The Noise

by James Patterson

  “I’ve been assured by people much smarter than me that sonic weapons, both current and future, are not, and will never be, capable of delivering the damage we’re witnessing here. Frankly, if they were, we’d see a military push to replace conventional weapons. Chemical weapons, nuclear, even most conventional, they leave a residual aftermath. This is…”

  “This is what?” Martha asked.

  Harbin huffed. “Clean. He was going to say clean. Isn’t that right, Mr. Holt?”

  Holt didn’t answer.

  Harbin faced Martha and Reiber. “We’ve got no radiation, and a swift, targeted destruction. The military considers that to be a clean weapon. Highly desirable.” He stood and wiped his hands on his slacks. “If this was a weapon, I guarantee someone is trying to figure out who possesses it. If it wasn’t a weapon, Hoover and those at DARPA are interested because they want to know if it could be turned into one.”

  “Lovely,” Reiber muttered.

  She’d filmed the entire exchange.

  A group of Army Rangers, three men and a woman, approached them, stepping carefully over the debris. To Holt, the woman said, “Sir, we’ve got something.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Martha

  Walking along the center of the anomaly, Martha and the others followed the four Rangers toward the large crevasse they saw from the air. She found it amazing how cleanly the damage cut through the forest.

  She was quickly reminded of the violent devastation when they came upon the remains of a barn. One support beam stuck up out of the ground like an old, crooked finger scratching at the sky. Hay was scattered about. If there had been animals inside, there was no sign of them now.

  Martha found the silence unnerving. Not a single bird chirped.

  Two other Army Rangers watched them approach from the center of the debris. Tense, weapons at the ready.

  Holt kept glancing at his watch.

  “If there’s no radiation,” Martha said, “why are you so concerned with the amount of time we spend here?”

  Harbin said, “I believe Mr. Holt thinks the bogeyman might come back.”

  “Could it?”

  Holt appeared frustrated. “We don’t know what it is. Best to remain cautious. I’ve been ordered to limit exposure to two hours until we know more.”

  With the camera up, Reiber slowly walked the perimeter of the barn. The soldiers carefully avoided the lens, turning with her so she only got shots of their backs. Martha noticed none of them wore name tags on their uniforms.

  The female Ranger led them to the center of the barn. There was a trapdoor in the ground, open. She produced a bulky cassette recorder with RADIOSHACK stamped into the old, chipped plastic. “We found this inside, on the top step, sir.”

  Holt took the recorder from her, turned it over in his hand, then pressed Play.

  Static.

  A young girl’s voice: “Momma? Poppa? We’re okay. Where are you? We’re going to number two. We’ll wait for you there.”

  More static.

  Holt rewound the tape, increased the volume, and played it again. When the message finished, he looked up at the others. “Teenager, maybe? Hard to tell.”

  “She said ‘we,’” Martha pointed out. “We’ve got at least two survivors.”

  Harbin said, “Play it one more time?”

  Holt did.

  “She doesn’t sound deaf to me.”

  “You can’t always tell,” Reiber said. “I knew a girl in college who’d only been deaf for two years, and her inflection and tone were perfect.”

  Harbin shrugged. “If she didn’t write that message on the wall, that means we have more survivors; that’s my point.”

  The Ranger pointed the barrel of her weapon at the open trapdoor. “We’ve cleared the space. It’s tight, but you’ll want to go down there, sir. There are signs of a struggle.”

  “A struggle?”

  “On the ground, to the right of the steps. Possibly more. Hard to tell, sir.”

  Holt nodded, took out a flashlight, and started down the steps.

  Harbin leaned in close to Martha. “I’m not a fan of confined spaces. I think I’ll sit this one out.”

  She patted his shoulder and followed down behind Holt.

  A storm cellar.

  Holt stepped down onto the dirt floor: Martha, too. Reiber remained on the steps, panning the camera.

