by Kane Gilmour
On the other side of the room, the Black Team was under-represented, because half of them-the pilots, callsigns: Black One through Black Four-were currently out in the field. Two mechanics that repaired the team’s helicopters and the Crescent were present. Both men wore bib overalls, and both tended to keep to themselves. Pierce had seen them around the base a few times. They were both short and skinny men, with grease caked under their fingernails from a lifetime of mechanical work. Both men were dark haired, and Pierce occasionally wondered if they were brothers. The men were callsigns: Black Seven and Black Eight.
Black Five was an overweight man of at least sixty years old. Deep Blue had introduced Pierce to the man only a few weeks earlier. Balding and always wearing half-moon glasses, Black Five probably looked older than he was. When Pierce had seen him, he was neck deep in computer programs, on the phone or both. Deep Blue had introduced Black Five as an intelligence analyst, but he had been recruited because he also had a Ph. D. in physics. Deep Blue liked team members to pull double duty, which was why Pierce was expanding his expertise into general history and even paleontology, should dinosaurs ever emerge from Antarctica. Sounded ridiculous, but the ridiculous was kind of their thing.
Black Five stood against the wall, speaking softly to a man Pierce had never met. But Pierce knew this wiry, muscular man in the charcoal suit could only be one person. Black Six was the team’s only former Central Intelligence Agency member. He was a field operative. The team’s very own spy, like James Bond. But due to the nature of his work, he was usually in the field. Pierce had, until this moment, only heard of the man, and never actually laid eyes on him. Black Six was younger than Pierce might have thought-perhaps in his mid twenties. He had a strong jaw and blue eyes, but the cut of his hair was a bit long, and Pierce could easily picture the man sliding undercover as an executive one week and as a surfer the next.
Lewis Aleman cleared his throat.
“We’ve got General Keasling, Deep Blue and King on the line in New York. Bishop, Knight and Black One and Two are also online as they transit to Europe. Mr. Boucher, is on the call from DC. I have the rest of Endgame here with me. Here’s the situation as we have it so far.
“We’re dealing with a threat unlike anything we’ve seen before. I’m afraid most of the news I have is pretty grim…”
“Lewis,” Deep Blue interrupted. “Let’s start with the bad news.”
“Okay,” Lewis said, looking down at the floor. When he looked up again, sorrow hid behind his eyes. “The world is going to end in four days.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH
3 November, 0715 Hrs
Complete silence followed. Pierce watched as jaws dropped around the room.
“Come again, Aleman. Did you say the world was going to end in four days?” Deep Blue’s voice sounded rattled.
“That’s what I said. The portals are stabilizing and appearing with more regularity around the world.” Aleman sounded tired, but certain.
“Portals?” Pierce recognized the gruff voice of General Keasling.
“Yes, General. King accidentally entered one in Chicago and came out again.”
“I was only in contact with the portal for a few seconds,” King’s voice came through the speaker as clearly as if he were in the room, and Pierce found himself suddenly missing his friend. “But all I saw was darkness and multiple tangos coming at me before I was swept out by the parachute.”
“Yeah, King,” Aleman continued his briefing, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought and cross-referencing it against all our other data on these things. Everything fired inside the portals hasn’t come back out. Your F-16 crashed into one and we didn’t see a sign of it after that. You came back out of one alive though. We’re definitely looking at a portal.”
“To, uh, to what Aleman?” Pierce recognized the always-cautious voice of Domenick Boucher, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and one of only a few people left in the current administration that knew of the existence of Chess Team and the entire Endgame organization. “If these energy balls are portals, then portals to what? To where?”
“That is the question, Mr. Boucher. My best guess, based on the information available, is…to another dimension.”
Boucher scoffed on the other end of the call. “Another dimension? Like in Star Trek or something? You can’t be serious.”
“Dom…” Deep Blue’s voice was stern, and the message was clear: Give the man a chance to explain and the benefit of the doubt. Besides being the leader of Endgame, no one on the call would ever forget that this man was also formerly the leader of the free world.
“Sorry, Lewis. Please explain.” Boucher sounded as tired as Pierce felt, and he imagined the Director was up to his neck in briefings of his own, trying to explain to the new President what the hell was going on around the world.
“Theories of other dimensions have been around for a long time. Basically, what you need to do is imagine a bright red shiny ball. The ball is sitting on the ground and it’s casting a shadow. The shadow on the ground is-”
Black Five cleared his throat loudly, cutting Aleman off. He raised an index finger and stepped forward. “Sorry, but that’s a horrible explanation.”
“It was-”
Aleman was cut off again. “Accurate? Maybe. Understandable? Hardly. In layman’s terms, alternate dimensions are multiple possible universes, otherwise known as the multiverse. But there are just as many theories about how it’s possible as there are probably universes. Tegmark’s four-level classification, anthropic principle, cyclic models and my personal favorite, M-Theory, which would be impossible to explain to any of you in a timely manner, unless you all have a working knowledge of p-branes.”
For a moment, Pierce thought that Black Five had just insulted them, but realized that wasn’t the case when the man continued without cracking a smile.
