Apocalypse Island (48 page)

“Jesus, Seph. How much time are you talking about here?”

“Oh, an hour, maybe two tops.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“I wasn’t.” Wilder laughed wickedly.

“You plan on taking me with you, huh?”

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to come over here. You invited me, remember?”

“Listen, Seph, give me a chance and I’ll help you expose those bastards. It doesn’t have to end this way.” Jennings knew he had to get away from this crazy bitch. He didn’t know how he was going to do it but it had to be soon.

“Don’t bullshit me, Rick. You and I both know it’s the only way it
can
end for me.”

“We can prove they screwed with your minds, made you what you are, made you do the things you did.”

“Oh you mean like an insanity defense or something?”

“That’s right.”

Wilder threw her head back and laughed out loud. God she was so fucking beautiful Jennings almost couldn’t breathe. What a waste.

“You can’t imagine who you’re dealing with,” she said. “I’d never make it to a courtroom. They’d think of something; lethal injection late at night in my cell, or I’d hang myself, and those bastards would get away unscathed. No way. They’re going down. Trust me, the world will finally know what happened here. They’ll know
everything
.” Wilder pointed the gun at Jennings and motioned for him to descend the staircase. “Move along, Rick, I’m tired of talking.”

Chapter 123

Eli led Wolf along the wall until they came to a large air conditioning vent cover. Eli took a small screwdriver from his pocket and removed the screws that held the cover in place. Wolf wondered how Eli could even function, he was so horribly deformed. But watching him caused pride to swell in him. He was glad he had befriended Eli all those years ago, happy that he had saved him from the fire and even happier that Eli was still around.

Wolf helped him get the heavy lid off the vent and together they carefully set it on the floor. Eli went in first, scrabbling up and over with those short, twisted legs of his. By the ease and confidence with which Eli navigated, Wolf was certain that he had done this many times before. Wolf followed Eli’s lead. On hands and knees they made their way through the 3 ft. by 4 ft. aluminum ductwork tunnel. In here there was a slight breeze blowing cool air at them. He wasn’t sure where it was coming from but he was grateful for it.

Several hundred feet in they came to an intersection where the ductwork split into two sections. Eli chose the left section and Wolf followed. Presently they arrived at another wall vent. Eli took out his screwdriver and quietly removed the louvered cover, this time, from the inside. Wolf saw that it had been cleverly reverse-engineered and realized that Eli was some sort of genius.

Once the vent cover was removed they stepped out into a stairwell. Wolf glanced over the railing and saw a deep set of spiral stairs descending perhaps a dozen or more stories before reaching bottom. The stairwell had been cut from solid bedrock.

Eli turned and placed an index finger vertically to his lips for Wolf to be silent as they made their way carefully down the stairs. At the bottom they heard men’s voices and Wolf froze. Eli pointed at a wall vent and Wolf realized that this is where the voices were coming from. They put their ears to the vent and listened.

Chapter 124

The interior of the room was bathed in eerie blue light. There were dozens of computer stations and tons of other electronic equipment, most of it flashing and beeping, like  a giant intensive care unit hooked up to a massively sick patient.

“What in the world
is
this?” Tall Tech asked. He was staring around the room, his mouth open in awe.

“Monitoring equipment,” Spencer replied.

“Yeah, I can see that, but what the hell is
that?
” He pointed toward the center of the massive room where a perfectly circular and futuristic-looking dome-shaped structure dominated. It was perhaps fifty feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, constructed of what looked like riveted stainless steel and surrounded by oval-shaped windows of thick transparent material. It could have been an alien spacecraft for all he knew. The room behind the windows was bright with a light so intensely blue that looking at it gave him a headache. It was as though the room contained its own mini sun brought here from some distant and exotic galaxy.

“Holy shit,” said Short Tech.

“Don’t stare directly into it until you put your glasses on,” Spencer warned.

The two techs stopped and set the package gently onto the floor. They all pulled Polaroid sunglasses from their pockets and donned them. Tall Tech put his hands over his ears. The humming noise inside the room was dreadful, nearly making him sick.

