Marsh already knew this wasn’t going as planned. There were supposed to be four explosions and only two had gone off, accounting for survivors who should’ve been victims. Had things gone according to plan and Rathman’s divers done their job, the occupants of the Zodiacs would be steaming their way toward the chaos now to find the boy. If that meant killing any number of others in the process, so be it. Victims were far easier to deal with than witnesses.
The zero-sum game again.
As it was, though, the life rafts were filled with survivors fleeing the very chaos Marsh had planned to use in his favor. No sense exposing themselves now, not until they’d reacquired their target and moved to intercept him. Out here, in the bay at night with a suitable Coast Guard response still minutes out, his men still held a distinct advantage once they had the target in their sights.
“I’ve got him,” Rathman said, binoculars still pressed against his eyes.
And moments later the Zodiacs burst out of the fog bank on a direct course for Alcatraz.
102
BEACON
RAIFF MANAGED TO STEER their life raft through the final swells toward the dock used by tour groups to access the island.
“What do you mean, Doctor?” he said, supporting Donati as he tried to grab the ladder despite the lurching craft. “About the wormhole, the pattern leading here!”
“That’s what I said.”
“I know it’s what you said, but what does it mean?”
“The wormhole! Dixon’s pattern plugged into an elementary algorithm to determine the location! Just like Laboratory Z eighteen years ago! It’s going to happen here, the place they’ll be coming through from your world on the other side, hordes and hordes, I’d imagine.”
Donati was breathing hard by the time he reached the dock, his glasses fogging up from the ever-present mist over Alcatraz.
“Can you be more specific?” Raiff asked him, noticing the slightest flicker of lights and motion growing toward them out on the bay. “Because we’re about to have company.”
* * *
Alex reached the dock next, lowering a hand to help Sam up. She held fast to him when her feet touched down on the moist wood of the dock, felt his knees buckle and clung harder to keep him from spilling over into the water.
“My head,” he managed to say, squeezing his temples as he sank into a crouch.
Donati crouched alongside him. “Is this what the headaches feel like?”
“No, this is worse, different. Deeper, more throbbing.” Alex winced in pain. “Like every time my heart beats, which is a lot right now. Wouldn’t happen to have any aspirin with you, would you, Doc?”
Donati helped Alex back to his feet. “I’m not that kind of doctor, a good thing since I think I’ve got the right prescription,” he said, then turned to Raiff. “I think I know how to find what we’re looking for.”
* * *
The Zodiacs slowed as the dock to which the life raft was tied came into clear view. The kid’s protector, the man who’d thwarted the efforts of the men Rathman had deployed to the former site of Laboratory Z, had laid waste to all three ladders leading up. No bother, since Rathman had come prepared.
“I’m not comfortable with you being here, sir,” he said to Marsh.
“Nonsense. I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was seven years old.”
“Then wait here. I’ll leave two men with you.”
“To keep me safe, Colonel, or to prevent me from following you?”
The three Zodiacs slowed further and Rathman turned his gaze out into the bay, as if to look for a fourth one. “To serve as a last line of defense, sir, just as we discussed.”
* * *
Raiff brought up the rear, keeping his gaze peeled behind him for their expected pursuit. The twenty-two-acre island seemed like the only chance they had upon skirting away from the toppled tour boat, but now he wasn’t so sure. They’d docked on the far side of the island, directly below the infamous prison, that was now part of the national parks system, and across from the relic of a hospital on the other side, facing east.
Donati remained tight-lipped about what he expected they were going to find inside the prison. The island’s small size when viewed from the water belied its true scope and the difficulty of the climb, especially amid the chill and biting wind rising off the bay.
“What are you looking for, Doctor?” Raiff asked finally.
“It’s not what I’m looking for, it’s what Alex here is looking for.”
They’d reached the downward-sloped patch of land that rode the island’s middle. Not much besides dirt and brush; Raiff realized they were square in the open. He’d moved ahead of Sam to reach Donati and express his concerns, when Alex dropped to the dark earth like someone had ripped the world out from under him.
“Alex!” he said louder than he’d meant to, kneeling on one side of the boy while Donati knelt on the other. “Dancer, can you hear me?”
The boy turned his way, his eyes wandering and skin suddenly pasty pale. “It’s my head.”
“Worse?”
“Better. The headache’s gone.”
“We’re here,” said Donati. “According to the beacon, anyway.”
* * *
“An excellent strategy,” Marsh said, after Rathman had laid it out for him.
“I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary.”
“You’re as good as advertised, even better.”
“Then you’ll stay behind with a pair of my men. And our hostages.”
“Of course. Just in case.”
Rathman had turned his gaze back on the bay. “That’s good, sir, because they’re almost here.”
* * *
“What do you mean, a beacon?” Raiff asked, as Donati kicked at the ground with his feet.
“The chip in the boy’s head,” Donati told him. “Something in the electromagnetic waves and energy emanating from the place where we’ll find the wormhole channel. Like a pair of magnets, the one near Alex’s brain and the other somewhere in this area where they’re re-creating the wormhole.”
