The Fall

by R. J. Pineiro

  He dove, landing on a sea of sharp glass, his battle dress shielding him as rounds buzzed overhead, tearing into the sofa, into the ceiling, showering him with plasterboard.

  The deafening noise momentarily disoriented him as he tried to crawl to the suit when an invisible force punched him square in the chest, the Kevlar over Nomex fabric absorbing the impact of a direct hit, spreading it across his upper body, pushing him back with savage force, nearly making him lose control of his bladder muscles.

  Jack landed on his back, dazed, out of breath, mouth wide open trying to inhale, his chest on fire.

  A trembling hand reached down for the M32 by his feet, clutching the weapon while the other felt his chest, verifying that the round hadn’t pierced the Kevlar.

  Jack made another attempt for the OSS, ignoring the agonizing pain as he crawled back to the sofa, but the earsplitting fusillade held him back, forcing him to stay low as bullets punched holes in the helmet, ripping through the folded suit inside, in an instant eliminating his return home.

  Damn!

  Instincts made him roll away toward the back of the house, wincing in pain as the M32 pressed against his chest on every roll, the staccato gunfire intensifying, the ceiling and the carpet swapping places again and again until his right shoulder struck something hard, unyielding, a wall by the dining room as rounds shaved wood inches above him.

  He crawled on elbows and knees under the heavy dining table while shots hammered it, splinters exploding, stinging the back of his neck as he reached the other side, just a few feet away from the same sliding glass now shattered by gunfire, gloved hands still clutching his grenade launcher and its two remaining rounds.

  His inner voice now screamed at him to jump, to move, to scramble from his temporary hideout, from the false sense of security of lying low inside a light structure under heavy fire.

  Because the former SEAL knew precisely what would come next—knew the tactics of flushing an enemy in modern suburban warfare.

  This initial volley of rounds, as intimidating as it was at the receiving end, was just the appetizer of a standard-issue U.S. Army ass-kicking meal.

  The main course came a moment later, just as the firing stopped in unison.

  Jack heard three popping sounds as payback skittered across the living room floor.

  Something snapped inside of him, and he sprung, almost as if he were lying on a nest of scorpions, long-ingrained survival instincts propelling him toward the shattered sliding glass doors, ignoring his throbbing chest and shards of glass threatening to tear his armored battle dress apart as he kicked his legs hard and dove through, landing on the back patio, rolling into lawn chairs just as multiple blasts rocked the house.

  Glass and flaming debris exploded over the backyard, tongues of flames forking through shattered windows, through the doors he had just jumped through, licking the night sky.

  The acoustic wave punched him in the back, throwing him a dozen feet in the air, before crash-landing on the grass beyond the patio.

  Jack rolled to his side, sitting up with great effort, wincing in pain as he did so, but grateful for his SEAL training as he stared at his hands, still clutching his grenade launcher. Just like NFL players are trained to protect the football, so are SEALs taught to protect their weapon.

  Get up, Jack.

  He staggered to his feet, dazed, disoriented, his back burning from the blasts. Ears ringing, he blinked rapidly, clearing his sight, tightening the grip on the M32, taking a deep breath, coughing, fighting the urge to convulse as nausea spread through his system.

  Move, Jack.

  Mustering strength, he forced his legs to move, to run, to cover the fifty feet to the boathouse. He didn’t need to look back to know the soldiers were coming, as prescribed by their training.

  Jack scrambled from the threat, flinching in pain with each step, his ribs protesting the abuse, his heartbeat rocketing, hammering his aching chest.

  His vision tunneled, converging on the Boston Whaler backdropped by the water as he pushed his scourged body ahead, refusing to give up, to capitulate, to let them take him. He owed it to Angela to escape, to survive to fight another day, just like in the Colombian jungle.

  So Jack persisted, lurching forward, struggling to keep his footing, resisting the urge to turn around. Timing was everything, especially with only two M406s left in his launcher.

  His chest stung with every step as he stumbled, nearly losing his footing, regaining his momentum, pointing it straight at the boathouse.

  Thirty feet now, where Angela awaited, twin outboards rumbling.

  Dark & Stormy.

  Jack continued running, the spring-loaded soles of the battle dress increasing his momentum, assisting his escape.

  Twenty-five feet.

  The soldiers would be almost in view now, about to reach the backyard from both sides.

  Twenty feet.

  Now!

  Dropping to the ground and rolling once, Jack spread his legs, arresting the roll while leveling the M32 to the right of the house, where he used the reflex scope to place the first grenade, the butt-stock recoiling before he shifted the wide muzzle to the left, releasing his last round.

