“Can’t see it, but there’s something down here in the woods,” the voice crackled. “Got a hell of a jolt on the Geiger.”
“All right, all units,” Bahr said. “Circle at a quarter-mile radius from Number Seven. Ground units alert for encirclement. Use caution. Whatever’s in that circle, keep it in there! But do not attack. Repeat: do not attack! Out.”
He turned to Alexander as Carmine came stumbling up through the muck and rain and slid into the car without saying a word. “You heard that,” Bahr said. “I need this car to join the ground units.”
“This is a Volta,” Alexander said. “You’ll break your neck in it, if you don’t know how to drive it.”
“Then you drive it,” Bahr said. “Now get it moving.”
He knows you, Alexander thought. He knows you, and he’s playing this little game out, just waiting for you to break. There was no longer any question in Alexander’s mind about his being investigated. But McEwen could get him off the hook. He’d known McEwen back in Mexico, when McEwen was training with BRINT. McEwen would help him . . . .
Viciously, Alexander slammed the controls into full drive. The car screamed out of the soft, muddy rut, siren going, and Alexander sent it screeching along the center of the road strip, wet grass and bushes slapping at the sleek, high-speed plastic shell, headlight on high and red turret-light winking. The Volta could actually do 300 on a good road, but on this winding, gravel-shouldered road strip Alexander held it down to 120. They made a sharp turn, and he slammed the directional gyro at a ninety-degree offset, using the boosters to overcome the inertia of the loaded car. Gravel spat out under the single wheel as the Volta skidded onto the shoulder, gyros whining to keep the car from toppling. He could feel Bahr’s huge body stiffen as a tree loomed up at them, then relax as they slammed off it and kept on going after the jolt.
“Hold it,” Bahr said as they approached the helicopter cluster. Alexander hit the brake button and the Volta squealed to a halt, rocking. Spotlights were on them for three seconds before the car stopped. Carmine opened the door, and he and Bahr jumped out without a word to Alexander.
The DIA ground troops were already trotting into the drenched brush and forest, their flashlights bobbing, disappearing. They melted into the brush with a certain grim urgency . . . no shouting, no waste motion. Probably veterans of the crack 801st, Alexander thought, the legendary guerilla army that had been fighting the war of containment in the East Indies. Commanded by the British, the 801st had never been manned by anyone but Americans, the toughest, hardest, most incorrigible mercenaries the British could find, executing raids on Indonesia and South China that made Sherman’s march look like a reforestation project. British Intelligence used the 801st to forge stubborn links in the Asian economic and political situation, but BRINT’s interest in a young army sent back to the Americas each year a steady quota of battle-toughened, BRINT-trained intelligence men in their late twenties.
The DIA had their pick of these men, and to date there was no record of anyone resisting arrest by DIA agents. Which, Alexander thought, was just a little bit ominous.
“Strike!” the squawker boomed again. “Ground Unit Three. There’s something up here, Mr. Bahr.”
“Hold your position,” Bahr’s voice grated from one of the ’copters. “What do you see?”
“Nothing clearly. It’s hot, though . . . .”
“Get some flares in the air. Bring your circle in tighter, but hold fire . . .” Bahr’s voice trailed off in a crackle of static. Then another voice came in.
“Mr. Bahr? This is Johnson, at the plant. You were right, sir. Three U-metal slugs are missing from Number Four pile. Dummies loaded instead.”
“Good work,” Bahr’s voice came back. “That about clinches it. We’ve got them cornered out here. Sit tight.”
Stunned, slack-mouthed, Alexander slumped back in his seat, his heart barely beating, cold sweat forming on his palms and forehead. A dead, crushing weight seemed to be locked inside his chest.
Three slugs missing.
Even McEwen could not help him now.
His security system, worked out step by step over the months at Wildwood, thought to be absolutely flawless, had let three U-metal slugs, each weighing fifteen pounds and furiously radioactive, get out of the compound. And his career . . . he swallowed, a bitter taste cloying up in his mouth.
A supply dump in Watooki at best. At worst, a full-scale DIA investigation, a court-martial, a DEPCO psych-probe, the final down-grading.
