The Seraphim Sequence: The Fifth Column 2 (28 page)

‘Turning one of the transmitters into a high-energy radio frequency weapon,’ DC said.

‘Yeah,’ Sophia said. ‘If we can discharge the capacitors quickly enough—’

‘We have ourselves one badass electromagnetic pulse,’ Nasira said.

‘But will that be powerful enough to destroy the electronics inside an entire installation?’ Jay said. ‘On the other side of the freaking country?’

‘The installation might be shielded too,’ Damien said.

‘The transmitters generate the signals in the ionosphere,’ Sophia said. ‘That’s where an EMP is most effective. And it’s difficult to shield from such a low-frequency pulse.’

‘Just like a high-altitude nuclear detonation,’ DC said.

‘Shit, with that we could knock out the whole country,’ Nasira said. ‘One team, one hit, we’re done.’

‘I’m already responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths,’ Sophia said. ‘I don’t need to add half the population of America starving to death.’

‘At this rate, that’ll probably happen anyway,’ Jay said.

‘Not if we succeed,’ Sophia said.

Nasira held up her hands. ‘Alright, fine. Small blast then. We can do that right?’

‘We’d have to use the right amount,’ DC said. ‘A miscalculation could knock out an entire city.’

‘OK,’ Sophia said. ‘New plan. And we’ll only know once we’re inside if we can do it. Team A uses the New York transmitter to knock out the Alaska transmitter; Team B uses the Miami transmitter to knock out the Nevada transmitter. Then we self-annihilate—aim the EMP above our own transmitter.’

‘That’d knock out all our electronics, including radio,’ Damien said. ‘We’ll be dark as soon as we destroy our own transmitter.’

‘Anything you want to keep, wrap it in a towel and place it in a metal box to insulate it,’ Sophia said.

‘You’ll be needing these then,’ DC said. He placed Benito’s Interceptors on the crate, along with six access cards.

‘And they do what?’ Jay said.

‘For sure. The Seraphim installations have access-card readers protecting their control centers,’ Sophia said. She removed an access card from her pocket, the one Schlosser had given her. ‘This is Schlosser’s old access card. We copy his code onto one of those two blanks there.’

‘And then what?’ Damien said.

‘Connect the Interceptor to the access-card reader,’ Sophia said. ‘All the Interceptor needs is some form of access, even if the access has been revoked. It needs a template to work from. Swipe your new Schlosser card with his code on it, the Interceptor snatches the code, escalates the security privileges and stores the code. Then you swipe one of those two replay cards and open sesame: the Interceptor deploys the code to the controller and access granted.’

‘So we’ll be needing one of those,’ Jay said, suddenly interested.

‘What are the other two cards for?’ Damien said. ‘You said you have two blanks and two replays.’

‘Disable cards,’ Sophia said. ‘Swipe those and the reader will only grant access to your new Schlosser card, no one else.’

‘We can lock ourselves in,’ Damien said.

‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ Jay said.

‘A bad thing if we can’t generate an EMP with these transmitters,’ Chickenhead said.

‘That’s why we have a Plan B,’ Sophia said. ‘We plant explosives and detonate the transmitters.’

Jay nodded and collected one of the Interceptors. ‘The old-fashioned way.’

‘You’ll need to source the explosives,’ Sophia said.

‘And you guys in Miami?’ Jay said. ‘What are you going to use to blow the transmitter if the EMP doesn’t work?’

‘We’ll have to improvise,’ Sophia said.

Damien shrugged. ‘After we blow them or fry them or whatever we do, won’t they just rebuild them?’

‘It would take them years,’ DC said. ‘By then we hope the Fifth Column will be dismantled.’

‘That’s a big hope,’ Damien said. ‘I mean, it’s just us. There’s no one else who can help?’

‘No,’ Sophia said. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no other resistance. No other good guys left. Just us.’

‘A bunch of washed-up ex-programmed damaged soldiers,’ Nasira said.

‘And what happens if we fuck this up?’ Jay said. ‘Tinfoil hats?’

