“By killing two birds with one stone,” Kleezebee said, putting a hand on the shoulder of one of the video techs. “Where’s the squad right now?”
“Ten miles out, sir,” the man reported.
“Good. Then we still have time. Get them on the horn for me.”
TWENTY-ONE
Even though the city streets were mostly abandoned, Bruno waited for the green arrow to appear on the traffic signal before turning left onto 22nd Street from Kolb Road. Now only five miles east of campus, he was driving the lead car of their three-vehicle convoy in the right-most lane, keeping under the posted speed limit. L was to his right, staring out the passenger’s window, while two more Bruno copies were directing the lumbering tanker trucks behind him.
Bruno’s handheld, ten-watt Motorola radio squelched from inside the middle console, startling him for a moment. “Rabbit, this is Base, do you read?”
Bruno dug for the two-way radio, taking his eyes off the road.
“Hey, watch out,” L said, snapping out of his trance.
One of tanker trucks blew its horn three times when Bruno’s black four-door sedan drifted to the right, nearly hitting the curb. Bruno swerved the car to the left, just missing a newspaper dispenser chained to a light pole. His heart was pumping full steam when he rolled down his window and gave the other Bruno copies a courtesy wave. He picked up the radio and pressed the talk switch. “This is Rabbit. I read you loud and clear, over.”
“There’s been a change in plans,” Kleezebee said. “I need you to deploy to checkpoint Alpha. You’ve got forty-seven minutes.”
“Roger that. Proceeding to Checkpoint Alpha,” Bruno replied, adjusting the angle of the camera mounted to the dash. It was disguised as a portable GPS unit. “How’s the video feed, sir?”
“We’re receiving you five by five. Is L ready for this?”
“I think so,” Bruno replied, looking at L.
“Excellent. Make sure you’re not captured.”
“Will do, Chief,” Bruno said before hearing Kleezebee’s sign-off.
“Are we going to make it there in time?” L asked.
“Yes, if I can keep this thing off the sidewalk.”
“So we’re really going to do this?”
Bruno nodded. “We don’t have a choice. DL’s counting on us.”
Bruno pressed the transmit button on his radio. “Chase One and Two, this is Rabbit. Did you guys copy that? We’re redeploying to Checkpoint Alpha. You guys continue on with your original mission.”
“Understood,” one of the Bruno copies reported.
“Ten-four,” the other said.
Bruno looked into his rearview mirror as they drove through the next intersection. The tankers behind him slowed down, then turned left, per their instructions. “Good luck, guys,” he said.
* * *
“What’s their ETA?” Lucas asked one of the silo’s video surveillance techs, keeping his eyes on the video monitor just below the center screen. It was streaming live from the camera mounted on Bruno’s dashboard.
“Approaching the checkpoint now,” the tech said.
“Are the tankers in position?” Kleezebee asked.
“Yes, sir, location confirmed.”
“Go ahead. Call the press.”
The video screen flickered twice as Bruno’s sedan inched forward toward Checkpoint Alpha, which controlled access to the campus from 6th Street. The checkpoint was comprised of two semi-circles of sandbags piled four feet high, manned by two National Guardsmen each. A red and white-colored barricade stretched from one set of sandbags to the other, blocking the street. A Humvee with a roof-mounted machine gun was parked behind the post, in case anyone tried to breech the checkpoint.
The wide-angle camera was aimed straight ahead, out over the hood. One of the checkpoint guards disappeared from view as he walked up to the driver’s window. Both the miniature U.S. flag mounted on the left side of the hood and the two-star command flag on the right were flapping in the breeze.
“Here we go,” Kleezebee said.
“Too bad we don’t have audio,” Drew said.
“If Bruno does his job, we shouldn’t need it. The guards will surely recognize his passenger, then take action.”
A few seconds later, the screen showed Bruno’s vehicle backing away from the checkpoint at high speed, providing an underside view of the lower concourse to the university’s 58,000-seat stadium to the right. Smoke from its spinning tires hung in the air as the vehicle spun ninety degrees counterclockwise, then accelerated west along 6th Street.
