Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  Julius leaned closer and smiled mischievously. ‘Think nothing of it, Spanky.”

  “You mean Spunky.” She laughed. “Haven’t heard that in a long time. He told you about that?”

  He checked to see who might be listening, then confided a secret to her. “As soon as he figured out this thing with the signal, all he could think about was getting to you. There’s still love there, I think.”

  Connie sighed. “Love was never our problem.”

  “‘All you need is love,’” Julius quoted. “That’s John Lennon, a smart man. Shot in the back. Very sad.”

  Connie nodded in agreement, trying to conceal a smile.

  *

  Four hours after the blast came ripping through the tunnel, sealing them inside a vast tomb, Jasmine thought she had finally found an exit.

  She had lifted the wire grating and climbed down into the labyrinth of storm drainage pipes that crisscrossed the city. The concrete passageways had flat floors, twelve-foot ceilings, and absolutely no light. There was the sound of trickling water and the faint smell of oil. At first, Jasmine tried to convince Boomer to lead the way through the pitch darkness, but the dog was a coward, leaving it to her to feel their way along. The moist walls were full of damp, slimy surprises. They had moved slowly along for a few hundred feet, when Jasmine heard something that sounded like footsteps. Her heart turned to stone as the idea occurred to her that the invaders might already be in the sewer with her.

  She knelt down and put her hand over Dylan’s mouth, whispering very low, “Listen.”

  The smell of the gunpowder in Dylan’s fireworks reminded her there was a book of matches in his backpack. As quietly as she could, she unzipped the pencil pouch, found the matches, and lit one. The chamber was empty in both directions. The match burned low and was extinguished by an imperceptible breeze. Realizing a breeze must mean an opening to the outside, she led her family forward as quietly as possible, listening for more footsteps. She picked her son up and could feel how scared he was becoming.

  “You’re doing a great job, baby, keep quiet.” Any other six-year-old kid would be bawling his eyes out by now, Jasmine thought.

  Creeping steadily along the wall, Jasmine’s senses were on full alert. Several times, she thought she heard the footsteps again. Each time, she lit another match and saw nothing. Then she sensed a faint flow of air brushing across her face. She set Dylan down and searched the walls with her hands until she found an opening. It was a small square gap about four feet off the ground. Cautiously, she reached an arm through the hole and explored what lay beyond. She was half expecting her fingers to find something from another, unfriendly galaxy. Suddenly she gasped and pulled her hands back. She had seen something moving through the darkness. It took her a few moments to realize it had been the faint outline of her own hands. There was light seeping through the opening which connected to another tunnel above, a way out of this watery indoor grave.

  “Baby, I think there’s a way out of here. I’m gonna lift you up and you tell me if you can see anything, okay?”

  As soon as Dylan’s head was through the opening, he yelled, “I see a light! It’s outside light!”

  A few minutes later, Jas was walking toward the sunlight at the open mouth of the upper tunnel. An overturned car was smoldering just outside. With Boomer in the lead, they picked their way between dangling electrical cables and hunks of mangled automobiles, crumpled like wads of used tin foil.

  When they came to the mouth of the tunnel and looked out into the blinding morning light, they saw a new world: postapocalypse LA. Eighteen miles from the epicenter, the neighborhood into which the Dubrows emerged looked like Nagasaki after the bomb. Most buildings, especially those along the east-west streets where the firestorm had moved fastest, were gone, kneecapped at their foundations and blown away. The ground was the gray color of ashes and the sky was a sickly off-white color, swirling with a mixture of dust and ash. There was no sign of life, and for a moment Jasmine wondered if she and Dylan might be the last two people on earth.

  The boy reached for his mother’s hand and without knowing why began to cry. “Mommy, what happened?”

  Jasmine picked him up and stepped out of the tunnel. “I don’t know, Dylan. Mommy doesn’t know.”

  High above, the roar of engines punished the sky. A squadron of thirty-five jet fighters was flying north, toward the spaceship over Los Angeles.

  “Is that Steve in the planes?”

  “It might be. I hope so. Why don’t you wave, just in case.”

