David Wellington
The Cyclops Initiative
For Mom, who taught me to love books
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have existed without certain individuals I would like to thank. They include (but are not limited to) Russell Galen, my agent; Lyssa Keusch, my editor; as well as Rebecca Lucash and Jessie Edwards at Harper. Thanks for bringing Jim home.
PROLOGUE
Silence.
Ten thousand feet up there was nothing to hear, except the faint scratching hiss of the wind as it spilled across carbon fiber control surfaces. Riding high on a column of warm air, the old Predator’s engine barely ticked over. It was very good at conserving its energy. It was very good at waiting patiently. Waiting and watching with its single, unblinking eye.
Chuck Mitchell was asleep at his post.
He had the best of all possible excuses. His wife had given birth to a beautiful little girl three weeks ago. Mitchell hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since — he’d been far too busy sitting up at night next to the crib, watching her squirm and wriggle, counting her ten perfect fingers, her ten perfect toes.
But if anyone needed to be awake at his job, it was Mitchell. He worked at the busiest port in America, scanning cargo containers as they passed through on their way to grocery stores and warehouses and schools across the country. It was his job to oversee the PVT portal monitor, a device that scanned those containers for radioactivity. All day long the containers passed through his station, one every few seconds — more than sixty million a year. They went under a giant yellow metal arch and came out the other side, and nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, nothing happened.
That thousandth time Mitchell very much needed to be on top of his game.
So he did his best to fight the tide of sleep that kept washing over him. He mainlined coffee. When that wasn’t enough, he would jab himself in the leg with a pen — anything to help him wake up.
It was a losing battle.
The cargo containers were all the same. They didn’t stay in front of him long enough for him to even know what was inside them. Even before dawn it was warm at his station, warm enough to make him feel cozy and complacent. Even the noise of the giant rolling belt that carried the boxes was a droning, repetitive sound that just lulled him back to sleep. Staying awake was just about impossible.
There was only one thing that could possibly yank him back, one sound.
A steady, persistent ticking. The sound he heard in his nightmares. The sound the detector made when it picked up stray gamma radiation.
Mitchell’s eyes shot open. He nearly fell off his chair. Without even thinking about it, he slammed his palm down on the big red button in front of him, stopping the belt, freezing the cargo container in place under the arch.
The ticking sound didn’t stop.
The old Predator could see in color, though the first early light made everything the same three drab shades of gray. Below, in the sprawling yard, the boxes stood in ziggurats twenty high, bluish gray and reddish gray and yellowish gray. The Predator’s eye swiveled back and forth in its socket as it looked for patterns it could recognize.
The drone was an old model, one of the first wave of UAVs to see real action. It was obsolete now, and it had been declawed — stripped of its weaponry and most of its fancier software. It should have been decommissioned a year ago.
But it could still fly. It could still loiter up there, so high up it looked like just another bird, a speck against the blue sky. It could still see — its camera eye had not grown nearsighted over the years.
It still had one more mission in it.
Mitchell pulled a lead-lined vest over his shoulders. The same kind dentists wore when they took x-rays of your jaw. He jumped down from his station and took a hesitant step toward the cargo container.
The PVT equipment kept ticking away.
Mitchell knew that most likely this was a false positive. There were all kinds of things that gave off gamma rays — everything from fertilizer to kitty litter to bananas. The chances that this box was full of, say, weapons-grade plutonium were vanishingly small.
Like every box in the port, this one came with a sheaf of papers listing its contents and tracing its route across the oceans. The sheet on top was just a list of bar codes. He waved a handheld scanner over the box’s codes. If the bill of lading said it was full of kitty litter, he would have a little laugh and go back to his chair and fall asleep again. It had to be kitty litter, right?
The box’s forms all claimed it was full of plastic water bottles. Empty bottles. That definitely wasn’t right — he flipped through the sheets until he found what he was looking for, the declared weight of the container. The box was heavy. Heavy enough that it had to be filled with metal or stone, not empty plastic bottles.
He hadn’t thought his day could get worse, but it just had.
Someone had shipped this box with counterfeit paperwork. Somebody had wanted to make sure nobody knew what was really inside.
Mitchell closed his eyes and tried hard not to panic. Was this the moment he’d trained for? He’d never actually seen radiological cargo come through his post before. It had just never happened. But when he took this job, he had known it might.
His duties at this point were clear. He was supposed to alert his superiors and then open the box and make a visual inspection of its contents.
Mitchell licked his lips because they were suddenly very dry.
If he did what his job required, if he popped the seals on that box, he might expose himself to the radiation inside. Most likely it wouldn’t be enough to actually hurt him. Most likely it would be like getting a single chest x-ray, nothing that would have long-term effects on his health.
Most likely.
There. The drone had found the pattern it was looking for. Near the docks where the big ships came in, it made out the rectangular silhouette of a box sitting underneath a yellow arch.
The drone shifted its control surfaces a few degrees, turned about on its circling course. Then it put its nose down and opened up its throttle, launching itself into a powered dive.
“I can’t,” Mitchell said, aloud. “I just can’t. Not with the baby…”
He stared at the box, knowing what he was supposed to do. Knowing he would probably get fired if he didn’t do it.
Knowing he couldn’t.
If he got sick now, if he couldn’t work, who would take care of his perfect little girl? His wife had quit her own job to look after the baby. If he got sick—
He would go and find his supervisor, go and explain. He turned on his heel and started to walk away from the box, away from—
He didn’t get very far.
The drone weighed nearly five thousand pounds. It had a top speed of three hundred miles an hour. Dropping out of the sky like a javelin, it was moving even faster than that when it struck the cargo container.
Its eye hit the steel side of the container and shattered in a million shards of glass. Its nose, made of carbon fiber and Kevlar, disintegrated on impact.
But its wings were edged with pure titanium. They smashed into the container with enough force to tear through the box’s metal walls, to pulverize its contents and send them flying, a thick roiling column of powdered metal that hung glittering in the air until the wind caught it.