Turning Point (Book 1): A Time To Die

by Wandrey, Mark

  Chris snarled. “Fuck it,” he said, and flipped the selector down, braced against the door, and squeezed the trigger. The gun fired on full automatic. The first three shots made the gun climb. He cursed himself for not expecting it, regained the target, and pulled the trigger, again. The magazine fired out in a long rata-tat-atat-atat, barely audible over the earsplitting roar of the plane’s engine, only a few feet away.

  He didn’t know if he hit the rope, or if it was the flying metal debris from the shredded wall, but the tie-down rope severed, and their contraption flew into action.

  They’d tied the rope to the lock. When the rope severed, the lock flew open. The other end of the rope restrained two five-gallon buckets of gear lubrication grease, weighing 35 pounds apiece, and the weight of the buckets pulled the doors open.

  “Thank God,” Andrew said as the doors began to slide. Half a dozen crazies were already through the rapidly disintegrating back doors and rapidly approaching the plane. Andrew snarled as he pushed the throttles to 80 percent.

  The brakes barely restrained the plane, and the squeal of tires on concrete was clearly audible over the straining engines. The plane started to yaw to starboard, and Andrew decreased the opposite engine a notch, and it straightened out. He glanced at the doors behind them. They were almost open. He hoped it was enough. He reversed the pitch on the blades, released the brakes, and yelped as he was jerked forward, and his face smashed into the control yoke.

  “Shit!” he said, putting a hand to his nose; it came away bloody.

  The plane rocketed backward. He had half a second to worry about the wings clearing the doors, before the plane flew through them and onto the taxiway. Andrew braked, and the tires screamed and spewed smoke as they tried unsuccessfully to gain traction on the concrete. It took him a full second to come to his senses as the plane careened over the taxiway and halfway across the runway. He grabbed the throttles, yanked them to neutral, and jammed on the brakes, and the plane finally skidded to a stop on the opposite taxiway.

  As the turboprops slowed to a dull roar, Andrew could hear the concern from the back. His unconventional maneuvers had tossed passengers around. He feathered the props and glanced over the instruments quickly to make sure he hadn’t damaged anything. As looked at the gauges on the overhead console, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked. There were hundreds of crazies racing right at them.

  He keyed the intercom. “Hang on back there!”

  “You couldn’t have said that earlier?” Chris replied. He could hear them dogging the door over the speaker.

  Andrew reached down, pushed the pitch levers forward, and increased the throttle. At the same time, he flipped the cross-over and started the #2 engine. He glanced out the window and saw the prop starting to spin.

  “We’re going to have company!” Chris yelled over the intercom.

  Andrew craned his head and saw several dozen crazies a few meters behind the plane. He gave it more throttle and spun the front wheel control, turning it toward the end of the runway. He looked out the left window and saw the hundreds who’d assaulted the hangar sprinting after the plane. The hangars were about midway down the runway. Either way he chose would cost him concrete. He gave it more throttle, reaching almost 70 miles per hour on the taxiway. He realized he was driving into the wind, and felt a feathery sensation on the yoke. The plane was trying to take off!

  He looked toward the end of the taxiway. There was about 300 meters left, no more. About 100 meters beyond the end of the runway was a perimeter fence, and then a radar dome that stood at least three stories tall. “I’m fucking nuts,” he realized, even as his hands went to the controls. He flipped the flaps control to 40 percent, surprised at how quickly they deployed, and shoved all three running engines’ throttles to the firewall.

  The plane leaped ahead. It wasn’t an F-35, but the acceleration was still noticeable. He gave it some rudder to compensate for the yaw from the missing engine, and watched the ground sweep past at 100 miles per hour. He kept the nose down for another second, gaining speed, and looked up at the rapidly approaching end of the taxiway. A dozen crazies raced out of a maintenance building, right into his path.

  “Great,” he grumbled, and pulled back on the yoke. The plane’s nose came up, just as he ran into the crowd. He felt a couple bounce off the nose gear, and the wide main mounts under the fuselage pulverized another.

