The Shimmer

by David Morrell

  “Yes, sir!”

  The sergeant shook Raleigh so hard that the colonel’s teeth knocked together. Then Lockhart spun him so forcefully that the colonel had the sense of being in a centrifuge. For a moment, he wondered if the sergeant might be enjoying his work too much.

  Abruptly Lockhart let go of him, thrust an M4 into his hands, and shoved him into the shooting house.

  The sergeant had, indeed, done his job. Raleigh felt so disoriented that the floor seemed to ripple and the walls to tilt. His heart rushed, and his vision wavered.

  Each time Raleigh tested himself in the shooting house, Lockhart reconfigured the partitions, arranging the layout in a new and unprdictable design. The one thing Raleigh could be sure of was the familiarity of the weapon in his hands. During his twenty-five-year career, he’d used its forerunner-the M16-in numerous conflicts around the world. He knew how to field-strip and reassemble an M16 in absolute darkness and with amazing speed. He’d learned to appreciate its contours and secret places as he would those of a lover. He could shoot that venerable assault rifle with remarkable accuracy, even when it was switched to full auto.

  Still, the M16 had drawbacks, particularly the length of its barrel in the close environments of urban warfare, so the shorter, lighter M4 carbine had been developed. As an officer in the Army, Raleigh had his differences with the Marines, but he definitely agreed with their wisdom in requiring all officers to replace their sidearms with M4s.

  At heart, we’re all riflemen, Raleigh thought.

  Moving warily along a dim hallway, he checked that the M4’s selector was set for three-shot bursts. He willed his mind to stop swirling and his legs to become steady. With long-practiced biofeedback techniques, he worked to control his respiratory rate and sub- due his pulse.

  A target sped out of a doorway ahead.

  Raleigh aimed and held his fire. The target was an old man holding up his hands in surrender.

  Raleigh peered into the room, saw that it was empty, and continued down the hallway, but at once, a noise behind him made him pivot. Another target sped from the room. Somehow it had been concealed from him. It was a man with a rifle, but before it stopped, Raleigh pulled the trigger, sending three rounds into the opponent’s head. He blew another three rounds into the old man’s head on the assumption that he was in league with the assailant and that in an actual firefight, the old bastard would probably pick up the dead man’s gun the moment Raleigh’s back was turned.

  Raleigh quickly scanned the rest of the corridor. Ready to shoot, he moved forward through growing shadows. The trick was to keep his weight balanced, never placing one foot too far ahead of the other. Sliding his feet, he progressed in an efficient shuffle, always capable of adjusting to the M4’s recoil.

  Another target popped from a doorway. Raleigh almost fired be- fore he saw that it was a woman holding a child. But then he realized that the child was actually a doll and that the grip of a pistol projected from behind it. He pulled the trigger and sent three bullets into the woman’s brain.

  The smell of gun smoke was thick in the corridor now. Although Raleigh wore protective earplugs, his awareness was at such a level that he swore he could hear the clinking sound of his empty shells hitting the concrete floor.

  How much time had gone by? How long had he been there?

  Don’t think about it! Just get the job done!

  The corridor went to the right. Raleigh entered an area that had a receptionist’s desk and wooden chairs in front of it. Without warning, a target surged up from behind the desk. A man with a handgun!

  As Raleigh fired, a figure rushed from an office doorway-a woman in a white medical coat. She held up her hands as yet another target sped into view, this one from another doorway, a man about to throw a grenade.

  Raleigh shot him, then shot a target that hurried from a farther doorway, a woman with a rifle, then shot two gunmen who rushed from the corridor on the opposite side of the reception area.

  He pivoted, scanning everything that lay before him, on guard against more attacks.

  His mouth was dry. His hands sweated on the M4.

  The rush of his heart was so powerful that he felt pressure in the veins of his neck. Breathing deeply but not quickly, he assessed the scene before him. Were all the threats eliminated?

  No.

  The woman in the white medical coat continued to stand before him. Weaponless, her hands were raised.

  Is the sergeant setting me up? Raleigh wondered. Is that a weapon in the pocket of her medical coat?

  He twisted the M4’s selector to full auto and emptied the remainder of the magazine into her, the powerful burst blowing the ply- wood figure apart.

  Through his earplugs, he heard a sharp electronic whistle, the signal that the exercise had ended. He pulled out the earplugs and turned toward Sergeant Lockhart, who approached along the corridor.

  “I finished before the ninety-second time limit,” Raleigh said. “Beat my own record, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lockhart said, but there was doubt in his voice. He glanced behind him, and Raleigh knew he was thinking of the bullet holes in the target that portrayed the old man. Then Lockhart peered ahead toward the disintegrated target of the woman in the white medical coat.

  “Collaborators,” Raleigh explained. “They’d have moved against me the first chance they had.”

  “Of course, sir.” Lockhart still sounded doubtful.

  “Sergeant, don’t you like this assignment?”

  “Sir, I’m very happy with it.”

  “I could arrange to have you sent someplace that offers you more of a challenge. Perhaps a war zone.”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t, sir.”

  “Combat builds character, you know.”

  “Sir, I’ve been in combat. With all due respect, I don’t think I need any more character.”

