Blindspot

by Michael McBride

  Ramsey wished he could remove his helmet, if only to clap his hands over his ears.

  A flash of muzzle flare. A resounding boom.

  The screeching ceased, and again there was only whimpering.

  And beneath it, a new sound materialized. From far away. He felt it as much as heard it. A faint rumble that made the ground tremble ever so slightly.

  He glanced at Rockwell, who stood stock-still for a moment, like a prairie dog at the mouth of its burrow, then sprinted toward the demolished wall.

  The rumble grew louder. As it did, it dissociated into the metered rhythm of a racing heartbeat, a steady, unmistakable whupp-whupp-whupp. More than one. There were several helicopters streaking directly toward them from the south, still invisible through the smoke, beyond the tree line.

  “We have to go,” Ramsey whispered.

  “Not yet,” Rockwell said. “This has to end here and now.”

  “If we’re still here when they arrive…”

  Ramsey couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence.

  “Then so be it,” Rockwell said. He looked directly at Ramsey, defiantly. There were tears on the hardened soldier’s face. “You go. I can finish this on my own.”

  “No,” Ramsey whispered. “Like you said, this has to end here.”

  They fanned out around the ruined warehouse, following the cries of the survivors even as the thumping sound of blades drowned them out.

  Ramsey sobbed as he euthanized one, the combination of sheer terror and primal rage in its bright eyes forever to be a soul-deep wound that would never heal.

  The smoke swirled around him now. The rotor wash whipped him harder and harder until he could barely stand. A searchlight passed over him, stretching his shadow across the carnage. At any second, bullets would tear up the ground around him and chew right through him. It was over. All over. Only one thing left to do. He whirled toward the chopper, raised his rifle, and bellowed as he squeezed—

  “No!” Rockwell shouted, forcing the barrel of his rifle down. “Hold your fire!”

  Ramsey raised his hand to shield his eyes from the blinding light. He could only stare as the sleek MH-60 Direct Action Penetrator, a modified Blackhawk, hovered momentarily before setting down on the ground above him where the building had once been level with the earth. The second chopper beat a circuit around the warehouse several times before touching down on the opposite side of the building, barely visible through the broken windows.

  “They’re ours,” Rockwell said. The relief in his voice was palpable. “They’re American.”

  Ramsey fell to his knees amid the wreckage and watched in wonder as an armed soldier wearing a similar hazard suit to his own sprinted down the hillside toward them.

  “The North Koreans are about ten minutes out,” the man shouted over the ceaseless thunder of the chopper. “We have to move! Now!”

  The man grabbed Ramsey by the arm and tugged him to his feet. Ramsey felt numb as he stumbled out of the ruined building and up the steep slope.

  He had been certain he was going to die.

  Now he moved as if through a dream. The world stopped turning beneath him. The rotors slowed, their thumping pulse in time with his own. The men were shouting, but he couldn’t understand their words. A chaos of white noise. Churning smoke. His sole focus was on the helicopter. He ran. Tripped. Fell. Ran again into the white glare of the searchlight. Another man, a shadow, appeared and pulled him toward freedom.

  “We have to hurry, Dr. Ramsey,” he said, and ushered Ramsey toward the open side door.

  Ramsey glanced back down the hill toward the collapsed building. Men moved through the smoke, ghosts formed of darkness, alternately hidden and then revealed.

  And in that moment before he was shoved up and into the chopper, he could have sworn he heard a primate scream.

  IX

  The following hours passed in a blur. Ramsey vaguely remembered flying so low over the dense forests that he worried they would tear off their landing gear in the branches. Wending through steep valleys. Mirroring the topography closely until they crossed the border into South Korea and then finally rising back onto radar and streaking toward the base from which he had originally been dispatched in Kansong. He’d been whisked from the chopper to a transport carrier that lifted off even before he was out of his protective suit. A medic had been waiting with an IV to hydrate him and a kit of needles to draw samples of his blood, but all Ramsey had wanted to do was sleep. The whole ordeal had seemed like a nightmare, a memory of events that could have happened to someone else entirely, when he was awakened upon landing at a tiny, unnamed Air Force Base on an anonymous island that looked like every other along the Pacific rim and transferred to the two-story base hospital for a more thorough evaluation.

  He now rested in a firm bed with sunlight streaming through the gap in the blinds onto the blankets over his legs. Its warmth was a sensation beyond belief. Outside the window, tropical trees with purple and red blossoms swayed against the placid backdrop of the turquoise ocean.

  After so many time zone changes and sleepless nights, he had no idea what time it was, or even what day.

  All he knew was that his ordeal was now over and his normal life would soon resume.

  He found the remote control and clicked on the television mounted to the otherwise bare white wall. Took a drink of the ice water on the stand beside his bed. Wondered what was on the menu for breakfast. Or was it lunch? Surely there was a clock around here somewhere.

