Apocalypse Burning (35 page)

One thing she was convinced about First Sergeant Goose Gander—there was a lot going on spiritually within him. She was sure of it. It wasn’t just the times she’d seen him at church or in the company of Corporal Baker. The spirituality she’d …
felt
surrounding him resonated within him. He was a natural-born leader, a man other men looked up to. But there was something more to him than that. Something that seemed to be growing. It had to be growing, she knew, because she hadn’t
felt
it about him as much when she had first met him during the rescue in Glitter City. And it wasn’t that she’d missed it, because she knew she would never have missed something like that.

Mostly she remembered the stark images of the first sergeant, the way he had looked when he’d swooped in and taken charge of Glitter City after the initial SCUD attack, announced himself and his unit, and told everyone there that the U.S. Rangers were there to save them. And she remembered the image of him when he’d carried that wounded marine from the fallen helicopter, the image that OneWorld NewsNet had turned into an icon for the Turkish-Syrian conflict news footage.

And wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants, she thought as she stood there in the darkness of the alley less than an hour before dawn, if OneWorld found out their chosen hero-guy is the one working to bring their little empire of assassins to the ground?

Just as quickly as that thought occurred to her, Danielle dismissed it. If OneWorld NewsNet discovered what she and the first sergeant knew, if Nicolae Carpathia had any inkling that they were trying to put their hands on materials that could possible damage his bid for international attention—and maybe the office of secretarygeneral of the United Nations, if the scuttlebutt Danielle had heard was true—she and Goose would be killed.

It’s not like all the Rangers are in on this,
Danielle told herself.
There’s no safety in numbers.
So far, the resistance movement consisted of an unknown computer hacker, herself, and First Sergeant Goose Gander.

Despite all the ways she had seen him—on the battlefield and off, winning and losing—Danielle had never seen Goose like this. She hid in the shadows across the street from the two-story building Goose had identified as one of the hidden headquarters of Alexander Cody’s CIA team and watched him, barely able to make him out in the darkness and through the rain that continued to assault the city. The storms to the south hadn’t stopped either, nor did they show any signs of slackening.

Goose was dressed in all black, a drenched shadow out in the night. The black suit he wore was standard night wear for these kinds of operations. His pants fit into high-topped combat boots. A mattefinish combat knife rode in a black sheath at his right ankle. He still carried an LCE, but instead of the M-4A1 he normally carried, he’d switched to an MP5 SD3. The small machine pistol was fitted with a suppressor to prevent any gunfire from being heard very far over the falling rain. He carried his M9 on his hip, but it had been outfitted with a suppressor as well.

Danielle had noted the change in weapons but hadn’t asked him about them. She knew why the first sergeant carried them. Alexander Cody and his men were killers. Goose didn’t intend for them to kill him.

Without warning, Goose vanished on the other side of the street.

Anxiety ripped through Danielle. Goose had taken charge of their escape from the three-agent CIA surveillance team two hours ago. They’d managed a two-hour nap in one of the public areas in the downtown sector after leaving Baker’s church, then lost themselves in the maze of alleys and side streets Sanliurfa was full of.

Goose’s knowledge of the city’s layout was staggering. They’d gone on foot, making better time and passing relatively unnoticed. When she’d asked him how he knew so much about the city, he’d told her it wasn’t a city; it was a battlefield. A sergeant’s job was to know a battlefield, every natural feature that could be turned to an advantage, every structure that offered a brief staging position, and everything that moved through that zone.

He’d had to learn the strengths and the weaknesses of the city, and know the strengths and weaknesses of his men. Then he had to be able to convert those things on a sliding scale on the fly as ground was lost or gained, as men were moved forward or brought back.

Goose was the one who had thought of the way to get Mystic’s information through a satellite burst transmission. Looking back on it now, Danielle guessed that the first sergeant had known how he was going to do it—how
they
were going to do it, Danielle corrected herself—the instant she had told him of the information packet.

Getting the packet through OneWorld NewsNet’s satellites was suicide. Getting it through another news service’s satellite link wasn’t secure and probably not very likely, given the troubles they were still having. Danielle had hoped Goose would tell her that he could get access to the army’s computers, but he’d shot that down when she’d finally asked him about the possibility.

The option she hadn’t thought of, the possibility that had brought them here now, was the existence of the CIA’s computers. If Alexander Cody was running a covert operation within the CIA, he had to have satellite access. As it turned out, Goose had known he was being spied on, and he’d tracked the CIA back to their hiding holes in the city. He’d admitted he might not know where they all were, but he knew where three of them were, and this one had a communications link to a satellite.

Goose hadn’t wanted to bring Danielle here tonight. But she hadn’t given him a choice. She knew the Web address where Mystic could be reached. She had refused to give it to him when he’d pointed out calmly how dangerous it was for her to come, or when he’d gotten irritated and told her that her presence was going to be a danger to him as well.

That had almost gotten her. Knowing that she might be responsible for his death had almost been too much. But she wouldn’t have the story she needed if she wasn’t there to get it firsthand.

And if push came to shove, no one would know how First Sergeant Goose Gander had truly died in the back alleys of a doomed city.

She breathed through her mouth, trying to be as quiet as she could. She stared through the darkness so hard that her eyes hurt. With the distance and the rain, she barely saw the satellite dish mounted on the building.

