. Dragged down the hallway, to the—Miller looked at the water. He sat in the river heated by geothermal vents.

  As he relaxed and Hammaker loosened his grip, the burn began to fade. The water still stung for sure. It was hot. But he’d been in hotter Jacuzzis. He leaned his head back on the soft, moss-covered shoreline and looked at Hammaker’s upside-down worried face. He was cast in blue, lit by the glow stick. Night had fallen. “Where’s Vesely?”

  Hammaker tilted his head to the right. Miller followed the motion, his head spinning as he moved, and found Vesely lying in the water next to him, unconscious and unmoving.

  “He didn’t wake up when you put him in?” Miller asked.

  “Moaned,” Hammaker replied. “But nothing since. Think he’ll be okay?”

  “He’s tough,” Miller said. “Hey, kid—”

  Hammaker looked him in the eyes.

  “Nice work.”

  The kid smiled.

  “Can’t believe they made you a cook.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  A strange euphoric feeling came over Miller as the heat worked its way into his body, melting the tension away. “You can stop calling me sir. I’m Survivor.” He looked at Vesely. “He’s Cowboy. And now you’re The Kid. I think Cowboy will like it.”

  “The kid?”

  “Capital T, capital K. And we’ll write it with two Ds so it looks cool.”

  Hammaker grinned, but his eyebrows still bent up in the middle. “You need to rest.”

  “Uh-uh,” Miller said, and tried to push himself up. “We need to leave. Adler. She—”

  Hammaker pushed Miller back down. “Your lips are still blue. You need to get warm. Besides, it’s nighttime and a storm blew in. I’m a good pilot, but I can’t fly in that.”

  Miller felt too tired to be angry. He blinked, but had to force his eyes back open. “There isn’t time. The red sky is … We only have two days left. Just two—”

  Miller’s vision blurred as sleep claimed him once more.

  * * *

  He woke to the sound of voices.

  The river still flowed around him like a wet electric blanket. His head rested on a mossy cushion. The scent of plants and something—coffee?

  The smell of fresh brew sat him up.

  “Survivor!” Vesely’s voice was loud and cheerful. “You have cheated death once again.”

  Miller rolled over and pulled himself from the water. On shore, bathed in blue light, he found his clothes were missing. Naked on Antarctica and not cold, he thought, before wondering what happened to his clothes. Before he could ask, he saw a small fire burning next to the gorge wall. His clothes dangled from the rocks, drying.

  Vesely, who was also naked, waved to him from his seat on the gorge floor. Hammaker sat next to him. Both were lit by a large rectangular light that blurred Miller’s vision. He squinted, rubbed his eyes, and then saw the light for what it was—a laptop.

  Hammaker noted Miller’s attention. “I went back up to the helicopter after Vesely woke up. Got supplies and the laptop. The flash drive works fine.”

  “And it is treasure trove of information,” Vesely added. “Come! See!”

  The flash drive! Miller quickly joined them by the laptop, his nudity forgotten. He felt a chill for a moment as the water evaporated from his body, but the air at the bottom of the gorge felt tropical. His muscles ached as he sat down, but the pain was bearable. The throbbing in his arm was another matter. He grunted as he put weight on it. The wound had been bandaged.

  “It’s a clean shot through the side,” Hammaker said.

  “You dressed it?” Miller asked.

  “After I sewed it,” Vesely said. “I’m afraid your scar will be as ugly as mine.” He patted his injured shoulder, which also had a new dressing.

  Miller flexed his hand. The pain was immediate, but wouldn’t incapacitate him. He knew morphine would help, but didn’t want to dull his senses or reaction time. He’d need both in the coming days.

  Days.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Four hours,” Vesely replied. “I’ve been awake for an hour.”

  “He nearly killed me when he woke up,” Hammaker said.

  Vesely shrugged. “I was confused. Last I remember I am being frozen. I wake up in hot water.”

  Miller looked at the computer screen and saw a mass of open files. “What have you found?”

  “A lot,” Hammaker said. “And honestly, a few days ago I wouldn’t have believed any of it. There are records going back to World War One. Science staff. Military. Engineers. Support staff.”

  “Not to mention traitors, spies, moles, and saboteurs,” Vesely added.

  Miller knew that it wouldn’t be hard to weed out the majority of turncoats based on who had gone AWOL shortly after the attacks on Miami and Tokyo, but hard proof was always a good thing to have. And there were obviously a good number of traitors still embedded in the actively deployed military. They would need to be exposed and dealt with as well. But not right now.

  Vesely read his mind. “But that’s not important right now. I think I figured out where they went.”

  Miller remembered. “Dulce.”

  “How did you know!” Vesely said, his thunder stolen.

  “I’m an investigator,” Miller said. “I investigated. Before Brodeur tried to kill us.”

  “Have you been there?” Vesely asked.

