∞§∞
Brooke found the main staircase and was joined by the first floor team, who now headed up to the second floor and to the cluster of bad guys. Brooke headed toward the two figures in the far off room. She was convinced they were the hostages and, with the clock ticking, the figure heading toward them was their executioner. She took the stairs two at a time and before going through the door waved on a SWAT guy with a fiber optic camera. He bent the flexible lens around the corner and saw that the way was clear. She pointed to the five-man kill team and directed them to the room down the hall, and she ran off in the other direction with one cop in tow.
The main body of the SWAT team reached the room, which held the five figures. A flash bang would have been the recommended way of storming the room, thus temporarily blinding and deafening the men inside, however, with the hostages’ whereabouts not confirmed, the noise could signal their hasty execution. So they hit the room in force and acquired targets, shooting to kill those with weapons and to wound those who were unarmed. As they had practiced for hundreds of hours, they swept in, two right, two left and one center, each responsible for his own field of fire. Their instincts took over from there; two men in the room with weapons in their hands were immediate kills, one from team right and one from team left. The center SWAT man shot the legs out from under one of two older men and placed the muzzle of his gun on the temple of the other, who was scrambling across the table to get a pistol. The man saw the logic in freezing and retracting his hand. Given the muzzle suppressors of their guns, the sound didn’t go much farther than the immediate hallway around the room, and since no bad guy got a shot off, their presence was still a secret.
The center man suddenly realized something. “Confirm, I count four targets?”
“Confirm four,” came the response that caused him to say, “Shit, one got away!”
Three from the team immediately hurried to get the one who was now running toward the other end of the building.
∞§∞
Checking her phone quickly, Brooke saw her own outline and that of the figure just ahead, but there was no one in the corridor in front of her. She immediately reckoned there was a parallel hallway. Then her phone lost its signal in the steel of factory structure. She was flying blind now, but knew she had just seconds to save the mother and child.
As she reached a crossing corridor, she cautiously approached the corner. The SWAT guy looked with the fiber optic gooseneck lens and gave her the clear sign. She ran as lightly as she could in order to not give her position away. She knew the figure headed toward her might not have passed this corridor yet, and at any second she could stumble across the person, so she had her weapon up and was ready to kill anything coming at her. First she peeked around the corner in the direction someone would come from. It was clear; a quick turn of the head allowed her to catch a glimpse of a woman entering the room at the end of the hall.
Brooke padded quickly to the end of the hall and flattened up against the door jamb. She pivoted in and saw a woman standing five feet from Leena and her daughter. Then the woman’s cell phone’s bright video light went on and Brooke could see the image of the two hostages cowering in the screen.
The woman spoke, “You want to play games?” She cocked the gun and pointed it at Leena. Brooke raised her weapon and squeezed the trigger, but at that instant her body was racked to one side by a concussion in her left shoulder bade. The impact made Brooke stumble as she fired and missed the center mass of the woman, instead hitting her in the arm. She then heard two shots behind her.
The trooper down the hall reacted immediately when a man unexpectedly came out of the stairwell door right next to the room at the end of the hall. The man got off the shot that hit Brooke in the back of her vest, but before he could fire again, the SWAT man double-tapped the intruder in the head and he was down.
Brooke had a searing pain in her left shoulder and was on one knee trying to raise her weapon. She saw the face of the woman as she was also struggling to raise her own weapon. Brooke managed to flop her almost-dead hand onto her knee, adjusted her aim from her hip, and hit the woman dead-center. The woman fell back as her gun fired, the bullet perforating the ceiling. The SWAT guy jumped over Brooke, ran to the downed woman, and kicked the gun away from her lifeless hands. In short gasps, Brooke demanded the phone from the woman’s hand. When she got it she told the SWAT man to squat next to the hostages. Brooke fumbled with her good hand and pressed the FaceTime icon. She had the camera pointed at herself and could see her own image on the screen. The call was answered by Raffey. Through short labored breaths she said, “Mr. Juth…your family is safe…with the Swiss…police.” She turned the camera around and showed him the two of them with the Swiss SWAT guy as she reiterated, “Again, they…are safe this…is real time, they have been…rescued.” Then the camera hit the floor as Brooke collapsed.
∞§∞
Watching all this on the cloned phone one room away was Bill, who looked at the clock as it clicked under five seconds to the collision, ‘2:59:55:54.’ “Let’s go!” he said to his military guy, and they entered the room where Juth was seated at his workstation holding the phone. Immediately, Bill had a bad feeling about what he saw.
∞§∞
The screen showed the video that proved his family was safe and there were tears in his eyes, yet he busily typed away. Three seconds.
“Raffael Juth! It’s over! Your family is safe — step away from the console,” Bill barked as he approached.
The soldier drew a bead on Raffey. “Put your hands in the air, now!”
One second.
Juth looked to Bill; there was a small smile of satisfaction breaking as he pushed the enter key. The blood from his head wound splattered over the workstation and the keyboard before the alarms started sounding.
