The Rift (2 page)

Roland stood on the open back ramp of the Snake, fifteen thousand feet above St. Louis, as calm as if he were waiting in line at Pottery Barn. Of course, Roland had no clue what a Pottery Barn was, but if one mentioned the term to him, he would deduce that it had something to do with a recurring fantasy about fine china and a bull, which was pretty much the definition of Roland—the bull part. Roland was six-four and two hundred forty pounds of muscle, bone, and pure killer. He had a scar running along the right side of his head, starting from his temple and curling behind his ear. On his last trip to Vegas, he’d had it tattooed with barbed wire, which earned him a big-time ass-chewing from Moms, because Nightstalkers weren’t supposed to have tattoos (the body could be identified), but in this case Ms. Jones intervened because the tattoo actually sort of hid the scar, which had been more noticeable than the black ink covering it and raised more questions.

And Roland was noticeable no matter what was on his skin.

The Snake was at fifteen thousand above ground level (AGL), because any higher and everyone inside would have to be on oxygen. As it was, the breathing was hard for normal people, but the people inside were anything but normal.

They were the Nightstalkers.

The best of the best, the cream of the crop, the tip of the spear, et cetera, et cetera, so secret they even wondered if they existed, in their more existential moments, of which there weren’t many, except when Eagle, the pilot, got to thinking.

“There’s a lot of lights,” Roland observed, looking down.

“It’s a city,” Mac said, as if talking to a three-year-old, which is the way Mac talked to Roland pretty much all the time, except in combat, when Roland was everyone’s best friend. “A big city.”

“I know it’s a city,” Roland muttered. “But it’s three in the fraking morning.”

The team had recently done a
Battlestar Galactica
marathon in the Den, buried underneath the Ranch outside of Area 51, and
frak
was now the buzzword, as Moms frowned on cussing. They had adopted it as adjective, adverb, verb, noun, and simple exclamation. It had caught on with some, but not all.

“Two minutes,” Eagle announced from the cockpit.

Roland took a short step closer to the ramp. Moms came up and ran her hands lightly over his rig, doing a last-minute jumpmaster parachute inspection (JMPI), redundant, not needed and not Protocol, but Moms always checked Roland before a jump. Tradition trumped Protocol sometimes. She slapped him lightly on the shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up.

Roland blushed, because he always blushed when Moms paid him special attention. It wasn’t a sexual thing but a deep and abiding affection, much like a Doberman for its owner, because Moms had once saved his life in combat and for Roland there was no deeper love than that of combat.

Roland had concocted a unique rig for this jump and he was overly excited about trying it out, even though there was a good chance he was jumping into a real-world equivalent of the Hellmouth. (They’d tried a
Buffy
marathon, but only Roland had wanted to see it through; that was ’cause he had immediately identified Buffy with Moms. The Nightstalkers dealt with things that made vampires look tame, so the rest of them felt the show was kind of lame.) Roland had done thousands of jumps in many different configurations and situations, but this one was unique even for him. The prospect of a combination of an aircraft free-fall jump directly to a landing, where he would then do a BASE jump tickled his tiny, tiny imagination—or so Mac had said as Roland had prepped.

Roland, as usual, had ignored his poking.

“It is a city,” Nada said, his voice, more a growl, coming into each team member’s earpiece. “Even at three in the morning there’s likely to be civilians. We’ve got Support en route, but as always, we’re on our own for a bit. Remember—containment, concealment, and control. And the local law is as dangerous as anyone else because they give those people guns, even though most of them shouldn’t have one.”

A couple of the Nightstalkers exchanged glances, because those three C words were their mantra and deeply imprinted in each of their brains. For Nada to feel he needed to repeat them reminded them not only of the mantra, but also that things had been a bit frayed in the past year on various missions.

“One minute,” Eagle said.

“Doc?” Moms asked.

Doc was staring at his laptop screen, his forehead furrowed above his thick glasses. “A Rift is indeed forming. But different.”

“Not much help,” Nada said. “Different how?”

“Bigger.” Doc looked up. “Someone’s using the Gateway Arch to make a Rift.”

“Frak,” Mac said, vocalizing what every Nightstalker thought at the moment.

“You know,” Eagle said over the net, “the guy who designed the Arch said it symbolized, and I quote, ‘the gateway to the west, the national expansion, and whatnot.
’
”

“Looks like we’re heading for the whatnot,” Kirk, the team’s commo man, observed.

Moms began chanting Warren Zevon’s “Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner,” and the team picked it up.

“Go!” Eagle ordered from the cockpit.