  Miller shook his head. “I’ve only heard of it once.”

  “Is in New Mexico. Little is known about base, and government denies it exists. In 1997, Dulce Papers were released. There was video. And photos. And supposed quotes from guards about internal layout and alien breeding chambers. Tall tubes. Metal. One guard spoke of pale, skinny being removed and placed in tube of hot wat—”

  Vesely and Miller looked at each other and then to the river of hot water.

  “He saw a cryogenically frozen Nazi,” Miller said. “Being thawed.”

  The revelation further solidified Miller’s opinion that Dulce wa
s the place to go.

  “Dulce is underground base. Some say tunnels from base stretch far away. Some say across continent. But most believe a tunnel—a high-speed rail—goes to Los Alamos.”

  “The laboratory?” Hammaker asked.

  Vesely nodded. “If they can become directors of NASA, why not national laboratory? If Kammler wanted a modern think tank there is no better place to start.”

  Miller stood, walked to his clothes, and picked up his underwear. Warm and dry. He slipped them on. “So what’s our move? Infiltrate Los Alamos and search for the rail? Or go straight to Dulce and kick in the front door?”

  Hammaker raised his hand. “Do I get a say, since I got a code name?”

  “He gave you a code name?” Vesely said.

  “The Kidd,” Hammaker said. “Two Ds.”

  “Like Billy the Kid,” Vesely said. “I like.”

  “I knew you would,” Miller said, and turned to Hammaker. “What are you thinking?”

  “Kick in the front door,” The Kidd said. “Kill every Nazi son of a bitch you find.”

  Miller grinned as he pulled his black pants up and cinched the belt tight. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” He put his shirt on next. “But the only way that’s going to happen is if we leave. Now.”

  Vesely stood and began dressing.

  “That’s not possible.” Hammaker looked from Vesely to Miller. “There’s hundred-mile-per-hour gusts up there. Blinding snow. Twenty feet visibility if we’re lucky. And it’s night. Going to be for like eight more hours.”

  “We don’t have eight hours,” Miller said. “We’ve been here too long already.”

  “But—”

  “Kidd, impossible sums up my entire week. I survived Miami, two hit squads, a rogue F-22, a traitor, and I was almost melted alive. There is no way I’m going to let a little wind and snow stop me now. I know you weren’t looking to take risks when you enlisted, but you did enlist, you’re here, and if you want to keep that code name, you better grow a set of balls right this second and say you’re going to fly us out of here.”

  Hammaker looked on the verge of panic, but dug down deep, set his serious eyes on Miller’s, and said, “On one condition.”

  “What?”

  “I want in,” he said. “On all of it. Dulce. Los Alamos. Whatever. I want in.”

  Miller nodded, slung his MP5 over his shoulder, and took the flash drive out of the laptop. “You got it.”

  Ten minutes later, after leaving the gorge and entering the below-freezing Antarctic storm, both men reconsidered the wisdom of their decisions. But there was no turning back. The white flakes that shot through the nighttime air and stung the skin like angry wasps were nothing compared to the red flakes that would soon envelop the planet.

  49

  The big helicopter lurched to the right just ten feet above the Antarctic landing pad. Miller couldn’t see the ground—the nighttime sky and blanket of snow blinded him—but his stomach and the helicopter’s altitude indicator twisted in tandem. If they rolled much further, the rotor blades might strike the ice and their flight would be one of the shortest in the history of avionics.

  Several warning indicators flashed. Alarms sounded. Miller wanted to slap the helicopter. Tell it to stop screaming like a little girl. But all he could do was hang on and trust The Kidd.

  Hammaker fought the storm for control of the aircraft. While they were still far from vertical, the altimeter showed them rising slowly. At an angle.

  Miller searched his memory. What had the surroundings looked like? They were surrounded by flat ice, but there had been mountains inland, to the east. He found the compass. They were facing north, but moving west.

  As they continued to rise, the helicopter’s roll leveled out. Hammaker turned to Miller. “Sorry about that. Wind was intense.”

  “That Katabatics,” Vesely said from the back. “Luckily they flow out to sea, which is where we want to go.”

  “We’ll make it to sea,” Hammaker said. “But landing on the George Washington in this mess is going to be a trick.”

  The chopper shuddered and dropped fifty feet.

  “Storm is reminding us who is in control,” Vesely said.

  A gust struck the chopper’s side, rolling them to the left. Miller sensed that if he could see, he’d be looking down at the ground through his window. The helicopter was close to tipping.

  Either God heard someone’s quickly-said prayer or Hammaker was the best damn closet-pilot in the navy, because the helicopter righted and all three men sighed with relief.

  Miller looked at the GPS screen. They were headed in the general direction of the George Washington, but couldn’t see beyond the helicopter’s nose. He picked up the radio transmitter.

