SecondWorld

by Jeremy Robinson

  “On your six,” White Horse said. “Black Horse, would you mind showing these kamikaze assholes how to fight? Over.”

  “Shit!” It was Red Horse. “Bogey on our six! Black Horse is down! Black Horse is down! Missile lock! Deploying countermeasures!”

  Static.

  “How did they take down an F-22?” Miller asked, fighting his rising fears.

  “Snuck up behind him.”

  “What can sneak up on an F-22?”

  “Another F-22.”

  “White Horse, this is Pale Horse. Open it up. Let’s give ’em a run for their money.”

  “Copy that,” White Horse said.

  Miller’s anti-G suit grew tighter as Pale Horse pushed the F/A-18 to its top speed, just fifty feet from the ground.

  “We’ll be there in four minutes,” Pale Horse said to Miller. “Be ready.”

  A loud beeping filled the cabin.

  “Missile lock,” Pale Horse said. “Here we go.”

  Miller was expecting a rapid turn or ascent, but when Pale Horse pointed the plane down, just fifty feet from the ground, Miller knew he had half a second before being pancaked on the New Mexico desert.

  52

  A valley opened up in front of the Hornet and swallowed it whole. Stone walls flashed past on either side. Pale Horse guided the plane through the wide twists and turns at ridiculous speeds.

  An explosion from behind shook the plane.

  Vesely.

  “You still with us, Cowboy?” Miller said.

  Vesely’s reply was shouted, but not with fear, with excitement. “Is like Star Wars Death Star trench run!”

  “The explosion was one of the bandits,” White Horse said, his voice cool and collected. “Clipped the top of the valley trying to follow us in.”

  A sharp turn squeezed Miller’s body as the anti-G-suit bladders expanded. He looked to the left and saw the valley floor not far below. The plane righted and Miller’s head spun. Anti-G suit or not, this flight was taking a toll on his body. The military’s ground forces, including the SEALs, tended to give pilots a hard time. Had all sorts of unsavory names for them. The impression was that they flew above all the action, all the danger, but Miller realized that wasn’t necessarily true. This was intense on the body and mind in a way he hadn’t experienced before.

  An explosion rocked the valley wall ahead of them. Boulders and debris shot out.

  The anti-G suit nearly crushed him this time as Pale Horse hit the brakes. White Horse pulled up and roared over them, spinning as he cleared the falling debris. The maneuver was an act of aerial acrobatics that looked well rehearsed, but Miller knew had more to do with training. Pale Horse pulled up over the debris, and then punched forward again, closing the distance between the two planes.

  With White Horse in the lead, Miller could see just how close they were coming to the valley walls. As a child, Miller often closed his eyes at scary movies and a part of him wanted to do that now. But if he were going to die, it would be with his eyes open.

  He looked to the side and saw the top of the valley wall. “We’re going up?”

  “Valley ends up ahead,” Pale Horse said. “We’re going to be exposed for about thirty seconds before entering the next valley that will take us to the DZ.”

  The DZ was the drop zone, and “drop” was a nice word for what they were going to attempt.

  As soon as they left the valley behind, warning lights flashed and alarms blared.

  “Missile lock,” Pale Horse said. “Hold on to you—”

  The alarms went silent.

  “I got your backs, boys!” Red Horse shouted. “Just needed to swat a fly first.”

  “Glad to hear it,” White Horse said from the lead plane.

  “You still have four bandits on your six. Over.”

  “Keep them occupied for another minute,” Pale Horse said. “Then bug out. Over.”

  “What?” Miller said.

  “We can use them,” Pale Horse said.

  “Copy that,” Red Horse said. “But if it’s okay with you, I’m just going to hang back until you’re on the ground and then shoot the shit out of them. Over.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Miller saw White Horse dive into the ground and disappear from sight, so he was prepared for the motion, but the feeling of falling fast still unnerved him. He’d flown a lot. Jumped out of planes. Off of buildings. Never mind experiencing aerial combat onboard Air Force One, but after this dogfight, he was going to swear off fighter jets.

