Apocalypse Dawn (29 page)

For a moment, Delroy was back in his grandfather’s house, listening to the old man tell stories to his grandchildren that triggered fussy arguments from his wife. Grandpa Smith, on Delroy’s mother’s side, had been a constant joker. One night when the grandkids had been visiting, he’d explained about sitting up with the dead, and how sometimes in the old days before mortuaries embalmed the bodies and prepared them for burial, that sometimes the dead would sit up as well.

The first time Delroy had sat up with the dead with his father a few years later, he’d been frightened out of his mind, thinking the corpse of his great-uncle Darmon would sit up at any moment, maybe even come crawling out of the casket like a mummy in one of those old monster movies. His father had noticed Delroy’s discomfort at once.

Reluctantly, Delroy had explained his fears. Quietly and patiently, as was his way except when frightening nonbelievers with visions of hell and eternal damnation in that roaring lion’s voice of his, Josiah Harte had explained how in the old days the unprepared body would sit up. He had described in detail how the reaction was caused by rigor mortis setting in and tightening muscles due to the dead body’s inability to process sugar. Sometimes, his father had said, trapped air was even expelled from the corpse’s lungs, but the person was not actually alive, as uneducated and superstitious people thought.

Even though his father had been kind and understanding and in formative, and even though Delroy was nearly fifty years older, he suddenly felt like that small eight-year-old boy sitting in near dark with only candles for light. He forced himself to breathe again.

Using his remote control, he muted the television and pushed up from the chair. His heart beat frantically as he made himself approach the much flatter body bag. Hand shaking, he pressed his palm against the body bag.

The bag sank beneath Delroy’s hand, giving way immediately and not stopping till his palm reached the table.

“No.” He didn’t even recognize his own voice at first.

Quickly, struggling with all the emotions that were suddenly cascading within him, Delroy slid his hand down the length of the body bag. It was empty. At least, it was empty of a corpse. However, there was something inside the bag.

Before he could stop himself, Delroy reached for the zipper and tugged it down, freeing the zipper’s teeth so the bag could fall open.

Empty. The realization filled the chaplain with a mind-numbing cold that the refrigerated room couldn’t even begin to compete with.

With the bag open, Delroy saw the clothing lying inside. The lump he’d felt had been Dwight’s favorite shoes, a pair of Birkenstocks that his wife had given him a few Christmases ago.

Stunned, his mind reeling and snatching at possible reasons for this unbelievable turn of events, Delroy left the empty body bag and crossed the room. He pulled the door open and stepped into the main hallway of the medical department.

Cary Boone, in his mid-thirties and one of the ship’s best surgeons, stood in the hallway with a puzzled look on his face and a PDA in his hand. Tall and powerful with short dark hair, and right now a heavy five o’clock shadow, Boone was one of the regulars in Delroy’s pickup basketball group when Wasp was in her homeport.

“Chaplain Harte,” Boone greeted him distractedly.

“Dr. Boone,” Delroy replied. Navy doctors were called “doctor” until they reached the rank of commander. “Do you know if anyone moved Chief Mellencamp’s body?”

Boone looked irritated. “Why would anyone do that?’

“I don’t know. But Dwight-” Delroy halted himself. “The chiefs body is missing.”

.1 thought you were in there with him.” Boone covered ground rapidly, opening hatches along the hallway and peering inside.

“I thought I was, too, but just now, when I checked the bag, the chief’s body was missing.”

“I’ll ask around.” Boone tried another door. “Have you seen Nurse Taylor?”

Jenna Taylor was a favorite among the crew and the doctors. She was a vivacious young redhead from Ohio and one of the most levelheaded, kind, and considerate people that Delroy knew.

“No,” Delroy answered.

“I swear that she was right here,” Boone said distractedly. “I was going over these files with her, in preparation for the wounded we expect to take on from the border skirmish, and Jenna was talking to me from one of these rooms. She stepped in here to get something.”

“She’s been working this morning?” Delroy asked.

“Yes.”

“Then maybe she’ll know where the chiefs body is.” Despite the calm, rational exterior he held carefully in place, Delroy felt frantic. No one would take Dwight’s body. There was no reason. But the body had disappeared and he had no explanation for that. He joined Boone in his search, both of them calling out Jenna’s name.

A pile of scrubs lay inside the second room Delroy checked. He froze, not believing what he was seeing. “Cary.” His voice was a harsh desert croak that barely freed itself from his lips.

“What?”

“Come look at this. Tell me I’m not going crazy.” Slowly, Delroy squatted, hearing his knees pop and crack, because basketball hadn’t been the kindest of sports to his body.

Boone joined Delroy in the open hatch. “What?” the navy doctor asked.

Delroy pointed at the blue scrubs lying on the floor inside the supply room. Right on top was a name badge with Jenna Taylor’s name and rank on it.

“She left her clothes here?” Boone asked.

“The chiefs clothes were still inside the body bag,” Delroy said in a low voice.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” Delroy admitted. “It doesn’t.”

Running feet slapped against the steel floor. A young midshipman in scrubs rounded the corner at the end of the hallway. “Dr. Boone,” he gasped.

“What is it?” Boone replied.

For an insane moment, Delroy thought the young man was going to say that the chiefs body had been found, or that Jenna Taylor-as impossible as it sounded-had been caught streaking through the medical department or had even made it out onto the flight deck. Stress did strange things to people, and the coming hours and probably days of dealing with wounded troops and the battle that raged along the TurkishSyrian border promised plenty of wear and tear on the nerves.

“They’ve disappeared, sir,” the midshipman said.

