The stairs ended in the scrub room. When the president turned the corner and stepped into the long clean room, it took a moment for him to recognize it. In place of the hooded workers he’d seen before, Whitmore came face-to-face with hundreds of ordinary citizens, the refugees who, only minutes earlier, had been preparing themselves to die. They erupted into loud, sustained cheering for the crew of heroes who had shot the alien destroyer out of the sky. Overwhelmed by their reception, Whitmore waded through the crowd, shaking hands and letting himself be hugged until he spotted someone he knew a short distance away. Julius lifted little Patricia onto the walkway and she ran toward her father as fast as her feet would take her. Whitmore scooped the girl up, wrapping her in his arms.
A young man with long hair stood nearby, watching the scene without emotion. He felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Dang, Miguel,” Troy was back to his ornery self, “didn’t you hear us? We’ve been yelling at you for ten minutes.”
Alicia pushed her way through the cheering mob with Philip’s help. The expression on Miguel’s face told her instantly that Russell was dead. She burst into tears, leaving Philip and throwing her arms around Miguel.
“Hey, what happened?” Troy demanded. “What’s wrong?” Without a word, Miguel reached out and pulled the boy close.
*
Slamming through the door of the war room, Whitmore was greeted with more applause. Grey, scowling at one of the monitors, turned and saw who it was. Something like a smile lit up his expression as he came forward to embrace his friend.
“Damn it, Tom, you trying to give an old man heart failure?”
“How’s the attack coming?”
“Excellent. We’ve already got eight confirmed knock-downs and several more probables.”
“Got another one, General,” one of the soldiers yelled. “The Dutch air force just wasted the ship over the Netherlands.”
The man’s report sent another chorus of cheers through the room, but when Connie came through the door with a sad smile on her face, most of the men in the room quieted down. Jasmine, carrying Dylan on her hip, followed her inside.
“And our delivery boys?” Whitmore asked. “Any word yet from up there?”
Reluctantly, Grey answered, “Unfortunately, we lost contact with Hiller and Levinson about fifty minutes ago, a moment or two after the mother ship exploded.”
Whitmore looked over at Connie and Jasmine as they listened to the bad news. Just when he was coming toward them to offer a few words of condolence, one of the men at the monitors shouted.
“Hold on! Something’s showing up on radar. Looks like we have another incoming.”
Everyone crowded around the monitor, watching the tiny blip move across the radar screen.
*
An hour later, a Humvee crowded with passengers was speeding across the afternoon desert, kicking up a long trail of dust. Behind the wheel, Major Mitchell steered the transport, half sports car and half tank, toward a towering column of black smoke rising in the distance. The war room crew had tracked the craft moving across their radar screens until it landed about nine miles from the base, deep in the middle of nowhere. In the bucket seat next to Mitchell, Jasmine kept watch out the front window while Dylan bounced around on her lap. Standing just behind her, with their faces to the wind, Connie, President Whitmore, and General Grey held on to the roll bar, scanning the horizon for signs of life. In the roomy cargo area, Julius sat with the president’s daughter Patricia. Another vehicle, a jeep loaded with armed soldiers, followed a short distance behind.
At a distance of three miles, they could see that the ship had crash-landed against an isolated set of rocky hills. There was no evidence to support their hope it was the same ship Steve and David had taken into space, and even less reason to believe the men might still be alive. The ruined attacker was completely engulfed in flame.
Tiny dark shapes appeared on the flat brown horizon. As the Humvee came closer, it became clear these shapes were actually a pair of creatures. They seemed to be standing upright and moving. Grey yelled for Mitchell to slow the vehicle down, then motioned the soldiers in the jeep forward. With several assault rifles trained on the two figures, the caravan rolled forward at a cautious pace.
At fifty yards away, Mitchell brought the vehicle to a stop, switched off the motor, and draped his arms over the steering wheel. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said in disbelief. The mysterious figures were smoking cigars.
Hiller and Levinson had done the impossible and lived to tell about it. They’d infiltrated the alien fortress, disabled her shields with a dime store computer virus, blown the planet-sized orb to smithereens, then flown back to Nevada before their attacker’s energy supply was exhausted. Now they came swaggering across the sand, casual and confident, as if it were all in a day’s work.
Jasmine threw open the door and went sprinting across the hot sand. She didn’t stop running until she was wrapped in her husband’s arms. Squeezing him like she’d never let go again, her voice choked with emotion, she said, “You scared the hell out of me. We thought you got trapped inside.”
Steve looked down at her with that cocky grin of his. “Yeah, but what an entrance!”
Jasmine stared at him, shocked and amused in the same breath. Didn’t anything scare this man? “There you go again.” She shook her head. “I guess your ego’s gonna be out of control now, and you’ll be impossible to live with, right?”
“Probably. You still willing to find out, Chicken Legs?”
She let out a joyous laugh. “Yeah, I’m willing to give it a try, Dumbo Ears!”
Connie and David approached one another slowly, then stopped to face one another as if one step closer might set off a buried land mine. She was mightily proud of him. For David, the sweetest part of living through his ordeal was being able to see her again. But neither of them knew what the other wanted, so they remained standing three feet apart.