Once Bahr got those three slugs, he was finished.
Somewhere in the sky a flare burst, throwing dead white light down on the treetops. Another flare, and another, appeared below the fiery ’copter rotor jets. Alexander pulled himself out of the car, stumbled up the hill into the woods. He heard radio chatter crackling from a ground unit as he passed:
“Disk . . . .”
“What is it? Where?”
“. . . looks like some kind of craft . . . .”
“Where?”
“. . . metal disk, over there to the left . . . .”
“. . . been there all the time . . . .”
“Move back, move back . . . .”
Beyond the closing circle of men, Alexander could see something. It lay in a clearing in the trees, vaguely defined in the harsh flare light . . . something large and gray and flat.
“Put a camera on it, whatever it is,” somebody was shouting very near him.
“Get us Air, Lowrie Field; well need Air. Ground units hold . . . .”
Quite abruptly, the gray thing in the clearing seemed to blossom out like a violent orange flower. The blast wave of the explosion struck Alexander like a wall, hurling him flat, as a flame-colored cloud mushroomed upward, brilliantly lit from below by something burning furiously, briefly, then sputtering out in a wave of intense heat. The ’copters still in the air closed in like so many vultures to peer down into the smoking crater, and in the silence and darkness there was only the scattered sound of bits of wood, dirt and metal falling down through the trees; then shortly after, the smaller fragments, almost dust, sprinkling slowly down in the rain, silent, invisible, and slightly radioactive.
Chapter Two
Numbly, Alexander flexed his fingers a couple of times, feeling his wrist artery hammer revealingly against the pressure cuff that was making his left hand swell and discolor, and driving one of the polygraph pens across the recording sheet in an agitated sinusoid pattern.
“It’s all very simple, Major,” Bahr was saying, walking around in front of him. “All we want from you is the truth. Now, I think that’s a reasonable enough request under the circumstances. Just a few simple facts. You know them. You must know them, because you were the security officer there, and you admit you devised the system. Our investigation is going to turn up those facts eventually. You’ll help yourself if you save us some time.”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Alexander insisted, his diaphragm collapsing in a long, exasperated sigh.
McEwen, sitting on one side of the room, motioned to Bahr, who glared at Alexander for a moment and then turned away with a growl. From the corner of his eye Alexander watched them whisper. Bahr’s huge fist slapped the arm of McEwen’s chair angrily; the elderly DIA Director mumbled back something low and inaudible, shaking his head. Alexander couldn’t catch the words, but one thing was apparent: Bahr was winning the argument.
John McEwen had arrived. McEwen, the ace-in-the-hole, the white hope, the letter-of-the-law defender of National Stability and the democratic way of life, took one look at the gaping crater five miles north of Wildwood, and ordered a complete news blackout (illegal except under hemispheric Condition B), isolation of the area within a twenty-mile radius (illegal without consent of the Army unit responsible for the land, since it was part of a military reservation, and Alexander had not even been asked for his consent), and scrambling of all communications (legal, but almost without precedent since the bleak days of 1995-96 when the pa
nic wave that followed the Crash was at its bloodiest).
Bahr had outlined the observed facts to McEwen, briefly and authoritatively, and McEwen had accepted the most obvious explanation. The three U-metal slugs missing from the plant had been carried—by person or persons unknown—past the road alarm, and loaded into the vehicle in the woods—whatever that was—which promptly blew up when searchers approached it too closely.
When Alexander had protested and brought up certain annoying details such as the questions of method, motive, and the silent exit monitors at the plant gates, Bahr had countered angrily with charges of obstruction, interference, non-co-operation and concealment. Quickly he tore into the lardy arrival of Alexander’s security troops, who were still strung out halfway across Illinois on a long eye-beam perimeter, wondering what had happened.
Finally Alexander had played his trump . . . the blatant illegality of Bahr’s DIA unit forcing an inventory at the plant. McEwen muttered something unintelligible about Project Frisco, and walked back to stare into the crater again. Alexander was packed into a ’copter and flown to Chicago for questioning.
The questioning had started six hours ago.