  *

  Hugging the Orange County coastline, the Black Knights thundered toward the battle at an elevation of eleven thousand feet. The missile fields at Seal Beach looked to be operational, but inland the destruction was complete. The wall of fire had cut a large circle of devastation into the area. All around the perimeter, fires continued to burn, lit by the flaming debris the blast had sent flying through the air.

  The spaceship was visible on the horizon, hanging like cast-iron doom over the ring of mountains surrounding Los Angeles. Towering columns of black smoke roiled upward from the remains of the oil refinery at Wilmington, causing the Knights to swerve a few miles out over the postcard blue Pacific, its shoreline awash with a million tons of spilled oil and twisted wreckage. Steve studied the destruction, stonefaced. It was now clear to him that Jasmine must be dead. If she had made it beyond the reach of the blast, she would have reported to El Toro long ago. He muttered something in frustration and punched the wall of the cockpit.

  “Don’t you sweat it, daddy-o,” Jimmy’s voice came through the earphones in stereo. “I’m sure she got out in time.” The line stayed quiet for a long moment until Steve spoke to the entire squad.

  “Here we go, boys. Time to lock and load.”

  Steve reached forward to the computer screen set into the instrument panel and entered a series of commands. Immediately the cantilevered doors along the belly of the fighter dropped open ready to dump their AMRAAMs (Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles). At the same time, a mechanical arm inside the cockpit brought a sighting device to within inches of the pilot’s headgear. This was the scope on the plane’s FLIR (Forward-Looking InfraRed) targeting system. Looking through the eyepiece, the sky in front of him was transformed into a pulsing gray-and-yellow computer world. He brought the crosshairs down on the image of the spaceship, adjusting them until the tower was in the bull’s eye.

  The technicians aboard Air Force One took over the air waves. “Los Angeles attack squadron has AMRAAM missiles locked on target.”

  “New York and Washington squadrons also reporting lock on.”

  A new voice came over the radio. “Gentlemen, this is Air Force General Grey, Chief Commander of Allied Space Command. On behalf of the president of the United States, who is here aboard Air Force One, and the joint chiefs operating out of NORAD, I want to wish you all a successful mission. Godspeed. You may fire at will.”

  The Black Knights were still ten miles away, thirty seconds out of firing range, but the sheer enormity of the ship made them feel much closer. As the details of the ship’s exterior grew clearer and more defined, so did the lump in each pilot’s throat. The normally boisterous radio communication between the Knights was grimly silent.

  “Hold tight,” Steve told everyone, “fifteen seconds.”

  “Looks like one of those seventeen-year ticks we get down in Charlotte,” drawled one of the pilots, trying to lighten the mood.

  “We’ll let’s do a little exterminating,” Steve held them steady, “five more seconds… and… fire!”

  The AMRAAMs dropped away and went sprinting out ahead. Radar targeted, they banked slightly toward the target area like a school of minnows swooping to attack a giant gray whale. With their payloads away, the F-18s began to pull up. Few of the pilots seriously expected a ship of this size to go down all at once. The mission called for them to hit the ship in several different areas, reconnoiter to see which type of strike had done the
most damage, then provide intelligence to the next wave of attack planes, already sitting on the runway at El Toro. As the F-18s banked away, they kept a careful watch on their missiles. Suddenly, a quarter mile from their target, they all exploded at the same time.

  “Damn it!”

  “I didn’t even see them fire,” Jimmy said, obviously impressed. When the smoke began to clear, it was obvious that the alien ship had sustained no damage.

  Steve radioed back to Air Force One. “Command, this is Knight One. The target appears to have shot our AMRAAMs down. Zero damage to target. Repeat: zero damage. We’re going to switch over to Sidewinders and take it in a little closer.”

  “Good call, Knight One,” Grey replied. “Spread formation.”

  “Six times five, fellas. Six times five.”