  Surging to his feet, waiting for the blasts, Jack took off again, kicking his legs against the grass, hearing shouts behind him, threats, warnings. But his mind blocked everything, counting the seconds as gunfire erupted and the ground exploded to his left.

  He cut right, then left, zigzagging in the darkness, almost by the short pier as gunfire increased, the sound of a near-miss buzzing in his left ear.

  Jack ducked and kept rushing away.

  Movement is life.

  He cut right, then left, then right again, the terrain under his cushioned soles hardening, changing from grass to wood as he kicked harder, the boat now less than—

  The first blast finally came, overarching, powerful, killing the gunfire, the acoustic blast reaching him an instant later, lifting him off his feet, tossing him in the air, propelling him forward with savage force.

  And the second blast took over, ear-piercing, kicking him back up in the air as Jack instinctively let go of the M32, arms covering his head, bracing for impact as he crashed into something, disoriented, stung by the twin explosions, unable to hear, to speak, to—

  An invisible force shoved him sideways now, and he tumbled in its wake, striking another wall as the world around him blurred, as engines roared, as he sensed motion, bouncing on the floor.

  He heard her voice now, distant, remote, quickly fading, just as her silhouette planted at the controls, legs spread for balance, long hair swirling in the wind as the Boston Whaler leaped from its shelter.

  Holding his aching chest while lying sideways on the stern, under the rear bench, Jack tried to speak, to shout, to tell her that he had failed to retrieve the suit, his ticket home, the only way he knew to return to Angela.

  But … then again … he had returned.

  Angie was right there, her slim figure steady against the night, navigating them to safety.

  Jack struggled to focus his tired mind, but shock overwhelmed his last straw of resistance, draining his stamina, dragging him into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  The world of Dr. Olivia Wiltz, SkyLeap’s chief engineer, forever changed the moment her screen flickered, then went blue.

  She just didn’t know it yet.

  Leaning forward, readjusting her large glasses, the former CERN scientist stared at the screen in disbelief.

  The servers at SkyLeap never glitched.

  Ever.

  They had a triple-redundancy protocol, standby uninterrupted power supplies, and it was all backed by massive generators in the basement that could keep the entire building operational for up to a month in case of inclement weather.

  And Claudette was anything but inclement now, having lost its punch somewhere over Orlando.

  So what just happened?

  Sitting behind her desk in the R&D lab on the
second floor of the two-story facility built four years ago, the Swiss-born scientist watched the system go through its reboot process, before her gaze wandered around the interior of the pristine lab, where multiple versions of the OSS hung neatly from their frames, resembling glorified coat hangers, before staring at the final design, the one Jack used two days ago.

  The confirmation that Jack had jumped dimensions had validated General Hastings’s decision six months ago to ramp up the production facility on the first floor. Operation SkyLeap was a Go, and with it any hopes of Olivia returning to her formal life. She knew too much about this program, and the framed photo of her ten-year-old daughter, Erika, attending a private boarding school in Orlando, served as a constant reminder to never, ever deviate from the instructions handed down by Hastings.

  Olivia had thought about going public once, in the beginning, shortly after she had learned of Hastings’s long-term plans. But before she could contact the press, the general had summoned her to his office and calmly set a photo of Erika in front of her, taken by a surveillance team just hours before.

  No words had been spoken, and to this day Olivia didn’t know how he had figured out her plan. But whatever thoughts she may have had about exposing the operation had ended in that office.

  Taking a deep breath, trying to keep the past in the past, Olivia chastised herself for accepting Hastings’s offer to join SkyLeap. But at the time it had seemed like a great opportunity. She had just lost her husband to a brain tumor, and perhaps a change of scenery from Geneva to warm and sunny Florida was just what Erika needed—not to mention the amazing opportunity to develop the next-generation, glass-based particle accelerator.

  In a way she wished their technology allowed for time jumps. Olivia would gladly turn back the clock and just continue on her work at CERN. Erika would certainly be safer now.

  Readjusting the glasses on her fine nose, she watched the system go through its long reboot.

  The laboratory walls, made of glass, gave her an unobstructed view of the entire operation. She walked over to one end, overlooking the Class-1000 clean room below, where suits hanging from tracks moving through various stages of assembly had just stopped as a result of whatever was happening to the network. Red lights flashed across the production floor, where technicians, dressed in clean room suits to keep particle contamination below the target of one thousand per million, moved about trying to get things started again. But their handheld tablets, designed to control every aspect of manufacturing, were as dark as her screen.

  Sighing, wondering what could have happened, Olivia walked over to the other side of the lab, which overlooked the massive SkyLeap module under construction, to be deployed to the International Space Station aboard an Atlas-V rocket later this year as a secret military payload. Capable of housing up to twelve jumpers at a time for a period of three months, SkyLeap promised to be the largest single module ever deployed in space.

