by Mark Alpert
To clear his mind he stared at the wavy lines on the GPR screen. Then he heard the sound of squealing tires behind him. Turning around, he saw an armored Humvee barreling down Payson Avenue. It was going full speed down the empty street as if a regiment of enemy tanks was chasing it.
Hanson felt a surge of adrenaline in his gut. This is it. It’s about to happen.
The corporal and lieutenant also turned around. The Humvee screeched to a halt a few yards away and an officer bolted out of the driver’s seat. It was Colonel Tatum, a wiry redhead in his late thirties. Normally, he was one of Hanson’s most levelheaded officers, but now his face was flushed and sweaty. His right hand trembled as he saluted Hanson. “Sir! Can I speak with you privately for a moment?”
They stepped toward the sidewalk, away from the other men. Like Gunter and the other colonels on Hanson’s staff, Tatum knew about the space probe. During the mission briefing earlier that evening, Hanson had told his senior officers about the discovery of the conductive cable and its extraordinary molecular composition. He’d made it clear there was a strong possibility that the probe had originated on another planet, and that it might be using its advanced technology to spread across Manhattan. His colonels had taken the news stoically, showing no fear and not even much surprise. Since then, however, something had obviously shaken Tatum’s composure. He stood too close to Hanson, and he was breathing fast.
“I came here as quick as I could, sir,” he blurted. “I couldn’t radio you because I didn’t know if the transmissions would be secure, and you said not to use the radio unless we were absolutely sure that—”
“Jesus, Tatum, slow down. What’s gotten into you?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just…” Tatum stopped himself and took a deep breath. “One of the search teams found something unusual.”
Hanson felt another adrenaline surge. His stomach was churning. “What is it? Do you have the GPR data?”
Tatum shook his head. “They didn’t find it with the radar system. It’s not underground.”
“Not underground? Where the hell is it?”
“It’s in one of the apartment buildings. The address is 172 Sherman Avenue. That’s between Academy Street and West 204th.”
Because Hanson had been crisscrossing Inwood for the past three hours, he had a pretty good map of the neighborhood in his head. The address was just four blocks to the east. He stepped toward the Humvee and motioned for Tatum to follow him. “Come on, you’ll drive me there. We can talk on the way.”
A wide-eyed look of panic appeared on Tatum’s face, but it lasted only a moment. He shook off his fear, shouted “Yes, sir!” and dashed toward the Humvee.
Hanson got into the vehicle on the passenger side while Tatum returned to the driver’s seat and restarted the engine. He turned the Humvee around and headed south on Payson. As they sped down the street Hanson felt recharged and alert and stupendously impatient. He squinted at Tatum. “What did the search team find? How big is it?”
“Uh, it’s hard to say, sir.” Tatum was still breathing fast. “The leader of the team thinks they’ve uncovered only a small piece of the thing.”
“Uncovered?”
“Yes, sir. While the team was conducting its GPR survey of Sherman Avenue they noticed several local residents who hadn’t followed the evacuation order. They’d remained in their apartments even though they had no electricity and all their neighbors had left.”
Hanson remembered the shadowy figures he’d seen in some of the windows. “Yes, I noticed a few of them on Payson Avenue too.”
“So the search team called in a military police unit to sweep through the buildings on that block and round up the stragglers.” Tatum paused to catch his breath. He steered the Humvee to the left and started driving down Academy Street. “In one of the buildings the MPs found an old man in a ground-floor apartment who hadn’t heard about the evacuation order. They tried to explain to him why he needed to leave the neighborhood, but instead of listening to them he kept complaining about the smell from the apartment next door. At first the MPs thought he was senile, but then they noticed the smell too, a really bad fishy odor coming from that apartment.”
“This is turning into a long story, Tatum. Can you get to the point?”