“And no one knows which theory is correct, because we have, until now, never had any tangible evidence that they exist beyond the numeric musings of mathematicians and the insistence of Star Trek fans. However, most theories agree that these alternate dimensions could look very similar to our own, with alternate versions of ourselves living similar if not nearly identical lives to our own, but that they could also be very different. Alternate dimensions don’t just affect humanity. They affect everything right back to the beginning of time. In some dimensions there might not be an Earth, or even a Milky Way galaxy. In others, Earth might exist, but maybe the dinosaurs never went extinct, or the moon was never formed, or life evolved in a way that is totally alien to our Earth, which I believe is what we’re seeing here. The creatures have similar features-eyes, teeth, limbs, claws-things that we recognize as being advantageous to living on planet Earth. But they’re also quite different, which means their Earth is likely quite different. How, I couldn’t speculate.
“It’s even possible that the laws of physics are different there. Human beings are designed to perceive things in only three dimensions. An alternate dimension might simply be a fourth dimension that co-exists but is separated from our own simply because we can’t perceive or experience it. Those that subscribe to this theory believe it to be the root of most ghost stories and poltergeists-glimpses into mirror dimensions caused by gravitational anomalies. Of course, that’s irrelevant. The point is, a human being might view an alternate dimension in a distorted, or skewed way, because our perceptions are limited to experiencing three dimensions controlled by our universe’s laws of physics.”
“I saw something on the other side of that portal,” King said through the speakers in the room.
“You said it was mostly dark, right?” Aleman asked. “If Black Five is right, perhaps light doesn’t work there like it does in our dimension.”
“Or it was just night,” Black Five said with a twitch of his lips.
King sighed. “Right.”
“What does all this information give us? What are
we dealing with?” General Keasling’s voice was gruffer than normal, the grav-elly scraping of his voice reminded Pierce of just how long it had been since they had each slept.
“It’s all moot, actually,” Deep Blue interjected. “We need to find a way to stop the portals from opening or to stop the creatures from coming through them.”
“On that front, I have some ideas,” Aleman said. “Fogg and Pierce and I feel convinced from 10 ^th — century evidence that the planet has seen these creatures before. How many times, I can’t say, but there is a historical record. We believe the creatures are what the Norse first called dire wolves. We’re still working on finding out how and when the portals closed in the past, as well as efficient ways to kill them.”
Bishop’s meaty voice came through the speaker next. “They can be killed. They’re just fast. Enclosed spaces or battlefields with obstacles are our best bet. If they get up to speed, they’re hard to hit.”
Aleman spoke up again. “And their roar is devastating.”
“Any theories on that?” Deep Blue asked.
“Just one,” Aleman said. “Infrasound.”
“Which is?” King asked.
“Any sound lower than twenty hertz, which is right at the fringe of what human ears can hear. For us to hear it, the sound pressure would have to be significant.”
“It’s significant,” Knight added.
“At the right volume, we would actually be able to feel the sound as much as hear it. Several studies I found, published and unpublished, suggest that a seventeen-hertz infrasound, with enough punch, can induce strong feelings of fear. Test subjects reported powerful anxiety, extreme sorrow, revulsion and terror. Physical symptoms ranged from goose bumps to loose bowels, which might have also been a physical effect caused by the low frequency vibrations, rather than an emotional response. As for the hallucinations, they’re probably caused by the adrenaline and other chemicals dumped into the body by the fear response, but it’s worth noting that the resonant frequency of the human eye, according to NASA, is eighteen hertz. Pegging someone with this frequency can cause optical illusions, visual hallucinations and are one of the leading theories for ghost sightings. If they’re pegging multiple frequencies at once, the effects match.”
“That sounds about right,” Knight added. “Good to know I’m not a wuss.”
King, who was the only field team member to be unaffected by the dire wolf roar, was unperturbed. “So if we hear it, we’ll either fight harder or run away? Not that big of a problem.”
“Oh, but it is, King,” Sara Fogg stepped toward the center of the room to speak. Pierce noted that her eyes were still baggy, but her face had come alive at a chance to participate in the conversation on a medical topic, with which she could relate. He also noted that she remembered to use his operational callsign, instead of calling him Jack. “In a life-threatening situation, the human ‘fight-or-flight’ response involves an involuntary increased heart rate, increased blood flow to the muscles, pupil dilation and a whole host of other symptoms. You won’t be at your fighting best, and what’s worse, adrenaline dumps into your lungs, your liver, kidneys and heart. With the dire wolf roar activating such a heightened fight-or-flight, your heart could seize up with adrenaline and crash. You’d drop dead just like with the Brugada strain from a few years ago. The dire wolf roar can actually scare you to death.”
Deep Blue cleared his throat. “Lewis, you said you have a plan for dealing with the dire wolves?”
Aleman replied without hesitation. “Yes sir, I think we should nuke them.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
London, England
3 November, 1600 Hrs
“ That’s not good.”