  “…have suddenly and visibly begun to stand down,” the polished voice of a newscaster said. Ramsey glanced up to see the CNN logo at the bottom corner of the screen. A parade of stock quotes scrolled past under footage of convoys of Jeeps rolling down highways interspersed with uniformed soldiers clambering into covered ground transport vehicles. “This coming on the heels of the statement issued by Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in which he categorically redacted his initial allegations that the Republic of Korea was responsible for the unprovoked nuclear detonation on its soil. While details are still forthcoming, Kim has scheduled a brief press conference in a matter of hours in regard to what he has termed an ‘unfortunate and unforeseeable accident’ at a formerly classified nuclear storage facility near Kumgang-up. Critics decry Kim’s odd and seemingly inexplicable eleventh-hour statement as disingenuous and call for him to be held accountable for the deaths of more than a hundred refugees reportedly overcome by the fallout, but United Nations officials have quickly, and somewhat surprisingly, risen to his defense in a prepared address delivered by Security Council President Anders Odegaard.”

  The footage cut to a tall man with silver hair and piercing blue eyes behind a podium featuring the U.N. crest.

  “At this point, we have no reason to believe that Mr. Kim had been anything other than forthcoming. Considering that all involved at the site were killed in the tragedy, we find Mr. Kim’s claims that he was forced to act without the benefit of all of the facts to be plausible, if not entirely regrettable. And while we commend him on staying the launch of a full scale assault against the Republic of Korea while awaiting the results of further investigation, we find his knee-jerk response to the situation troubling, to say the least. To his credit, Mr. Kim has agreed to grant U.N. inspectors full access to any and all facilities involved in the production, enrichment, and potential weaponization of nuclear-grade material.”

  Cut to images of more armed soldiers, some of them with patches featuring the red and gold of the Chinese flag and others with the red and blue yin-yang of the Republic of Korea.

  “Despite the support of the U.N. Security Council, Chinese and South Korean forces remain mobilized, albeit in slowly diminishing numbers. A formal press release from Beijing, written in an arguably disappointed tone, offered a timetable for the withdrawal of Chinese troops from staging grounds across its southern border, but President Hu Jintao, as of yet, has declined to lower his country’s overall state
of preparedness pending an agreement with the U.N. to allow his own experts to participate in their investigation. South Korean President Lee, understandably, isn’t quite as willing to adopt the same forgive-and-forget mentality as the rest of the world, saying that ‘they weren’t the ones who had a nuclear bomb detonated in their backyard.’”

  Another cut. A sunken warehouse, smoke billowing from its collapsed roof. A shaky recording from high above. The shadow of a helicopter passing over the slanted ground of a crater.

  Ramsey’s heart nearly stopped in his chest.

  “This is the first footage captured of the Kangwon-do site, provided by North Korean officials, showing a facility which, at least superficially, appears to have no direct military applications. And while radiation levels are already plummeting, due in large measure to the subterranean nature of the detonation, conservative estimates suggest that it will still be more than twenty-four hours before levels are considered safe for the U.N. envoy—”

  A knock at the door. Ramsey glanced to his left in time to see the door swing inward.

  Rockwell stepped into the room. When Ramsey had found himself on the plane without Rockwell, he had assumed he’d never see the soldier again. He was wearing a pair of clean fatigues that somehow made him look much smaller than he had in the field. Ramsey almost didn’t recognize him without the black greasepaint on his face.

  Rockwell offered a twitch of the left corner of his mouth.

  “That burn will leave a nice tan when it fades,” Ramsey said.

  “Erythema. Thanks to the radiation and a cracked face shield. I have a good mind to sue.”

  He gestured to the lone chair beside the bed. Ramsey nodded and Rockwell plopped down with a sigh, then inclined his head toward the TV.

  “I see you’ve found the political spin channel.”

  “It’s making me dizzy just watching it. Next thing you know that warehouse will have been a facility for breeding puppies and cloning rainbows.”

  “I can only imagine the expression on Kim’s face when he took the call from the U.N.. Face an international tribunal to answer for violations of the Geneva Convention or back down with a small measure of his dignity intact.”

  “They had him by the short-hairs, all right.”

  Rockwell nodded and kept his eyes on the television. There was obviously something on his mind, but he wasn’t quite sure how to begin. Ramsey waited him out.

  “Have you been debriefed yet?”

  “Not officially, but I’d imagine someone will be coming by shortly to threaten to cut out my tongue.” Ramsey smirked. “We were never there, I assume.”

  “Never where?”

  Rockwell looked at his hands in his lap as though to make sure they weren’t shaking.

  “You suck at small talk,” Ramsey said. “Just cut to the chase.”

  Rockwell glanced up into each corner of the room in turn, then at the heating ducts, the lamp on the nightstand, and the TV like he was looking for something specific.

  “There are some things…” he said in little more than a whisper. He paused as though debating how to continue. “Some things that bother me. That just don’t sit right with me, you know?”

  Ramsey wasn’t quite certain what to say, so he simply gestured for Rockwell to proceed.

  “Remember those footprints we followed from the refugee camp toward the detonation site?” He waited for a nod of acknowledgement. “They were indistinct, right? Traveling single file, one on top of another. We couldn’t really tell how many of them there were. We just assumed they belonged to whatever was responsible for the slaughter. It made sense at the time. It was the only logical option, right?”