“So,” David asked, looking around the empty sky, “did it work?”
The question brought Connie suddenly back to earth. She’d been imagining what it would be like to move across the last small piece of territory separating them and feel his kiss again. But, naturally, he wanted to know whether his brilliant plan had been successful. Embarrassed by her hidden thoughts, she suddenly felt the eyes of those watching from the vehicles.
“Yes, yes,” she told him, “it worked beautifully. A couple of minutes after the upload, all their shields went down and we started hitting them with missiles.”
She started to tell him how the city destroyer had come toward Area 51 and how Whitmore himself had led the air battle, how the mysterious pilot in the old biplane had arrived in the nick of time, but David held up a hand to interrupt the story.
“No, what I mean is,” he pointed to her and then back to himself, “did it work?”
The smile that spread across Connie’s face was brighter than the afternoon sun. “You bet it worked,” she told him. They stepped across the no-man’s land between them and into one another’s arms, “you bet it did.”
When the couples returned arm in arm to the vehicles, Whitmore nodded his head at the two men in begrudging approval. “Not bad,” he told them, as if they’d just taken a test and scraped by with a C+. But the next moment, he was grinning from ear to ear, unable to hide his admiration for all that the two heroes had accomplished. “Not too damn bad at all!”
He congratulated Steve with a handshake, then turned to the lanky MIT alumnus who had punched him in the nose years before. “You turned out to be even smarter than I thought you were,” he said as they shook hands. “And a hell of a lot braver than I ever gave you credit for. Thank you, David.”
“What I would like to know,” a loud voice interrupted, “is how come Mr. Healthnut is suddenly smoking one of my disgusting cigars?”
Julius was relaxing on the bumper of the Humvee, his legs not quite long enough to reach the ground. David let go of Connie long enough to wrap his fa
ther in a rowdy bear hug, lifting him off the ground.
“Oy, now he’s a pro wrestler.”
David set the old man down and eyed him suspiciously for a moment. As Julius composed himself, straightening out the hair and clothing his son had mussed, he asked David what he was staring at.
“How did you do it, Pops?”
“Do what?” the old guy asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I mean,” David kept at him. “First, you got us to Washington, then to Area Fifty-One, and just when I was about to quit, you gave me the idea for the virus. I suppose you’ll tell me it was all just a series of accidents, right?”
For a split second, Julius let a cunning grin play across his face before returning once more to an expression of mock annoyance. “I don’t know what happened to you out in space, but I’m thinking those aliens maybe did something funny to your brain.”
The two men smiled warmly at each other.
Steve was kneeling down beside Dylan, getting his welcome home hug, when General Grey stepped forward for a word with him. “Well, soldier, you’ve had quite a weekend.”
“Yes, sir, I have,” the Marine pilot agreed.
“And you did one hell of a fine job. We’re all proud.” Grey offered a salute, which both Steve and Dylan returned.
Triumphant, the group began to load into the Humvee for the ride back to Area 51. As they were doing so, Patricia Whitmore pointed up to the sky and yelled, “Hey, what’s that?”
The group turned in time to see a fireball, orange and red, streaking overhead like a falling star. Then another trail of light, this one bright yellow, ripped across the aqua blue sky. Wreckage from the exploded mother ship was raining through space and burning itself up at it entered earth’s atmosphere. The colorful meteors would go on bursting in the air all through the night.
Steve lifted Dylan into his arms and looked skyward. “You know what day it is?” he asked.
“Yup,” Dylan told him, “it’s the Fourth of July.”
“That’s right, son. And didn’t I promise you fireworks?”
*
The battle over Area 51 had ended in a relatively clean and painless victory. Fewer than three hundred people had died. But the situation was far different in other parts of the country and around the world. Humanity had survived, but only at a staggering cost. Millions were dead and millions more were injured. Many would never recover from the wounds, both physical and emotional, they had sustained during the invasion. Even as the survivors began digging themselves out from under the debris, thankful to be alive, they felt the dread of the months and years of rebuilding which lay ahead. The howls coming from the victory celebrations echoed out over a collapsed and blighted world. In most places, the destruction was so severe that the living envied the dead.
More than a hundred of the world’s largest cities had been obliterated, among them ancient, irreplaceable treasures such as Paris, Baghdad, New York, and Kyoto. Gone too were the world’s finest museums and libraries, its major airports and factories, food processing plants, markets, office buildings, and one out of every three human homes. Refugees, hundreds of millions of them, without shelter or means of feeding themselves, wondered how they would survive. The situation was most dire in the southern hemisphere, where it was the middle of winter. Mass migrations to the temperate zones of the earth began immediately, further taxing already strained ecological resources. The earth’s water, land, and air were all heavily polluted in the aftermath of the short but cataclysmic war.