Bishop tilted his head to the side and looked out the open door of the Crescent, as it hovered on its thrumming VTOL engines. Rain lashed the late afternoon London sky, but both he and Knight had a perfect view of the River Thames and the 443-foot tall white Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye. The bizarre cantilevered support struts and several of the steel tie rods of the structure were hidden inside a large crackling dire wolf portal that covered over a fourth of the surface of the wheel. Both Bishop and Knight understood that when the portal winked out, it would take the central hub of the giant structure with it.
But that wasn’t what had caused Bishop’s comment.
Despite the lousy overcast weather, the ride-one of the largest tourist attractions in Europe that saw 3.5 million visitors a year-had been full when the portal appeared out of thin air. As the Crescent moved the men into position above the wheel, they saw hundreds of passengers from the remaining egg-shaped capsules around the edges of the wheel. A storm of brightly colored tourists attempted to climb down the superstructure after having freed themselves from their steel-and-Plexiglas prisons. Some were still trapped in their capsules. They frantically hammered on the glass as they watched the immense sphere of pulsing light engulf the wheel like Pac Man gobbling up tasty snacks. Bishop noted that some of the people were leaping to the river far below them from the upper reaches of the rim, almost 400 feet above the water.
Others leapt off the ride on the other side-to the concrete pedestrian path and the trees, which were turning dark red from the frequent human impacts.
The panicked tourists fled in terror as the portal disgorged its swarm of milky white occupants. Hundreds of dire wolves leapt out of the yellow wall of light. Many of them lunged up the London Eye’s struts and scampered across its surface like manic children on a playground.
“Get me close, Black One. Now!” Bishop shouted into his helmet microphone to the pilot of the Crescent and readied a rappelling line at the door. Their plan had been to keep the creatures at bay as much as possible while the Ministry of Defense arranged to get a small nuclear device to them. Domenick Boucher had handled convincing the US President of the plan to drop a nuclear device inside a portal with a timer. The device would be shut off by remote control if the timer ticked down and the portal hadn’t shut. If it did close, as all of the portals had done so far, then the device would detonate, hopefully stopping the dire wolf incursion. A device would be attempted both here in London and in New York. The US President convinced the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom only an hour before the Crescent arrived. As far as both the US and the UK were concerned, Bishop and Knight were US Delta members, acting on US orders-not independent operators.
No one liked deceiving the President, but all involved agreed that a typical Special Forces unit would be a liability. While other soldiers would still be reacting to the freakish events unfolding around them and the dire wolves trying to tear them apart, Chess Team would be acting. They had grown accustomed to the strange and horrible, and weren’t distracted by it. Deep Blue and General Keasling had agreed that they would deal with the political ramifications after this event, if they lived through it. Boucher had concurred and the plan was set in motion. If Bishop and Knight failed, King and Deep Blue would attempt the same strategy in New York or in the next event location.
But after seeing the chaos up close, Bishop was not content to sit and wait for the device to arrive with its British couriers.
Knight squatted in the open doorway, one arm looped through a nylon safety strap on the door’s edge. He knelt to the floor of the doorway and began picking off targets. He was using a new rifle-a Barrett M82 he had snagged from an armaments closet on the Crescent after they had boarded in Shanghai. He knew he wouldn’t find a better vantage point for sniping the dire wolves than right where he was-above them on the gently hovering troop transport plane.
Even with the new helmet he wore, equipped with sound dampener technology to protect him from hearing the roar of the dire wolves, Bishop could still feel a vibration every time Knight took a shot with the. 50 caliber rifle. The climbing creatures moved slower than they did on the ground; Knight had no problem executing them one by one. Still, no matter how quickly Knight fired, more of the dire wolves darted from the portal. Bishop was tempted to
open fire with his newly replaced XM312-B as well, but he couldn’t risk hitting tourists. He needed to get down onto the Eye.
Bishop looked down at Knight, who wore one of the impact-absorbent suits. It seemed to double his size. If Knight looks big, I must look like the Goodyear Blimp.
Bishop hated the helmet. The sound dampener allowed him to hear nothing but his own breathing and he found the faceplate’s view limiting. With more time, they could have had helmets that only blocked certain frequencies, but time was short, so they blocked everything, and it just about drove him nuts. Still, he wore it for protection against the fear-inducing roar. Better to have limited eyesight than to bolt in fear from a dire wolf only to realize, like Wile E. Coyote, that he had run off a cliff-or in this case, off the top of the London Eye.
He leaned down and placed his hand on Knight’s shoulder, then rocked the man slightly-a tap to the shoulder would do no good with the armor. Knight quickly retracted from the doorway, allowing Bishop to exit the craft.
With two MP5 submachine guns stretched across his chest and the XM312-B across his broad, armored back, Bishop leapt out the door, splaying the 11 mm black rappelling rope out his titanium belay device at his waist. The rope ran through his gloved fingers. He cleared the Crescent and began his drop toward the Eye.
Black One piloted the transport ship just above the wheel’s curvature. As Bishop descended, controlling the rappel with one hand, he swept an MP5 up and began pummeling dire wolves with bullets.