“ETA to the tunnel?” Kleezebee asked.
“Four minutes.”
Lucas checked the video feed monitoring the open stairwell shaft above NASA’s bunker and the one in front of his apartment complex. The soldiers guarding both locations took off running, scrambling away from their posts. “Excellent. The chase is on.”
“What about my mom’s house?” Drew asked.
The tech changed one of the other monitors to show Dorothy’s neighborhood. The soldiers were no longer positioned along her street.
“Wow, better than we hoped. Looks like they all got the message,” Lucas said.
“What’s the lead separation?” Kleezebee asked his man.
“Two minutes, sir.”
“That’s too close. Notify the tankers and show me the tunnel feed.”
The center screen switched to a lengthwise view of a two-lane road. The camera was mounted deep inside a tunnel whose surface had been desecrated by a blanket of brightly colored graffiti. Two military tankers were sitting at the far end of the tunnel, just outside the entrance, parked on opposite sides of the street. Clouds of white and blue smoke were puffing out of their tailpipes.
“Can you zoom in?” Drew asked. “I can’t see Bruno’s car.”
“He’ll arrive in a moment,” the tech answered, not changing the camera’s focus.
“ETA to the flash point?” Kleezebee asked.
“Twenty-seven minutes, sir.”
“Cutting it a little close, don’t you think?” Lucas asked his boss.
“Unless something unexpected happens, we should be fine. Are the big rigs in place?”
“Ready and waiting, sir,” the tech answered.
* * *
“There are the tankers. Looks like we’re a go,” Bruno told L, checking the sedan’s jittery rearview mirror. The swarm of vehicles chasing him was growing larger in the reflection.
“Dude, the access ramp is coming up fast,” L said, tightening his seatbelt before gripping the top of the dashboard with both hands.
Bruno waved to his brethren as the sedan blurred past the waiting tankers. He eased off on the gas pedal, preparing for a sharp left turn once they cleared the thousand-foot tunnel.
“I sure hope this works,” L said.
“It should; there’s no other way onto the Interstate from here. They have to come this way.”
Bruno’s mirror showed the tankers pulling their front bumpers together, blocking his view of the oncoming procession. Bruno changed lanes and flipped on his left turn signal.
“A blinker? Really? Now?” L asked.
“Sorry, old habit,” Bruno said after a short chuckle. He turned off the blinker and peeked again into his rearview mirror. All he could see were the tankers blocking the tunnel entrance.
As his sedan turned left and approached the incline to the freeway, Bruno looked to his left. The two Bruno replicas were standing together just inside the tunnel’s entrance, on his side of the tanker trucks.
“Thanks for the help, guys,” he told them on the radio.
“Good luck and Godspeed,” one of the Bruno copies replied.
* * *
“How many Bruno copies are there?” Lucas asked Kleezebee when the video feed showed two of them standing together just inside the tunnel entrance.
“Eleven in all.”
“Couldn’t afford an even dozen?” Lucas joked.
The video tech laug
hed. Kleezebee sneered at him.
“Sir, the sedan’s made it onto the freeway and is headed south,” the tech said.
“Give Bruno Two the go ahead.”
The screen showed one of the Bruno replicas attaching a tan-colored object to the rear section of both tanker trucks.
“C-4?” Lucas asked his boss.
“Something like that.”
“I know you want to delay the soldiers, but won’t that take out the tunnel completely?”
“It shouldn’t. We only partially filled the tankers. But if it does, there’s always the news helicopter,” Kleezebee said, pointing to the upper right screen. A circling aerial view showed the tankers facing each other outside the tunnel’s entrance.
“Oh, so that’s why you had them call the press,” Lucas replied, nodding to applaud Kleezebee’s strategy. “Smart.”
“I try,” Kleezebee grunted.
