Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “I’m not detonating twelve nukes in the ocean, if that’s what you’re suggesting! I’m not a damned eco-terrorist!”

  “I’m not suggesting anything yet,” Cassidy said, “except that you steer them away from your precious fellow humans and hang out for a little bit while I see if I can disarm them. Then you can just ride them to the ground or ice or whatever without fear of turning into a crispy critter. Still … maybe stay back a ways.”

  “I … will …” I felt a hard tug. The lead rocket was really resisting me, and I wasn’t able to bring much to bear on it. Looking up, I saw it was a few miles ahead of the rest of the pack, which were responding to my wind commands and had made the turn as I’d requested. They were blazing ahead on a lateral line.

  That lead, though … it was pulling further and further away by the second.

  “Shit,” I said, thrusting a hand out, as though that would help. I was pushing on it from above, redirecting the current around the fins, even jacking it around with the flow intake, but …

  “Uh, Reed. One’s getting away.”

  “I know that, thanks!”

  With my mind half on the ones heading northeast and the other firmly on the one still climbing, I concentrated. I pulled at all the levers I had at my disposal, every single thing I could think of …

  But it kept sailing upward.

  Out of the effective reach of my winds.

  “Cassidy …” I said, watching it blaze as it climbed, up to the heavens, “I … I can’t follow this one any higher if I want to maintain control of the others.”

  “Simple choice, Reed. One or the other eleven.” Man, she sounded indifferent about it. “If you let the others go to pursue that one, they will course-correct and be out of your reach in about a minute. And they won’t re-enter the atmosphere until they’re over their targets, at which point they’ll split off the six warheads, and suddenly you’ll have seventy-two nukes to deal with instead of eleven, and spread out over—I’m guessing, here—the entire North American continent. The answer seems obvious, doesn’t it?”

  I watched that lone rocket sail higher into the sky, like an upside-down candle rising above me into the clear blue. “Obvious,” I said, my voice a little husky, “but damned sure not easy.”

  “Well, if it was easy anyone could do it,” Cassidy said, so matter-of-factly that I wished I could reach through the phone and slap her.

  But instead, I concentrated on the eleven rockets in my control and steered them north, kept them low in spite of their struggling to return to the course path that would carry them into the upper atmosphere and out of my reach. “Cassidy … tell Sienna … tell her … I lost one.” I swallowed, the wind blowing past my face as I rushed to keep up, to keep the flaming tails of the ones I had in my grip at least in sight. “Tell her … I don’t know … tell her …” A cavalcade of potential appeals came to me, all some variant of me seeking absolution for the fact I’d just let a nuclear weapon escape me.

  That I had just sealed the fate of millions.

  And I didn’t even have time to mourn, because I had to prevent the deaths of countless millions more.

  “Tell her I screwed up,” I managed to choke out. “Tell her … I failed.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

  Lethe

  Hades’s face was getting pretty close to purple, or at least as close to it as he got. Rage suffused it, twisted it, his mouth a wavy line of anger as the rocket track showed eleven of the twelve veering off their intended course, fighting madly against the winds that were blowing them, somehow, off course.

  “Curses,” Lethe said mildly, “foiled again.”

  “I am hardly foiled,” Hades said, face lightening but a shade as he turned and shared a look with Krall. “I am perhaps Saran-wrapped, but only temporarily.” He smiled. “I have, after all, three Typhoon-class submarines on the coast, waiting to launch … and the Russians, with their entire arsenal, in my back pocket.”

  “Sir,” one of the console operators stood. “The port, at Canta Morgana. They are reporting—” He was a wide-eyed, fresh-faced lad, but his eyes seemed especially wide now. “Elevated waves, sir. Something—something is happening on the coast—”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE

  Canta Morgana, Revelen

  Valter Liisu had been a fisherman all his life. Had roamed the Baltic all his life. From Riga to Canta Morgana, he had made his trade in his boat, the Kalju, and plied his trade up and down the coast.