  “Then I’ll spare you a repeat of the experience. But since you’ve been in firefights, there’s one relevant thing I’d expect you to have learned.”

  “Yes, sir. And what is that?”

  The colonel gestured toward the disintegrated target of the woman in the white medical coat.

  “You don’t stay alive long if you take the time to worry about innocent bystanders, especially in a firefight. Sure, maybe some pussy reporter’ll accuse you of a war crime, and maybe the Army’ll cave in to the grumbling of a bunch of politicians and put you on trial. But you’ll still be alive, and ten years of hard labor is better than getting shot to death by a supposed innocent bystander who thinks you’re a fool for not killing him. Or her. There could easily have been a suicide bomb under her medical coat.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s going to be hard for anyone to outdo my new record.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant assured him emphatically.

  Raleigh’s cell phone buzzed. He pulled it from his belt and spoke into it with authority. “Raleigh here.”

  What he heard made his jaw tighten.

  “I’m on my way.”

  16

  The strange sounds seeped past the closed door of the command center one level below the underground shooting house. Raleigh heard them the moment he hurried from the elevator. He passed an armed sentry, jabbed numbers on a security pad, and pushed the door open.

  The full volume of the sounds drifted over him. A dozen civilian researchers studied various electronic displays, assessing, measuring, calculating. He’d never seen his research team look so intense. Amid the multitude of glowing instruments and pulsing meters, he hurriedly closed the door and tried to identify what he was hearing. He was reminded of music, but these weren’t like any notes he’d ever heard. Granted, they were processed through a computer’s synthesizer program, which gave them an artificial tone, but he’d heard synthesizer music before, and that wasn’t what created the distinctive feeling these sounds inspired.

  First, the rhythm sank into him. It drifted, so hypnotic that it seemed to counteract his quickening
heartbeat. Second, the notes vibrated in a way that made the colors in the room appear to intensify. Third, the melody-which didn’t have any pattern that he could detect-made his mouth feel as if he’d just sipped…

  “You’re tasting orange juice, aren’t you, Colonel?”

  Startled, he looked up. A researcher had noticed him draw his tongue along his lips.

  “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “We all are. Do the colors seem stronger as well?” The man’s eyes flashed with curiosity.

  Raleigh nodded, squinting to subdue the sudden intense glow of the monitors.

  “You can almost feel the music as much as hear it,” the man continued.

  “Yes. A ripple of warmth along my skin.”

  “It’s called synesthesia.”

  Raleigh was blessed with an encyclopedic memory. He quickly identified the word. “A process by which the stimulation of one sense somehow causes other senses to be stimulated as well.”

  “Exactly,” the researcher said. “In this case, we’re not only hearing these sounds, we’re also seeing them, feeling them, and tasting them.”

  Raleigh glanced from one scientist to another. He thought of the projects his team had been developing. One of his favorites was a method of transmitting ultralow sound waves that affected the physical and psychological well-being of an enemy. The enemy wouldn’t be able to hear the sound and hence wouldn’t be aware of the aural bombardment. But the effects would be profound. In the 1990s, an early version had been tested around the isolated community of Taos in northern New Mexico. For months the valley had been saturated by a low-level frequency that in theory should have been beneath the range of what human and animal ears could register but in actuality turned out to be just barely detectable. Locals who were made nervous wrecks by it took to calling it the “Taos hum.” Dogs and cats showed visible pain, scratching at their ears until they were bloody. That glitch had been corrected so that no person or animal could hear the low vibration, and Raleigh had enjoyed the power of being able to make people irritable enough to lose their tempers-even at- tack one another-simply because he had flicked a switch.

  But no project had ever offered so much baffling promise as this one. It had been in development for decades, since long before Raleigh had maneuvered his career so that he’d been put in charge of it in 1995. It dated back to before INSCOM had been established in 1977, and even before the National Security Agency itself had been created in 1952. This was the culmination of something that had obsessed him since he was a boy, and it presented the chance for him to fulfill a lifelong ambition.

  Finally it’s my turn.

  Leaning over the console and staring at the flickering lights, he addressed his next question to the entire team.

  “Usually all we get is static. Why is this happening all of a sudden?”

  “It’s not just Rostov,” a woman scientist murmured as she shook her head as if to free herself from the strange music.

  Raleigh turned toward a large computer screen on which a world map showed four widely separated red dots. Each of the dots was pulsing.

  “Rostov started first,” a man with thick spectacles said. “But then the others began doing the same thing. The static dissolved, and…” The man gestured in mystification. “And then we heard this.”

  “The others?” Continuing to taste orange juice, Raleigh moved closer to the map on the screen. One of the flashing dots was situated in west Texas. That was the one he’d automatically looked toward be- cause that was the site on which the research had always been focused. But now he peered at the other locations. Norway, Australia, and Thailand-all sites known to display phenomena similar to those in west Texas.

  “What you’re hearing is the one in Australia,” the woman continued.

  “But those areas are even more out of the way than Rostov,” Raleigh objected. “Hell, the one in Thailand’s on a riverbank in a jungle. The one in Australia’s hundreds of miles into the outback. And we don’t have monitoring equipment anywhere near them, let alone a radio observatory like the one in west Texas.”