“Ear plugs won’t help much,” Spencer said. “It gets into your bones. Trust me, eventually you get used to it.”

“I don’t know if I could ever get used to that,” replied Short Tech.

“You won’t have to,” said Spencer. “Our work here is almost complete.”

“Just as I remembered it,” Robeson said, staring rapturously—and a little bit warily—at the spectacle before him.

Spencer frowned deeply. “But it’s not as you remember it, Red.”

“Explain to me why that is?” said Robeson.

“Whatever connection that thing had with those kids has been reactivated. We suspect it’s communicating with them again after all these years, drawing them back here. What we don’t know is why.”

“According to my calculations, there aren’t many of those kids left,” Robeson said.

“Four,” Spencer said. “After tonight there won’t be any.”

Robeson nodded. Since becoming Portland’s police chief he’d been more than happy to be out of the loop and away from this awful place. His instructions had been clear: keep an eye on things, especially the island, and report any unusual activity. For the most part the past twenty years or so had been relatively quiet. There was all that shit with jack Higgins, but that was long over. And then things had heated up again five years ago when that big retard, Sam had escaped from Indian Lake, the CIA’s secret facility in New York State. And then while they were tracking him, the murder of that woman had complicated things, especially when they’d discovered that Sam had been at the murder scene along with another person suspected of being a woman. But Sam and his conspirator had disappeared and things had been relatively quiet, until recently. Actually he’d almost forgotten about the place. Almost. But he’d never been able to forget about the blue light. Oftentimes it haunted his worst nightmares.

Short Tech moved closer to the dome, staring like he was enraptured. “My God,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. What the hell is it? How did it get here?”

Spencer smiled but to the tech it looked more like a grimace of pain. “The dome is man-made,” he said. “It was designed to contain it. Cutting edge shit, carbon composites, high tech ceramics and an amalgamation of some of the toughest armor-piercing metal known to man. The walls and glass are more than four feet thick.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“We don’t know for sure. But probably. That’s why we contained it. We figured it was best not to take chances.”

“Yeah, but what the hell
is
it?”

“No one knows exactly. It’s a rod of light but different from any light known to man.”

“No shit,” Short Tech replied. “That’s the strangest color I’ve ever seen.”

“It belongs to no known spectrum,” Spencer said. “And it has all sorts of properties that defy logic. It’s made of stuff we can’t even measure. There’s heat but not enough to compensate for all the light. It emits a steady hum in the 250 Hz narrowband and it never wavers. We believe its source is somewhere down in the earth but we’ve never been able to pinpoint it exactly. It exists in a shaft that’s too perfectly formed to be natural, and the strangest thing about it is its ability to telepathically communicate with certain individuals.”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” the tech said.

“Wouldn’t think of it,” Spencer replied. “For more than thirty years teams of some of the most brilliant scientists in the world have studied it, and most go away scratching their heads. We’ve tested it in every way known to man and still we can’t figure out what the fuck it is. At first we thought it was unique to this island, but since its discovery several others have been located around the world. And they’re all exactly the same. It’s almost as if they exist in a separate universe than ours because we can’t wrap our brains around their particularities. There’s one in China, one in Africa, one on the island of Fiji, and recently another one was discovered—of all places—smack in the middle of Antarctica. There might even be more of them. We’re not sure. We don’t know what they are, where they came from or what the hell they’re doing here. They might be ancient or something relatively new. One theory is that they’re somehow connected. And the most interesting thing about them is that they seem to have some sort of telepathic influence over the natives in the areas where they’re located. It causes them to act in strange ways.”

“What ways?”

“Makes them homicidal for one thing.”