  He had sailed in sun, he had sailed in rain. Even in winter, though only before the port of Canta Morgana froze. Even then, sometimes he would fish out on the ice, with nothing but a pole and an auger.

  Valter had, in his sixty years, seen everything. Or so he thought.

  Because now …

  Now …

  He saw fifty-foot waves coming in off the sea …

  And there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  A shouted exclamation to brace was lost in the roar of the lead wave rising up past the bow. It seemed very small, a tiny profile, running only a couple hundred yards in length. But it had fury, churning across the surface of the Baltic—

  And missing his boat by what felt like inches.

  Valter held tight as it seemed to shrink upon the edge, the Kalju bobbing furiously, spinning in the power of the wave’s wake.

  Valter gawped; another wave followed, rising just as high, and within it—

  What … what was that?

  He pointed as it passed, and his crew saw it.

  “Like a metal … fin?” Rain Koit asked, the wave rolling through, missing them, once again, by feet, but spinning the boat about and carrying them closer to shore.

  “Look!” another of his crew shouted, and pointed toward the shore only a mile off now, where the first wave was rolling in on an empty stretch of beach and sand and trees—

  The wave seemed to roll higher, rising up to a hundred feet, two hundred feet, a solid wall of water, a tsunami that would surely roll inland, past the coastal hills, hell, it might even reach Bredoccia, Valter thought as it crested, high, just above the beach—

  And stopped, just as suddenly, before the shore.

  Something … fell out of it, barely visible from their position riding the waves. It dropped the two hundred feet and crashed on the rocky beach, metal landing hard on sand and stone.

  “Is that a … submarine?” Valter asked as the first wave dissolved into the second, and the sequence was repeated, another grinding, crashing noise as a second sub was deposited on top of the first, and the endlessly tall waves continued to roll past the Kalju—

  “What the hell is that?” Rain asked, pointing at the next wave in line. It, too, showed signs of a tail fin popping out of the water, but that was not what Rain was pointing at.

  No … what he was pointing at …

  Was a man. A man riding the top of the wave. As though he were some sort of mad surfer.

  “WHO DO?” the man shouted, and Valter could see his sandy blond hair flashing in the sunlight, the wind calm and the seas mad. He seemed to let the question echo over the wild sea for a moment, and then let fly the answer, cracking over the roar of the waves. “SCOTTY DOOOOOO!”

  And then he was gone, riding the wave into shore, another deafening clang as another submarine crashed onto the others, slamming into the stony shore, the ventral surface and conning tower crashing into the earth as it came shattering onto the beach. Another followed.

  “Who … is ‘Scotty’?” Rain asked, watching with his brow furrowed.

  “Him, I hope,” Valter said, watching the last of the waves roll in from the sea. Another thunderous crash; another submarine wrenched from the loving embrace of the waters and smashed upon the shore. The raw tonnage of those things … the power it would take to drag not one but … ten? Valter had lost count. “Because if another one of these … people … is coming …” He just shook his head. “What kind of madness might they bring?”

  CHAPTER NINETY


  Passerini

  Passerini watched the satellite view that Graves had pulled up of Canta Morgana. He’d seen a ship graveyard once or twice. Time was, though, they’d put them at the bottom of the sea, not on a perfectly good beach in Revelen.

  But then, beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when you were beggaring for the lives of every American those sub-bound nuclear warheads might be targeting.

  “Sir,” Graves said, barely concealing a smile, “it would seem that Sienna Nealon and her friends are helping to defuse this situation.”

  The main screen flicked back to the radar tracking. Eleven of the missiles were veering off, gathered together like a herd, maintaining a steady altitude and being herded off course. That last one, though—

  “Do we have a target yet?” Passerini asked.

  “The Midwest, sir,” Graves said, and his smile vanished. “Chicago. Detroit. Des Moines and … Minneapolis.”

  Passerini blinked. “That was the first one launched?”

  Graves nodded. “And so probably the first targeted. The most … important.”

  Passerini looked sideways, thinking about it. “Sending a personal message, you think?”