“Sorry, sir. The MPs also noticed that the front door to that apartment was hot to the touch. They thought a fire might’ve started in there, so they broke down the door and went inside.” Tatum slowed the Humvee at the intersection of Academy and Sherman and took another left. “The living room was hot, but it wasn’t smoky. The smell seemed to be coming from the bedroom, but the MPs couldn’t open its door. They hit it with their battering ram and it still wouldn’t open, but after a few hits the door started to crack and—”
“There! That’s it.” Hanson pointed at a crowd of soldiers outside an apartment building. Although the street was very dark, he could make out the number 172 above the building’s entrance. “Stop here.”
Tatum hit the brakes, and Hanson jumped out of the Humvee before it even stopped moving. The soldiers on the sidewalk looked puzzled when they saw their commander, but they automatically stepped out of his way and saluted him as he rushed into the building.
Hanson felt as if he were being drawn inside, as if an invisible rope were pulling him toward the scene. He charged down a corridor and ran headlong into the foul-smelling apartment. A dozen of his men stood in the living room, all of them aiming their flashlights at the wall on the room’s right side. They turned their heads and saluted when Hanson entered the room, but they kept their flashlights trained on the wall.
This wall, Hanson realized, was the one that stood between the living room and the bedroom. The soldiers had already pulverized the bedroom door—it lay in splinters on the living-room carpet—and inside the door frame was a rectangle of blackness. At first glance Hanson thought he was simply looking into another dark room, but after a moment he saw the reflections of the flashlight beams glinting off the black rectangle.
A sheet of shiny black metal blocked the doorway. Polished and flawless, the sheet extended behind the wall on both sides of the doorway, running the whole length of the room. The soldiers had used a battering ram to pound holes in the wall to the left and right of the door frame, and through each hole Hanson could see the same metallic sheet.
He studied it for several seconds, mesmerized by its strangeness. Then Colonel Tatum caught up to him, dashing breathless into the apartment. Hanson snapped out of his trance and pulled Tatum aside, leading him across the living room to a sliding glass door that had been opened to air out the place.
They stepped outside to a dark patio furnished with a chaise lounge. There were more soldiers out here, pointing their flashlights at a smallish window in the brick wall, the window to the apartment’s bedroom. It, too, was blocked by a metallic sheet. One of the soldiers, a muscular sergeant, stood by the window with a sledgehammer in his hands. He’d already shattered the glass, which lay in shards on the ground.
Pointing at the window, Hanson turned to Colonel Tatum. “Is the bedroom completely enclosed in the black metal? On all sides?”
Tatum nodded. “We poked holes in the floor of the apartment above it and found the barrier there too. It’s like a big metal box surrounding the room. We think it’s connected to structures beneath the surface, but we haven’t found the links yet.”
“Have you tested the barrier? Tried to break through it?”
“Yes, sir. Look at this.” Tatum stepped toward the sergeant who held the sledgehammer. “Sergeant, hit the barrier again. Show the general what happens.”
The soldier nodded. He raised his hammer, cocked it over his right shoulder, and swung it hard.
The sledgehammer’s head slammed against the black metal. With a ringing thunk, the hammer bounced off the sheet, recoiling so violently that the sergeant almost lost his grip on the handle.
Hanson stepped closer and saw a small dent in the sheet, maybe three inches wide and
half an inch deep. As he examined it, though, the dent disappeared. The metal oozed back into place and became perfectly smooth again.
“See that?” Tatum’s voice was high-pitched, half-amazed and half-terrified. “It’s strange, right?”
Hanson frowned. Yes, the alien metal was strange, but it didn’t frighten him. He intended to put the substance through a more rigorous test, something a little rougher than a hammer blow. “I’m going to call in the Special Operations unit. Are all the residents out of the building now?”
“Yes, sir, it’s clear.”
“I want you to make sure this entire block is empty. Have your men go into every building and knock on every door.”
Tatum raised an eyebrow. “Sir, may I ask what you’re planning?”
Hanson ignored the colonel’s question. Something else had occurred to him. “What about the resident of this apartment? Do we know who it is?”