Bill grabbed a supervisor who stood nearby, stunned by the gore, and snapped him out of it. “What did he do? Can you reverse it? Hey! What did he do?”
Cautiously, the supervisor looked at the blood-spattered screen. All he could say was, “Oh, my God.”
Bill pushed him aside to see if he could reverse whatever Juth had just done when everything started shaking and a low rumbling growl enveloped the room. It was like an earthquake. Every screen and meter flashed and pinned against the maximum range.
A moment of extreme terror froze Bill’s mind and body as he looked at Juth’s lifeless body and realized that he had been wrong — it had been Juth all along.
A technician three positions over yelled, “Ring temperature critical and rising…off the scale.”
The supervisor, now engaged in the drama, looked over Bill’s shoulder and flatly and without emotion said in a small voice, “He overrode our simulation with his own; he’s melting the machine.”
Bill’s mind raced, it didn’t go off! Everything is still here. Everything should have been atomically disrupted, a cloud of plasma to dissipate into nothingness. Yet we are all still here. Then he got it. Juth made his own play, a master’s gambit to rob from anybody else the opportunity to destroy eternity. Bill looked down at Juth’s lifeless body and was caught by the now frozen smile of satisfaction on his face. “Well played, Raffey. Sorry you didn’t get to call ‘Checkmate!’”
XXXII. GIFTS BOTH BIG AND SMALL
Brooke returned to consciousness on a gurney outside the factory, her shoulder bandaged. On a gurney to her right were Leena and Kirsi. She called a SWAT guy over and whispered something into his ear, and he trotted off. Leena was crying — her ordeal was over and her emotions flowed. Through her sobs she saw the cop come back carrying something. She wiped her teary eyes and saw that it was Kirsi’s ‘beebeebear.’ The mother started heaving deeper sobs as the magnanimity of the gesture released even more torrents of emotion. She looked to Brooke and said, “Vielen Dank, Vielen Dank.”
Brooke managed a half smile, but the strain of holding her head up took over and she lay back down. She rolled her head sideways and saw the little gir
l squeal with delight as she hugged the worn, ratty stuffed toy almost as tightly as her mother was hugging her. Brooke closed her eyes as the IV of painkillers kicked in, her last thought being that this was the best way to end her career and start her new life with Mush.
∞§∞
“Seventeen years!” was what Bill told President Mitchell over his secure phone when he asked how long the collider would be out of commission.
“So we all dodged a bullet then?” the president said, not hiding his relief.
“It seems that Juth outsmarted everyone. He paid for it with his life, but he took away the biggest target any terror group could hope for, and maybe saved the known universe as well.”
“How’s Brooke? I heard she was shot.”
“She’s good; the bullet was slowed by the back of her vest and lodged in her muscle. She’ll be sore for a while but the docs here say no permanent damage but she’ll know when it’s going to rain without a forecast.”
“Thank God.”
“What do we know about who was behind this?”
“We’ve got The Engineer and The Architect. So far they seem like our worst nightmare: brilliant, insane, and bent on a religious belief that if they destroy everything, their God will be able to rebuild a perfect new universe — without infidels.”
“So detonating the collider was the only way they could have ever even dreamed of achieving that madness.”
“Again, Juth has made sure that no one else in the foreseeable future could ever get that close.”
“The man gave his life to see to it; to some he will be a hero.”
“I can live with that, sir,” He smiled at Janice as she walked over to him. His attention returned to the phone as the president’s tone changed.
“Bill, you and your team performed above and beyond any expectations a commander-in-chief could wish for. Hell, you’ve already got lots of medals you can never show anyone. Is there something else our nation could do for you?”
“Two things, sir.”
“Name ’em.”
“Can Janice, Joey, Phyllis, Brooke, Mush Morton, Kronos, and whatever he is dating these days book in for a weekend at Camp David? That was awesome.”
“That’s easy. Done. Next?”
“A full scholarship and the full death benefits befitting a staff officer for the family of Corporal Deon Bradley; a good man, a patriot-warrior and loving father who died too soon, sir.”
“Great idea Bill. In fact, I’ll cover the scholarship myself and Congress will enact the annuity to his wife and kid.”
“Then I’d say we are even, sir.”
Bill slipped the phone in his pocket.
Janice was beaming at him. “That was the best thing you could’ve asked for. And you, my dear husband, are the best thing I could ever ask for.”
She turned and leaned back against Bill. He put his arms around her as they enjoyed the silence and the exquisite storybook beauty of the lake. It seemed unreal that five hundred feet below, the rings had melted and collapsed. Thankfully, the machine’s demise did not mar the beauty of Lake Geneva and this picture-perfect setting… or the universe.
“Mmmm, beautiful isn’t it.” Janice said as she sighed.
“Yes, you are.” Bill nuzzled and kissed her neck.
“Okay, I’ve had enough of this place, lets grab some chocolate and go home.”
“I’m right there with ya.”