“Who?” Boone asked.

The midshipman shook his head. “I don’t know exactly, sir. Dozens. I’ve found piles of clothes throughout the medical department. The missing people are leaving their clothes behind. But nobody’s seen them. It’s like they disappeared right off the ship!”

United States of America

Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, Colorado Springs

Local Time 2321 Hours

In the last six months of his new posting in the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, twenty-eight-yearold U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant James Franklin Manners had never before seen an attack as large as the one now spinning across the huge wall screen monitors. The feeds came directly from the satellites watching over the action that had broken out along the TurkishSyrian border. The other men and women around Jim worked diligently at their assigned tasks, collating the real-time information and moving it on to the command post in Turkey.

Buried two thousand feet beneath the mountains that gave the complex its name, Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center remained the backbone of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). The United States and Canada had jointly maintained the command post since 1957, with subdivisions responsible for delivering warnings about aerospace dangers, missile attacks launched against North America or the United States, surveillance and protection of U.S. assets in space, and geopolitical events that could threaten the U.S. as well as troops abroad. The command center gathered, assembled, and interpreted data from numerous sources.

Jim tapped commands on his keyboard, bringing up the information from the geosynchronous satellites as well as the low-earth orbit satellites that still maintained a visual window on the aggressive combat theater that had erupted eighty-seven minutes, forty-three seconds ago. He adjusted his headset and listened to the ground communications streaming through the computer links.

“Excaliber, this is Phoenix. Are you prepared to take on wounded?” The transmission was slightly garbled by the cacophony of explosions taking place around the speaker. Despite the dire straits he’d found his group under, First Sergeant Samuel Adams Gander performed his job and reported the events as they occurred.

“Affirmative, Phoenix. Excaliber is ready, willing, and able to transport wounded back to Wasp. The cap’n has the ship’s hospital standing by if we can’t make use of local resources in Sanliurfa.”

Jim studied the terrain, spotting the wing units put into the air from USS Wasp’s deck out in the Mediterranean. The Marine pilots kept their aircraft flying smoothly, staying close to the hard deck. Tracking the Marine wing had been Jim’s primary job, and the task had been relatively simple-until now. Once the Syrian forces were engaged, tracking would become complicated. One of his main priorities was to keep the friendlies separated from the hostiles.

Jim’s guts churned as he watched the aircraft moving. He tagged them again with the computer, converting the visual feeds into digital tactical information that showed on the wall screen in front of him. A Syrian MiG popped onscreen as well. Jim noted that he already had a designation for the craft but reaffirmed the tag with frantic trackball movements and a couple keystrokes. He glanced at the computer monitor on his right.

The computer monitor showed the American air forces as blue triangles. The Syrian forces were red. Any unknown aircraft, and thank God there were none of those, would be rendered in green, all of them marked with digital readouts of elevation from the hard deck. The resulting effect would be viewer friendly, like a kid’s video game.

Suddenly, many of the blue triangles veered from the LZ the Rangers had set up along the ridgeline behind the border. In a heartbeat, that tightly knit group of helicopters became a tangled confusion.

Glancing back at the satellite visual, Jim watched in disbelief as highly trained Marine pilots somehow managed to crash their aircraft into each other. Only a few escaped the immediate destruction. Even so, others dropped from the sky without ever being touched.

In one split instant, the rescue effort became a catastrophe. What had once been efficient fighting machines suddenly became ripped and twisted debris. As Jim watched in stunned amazement, one of the Cobras blew up when it struck the ground. Somewhere in the areas of his mind that cataloged, identified, and reasoned out such occurrences, Jim knew that the Cobra’s ordnance must have blown. Fire wreathed the battered hulk, letting him know there would be few-if any-survivors.

“What just happened?” someone demanded.

“Man, this reminds me of what happened to the Russian air force when they tried to pull off that surprise attack on Israel in January last year.

“Yeah,” someone else said nervously. “But that shouldn’t happen to us. We’re the good guys.”

Jim remembered the Russian attack and the way the Soviet aircraft had been swatted from the sky as if by an invisible hand. Footage of the failed attack still rolled on the Learning Channel and on The History Channel when Cold War programs aired.

Spinning in his chair, Jim gazed back at the observation post where the officers stood. Brigadier General Hamilton Farley stood with Canadian Brigadier General Victor Williams. General Farley was commander of the Cheyenne Mountain Command Center and General Williams served as second-in-command. Both men were stem and alert, not showing any signs of having been rousted from bed.

Jim looked for Colonel Morris Turner, the Canadian officer in charge of Charlie Crew, which was currently on duty. Colonel Turner had been standing in his customary position behind Jim, who was the newest member of the team. When he didn’t spot the colonel there, Jim glanced around the room. At present time, Charlie Crew consisted of thirty-seven individuals. Even considering that someone might have stepped away from their post, an event that Jim figured was never done during an alert situation because he’d never seen that happen, losing a person in the room was next to impossible.

Then he saw the uniform lying on the floor only a few feet from his chair. Colonel Turner’s name badge poked out from one of the buffed shoes.

Despite the training Charlie Crew had undergone, despite the stress that the team had faced on a number of occasions that threatened North American security, the men and women manning their posts came undone. As it turned out, several people were missing.

“It’s like they got beamed out of here,” Sterling Thompson said. He was a couple years Jim’s junior but had such an affinity for all things cybernetic that he had been a natural candidate to post at Cheyenne Mountain. Sterling was also big into science fiction. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at Jim. “There’s no other explanation, man. We’re two thousand feet down in solid rock, locked up tight behind doors that weigh twenty-five tons each.”