Radiant Dawn

by Cody Goodfellow

  "You can see brush fires with those things?"

  "Of course, we can shoot thermographic gradient images, but the interpretation people have all gone home for the day."

  "Do you know what fire looks like? Digitally, don't bother printing anything."

  "Yes, but—"

  "There's a really big fire somewhere in California, or there's going to be, very shortly. I want your satellite to keep shooting and I want you to look at every image and call me at the number my lieutenant is going to give you the instant you see an image."

  "Is this an official request, sir? because I'm going to have to get at least a verbal authorization from—ah, Jeez, I don't even know where to begin."

  "This is a military state of emergency, son. Do you know what that means?"

  Silence: paper shuffling and flop-sweat dripping.

  "It means I'm sending someone to help you unfuck yourself and do what I've asked, and maybe execute you as a traitor by negligence, in the bargain. Do you follow me?"

  "Nobody—nobody has to come here—"

  And within minutes, Lt. Col. Greenaway was looking at richly detailed thermographic images of the whole lower half of California and the western wastelands of Nevada. Blowing them up and strolling up and down them was a maddeningly slow and aggravating process, as the modem speed fluttered and intermittently froze. But he learned much. The whole eastern portion of the state was only now throwing off a blanket of rain clouds that'd provided excellent cover for the assault. He'd thought of it himself only this morning, but rationally, what did it come to? He hadn't actually expected anything to come of the napalm theft, had honestly believed that if they were still in the country, they were lying low, and ruing the day they'd provoked the US military into the kind of war it fought best: a secret one. Now they were loose on the land, and he could only hope to find them by the destruction they'd wreak.

  Five pointless minutes later, cruising over Bishop, he'd gotten a call from someone he'd hoped not to have to deal with: Special Agent Cundieffe, calling from his HQ back at China Lake. He'd shown either rare ingenuity or astonishing dumb luck in getting back from where he'd been dumped only a little over an hour ago. Greenaway reluctantly admitted the little ratfucker was loaded with both.

  "Colonel, you have been less than cooperative in the course of this investigation."

  "You've been less than baggage, Cundieffe."

  "I expect it was under such an opinion that your goon squad left us in Titus Canyon a little while ago. Your conduct has been criminal if they were under your orders, and incompetent if it was not. All of this is being recorded and transmitted to my superior's offices in Washington."

  "Then I have nothing to say."

  "I do. I thought you'd like to know where they are."

  A scheme to throw him off. Over my dead body will this ever be a criminal investigation. Best to play along. It would be too late to keep this from becoming a media event or push the Pentagon's buttons, but he could still insure there would be no embarrassing jailcell interviews. "Where are they?"

  "Near Convict Lake, south of Big Pine. Local volunteer fire department responded to a cell phone call from a passing motorist who said he saw a fireball one mile east of the 395, about sixty miles north of my present position. I've only just gotten off the phone with the chief. Nice man, he's not afraid to admit it's way out of his league. It's a full napalm strike, Colonel."

  This time, his interest wasn't feigned. "On what? What's out there?"

  "Only a hospice community for terminal cancer patients. The chief says two helicopters cremated it. I can't get there, but maybe you or some of your thugs could take the initiative and force them to land."

  Force them to land. All the while looking at the map, their present location lay over Devil's Postpile National Monument, ruling out a remote speculation by some genius at Naval Intelligence that the choppers were radical environmentalists bound for the logging operations bordering Yosemite. Convict Lake was less than fifty miles south of here. He hung up on Cundieffe and told the pilot to turn around and proceed to Convict Lake, and relay the order to all other armed aircraft.

  A minute later, the tech from the National Weather Service called back, excited and out of breath. Greenaway had his lieutenant answer the phone as the head night orderly at the Mendocino County Mental Institution, and apologize for the harassment.

  They reached the northern tip of the Owens River valley in ten minutes. After they passed over the smallish city of Bishop, the pilot didn't need to navigate by radar. The fire stood out on the lip of the barren valley wall fifteen miles away, the monstrous column of black smoke like a divine arrow pointing at the biggest, strangest terrorist operation in American history.