  “A personal message?” Gondry’s voice crackled in. Passerini had almost forgotten the president was on the line. “To who?”

  “Sir,” Passerini said, “if that’s aimed at Minneapolis … I think you know who the message was for.” You just don’t want to hear it over your hate. Sir.

  “Well … still,” Gondry said, and yeah, he was clearly back in denial on this one, “we have almost all the missiles under control. Treston has those, Byerly has wrecked their subs—what do we do about that last one? There has to be a way to stop it.” His voice cracked. “We have to stop it, Bruno.”

  Earlier today you told me I was on my way out the door. Now I’m ‘Bruno’ to you. Bastard. “Sir,” Passerini said, “there might be one way.” And here he looked at Graves, because … Passerini felt like he was finally starting to get something that had been in front of his face all this time, something he damned sure ought to have gotten a long time ago.

  “How?” Gondry asked.

  “I’m going to need a few minutes, sir,” Passerini said. “To get an operational concept together and get back to you.”

  “Whatever it takes, Bruno,” Gondry said, and there was an unusual urgency in his voice. He collected himself a moment and said, “I trust you to … to get this done. However you have to.”

  “Roger that.” Passerini cut the line and looked right at Graves. “You’ve been playing me all this time.”

  “No. No, sir, I haven’t,” Graves said, unbuttoning his uniform. “I’ve been trying to defuse this situation before it blows up—like this.”

  Passerini stared back at him. He liked to consider himself a good poker player, and there was certainly an earnestness there. “We’ll deal with your impersonating an officer later—‘colonel,’” and he imparted a savagery to the title. “What type of—”

  “I see the future,” Graves said. “They call me a Cassandra.”

  “The girl who saw but was not believed,” Passerini said.

  “You’re quite the classicist, sir.”

  “Eat shit, Graves—if that’s your real name.”

  “It is.”

  “How are you tied into all this?” Passerini asked. He looked sideways toward the door. MPs were there, of course, on guard—

  “You can arrest me once it’s over, if you like,” Graves said, drawing his attention back. “I won’t fight it. Really. I just want to save the situation …”

  The trail-off was all the tell Passerini needed. “Bullroar,” he said. “You’re with Nealon.”

  “Yes,” Graves answered, without hesitation. “But consider this: I knew you were going to find me out, but I came anyway. Stayed anyway. Let you figure it out. I could have left anytime. I’ve been trying to help you, because you’re the only one who’s powerful enough and open-minded enough to help her.” He came out from behind the console and approached with open hands. “Sir … she’s not what Gondry thinks she is. She’s not a danger. She’s not this terrible criminal the public sees.” His eyes were bright, open, and sincere. “She’s a damned hero, sir—and she’ll give everything to save us. If you let her.”

  Passerini just stared at him. Part of him wished he carried a sidearm here, like he did on his last deployment. “Lieutenant Kefler—”

  “Don’t,” Graves said.

  Passerini’s eyes narrowed. “What was I about to say?”

  “You were going to order an F-35 to test the border,” Graves said. “It’ll blow up. And not just because it’s a shitty plane. The Magneto will get it.”

  “You know I have to try anyway,” Passerini said, staring at him evenly. He could have guessed the order, though it seemed improbable.

  “Use a drone,” Graves said.

  “Will the pilot survive the attempt?” Passerini asked.

  Graves thought about it a second. “Yeah. He’ll eject in time. No injuries.”

  “Then I’d rather use the F-35 than a drone,” Passerini said, almost shrugging, as he prepared to give the order. “Those things just suck.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-ONE

  Hades

  “So … less foiled and more … Tupperwared?” Lethe asked, not even bothering to test the cuffs anymore. Even if she did break them … what then? Fight her way through everyone in the control room? Kill her father? Kill Krall?

  Well, maybe Krall. That could be fun.

