Gabby was back studying the plans for the doomsday ship when she said, “I think I might know how.”
Chapter 47
The sun was brushing the horizon with long golden fingers when they left the Puerto Rican shack. They would make the journey to the Arecibo Observatory in two separate vehicles—Ollie and his team in one, Luis, Kay and the rest of her team in the other.
Ramon had discovered a recently abandoned logging road that ran parallel to the observatory. And this was the route they would take. Given the facility stretched out over several miles, Ollie’s team would push further into the nearby valley.
“Maintain radio silence,” Ollie said to the others, speaking softly into the mic.
“Roger that,” Richard replied from the van behind them as it pulled off the road and into position.
Ollie’s van raced on, kicking up dust and bits of gravel as it sped along the narrow road. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d suggested not all of them would make it back. Although it had seen its fair share of bad luck, blowing up the nuclear missile in Florida had been a resounding success. Sure, there had been moments when things had been touch and go and they had been forced to take a few lives, but the real concern was that a false sense of confidence might set in. And he knew there were few things deadlier in the field than complacency.
Before long, Paco pulled over. They got out and geared up. Each of the four men had a backpack with water, a first-aid kit, a machete, two hundred rounds of 7.62 ammunition for the AKs, as well as several 9mm pistol mags. And they might have carried more too if they hadn’t needed to scale a hill in seventy percent relative humidity.
Ramon led the way, hacking through the jungle as they began their climb. It wasn’t long before Ollie felt beads of sweat rolling down his forehead and into his eyes. The rifle strap was strung across his chest and still it jostled around, jabbing him in the ribs as he struggled to place one foot in front of the other. Beside him, Sven was not faring much better. For starters, his muscular frame meant he was carrying a lot more weight. Only Paco, the thinnest of them, showed no signs of fatigue.
The vegetation was thick, but Ollie was sure he could see the outline of a white building through the screen of trees above them.
“Report your status,” Ollie said, gulping for air.
“I have reached the northernmost tower,” Luis replied, “and am preparing to attach the explosive charge.”
“Kay?” Ollie asked. “What about you?”
“We’re moving along the edge of the dish and will let you know when we’re in position.”
So far so good, Ollie thought. Ten minutes passed as he and his team moved slowly through the jungle. It made him wish they’d had a tank to bust through the front gate. Or better yet, a long-range missile to obliterate the area from a distance.
“Almost there,” Ramon said, lowering his profile against anyone looking for movement along the perimeter.
Then it came fully into view, a three-story white structure. The sides were made of corrugated metal. On the top floor, a series of windows overlooked the dish itself. Luis had told them that was where they would find the control room.
They reached the edge of the jungle and stopped searching for guards and cameras. Finding none, they shuffled into the open, aiming for the nearest entrance. A door leading to the structure’s main floor stood directly before them. That was when Ollie spotted the recessed stairwell which led up to the third floor. He tapped Sven and everyone headed in that direction.
They were halfway there when they heard the explosion. Ollie scanned left into the open valley below, where he saw a huge fireball billowing up to the left of the dish. The flames streaked up the length of a steel pillar a second before they caught the distant sound of screeching metal. Slowly, the pillar began to topple over like an enormous tree. The receiver buckled as the cables holding it were stretched beyond acceptable limits. Soon the sound of snapping cables joined the cacophony of destruction below as one tower after another was pulled down by the weight of the first.
“Luis, what the hell did you do?” Ollie shouted into the radio. “That wasn’t supposed to go off until I gave you the go-ahead.”
Luis didn’t respond and something told Ollie the engineer had been taken out by his own bomb. Ollie knew the plan was always the first casualty in combat. He had no intention of being the second.