  “In this case, there’s no need,” the man with thick glasses explained. “The signals are so powerful they’re leaking out into the atmosphere. We’re capturing them off special frequencies on our satellites.”

  “You said Rostov started to do this first?”

  “Yes. Then the others became active.”

  Raleigh pulled his cell phone from his belt and quickly tapped numbers.

  “Sergeant, assemble a team. Civilian identities. Concealed weapons. We’re leaving for west Texas at dawn.”

  17

  “It’s dark enough now,” Costigan said, his figure indistinct in the police car. Neither of them had spoken in so long that his voice seemed extra loud.

  “Finally,” Page told him. “It’s about time I got the answers you promised.”

  “I didn’t promise answers,” the police chief replied. “What I promised was that you’d understand.”

  Page shook his head in annoyance, opened the passenger door, and stepped onto the gravel parking area. He stretched to ease the tight muscles in his legs and shoulders. His companion walked to the back of the cruiser, where he opened the trunk and pulled something out.

  “Here.” Costigan reached across with a windbreaker. “In a couple of hours, you’ll want this. It gets cold out here.”

  “A couple of hours?” Baffled, Page took the windbreaker but didn’t put it on. Everything was shadowy in the dusk. A faint light was mounted on the sidewall of the observation platform, but its effects were minimal. The last glow of sunset disappeared below the horizon.

  As he walked past Tori’s Saturn, approaching the observation plat- form, he heard a vehicle behind him and looked back toward the headlights of a Volkswagen van that steered from the road and stopped a short distance from the police car. Puzzled, he stopped to see who had arrived. The van’s headlights went off. Then interior lights came on as doors were opened. Page saw the silhouettes of a middle-aged man and woman getting out. They twisted their shoulders, stretching the kinks out after what had evidently been a long drive.

  “This better be worth it,” the man said irritably. “We’re a hundred and fifty miles out of our way.”

  “You said you wanted to retire early and see the country,” the woman replied.

  The man surveyed the dark, barren area around him.

  “And we’re sure as hell in the country. That police car’s probably here to keep people from getting robbed. Well, come on, let’s get this over with.”

  The couple shut their doors, extinguishing the van’s interior lights. Their footsteps crunched on the gravel as they walked toward the observation platform.

  Following their example, Page continued in that direction. Costigan veered off to throw the crumpled paper bag with the remnants of their burgers and fries into a trash can, then followed him across the lot. Before they made it another ten feet, Page heard a second vehicle approaching, then a third. Both turned into the parking area, their headlights sweeping across the structure, but he didn’t look back this time.

  He came around the sidewall and found an area about thirty feet long and ten feet deep. It had a wooden floor, a roof, and a built-in bench that went all the way along the back wall. Anyone sitting there would face the grassland that stretched beyond the fence.

  A solitary figure was in the middle, looking toward the dark horizon.

  A woman. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a sweater. She seemed oblivious to the shadows of the middle-aged man and woman, who went over to the fence and stared past it toward the night.

  Page concentrated on her, trying to understand.

  “I don’t see a thing,” the man complained.

  “Well, we just got here. You need to give it a chance.”

  A family came around and stepped in front of the platform- parents with a young boy and girl tugging on their hands.

  “By the time we get to the motel, it’l
l be long past their bedtime,” the mother said.

  “Hey, as long as we’re driving by, there’s no harm in stopping. It’s not as if it’s taking us out of our way,” the father replied.

  “But the temperature’s going down. The kids’ll probably catch cold.”

  The woman on the bench seemed oblivious to the family as well. And oblivious to Page. She just kept looking toward the night.

  He smelled cigarette smoke and glanced over his shoulder toward where Costigan leaned his tall, thin body against a post that sup- ported the platform’s roof. The police chief had put on a cowboy hat and raised a glowing cigarette to his mouth. The woman didn’t pay attention to that, either.

  Confused, Page looked in the direction that held her gaze. Above the horizon, he saw an amazing number of stars, with more appearing all the time as the last of the sunlight retreated. He studied the dark expanse of the grassland. Forty-five degrees to the right, he noticed the distant specks of headlights as a few vehicles approached Rostov from the Mexican border, which lay fifty miles away.

  So what the hell am I supposed to understand? Page wondered. He was beginning to feel like the victim of a scam, yet he couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  At the fence, the middle-aged man spoke again, echoing his thoughts. “It’s just like I told you. Nothing. Just some kind of tourist trap. I’m amazed they’re not trying to sell us something.”

  “Honestly,” the woman replied, “I don’t know where you’re in such a hurry to go. Just give it a chance.”

  Meanwhile, at another section of the fence, the two children tugged harder at their parents’ hands.

  “Daddy, I don’t see anything,” the little girl said.

  “Here, I’ll lift you up,” the father said.

  “Me, too,” the little boy insisted.

  “You’ll have to wait your turn. I can’t lift both of you at the same time.”

  “I’ll do it.” The mother picked up the boy.

  “I still don’t see anything,” the little girl said. “Daddy, the dark makes me scared.”