  They entered the valley moving slower than the last. With Red Horse making the bandits’ life a misery of missile locks, they had less to worry about. That is, if you didn’t count the narrow valley walls squeezing them on either side. Happily, this valley was nearly a straight shot toward the DZ.

  “Thirty seconds,” Pale Horse said.

  Miller tensed. He knew what was coming. And he knew it would hurt.

  A bridge appeared in the distance. He recognized the shape. Los Alamos National Laboratory lay on the left side of the gorge. The rest of the city to the right. The only way in was to cross what had been dubbed the Omega Bridge—a 106-foot tall, 422-foot long steel arch bridge that connected one side of Los Alamos Valley to the other.

  The valley widened, exposing them to attack.

  “Red Horse, let them off the leash,” Pale Horse said. “Over.”

  “Copy that,” Red Horse replied. “Good luck and happy hunting. Out.”

  Alarms sounded a moment later.

  “Lock,” Pale Horse said.

  The bridge loomed ahead. It was empty.

  “Missiles away.”

  Missiles. Plural. The enemy was unloading.

  Warning beeps sounded. Beep, beep, beep.

  “Here we go,” Pale Horse said.

  White Horse passed under the Omega Bridge a split second before Pale Horse followed.

  Beepbeepbeepbeep.

  Both planes pulled up.

  Spun sideways.

  And exploded.

  Miller felt the heat of the explosion, but it lasted only a fraction of a second. He felt a pressure beyond anything he had experienced while flying in the plane. The anti-G suit tried to compensate, but Miller’s vision began to fade. A split second before the missiles had struck the jets, Miller, Vesely, White Horse, and Pale Horse ejected. The rocket-propelled ejection seats launched from the cockpits like missiles, carrying them two hundred feet in the blink of an eye.

  The twin explosions of the Hornets, along with several missiles striking and decimating the Omega Bridge, hid their escape from the bandits, which rocketed past a moment later.

  The ejection seat jolted Miller hard as the parachute deployed. His vision returned in full a moment later. He saw the ground approaching fast. They’d ejected at an angle that launched the seats up and out of the valley. When the chutes deployed, they were only three hundred feet above the ground. Miller braced himself, but the impact didn’t play out exactly how he expected. He slowed suddenly, and then swung in an arc before crashing into the side of the tree. The seat absorbed most of the impact, but his damaged body begged for mercy.

  Miller waited for the seat to stop moving, clutched his gear, and unbuckled from the seat. He fell just a few feet, but his legs ached at the effort after being confined in the F/A-18 for six hours.

  The roar of jets brought his eyes up to the sky, which had turned purple because of the falling red flakes. He saw two F-16s turning around in a wide arc. He had no doubt they’d do a flyby in search of survivors. But then both planes began flying erratically. A missile cut through the sky and turned one of the planes into a fireball.

  Red Horse. The F-22 Raptor gave chase to the second, but was pursued by two more bandits. A missile launched. Small explosions burst behind Red Horse, then the F-22 rose at a sharp angle. The missile exploded well behind the jet, which continued up and over until righting itself behind all three bandits. More missiles fired.

  A hand on Miller’s shoul
der spun him around.

  He drew his sound-suppressed Sig Sauer P226 handgun and aimed it at Vesely’s head.

  Vesely grinned. “Not bad, Survivor. I feared you’d been injured.”

  Miller lowered the weapon. “Never better.”

  “White Horse did not make it,” Vesely said. “Shrapnel from explosion. Where is Pale Horse?”

  Pale Horse cleared his throat, bringing their eyes up. He was stuck in a tree, dangling six feet from the ground, but facedown. If he unbuckled he’d fall hard. Miller and Vesely braced the man. He unbuckled and they slowed his fall, both men grunting as the weight strained three stitched gunshot wounds.

  Hidden in a stand of short pines, the three men peeled off their anti-G suits. Each wore black tactical suits with supply belts holding holstered handguns, extra ammo, and small, fifteen-minute pony bottles, just in case. Miller opened a case of disassembled weapons and quickly slapped them together, handing an UMP submachine gun to Vesely and Pale Horse. Each carried silenced handguns with spare ammo for both weapons.