‘Zombieland,’ Sophia said. ‘Population seven billion.’

The goliath-sized Antonov turboprops sat dormant on the tarmac. As Damien and the rest of the team were taxied toward them in a minibus, he noticed the Antonovs’ tails were scribed with the letters
WFP
in blue. The aircraft’s tails and back ends were flipped upward, like the lid of a zippo lighter, and food pallets swathed in cargo nets were being loaded inside with forklifts.

Sophia’s team split up. Damien and Jay headed toward the Antonov scheduled for New York, while Sophia and DC veered toward the first of the two bound for Miami. Nasira and Chickenhead went for the second.

Damien and Jay’s pilot, a mountain of a man with large teeth and an American accent, introduced himself as Will.

‘Missionary, mercenary, misfit or broken heart?’ he asked, beaming at them.

‘Do I have to choose?’ Damien said.

Will cackled with laughter and directed them to the seating area in front. He didn’t ask any more questions, much to Damien’s relief. The seating area was directly behind the cockpit, as he’d anticipated. The seats were foldable and steel, with an afterthought of padding in the center and freshly installed waist seatbelts. There were no other passengers, so Damien took one side and Jay the other. Will appeared a moment later, telling them take-off was in five minutes.

Damien wanted to attempt some sleep, but the engines howled to life on both sides. Jay wiggled his eyebrows with faux delight. Damien buckled his seatbelt and popped an Ambien, watching as Jay grew noticeably tense. A parachute pack already lay between his tapping feet, on top of his new daypack. He had another parachute pack already strapped on his back. Jay wasn’t a big fan of heights.

Once the Antonov leveled out, Damien unbuckled and grabbed his own parachute pack from a large metal box. Jay thrust a pack into his hands. Damien tried to explain they didn’t need two but the engines were too loud, and Jay just ignored him anyway and stuffed the spare one into Damien’s daypack. Damien pulled it out to get to his parachute hammock, but Jay stood with his hands on his hips until he put the spare parachute pack back in.

Damien took a moment to check the contents of his daypack. He had a tin of hot and spicy spam, satphone and charger, a backup battery for the satphone, one pair of night-vision goggles, his flashgun, disposable razors, a couple garbage bags, paracord, a row of Ambien and a hundred in US bills, along with his mostly empty wallet and false New Zealand passport.

He was still wearing his own jeans, and inside one of his hip pockets he carried his usual low-profile slimline pouch containing essential items: penlight with red filter lens and spare battery, waterproof pencil, two tylenol and ibuprofen capsules, two alcohol wipes, four material bandaids, two safety pins, three rubber bands, two paper clips, a plastic nylon handcuff key, single- and double-notched lockpicks that also doubled as tension wrenches, a handcuff shim, electrical tape and some kevlar cord. For now, he kept his medium-sized multitool loose inside his pocket and kept his great-grandfather’s watch in the gap where his multitool normally went. Jay carried a similar kit, although he didn’t need a torch because of his enhanced vision; instead, he carried a Gerber knife and a single emergency cigar.

Damien also had a sachet the size of a credit card in a secret pocket sewn inside the left hip of his jeans, invisible to searches and pat-downs and reachable even if his hands were tied. Inside the sachet was his emergency kit: two-inch lockpicks, a handcuff key and shim, and a short length of kevlar cord. He knew Jay’s emergency kit was almost identical, except that the kevlar cord was replaced with a ceramic blade taped to an inactive credit card and a small diamond wire blade—everything they needed to escape from all forms of restraint and escape. Damien hoped they’d never need to use the emergency kit, but it was there for when the time came.

Damien strung his parachute hammock to the fuselage struts with paracord. There was no way he was going to sleep lying across those metal chairs. If he could manage four hours he’d be happy. The flight was seventeen hours, but since they were traveling backward in time he’d only lose five. ETA was 0300. Night arrival, which suited them.

