Radiant Dawn

by Cody Goodfellow

  "I can't believe it worked twice," Draper said. "But this fucker's still trash."

  "Sir," Storch swallowed and started off, "I don't understand what the fuck's going on these last few days, but I want to get out of it. And I'm starting to see the only way out is down to the bottom and through. If you're fighting these motherfuckers that burned down my store and killed Harley and that girl and I don't know what else…I'm in."

  "Sergeant, you're stupider than Pettigrew let on, and definitely insane. But now, more than ever, I need stupid, crazy grunts to fulfill my task. You can't leave here if you say no, but don't think for a minute that saying yes is going to save your life. We've all killed for this cause, and we're all going to die for it."

  "I think I'd be a liar to pledge that kind of loyalty, sir. With all due respect." He drank a long drink of the close, stale trucker's-coffin air, and closed his eyes. What else could they expect him to say?

  "Did Sperling tell you what Radiant Dawn did with his daughter?" the Major asked, and Storch cocked his head and thought for a moment about this tangential question.

  Storch blinked, it was darker with his eyes open. "He told me some, but I don't see what—"

  "We want to show you something, Sergeant."

  A break in the blackness, a black box he recognized must be a TV just as it exploded into blinding snow, staring into it until tears came to adjust his eyes. A picture swam up out of the snow, squiggled as the tracking settled itself.

  A plain TV studio set, grainy, public-access quality video, shot through with confetti-bursts of spastic static. A middle-aged man with silver hair and plastic wraparound shades sits in a leather chair, his lips moving and hands gesticulating absently. The man looked familiar, like something he might've skipped over while channel-surfing. Draper adjusted the volume.

  "—and this striving to transform is so powerful within us, that it takes a lifetime of programming to overcome it. That frustrated energy has to go somewhere—"

  The image froze in crystal clarity, not skipping like his cheap VCR. "This is Cyril Keogh," the Major said. "He transmits this program via satellite each week. It is called Radiant Dawn. It is not a popular program, but it is accessible to several hundred million people all over the world. As you can see, little effort is expended on the program itself, but stego decryption reveals that the program itself is only a Trojan Horse for a private transmission."

  The pixels began to flicker, every atom of the New Age lecturer's freaky visage strobing, becoming snow again, until another image came out of the Technicolor blizzard.

  This was not the same program.

  A young girl lies on a steel examination table, naked and bound, and oh, so very pregnant. Her distended belly towers over her prone form, splaying her legs out at right angles to her torso, reminding Storch of the monstrous abdomens of termite queens. She appears to be sedated, her breath slowly, steadily fogging up an oxygen mask.

  Still, he recognized her. It was Sidra Sperling.

  A figure shrouded in crimson surgeon's robes circles round to the girl's pelvis, which is screened off from the rest of the patient under a red gauze tent. The surgeon selects a tiny radial saw and matter-of-factly worries away at the mons veneris, elegantly extending the vaginal canal to accommodate the monster fetus within.

  Look how efficient he can afford to be, Storch realized, when he never intends to close her back up.

  The surgeon lays aside the tool and selects another, much larger, like the barbecue tongs his father used to use to flip whole turkeys on the grill. His free hand plunges into the widened birth canal, disappears up to the elbow. With the other he gingerly inserts the tool. Another robed figure steps into frame to check Sidra's anesthesia, then moves out. After wrangling around inside the girl for a whole minute, the surgeon seems to latch onto something and withdraws his hands. He grasps the handles of the turkey-tongs and begins to pull, and for a moment looks as if he's going to brace one foot against the edge of the table.

  All at once, something inside her gives with an audible crack and, on the crest of a small tsunami of milky fluid, out slides a child.

  Storch couldn't properly call it a baby, because it was the size of a kindergartner. A caul covered its facial features, if it had any.

  "Geneticists routinely use fruit flies to study mutations, because they have a new generation every week or so," said the Major. "Our enemy has achieved similar results with…higher animals."

  The gigantic fetus stirs sleepily, its rubbery legs extending to reveal a horribly bloated belly. The surgeon injects the fetus with a hypodermic gun and, again, takes up the radial saw.

