Predator One (54 page)

“See? See?”

“Yes,” said the Gentleman. “I see.”

He was pale beneath his burns. His hands shook with palsy and spit glistened on his lips.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

The burned man was impotent and crippled, disfigured and incontinent,
but in that moment there was such heat in his eye that even Pharos recoiled. Never once in his entire life had he ever seen such malevolence, such fundamental hatred in the eyes of another man. In the eyes of another person. The looked that flared in the Gentleman’s eye rivaled the inhuman hatred and contempt of the freak Nicodemus.

Or … maybe in some impossible, unnatural way it was the evil
priest himself staring out of that one baleful eye. That single orb was like a hole burned through the floors of this world from the ceiling of hell.

That was the thought, the startled reaction that filled Pharos’s mind.

And in that moment the color of the Gentleman’s eye seemed to change. To metamorphose from a human blue to a swirling m
é
lange of colors. Feces-brown. The mottled green of toad
skin. Jaundiced yellow.

Pharos felt himself leaning too far back, sliding from the chair, falling onto the floor. That eye followed, tracking his collapse. The mouth below it curled into a snarl that was unlike anything that had ever troubled the mouth of the Gentleman—before or after he was maimed. And yet it was such a familiar smile.

So familiar.

“I see,” said a voice that was not at all
the voice of the burned man. “I see very well.”

Pharos scuttled backward, a small cry bursting from his throat.

“Dear God!”

“I see,” said the voice. Then, in a voice that was filled with the promise of pain and horror, he said, “Now show me more.”

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-four

Air Force One

In Flight

April 1, 2:09
P.M.
Pacific Standard Time

Bain, the national security advisor, took a call on his reserved line. When he stiffened and went white with shock, everyone else in the conference room fell suddenly silent. Bain instantly began snapping his fingers for his aide.

“Channel nine, channel nine!”

The aide snatched up a remote
and began punching buttons to reach the channel, which was one of four secure feeds from the Department of Defense. The big screen on the wall burst with sudden color and movement.

“What is it?” demanded the president. “What’s happening?”

“There’s been another incident,” barked Bain.

“No,” said the president very softly. “No more. No more.”

“It’s the base commander at Beale Air Force Base
in Marysville, California,” said Bain. “They’ve been testing the QF-16Xs out there, and two of them have gone rogue.”

The president bristled. “What do you mean ‘gone rogue’? I ordered that all drones with Regis be grounded.”

On the screen, a satellite was tracking the flight patterns of two jet fighters traveling at thirteen hundred miles per hour. Fifty nautical miles behind them was a pack
of other fighters.

“Mr. President, these drones aren’t using Regis. They have a different software package. Something new. Nothing that connects them to anything Davidovich worked on.”

“Christ,” said Brierly, “they’re heading toward San Francisco.”

The jets were blurs as they tore across the screen.

“What’s our response?” demanded the president.

“We scrambled four F-18s from Vanguard Group.
They’re in close pursuit. Permission to—”

“Granted,” barked the president. “Shoot them down before anyone else gets hurt. Don’t let them reach the city.”

One of the generals spoke into a phone. “This is Air Force One to Vanguard Group, do you copy?”

“Copy, Air Force One. We are forty miles back and closing.”

“Permission has been given to go weapons hot. Vanguard, you are cleared to engage.
Repeat, you are cleared to engage. Put them down.”

“Roger that,” said a voice that, typical of fighter pilots, was calm despite the circumstances. Brierly thought that level of calm was admirable but unnerving.

“This is Vanguard Two, fox one,” said a second pilot, and everyone tensed as they waited for the AIM-20 AMRAAM missiles to burst from beneath the wing and drill their way through the
air toward the rogue drone at Mach 4.

The moment stretched.

Nothing happened.

“Vanguard One, I detect zero missiles fired. Confirm.”

The radio was silent.

“Vanguard Two, do you copy?” yelled the general.