  A final crazy ran in front of the #4 motor, and the massive four-bladed prop, spinning at well over 2,500 RPM, hit him and turned him into meat confetti. Streamers of muscle and bone splattered against the plane’s fuselage. Andrew slammed the window closed as bits flew against the glass. “Ewww!” he groaned. The starboard engine’s RPM dipped a fraction, then recovered.

  Andrew watched the airspeed as it continued to climb and nodded in appreciation. The plane really was a beast. He cleared the radar dome by 50 feet, and banked into a wide turn to port, looking down at the runway covered in crazy fucks. If he’d used the runway, he wouldn’t have hit half a dozen crazies, he would have had to plow through hundreds.

  “That was insane!” Chris exclaimed over the intercom. Andrew could hear the passengers cheering.

  He checked the instruments; all three engines were in the green. With one more check of the consumables, he turned the AC-130 north.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 20

  Sunday, April 22, Interlude

  The Surgeon General had asked for two days; five had gone by. At the request of the Mexican government, the U.S. government sent elements of the Third Army Regiment out of Fort Hood to Mexico. The regimental commander informed them they’d set up a defensive line west of Monterrey, to assist the Mexican Army units. Then they received word that a wave of refugees was heading their way, along with crazy stories about murder and cannibalism. Twenty-four hours later, the U.S. lost all contact with the Third. Within hours, NORAD reported solid evidence of nuclear detonations within Mexico, backed up by satellite imagery.

  Now the UN knew about the blast, and the story was about to break on the international news. The Mexican government was dark; no official communications went in or out. The Border Patrol was going crazy; their detention facilities filled with hundreds of thousands of illegals. The order by the CDC to isolate them only made it worse. The Chief of Staff read a report from the Nogales section indicating that an “incident” had happened in their detention facility. More than a thousand were dead.

  “We can no longer deny a mass of infected from Mexico are on their way here,” the man on the computer monitor said. He had the look of someone you didn’t argue with. “We’ve controlled the outbreaks here—”

  “We don’t know that,” the Chief of Staff said, looking up from the printout. “There are reports of scattered outbreaks.”

  “Nothing like Mexico,” the man insisted.

  “The Surgeon General reported, just before he had his stroke last night, they had yet to isolate the source of the infection.” He glanced at another printout. “There is evidence of multiple vectors.”

  “Our experts say that isn’t possible.”

  The Chief of Staff shrugged. “That doesn’t change the evidence.” He found another piece of paper and read a line. “Some researcher at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, a guy named Amstead, is making noise about aliens, too.”

  “Aliens?” the man asked incredulously.

  “Yes, aliens. He says he has evidence and wants to convene some group calling themselves Genesis.”

  “The purpose of that group was alien contact,” the other man mumbled. “Might be a useful distraction.”

  “You should know that the president’s advisors are suggesting he activate the Internet kill switch to keep the news about Mexico from getting out.”

  “That would take quite a cover story.”

  “There are always terrorists to blame,” the Chief of Staff noted.

  “Russians?”

  “Works as good as any of them.�
� The Chief of Staff was quiet for a moment as he thought. Maybe we could craft the alien crap with the Internet shut down? “Speaking of Russia, what about the news of the outbreak in the Ukraine?”

  The other man consulted his documents. “Their disease control agency relayed through the World Health Organization, WHO, that they contained it inside the city of Pivne. According the WHO, that makes five sites now under control. It looks like only Mexico is in complete meltdown.”

  The man nodded. “What about that CBP officer, the one bit by the cow?”

  “The CDC has him in their Dallas facility. They’re going to transfer him to Atlanta this afternoon. They pulled him out of the Nogales hospital before it spread.” The chief read from a green paper with the CDC logo on the bottom. “They quarantined all the cattle from that train and took blood samples. A few got loose. The local police are looking for them.”

  “I suppose you want me to take care of the cows too?”