“Where who’s re-creating the wormhole?” Sam challenged. “The androids we call the drone things?”
“Which were clearly built on this planet as well.”
“Again, Doctor,” Sam persisted, “by whom?”
“Hopefully, Dixon, that’s what we’re about to find out. But first we have to find the entrance that will take us, I fully expect, into Fort Alcatraz.”
A few years before, researchers using the same kind of seismic sensors as the oil industry had uncovered the remains of an old military fort named after the island itself in the mid-nineteenth century. Their work had revealed fortifications extending down farther than the machines’ ability to measure and jutting out into the bay as well. It had been built as a Civil War facility from which no shot had ever been fired and upon its ruins the prison itself had been constructed. No excavation work had been conducted and the researchers could not explain why their studies had revealed a far more sprawling underground structure than that believed to be the original footprint of the fort.
“Here,” Alex said, his ear literally to the ground as he grimaced again from a sudden jolt of pain. “It’s right under us.”
“We need to find the doorway,” Donati replied, eyes sweeping about as if expecting the entrance to magically appear. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.…”
“There’s a doorway, all right, but we won’t find it here exactly,” Raiff told him, eyeing the shape of the prison.
103
THE FORT
THEY TRAIPSED UP A path toward the prison entrance, having it all to themselves since no public tours were available on Sunday nights. They ignored the warning signs credited to the National Parks Service and reached the big double doors through which some of the most notorious criminals of all time had been paraded. Raiff extended what looked like a baton that had been wedged through his belt into a whip-like device that cut stra
ight through the middle of the doors, allowing them to sway inward.
“Welcome to Alcatraz,” he said, leading the others inside the prison.
* * *
Almost ten minutes had passed since Rathman had left the area of the dock with the bulk of his men, leaving Langston Marsh with two of them for his own protection and, Marsh suspected, to make sure he didn’t follow. Not that he would have, now that Rathman’s “insurance” was arriving in a small launch as opposed to a Zodiac.
Marsh studied the couple handcuffed in the craft’s open rear, shivering from the cold. Obviously their abductors hadn’t let them dress appropriately.
“I’m sorry this was necessary, I truly am,” he called to them.
“Eat me,” the man said.
“And choke on it,” the woman added.
“Douchebag.”
“Asshole.”
“I can see where your daughter gets her spunk, Mr. and Mrs. Dixon.”
* * *
His life had changed a great deal in an incredibly short period of time, but Rathman gave that little thought as he watched four figures, including one he was able to identify as his primary target, enter the prison complex, the big doors left ajar behind them. He also tried not to think too much about this pending “invasion” to which Marsh kept referring, convinced now that the boy was a key cog in its implementation. The group could have simply ventured inside the prison to hide, the connection between the explosions that had toppled the tour boat and pursuit by a committed force an easy one to make.
In this case, though, Rathman found himself agreeing with Marsh at least in principle. There were other strategic places to hide on this cluttered island that made far more sense than this one. For that reason, together with a nagging sense he couldn’t let go of, Rathman believed the boy and the others had a different purpose for entering the prison. But his was a soldier’s mind-set. He had a job to do and needed only to know where his target was, not why he was there.
“Target acquired,” he said into the Black Ops 2 Throat Mic connecting him to all his troops. “The entrance to the prison is our zero. Follow my lead.”
* * *
The inside of the prison was laced with a peculiar combination of scents ranging from cleaning solvent to musty mildew to cold, cracking concrete. The tile floors were chipped and dull, but slippery as if freshly waxed or finished. Raiff led the way, Alex professing to have no idea where to go from here now that his head was no longer throbbing. All Raiff knew was that they were close to whatever the boy’s chip had honed in on.
The accessible prison halls were cavernous and serpentine, eerie in their desolation. The kind of place that left Sam wishing she had someone’s hand to hold while traversing them. Made her feel like a little kid, afraid of the dark. But there were plenty worse things to be frightened of than the dark.
“Hard to find something when we don’t know what we’re looking for,” Raiff noted, his voice echoing in a tinny fashion through the abandoned confines.
“A doorway, an elevator shaft—something, anything,” said Donati.
“Wait,” Sam said, sneakers grinding to a halt. “That elevator we just passed for the second time.”
“What about it, Dixon?”
“It’s key operated. Did key-operated elevators exist back when Alcatraz was built?”
* * *
The doors parted with a whoooooshhhhh, after Raiff managed to work a twin-set of precise tools into the proper slots of the keyhole to twist it from left to right. He peered inside, hand on his pistol now.
“No buttons, no controls,” he reported.
Alex slipped past him, inside. “Then what’s the worst that can happen?”
“Nothing,” Sam ventured.
“I can think of plenty worse than that,” said Donati, joining them inside and leaving Raiff blocking the door from closing.
“I’m supposed to keep you safe, Dancer.”
“Then you better step inside,” Alex told him.
* * *
The old cab descended slowly, creakily, its ancient hydraulic system an odd match for technology millions of years advanced.
Raiff slid forward as the elevator squealed to a grinding halt.
“No,” Alex said, holding a hand against him, “stay behind me.”
