As Wilkes held on, he suddenly saw the world differently. It was all clear to him now. What he’d always known as down no longer was down. The city was a great roof over his head.
And as he looked down, he could see that the sky was a yawning chasm beneath his feet. His grip weakened on the lamp pole, and finally it slipped from his fingers as he fell screaming into the vast emptiness below.
At Site R, Director of National Intelligence Kaye Monahan sat in a mission control center watching live satellite imagery of the operation under way in Detroit. The generals and intelligence directors around her gasped. She herself felt a tingling, almost detached feeling as she saw an entire battalion sucked up and hurled into the heavens, the streets and building fronts along with them.
Now there were fires as what appeared to be a gas main silently exploded.
A hush had gone over the control room.
But then someone said, “Pull them back. For God’s sake, pull back.”
A general next to her said, “Where’s the MK-54?”
“Lost, sir. We have no idea where it is.”
“My God.”
“We just lost a suitcase nuke.”
“Jesus.”
Monahan came out of her stupor and called to an operations officer. “What’s happening?”
The lieutenant colonel examined a radar screen and shook his head. “They appear to be falling up. The leading edge is above a hundred thousand feet already.” He looked up from the screen. “They’re falling off the planet. Apparently the BTC can control gravity.”
The gathered generals and intelligence directors let out a breath and wandered about the control room, trying to process what they were seeing.
A four-star general said, “We have no choice now. We’ll need to tell the president.”
The deputy director of the CIA scowled at him. “The last thing we need is politicians involved in this mess.”
The NSA deputy director nodded. “We can’t tell anyone about the BTC. If people find out how powerless civilian government is, there’ll be a political crisis.”
Monahan looked from one to another. “Then what do we do? We can’t do nothing.”
The deputy director of the CIA grimaced. “Maybe it’s what we should have been doing all along. Just leave them alone. Let things go back to the way they were.”
She looked up at the big satellite screen. The carnage seemed to be starting all over again miles out of town now as a whole artillery section began falling into the heavens, along with the farm fields in which they were deployed. The site was rapidly turning into a quarry.
Monahan pointed. “What the hell are people going to think, Mike? Half of the main drag in Detroit just fell into the sky in front of ten thousand witnesses.”
“The BTC jammed cell signals. Radio frequencies.”
“He’s right. There’s no television coverage. No YouTube video.”
“So what are you saying? They did the right thing?”
“They did sanitize the scene. There’s no wrecked military equipment to explain.”
She clenched her fists. “You people are unbelievable…”
“Kaye, be practical. This is a monumental disaster—no doubt about it. But we won’t help things by making them worse. Hundreds of young men and women are dead. They died trying to defend their country—but they lost. For now. And it doesn’t help anyone if we reveal that.”
She collapsed in a leather chair. “We need to inform the president.”
“No. We don’t.”
“Goddamnit, he’s going to notice that parts of Detroit are missing. That a battalion of the 82nd Airborne just went airborne.”
“We’ll get meteorologists to come up with something. Climate change. Freak whirlwind—something. For chrissakes, Detroit’s right on the Great Lakes.”
“Or close enough to them at least.”
She shook her head. “You’re expecting people to believe that seventy-ton main battle tanks and armored vehicles fell up into the sky because of a freak storm?”
There was silence for a few moments.
“Obviously, we’ll need to work on the cover story, but you get the idea.”
She sighed. “The BTC murdered Bill McAllen. They disintegrated him. Do we just let them do whatever they want and get away with it? How long before they come for us, too?”
The deputy director of the CIA put his hand on her shoulder. “They won, Kaye. Let it go. Let’s try to manage the aftermath. Bide our time.”
Monahan felt numb for the next half hour as the generals and intelligence chiefs tried to divide their PR problem into solvable pieces, but it all sounded like nonsense to her—like something the public would never believe. But then again, she had seen the truth and she didn’t believe that either. Monahan kept thinking that there must be some way she hadn’t yet thought of to react. Some strategy by which she could best the BTC.
But then there was a distant booming sound—and impossibly, water glasses on the table rippled, even though they were deep underground.
The generals and intelligence directors leapt up, looking up at the ceiling.
“What the hell is that?”
“Hedrick is coming for us. Jesus. If they can control gravity… they could rip us straight out of the ground!”
Monahan looked around the table at them. Panicked. They were all panicked.
One general shouted, “Continuity of government bunkers are no longer safe! We need to get out of here and spread out—go to separate locations. Or the heads of critical agencies are going to be wiped out all at once.”
Monahan followed them as if she were watching from a distance. Still in a daze. They put her on an electric cart with a couple of generals and a heavily armed security detail—all of the guards inexplicably wearing MOPP biological protection gear. She figured somebody must have grabbed the wrong binder. Or perhaps they didn’t have a binder for the scenario where Site R and all its high-value occupants fell into the sky.
As the cart came out of the huge gates at the bunker entrance, it skidded to a stop, and Monahan’s stupor served her well. She didn’t immediately lose her mind. Generals staggered around holding their heads in their hands, but she walked calmly, staring out at the shattered remains of main battle tanks and armored vehicles that had crashed into the forested slopes around them, leaving huge craters and fires behind, along with the body parts of hundreds of men, their corpses flash-frozen and then shattered like glass.
And she realized that the entire battalion had been thrown at them from the heavens by technological gods. Gods whom they’d angered.
CHAPTER 26
Action Plan
Jon Grady awoke in a comfortable, modernist bedroom with a high-raftered ceiling with walls that didn’t rise high enough to meet it. As a result he could hear a distant television elsewhere in the loft. The sound of clattering pots and dishes.
Grady turned to see Alexa asleep, sitting in a chair across the bedroom, positron gun in her lap. He guessed she must have come in sometime during the night. Standing guard perhaps? He turned on his side and watched her sleeping, studying her face. The goddess Aphrodite had nothing on her.
With her eyes still shut Alexa said, “You’re freaking me out, Jon.”
He quickly looked away, coughing. “What was that?”
Alexa opened her eyes.
“You’re obviously still on guard.”
She sat up. “I don’t sleep much. Never have. I heard your door open in the middle of the night and checked up on you. Found the door open—you asleep. I’m not sure I entirely trust Cotton. You realize he could turn us in to save his own skin?”