Patient Zero

by Jonathan Maberry

  ATOLL

  BY JONATHAN MABERRY

  -1-

  THE PIER

  DEPARTMENT OF MILITARY SCIENCES SPECIAL PROJECTS OFFICE

  PACIFIC BEACH

  SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2:11 PM

  _______________

  “Something has crashed on an island south of Hawaii,” said Mr. Church, frowning at me from the videoconference screen in my office.

  I was not dressed for a teleconference. I was wearing ancient, ragged board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with images of old fifties roadside diners on it. My feet were bare and propped on the edge of my desk next to an open take-out box of Wahoo’s fish tacos. Five empty bottles of Gift of the Magi golden ale I’d brought back to the Pier with loving care from the Confessional in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, just up the road. The Magi has spicy hops balanced with moderate malt sweetness and an aroma like nuts and honey. It also has 12 percent alcohol and I was on my sixth.

  It’s entirely possible that Church did not have my full and undivided attention.

  Two teams of enthusiastic and talented college women were playing volleyball outside of my office window and I had Art Pepper blowing cool jazz from the four Bose speakers in my office. The Pier was nearly deserted except for me, my big white shepherd, Ghost, and a few disgruntled employees who had to man the battlements on a gloriously warm Saturday in December. Quite frankly I couldn’t care less if Air Force One had crashed in my own parking lot.

  “As I recall,” I said, “we have a field team in Honolulu. They love playing with boats. Send those guys.”

  “I did,” said Church.

  “And…?”

  “We’ve lost all contact with them.”

  I sat up. “What?”

  “They are the third investigating group to have visited the island since the crash,” he said. “Following the crash, the Coast Guard tried to contact members of a small Nature Conservancy research team on the island, but they were unable to make contact via radio or satellite. A Coast Guard cutter was dispatched and they launched a drone for flyover. The live feed from the drone terminated as the aircraft crossed into island airspace. Contact with the cutter was lost within minutes. A navy ship, the USS Michael Murphy, an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, was within three hundred miles and it sent in a Seahawk helicopter, which has since vanished along with its crew of six. This occurred four hours and ten minutes ago. The Michael Murphy was ordered to maintain station fifty nautical miles from the island until the DMS can send a team.”

  “What do we know?” I asked. “Do we have an eye in the sky on this yet?”

  “Yes,” said Church after the slightest pause. “And that’s why this has been handed over to us.”

  The screen split into two windows and the second showed a good-quality satellite black-and-white image of Palmyra. Church explained that it was one of the Northern Line Islands, and was about a thousand miles due south of the Hawaiian Islands and about a third of the way between Hawaii and American Samoa. The nearest continent was thirty-three hundred miles away. Nicely remote.

  Palmyra Atoll is in the middle of nowhere. Seriously. Nowhere. The whole thing was a bit over four square miles, with sand and forested land wrapped around a seawater bay. It might have once been pretty, and parts of it still were, but it was scarred by a long trench that started from the southeast tip and drove inland for half a mile. Sand had been pushed up on either side of the trench, speaking to the force of the impact, and there was evidence of a forest fire that destroyed a lot of palm trees. The trench was shaped like a big spoon, with the bowl part of the spoon being the final impact point.

  In the center of the bowl was an object.

  Big. Triangular. And definitely not a chunk of space rock.

  I recognized that shape and it immediately turned me cold frigging sober and dropped the temperature of my blood to that of ice water.

  “Holy shit,” I breathed.

  “Yes,” said Church.

  “It’s a T-craft.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But it’s not one of ours.”

  “Whose?” I demanded. “The Russians? The Chinese?”

  Several of the world’s superpowers had been conducting a very quiet arms race to launch triangular-shaped craft like this, based on technologies recovered from places you might have heard of. Kecksburg, Rendlesham, Roswell. Like that.

  Yeah.

  Exactly like that.

  Church said, “I don’t believe this craft is of local manufacture.”