  "Oh my God…" Storch whispered. Unborn, a prisoner of the womb, it was pregnant, too.

  When the surgeon finally lays down his tools, there are seven fetuses, all laid out on the examination table like Russian nesting dolls that fit inside each other. Each is markedly less human than the last, the skeletal structure gradually withdrawing from the limbs, which become pliant, muscular tentacles. The skulls flare out like morning glories, grotesque horns of plenty from which pour luxuriant, convoluted brainsacs.

  The last is scarcely larger than the surgeon's index finger, and indistinguishable from the placental nodule that it embraces with its whiplike limbs. Then he steps aside again, and the table is being cleared by a giant of a man in a flak vest and no shirt.

  So tall was he that his head loomed out of frame, but Storch was staring at his forearm, at the tattoo almost obscured by the wiry tufts of hair and scars, but he could read it.

  Don't Mess With Texas

  And he remembered what really happened.

  26

  SA Martin Cundieffe sat in the back of the chopper carrying the twelve extra agents assigned to China Lake. No one paid him much attention, which suited him fine. His eyes pored over the opened file atop the stack of files on his lap, his lips moving mutely and so quickly he seemed to have a facial tic. The more astute of the agents took this as a sign of nerves, that Cundieffe wasn't up to the enormous task laid upon him, and they relished his apparent squirming. The rest simply saw Cundieffe's trademark overachievement in action, and resented him for it. Though he was well aware of their cynicism and hostility, he couldn't be bothered to disabuse them of their misreading, because he was practicing his speech.

  In his short, exciting time in the field, Cundieffe had discovered the practical value of interpersonal communication as a skill. He'd been taken aback at first at his inability to finesse interview subjects. He was used to simply reading the aggregated data about a subject and composing a list of cardinal points for Lane Hunt to use in interrogations. He felt deeply chagrined that he'd actually had to threaten that pony-tailed Pentagon functionary, Tuttle. Though nothing had come of it, Cundieffe had taken stock of his abilities, and laid down a rigid self-improvement regimen. For a mentor, he'd looked no further than the Director. Mr. Hoover was a legendary master of rhetorical manipulation and psychological intimidation, who, one stenographer allegedly complained, could reach a peak oratory rate of four hundred words per minute. With this awesome power, the Director persuaded hostile political opponents to let him build the Bureau into an awesome force for law and order, and to operate without any meaningful oversight for nearly fifty years. Beneath the blunt, orderly plain of his thousands of statements before Congressional panels lay a jungle of circuitous logical bypasses and semantic clover-leaves in which any mind that dared to penetrate would be swallowed whole. Cundieffe had acquired several volumes of congressional transcripts, particularly from the Director's embattled early fifties, marked off the word counts in blue pen, and devoured them whole, reciting silently with a stopwatch balanced on his knee. He'd topped out at two hundred fifteen words per minute after six hours of practice, fast enough that everyone but Assistant Director Wyler blinked and nodded like zombies when he wound into a verbal attack. Cundieffe would guess that Wyler spoke at least three hundred words per minute. Maybe he should record Wyler and use his speech patterns
instead. It would have to wait until after his presentation to the military arm of the China Lake investigation. The FBI had pressed for, and gotten, sole control of the case, and graciously opted to retain the Delta Force and the Navy in an advise & support capacity. Cundieffe had been given only the skeleton of a mission order, and had fleshed it out to AD Wyler's thorough satisfaction. The sell would not be any easier for having been bought and paid for in Washington. The FBI was not eager to place its elite tactical agents in the way of napalm-slinging terrorists, let alone in the potentially disastrous proximity to the media in Los Angeles. He would have to tell the Delta Force commander, Lt. Col. Greenaway, he of the short temper and the broken ballpoint, to accept the hazards of the mission, but make none of the decisions.