He curled up in the hammock, parachute pack on his back and daypack on his front, wrapping the silk over himself to keep warm. He wondered what had come of Grace. Where was she now? What was she doing? Why had she just disappeared without saying goodbye to him—to anyone? Sophia didn’t even seem to care. Had Grace been working for someone else before Freeman? What was she up to?

He wondered whether she thought about him much, or at all. Did she miss him? When she’d briefed the team in the mountains, she hadn’t checked once whether he was looking at her or not. Then again, he was meant to be looking at her: she was briefing the team and he was part of the team. He growled at himself for overanalyzing.

He remembered how, during their downtime in Project GATE, they used to lie on the floor in his room. He’d stroke her hair and she’d tell him about the four dragons, the Long Dragon, the Yellow Dragon, the Black Dragon and the Pearl Dragon, a fairytale she recalled from her mother. Did Grace even care about him any more? Maybe the deprogramming had wiped all of that.

Too many questions and too few answers.

He pushed her from his mind and let the Ambien numb him to sleep.

***

The props screamed and the Antonov shuddered violently. Damien woke to find the entire tailgate had torn away from the rear of the aircraft. They’d taken a critical hit.

He was tossed from his hammock and fell down the center of the cargo hold, his spare parachute pack tumbling in his wake. He reached out and snagged one of the shoulder straps. The Antonov pitched dangerously to one side. He continued to slide to the rear with nothing to slow him. Beneath his feet he could see the dark ripple of water at night. Wind battered his ears, cold biting into his scalp. A high-pitched alarm pierced the air.

He slid past a pallet of rice bags, managed to grab onto the webbing. He hung there, a mere twenty feet from the gaping hole at the end. Further inside the cargo hold, he could see Jay clinging for his life to the fuselage struts on the starboard side. He was wearing his daypack but his spare parachute pack was nowhere to be seen. Damien realized in horror that Jay would need to pull his parachute pack out of his bag and pull it over both shoulders and up his legs before he could deploy it. He looked over his shoulder at the hole and saw ocean rushing below.

The Antonov lost another chunk, almost taking Jay with it. He slid helplessly down the cargo hold, toward Damien. He struck the rice pallet and rolled over it, hands grabbing at the webbing. His grip slipped and he kept moving. Damien reached over as far as he could but missed Jay’s hands. He caught hold of something. His ankle. One hand on the webbing, the other on Jay’s ankle, Damien felt his body stretching as the Antonov hurtled toward Manhattan Island.

Jay tried to pull himself up, but the speed and resistance was too much for him and he flopped back into his headfirst position. Damien’s hand squeezed around his ankle, his fingers numb, slipping. Then a sickening jolt. The Antonov wrenched and shuddered. Debris and shrapnel roared beneath them. Behind Jay, Damien saw the Statue of Liberty, decapitated. Its head tumbled and dropped onto the building below.

Jay’s ankle tore from Damien’s grasp. He watched in horror as Jay disappeared into the night. Damien didn’t know what to do. He was the only one with a parachute pack properly strapped on and ready to be deployed. Would Jay make it to his own parachute in time?

Damien let go of the webbing. He was thrown back with a heavy lurch and found himself spinning blindly through the night. He scanned the spinning landscape for Jay’s figure, but a dark figure falling into darkness was hard to spot with un-enhanced sight. The Antonov burned above, a ferocious ember.

He hit something heavy, dark. Limbs entangled, a fingernail cutting below one eye. His face burned hot and the air was knocked from his lungs.

Jay.

His body rolled before Damien, unstable. Damien angled down, struggling to make out Jay’s shape in the darkness. He collided with him again, wrapped his arms around him and didn’t let go. He hooked his legs around Jay’s, elbows under his armpits. They rolled through the air at dizzying speed.

With Jay locked in, Damien stretched his arms and extended his locked legs as far as possible. Their sickening spiral started to slow, then he and Jay leveled out. Jay had wrapped his arms over Damien’s legs so tight he was cutting off the blood circulation. Damien pulled his main line. There was a rumble behind him as his chute unfurled. It flapped in the frozen wind and almost wrenched him and Jay apart with a sudden jerk.