  “Don’t be funny,” the Chief of Staff said. “Continue coordinating the disinformation. And stay out of trouble.”

  The chat session ended, and the man closed his laptop. Outside his hotel in Laredo, he could hear people partying as the sun went down. He’d tracked another outbreak here.

  He grabbed the remote and turned the TV to GNN. There was some nonsensical story about a group in Congress pressing for laxer immigration laws. He chuckled and shook his head. They’d be lucky if any of them survived, thanks to the already lax laws. His job would continue until they won, or the bug did.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 21

  Monday, April 23 Morning

  Three delays had pushed the test into the early morning hours. The sky behind the Laguna Mountains was already turning blue, and Jeremiah Osborne was almost out of time. If something didn’t happen soon, he would have wasted another day, and worse, more money he didn’t have. “What’s holding it up?” he asked into a handheld radio he hadn’t put down for hours.

  “A general lack of understanding?” was the exasperated reply. A hundred yards away floated a tug that had seen better days. Once named DBB Prosperous, Jeremiah got it for scrap, though it still had a functioning generator and could manage (with some coaxing) about five knots. It leaked like a sieve and smelled like a barrel of oil mixed with bad whiskey. The electrical system was prone to failure and, if you left the pumps off for more than a few hours, the engine room would be three feet deep in water. But it was built like a tank, and exactly what they were looking for.

  On the tug, renamed Angel One, Alison McDill put the radio down and couldn’t resist giving it the finger in disgust. One of her techs chuckled as he tried to get the computer to do what they wanted it to do. The radio out of the way, she settled down to figure out why the machine wasn’t working.

  She was the nominal captain of Angel One for the test that, thus far, was a complete dud. Jeremiah had handed the machine over to her 48 hours earlier, tasking her with making it work. She’d succeeded in a bench test and had suggested a small car or a trash dumpster for the next step. But if you gave Jeremiah an inch, he took a mile. He ran out and bought a 149-ton trash heap that was once a working tug, with a promise of payment the following week. Things quickly spiraled out of control.

  “What’s the power reading?” she asked the tech.

  “We’re pushing nearly 2 kilowatts into it,” he said.

  Alison looked at the modified stress meter wired into the tug’s keel. It stubbornly hadn’t budged. During the bench test, it had taken less than 1-milliwatt to lift the metallic ammo can. The metallic component proved vital, but the machine worked. They’d discovered it took ferrous metal to activate its ability. Thus, using a small, fiberglass sailboat was out of the question. That test operated with a nine-volt battery for hours. However, from 25 pounds to almost 300,000 was a jump of three orders of magnitude. Even so, she’d estimated it should have only taken 300 watts to lift the tug. They hadn’t proved their hypothesis.

  “Temperature from the interface?” she asked.

  “Holding steady at 150,” another tech told her. Interfacing with the machine to transfer power turned out to be a challenge. They ended up using a rare earth superconductor. Though it would degrade with use, it was the best they had.

  Alison grumbled and looked at her screen, confirming power was moving through the interface. However, neither of the stress meters was moving, which meant the machine wasn’t doing its job, even at seven times the power it should have taken.

  “Try varying the input polarity,” she ordered. There were four power input points, and from the bench test, they knew it took power flowing through all four to make the device work. Even after the machine activated, removing power from any of the four inputs stopped it. It was also particular about the type of power. She’d manufactured the power supply from scratch. It had to be 240 volts, with no more variation than 0.1 percent. It had to be DC, with two of them positive and two negative. The bench test wattage was extremely low, and the amperage was almost nonexistent.

  For a few minutes, they varied the input polarity with no results. She was sure the machine was “working,” but it wasn’t producing any measurable results.

  “Maybe it can’t handle something this big?” a tech suggested. “Didn’t it come out of a ship the size of a sofa?”

  Alison nodded. She’d said as much when Jeremiah pushed for the jump in scale. He hadn’t listened. A lot of people said one of Jeremiah’s problems was that he went off half-cocked sometimes.