It seemed that everything had been lost and that only one thing had, perhaps, been gained: a wider frame of reference. Along with the certain knowledge that humans were not alone in the universe, the murderous squabbling over petty differences of race and nationality suddenly seemed to be petty foolishness. In the wake of the attack, the people of earth finally realized the things they shared in common far outweighed their subtle differences. There was a worldwide recognition that the human imagination had been fundamentally altered and there was no turning back. In a sense, the species had grown up the hard way, being shoved unwillingly toward maturity. There was also an awareness of a new interdependence: the world would have to prepare for the possibility of a similar invasion in the future. Whitmore’s hope had come to pass: July Fourth would no longer be merely an American holiday.
It was a new future, and leaders like Whitmore were anxious to help shape the new world that would be built upon the ruins of the old. They knew the direction and character of this rebuilding would be determined early, within the first few months. There was every possibility for America, one of the most violent and divided nations in the world, to tear itself apart in a struggle over scarce resources, but there was also the possibility of people coming together, cooperating with one another in a spirit of community that would set an example for others around the globe. Before the dust of the battles had settled, Whitmore would be on the campaign trail once again, making essentially the same call to service and self-sacrifice he had delivered during his run for the presidency. But this time the scope would be international and the risks much higher. What kind of world would he pass on to his daughter?
As the rebuilding began, one fact quickly made itself abundantly clear: the human spirit, like the supple, tenacious weeds already beginning to push their way up through the ruins, would once again reassert itself, tougher, smarter, and more unified than ever.
To my science advisor.
K.R.W., and his wife.
PROLOGUE
THE BATTLE CONTINUES
On July 5, the worldwide battle against the invaders continued. All thirty-six of the alien city destroyers had successfully been shot out of the sky, but there was no mood of celebration in the belowground research facility referred to as Area 51. This secret lab, buried below the Nevada desert, had replaced Washington, DC, as the functioning headquarters of the United States. Inside the lab’s communications and tracking room, President Thomas Whitmore, his advisors, and a crew of technicians were frantically working to coordinate a counteroffensive. Four city destroyers, along with thousands of smaller ships called attackers, had crashed to earth on American soil—many of them in the scrub desert surrounding the lab—and it was too soon to know how many survivors there might be. President Whitmore, who had first come to national prominence as a fighter pilot in the Gulf War, had personally climbed into the cockpit of an F-18 jet and led the squadron of planes which had scored the first kill against these gargantuan airships. The aliens had apparently detected the radio transmissions coming from the base and broken off another attack to fly toward the spot. They were on the verge of destroying Area 51 when Whitmore’s team discovered that it only took a single AMRAAM missile detonating against the giant ship’s primary weapon to cause a chain-reaction explosion powerful enough to rip the craft apart. The technicians immediately spread this news around the globe, then waited for reports to filter back.
High above the base, AWACS reconnaissance planes were circling, using their sophisticated electronic equipment to provide Area 51 with cell-phone and radio links to the remnants of America’s military. From their perspective, the AWACS pilots had a clear view of the monstrous, fire-blackened hull of the destroyer lying in the desert, a smoldering shell seventeen miles wide. Also visible were the convoys of military vehicles coming from all directions to surround the destroyer. All day long, men and equipment that had survived the devastating attack poured in from military installations all across the Southwest. By midafternoon, the solid ring of soldiers and civilians surrounding the craft was thick enough to be seen from the air. On the ground, the crest of the ruined megaship was visible from as far away as Las Vegas.
Delta Company out of Fort Irwin was one of the first on the scene. This elite squad of soldiers was given the unenviable task of acting as the shock troops for the counterinvasion. They were the first ones in.
It was like storming into an impossibly large church. They ent
ered through a two-hundred-foot break in the exterior wall, advancing quietly, twenty-five yards at a time. The size of the ship’s interior spaces was stunning, incredible. Once they had secured and cleared the first thousand yards, armored vehicles, Jeeps, and hundreds of both soldiers and civilians, poured through the breach. Deeper into the ship, the rooms became a labyrinth of smaller chambers, closing down to the size of narrow hallways in some places. Delta Company pushed forward, tensely expecting to encounter hostile survivors around each corner. They began to find fragments of alien corpses ripped apart in the blast. But by the end of the first twenty-four hours, not a single survivor had been discovered.
Helicopters had entered the ship’s vast central chamber through great holes that the explosion had torn through the roof. The pilots had reported “a big barrel of fish,” thousands of destroyed attackers lying in a single heap three miles across. Delta Company received orders to spearhead a drive toward this central chamber, where it was thought they might find survivors and take them as prisoners.
*
Nolan jumped from the surface of one crashed alien attack ship, landed on the hard shell of the next, then sprinted the sixty feet to the edge of another, where he took cover and searched the vast space around him with the barrel of his assault rifle. The central chamber of the city destroyer gave him the feeling of being at the bottom of an underground lake surrounded by blackened vertical walls. He estimated the distance across the chamber to be about three miles. Gray sunlight poured in from where the explosion had torn away a large section of the roof. In the distance, he could hear the sound of a Jeep and the sporadic shouts coming from another recon team working the southern sector of the chamber. The space had obviously been some kind of portable airport, a staging area for the attacker planes, which now lay in a colossal pile, stacked ten deep in some places, after having been knocked loose from their moorings high overhead.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 30