Silence.

Then …

“Air Force One, we are experiencing—”

The voice vanished.

A moment later, another voice cut in, clearly from the tower at the airbase. “Vanguard One, I am reading a
system malfunction. Confirm status.”

As if struck by a harsh sideways wind, all four of the pursuit craft shuddered, their tight formation wobbling. The operator of the satellite video feed tightened the focus to show thin streamers of smoke or steam whipping backward from the cowls of each jet.

Then the tower voice was back. Yelling for each of the pilots to respond.

The jets flew on, still
gaining on the two drones.

But no one was answering.

The president turned to Church. “I don’t understand. What’s happening? Why aren’t they responding?”

Church set down the water glass he had lifted to his lips. “Dear God,” he said.

“What? Will someone please tell me what just happened?”

Mr. Church said, “The eject controls of all four pursuit craft have been activated.”

“What? Where? I
didn’t see anyone eject.”

“In order to safely eject the cockpit, cowling has to be removed. It’s done by firing explosive bolts.”

“But—”

“Those bolts never fired. The cowling is still in place.”

“But the pilots…?”

“The pilots are dead, Mr. President,” said Linden Brierly.

“Jesus Christ! Is this Regis…?”

No one answered.

“Is this fucking Regis,” screamed the president.

“No, sir,” said
the air force general. “We scrambled jets that did not have the Regis upgrade.”

“Then how—?”

“Solomon,” said Church. When the president turned to him, the DMS director looked as stricken as everyone else in the room.

“Yes,” said the general. “They were part of the first test group for Solomon.”

“Oh my God,” said the general, but it was not in sympathy with the president’s words or in mourning
for the dead pilots. Everyone turned back to the screen and watched in absolute horror as all six jets—the two drones and the four pursuit craft—fired their missiles.

Each of them.

Missile after missile.

The weapons flew from under the wings at four times the speed of sound. They streaked across the sky above the California landscape. Flying straight.

And true.

Toward a giant of steel that
stretched its arms from Marin County to San Francisco. Steel that glinted gold in the light.

No one spoke.

No one could.

As the missiles slammed into the vast span of the Golden Gate Bridge and blew it into fiery dust.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-five

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

April 1, 3:29
P.M.

We went in like silent birds.

Like the ghosts of some great old predators of the air.

Echo Team riding the breeze, coming through slanting rain out of a leaden-gray sky, carrying within us an even deeper darkness in our hearts.

The TradeWinds MotorKites were something Church had commissioned
from a company that made ultralight aircraft. The frame was made from a new aluminum-magnesium alloy that was lighter than a lawn chair but far stronger. Big silk bat wings filled the frame and extended beyond it, ribbed with flexible polymers. The motors were tiny two-strokes built for stealth rather than speed. Virtually silent.

No one heard us coming.

And unless they could make out shadows
against shadows, they couldn’t see us.

We wore a new generation of combat sealskin that had a network of cooling wires to keep the surface temperature of the suits in harmony with the air around us. Our own thermal signatures was masked. The rain helped with that, too. It was a dreary April morning. No one would be outside looking up.

I led the way, with Bunny riding shotgun on my left. Top
was on my right, and his kite pulled a second machine from which Ghost was suspended. He was in a close-fitting dog-shaped outfit that hid him as effectively as ours did. The motor of his kite was synched with Top’s, and the fur monster had been well trained for this kind of landing. Ghost loved the kites. Unlike his pack leader, who hated heights.

Brian Botley brought up the rear.

We were all
still reeling from what was going on in San Francisco.

The Golden Gate Bridge? Gone? And all those people.

More innocent lives.

More proof that we were losing this fight to the Seven Kings.

Who even knew if Tanglewood Island was the right target? If it was, did that mean we had our first real chance? If it wasn’t … then what?

Really. Then what?