Damien checked his canopy. He could hardly make out the shape and color in the darkness but it looked good. He reached for the steering toggles and peered over Jay’s head. Before them, downtown New York was an infinite strip of sharp, gleaming spires and monoliths. Damien spotted the shredded Antonov diving low into a collision course with Battery Park.

The Antonov smashed into the coastline, its cigar-shaped body hurtling through the park, flames kicking across its path. The noise was resounding. Damien steered to one side, trying to avoid the black smoke that poured in its wake. Below his feet, the park rushed to meet him. Jay released himself, tumbling into the grass below. Damien hit the ground, rolled, pulled at his canopy. He had come to a halt but his mind was still spinning inside. He rolled to one side so his daypack wasn’t digging into his back. His arms and legs screamed in pain but they didn’t seem broken. He wrenched his canopy off, unable to comprehend what had just happened.

Jay could taste the ocean. He rolled over and blinding flashes of pain twisted up his spine and shoulders. He swallowed blood and blinked at light shining above him. At first he thought it was an angel who had taken pity on his agnosticism, but as his vision cleared he realized it was a street lamp. His fists closed over short, damp grass. He was in a park. He could hear a dog barking and the distant wail of sirens.

He sat upright, or tried to. He was wearing his daypack with a parachute pack inside, not yet deployed. Nasira had given him her MP7, so that was in there too, hopefully still in one piece. He noticed a crop of flames in the distance. They were soft at first, then became crisp and jagged—just as the pain became jagged. He traced the source and found a laceration across his left arm. He tested the range of motion in his limbs, slowly at first. Nothing broken or fractured, but his neck throbbed and his upper back felt like it was on fire.

A hundred feet to the left and he would’ve been on fire.

He scanned the grass around him. Damien was nowhere to be seen. In the distance, the Statue of Liberty stood eerily without her head. He stumbled toward the burning Antonov, searching for Damien’s familiar shape, but found no one. The torn shell of the turboprop had shrieked through the park, knocking over lampposts and trees and churning the earth until it had come to rest. Food pallets littered the grass around him. The police sirens were growing louder. How long had he been lying here?

He found a breach in the hull. The metal was blackened, torn like aluminum foil. He stepped through into the carcass.

‘Damien!’ he whispered. ‘Damien?’

He heard a grunt from the cockpit. He moved toward it. The co-pilot was dead, coated in sticky dark liquid. But the pilot, Will the American, was very much alive. He clutched at his chest, harnessed in. Jay leaned over and carefully released the harness. Will was short of breath, but otherwise seemed fine. No bleeding. His pupils were dilated and his lips trembled. Probably concussed too.

‘It’s OK,’ Jay said. ‘Hang in there, the paramedics are almost here.’

Will nodded weakly. ‘They … they  …’

‘They’re coming,’ Jay said. ‘I’ll be right back, I just need to find—’

Will shook his head. ‘Took. They.’

‘Yeah, I need to …’ Jay paused. ‘Wait. The guy I was with. Where is he? Did you see him leave?’

Will nodded slightly, then changed his mind and shook his head.

‘Don’t move your head,’ Jay said. ‘Where did he go?’

Will lifted a large hand and pointed.

Jay checked the compass attached to his G-Shock watch. About north-northeast. ‘Was he hurt?’ he asked.

‘They took him,’ Will said.

Jay’s blood ran cold. Shocktroopers already?

‘How did we crash?’ he asked.

Will swallowed. ‘Something … hit.’

Jay nodded. That was all he needed. ‘How many people took Damien? One, two, five?’

Will tried to move his fingers but they weren’t working any more. Instead, he said, ‘Four.’

‘What sort of clothes? Did they have weapons? Helmets?’

‘Hoods … with feathers,’ Will said, wincing.

‘Feathers? Are you, um, sure about that? What about torches? Were they carrying torches? Or goggles?’

‘Torch,’ he said. ‘All … had torches.’