  Shelves lined most of the walls, many of them toppled. The various canned goods and boxes they once held littered the floor, made it difficult to maneuver the tight space. A bag of flour lay in the far corner, burst, covering everything in a thin layer of white dust.

  Holt knelt beside the steps, where the Ranger had mentioned.

  When Martha looked down, he was picking at something with the tip of his pen.

  She frowned. “Is that hair?”

  Holt nodded. “There are bits of scalp, too. Blond. Any chance you grabbed a sample bag from the tent?”

  Martha shook her head.

  “Here.” Harbin tossed one down to him from the opening above.

  Holt carefully bagged the hair, slipped it into his pocket, and stood, looking around. “Tough to say if all this damage was from some type of fight or the anomaly itself.”

  “Why would someone fight?”

  Holt walked over to one of the toppled shelves and studied what looked like blood on the edge of the board. “Tense situations tend to bring out the worst in people. Maybe they saw this as a safe space and there wasn’t enough room for everyone who tried to get down here.” He found more blood on a can of corn on the floor. He picked it up with the tips of his fingers and held it in the flashlight beam. “Blood happens in an accident. People get hurt. Hair doesn’t come out in clumps unless someone or something pulls it.”

  His watch began to beep. Holt glanced down at the display and tapped a button to silence the alarm. “Time to go.”

  Martha didn’t move. “We can’t leave—we’ve got a survivor out there. A young girl!”

  Holt gestured for Reiber to go back up, then started up the steps behind her. “Two hours, max. That’s my orders.”

  “I’m not going to leave a frightened little girl out in the woods!”

  From above, Holt called back, “Not your problem, Doctor. You’re here to determine the cause of the anomaly, not search and rescue. The Rangers will find her.” Turning to the soldier at the top of the steps, he said, “Is he here yet?”

  “Less than a minute out, sir.”

  Holt scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to the woman along with the old cassette recorder. Turning to his right, he said something Martha couldn’t make out, then pointed down at her.

  Two other soldiers appeared up above, looking down from the trapdoor. The two who had been guarding the barn.

  “Less than a minute out,” Holt repeated. “It’s covered, Dr. Chan. Get your ass on the chopper, or I’ll have these fine gentlemen carry you.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me.”

  Martha hesitated another moment, then cursed under her breath and huffed up the steps.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fraser

  Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Fraser peeled off his Velcro name tag and slipped it into the manila envelope on the seat beside him. His wallet and cell phone went in behind it. He handed the envelope up to the chopper pilot, who stuffed it into a leather bag.

  “Approaching forty-five, one-twenty-one now, sir. Stand by to disembark.”

  “Understood.”

  He glanced back down at the debrief documents in his hand.

  45.3736 degrees north, 121.6960 degrees west. Western corner of Mount Hood, Oregon. Several hours ago, he’d been asleep in his barracks at Lewis–McChord, just south of Seattle. The president asked for him, a munitions expert, specifically. He’d been given fifteen minutes to wake, shower, and prep for departure. Because he always kept a go-bag at the ready, he finished with six minutes to spare.

&nbs
p; The video conference with the joint chiefs on his way to the airfield had been brief. He was told to treat this event as an attack on American soil. Employ the utmost secrecy.

  He didn’t ask any questions, never did.

  He had only one concern—the debrief stated civilians had been employed as part of the investigative team.

  He sighed.

  Civilians.

  Fraser’s father had been career Army, his grandfather before him. Neither had achieved a rank higher than captain. Neither had lived long enough to see him achieve that rank or surpass it. He lost his grandfather to cancer. His father to Afghanistan. He hadn’t seen his mother in nearly four years. She lived in El Paso, and he had little time or inclination to take leave.

  Having graduated high school early, at the age of seventeen, and with letters of recommendation from his father and several high-ranking officials close to his father, he was accepted into West Point two months later. He majored in defense and strategic studies, took extra classes over the summer rather than return home, and graduated at the top of his class exactly four years later. From there, he shipped to Fort Benning in Georgia for Basic and began a series of deployments where he quickly moved up the ranks, becoming one of the youngest lieutenant colonels in the Army at the age of thirty-five.