  One of the techs made a joke Alison didn’t hear, prompting several to laugh. Someone laughed hard enough to slap the desk, hitting his computer keyboard in the process. The computerized stress gauge let out a squawk, and the ship MOVED DOWN.

  Metal groaned like a wounded monster as 149 tons of rusted, aging tug sank. The acceleration was so precipitous that, for a long moment, they left an air wake behind them, like a bullet shot into a water barrel. Inside the ship, they felt nothing, not the slightest hint of momentum, pressure, or acceleration.

  Alison gasped at the sudden movement of the gauge, then three things happened: the light in the room turned from blue to green, a girl screamed, and the air pocket collapsed. Water crashed against the upper superstructure with a resounding boom! It had been a chilly morning in San Diego, so they’d closed all the portholes. Even so, many began leaking water as the tug shot downward. It took her a half second to understand what was happening. In that time, the tug slammed into the bottom of the bay with a bone-shattering crunch.

  “We’re flooding!” yelled the seaman who was overseeing the operation of the tug’s nautical systems.

  “We sank!” someone else screamed.

  Alison was dimly aware of the sound of rushing water, and some of her instruments began to fail. “Cut power!” she ordered.

  “What?” asked one of the techs, turning to look at her, confusion and fear on his face.

  “I said cut the goddamned power!” she yelled. He stared at her as though she’d suggested jumping in shark-infested waters for fun.

  Alison vaulted across her desk, and shouldered the confused man out of the way. Abandoning all subtlety, she reached for the back of his laptop and ripped out the connections.

  The machine died, and so did the motive force holding them against the bottom of San Diego Bay. Angel One’s life as a tug required horsepower and buoyancy, and it possessed both of them in spades, but the impact with the rocky bottom had fractured her spine and flooded the substantial bilges. If Alison had delayed any longer, the buoyancy would have been gone, and the entire crew drowned. Her quick action saved the day.

  The tug pulled free of the rocks and muck and rocketed upwards, swaying violently from side to side as it ascended. This time, everyone aboard felt every motion. The ship threatened to roll over. It was the most exciting ride Alison had ever had, even though she’d been riding rollercoasters all her life.

  They broke the surface at better than 10 knots, stern-first, listing 20
degrees to port. The stricken tug jumped and nearly cleared the surface, before splashing back down like a flat rock dropped in a pond. Everyone aboard went flying.

  “Holy fucking shit!” someone screamed, and the control room erupted as half the people screamed in fear, while the other half celebrated the return of the outside light.

  “We’re sinking,” the head of the ship’s operating crew told her when she finally got his attention.

  “Can you keep us afloat with the pumps?”

  “I don’t know how you did that, or even what happened, but the hull is fractured pretty severely.” He glanced at a couple of displays. “We’ve got three feet of water in the bilge, and more coming in. I can slow it down, but I can’t stop it.”

  “Understood,” she said, and looked for her handheld radio. The floor was a jumble of broken computers, upended monitors, chairs, and vomit. Who puked? She found the radio and keyed it. “Jeremiah, this is Angel One!”

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he demanded in his typical, piggish, authoritarian voice. “I said take her up a few meters, not turn her into a goddamn submarine!”

  “Not our plan either, I assure you. Might have been nice to scale up rather than jumping to a huge ship immediately, right?” Silence answered her, and she grinned evilly. “Look, we can argue about this later. The ship is fucked. We hit the bottom and broke something. Your guy says we’re sinking.” She ignored his howls of protest, and, for the first time, heard cries of pain. “Shut up. We need to evacuate, and we have injured. Get some help over here, now, unless you want your fancy toy, and the data I collected, at the bottom with the tug.”

  It took every boat he had available to rescue the people from the Angel One, and even then, the tug’s operating crew had to throw rafts over the side and jump for their lives as he watched Angel One return to the depths with a loud sucking sound, leaving behind a huge swirling mess of fuel debris. A siren sounded, and a Coast Guard ship roared around the jetty, lights flashing.