That ruled out shocktroopers. They could see well enough without them.

The sirens were close now. Jay stepped out of the Antonov husk and searched the grass for tracks. The problem was, it was so short that it sprang back quickly once trodden on. But he did notice a feather. He plucked it from the grass and held it under the moonlight. It was blue. He slipped it into his pocket and headed north-northeast through what he now recognized as Battery Park. He was in Manhattan.

And so was Damien, somewhere.

***

The hood was plucked from Damien’s head. Light flooded in, bringing with it a searing ache behind his eyes and an unsettling dread of what might come next.

‘No depressions in the skull, maybe a mild concussion,’ someone said behind him.

Damien was sitting upright in a chair, his hands plasticuffed to the back and ankles to the chair legs. His watch, his pouch of items, his wallet, belt and even his shoes had been removed. They were thorough, he’d give them that. But he still had his slender sachet of emergency items hidden inside his jeans. He catalogued his injuries. His head felt like it had gone ten rounds with an ice rink, he had a loose tooth on his right side, and a searing pain in his left thigh. He looked down to see it bandaged and blotted red.

A young woman with a mane of blazing scarlet hair sat opposite him, one leg crossed and her chin propped on one hand. She looked younger than Damien, maybe early twenties. She wore white sneakers and a silver-gray jacket made of faux-crocodile skin. With two studs under her lower lip, a pierced nose and charcoal eye shadow, she looked more like an emerging fashion designer than a covert interrogator. He hoped that was the case.

‘Where am I?’ he croaked.

‘Somewhere safe,’ she said quietly.

On the edge of his vision, Damien could see a single armed man. It looked like he was being held in some sort of storage room. The dull throb of music suggested it was in close proximity to a nightclub. The door to the room was open, with stairs leading downward. He couldn’t see any further, but he could hear trains rattling in the distance. The ceiling was tiled green and white, with naked lightbulbs fringing a stained glass skylight.

The woman opened a passport—Damien’s passport—and glanced through it. ‘I’d like to know a little bit about you … Damien.’

They’d kept their first names but everything else was fabricated.

‘Shall we pencil in coffee next week?’ he said.

She feigned a smile and discarded the passport to the floor. ‘Interesting. You haven’t traveled much until recently. South-East Asia, that’s all. Nowhere else.’

‘I like Asian girls,’ Damien said, deadpan.

Her smile faded and she leaned forward, just a fraction. ‘What is it that you do again? I forgot.’

‘I haven’t told you.’

Her smile returned. ‘That’s right. You haven’t told me. Let’s start with that. What do you do, Damien?’

‘I travel. I do volunteer work for the World Food Programme.’

‘Have you ever worked for the government outside of the WFP, Damien?’

‘No.’

She turned to the table behind her and picked up a black pouch with a press-stud opening. It was his. Next to it, he recognized his daypack and the unused parachute pack beside it.

‘You pack light,’ she said, inspecting the pouch, likely for the second or third time.

‘I forgot my curling iron,’ he said.

‘Parachute, penlight, lock picks.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Alcohol wipes, bandaids—in case you get a boo-boo, I presume—a hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, no wallet, a cell with only one number and this.’ She held up the flashgun. ‘What might this be?’

‘Rocket launcher,’ he said.

She poked a hand into his daypack, her prismatic jacket glinting in the lights. ‘Nice watch,’ she said, removing his great-grandfather’s slim gold watch. ‘Is this an antique?’

‘If you break it, you’ll be an antique,’ he said.

She grinned. ‘Oh, and your radio and earpiece.’

‘Thanks, I was looking for that.’

‘I don’t have the code to access the frequency,’ she said, holding the radio. ‘So maybe you can help me out here.’ She flicked open a blade and winked. ‘Be a pal, Damien.’

‘I don’t know the code,’ he said, knowing how unbelievable that sounded. ‘But you seem to know your way around radios.’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve learnt a few tricks.’

She pulled her chair closer to him. When she sat down again, she was within striking range.

