Ragnarok (10 page)

“Damn.”

Bishop made for the river’s edge, as he had said he would do. Knight adjusted his stance, leaning further out over the parapet. He targeted the last creature chasing Bishop and fired. Then he pulled back from the scope to see yet another wave of speeding lines making waves in the air like heat haze, down on the street. Then one of the creatures mounted the roof of the cab Bishop had previously used for cover and turned its head up to the sky and howled.

The sound was hideous.

The noise was deafening and terrible, a deep bass rumble like a horn filled with every terror in the world. It vibrated through Knight’s body, rattling his bones. He dropped the sniper rifle and it fell to the next lower section of the tower. Goose bumps broke out across every part of his skin, sweat beaded and dripped as though he were clutched by fever, and a terror-filled scream that would shame him forever had anyone heard it ripped from his lungs.

Shin Dae-jung had never been so scared in his life.

FIFTEEN

Chicago, IL

3 November, 0100 Hrs

WELL, THIS IS embarrassing.

King thought he was going to die. Clutching the pants of a dead man with one hand, and the eject lever between the dead pilot’s knees in the other, King held on for dear life as the rockets on the underside of the ejection seat slammed him out of the crashing plane and across the sky laterally at close to 100 mph. He had just enough time to see that the thrust from the rockets on the seat were going to slam him, the pilot and the seat into the side of a building with darkened glass windows and five vertical stripes of dark tan concrete. Even in the brightly lit night scene, and at a point of view from which he had never seen it, he recognized it as the Park Hyatt building.

Then his next thought as the chair blasted across the sky was to try to crawl lower down the pilot’s legs toward the blasting rockets—so he wouldn’t end up between his impromptu getaway vehicle and the oncoming wall of stone and glass.

His brain didn’t have time to complete the next thought.

I hope I don’t get roasted—

The rockets died. The chute section in the headrest exploded outward with a pop, slamming into King’s shins and flipping him over the footrest of the seat toward where the rockets were propelling the craft just a second before. His body arced out and away from the seat and he lost his hold on the ejection lever. He clung for all he was worth to the dead pilot’s flight suit and twisted hard, scrambling in mid air to get his other hand back on the pilot before the impact.

When it came, it rattled him, but the impact was far less than he had expected.
Two men, one chair
. The normal propulsion of the seat might have pitched them through the glass and out the other side of the building, but because of the weight, the propellant had quit and their velocity had died down before the crash. The window around them shattered into tiny safety glass crumbles that rained down to the street. The chair lodged itself just inside the building, but King was dangling from the pilot’s ankles and swinging from the bottom of the chair, on the outside of the building, with the wind tearing into him and lightning strikes from the several-story glowing orb below him crashing into the surrounding structure.

Well. This isn’t too bad. If I can just…

King felt the chair shift and start to slide, and then it was in freefall—above King. He didn’t have time to wonder whether the parachute, which had already deployed but had yet to have time or airflow to inflate, would open in the plummet to the Water Tower park several hundred feet below him. He knew it wasn’t far to the ground and it would be a close thing. He scrambled up the pilot’s legs, now trying to get on top of the pilot before the seat separated from the pilot’s corpse.

TOM DUNCAN STOOD on the street craning his head up. He stared up at the spectacle of King’s amazing ejection and wondered if it would somehow be possible for the man to survive. He had approached the edge of the glowing, lightning-spitting ball, to see if he could gain some readings from it for Aleman, when King’s F-16 had come ripping into the sky overhead. Lightning struck the plane and then it faltered. Duncan could see it would crash. A second or so after praying that King would eject, he zoomed in with the camera lens on his helmet’s heads-up display to see King making his way into the pilot’s seat.

Then everything had gone crazy. Lightning began shooting from the glowing orb even more than it had been, striking the buildings all around the Water Tower park. The canopy on the jet burst off, and King, riding on the pilot’s ejection seat with the pilot, was fired sideways through the air and straight at the side of a building. Duncan’s heart was climbing up his throat like a mountaineer moving up a chimney of rock as he watched in fear for his friend.