  Civilians got in the way, slowed things down.

  Cogs.

  Fraser liked a smooth-turning wheel.

  The debrief folder contained several photographs—he took them out and held them next to the chopper window one at a time. Whatever caused the damage down below worked in a straight line, a damn near perfectly straight line, from what he could see from the air.

  In Iraq, he’d seen entire villages flattened by drone attacks, Patriot missile batteries, even MOAB, Mother of All Bombs bunker-busters. They all left a similar scar behind—a crater with burnt, disheveled earth and debris radiating out from the center. He’d been briefed on foreign advanced weaponry just last week, assured by the joint chiefs that no foreign actor had assets in their sky, no new satellite-based weapon or laser fired from space. The latest threat out of Russia was called 3K22 or “zircon”—a hypersonic missile capable of traveling at speeds up to two miles per second. Current missile defense systems were useless at that speed. Didn’t really matter; intel suggested 3K22 was at least several more years from use.

  His money was on the Chinese.

  Nearly all electronic devices contain one or more components manufactured in China. Recently it was discovered that many of those connected devices—everything from cell phones to wi-fi toasters—contained firmware that could be used for surveillance purposes. Even worse, much of the internet backbone contained hardware developed by the Chinese. In private circles, Fraser had heard talk of something called the Black Dragon Switch—a program linked to all these devices, capable of taking them over with the flip of a switch. Theoretically, they could shut off the lights and attack us while we fumbled around in the dark.

  Sneaky bastards, the lot of them.

  “Ten seconds to ground, sir. Stand by.”

  Reaching for his watch, Fraser set a timer for two hours.

  He slipped the photographs and documents back into the debrief folder, sealed it, and handed it up to the pilot. He was out the door before the skids of the chopper touched down. Ducking low, shielding his eyes from airborne dust, he ran across the small field to a waiting Ranger.

  Fraser shouted to be heard over the helicopter. “I was told to report to someone named Keenen Holt.”

  One hand on her hat, she nodded toward the west. “Gone, sir. Back to base camp. Time window expired. He gave me this for you—” She handed him a beat-up cassette player and a scribbled note.

  The note read:

  Contain them!

  Chapter Eighteen

  Martha

  Dr. Martha Chan stared out the small window near the front door of Zigzag Station, a cold cup of coffee in her hand. Holt had finished with her twenty minutes ago, and now she was free to observe all that had happened while they were gone. Army personnel had managed to complete the barrier around the perimeter of the ranger station: concrete blockades at the bottom with ten feet of chain-link fencing bolted to the top, capped off with glimmering razor wire. Every few feet were red signs reading, DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE. Soldiers were walking the length of the barrier in pairs, at least a dozen. Four more manned the only access gate. Two helicopter pads had been established within the perimeter, four more outside the gate. Numerous helicopters—EC135s, several smaller ones, and a large troop carrier, were in constant motion, ferrying people between Zigzag and the anomaly.

  Tents had gone up, too. She counted fifteen of them, all within the confines of this newly formed compound.

  Martha stared at the fortified fence between her and the outside world.

  Harbin’s words echoed back, Aren’t you the least bit curious as to what they’re trying to keep out of this little slice of heaven?

  During the flight back, their microphones had been disabled, making it impossible for them to speak with one another. Upon landing at Zigzag, soldiers escorted them to individual tents. She’d been alone for nearly an hour before Holt retrieved her, brought her to a tent he claimed as his own, and sat her in a chair facing a video camera on a tripod.

  “Summarize your thoughts on what you just saw for me.”

  Martha first looked at him, then directly into the camera. “I don’t have a fucking clue what I just saw. I need to call my children.”

  “When we’re finished.”

  During thirty minutes of useless back-and-forth, a medical tech checked her blood pressure, hearing, eyesight, and drew three vials of blood that she placed in a small silver case and carried out of the room.