  An hour later I was on my private jet, heading to Hawaii. My two most experienced and reliable shooters, Top and Bunny, were with me. And Ghost. All of us rushing headlong to a place where no one seemed to come out.

  I hate my job.

  -2-

  ABOARD THE USS MICHAEL MURPHY

  FIFTY NAUTICAL MILES NORTH OF PALMYRA ATOLL

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 6:01 AM

  _______________

  The captain of the destroyer was a friend of a friend of a friend, but that didn’t make him a friend of mine. In fact, he was pretty frigging unhappy to have me and my team delivered like an unwanted pizza onto his aft deck in the middle of a bad night. The fact that we were pretty damned unhappy to be there made it a real party. At least we’d changed into attire more appropriate to one of Uncle Sam’s clandestine Special Ops gunslingers—black BDUs without any trace of unit patch or rank insignia. I offered no credentials to the deck officer and was not asked for any by Captain Tanaka. We shook hands, but there was no warmth in it.

  He studied us for a long, silent time. First Sergeant Bradley “Top” Sims was a forty-something stern-faced black combat veteran who looked as if he could eat live crocodiles. He smiled exactly as often as he wanted to, which wasn’t all that often. Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit—known as “Bunny” by everyone including his parents—was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall white kid who looked like an Iowa farmhand but was really a surfer and volleyball player from Orange County. They had joined the DMS with me and we had walked through all kinds of hell together. And I use the word hell a lot less metaphorically than I’d like to. Our after-action reports could qualify as horror short stories, or so we’ve been told. Ghost was 105 pounds of combat-trained attitude, and after losing six teeth in a battle in Iran, he’d been gifted with titanium replacements. He loved showing those gleaming fangs to anyone he doesn’t like, and there are a lot of people he doesn’t like. He wasn’t overly fond of Captain Tanaka.

  We stood in a cluster and endured the officer’s inspection, allowing him to draw whatever conclusions he wanted from our appearance, our lack of credentials, and our presence. Tanaka’s only comment was, “Well, this should be interesting.”

  Not said with a smile.

  He knew our combat call signs and addressed me as “Cowboy,” which meant that he had been briefed. The DMS does not have any official rank in the U.S. military command structure. We operate on a very special and highly secret executive order that gives us extraordinary powers and freedom of action. The captain had been contacted and told to offer us every assistance and cooperation. He did that. He hadn’t been ordered to be warm or fuzzy, so we got none of that. And for the record, experienced captains of ultrasophisticated guided missile destroyers do not, as a rule, like having someone else come in to solve their problems. Particularly where their own crew members are involved. His ship carried everything from Tomahawk missiles to Harpoons and lots of other goodies, and the crew of three hundred enlisted men and twenty-three officers were among the finest in the service, which made them easily world-class. In almost any other circumstance, Echo Team would have been, at best, a mildly annoying bit of extra baggage or, at worst, a useless pain in the ass. A good case could have been built either way.

  This was not one of those other circumstances.

  And in every way that mattered this was my case anyway. There was a standing order that all incidents involving T-craft or even suspected T-craft were to be handed ov
er without pause or interference to the Special Projects Office of the Department of Military Sciences.

  To me.

  That order had been put in effect following the Extinction Machine case, in which a rogue group of DARPA called Majestic Three had built a small fleet of T-craft using taxpayer dollars but for very private purposes. The man behind all of that was Howard Shelton, and that fucking maniac had wanted to use the craft to start, and win, World War III. You see, Shelton had discovered a fact that eluded the other superpowers involved in the recovered-technologies part of the arms race. While their experimental T-craft kept exploding every time one of the engines was fired, Shelton figured out how to stabilize the ships. Doesn’t sound like too big a thing until you step back and look at what’s happened when T-craft have exploded over the last thirty years or so.