  The other lesson he'd taken from the Director had been much easier to manage given his new association with AD Wyler. Know Everything was Hoover's unspoken credo—his father bragged that the Director knew Lucille Ball was pregnant before Ricky did. Beneath the outline for his presentation, he had an itemized mission order and timeline for the resolution of the China Lake investigation; DoD files on several DARPA projects, including RADIANT; separate SFPD and FBI reports on the School Of Night investigation; confidential dossiers on several of the officers he'd be meeting; and the OPR's preliminary report on Lane Hunt, whom he'd come to relieve. Cundieffe had yet to practice that speech.

  The flight crew scrambled to prepare for landing. Cundieffe had never been to Death Valley before; though he'd memorized the temperature extremes tables along with everything else in the almanacs and Guinness Book of World Records before he was ten, and every year since, he was shocked to feel the heat closing around him, like the blasting wind of a kiln. The temperature was only a few degrees below the average July high of one hundred and four, but the humidity remained a freakishly high fifty percent. He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and applied a fresh coat of prescription-strength zinc cream to his face and bare scalp. He'd already sweated great sopping racing stripes down the sides of his shirt, and putting his jacket on only aggravated the condition. The other agents, all in meshback FBI baseball caps and navy blue windbreakers, were looking to him, or looking at him, many openly laughing. He packed up his files and pulled himself to his feet, hanging from an overhead rail and swaying much more than befitted the dignity of a team leader. His eyes roved over them, pinning each on the authority of his gaze, and stopping the laughter, the conversations.

  "Listen up, everyone. As of twelve hundred hours today, the FBI assumes full responsibility for the resolution of this case. I know my appointment comes as a surprise to all of you, and for most, not a pleasant one. I've never participated in a field operation, let alone led one, so your doubts are not wholly unfounded. However, I was selected to lead this investigation because the Assistant Director believes the assessment I've made of the situation is the most likely, and my proactive strategy for resolving this crisis promises to be more effective than the military solution, which has been to fly around California, knocking down doors and getting themselves killed in needless accidents. I think if you allow yourselves to wholeheartedly accept the strategic decisions I've been empowered to implement and implement them to the best of your respective abilities, the perpetrators will be neutralized without loss of life or property within seventy-two hours. I'm going to hand out assignment packets as soon as we hit the ground. I know these assignments may strike some of you as unorthodox, and may entail some subterfuge on our part in coordination with the Navy and Joint Special Forces elements of the investigation, but I assure you that we have the sanction and legal authority of the Attorney General of these United States, and I urge you to follow them with all due diligence. Are there any questions?"

  There were none. They gawked at him in bemusement, and not a little awe. He'd shouted out his prepared speech over the chopper noise in just under sixty seconds. A new personal best.

  Cundieffe could pick Lt. Col. Greenaway out of the crowd on the landing pad long before they touched down and the ground crew helped them out. He wore desert camo fatigues with no insignia, but stood a head taller than the other officers and the matched pair of Delta Force bookends flanking him with assault rifles at port arms. Cundieffe doubted this was an accident. It spoke volumes about Greenaway, sealed conclusions Cundieffe had reached upon his first contact with the Delta Forces commander.

  Greenaway would never rise above his present rank, never ascend into the world of palace intrigues and "perfumed princes," as lower echelon officers referred to generals. He took a perverse pride in this, and probably hated everything about the military except the camaraderie of his men and the quickening thrill of battle. According to a file Wyler'd had delivered to him minutes before they left Los Angeles, Greenaway became Special Forces in 1971 and took part in Operation White Star, the CIA's covert campaign in Cambodia. He quit the Army after the end of Vietnam and disappeared into merc work in Africa—Rhodesia, Mozambique and Congo that they knew about, training guerrillas here, government troops there, before coming back to the States in 1978 to join Delta Force. The circumstances of his reinstatement were muddled by footnotes to documents which had evidently been shredded long ago; Wyler had filled in the blanks in blue pen— "He blackmailed his way back into the service—White Star dirt." Greenaway's first action with the new elite antiterrorist unit was Operation Desert One, the ill-fated attempt to rescue the hostages in the American Embassy in Teheran. Greenaway stayed on the ground, but saw most of his comrades killed in a helicopter accident which would officially be blamed on bad CIA intel. From that day, he'd made no secret of his ardent hatred for the intelligence services, and he'd only risen through the ranks on his unmatched tactical skill and personal charisma. Cundieffe imagined the generals he held in such contempt must worship him as much as they feared him.