  “So very amusing you are, my daughter,” Hades said. Now his lips were a grim line, set, and his eyes thickly lidded into slits. “Where is the Russian president? I asked you to call him an hour ago. We still have their arsenal at our disposal—”

  “Sir,” another of the lieutenants said. “The Russian president has been declining our calls.”

  “Try again,” Hades said. Straining.

  “I have been trying for ten minutes,” the lieutenant said. “His secretary says he is in a meeting.” The lieutenant licked his lips. “With the Americans.”

  A vein popped out at Hades’s temple. “Betrayed. Betrayed by one of our very own.”

  “That’s the problem with puppets. You can’t remove your hand from their ass and expect their mouth to continue moving in time with yours,” Lethe said. At this point, the best thing she felt she could do was add to Hades’s irritation. It wasn’t as if sitting quietly was an option. At least not for her.

  “Sir, they are testing our air defenses,” Aleksy said, rising to his feet, eyes focused on the radar console in front of him. “It’s a—”

  CHAPTER NINETY-TWO

  Passerini

  “F-35 lost sir,” Lieutenant Kefler said. “Clean eject. Chute is good.”

  Passerini stared at Graves, who lurked just a few steps away, waiting for an answer. He got one.

  “Get her on the phone—if you can.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

  Sienna

  “Excuse me …” I turned, about to pull away from the curb in my stolen car. I’d just been looking away where Reed had just flown up into the sky to go be a hero when I heard the voice and turned my head. It was soft, feminine and pleading, but I raised my rifle across my body in preparation just in case.

  There was an older woman, wearing one of those scarves over her head and tied under her chin, and she was lingering just outside the broken driver’s side window, like she was trying to keep her distance from me but still be heard.

  “Yeah?” I asked, probably a little rougher than I should have, finger hanging out just off my trigger. So sue me. My brother had just gone off to do something brave and dangerous, and I was about to resume my current murder mission, which was now against my great-grandfather and his chief general, at least, and maybe included my grandmother, too. And this lady was likely about to badger me for stealing her ride. “What? Is this your car?”

  “No, no, it’s my neighbor’s,” she said, sha
king her head. “He’s a—how you say it? Prick? Take it. Totally fine.” She shook her head again. “No. I am so sorry to bother you during … this,” she said, turning her gaze from the car I’d just stolen to the bloody slaughter just down the street. It probably looked terrible, because red liquid was oozing into the drain gutters already. I’d never seen anything quite like it. I was a little proud that my brother had done it. And a little repulsed. “Ahhh … uhm … phone call for you.” She held up a cell phone in her hand.

  I stared at the phone.

  She stared back at me, grimacing like I was going to hit her or something.

  “Sorry,” I said, and gently took the phone. “You, uh … mind if I keep this for a while?”

  “Take it. Is fine,” she said, handing it over eagerly. “Am due for upgrade anyway. Has cracked screen. Is insured.” She looked around. “Will tell them it was lost in … this.” Her attention settled, again, on the mess at the former army camp. “Should not be problem.”

  “Yeah … I am deeply sorry for all … this,” I said. “And I’m gonna make the bastards responsible pay for it. One way or another.”

  “You ‘rock on with your bad self,’” she said, and then gave me a double thumbs up as she eased away. “But … maybe do so on other side of town? I have grandchildren that live with me …”

  “Yeah, no, I’ll totally get out of your way. Right now, in fact,” and I put the pedal to the metal without hesitation, leaving the poor old lady behind in the mess of her street. Once I’d gotten past the wreckage of the camp and its blood-sluiced streets, I switched the phone to speaker. “Talk to me, Cassidy.”

  “That was a really touching scene. I almost threw up in my mouth watching it through the phone camera.”

  I flipped the phone the bird where it rested in the cup holder. “Tell me something good or get lost.”

  “I do have some good news,” she said. “While you were busy stealing cars and bringing sweetness and light to the local grandmas, your brother roped together eleven of the twelve nukes and is riding them to the North Pole like some sort of long-haired, young Santa. Which I thought was pretty good, y’know, eleven out of twelve, but which he whined about like you wouldn’t believe—”