  The smaller Sidewinder missiles were short-range munitions that would give the spacecraft a tougher test of its air-to-air defense capabilities. This time, instead of thirty bombs, the Knights would give them one hundred and eighty to shoot at. The squadron broke into six separate groups, roaring off in different directions to surround the fifteen-mile-wide disk. It made sense that if the aliens had air-to-air defenses, they’d be located in the tower at the nose of the craft. When everyone was in position, Steve gave the order to charge.

  “Everybody check your radar, we’re starting from seven miles out. Let’s bring it in closer this time. Launch at one mile.”

  One mile? That’s a comfortable distance when you’re standing still, but when you’re streaking along at four hundred miles per hour on a collision course with something a hundred times larger than the Superdome, it doesn’t leave much margin for error. Steve knew that was shaving it pretty close, but he was hungry to inflict some damage on the craft before they headed back to the base.

  “Attack!”

  At the signal, all thirty jet fighters wheeled in unison and rocketed toward the spaceship, moving in from all sides. Looking through the scopes on their FLIR systems, the pilots nervously watched the numbers count down on their “Distance to Target” displays, the yellow sky disappearing into a growing blot of gray. When it felt like they were right on top of the craft, the one mile marker clicked in, triggering the Sidewinders to fire automatically. Six missiles blasted forward from each ship, their solid rocket fuel leaving a thin contrail in their wake. Almost at once, they reached the same quarter-mile perimeter and, like the AMRAAMs, exploded as a group.

  “Pull up! Pull up!!” Steve screamed. ‘They got a shield!!” From his front row seat, he suddenly realized why the missiles weren’t hitting. Yanking back on the controls, Hiller threw the plane into a right angle turn straight up, the kind of turn that holds you against a seat as if an elephant was sitting on your lap. Twenty-nine Knights made the turn in time. The last man, Zolfeghari, came in too fast. Trying to duck under a slower plane ahead, the hull of his jet did a belly flop against an invisible force field, splattering his plane into an explosion of jet fuel that spilled down the side of the invisible shield.

  Steve’s group streaked vertically up the face of the tower. “They must have some kind of protective shield surrounding their hull. Let’s head home.”

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy. As the squad continued up the face of the tower, a set of massive doors were opening. They pulled back fast, as if yanked open by the strong hands of a giant, and from the opening came a storm of small attacker planes. Forty or fifty pearl gray ships came darting out of the port, single file. They were exiting the city destroyer through the exact airspace Steve and his men had already committed to using.

  As he headed into the crossfire intersection, Steve looked toward the open door and saw the next attacker speeding toward him, the face of the plane almost at his canopy window, bearing down like a huge, hungry insect. By the time he braced himself for the impact he was already one hundred yards beyond the danger point. The next three pilots made it through, but the fourth, a man called “Big Island” Tubman didn’t. His jet collided head-on with one of the disk-shaped ships, causing a thunderous explosion right at the city destroyer’s front door. While Tubman’s plane fragmented on impact, the enemy fighter remained intact. It wobbled forward, as if momentarily stunned, before regaining its balance and flying off as if nothing had happened.

  On his way through the cross-traffic, Steve had glimpsed a massive staging area inside the city destroyer. The ship’s attack bay looked like an indoor airport, with hundreds of the small attackers parked in clusters along the walls. The monumental architecture of the room reminded him of some sort of hive or nest. Adjusting the yaw to flip his F-18 upside-down, Steve watched the gray planes pour into the sky. Instead of moving in a stable formation, the pack, now perhaps one hundred strong, bobbed up and down, weaving from side to side. Seen from a distance, they seemed to flutter like a swarm of bats. Without warning, they broke off in different directions to answer the attack on their ship.

  “Mayday! Mayday! Enemy planes in the sky. Coming out of the tower.” A shriek of light whizzed past Steve’s plane, then another. “What the fudge?” He craned his neck around and saw one of the hungry-looking gray ships had come out of nowhere and slipped in behind him.

  “Check six,” Jimmy warned him. “Check your six, Stevie.”