  The pilot called back, "I don't see anything in the air, and I'm looking down to the ground. I think the bastards scrambled."

  "Maybe, maybe not," Greenaway answered, already drawing up a containment maneuver around the valley on his map. "They're stealthed up the ass. How long 'til the first reinforcements arrive?"

  "Nearest one is five minutes off, at landmark Olancha."

  Greenaway handed the map to his LT, who started calling the support choppers. "Go weapons hot and approach. Watch your thermals, if you see them at all, it'll be by heat."

  The fire grew on the horizon, and Greenaway held his breath in awed appreciation of the destruction unfolding before him. They had certainly gotten their money's worth out of every ounce of napalm. Radiant Dawn had been a village of forty or so single-story tract homes and an incongruously large four-story tower nestled in a one hundred-square-acre circular valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. Now it was a cauldron of fire; only the skeleton of the tower reached out of the flames, a ruined castle in hell, still collapsing upon itself from a recent missile strike. There was a skirt of flashing red lights atop a ridge overlooking the crater from the east, but they only provided scale for the vast field of fire. There was no hope of containing this, no looking for survivors. Lt. Col. Greenaway got a chill. With Operation White Star in Cambodia, he'd seen more than his share of carpet-bombing: villages reduced to ash and slag, children running torches lighting the hidden Cong trails for machine-gunners to mop up the survivors. But he'd never seen any place so thoroughly destroyed. Cancer patients. What the hell did it mean? Either it was some kind of fanaticism, a grotesque mistake, or Radiant Dawn was something more.

  Radiant Dawn. RADIANT. Fucking DI Spooks.

  The helicopter nosed up and just as abruptly plunged, like a boat slamming into breakers. Even a mile away, the thermals rising up from the fire played hell with the pilot's best efforts to keep them level. They circled around Radiant Dawn along the high ground on the western side, staring into the fire and smoke until their eyes bled tears, but afraid to blink.

  "Holy shit, sir, I have one chopper at nine o'clock, heading away at speed!"

  "Pursue!" Greenaway barked, and only then looked out the window. Nine o'clock was a curtain of smoke over the center of the crater, and Greenaway grabbed the nightgoggles off the doorman's head and slipped them on, cranking up the infrared reception and narrowing the focus to screen out the blinding napalm glow.

  There. It was like seeing the Invisible Man revealed by a splash of paint. Only the reflected heat of the fire gave it away. A streamlined blob of heat dwindled in his sights even as he focused on it, heading southeast on an intercept course with the river. A single Black Hawk with stripped bomb racks, passing even now over the emergency vehicles on the ridge. Only one. Was the other one down there, somewhere, or was it somewhere else in the state, hitting the real target? Were these people sick enough to do something like this as a diversion?

  The pilot took them up two hundred feet and raced around the southern edge of Radiant Dawn. "We can overtake them just past Owens River, sir," the pilot said. "We can stay on them until support arrives, then force them down."

  "No. They're armed with unconventional weaponry. They're capable of disabling troops at range, a
nd there's only one accounted for. Another one's out there. We'll force this one down." He moved into the flight deck, crowded into the narrow space between the co-pilot and the comm officer, so his breath fell on the back of the pilot's neck, and his alpha male pheromones would make it viscerally clear that his authority went way deeper than Army rank. "Knock them out of the sky, Captain. Now."

  The pilot started to look around for support, but he couldn't see around Greenaway. He shrugged, flipped up the safety guard on the firing system and vocally prepped it, "Fox One to Target One, locking…" He pressed a button with one thumb, held it for a second, and a nova burst into furious, screaming life under their left wing. "And away," he finished lamely. "That was a direct order, right, sir?"

  Greenaway didn't answer. They were passing over the emergency scrimmage line themselves, now, and time slowed to a crawl and space scaled down to the tube between the missile and its target, the burn of its thruster a thermal period to the runaway sentence of the helicopter.

  Then the missile fell out of the sky. A blip of flame registered on the ground, and swiftly passed under them. "What the fuck was that?" Greenaway demanded. His head flicked around the flight deck, the copilot and comm officer staring at him with hands upraised in surrender.