Then a more immediate concern. The broken, crashing 20-million dollar jet was spinning and falling right for Duncan’s position. With the crackling dome wall of energy that now reached close to 80 feet high directly behind him, Duncan could only move ahead along Michigan Avenue or dodge to the side in either direction, but the plane was spinning erratically as it came down out of the sky at him and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Time slowed as he heard shrieks from the nearby onlookers, where the military and police had set up a cordon down by the Walgreen’s store on Chicago Avenue.

The plane was almost on him and Duncan simply threw himself forward onto the rough asphalt of Michigan Ave., scraping the palms of his hands. The falling plane, its engine completely shut down, flew over his head soundlessly. The lack of noise was eerie. The crowd down the street quieted.

Duncan rolled over and sat up to look back up Michigan at the energy sphere. There was no sign of the plane or its wreckage. Duncan tapped at the keys on his wristpad and a display from a CCTV camera mounted on the John Hancock Center’s roof, looking down on the street on the other side of the energy ball, appeared on his helmet’s display. No sign of the jet on the other side.

The energy dome had simply swallowed the crashing plane. Then Duncan remembered King.

He scrambled to his feet and looked back up to the top of the Park Hyatt and there was King, dangling from the bottom of the ejection seat, which had lodged into what his faceplate told him was the 67
^th
 floor of the building.
Hold on, King, I’m on my way
, Duncan thought. He was about to start running diagonally across the park to the building, when the chair, its dead pilot and King, all shifted, lurched and fell.

Oh no.

Duncan watched, spellbound as the chair separated and King scrabbled up the dead man’s body as the parachute inflated and slowed their descent.
Thank God
.

Then the strong winds ripping between the skyscrapers, made stronger by the atmospheric disturbance caused by the pulsing dome, slammed into King and the pilot, blasting their parachute north across the Water Tower park and directly toward the sphere of light. They were still a few hundred feet high when the roaring wind shifted and their parachute moved sideways, with King furiously working the toggle straps.

They plummeted faster, King and the dead man, just ten feet in front of the wall of electric light, and Duncan held his breath. King was 100 feet off the ground, but still too far to let go of the dead pilot and leap to safety. Lightning blasted from the sphere again, barely missing the parachute.

Duncan was sure King would make it now. Fifty feet off the ground.

The wind gusted again, hard. Duncan was almost blown off his feet. The dome was playing havoc with the atmosphere around it, like an electrical storm.

King was blown into the wall of the energy dome. He and the dead pilot swung in toward it at a 45-degree angle away from the parachute. As their bodies hit the wall of energy, they disappeared inside it, until only the lines of the parachute and the black canopy could be seen. King went into the dome at probably 30 feet off the ground. Duncan couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Then the wind shifted again and the parachute gusted back and away from the dome, yanking King and the pilot back out of it and over the park until they slammed onto the ground just to the side of the concrete fountain in the park’s middle. Duncan sprinted over to the crashed men.

King stumbled to his feet, after the dead pilot’s body had taken most of the brunt of the hard landing.

“King!” Duncan arrived and saw the haunted look on King’s face. “What is it?”

“On the other side. I saw them. They’re coming.”

“How many?” Duncan pulled the strap of a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun over his head and handed the weapon to King, then pulled out a Browning 9 mm from the leg holster he wore.

King looked at the MP5 and then at Duncan. “More of them than we have bullets.”

SIXTEEN

Fenris Kystby, Norway

3 November, 1130 Hrs

ROOK LED QUEEN and Asya down the steep slope of the hill toward a bush at the bottom of the rise. When he reached the large squat bush, he bent down and swept some of the snow away from the base of it with his bare hands until they were wet and pink. The snow had fallen for the last few hours, through their breakfast at a small inn and their impromptu shopping trip for Rook to buy a warmer coat.

Asya had arrived with her own pack full of warmer clothing, when she had come looking for Rook. Queen had her own supplies as well. But Rook had had only the clothes on his back and the Desert Eagle pistol that was now probably melted to slag in the fire back at Peder’s barn. The thought of Peder’s death brought Rook to a dark place and instead he turned his mind to the present task.