  “I don’t see—” Rockwell shushed him and glanced again around the room. Ramsey continued in a whisper. “I don’t see where you’re going with this.”

  “We wondered why they weren’t traveling through the trees since they could obviously do so with such ease. You even posed that question at the time. And we saw all of those branches carved up by their claws. Why would they try to hide their numbers on the ground when they made no effort at all to do so in the trees?”

  Ramsey sat up and leaned forward in the bed.

  “Did you get a good look at their feet?” Rockwell asked.

  Ramsey thought about the bare feet with the opposable big toes and the long claws.

  “I grew up in Tennessee,” Rockwell said. “I spent weeks at a time in the Great Smoky Mountains with my old man during hunting season. Deer, boars, black bears. We shot them all. Mainly with bows. We had to track them, you know? And bears? They’re not going to wander up on you in the middle of the woods. You have to recognize the signs. Scat. Scratch marks on the tree trunks. Paw prints, even on bare, dry ground. The pads of their toes. They leave distinct marks. Teardrop-shaped because of the claws. Those tracks we were following back in Korea? They didn’t have that shape. We just didn’t know we should have been looking for it at the time. The signs were all around us in the trees. We just flat out missed them.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Ramsey whispered, but he already had a hunch. He could feel it coming together, a tingle at the base of his skull. He swung his legs over the side of the bed so that he was right next to Rockwell. “You aren’t suggesting—?”

  “Think about it. Looking back, it’s clear as day. The clues were there all along. Remember what happened to Moya? Remember the sound of the gunfire? Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Then nothing. Two weapons. One set for single fire, the other triple. There was just so much blood we must have missed it. And his wounds. They weren’t the same as those of the refugees, were they? In every instance, the killers went for the side of the neck, nearly tore the whole damn thing off. But Moya? Not even a nibble. And how long did it take those creatures to come after us? We thought we were outsmarting them by sneaking around through the forest. Think about how much time we had with Moya’s body. It wasn’t because we fooled them. It was because they weren’t anywhere near us at the time.”

  “So you’re saying—?”

  “Those helicopters arrived at precisely the perfect moment, didn’t they? The North Koreans were only ten minutes out, or at least that’s what we were told. How did the pilots know where to find us? We were totally off the grid. From the time of the explosion that cost Wilshire his life to their arrival couldn’t have been more than half an hour. And how long did it take us to get from there to Kansong?”

  “Longer than that.”

  “Which means that they were already in the air when Wilshire triggered the detonation. And think about the overall appearance of the situation. Blackhawks streaking across the border would have been perceived as an all-out act of aggression. We discussed that, remember? Those choppers wouldn’t have been dispatched without some sort of guarantee that if they were detected it wouldn’t be the start of World War Three. What was that guarantee? What was the one thing we could hold over Kim’s head that would force him to back down? The nuclear detonation that triggered this whole mess? What was the reason behind it? We knew we could back them down because we would have the proof we needed, the smoking gun we could tie directly to Kim to have him tried for crimes against humanity, but we could also use that leverage in a positive manner, couldn’t we? We could make that little problem he was trying to cover up go away for him and allow him to save face. And what was that guarantee? What undeniable physical proof did we need to have?”

  “The bodies,” Ramsey said. “We needed the mutated bodies.”

  “And how did the Americans know? How did they know where to dispatch the choppers? How did they know when we physically encountered the creatures?”

  “Jesus. There were already men on the ground,” Ramsey said. His heart was pounding now, his brain firing at a million miles an hour. “It was their tracks we were following. But why wouldn’t they just do the whole thing themselves? I mean, if they were already there and no one else knew about it, why did they need us at all?”

  “Because w
e were there under the U.N. flag. We were nothing more than a smokescreen. Think about it. The U.N. can then approach the North Koreans with the proof on behalf of one hundred and ninety-five countries and take a globally unified approach. America, acting alone, would be perceived as an aggressor, its actions a declaration of war. By letting the U.N. step to the forefront, America’s able to maintain the moral high ground. So why were they really there when we were essentially led right to our goal, when the U.N. would be given all of the credit for the success of the mission, when they could have easily claimed it for themselves?” His voice had risen steadily. He caught himself, drew a deep breath, and moderated his tone again. “Why were they really there?”

  “They didn’t want anyone, not even the U.N., to know they had an operation of their own underway.”

  “Why?”

  “Because for whatever reason they feared it wouldn’t be sanctioned.”

  “And what possible reason could there be for that?”

  The answer hit Ramsey like an uppercut to the chin.

  “You said you knew about the nature of the experimentation going on in that facility. It stands to reason that if you knew, they did too. They were there because of those experiments. They were there for the biotechnology.”

  “And while we were airlifted out of there on the first chopper—”

  “They were loading up the other one on the back side of the building.”

  Rockwell sighed and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. After a long moment of silence, he finally stood and looked down at Ramsey with a newfound expression of determination.

  Ramsey summoned one of his own to match it.

  “You didn’t come down here just to walk me through your conclusion, did you?” Ramsey whispered. “You want to do something about it. And you need my help. What’s the plan?”

  “We make them pay for what they did.”