∞§∞
Ten hours later, they were standing by the lake behind their Great Falls, Virginia house. The morning sun was burning off the mist.
“Ours is pretty too,” Janice said, again leaning against Bill with his arms around her as they both appreciated the panorama of God’s creation in a new light.
“Yes, you are.”
She turned in his arms, “Bill, that line’s getting a little o…”
He kissed her. She threw her arms up over his shoulders and pulled him in tighter.
They continued to kiss like that until little Richie started running around them with his toy helicopter and saying, “Boom. Boom. Boom.”
XXXIII. THE HOMECOMING
A month and five days after the collider was disabled and the universe was safe, Brooke stood on the wharf looking out over the warm, tranquil waters of Pearl Harbor. For forty minutes, she had watched the USS Nebraska, from when it was a dot on the horizon until she steamed past the Arizona Memorial with all hands manning the rails in tribute and salute to the fallen men and ships of December 1941. The SSBN 739, the USS Nebraska, Mush’s boat, was built to deter any future nation from even contemplating a similar attack.
From the bridge of the boomer, Mush let his exec dock the boat. His total concentration was on the blonde standing on the pier with her arm in a sling. At that second he patted the cold, titanium edge of the conning tower as he whispered “goodbye, old girl” to his first wife.
- — - — - —
Acknowledgments
I am blessed to have a mastermind group of individuals who guide me through the specifics of lives that I have not lived. They freely lend their experience, knowledge, and achievements to me so that I may tell you a better story. In no particular order (because they would all be first on the list) they are:
Colonel Michael T. Miklos, US Army Retired, who provides a dash of warrior spirit in my story recipe that makes all things military in my work very tasty and, more importantly, correct.
Len Watson, my science soulmate, who places no limits on his contributions and encouragement of me when I am deep in the insecurity of building a story.
Anthony Lombardo, Retired First Grade Detective NYPD, who keeps all those “gotcha” e-mails from gun enthusiasts at a minimum as he makes my weapon choices and police procedure… bulletproof.
My cousin, author George Cannistraro, whose brilliant analysis always points me to golden nuggets of plot and character that I didn’t see.
Editor Sue Rasmussen, who was with me brick by brick as I built the book. Sue’s ability to decode what I thought was English into words and sentences that now read exactly like I meant them to was a luxury that I had the good fortune to enjoy.
Monta, who shares my life and shares me with the writing process. Without a complaint, she allows me to work at times when we should be at play.
To MHC who, with a few choice words, reached across the great divide that separated my aspiration from her tremendous fame and achievement. She steeled my confidence by giving me a glimpse of what was possible.
And my publisher, Lou Aronica of The Story Plant, who is a Zen master at compelling me to be a better novelist. He has potent “mojo,” which puts me under the illusion that no challenge is too big, no rewrite insurmountable.
And finally to you, the reader. I have been thinking about you since I wrote the first sentence. And unless you jumped right to the acknowledgments before reading the book, I assume you stayed with me to the last line. Thank you, for without you I am writing to myself.
A Word about Mush and Subs
Which is also to say a word about courage, honor and sacrifice. I met Dudley “Mush” Morton posthumously through the excellent work of William Tuohy. His book, The Bravest Man, affected me like a rocket’s red glare over Ft.McHenry. Everything I thought knew of war and human commitment to a cause was crystallized between the pages of that book. My invention of a third generation Morton to embody the best traditions of the service is my feeble attempt to encapsulate the tremendous respect, reverence and awe that arises in me whenever I read or hear of bravery in the face of adversity. My efforts in this book are a mere penny toward the trillions in the debt-of-honor we owe those who fought, fight, and will fight again to preserve our way of life.
In the writing of this story, I used many reference books, two in particular: Stealth Boat: Fighting the Cold War in a Fast-Attack Submarine by Gannon Mchale and Silent Steel: The Mysterious Death of the Nuclear Attack Sub USS Scorpion by Steven Johnson. I developed the deep-water intelligence plot in this book from
tendrils of the accounts in those and other books. However, it wasn’t until after The God Particle was in editorial that, amazingly, a veteran submariner who served on the USS Growler said, “Oh, like Blind Man’s Bluff!” Ten seconds later, I was feeling foolish. Coming at subs from the land, I only knew what I read. Obviously, I never heard of or read Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage by Sherry Sontag, which is, as I found out, a very popular and well known nonfiction book. If you loved the sequence under the sea to retrieve the crucibles, you will love Blind Man’s Bluff. But read my next book, The Devil’s Quota, first.
About the Author
TOM AVITABILE, a Senior VP/Creative Director at a New York advertising firm, is a writer, director, and producer with numerous film and television credits. He has an extensive background in engineering and computers, including work on projects for the House Committee on Science and Technology, which helped lay the foundation for The Eighth Day, his first novel. In his spare time, Tom is a professional musician and an amateur woodworker. He recently completed his fourth novel, The Devil’s Quota.
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