Lucas looked at the tunnel feed just in time to see the two Brunos crowd together, then vanish from sight. The tankers exploded into a billowing cloud of smoke and fire.
“Where’d they go?” Lucas asked, not trusting what his eyes had just seen.
“Nowhere, they’re still right there,” the tech replied. “Well, sort of.”
“Are they using some kind of personal cloaking device?”
Kleezebee shook his head. “It wouldn’t have protected them when the trucks exploded.”
“Then what happened, Professor?”
“They slipped into an inter-dimensional rift in subspace.”
“They did what?”
Kleezebee motioned for one of his video techs to join him. The professor grabbed hold of the tech’s forearm, just above the man’s watch, then held the arm close to Lucas’ face.
“I’ve seen Bruno wearing that same watch,” Lucas said.
“Well, it does a lot more than just tell time,” Kleezebee said. “It contains a subspace rift regulator that the wearer can use to hide inside a subspace flap. That’s where the two Brunos are right now, waiting for the area to clear. They’re perfectly safe.”
“Unreal,” Lucas smirked. “What else don’t we know?”
Kleezebee didn’t respond.
Lucas wasn’t surprised. He fiddled with the orange buttons around the perimeter of the tech’s device. “Can you show me how this thing works?”
Kleezebee nodded to the tech before returning his eyes to the video screens.
The tech put his watch hand on Lucas’ shoulder, then pressed a combination of buttons on the device with his other hand.
A moment later, Lucas was standing in a dark space, wishing he’d brought a winter coat and flashlight with him. The only thing he could see was the glow of the tech’s watch to his left. He extended his hands and tried to walk forward, but couldn’t move. He felt like he was trapped inside a locked refrigerator with the light off. “Why is it pitch black in here?”
“There’s no light source in subspace,” the tech said with a patronizingly superior attitude.
Lucas felt like an idiot for asking such a stupid question. Of course there was no light in subspace. Stars only existed in normal space. “Right. I get it. We’re in subspace. But where exactly?”
“We’re inside a subspace bubble that’s straddling the interconnecting membrane between two parallel universes. It’s like an envelope wedged into a doorjamb.”
“Which explains why we can’t move. We must be in some kind of force field that’s protecting us from the intense gravimetric forces inside the linkage.”
“Correct.”
“If the two Bruno copies are hiding in one of these right now, how will they know when it’s safe to return to normal space?”
“Our watches contain a proximity sensor,” the tech said, holding the timepiece in front of Lucas’ eyes. He pressed a pair of buttons simultaneously, illuminating a wire frame representation of the surveillance room on the watch face. Two red blips were in the center, with a single red dot to the left.
“I take it we’re the two in the middle, and the other one is Dr. Kleezebee?”
“Yes, and the diagonal row shows my co-workers, sitting at their stations.”
Lucas thought about calling out to Drew as a joke, but decided against it. The tech didn’t appear to have much of a sense of humor. “Can you take us back now?”
The tech pressed a few more buttons on the device, instantly returning them to normal space.
“Enjoy the trip?” Kleezebee asked.
“That was pretty cool, I have to admit,” Lucas replied, feeling a tad woozy. He rubbed his hands together to get the blood flowing again.
“What was it like?” Drew asked.
“Dark and cold. I felt like a shrink-wrapped sausage in there.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Nope,” Lucas replied, flexing his fingers as if he were playing the piano. “You should give it a try, little brother.”
“No, thanks, I’ll pass. I like regular space just fine.”
“Did you guys develop this technology?” Lucas asked the professor.
“We did.” Kleezebee nodded. “Besides BioTex, it’s one of our most useful inventions.”
“That’s an understatement. James Bond would’ve had a field day with that thing. So when do I get one?”
“These watches have sensors that only allow our kind to initiate a subspace rift,” the tech replied.
“So you’re a replica, too?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. But that’s not—”
“Gentlemen, we don’t have time for this,” Kleezebee said, pointing up at the screens.