•••
Kay was still on the ground when she heard Ollie yelling at Luis over the radio. Had the engineer waited until they were all in position, Kay and her team would have been far from the danger zone. Instead, metallic debris and cable ends were crashing down around them, cutting through the foliage like a deadly scythe. A tree nearby was cleaved clean in two, sending it hurtling no more than ten feet from where they were standing. Armoni was out in the open, clutching her computer bag, when Kay spotted a chunk of receiver hurtling toward her. There wasn’t enough time to get the girl’s attention. Without thinking, Kay leapt forward, tackling Armoni onto the ground and under the split end of a fallen tree right as the receiver casing landed next to them, kicking up a great swath of earth.
Armoni stood up, mud covering half of her face, her chest heaving violently. “Holy shit, that was close.”
Kay got up and brushed herself off. “So much for waiting until we were all in position.”
“I’ll bet you anything that idiot Luis went and blew himself up,” Patrick said, examining a long gash on his arm.
“We should get that taken care of,” Kay told him, eyeing the wound.
He waved her away. “Never mind, I’ve had a lot worse.”
The stillness in the air was shattered by the distant sound of gunfire.
Patrick moved into the clearing near the edge of the dish and looked up toward the facility.
“I see flashes from rifle muzzles,” he told them. “Looks like the guards are onto them.”
In the center of the dish below them, Kay could see the two-story structure Sentinel had erected to house their alien-inspired weapon. But strewn around it now was a mess of cables and the crumpled remnants of the receiver. Suddenly, a dazzling burst of blinding light streamed up from the structure. Kay shielded her eyes. Slowly, tiny spots of vision began trickling back.
“Oh, crap, they’re already firing it up,” Patrick said, scanning between the beam of light streaming into the sky and the gunfight going on near the control room.
“What should we do?” Armoni asked.
The fearful glint in the young hacker’s eyes mirrored the same emotion each of them was feeling. The plan had literally just blown up in their faces. Luis was likely dead. Ollie and the three others with him were engaged in a battle against overwhelming odds. They had only narrowly avoided being taken out by falling pieces of the world’s second-largest telescope.
“What we came here to do,” Kay answered, swinging the rifle off her shoulder and pushing past them.
The dish itself was smooth and dipped inward at about a twenty-degree angle. Every footfall lent the risk of losing one’s footing and rolling hundreds of feet to the bottom. The ride might not exactly kill you, but you’d wake up feeling like a sock that had been through the spin cycle.
As they continued making their way down, something pinged off one of the panels a few feet away. Kay eyed the spot where it hit and saw the hole. Then another ping fifteen feet to her right.
“What the hell is going on?” she wondered out loud.
“They’re shooting at us,” Patrick shouted, pointing to a nearby ridgeline. It was a spot where tourists normally stood to gaze out at the dish’s majestic size. Now it was being used as a firing platform. They increased their pace, bullets thudding around them in an ever greater volume. Kay had the unnerving mental image of standing out in the rain, trying to not get hit by a droplet.
“It’s right up ahead,” she told them, hopeful they might make it there in one piece.
Then from below she caught sight of movement. Two men in white lab coats
exited the building, surveying the damage from the falling debris. It was only a second before they spotted Kay, Patrick and Armoni. But rather than retreat back inside, they reached beneath their white coasts and came up with tactical carbines.
“Oh, great,” Patrick yelled. “Just what we need, a crossfire.”
Rounds pinged at their feet, from two directions now. Patrick took the lead, clearly more proficient with guns. Kay did what she could, leveling the barrel and squeezing the trigger like she’d been shown. The AK kicked up in her hands and she fought to keep the sights on target. Standing still and shooting was hard enough. But rushing down a slippery decline while firing a semi-automatic rifle was a whole new kind of crazy.
At one point, Patrick dropped to one knee and fired three carefully aimed shots, killing one of the men in the white lab coats. The other, seeing he was outnumbered, ran back inside and slammed the door.
A minute later they arrived before the structure, an intense heat radiating from the beam streaming above them. Lucky for them, the building and the fallen receiver debris provided some cover from the shooters along the ridgeline.