Raiff’s chest felt like banded steel, hot to the touch. “Why?”
“A feeling.”
“You’ll have to do better than that, Dancer.”
“I’m one of them.”
Raiff relented and backed off, as the elevator settled into place with a final jolt. The doors opened slowly with another soft burst of compressed air.
“My stars,” Donatti uttered.
“Exactly,” said Raiff.
* * *
Rathman’s team advanced on the prison and reached the front steps in assault formation with strict military precision. He wasn’t used to leading men he’d never worked with before; on missions like this, familiarity was everything. But the skill and experience of the men Rathman had brought in showed themselves now. These were seasoned operators who knew their way around combat and killing, understanding that having the back of the man on one side of you ensured that the one on the other side would have yours. It almost made Rathman smile reflectively, nostalgically, knowing combat to be the greatest of all unifying experiences. And these were men who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot and kill. Men who understood the mission parameters and were all about doing their job.
Normally that job was in service to God and country. In this case it was in service to Langston Marsh and the almighty dollar. But once the shooting started, such things wouldn’t matter to men like this.
Only the bodies dropping to their bullets would.
Hey, Rathman thought to himself with a satisfied smirk, it’s not rocket science. Just Combat 101.
* * *
Alex moved to the front of the elevator cab, finding himself just short of a steel catwalk that overlooked a seemingly endless sprawl of interconnected assembly stations. Essentially an entire world constructed beneath Alcatraz Island, built outward from the remains of the Civil War fort on which the prison complex had risen. His mind naturally measured things in terms of football field size and he estimated the sprawl to occupy what appeared to be five or so fields laid side by side three stories beneath the catwalk.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a factory. The reverberating sounds of heavy machinery and the grinding staccato-like din of conveyor belts reached his ears, emanating from the vast expanse of interconnected stations. The smell in the air was oddly familiar, a combination of motor oil, rubber, and superheated electrical wiring. He recalled it, painfully, from the battle against the drone things in his house before the ash man had killed his parents.
Or had he?
Raiff started to edge out of the cab, but Alex grabbed hold of his jacket and slid ahead of him.
Finding a drone thing on either side of the elevator.
Pressed tight against him, Sam dropped her mouth to gasp, maybe scream, until Alex covered it with a palm, his other finger held to his lips.
“Shhhhhhhhhhh…”
Something, some inert instinct born of his true breeding, told Alex he had nothing to fear and neither did anyone else as long as they remained tucked tight to him.
“It’s okay,” he said to Raiff and Donati over Sam’s shoulder. “Just stay close to me.”
Still, Raiff remained ready with his whip until the cyborgs failed to even acknowledge his presence. They lacked the flat, featureless faces Alex remembered from the drone things he’d destroyed back in his house, lacked any faces at all, their finish work incomplete but good enough to serve this purpose, as sentinels guarding against unwarranted entry to the facility.
“The boy’s right,” Donati whispered. “They don’t see him as a threat.”
Alex tapped his head. “Thanks to the chip. They must be sensing it. Maybe it’s communicating with them somehow.”
“What about us?” Raiff asked him.
“Just stay close, like I said.”
Alex taking charge now, the quarterback again albeit on an entirely different field. He watched Raiff pull his stick back, not entirely comfortable with Alex taking point, but knowing he had no choice.
“What is that thing?” Donati asked him.
“Hopefully you’ll never get a chance to see.”
Raiff left it there, not bothering to elaborate on the fact his stick was formed of subatomic, programmable particles based on nanotechnological principles. He wedged the stick back in his belt and continued along the catwalk in a tight pack clustered behind Alex. His breath caught in his throat at what lay before them, at the cavernous expanse that extended both out and downward, as far as the eye could see in the dim lighting.
It wasn’t a factory so much as an assembly plant responsible for building cyborgs nonstop for who knew how long. But there wasn’t a person, at least the flesh-and-blood version, in sight anywhere. The entire process looked completely automated, various stations manned only by drones sized and shaped to tasks specific to them.
“Machines building machines,” Sam noted, completely awestruck.
“Very good, Dixon,” complimented Dr. Donati. “The principle of self-replication, a core element of nanotechnology.”
“They don’t need a wormhole,” muttered Raiff, seeing it all from an entirely different perspective. “They’re building an army out of steel and wire. Or armies. Imagine a hundred of these plants, imagine a thousand.”
Sam started to do the figuring in her head, plugging in the years, locations, units produced per—She gave up. Too many variables to consider in the equation, and she was already scared enough. She realized she was clinging to Alex’s arm, realized he was letting her. The sight was mind-numbing, its very impossibility too surreal even to contemplate.
As near as she could tell, the farthest section of the plant was churning out finished limbs and steel body parts imitating the human endoskeleton in the tradition of the Terminator movies, which scared her no matter how many times she watched them. The next sequence along the line was responsible for assembling the pieces in a fashion akin to the automated car factories she’d seen, with robotic arms swaying about soldering, screwing, affixing, and clamping. And when one broke down she pictured some robotic drone sweeping into repair action, designed and built expressly for that purpose.
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