On the second floor a door opened, and light from inside the room spilled out over the covered patio area. Some of the light touched the first few steps of the stairs that led up to the patio from the ground. Beyond the small roof, the light turned gray in the rain and created a misty bubble, vanishing before it reached another surface.

The man was tall and medium built, dressed in khaki pants and a dark golf shirt. He wore a pistol in a shoulder holster under his left arm.

Danielle drew back a little farther into the night.
Looks like Goose’s information was correct.
Then she caught herself.
Intel. Military guys call it intel.

The man cupped his hands in front of his face and lit a cigarette. The lighter’s flame illuminated his hard features and blond hair, but it also brought out the fact that Goose stood behind the man with his back against the wall. The first sergeant’s face was tiger striped in green and black combat cosmetics. Then the lighter snapped off and darkness covered the patio area.

The man’s cigarette glowed like a red ember. A moment later, the cigarette dropped to the patio floor and exploded in a small flurry of orange sparks before extinguishing.

Danielle could barely make out the two struggling shadows on the patio. Panic set in, urging her into flight, but she was too afraid to move, too afraid that someone would see her.

Then Goose was in motion, stepping into the light from the doorway and going through it.

United States of America
Fort Benning, Georgia
Local Time 2222 Hours

Megan watched the end of her interview with Penny Gillespie, feeling less hopeful this time than she did the time before.

“Now I come to you,” Penny said on the screen, “as I so often have since this show began airing, in the service of the Lord our God, and ask that you make time in your hectic and troubled days to pray for Mrs. Megan Gander.”

Megan sat in an almost comfortable office chair at the small metal desk in Lieutenant Benbow’s office. The television set had a nine-inch screen but the picture was clear and in color. She’d been an hour late to the meeting to review for the start of the trial tomorrow, but the young lieutenant hadn’t been surprised.

Benbow sat on the other side of the desk with his elbows propped on his chair arms and his chin resting on his thumbs while his forefingers tapped lightly against his nose. His uniform was crisp, looking like he’d gone home and changed just before their meeting.

The story had aired more or less constantly on one channel or another since it had first broken on
Penny for Your Prayers
on the Dove TV channel. Since that time, several other local channels had aired sound bites of the broadcast. Too many of them seemed like they were taken out of context.

“Well?” Megan said.

Benbow looked at her, but there was a bit of reluctance in that look. “I don’t know what to say.” He picked up a pencil from the desk, turned to face her, and drummed the pencil against the legal pad in front of him. Notes covered the lined yellow page.

“Do you think I shouldn’t have agreed to the interview?”

“I wish you had talked with me first.”

“Would it have changed anything?”

“Would I have been able to change your mind?”

Megan considered the question. Talking with Penny Gillespie about everything she understood about the world had seemed right. She’d guessed that Benbow would disapprove of the interview before, during, and after she’d done it.

“No,” she answered. “You wouldn’t have been able to change my mind.”

Benbow hesitated for a moment, then exhaled and shook his head. “Then no, talking to me first wouldn’t have done any good.”

“Would you have told me not to do it?”

Benbow leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know. I have to admit, Ms. Gillespie is quite a persuasive woman. The piece was really good. But this much exposure at this time in the case—” he shook his head—“I don’t know if it’s going to help us.”

“I don’t think Penny’s program hurt us.”

“Hers didn’t,” Benbow agreed. He flicked the remote control and the television changed channels. “Dove TV is repeating the program every hour on the hour, and they’re going to do so until the trial finishes.”

“I didn’t know they were doing that.” Megan had gotten home and sat through the original airing. However, with all the noise in the Gander household, she’d missed the fact that there were going to be repeated airings.

“They are. And I like that, Megan, I really do. It means they’re standing behind what you’re trying to do. Not just grabbing a handful of headlines like a lot of these other stations are trying to do. Some of the major news networks are taking the opportunity to blast you. Have you seen OneWorld NewsNet?”

Megan shook her head. “I didn’t know OneWorld NewsNet was covering the story.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’re covering it, but they are featuring a few sound bites from it. None of it is favorable.”

“Why would they take an interest?”

“Because Nicolae Carpathia owns a majority stock interest in OneWorld NewsNet,” Benbow replied, “and because your statement that God raptured the world and took all the missing people flies directly in the face of his theory—and Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig’s theory, I might add—that a random surge of electromagnetism is what caused the disappearances.”

Tired and insecure as she was, the idea was enough to inspire Megan to anger. “That,” she stated flatly, “has got to be the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

Benbow shrugged. “In a way, the theory makes sense.”

Megan sighed. “How, Doug? Because Carpathia and Rosenzweig mentioned nuclear energy and electromagnetism? Because it sounded like technology? Do you know what their theory does?”

Looking a little put off, Benbow said, “I get the impression that you’re going to tell me.”

“Carpathia and Rosenzweig are taking away our humanity,” Megan said. “They’re putting us on equal footing with an image on one of those children’s sketchpads.” She remembered how Chris used to draw on the cheap little pads for long periods of time, telling her stories about every image he had drawn. Most of them were superheroes. Megan could always tell because Chris drew them wearing capes. “Those pads that kids can draw on, then lift the carbon paper in the middle and the image disappears?”