Careful not to expose himself, Patrick positioned himself next to the metal door the second gunman had fled through. He motioned to Kay, whispering into his radio. “When I open the door, you spray the room inside.”
She swallowed hard, readying her rifle as Patrick reached his hand out and turned the knob. Straight away, a series of shots rang out from inside, peppering dime-sized holes into the door. Patrick flung his hand out of harm’s way.
Kay listened to the rhythmic popping sound of distant gunfire coming from the hill near the observatory’s control room. She knew if they didn’t neutralize the man inside and plant this bomb soon, the beam would complete its deadly business and the world would have a whole new set of problems to worry about.
Chapter 48
Battered and bloody, Ollie, Sven and Ramon were trapped in the control room. Longer than it was wide, the room very much resembled the bridge of a large oil tanker. A row of controls and computer equipment were seated beneath a large set of windows overlooking the dish. Down below, a blast of purple energy streamed up from the weapon and into the atmosphere. The sight filled Ollie with terror. Whoever had heard them coming must have triggered the process and prevented their ability to stop it. He had shot up the console and smashed part of it with the butt of his rifle, all to no avail. A five-minute timer on the wall showed the seconds remaining before the weapon reached full power.
Two entrances sat on the opposite wall, one to their right and the other on their left. Each was barricaded with chairs and anything else they could find. Slumped over the left barricade was Paco, killed by a bullet while stacking the last piece of furniture.
Luis’ premature detonation had been the equivalent of kicking a hornets’ nest and screwed any hopes they had of getting in and out unscathed. A trail of blood leaked from the tourniquet around Sven’s leg where a round had shattered his femur. More blood trickled down Ollie’s forehead from a shot that had nicked the top of his skull. Next to him, Ramon was covered in blood, but most of that had come from dressing Sven’s injury. They were in a sorry state with enemy forces readying to bust in at any moment. Positioned on the other side of both entry points, enemy soldiers probed every few seconds by kicking at the barricaded door and eliciting a flurry of gunshots in return.
“We can’t keep this up forever,” Ollie said, as he stuck the bomb to the console.
The barricade on the right wobbled and Sven swiveled his AK, riddling it.
“Never mind forever,” Sven said, biting back waves of excruciating pain. “They’ll be on us any second now.”
Ramon repositioned to a spot in the middle of the opposite wall. Although he couldn’t engage the enemy directly, it removed him from the immediate line of fire, but more than that, it gave them an opportunity to ambush anyone dumb enough to charge in.
“Once they bring the smoke grenades and flashbangs, it’ll be over,” Ramon told them and he was right. An enclosed space wasn’t so much a defensive position as it was a death trap.
Ollie got on the radio and called out to the other team. “Patrick, Kay, do you read me?”
“We read you,” Kay replied, breathless. “Glad to hear you’re still in one piece.”
Ollie let out a hollow laugh. “We won’t be for long. We’re pinned down in the control room. That beam has a timer with four minutes left and I can only assume it’s counting down until the black hole is up and running. How close are you to blowing it up?”
“Not close enough,” Kay said as another round of gunfire drowned out her voice. “There’s a guy in there who’s more stubborn than you are.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” Ollie replied.
“Wait a sec,” Kay said over the noise on the other end. “Armoni has an idea. She thinks she may be able to hack into the observatory’s mainframe.”
“Well, tell her to hurry up.”
Just then the left side door blew off its hinges, pelting them with chunks of wood and fragments of metal from the barricade. A Puerto Rican man in green cammies rushed in, spraying wildly. A line of bullets punched a series of holes in the window, knocking out the glass. Shards rained down on Ollie and Sven. From the opposite wall, Ramon opened fire, cutting the man down. He then shoved his weapon around the corner and emptied the magazine. Sven and Ollie joined in.
A grenade rolled in at Ramon’s feet. All at once, each of their eyes went wide with fear. Diving down, Ramon grabbed it and tossed it back. But in the second before it went off, his exposed head took a bullet and snapped back. His body fell to the floor and was flung a few feet by the concussion from the exploding grenade.