  Miller took a deep breath. His chest ached, but he didn’t notice. His mind recoiled when the air tasted like blood. Time to get inside, he thought.

  “Ready?” Miller asked.

  Vesely opened a duffel bag Miller hadn’t seen him bring. He nearly laughed when he saw the man’s cowboy hat and twin .38s emerge. He strapped the weapons to his waist and donned the Stetson.

  “Now am ready.”

  They left the trees behind and walked out onto a large parking lot. A full parking lot. But there were no people in sight.

  Los Alamos National Laboratory was comprised of more than fifty buildings, but one stood out from the rest. In fact, there was nothing like it for hundreds of miles. The seven-story, 275,000-square-foot National Security Sciences Building (NSSB) towered above everything else in the area. And its design was no less impressive. The building’s all-glass front face curved like it had been cut away from a much larger circle. The sides of the building dropped down in a series of one-story steps where it merged with an all-glass square lobby area, a large circular auditorium, and a long stretch of terra-cotta wall that contrasted nicely with the blue-tinted windows covering the rest of the building.

  While he and Vesely had never been to the NSSB before, the building had been constructed in 2005, which was when the rumors of the underground rail began to surface from workers who’d been hastily laid off. No one ever investigated their claims. Until today, Miller thought.

  He started through the parking lot, weaving his way through the endless sea of vehicles. The first cars to arrive had parked in the designated spaces, but as more and more cars and trucks arrived, the vehicles parked in the roads between the rows of early birds. The vehicles slowed their approach, but the organized parking job created long alleys through which to move.

  Halfway to the National Security Sciences Building a shrill buzzer sounded and froze the trio in their tracks.

  “Sounds like a halftime basketball buzzer,” Pale Horse said.

  Miller shushed the man and listened. A distinctive whirring sound reached his ears. It approached from the right. Pale Horse was right in a sense, the game was changing. Miller was about to order the men to run when the thing shot into the thin, car-lined alley.

  “Faster than Antarctic variety,” Vesely said as they all stared at the now-motionless robotic weapon. It looked essentially the same as the robo-Bettys they’d encountered before, but instead of a flat disk at the center, it was a semicircle. The thing looked like a bona fide UFO on wheels.

  “What’s it doing?” Pale Horse asked.

  “Nothing good,” Miller said. “Time to go.”

  As Miller turned to run the other direction, a second robot rolled to a stop, thirty feet in front of him. These things were being coordinated. But by whom? Or what? “We’re boxed in!”

  The two robo-Bettys zipped toward them in unison.

  “Over the cars!” Miller shouted. The three men leapt over the nearest vehicles—a new compact car and an old pickup.

  The whirring grew closer still. The robo-Bettys could drive beneath the vehicles! Miller jumped from the hood of the compact car onto the back of a big black SUV, and threw himself on top. A moment later, the compact car exploded from beneath. The impact flung him onto the hood of the SUV, knocking the wind out of him.

  The pickup truck exploded a moment later. Vesely, who had reached the front of the next car, was spared the majority of the impact. Pale Horse was sent flying and landed in the gap between vehicles.

  Miller rolled off the hood and saw Vesely picking Pale Horse up. “Everyone okay?”

  “Fine,” Pale Horse said.

  Vesely gave him a thumbs-up.

  “They’re not Bouncing Bettys anymore,” Miller said.

  “Too many hiding places,” Vesely said. “Ineffective.”

  The problem was, the weapons had been adapted so that they could turn the vehicles into giant shrapnel bombs. If any of them had been closer to that car when it exploded, they would have been shredded. A second explosion made them all duck. “Gas tank!” Miller said.

  They were surrounded by bombs, just waiting for a fuse. When he stood, Miller saw the pickup truck engulfed in flames. The blaze would soon spread to the surrounding cars, which could also explode.

  The sound of several more approaching mobile bombs sent Miller into action. He climbed to the roof of the next car and searched the parking lot. The small things whizzed between and under cars as they converged toward the three men. “Stay on top of the cars, and don’t stop moving!”