  "It went dead-stick just short of the target. They've got a jamming countermeasure—"

  "Bring us in Vulcan range, and shoot their rotors off," Greenaway ordered. His hands balled up into fists, and he knew in a moment they would start shaking. These motherfuckers were like black magicians. They made warfighting into a fucking parlor game with their tricks.

  "Sir, we're being hailed," the comm officer said in a passionately scared tone.

  "Let's hear it," Greenaway answered. Maybe they'd explain themselves before he shot them down.

  A thin, but totally unshakable voice cut in. "Pursuing helicopter, wish to advise we are not armed, and have no hostile intent. You must land immediately and power down—"

  Greenaway shouted, "Set down or be shot down, goddamit. I've had enough of this shit!"

  "—Unless you are insulated against EMP radiation bursts in excess of—" the rest was washed away in static.

  "What is he talking about?" Greenaway blustered. Then it hit him. The bastards could zap them and knock out every onboard circuit. They'd be dead in the air, a stone. "Shoot them down now!"

  "We apologize. This is necessary."

  The lieutenant saw it first. He was looking northwest at the crater, keeping an eye out for the unaccounted-for Hind, and he screamed that he was blind. Greenaway took off his goggles before he turned around, but even so, he would see the violet ghost image of the sight on the back wall of his eyeballs for days afterwards.

  A sphere of white light rose up out of Radiant Dawn valley, filling it with a miniature sun that made the previous conflagration look like a brushfire. Greenaway watched, stunned as it fell in on itself and rose again into a columnar, roiling mushroom cloud.

  He was still watching it when he realized everybody else on the chopper was screaming, and all the lights were out.

  The flight deck erupted into a fireworks show. The crew struggled to get out of their harnesses, their flight suits burning. The helicopter dipped again, and the forward wall became the floor, the lieutenant flew past Greenaway and smashed into the windscreen, and the other four soldiers rained down on him in a dogpile. The doorman undid his tether and leapt out the open door into the night. Greenaway tried to untangle himself from his men when the chopper slammed into the ground, no, into the river, and green water rushed into the cabin, lifted his men off him and flooded the flight deck. As the waters closed over his head, Greenaway could see only the phosphene echo of the mushroom cloud against the blackness. He reached out, kicking off the flight deck's firewall and fumbling for the rungs that framed the loading door, fighting against the current flooding the chopper until he felt it fall away behind him, and only the sluggish tug of the river's current dragged at his sodden fatigues. Kick, claw, hold your breath a second more, you're almost to the surface, or the bottom…

  Floundering onto the muddy shore, Greenaway found only three of his men waiting for him. They raised a ragged cheer as he staggered across the mud flats and snapped them a salute. They looked like death, one of them only semi-conscious, with skull fragments sticking out of his hair. None of them had salvaged a rifle, they had only his sidearm between them. The tail of the chopper stood at a forty-five degree angle to the lazy river. No one else was coming out of it.

  The fuckers nuked us. There was no sane explanation for it, no angle that made it any less nightmarish than the stark reality. He now had to admit to himself that he never knew what the fuck was happening here, and now probably never would. Goddamned electromagnetic pulse knocked us out of the air. Fucking budget cuts, fucking uninsulated circuits in a fucking old, cheap chopper killed my men and cost us a war.

  "I don't suppose anybody has a radio that works?" Greenaway said.

  One of the soldiers took out his belt kit and opened a Zip-Loc bag with a PRC emergency beacon in it. "This ought to work, sir," he mumbled, "but what're you going to tell them? Those fuckers are gone."

  Greenaway's smile reassured the shivering soldier. "I know where they're going."

  34

  Stella knew when Delores Mrachek apologized to her for the way she'd been treated this last week that they weren't going to be leaving with the others. She watched as the last load of medical specimens was shuttled out of sickbay and down to the motorpool, and she'd looked at Mrachek to find her looking uncomfortable, so Stella knew she needed a favor. It was something she couldn't just make her do, which made her wonder. What was so damned important that it couldn't wait, when everyone else had taken off in separate cars exactly sixty minutes after the helicopters left?

  "What do you want me to do?" Stella asked.