  The engines were typically built in remote spots, far away from prying eyes and in areas where large amounts of hydroelectric, nuclear, or geothermal power was available. The energetic discharge from an exploding engine delivered a blast several orders of magnitude larger than the apparent fuel. It was a kind of zero-point energy that has resulted in some of the world’s biggest natural disasters. Mount St. Helens. The tsunami that slammed into Japan. The massive earthquakes in China. Like that.

  Shelton figured it out. The trick was to play a long game and breed pilots who had a small percentage of DNA from “other sources.”

  Yeah, E.T. phone home. You get the point.

  The biomechanical connection allowed the ships’ engines to stabilize. Shelton then rigged his ships to kill the pilot as soon as a T-craft was over a target city. Like Beijing or Moscow. He launched his ships to force a confrontation that began with the demonstration of a weapon so powerful that the other nations could not risk fighting a war like that. A fully powered T-craft could stroll past any fighter jet in existence because it used alloys based on what was learned from stripping the wreckage of alien craft. Fiber optics, microminiaturization, and other sciences in common use have quietly benefited from those same technologies. Even Velcro.

  Sure, some urban legends are true.

  The DMS went after Shelton and took him all the way down. However, the ship he sent to destroy Beijing was destroyed by someone else. We never met them and I’m very, very cool with that. An eloquent message had been conveyed to us to turn over all materials related to the development of T-craft. Or else.

  The “or else” part was scary as shit. We did, and E.T. went home. No good-byes, no wet, sloppy kisses with our friends from wherever.

  Actually, we never really found out where they were from. I had a theory, but I was pretty badly concussed when I came up with that theory, so no one has leaped up to say that I solved one of the great mysteries of the ages.

  That was all years ago. Since then things have been very quiet. UFO sightings around the world have dropped considerably, except in cases where people are seeing drones, actual weather balloons, airplanes, the Goodyear Blimp, or other ordinary things.

  Side note, I fucking hate drones, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that reliable sightings of saucers, T-craft, mother ships, the Death Star, Firefly-class space freighters, X-wing fighters, and the starship Enterprise have dwindled to a precious few. Which has made everyone in the know sleep a little more soundly.

  Past tense.

  Now we had a T-craft crashed onto an island in the middle of the South Pacific.

  “We’ve had no contact with anyone since the object crashed,” said Captain Tanaka. “And except for the one image that was sent to you, we’ve had nothing from the satellite.”

  “No images?”

  “No telemetry, no feed, no signal. If it’s up there we can’t find it.”

  Bunny murmured, “Oh, shit.”

  “Yes,” Tanaka agreed dryly. “Though I was hoping for a bit more than that from you fellows.”

  Tanaka was a middle-aged man who looked fit enough to run a marathon while carrying me on his shoulders. One of those guys you can’t even imagine with a hangover, love handles, or a hair out of place. Steely eyes and a hero jaw. Made me feel like a grubby beach bum with indifferent hygiene.

  “Was there any evidence that your chopper crashed?” asked Top.

  “No. Same goes for the Coast Guard drone. There is apparently some kind of line out there near the beach, and once something has crossed it all transmission ends. I sent a drone in to circle and photograph the island at a distance, standing half a mile beyond the surf line. We have lots of pictures of burned trees and mounds of dirt, but we can’t get a good angle on the object from that distance. We don’t know how firm the dead zone is, or even if it is still active, because orders came down to wait for you.”

  I met his stare and said, “And that wasted almost a full day where you don’t know if your people are injured and in need of assistance. I get it, and I’m sorry, but this situation is complicated and sensitive.”

  “And clearly above my pay grade,” he said, barely hiding his contempt of any policy that did not allow him to protect his people.

  “Yes,” I said, “it is. I’m sorry for the inconvenience and the obfuscation but—”

  “But you’re not really sorry.”

  “Frankly, Captain, I’m sorry any of us have to be out here, but this is how it is.”

  Top and Bunny both muttered, “Hooah,” under their breath. Ghost whuffed.

  Tanaka took a moment and I could see the muscles bunch and flex in the corners of his jaw. He had a lot of control and knew enough to think and compose his thoughts before he opened his mouth.