  He’d finally dismissed her, told her to wait here while he talked to Harbin, Fravel, and Reiber. She hadn’t seen Brian Tomes or Brenna Hauff, the two from NASA, since they left.

  He’d given her a sat phone, at least there was that, but when she dialed her ex-husband, she only got voicemail. She really needed to hear her children’s voices right now. Something about a kid’s voice made everything all right.

  Finishing the coffee, she retrieved the phone and hit redial. Unlike a cell phone, this one took about twenty seconds to connect. The line rang twice and again went to voicemail. “Goddamn you, Mark.” She waited for his recording to finish, then left another message. “Hey, it’s me. Sorry for the strange number. Please pick up or call me back. I want to talk to the little ones. All right. I’ll try again in a little bit.”

  She disconnected.

  Martha could picture the cocksucker staring down at his phone and just not answering, the kids probably within arm’s reach. Emily had a play tonight at school. Michael had a lacrosse match. She should be there. No doubt Mark would play up the fact that she wasn’t. He’d scribble something down in his little notebook for their next custody hearing. “Sorry, kids, Mom must be busy.”

  The door opened and Harbin came through, Fravel a few paces behind him.

  “Where’s Holt?” Martha asked.

  “Still grilling Reiber.” Harbin stepped up beside her at the window. “I don’t like this one bit.”

  Fravel collapsed into a chair, eyeing the sat phone in her hand. “Does that work? Can I see it?”

  Martha tossed the phone to him, watched him peck in a number. After about half a minute, he left a message, disconnected, and set the phone down on the table. “Did he ask either of you about crop circles?”

  Harbin’s eyebrows went up. “Crop circles?”

  Fravel nodded. “You know, patterns cut into fields of wheat and corn.”

  Martha and Harbin both shook their heads.

  Fravel went on. “He showed me pictures of several different ones around the world, but he focused on one in particular near Steens Mountain, about three-hundred-fifty miles from here. It was this giant Hindu symbol called a Shri Yantra mandala. Two Air National Guard pilots spotted it from nine thousand feet on
a routine patrol on August 10, 1990. They flew this route daily and swore it wasn’t there the day before. This thing was huge—13.3 miles of lines carved into a dry lake bed. Each line measured exactly ten inches wide and three inches deep—large, perfectly shaped squares, circles, and triangles, all coming together to create this ancient symbol. The Army went out to investigate, and when they got up close, they didn’t find any sign of tool marks. No tire tracks in or out, nothing but the ones they created.”

  “Haven’t they proven those things to be hoaxes?” Martha asked. “Kids using boards to stomp down the crops, that kind of thing?”

  Fravel leaned back in the chair and spread his hands. “Some, sure, but the file he showed me was marked Top Secret. He has closeup photos of the lines—ten inches wide, three inches deep, 13.3 miles in total. No visible tool marks. Holt asked me, ‘when a group of astrophysicists are locked in a room together at a conference and the alcohol is flowing, what theories come out?’”

  “And what did you tell him?” Harbin asked.

  Fravel shrugged. “There’s a small group of people who think they could be messages—labels, tags, branding—whatever you want to call it.”

  “Made by who?”

  “Are you really going to make me say it? There are no aliens. It’s a statistical improbability.”

  Harbin clucked his tongue. “You have to admit, there are similarities between crop circles and this anomaly. Think about what happens when you press your hand down into the sand at the beach. You may be able to compact it some, but most will displace. A depth of three inches is significant. The anomaly shares signs of immense pressure, the perfectly straight lines of a geometric shape, even the smaller feeder lines we saw converging with the main line. These are all similar to crop circles.”

  “But much larger,” Fravel said softly.

  Harbin nodded. “Much, much larger.”

  Fravel’s eyes went wide as he considered this.

  Outside, a large helicopter came in low and fast. It set down on one of the newly constructed pads near the far corner of the compound.