“Jesus, so these things are alive, they have intelligence?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. The only thing we’ve been able to do is contain them and no one’s really sure if these things
are
contained or if they can actually
be
contained. Because we don’t know what they are or what they’re capable of. We have them hooked to all sorts of monitoring equipment including seismographs, and lately seismic activity is up, and not just in this one. They’re all becoming more active and we don’t have a clue why. They might be getting ready to do something for all we know. For obvious reasons they’re one of the most closely guarded secrets on the planet, and we definitely consider them a threat, especially when you consider that they have mental and emotional influence over human beings.”

“The scientific community would like to continue studying them,” Spencer continued, “but the consensus amongst governments around the globe is that they pose a danger and need to be eliminated. Time for study is over.”

So what’s gonna happen to the others?” Short Tech asked.

Spencer looked at his watch. “In exactly two hours they’ll all be destroyed simultaneously. Yes, we’ve even got the Chinese on board.”

Let me ask you something,” Robeson said. “What kind of damage can we expect from that thing?” He pointed at the footlocker. “I mean, this island is populated and the mainland is only five miles away.”

“A detonation on the surface would be catastrophic for a wide area if this was a conventional nuke,” Spencer replied. “It’s not, and we’re not going to detonate it on the surface. There’s three hundred feet of solid bedrock between us and the surface.” He looked at Tall Tech. “You’re the expert. Why don’t you explain?”

“This is a suitcase nuke,” said the tech. “The smallest nuke known to exist. Its design is based on the W54, a 10.6" x 15.7" cylinder, code named Davy Crockett, that was used both as a recoilless nuclear mortar for ground troops, and as a special atomic demolition munition, a hand-delivered nuclear time-bomb for attacking enemy ports. This one is code named SADM and it’s even smaller than the Davy Crockett at just 10.6" x 11.8" weighing in at just under 51 lbs. It is absolutely the smallest nuclear weapon ever built. The Davy Crockett had a 10-20 ton yield—intentionally kept low to be safe to those firing it—while this one has a variable yield between 10 and 15 tons.”

“Yeah but what does this all mean in terms of damage?”

“Okay, to create a nuclear weapon requires a critical mass of a fissile material, and a chassis for a gun-type trigger or explosive lenses. A critical mass of uranium is about 10.5 kilograms or 23 lbs, 10.1 cm or 4 inches across. This is not enough to start a multiplicative chain reaction, but does produce enough radiation to be deadly if you were holding it. To produce a chain reaction requires upping the uranium just a bit. Just 10% over critical mass is sufficient to create a nuclear weapon with a yield of 10-15 tons. That’s what we have here. Detonated beneath the ground it’s going to do enough damage to take out this facility and everything in it, perhaps enough to put a small hole in the earth—although we hope that won’t happen—but not enough to take out the entire island.”

“You
hope
that won’t happen?” Robeson said.

“We spent weeks doing the calculations. We’re as sure as we can be. On the surface it’ll feel like a 5.0 earthquake. But that’s about it. Might shake some folks out of their beds but it’ll pass quickly.”

“What about radiation?”

“There’ll be some, but being this deep into the bedrock most of it will be contained.”

“But what about the people who live on this island?” Robeson asked, addressing his question to Spencer. “What if some of that radiation does leak out?”

“I thought I’d made myself clear on this,” Spencer said, his impatience evident in his tone. “This facility operates outside the umbrella of the United States intelligence community. Our orders are non-negotiable. They come down from the highest levels of authority, so high in fact, that the people who issue them don’t have names or faces. Regardless of possible consequences, we cannot and will not deviate from those orders. Do you understand?”

Robeson nodded.

“Do you have any idea how many questions there would be, or how big this could get if we tried to evacuate the island?” Spencer asked, his voice now conciliatory. “This way no one will ever know exactly what happened here. It’ll take years to sort it out. By then we’ll be long gone. It all ends tonight. Got it?”

Again Robeson nodded, but he was feeling queasy inside, wondering who would be left holding the bag if it all went to shit.

“Yeah, but what if this thing doesn’t destroy it?” asked Tall Tech. “Or worse, what if it just pisses it off?”

“Those questions have all been addressed a thousand times,” Spencer replied. “Not my problem.”