  “Let me know what you need from me and I’ll make it happen. Weapons, equipment, people…”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We brought our own toys. What we need is a boat and a whole lot of rope.”

  “How much rope?”

  “Enough to run a line from a second boat out in the water to the one I’m going to take all the way in. This might be a stable or repeated null field.”

  Tanaka frowned. “Wait … like what was used two years ago?”

  I nodded. A rogue CIA agent had gotten his hands on a man-portable device capable of canceling electronic power within a certain range. Unlike the EMP cannons DARPA was developing, this did not destroy electronics but merely interrupted them.

  “You think someone on the island has Kill Switch technology?” he asked.

  “That,” I said, “would be best-case scenario.”

  He gave me a funny look. “What exactly do you do in the DMS?”

  “Mostly?” I asked. “We get the shit scared out of us on a regular basis. Better than a high-fiber diet, but my blood pressure could pop rivets on a submarine hull.”

  -3-

  PALMYRA ATOLL

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 6:44 AM

  _______________

  The Michael Murphy carried two RHIBs, or rigid-hull inflatable boats, that could zip across the water with great speed and surprising grace. Bunny was good with boats, but not as good as the chief running the second RHIB. Top and I had our rifles ready and we studied the shoreline through sniper scopes. Saw a few seabirds and a turtle, but nothing else.

  Bunny asked, “If I say that it looks quiet, will one of you cats say, ‘Yeah, too quiet’?”

  “If I wrap an anchor chain around you and drop you in the water, will the cap’n cry the blues?” was Top’s reply.

  Bunny grinned.

  When we were five hundred yards from the beach, the chief cut his engine and stopped, but we kept going, spooling hundreds of yards of thin line behind us as Bunny drove toward the beach at reduced speed. The counter on the spool on the chief’s boat would record how much line had paid out before we hit whatever electronic barrier was present. I was surprised that we made it all the way to the mouth of the lagoon before the engine died. There was no sputter, no spark trying to catch inside the motor. One second the engine was running normally at fifty knots and then it wasn’t. Just like that.

  “Now we know where
the fun and games start,” muttered Top.

  “Just like with the Kill Switch,” observed Bunny.

  The day became very quiet very fast.

  Bunny had to wrestle for steerageway and used a passive rudder to angle us in toward the shore. There was just enough impetus to allow him to beach the nose of the boat; Top and I jumped out and dragged it onto the sand. Ghost bounded out past us and ran up and down the beach like a silent gust of white smoke, then he returned to me and sat. It meant that he detected no immediate threat. Not sure if that was a good thing or not. We all moved toward the shelter of a stand of palms.

  Top tapped his earbud and shook his head. Mine was just as dead, not even the white noise of an empty channel. Nothing. We checked all of our electronic gear and it was all down.

  Bunny made a rude noise, then said, “If some ISIL dickheads are out here with one of those Kill Switch machines, I’m going to get cranky.”

  “You’ll have to wait your turn,” I said.

  Even my flashlight didn’t work, which wasn’t much of a problem because the sun was up. I looked out to sea and saw the other boat about half a mile beyond the farthest point of the island. The faint thrum of its idling engine drifted to me on the humid morning air. They would keep the engine on to allow them to maintain a safe distance. There was a quick two-pulse flash of light as a signal. I stood up and waved my arms three times to indicate that I was safe. Then I turned and moved into the dense foliage, vanishing from their sight. Not, I hoped, from history.

  The island was not big enough to get lost on, which meant it was small enough to get found on. So, I was very damn careful as I made my way along the southern reach of it, staying inside the trees, pausing to listen. Hearing nothing. Not a bird, not a bug. Nothing but the sway and hiss of palm fronds moving in the sluggish breeze. Ten minutes in, I heard a sharper hiss and looked up to see a flare rise in an arc from the direction of the other RHIB. It popped high above me and stained the sky with green smoke. It was intended to both signal any survivors on the island and draw the eye away from the beach—away from us.