I would have liked to have had a bigger team
in case this was the big play, but this is what we got. Odin and Java Teams were on their way down to San Francisco to help with the disaster and offer support to Homeland. We had a SEAL team inbound, but they wouldn’t be here for nearly an hour. I didn’t think we had that much time. No, check that, I couldn’t risk
wasting
that much time.

Ten miles over the horizon, our launch ship rocked on
the waves. Not a military ship. No one trusted any of them right now. No, we commandeered a fishing trawler. Not much of a ship. It had engines and not much else. We didn’t need much else.

In my ear, I heard Nikki’s voice. “We have an Osprey in the air with an E-bomb.”

“A trustworthy Osprey or—?”

“They pulled all of its computers.”

“Welcome to the world of the Luddites,” I said.

We sailed
closer and closer to Tanglewood Island, our kites and gear invisible against the storm clouds. The winds were steady but not heavy. No gusts—and the rain was a relentless drizzle rather than a crushing downpour. We had our Google Scout goggles on, and telemetric feeds projected onto the lenses gave wind speed, altitude, angle, pitch and yaw, distance to the island, and other data.

“Okay, listen
up,” I whispered. “We go in exactly as we rehearsed.”

I thought I heard a soft grunt from Bunny. Our rehearsal had been all of twenty minutes. That had been all the time we could spare. It wasn’t much, and I prayed that it was enough. The smallest mistakes could cost lives. Not just among Echo Team, but across the nation. We needed those reset codes. If we bungled the landing, if we failed to
take the island, if we couldn’t gain access to the chamber of the Kings, if, if, if …

If we made any mistakes, America was going to grind its way into a new dark age. Although the president was grounding all military aircraft, there were still a lot of ships with missiles. Crews aboard each one were cutting cables to the computer systems in a desperate rush to keep Regis from launching a self-inflicted
war.

In some cases, though, the efforts were too little and too late. A destroyer, the USS
Momsen,
leaving Pearl Harbor tried to self-launch Tomahawk missiles. The crew managed to secure the launch tubes, but the warheads went live. The
Momsen
blew itself in half. Rescue crews were searching for survivors. At last count they had only found three.

In the waters off Yokosuka, Japan, the USS
Ronald
Reagan
’s engines and navigation system went active and autonomous. Before the crew was able to physically disable the motors, the massive aircraft carrier had smashed its way through twenty-six commercial vessels in a fishing fleet and rammed the helicopter carrier JDS
Izumo
. Both ships were taking water and listing badly.

The butcher’s bill kept growing, tightening the knot of tension around
our throats. Thousands of lives. Billions of dollars.

And no end in sight.

All banking in the United States had been shut down. Schools were closed and most other activities were canceled. All trading was suspended. However, around the world, the stock markets were going wild, much of the panic fed by our own news media.

The Seven Kings were winning.

Winning.

It was like playing chess when
the other guy had all the pieces.

It was impossible to know if the Regis agenda was working as planned. If this was exceeding their expectations, then fuck them. If this was falling short of their hopes, it was still bad enough.

The DMS computer team was working to track whoever was raking in profits from the swings in the global market. The problem was that there were so many people getting
rich that it was hard to point at anyone who stood out as clear agents of the Kings.

Already, Yoda’s computer models were suggesting that the system couldn’t take much more of this. Some kind of collapse was coming. All it needed was one more push. One more punch.

Echo Team rode the dark winds trying to beat that punch.

We had no idea if we were already too late.

Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-six

Air Force One

In Flight

April 1, 3:33
P.M.
Pacific Standard Time

On the conference-room screen, the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge were bowing toward the water. Fire was woven inside great cables of smoke, and they coiled upward toward the clouds. Small dark objects continued to fall.

Cars.

People.

Lives.

“Goddamn you all to hell, you miserable pricks!”
screamed the president as he whipped his arm across the table, sending laptops and papers and coffee cups flying, showering the generals and Marcus Bain and Alice Houston. “You let this happen. You fucking let this happen.”