  “I see him.” Steve knew he had to think fast. The whole group of American planes was still moving toward a rendezvous over the top of the city destroyer and the faster enemy ships were surrounding them. Should he have the squad meet at the top where they could defend one another, or would that make them sitting ducks in a shooting gallery? He’d never seen a situation like this and didn’t know which tactic to order. Multiplying his confusion was the fact that he had been made by the alien pilot in no time flat. Steve considered himself the craftiest pilot he knew, and to be outfoxed at the very beginning of a dogfight was another new experience for him.

  “Evasive maneuvers!” he yelled, jamming his own plane into a sudden sideways loop only milliseconds before a barrage of laser shots sailed by. “Stay in your groups! Keep your spacing.”

  The gray enemy planes, gliding like metallic stingrays, were firing pulses of super-condensed energy, deadly balls of light that screamed as they sizzled through the sky, leaving a bright white trail. Trying to lose his pursuer, Steve bobbed and weaved his way toward the edge of the black city destroyer. In the commotion, he saw a pair of abrupt explosions as two of his team were blown away. At flight school, they’d emphasized over and over how quickly air battles were won or lost, how drastically they could change in only a few seconds. Here was the proof. The proud Knights, champions of the sky a moment before, were now having their asses handed to them, hunted down and killed. Disorganized and on the run, they broke into pairs, covering one another as they ran for cover.

  Steve plunged into a nose dive, accelerating straight toward the ground. His attacker followed. As the blackened earth that had been Los Angeles rushed closer, Steve fought the impulse to slow down. He remembered what happened to the Apache helicopter during Operation Welcome Wagon and increased his speed. In the next ten seconds he would be either very lucky or very dead.

  “Where you at, Jimmy?”

  “Right where you need me, Stevie, on this motherfucker’s tail. If you can straighten him out for me, I’ll waste him.”

  Steve ceased evasive maneuvers and flew in a straight line for as long as he dared—a total of about 1.5 seconds. Fortunately, that was all Jimmy needed.

  “Away!” he yelled. As Steve peeled away into a starboard bank, Jimmy’s Sidewinder shot forward and overtook the alien attacker. Five yards before the missile reached the surface of the ship, it exploded. The ship flipped over in midair, staggered forward for a moment, then zipped back into action as if nothing had happened.

  “Shit! These little guys got shields, too!”

  Steve came out of his dive and looped upward, ready to take a shot at the disoriented attacker plane. In the distance, he watched two more of the American fighters shredded by
tracer fire. By the time he was in position again, Jimmy had an enemy on his tail.

  “Jimmy, roll right. I’ll cover.”

  Jimmy barrel rolled away just in time to avoid a new burst of tracer fire. Steve brought the crosshairs down on one of the gray stingray planes and fired another sidewinder. The alien pilot banked away, but the tracking system inside the missile chased him down and detonated against his rear protective shield. Radar-guidance was about the only hardware advantage the humans had in this dogfight, and it wasn’t buying them much time. For a few seconds, Hiller and Franklin flew unmolested along the crest of the Hollywood Hills. Above them, they watched the fluttering gray ships hunting in packs, tearing the F-18s, and their brother pilots, to ribbons. The sky was littered with tracer fire and the fiery wreckage of America’s elite air strike force. A new pair of attackers came racing toward them from above the ship, unleashing a hailstorm of firepower.

  “Maybe we can outrun them. Follow my lead.”

  “Let’s run, then. Here they come at two o’clock, Stevie.”

  The powerful jet engines of the F/A-18s surged into a higher gear when the Americans hit the SuperCruise control. They shot forward, speeding east over the mountains and leaving the enemy aircraft far behind. Or so they thought. As the planes accelerated, both pilots experienced the phenomenon of “pulling a few gees.” One gee is equal to the force of gravity at sea level. Moving from below Mach speed all the way up to Mach 2 in a matter of a few seconds was something like being strapped to the nose cone of a moon rocket. It was the extreme physical discomfort of feeling your organs crash backwards against the seat as the plane rocketed forward. Ears, lips, cheeks—everything tried to slide backwards off their faces. The landscape below them rushed past in a blur. When they were up to speed, both men felt dizzy and slightly nauseated. Steve struggled to get a look behind them. The stingray ships were close behind and gaining.