  Drawing on these facts, Cundieffe felt comfortable with Greenaway. He might even be able to tell him some of the truth.

  The ground rushed up at Cundieffe's flailing legs as the helicopter bucked up six feet under him, and the ground crewman seized his hand and yanked him off. He hit the ground hard on the ball of his right foot and leaned on one of the crewmen so as not to collapse or drop the bulky attaché case he carried. The shooting pain incapacitated his whole right side for a moment, but Cundieffe waved with his left and forced himself to walk up to Lt. Col. Greenaway. He didn't offer his hand to be shook, nor did Greenaway offer one. Higher ranking naval officers were present, but their body language deferred to Greenaway, so Cundieffe did not look at them. He met Greenaway's stare without blinking or smiling. It took mighty effort, for Greenaway's ability to project images of extreme personal violence out of his eyes was more nakedly demonstrated here than in the briefing room. He approached Cundieffe and one hand snapped up as if he were going to backhand the FBI agent across the helipad. His huge hand spread out before Cundieffe's eyes. He bit his lower lip clean through, but he didn't flinch.

  "Give it here," Greenaway said. His hand wagged impatiently at Cundieffe's blank look. "The bag, it's got your reports in it. Give it here."

  "I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding, Lieutenant Colonel. I'm surprised you weren't informed. As of twelve hundred hours PST today, the FBI assumes control over this investigation, by joint order of the Attorney General and the Director and Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. It's been approved by the President, though I'm sure you understand why he wouldn't want to sign it himself." He plucked out a document on thick machined parchment, which flapped like a flag in the helicopter's blade wash. "Here's a copy for your records."

  Greenaway snapped the paper out of his hands and looked it over for a moment. His forehead wrinkled and turned redder than the desert sun had already made it, but when he returned to Cundieffe-bashing with his eyes, he was smiling. "Best news I've heard all year. This was a fucking goat-rope, anyway. You're welcome to it, Junior."

  Cundieffe bit his lip again. "I think you need to read the docume
nt again, Lieutenant Colonel. Your services will still be required here, but under the directives of the FBI. This is now a criminal investigation, but we're going to need your help now more than ever."

  The cords in Greenaway's neck snapped with an audible twang as he rounded on Cundieffe and seized him by the arms. His face filled Cundieffe's field of view; he could see just enough of the world around him to sense that no one was moving to stop the Delta Force Commander from beating him to death. "Well, please convey my sincerest and humblest apologies to the President and the Attorney General for bungling this operation," he shouted, his spit hot flying in Cundieffe's face, "and thank them for sending us the FBI to dig us out. What can we do to help?"

  Cundieffe started to open his mouth, an impromptu four hundred word oratory outlining the strategic improvements in the search which he would bring to the table, but Greenaway cut him off with a wordless hiss and a slashing hand that grazed his throat. "You—know—shit." A moment to let this blunt ground-truth sink in, then, "Your SAC on this base is a pathetic, grabasstic pussyhound who couldn't draw his weapon unless it was for a photo op. You don't know what happened here, and you're not going to find them unless they want you to."

  Now Cundieffe did smile, and blood ringed his white teeth, as he said, "He's not in charge anymore. I am. And I think I do know what happened here, and who did it, and why. if you'll take me to a secure place, I'll endeavor to enlighten you."

  Once Greenaway overcame his natural repulsion for Cundieffe, the junior FBI agent couldn't ask for a more receptive audience. Sequestered in a basement conference room with a silent gallery of naval officers and DoD functionaries looking on, Cundieffe launched into his presentation, beginning with a heavily expurgated recital of his theories regarding the China Lake heist and its implications. A few of the DoD people were predictably skeptical at the outset, but Cundieffe played to Lt. Col. Greenaway, particularly to his mistrust of defense intelligence, and within a few minutes Greenaway told them to shut the hell up. He asked insightful, pragmatic questions and didn't tell Cundieffe to slow down when he replied with exhaustive statistics and sketchy speculation.