In spite of the glare of lights in front of him, Alexander could turn his head enough to get a fairly good look at McEwen’s face. The DIA Director’s skin looked dirty gray, his eyes hollow with deep creases. The comers of his mouth were pulled down, immobile even when he talked. The face was a mask, the face of a man who had been sick for a long time . . . or afraid.
Do I look like that? Alexander wondered. He knew the look of a man who was fighting to hold on; he had seen it on his own face often enough these last few months.
He broke off sharply as the real, immediate problem of how to get this investigation over with exploded in his mind. He felt a sudden wrenching in his stomach, and a dizzy, sick feeling of fear. So far neither he nor Bahr had given the slightest indication of their previous acquaintance, imposing their own private rules in this cat-and-mouse game of polygraphy in which Alexander was the carefully-calibrated mouse. But the questioning was getting sharper. Bahr didn’t seem to tire; already Alexander could feel fatigue catching up with him.
It was only a matter of time before his ability to pick his way through the razor-edged questions would begin to falter, and confusion and bewilderment would set in . . . .
And he knew, as Bahr glared at him and argued with McEwen, that there was more to this than just a routine interrogation.
Bahr was remembering Antarctica.
Vividly the memory flooded back to Alexander now. Bahr had been in the Army then . . . a sergeant in Communications Command, assigned to the tiny post in the early-warning net that stretched across the frozen Antarctic continent.
How long ago? Four years? Five?
Alexander’s mind placed the date instantly: July 12th, 2019, just three days after the first radar alert, when the scopes of Station 1743, buried deep in the Antarctic ice, had picked up three unidentified objects moving over the lower end of South America at an altitude of 800 miles, three times higher than anything had traveled since the satellites had been scuttled and the infamous Moon-rocket project abandoned back in the ’90s. The three objects had made four passes around the Earth at precise orbital speed, tracked at the South Pole and across the Pacific, then lost as they moved over the East Indies, China and the Soviet. An immediate report had gone to the special intelligence section of DEPEX, and when the objects did not reappear after the fourth pass across the “dead” area, the entire Western Bloc went into Condition B—preparation for H-missile attack.
Coded intelligence releases from DEPEX inferred that the Eastern Bloc had developed a missile, unknown even to British Intelligence liaison, which could be mounted in orbit. BRINT of course denied that anything approaching that size could have been developed in Eastern territory without their knowing it years ago, and suggested an extraterrestrial source, possibly meteorites—a somewhat unsatisfactory idea, since meteorites do not normally orbit at 800 miles.
Antarctic Station 1743, Alexander’s command, was the chief early-warning unit between Southeast Asia and the vital South American population centers. It was expected that the first hostile move from the East would be an armored H-missile plunging into the buried station from a 600-mile altitude. The station had been living on coffee and hyperstimulated fear for forty hours, the air reeking with sweat and adrenalin, the men snarling at each other with increasing tension, when the sergeant had come into Alexander’s office.
“I want six hundred sedation units,” he said.
“What for, Sergeant?”
“I am going to put half the personnel under sedation for twelve hours,” the sergeant said, “before we have a riot.”
“Half the personnel!” Alexander said. “That’s impossible. We’re on Condition B.”
“I know that. I can’t be responsible for blunders in Washington,” the sergeant said to him. “If we’re hit, it won’t matter whether we’re sleeping in bed or souped up on Benny, but if those men out there stay awake any longer they won’t have to be H’d. They’ll tear each other apart.”
Alexander had known that the tension was growing there, but he was in command of the station, and a Condition B could not be ignored. “Suppose you let me make the decisions about the welfare of the men, Sergeant,” he said sharply. “That is not your responsibility.”
The sergeant stared at him across the desk, clenching his fists. “You stupid bastard,” he said distinctly. “You pigheaded, uncomprehending son of a bitch. If I didn’t make it my responsibility to run this lousy unit for you, you’d have been cashiered out of the Army in a week for snafuing!” Alexander realized, suddenly, that the huge man was trembling with rage. “Do I get those sedation units, Captain?”
“No!” Alexander managed to choke out. “Get out of here. Get back to your station.”