He reached down for the roots at the bottom of the shrub and hauled on them with all his strength. The bush lurched upward and then sideways, as the secret entrance to the lab, concealed beneath the bush, flipped open with the fake bush on top of it. Snow blew down into the four-foot-square, darkened opening. The air smelled stale. But Rook could still clearly see the rungs of the ladder that led down the vertical tunnel to the horizontal tunnel at its bottom, which would take him to the old lab he had discovered.

“You found this when you were hunting a scientist?” Queen was skeptical.

Rook turned to her and then to Asya. Both women wore similar expressions. “Look, something was eating Peder’s animals. I thought it was a wolf at first—there are several around here—but it turned out to be this Nazi scientist that had been here since the ’40s, and had experimented on himself, to the point that he was nuts. The guy’s corpse is down here, so you’ll see for yourselves. I don’t know what the hell is going on in this town, besides this old Nazi science lab, but I was told it had been shut down for ages. No one even knew Kiss was still alive. The place looks abandoned, but I figure it’s the best place to start looking for information. I didn’t have time to search it properly last time, because, you know, I was trying not to die.”

Queen nodded at him, her blonde hair bouncing. “Booby traps?”

“Down there? Nah.”

Queen dropped into the hole, her hands gripping the sides of the ladder. She slid out of sight. Asya looked at Rook and nodded. “You have strange friends, Stanislav. And strange stories.”

“Call me Rook.”

“Finally being honest with both of us, then?”

Rook widened his eyes to say,
Shut-up
! He realized Asya had heard more of the conversation at the store than she’d let on and whispered, “Don’t go listening in on people’s conversations. It’s rude.”

“I could not hear you. Your body language said everything.” Asya grinned. “You have feeling for—”

Rook raised his hand quickly, pinching his fingers together and hissing like Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” to an unruly mutt. “Not another word.”

Asya shrugged and dropped into the tunnel after Queen.

Rook shook his head and grumbled, “Friggin’ women, always getting in everyone’s business.” He looked around the field and back up the hill. Nothing moved in the snow except for his misting breath as it slowly rose from his mouth and met the frigid air. Then he dropped down the ladder, and pulled the trap door shut over his head.

At the bottom of the ladder, the stone tunnel led away down a slope toward the old Nazi laboratory. The tunnel was small, and Rook had to stoop in places to make his way. Crumbled stone still littered the floor. The air smelled dry and dusty. Rook doubted anyone else had been down here. After five minutes of travel down the sloping tunnel, he caught up with Queen and Asya, who both stood before a metal door with a frame embedded in the rock. Queen wore a Petzl headlamp on an elastic strap where her fleece headband had been. The light illuminated the door and the word stenciled above it:

Ragnarök.

Queen turned to him with an upraised eyebrow. “Destruction of the Gods?”

“Yeah, something like that.” Rook saw the confused look on Asya’s face. “The word refers to the end of the world in Norse mythology. I’m sure the Nazis thought it was suitable for their kooky experiments.”

The door had no handle. It was just a smooth metal slab. Rook reached past the women to the upper-right edge of the door, where he knew a small crevice existed in the frame of stone around the metal door. He remembered the worn-smooth feel of the stone on his fingers. He exerted the right amount of leverage and the metal door began to creak open. Queen stepped up and braced her arm against the wall to help Rook with the door. In her other hand, she held an M9 pistol—the only weapon any of them now had.

They stepped through into a small laboratory. It clearly had not been used in some time, but the room was still well organized, with the exception of a few bullet holes in things from Rook’s recent battle with Edmund Kiss, the scientist that had experimented upon himself until he was practically a feral, yeti-like creature. But Kiss was dead. Nothing Rook had seen in his previous visits to the lab—first hunting for the creature that turned out to be Kiss, and later battling the creature he had become to the death—hinted at mind control or anything else that could be connected to the townspeople of Fenris Kystby going glazed and attacking him and Peder at the farm that morning.