  Mrachek blinked, but said impassively, "I'd appreciate your help moving a very sick man."

  Stella thought of Napier and grimaced, but he was dead, wasn't he? She'd seen nobody else that merited special attention. She shrugged and followed Mrachek down the hall, back into the empty warren of tunnels to a vault door which Mrachek had to enter a code to open. Hot, ionized air blasted her, and she thought of a walk-in microwave, but Mrachek walked into it, merging into red shadows and looking back at her as if to make her feel foolish. It worked, and she walked into the room.

  Until recently, this must have been the hub of the Mission's operations, but now it was deserted, but for one technician in a white paper cleansuit, seated at a computer terminal. Stella looked around at the walls of the octagonal room, walls that were skyscrapers of computer chips from the spotless bare concrete floor to the ceiling, lost in the dark above the red bulbs. She wondered that anyone would want to work in darkroom light, then supposed that geeks liked to feel their work was dangerous and important.

  Mrachek stood by the lone computer technician, patiently waiting to get his attention. Stella walked up on her faster than she'd intended, came dangerously close once again to violating the no-touching rule. "He looks like he got better. Why don't we go? The light is giving me a headache."

  "White light makes his corneas bleed," the technician said in a thick Hindi accent. "He will be ready in a moment, if you will please wait here."

  "Dr. Armitage is a great man," Mrachek said. "A giant in the field of applied physics, he has suffered grievous neurological damage, and requires special handling."

  "Then why wasn't he moved first?"

  "He wouldn't go until the birds were in the air," Mrachek said, "and there's lots of computer records to be dumped, or changed, in places that're hard to get at. I need your help."

  "She doesn't trust me to do it," the tech said.

  "Shut up, Vijay. Go up topside and get the van ready."

  "Madame Dr. Mrachek, I designed the final release version of the guidance system software of the Phobos antisatellite system before my twenty-fourth birthday, and I am now thirty-e
ight. I am not a soldier, and I am no one's porter."

  "Do you see anyone else here? Just get the godblessed van, already."

  Vijay stood and turned on Dr. Mrachek. He yanked off his surgical mask and polished his thick glasses with it. His dark face was traced with worry lines, and his bushy eyebrows were shot through with gray. He smirked in anticipation of something to be savored before he said it, but a frail voice from an intercom at his workstation cut him short.

  "Vijay, I'm just about finished in here. Is my ride here, yet?"

  "Make yourself decent, Cornelius," Mrachek said. "We don't have time to mess around."

  Vijay entered a code at his workstation and a false wall opened up on a tunnel, and he waved them in. It was even darker in here, and she stumbled into the doctor when she stopped just short of a dull green glow around a corner. "He is still a very brilliant man, in full possession of his faculties. What you see is not who he is."

  "I'm a nurse," Stella said. "I won't make fun of your boyfriend."

  Mrachek went around the corner and Stella followed her. The man on the bed wasn't the worst-off specimen of humanity she'd ever seen, but he could've given Seth Napier a run for his money in the swimsuit competition. His skin was so mottled Stella couldn't tell if he was black or white, he twitched so badly she couldn't see his face at all, and patches on his skull and neck were so silvery-shiny she could almost see her own reflection in them. He wore only a robe, but looked as if he were wearing wrinkled leopard-print pajamas underneath. This, she realized with chagrin as Mrachek laid open the robe to take his pulse, was his bare skin. A splatter of melanomas covered him from shoulders to belly. His hands roamed the bedsheets like starving rodents and, upon discovering each other in his lap, seemed to devour each other. Mrachek shot her a silencing glance, then returned to Armitage, whispering in his ear.

  Stella busied herself looking elsewhere, at the sick man's computer terminal, at the pharmacopoeia neatly arranged in a wheeled caddy beside the bed, at the stained blueprints on the walls. She recognized them immediately, though she'd never seen it from the air. Radiant Dawn. They'd held out the promise of surviving her cancer, and she'd turned her back on them in rashness, joined the people who were going to exterminate them. Had Dr. Keogh seemed so insane, or so sick, as this? I belong here, she thought. With these sick, cast-off killers.