  “George Washington, George Washington, this is Lieutenant Lincoln Miller. Do you read? Over.”

  There was a moment of silence and Miller opened his mouth to repeat his message, but then heard, “Miller, this is the George Washington, Ensign Partin speaking, reading you five by five. Are you all safe? Over.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Miller said. “We are en route, over.”

  “Did you say you were on your way here?” For a moment, Miller waited for the man to say over, but the surprise in his voice marked a shift in the conversation from trained radio operators to normal conversation.

  “We’re a mile out and closing on your position,” Miller said. “But we can’t see anything. Do me a favor and light that boat up like it’s the Fourth of July. Over.”

  Miller expected a statement of shock or outrage, but all Partin said was, “Copy that. Consider it done. Out.”

  For a moment he thought the change in the man’s demeanor was strange, but then he remembered that the ship was missing the majority of its crew, and Partin might actually have to run around switching on the lights himself.

  Two nerve-wracking minutes passed as the helicopter pitched, rolled, and shook. Had the helicopter been a news chopper and not an aerial tank designed to handle extreme weather and machine-gun fire, they would have crashed long ago. That wasn’t to diminish The Kidd’s piloting abilities. He was better than he claimed. But the chopper was a beast.

  “There she is!” Hammaker shouted.

  Time seemed to pass more quickly as they closed the distance to the ship, but as soon as they descended over the George Washington’s deck, a new level of hell gripped the helicopter. The lower they flew, the stronger the wind became. The Katabatics rolled down Antarctica and spilled out over the ocean. That was normally bad enough, but the storm added power to the wind and turned the normally unidirectional force into an omnidirectional maelstrom. Giant waves, fifty to seventy-five feet tall, hammered the aircraft carrier. The massive vessel surged up and down, its decks repeatedly drenched with freezing seawater.

  They could see the lights blazing on the deck, rising and falling with the waves, but there were no colorfully clad crew on deck to guide them down. No one was that stupid. They were on their own.

  The helicopter spun as Hammaker guided it down. Sweat dripped down his forehead. “C’mon,” he said to the helicopter. “C’mon!”

  A gust of wind sent them flying to the side.

  Miller saw the control tower come into view as they flew toward it, seconds away from becoming a bloody, oily smear on the metal wall. Then they tilted away. After leveling out again, Miller could see the deck just ten feet below.

  “Almost there!” he shouted.

  Then the deck fell away.

  “Why are you pulling up?” he asked Hammaker.

  “Not me,” Hammaker said. “The ship’s in a wave valley. I’m still descending.”

  Miller saw the deck lights rising to meet them.

  Fast.

  “Pull up!” Miller shouted, but he was too late. The giant deck of the aircraft carrier slammed into the bottom of the helicopter. Its legs folded and its belly struck hard.

  The impact hammered the three men inside. Miller felt his head spi
n.

  “You okay, Survivor?” Vesely shouted from the back.

  He shook his head, shouted, “Yeah,” and looked over at Hammaker. The Kidd was unconscious.

  A blast of ocean foam struck the helicopter’s windshield. When it cleared, Miller saw the George Washington’s deck. It was slick with snow, ice, and ocean water. The ocean lay beyond the deck, lit by the ship’s array of exterior lights. And it was getting closer.

  No, Miller thought. We’re getting closer!

  The aircraft carrier had entered another giant wave valley and pitched forward, its slippery deck acting like a slide—straight into the water.

  Miller shouted as the ocean reached up to swallow them. “Oh shi—”

  An impact shook the helicopter.

  Water surged over them.

  Miller’s thoughts flashed back to his Navy SEAL training. Thirty months of the worst the military could legally put a man through. The infamous “Hell Week” alone included sitting in freezing water, endless running, miles of swimming, and pushed the human body to ten times the amount of exertion of which the average person was capable. He could overcome almost anything. A dip in the Antarctic Ocean on its own could kill a man—any man—in two minutes. But being sandwiched between giant waves and an aircraft carrier would mean a much quicker death. Granted, being crushed by the hull of an aircraft carrier would be a merciful ending as compared to freezing in the water, but Miller didn’t like either option.

  When the water fell away, Miller saw the ocean recede. The George Washington rose above the waves. The helicopter sat ten feet from the edge of the deck. Then fifteen. Then twenty. They were sliding back as the ship rose up the next wave.

  Miller knew the ship would pitch forward again after cresting the wave and had no doubt the ocean would swallow the chopper whole when it did.

  “Get ready to jump!” Miller shouted to Vesely.

  The man already had the laptop, secured in its case, in one hand, and his other on the door handle. He would have made a good SEAL, Miller thought, and then turned his attention to Hammaker’s unconscious form. The SEALs had a long tradition of teamwork. It was essential to everything they did. And as a result, they had never—not once—left a man behind, dead or alive. Miller wasn’t about to let Hammaker be the first.