For an instant he thought the man was going to reach out and take him by the throat. Then Sergeant Julian Bahr turned on his heel. The heavy plastic door slammed, and he was gone.
Four hours later, in the mess hall, one of the men began beating on the table with a heavy plastic cup, the long underground chamber echoing the blows. In an instant the walls were reverberating with the thundering clatter that could be heard all through the station. Someone began to scream. In a moment twelve hundred men were screaming, cursing, yelling at each other, the benzedrine-stimulated fear and frustrated helplessness erupting in volcanic pandemonium.
At the decibel peak of this first crescendo Alexander walked into the mess hall, unarmed and alone, aware that he might not live three minutes longer, but realizing that the riot had to be stopped. What he said to that mob of angry, frightened, cursing men was drowned in noise; quite suddenly he was facing a closing circle of hate-filled faces. With coffee mugs and table knives in their hands they crowded toward him . . . .
Something seized him from behind. Someone jerked him out the door, half-carried and half-dragged him down the corridor, up a flight of stairs and down another corridor to the weapons room. Groggily he saw Bahr kick the door open with a wrench of cracking plastic. Then with a heave Bahr threw him through the inner door that led to the weapons rack.
“The key, give me the key,” Bahr demanded. Heavy-duty stunners lined the racks, carefully secured by a steel bar and padlock.
“You don’t touch those weapons,” Alexander warned.
Bahr jerked him around viciously, turned his pockets inside out, dumping the contents on the floor. “Where do you have that key?”
“You’re not going to touch those weapons,” Alexander told him bluntly. “I’m still in charge of this station.” Bahr didn’t even answer. He slammed the inner door shut and bolted it as the sounds of the pursuing mob grew loud in the corridor. As the first pounding of cups, feet, fists and shoulders began on the plastic door, Bahr crouched in front of the weapons rack, his hands gripping the six-foot-long steel lock bar. He began wrenching at the bar, his huge back and legs stra
ining.
Alexander pulled a thin metal cylinder out of his pocket, ostensibly a pencil, but actually a low-power stunner which all foreign-service officers carried. “Get away from that rack,” he said. “Those men will take my orders or face mutiny charges. I’m not going to have anybody doing any killing and paralyzing with stunners.”
Bahr only grunted as the steel rod began to bend a little.
“I warn you . . . I’ll fire,” Alexander said. Bahr turned his head, saw the shiny cylinder and recognized what it was. Behind him the plastic door shuddered under the crash of a heavy bench slamming into it.
“Drop dead,” Bahr said, and began pulling on the rod again.
Alexander fired. Bahr screamed and hit the floor like a block of wood, smashing his face on the floor until the blood ran from his nose. The stunner should have knocked him unconscious and paralyzed his whole body in a rigid knot, but it didn’t. Somehow, unbelievably, he pushed himself off the floor, grabbed the back of a chair and hoisted himself erect, his right arm, neck and side frozen in the position he was hit, his right leg jerking in agonizing, uncontrollable spasms. Alexander started to aim the cylinder again, and Bahr swung the chair, hitting him across the face and knocking him back against the wall. The cylinder flew out of his hand across the room.
Dazed, Alexander saw the big man drag himself across the room, using the chair as a crutch, his right leg and arm flapping, his face half-twisted out of recognition with pain. Alexander watched incredulously as Bahr seized the padlock in his left hand and slowly twisted the lock apart, the hard steel snapping with a sudden crack. Bahr tore the lock-bar off and pulled a sleek heavy-duty stunner from the rack as the plastic door cracked under the savage pounding, spilling a dozen men into the room.
What happened after that Alexander learned later in bits and snatches while he was recovering in Buenos Aires Military Hospital from a fractured skull and a broken nose. He had passed out. Bahr, armed only with an unloaded stunner, drove the rioters back into the mess hall and, though obviously half-paralyzed, marched six hundred of them through twelve-hour sedation shots, ordering the four frightened lieutenants around like puppy dogs. With half the station sedated, he sat at the head of the mess hall, stunner across his knee, making the men recite dirty stories for eight hours until his leg stopped jerking and his right side would function again.
The Invaders Are Comming! Page 3