The clock was down to two minutes when an alarm began to sound. Then the sprinklers turned on, spraying the room with jets of water.
“Is that Armoni’s idea of a joke?” Ollie said. Saturated, the console began to belch sparks and smoke as one by one the computer components were overloaded. Ollie spun and was surprised to see the beam begin to waver. Even the countdown had slowed. Slowed was good, but it hadn’t stopped.
“Ollie,” Sven called out, weak with blood loss. “You and I both know I’m not gonna make it. Give me the bomb. I’ll detonate it manually.”
Ollie wanted to object, but with the seconds ticking away and a fresh assault coming any second, he knew there was no other option. He handed Sven the bomb and the two men embraced.
“Give Mia my best,” Sven said, his eyes wet with tears.
Ollie nodded before leaping through the broken window. He landed hard, rolling to avoid breaking both of his legs. Rising to his feet, he was limping down the side of the hill when the control room exploded, blasting off the roof and sending shrapnel flying out the broken windows like the barrels of a double-barreled shotgun.
A second later, the beam flickered and disappeared.
•••
But disabled didn’t mean destroyed. Kay realized this even as she watched the control room above go up in a ball of flame. Had any of them survived? she wondered in muted horror. She didn’t know. What was clear was that if they didn’t do the same here, Sentinel could always use it again.
Without any regard for her personal safety, Kay flung open the door, leveled her rifle and fired. Bullets ricocheted off the floor and passed through the wall at the other end. Coming close in behind her were Patrick and Armoni. Kay had hoped to see a crumpled body in a white lab coat near the entrance, but there was none. It seemed the shooter had retreated further inside. A doorway on their left was open, providing the only way into the rest of the structure.
“This guy’s got us in a damn bottleneck,” Patrick said, swearing.
Clearly, waiting for him to come out hadn’t worked so well. Kay pushed ahead, certain there was no other way. She passed over the threshold into the room with the weapon, feeling her pulse thumping in her neck, her vision blurring. The body sometimes had a strange way of getting in you
r way at the worst possible moments.
This new room was nothing more than a container for the weapon itself, much like the silos for nuclear missiles. Rising up from the center of the chamber was a cylindrical device punctuated with rows of glowing lights that flashed on and off in a rhythmic, almost hypnotic pattern. But far from being sleek and streamlined, it was clear where bits of human technology had been added so Sentinel could interface with the device.
A circular staircase hugged the round inner walls of the room, rising thirty feet to an open rooftop where sunlight streamed down at them from above.
Patrick knelt down at the base of the device and attached the bomb while Kay and Armoni covered him.
“Almost done…” Patrick began to say as a staccato of shots rang out from above.
Patrick slumped over, bleeding from a hole in his neck. Kay moved in, her rifle raised, circling around the bottom level to find the gunman.
“Kay, watch out,” Armoni said.
The man in the white coat jumped down, landing on the metal grate next to Kay, and fired his weapon. Most of the rounds missed, but two didn’t and they knocked Kay to the ground. Nearby, Armoni returned fire, killing him.
She ran over and knelt beside Kay. “Where are you hit?”
Kay looked over and saw Patrick lying a few feet away, his eyes open and vacant.
She tried to draw in a breath and felt a sharp pain in her chest. “I don’t know,” she said, clearly still in shock. “You need to set that bomb.”
Armoni got up and did so, checking on Patrick one last time and shaking her head in despair. She returned a moment later to help Kay to her feet.
One of her lungs must have collapsed, Kay realized as she struggled for breath. Blood soaked the front of her shirt. With Armoni’s help, they exited the structure and began heading up the side of the dish. They were halfway there when the bomb went off. With what little strength Kay had left, she swung Armoni away from the blast, shielding her. After that the world grew hazy and Kay wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.
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