“Yeah, we checked the records.” Tatum reached into the pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a slip of paper. “The resident is a fifty-nine-year-old African American woman, a retired minister. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about her.”
“Where is she now? Did she register at one of the emergency shelters?”
Tatum shook his head. “Not so far. But we’re still checking. Her name is Dorothy J. Adams.”
* * *
Fortunately, Hanson had planned ahead. He’d stationed a Special Tactics team at the command post near the Hudson River. The Special Tactics men were the Air Force’s commandos, roughly equal in skill to the soldiers in the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL teams. Their role in combat was to parachute down to airfields in enemy territory and secure them for the military’s use. The men were trained to fight in unfamiliar situations and face unexpected threats. More important, they had extensive training in demolition work, which was often needed to remove wreckage from captured airfields. They were experts at handling C-4 and other plastic explosives.
The team left the command post in an armored Stryker troop carrier, which came roaring down Sherman Avenue less than two minutes later. Hanson had pulled all his other soldiers out of the apartment building—there were about thirty of them in all—and now they stood guard on the street about a hundred yards south of the building’s entrance. The Stryker stopped at this point, and its rear hatch opened. The nine Special Tactics officers burst out of the vehicle and spread across Sherman Avenue, cradling their assault rifles and scanning the street with the night-vision goggles that hung from their helmets. Their faces were smeared with black paint, and they wore camouflage uniforms padded with body armor. Their commander, a swarthy, hulking captain named Pavlovich, headed straight for Hanson and raised his massive right arm in a salute.
“Sir!” he shouted. “What are your orders?”
Hanson was impressed. These men were perfect soldiers. They’d spent years strengthening their bodies and honing their skills. They’d jumped out of planes and marched across deserts and slogged through rain forests. They were ready to carry out any assignment, no matter how difficult, and they performed their tasks so admirably that Hanson found it a real pleasure to give them orders. It was like the pleasure a carpenter or mason must feel when handling a well-designed tool. The general’s satisfaction was so strong he wanted to smile.
But he didn’t. Instead, he narrowed his eyes at Captain Pavlovich. “This is a demolition job. I assume you’ve been briefed about the terrorists we’re looking for?”
Pavlovich nodded. “Yes, sir. Have you located the individuals?”
“We think so.” Hanson pointed at the entrance to 172 Sherman Avenue. “We discovered a massive metal barrier on the ground floor of that building, inside apartment 1A. The barrier completely encloses the apartment’s bedroom, turning it into a fortified bunker. There’s a good chance the terrorists are inside that bunker, along with all their bomb-making materials. We tried to breach the barrier using battering rams, but they were ineffective.”
“And now you want us to try explosives, sir?”
“Exactly. How much C-4 does your unit have?”
“We have a hundred and twelve demolition blocks, plus all the priming assemblies and detonation cords.” Pavlovich gestured at three of his sergeants, each of whom carried a bulging backpack. “That’s almost a hundred fifty pounds of C-4, sir. It’s enough to knock down any barrier I can think of.”
“Good. I want you to use it all.”
The captain gave him an uneasy look. He clearly didn’t want to contradict his superior. “Uh, sir? It may not be advisable to use that much C-4. The explosion would collapse the whole building. And maybe the neighboring buildings as well.”
“Don’t worry about that.” Hanson swept his arm in a wide arc, gesturing at all the buildings on the block. “We checked all the other apartments and made sure they’re empty. You have permission to use as much explosives as necessary.”
Pavlovich still seemed uncertain. “Sir, can I ask a question about the objectives of this mission? Don’t we want to have the option of capturing at least one of these individuals alive? So we could interrogate him and obtain some intelligence about their organization?”
Hanson frowned. As it turned out, the Special Tactics men weren’t perfect after all. A well-designed tool doesn’t question its handler. “That’s not your mission, Captain. Your mission is to eliminate the terrorists. I want you to put your C-4 all over that metallic bunker they’ve built and blow it sky-high.” He stepped closer to Pavlovich. “Do you understand your orders?”