‘You’re a nice boy, aren’t you, Damien? Just the code,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Who are you?’ he said, hoping to gather some information of his own.

‘I’m not that kind of girl. I don’t give too much away on the first date.’

‘Do you tie everyone up on a first date?’

‘Circumstances permitting,’ she said.

The nightclub music swelled. Damien breathed deeply. She wasn’t a shocktrooper, that much was clear. She didn’t seem to be working for the government, or, by extension, the Fifth Column, although he wasn’t about to rule that out. It was possible she was the Akhana, whatever remnants had survived the hurricane, or perhaps a member of some sort of underground gang or resistance. There were a lot of those in America these days.

‘Where did you find me?’ he asked.

‘Battery Park. You were lying near a burning cargo plane. Thought you were nearly dead, but you bounced back quite nicely,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the rations, by the way, we grabbed what we could.’

The plane must have crashed. He recalled nothing. His first instinct was to ask about Jay, but he had to be patient; he couldn’t give that away just yet. For all he knew, they had Jay in a separate room and were cross-examining them both.

A train rumbled close by. The light bulbs flickered excitedly.

‘Must’ve been … shot down,’ he said.

‘The media are blaming terrorists, resistance groups, whoever they can,’ she said. ‘Between you and me,’ she leaned in to whisper, her lips an inch from his nose, ‘pretty obvious it was the government. Not the first time they’ve pulled a stunt like that.’

At this point there were two scenarios, Damien thought. Either she had a very plausible cover to lure him into a false sense of security in an attempt to extract information from him on behalf of the Fifth Column. Or she was some sort of vigilante who placed little trust in her government. In a world like this, either was as likely. Or even both.

He played along. ‘Why would the government shoot down a plane carrying food for the people? We came here to help!’ May as well throw her a bone. ‘We’re the United Nations.’

‘Oh.’ She seemed to like that last tidbit of intel. ‘Or perhaps that’s just a cover. Perhaps you were here for other reasons.’ She nodded toward the table behind her. ‘That filter on your penlight is just because you like the color red, right?’

‘Something like that,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘Damien, I can’t give you anything if you don’t give me anything.’ She lifted her blade. ‘I don’t want to hurt you. You’re kinda cute.’

‘I should warn you, I haven’t showered in four days,’ he said.

‘Why are you here?’ she said, knife poised above his bandaged leg.

‘I’ve already answered that,’ he said, trying to ignore the blade and keep his eyes on her.

She sank the knife into his thigh. The blade pierced the dressing and cut through what was already sensitive tissue. He bucked and screamed. Fire engulfed his leg. His wrists drew tighter on the plasticuffs, cutting the circulation off. Sweat ran down his nose. She withdrew the blade and for a moment looked genuinely concerned. He clenched his teeth and blocked out the pain. Focused. On what he needed to extract from her. What his escape options were. With his hands plasticuffed like this and his legs too, there wasn’t much of a way to escape with her watching. So he needed to create a way.

‘The cuffs are cutting off my circulation,’ he said. ‘If you take them off I’ll tell you.’

She seemed to consider it. ‘Actually, I prefer you tell me and I stop stabbing you.’

‘Because that’s working really well so far,’ he said.

She raised the knife, aiming for his other thigh.

‘I’m working against the Fourth Column,’ he said, purposely using the incorrect name.

She smiled. ‘I don’t know, Damien. I don’t think they’re real.’

‘They are. But they won’t be for long once I’m done with them.’

‘And what is it you plan on doing?’ she said, inspecting the blood on her knife.

‘I’m still working on that. But I’m open to suggestions.’

She hadn’t corrected his mistake. Either she was well-trained or she wasn’t a Fifth Column asset. He was leaning toward the latter, but that was mostly wishful thinking.

She licked her lips. ‘I can’t untie you, Damien. I don’t trust you enough yet. I hope you understand.’

‘What I’d like to understand is why I’m here,’ Damien said. He might as well get to the point. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to make sure you’re not a threat,’ she said. ‘And also I like gossip.’