Roland stepped off into the glowing darkness above St. Louis. In his earpiece he could hear the team finish the second line of the song.

He wished he had a Thompson gun, with its big .45-caliber slugs. He spread his arms and legs, got stable, then pulled the rip cord. The opening shock jerked him upright, and he looked up to make sure he had good canopy while he grabbed the control toggles for the chute.

Then he looked down.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” It could have been the soundtrack for a porn movie, except the young woman exclaiming the words was fully clothed, sitting cross-legged in the grass, had a laptop on her knees, and was watching six different data boxes on it.

We all get our kicks different ways.

She was so focused on the data that she was missing the real show. The Gateway Arch towered 50 feet in front of her, 630 feet high and 630 feet wide, making it the tallest memorial in the United States and the tallest stainless steel structure in the world. It had been dedicated in ’65 and opened to the public in ’67, not the greatest decade to celebrate the westward expansion of the United States, as the country was embroiled in an unpopular war abroad and unrest at home.

At three in the morning, the woman had the park to herself, which is why she’d picked three in the morning to run her test. The numbers and indicators on her laptop screen showed that the program she’d started two hours ago was reaching culmination. She was completely unaware that the initiation had also set off flashing lights and a loud clicking alert deep underneath Area 51 in the Can, and that was why the Nightstalkers were descending from above like avenging angels or, as Mac said in his grumpier moments, flying turds, especially with regard to Roland, the largest turd of them all according to Mac.

He never said it within earshot of Roland, though, because Mac had an innate survival instinct.

A single thin cable ran from the USB port of her laptop across the grass and was attached to the left leg of the Arch with a magnet.

As with most of the scientists the Nightstalkers ended up dealing with, she thought she knew what she was doing.

As with most of the scientists the Nightstalkers ended up putting in body bags or more likely listing as MIA, she re
ally didn’t.

A crackling noise caused her to finally look up. Her mouth dropped open and she couldn’t even moan her excitement anymore. The entire interior of the Arch was flickering, a slightly golden sheen illuminating the space framed by what Eagle could have told her was a weighted catenary form of stainless steel. Eagle could have even gone into the math involved, something to do with
x
and
y
and cosines and fractions and whatnot, but that wasn’t what Melissa Eden was interested in, even though she was very good at math, having earned a PhD in physics from Stanford, which required more than a few math courses along the way.

Just as quickly as
she’d
seen it, the gold coalesced inward from the metal arch to a single tiny, golden, glowing arch, about ten feet wide and high, in the exact center on the ground.

It wasn’t a sign for McDonald’s.

Eden felt the hairs on her arms tingle and there was another crackling sound. She had a sour taste in her mouth. She squinted, because through that small arch, there was something, like there was another side, which was the whole point of this experiment, except even in her most excited dream, she’d never really imagined it would work. Because no one had ever published on it, saying they had succeeded.

That should have been a hint.

She didn’t realize she’d gotten to her feet, the laptop forgotten on the grass. Through the golden arch, she saw rows of…something. Even though she couldn’t make out what the somethings were, she had the distinct sense the somethings were facing this arch and if it stayed open much longer, they were going to come through.

In the way ancient man used to stare out the mouth of the cave into the darkness, knowing danger lurked out there, Eden felt a primeval fear of those somethings.

Here there be monsters
used to be written on ancient maps to fill in the blank spaces. In this case, it should be written in capital letters. With one or two exclamation points.

As quickly as she thought that, though, instead of a bunch of somethings, a single someone stepped through and the golden arch snapped out of existence.

Roland was focused on the Arch and the area around it. There was a golden glow underneath the stainless steel structure, which was never a good sign.

As he passed through eight thousand feet, he checked in, because it was Protocol that he check in at eight thousand feet.

“Eagle, thermals?” Roland asked as he adjusted his descent.

“I’ve got one hot spot near the Arch. On the landward side. Probably our genius scientist.”

“That’s the side on the other side from the river,” Mac added, in this case probably a smart add, because Roland had been a bit puzzled by the landward part, although Mac’s explanation didn’t help much with its redundancy.

Roland was using a clockwise spiral to descend, checking all directions.

“Beyond that, looks like a couple of homeless on the riverfront,” Eagle continued. “And then there’s the city. You’ve got I-70 cutting the park off from it.”

Doc’s voice cut in. “The Rift is closed. I’m getting nothing. That was different. Like it snapped shut.”

“Roland, see any Fireflies?” Moms asked.

“Too high up,” Roland replied.

Roland started to dump air, increasing his downward speed.