All the uncertainty vanished from the captain’s paint-smeared face. He snapped off another salute and boomed, “Yes, sir!” Then he turned to his three sergeants and began to give them instructions, pointing at 172 Sherman Avenue as he talked.
Hanson stared at them. As the sergeants huddled with Pavlovich they seemed to be advertising the Air Force’s diversity—Sergeant Turner was black, Sergeant Hernandez was Latino, and Sergeant Lee was Asian. The racial mix was appropriate for the occasion, Hanson thought; all the peoples of the Earth were working together to combat the alien invader. It was a heartening image, filling the general with pride and fervor, although it was somewhat undermined by the fact that the men didn’t know who they were really fighting. They thought they were going to kill Muslims.
After a minute or so, the huddle broke up. The sergeants gave hand signals to the five corporals under their command, and then Captain Pavlovich led them all down the street.
Hanson stayed near the Stryker vehicle with the other soldiers, who craned their necks to watch the Special Tactics team march toward the apartment building a hundred yards away. The general watched them too, silently urging the men to move faster. He was worried that by the time they reached apartment 1A, all the shiny black metal would have already retreated underground, just like Sarah Pooley’s black cable had retreated into the concrete wall of the manhole. It had disappeared, Dr. Pooley speculated, because it didn’t want to be observed. And if that was true, then some kind of intelligence—artificial or biological—must be guiding the alien machinery.
Hanson had dismissed this hypothesis at first, but now he believed it. He believed the alien machinery had reacted to the GPR survey teams by delving farther underground and hiding from the radar scans. And though the soldiers had succeeded in discovering the black walls at 172 Sherman Avenue, Hanson guessed that was only because something large and important was inside that metallic box, something the machinery couldn’t move underground. But what was hidden there? A power source? A computer? A weapon?
The general shook his head. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to know what the hidden thing was. His men were simply going to blow it up. If it was important to the operations of the alien probe, then maybe destroying it would stop the spread of the machinery.
As Captain Pavlovich came within ten yards of the building’s entrance he looked over his shoulder and said something to Sergeant Turner. Sergeants Lee and Hernandez moved closer
, obviously listening in. Although Hanson was much too far away to hear what Pavlovich was saying, he assumed the captain was telling his men how they should enter the building—who would take the point, who would bring up the rear. After a few seconds he turned back to the building and bounded toward its doors.
Then there was a flash of white light, and the captain collapsed. He fell forward, hitting the sidewalk in front of 172 Sherman Avenue. Hanson caught a glimpse of Pavlovich’s prone body and recoiled in horror. The man’s head was gone. Blood and charred skin and blackened pieces of the captain’s helmet were scattered across the sidewalk.
A moment later the same thing happened to Sergeant Turner. His helmet blew apart and his skull burst open and his blood sprayed into the faces of the other Special Tactics soldiers. They stood there in the street for the next half second, turning frantically in all directions to see where the enemy was. There were no gunshots, no muzzle flashes, no signs of movement on the street or inside the apartments or on the rooftops. It was impossible to tell where the opposing fire was coming from. Then, while Turner’s corpse was still falling to the ground, Sergeant Lee’s head exploded.
The other soldiers ran for cover. Three of the corporals dashed toward an SUV parked at the curb, and two of them followed Sergeant Hernandez toward a minivan on the other side of the street. But as Hernandez sprinted across Sherman Avenue, flames suddenly erupted from his backpack. Then the C-4 inside his pack detonated.
The explosion cratered the asphalt and crumpled the minivan and killed all the remaining men on the Special Tactics team. A plume of smoke and debris fountained above the street, and the blast wave shattered every window on the block. The wave rolled a hundred yards down Sherman Avenue and knocked over Hanson and most of the thirty soldiers behind him. Even the Stryker troop carrier rocked on its tires.
Hanson’s ears rang from the blast, but he managed to get back on his feet. He was in combat mode now, automatically following his training. They’d been caught in an ambush, and the opposing forces could be anywhere. The only viable option was retreat.