  Miller led the charge. They needed to cover one hundred yards over the roofs of nearly fifty cars. What could have taken fourteen seconds on flat ground would take more than a minute leaping from roof to roof. The bombs closed the distance quickly. The first exploded a little prematurely, four cars behind Vesely, who brought up the rear. The red hatchback flipped into the air. The explosion stumbled Vesely, but didn’t knock him over.

  Miller glanced back to make sure the man was okay, but when he saw Vesely, the man was stabbing his finger ahead. Miller spun forward and found one of the robotic bombs tearing toward the Cadillac upon which he stood. There was no time to leap away, so he raised his sound-suppressed UMP, took aim, and squeezed off a tight three-round spread. The first two rounds found pavement. The third hit the red light dead on. The small engine fell silent and the vehicle rolled forward. It came to a stop against the wheel of the Caddy, and didn’t explode.

  A car behind Vesely exploded, and this time the impact sent him sailing. He crashed onto the roof of the next car. Pale Horse jumped back to help him up.

  “Aim for the light!” Miller shouted. He wasn’t sure what it was, but thought it was some kind of sensor, probably tracking body heat. And now that it was blind, the thing couldn’t see him, and thus, didn’t detonate when it came within range. It was his best guess, anyway.

  As Vesely was pulled into a sitting position, he whipped out his pistol and squeezed off a single round. The bullet streaked past three cars, sailed past the red light sensor on the front, and struck the domed disk in the middle.

  The explosion knocked Pale Horse and Vesely down. Though it was farther away, the force of the blast wasn’t dulled by a vehicle. Miller ran back and yanked both men up. There were still five of the little bastards on the way.

  “I said aim for the sensor,” Miller said to Vesely.

  Vesely shook his head, clearing it. “Aim can’t be perfect every time.”

  “Thought you were gunslinger?” Miller said.

  He took aim in the direction of a distant whir and fired twice. When Miller peeked around the man, he saw two disabled robo-bombs, fifty feet away.

  Before Vesely could gloat, several more whirring engines grew louder. The sound came from the direction of the National Security Sciences Building. Miller realized the vehicles were approaching from beneath the cars. They’d only be visible for a fraction of a second as they passed through t
he open space between cars. “Go back!”

  The trio jumped back over the next line of cars. As Miller slid over the hood of a black Corvette, he rolled onto the ground and quickly saw a single red light approaching in the shadow of a car just twenty feet away. He pulled the trigger four times before the red light winked out. It was replaced by two more, coming in fast.

  Miller jumped up, scrambled over an old Chevy station wagon. He dove from the back of the wagon, sailing over the cab of a Ford F150. The station wagon exploded a moment later, its front end lifting off the ground. As Miller moved to the back of the F150, the wagon’s gas tank exploded. The jolt knocked Miller from the back of the truck. He couldn’t see the last of the robo-bombs through the smoke, but he could hear it closing in. He turned left and bolted down the alley between cars.

  The robo-bomb entered the alley just seconds later and accelerated. Miller had just seconds before the thing slid up behind him and blew him to pieces. He fired several rounds over his shoulder as he ran, but none found the mark.

  “Survivor!” Vesely shouted.

  Miller turned forward. Vesely stood over the alley, each foot on a car to either side. He lifted his gun, aiming toward Miller’s head.

  Miller dove forward, rolling beneath Vesely as he pulled the trigger.

  The loud report of the .38 Super drowned out the sound of the robo-bomb’s engine, but Miller knew Vesely’s aim had been true when the thing rolled to a stop against his leg.

  Miller bent down to look at the robot and several things happened at once.

  A breeze kicked up just over his head.

  The car next to him imploded.

  And he heard a very loud, rapid buzz that sounded an awful lot like a minigun.

  53

  Contrary to how it sounds, the minigun is anything but small. The heavy machine gun’s six rotating barrels can fire up to six thousand high-caliber rounds per minute. And judging by the sound of it, Miller thought that there were actually two miniguns firing in tandem. A glance at the ruined car confirmed it. Twin streaks of destroyed metal ran from back to front. If Miller hadn’t ducked to look at the robot, he’d be missing the top half of his body.