“Yes, sir?”
“Activate Kratos. I have a list of targets…”
Staff Sergeant Randall Wilkes stared down the wide, sculpture-studded length of Washington Boulevard. His National Guard military police unit had done as instructed and set up a roadblock at Clifford—closing off this portion of downtown to all traffic. They were to let civilians out of the area but let no one in. It was a damned strange training exercise, to inconvenience people who were just trying to get to work.
And what about the people who lived in the pricey condos to either side? He didn’t spend a lot of time up here, but he could only imagine how much the condos were going for, and he knew if he’d laid down that kind of cash, he wouldn’t be too thrilled with the military doing training exercises in the middle of the street at the crack of dawn. This wasn’t North Korea.
Operation Rubicon had been strange all around so far. Wilkes waved on a newspaper delivery truck as it came out of the downtown area in the predawn. He looked across at the four up-armored Humvees in his platoon. They had occupied the street corners and set up police sawhorses blocking the road and sidewalks. An early jogger had been turned away—and wasn’t too happy to hear this was a training exercise, but that he’d nonetheless be arrested if he continued. Some corporate lawyer threatened to sue them, too, but then he ran off the other way.
And Wilkes hadn’t heard anything about this operation until forty-eight hours ago. He’d gotten a call telling him there was a mandatory training exercise—his normal one-weekend-a-month duty be damned—and here he was. His orders were to secure the intersection and wait for a column of military vehicles to move in from the north. They were to open up the cordon to let them pass, and then reblockade the street and await further orders. Some War on Terror training exercise, he supposed—the whole federal courthouse area was down Washington a half mile or so. He figured it was special operations stuff.
But radios had been down for the past ten minutes. Cell phones, too. He suspected that was part of the exercise—to see how the units handled the loss of communications.
Just then he saw the captain’s Humvee approaching fast, and Wilkes walked to meet it as it rolled to a stop on the sidewalk. Captain Lawrence, a county judge, stepped one foot out and peered over the armored door. “All comms are out. Prepare to part those roadblocks. You’ve got a column of friendlies coming in fast from the north. They’ll be here in thirty, so hustle it!”
Wilkes whistled and hand-signaled his men, then replied, “You got it, Captain.” He then started toward the nearest sawhorses. They were each fifteen feet long. “Hey, Martin! Robbie! Get ready to move these fast. We got vehicles coming through, and they aren’t stopping for shit!”
The captain got back in his Humvee, and it took off down a side street. The rest of Wilkes’s platoon scrambled to grab the ends of the sawhorses, and they moved a couple out of the way in advance.
Wilkes moved into the center of the boulevard, standing on the grassy meridian. It was about twenty feet wide, and he wanted the vehicles to see him signaling as they approached. And he could see their headlights—even though it was light enough to run without them. Damn! This was some exercise. There was a long line of vehicles. They were coming down all four lanes on both sides of the street. They seemed to be following Baghdad road rules, too—high speed, civilians be damned. Leading the charge were half a dozen M1 Abrams tanks—their turbofan engines waking up the neighborhood. Wilkes could see lights going on in the windows of buildings all around them. Bewildered faces peering down.
Behind the tanks were dozens of Stryker armored vehicles. The whole column was moving thirty or forty miles an hour. This was insanely irresponsible. “Goddamnit! Get these blockades out of the way!”
His men scrambled to move the heavy sawhorses—and they damned near did it, too. One of the lead Abrams smashed through one remaining sawhorse, blasting it into pieces—one of which shattered the window of a parked car.
“Goddamnit. This is a frickin’ training exercise…”
But no one heard him as the rest of the tanks and Strykers roared past, their CROWS autoturrets scanning apartment windows above, scaring the hell out of people.
Wilkes was a Detroit cop, and he just threw up his hands and looked to his men. “This is crazy! What are they doing?” He hoped no one had live ammunition.
But then, as he looked down the length of Washington Boulevard, he saw something distant fly up from the ground—something large, along with pieces of debris. It reminded him of videos he’d seen of tornadoes roaring through trailer parks. Wilkes pulled off his goggles and stared ahead.
And then he saw a UPS delivery truck hurtle into the sky a quarter mile away, tumbling as it went. Following it were what appeared to be trees, light poles, another car. It was as though the ground was peeling up. And now a horrendous thunder came to his ears as if a great machine were being ripped apart. Flocks of nearby pigeons scattered in a panic.
But the armored column roared onward.
And then Wilkes could see the lead tanks falling up into the sky as well, as if they’d driven off a reverse cliff. Red taillights stabbed on the following Strykers as pieces of asphalt, parking meters, manhole covers, trees, grass, sculptures—everything, literally everything—ripped out of the ground and flung itself into the sky. There was the deafening sound of breaking glass as the facade of one of the tall buildings ripped away, but instead of collapsing, it up-lapsed—pouring into the air and shattering into thousands of pieces as people screamed in terror and fled deeper into their apartments.
The Strykers had screeched to a stop now on their eight large rubber tires, but as Wilkes watched, speechless, the tanks were clanging together like great bells and cresting the tops of twenty-story buildings—then falling up, up into the dawn sky, receding, shrinking smaller with every second.
And other vehicles and debris continued to follow them as though on a conveyor belt. The cracking sound of the concrete, as if the bones of a giant were being broken, rippled through Wilkes’s chest. He watched, paralyzed, as a whole section of Washington Boulevard—center meridian, sculptures, asphalt, and Stryker vehicles all—peeled up and came apart as they fell into the sky.
The remaining Strykers tried to turn or back away from the disaster, but the suspension of reality was racing them down the street—and winning. Men were piling out of the gridlocked Strykers now as their rear gates opened. They pulled off their packs and ran screaming away from another building facade ripping upward. Lampposts tore out of the ground; fire hydrants and sidewalks peeled up. Piping and electrical work from the streets dangled upward, their ends swinging as water poured into the heavens as well from a broken main. Soil hurtled upward, splashed through water, and came out mud on the other side.
Soldiers ran past Wilkes now, fear in their faces. He could barely hear them as he watched the sidewalk tearing up a hundred feet away. Soldiers there clawed at bicycle racks, but then the ground beneath it all gave way, the concrete cracked apart, and they spun screaming into the air, their cries receding.
Wilkes’s neck craned up to see a line of debris heading into the heavens. What he knew must be M1 tanks were tiny dots now, crumbs in a vast river.
And then he felt the pull, it started dragging him forward, and he finally came out of his paralysis. Too late.
Almost immediately the feeling of falling tripled, and he grabbed for the light post next to him. The Humvee in the street before him, along with fleeing infantryman, flew upward with the asphalt of the street beneath them, and then the concrete and gravel beneath that, and finally the soil, poured skyward.