The news helicopter was tracking Bruno’s sedan from the air. The military chase vehicles, led by the Humvee with the mounted machine gun from the checkpoint, had cleared a path through the tanker explosion and entered the tunnel. They were turning left onto the access ramp leading up to the freeway.
“What’s the separation?” Kleezebee asked.
“Ten miles. Do you want to deploy the semis?”
“Let’s wait and see. We may not need them.”
* * *
Bruno whizzed past a pair of eighteen-wheelers parked on the freeway’s shoulder. “Can you see Alvarez back there?”
L climbed into the back seat and looked out the rear window. “No, the only thing I see is a helicopter following us. I think it’s one of Channel 13’s.”
“Good, then we probably won’t need the semis to slow them down,” Bruno replied, raising the handheld radio to his mouth.
“Base, this is Rabbit. Do you read?”
The radio squelched. “Rabbit, this is Base. We read you loud and clear.”
“I’m five miles from the primary flash point, awaiting final instructions.”
“Increase speed to seventy-seven miles per hour and maintain course.”
“Acknowledged . . . setting cruise control to seven-seven.”
“So, that’s it? We just drive straight ahead?”
“What’d you expect?”
“I thought I’d at least get to fire my weapon before we die,” L said, holding the rifle in a firing position out of the right rear window.
“But they’re only blanks.”
“I know, but still, it would’ve been a blast to shoot it.”
“Go ahead, let ‘er rip.”
“Seriously?”
“Sure, why not? Just don’t unload the entire clip. It’s going to be loud.”
* * *
On the video feed, Lucas saw a long, slender black cylinder poke out of the sedan’s right rear window. “What’s that? In the window?” he asked Kleezebee’s tech.
“Looks like a gun barrel . . . and someone’s shooting it.”
“Is there any way to adjust the camera so we can see what they’re shooting at?” Lucas asked the tech.
“I tried, but the servos aren’t responding.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Kleezebee said. “The chase vehicles are out of range and there’s nothing else on the road
, other than our big rigs.”
Lucas thought for a moment, then realized what was happening. “I must be blowing off a few rounds,” Lucas said, smiling proudly.
“Sounds about right,” Drew said in a matter-of-fact way.
Lucas scowled at his brother. “Like you’d do any different. No red-blooded American male in Arizona would ever pass up a chance like that.”
Drew shrugged. “Hey, whatever floats your boat.”
“One minute, thirty seconds, sir,” the tech said.
“Show me the horse track in Green Valley,” Kleezebee said.
The upper left screen changed to show a wide-angle, landscape view of the northern edge of Green Valley. A sprawling mountain range cut across the upper section of the screen. The rugged brown ridges and valleys were dotted with jagged rock formations. The mountains faded to black in the far distance, serving as a backdrop for a towering cement plant in the foreground.
In between the cement plant and the track’s parking lot was flat, open desert. The desolate landscape was dotted with half-wilted bushes and saguaro cacti. Winter wasn’t a beautiful season in the desert, turning the greens pale and dry. The right edge of the screen was filled with a sea of orange-tiled roofs, packed together like war protesters storming the White House gates. The line of houses clearly marked where nature met civilization.
“Is that the best angle you have?” Kleezebee asked.
The tech nodded.
The bottom of the screen contained a section of the track’s lower grandstands. “Look at all the paper,” Lucas said, seeing thousands of tiny strips of white paper littering the track’s infield and seats.
A short minute later, Lucas asked, “Where should we see it?”
“Just on the other side of the cement plant,” the tech answered, “along the freeway’s access road.”
Right on cue, a bright flash filled the racetrack security feed, just beyond the cement factory. Moments later, the flash dissolved, leaving behind an energy dome exactly where the tech had predicted.
“Nice work,” Kleezebee said, patting the tech on the back. “Looks like our team planted just the right amount of bait.”
Lucas wasn’t sure what they were talking about but decided to wait until later to ask, when Kleezebee wasn’t as busy.
Linkage (The Narrows of Time Series Book 1) Page 29