  But construction had also stopped as the half-dozen computer-controlled robot arms used for assembly hung useless from their bases around the module while the system restarted.

  Hastings isn’t going to be happy, she thought, returning to her monitor, sitting back, elbows on the arm rests, hands by her face, as if she were praying while her blue eyes watched the system finish its power cycle.

  Only it didn’t quite start up again.

  The SkyLeap main menu appeared for a few seconds. The display then turned completely black before a door opened in its center, like someone entering a dark room, his dark silhouette, as black as the screen, contrasting sharply with the bright light beyond the doorway, which also cast his shadow into the room.

  Slowly, from the bottom of the screen, a phrase loomed into view.

  YOU’VE BEEN HACKED.

  Oh, God … no.

  Her heart stampeding in her chest, Olivia reached for the phone and stabbed the button for the IT department in the cubicle area exactly below her, wedged in between the production floor and the SkyLeap module assembly room.

  “Talk to me, Rajesh,” she said.

  “Virus attack, Dr. Wiltz,” replied Rajesh Sharma, SkyLeap’s IT manager and a former hacker who Hastings had recruited to prevent precisely what had just taken place.

  “What is its origin?”

  “The Solomon Islands, but it’s a decoy.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My guess is that the true origin’s somewhere else. We’re following it from the Solomon Islands to an ISP in Geneva. We’re still digging into it, but my opinion is that tracking it that way may be a red herring.”

  Olivia momentarily froze at hearing Rajesh mentioning her hometown, before asking, “Why?”

  “Because that’s what the hacker would want us to do, use up resources that could be assigned to containing the virus, which is a higher priority.”

  “How … how bad is this, Rajesh?”

  “Very bad, doctor. Probably the worst I’ve seen … almost elegant.”

  Coming from him that was really bad news.

  “How are you going to contain it?”

  “The quick and easy way: we’re performing a hard shutdown and re-imaging the servers from our daily backup. So all data and activity in the last twenty-four hours will be lost, but when the system comes back up, it will be one hundred percent clean. That’s the only way to be sure.”

  “How long?”

  “Thirty minutes. An hour tops.”

  Olivia leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, exhaling in relief before asking the obvious question. “How did it get past the firewall?”

  “It had to be an inside job, doctor.”

  She leaned forward, her heart skipping beats inside her chest. First he had mentioned Geneva and now someone on the inside might be responsible. Her eyes gravitated toward the picture of Erika, and the words almost got caught in her throat as she said, “Please … explain.”

  “Right before the virus struck, one of my guys ran a routine system usage log and found General Hastings’s account accessing the network. First the program management site and then the Technology site. That’s when we flagged it. The general never checks the Tech site. He only cares about schedules.”

  Rajesh was correct. Hastings hardly logged in to the system as it was, and when he did, he just checked the PM tab for production updates. To him it was all about the numbers. He wanted as many suits built as fast as the facility could crank them out. But more often than not, Hastings would just skip the Web site altogether, pick up the phone, and call Olivia or her colleague in charge of production, Dr. Richard Salazar, currently spending most of his time at a materials lab that Hastings had disguised as an old warehouse in some field thirty minutes away.

  “But … Rajesh … why would he compromise his own operation?”

  Silence, followed by, “We think it was probably someone using his credentials. I think his phone was hijacked because they got the passwords right the first time—all four of them. Also, there is a possibility—however remote—that the hack may have originated in Europe. The Geneva ISP. But then again, it could just be a distraction. That’s how hackers like to play the game.”

  Olivia glanced at her tablet computer on her desk, glad that she lacked external access, as was the case with everyone at SkyLeap, except Hastings, who had insisted on being able to monitor progress from anywhere in the world. Only the general had the passwords in his mobile device to log in to the system from beyond the high-security walls of Project SkyLeap. The rest of the personnel had to be physically inside the facility to gain access to the network.

  “We have to warn him that his phone may be compromised,” she said, hoping that the Geneva connection was just a weird coincidence.

  “We already did,” Raj said. “The passwords were stored in his SIM card.”

  “But isn’t it encrypted?”

  “It is. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be decoded. All it takes is the right software in the hands of a talented hacker.”


  “Is there a way to track down who did this?” Olivia asked, feeling a headache coming.

  “That’s a catch twenty-two, doctor.”

  “Explain.”

  “Well, in order to figure that out, we need to leave the system as is, with production on hold and the virus replicating while we try to dissect it and extract its origin.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “That’s the thing. It could be days, or longer, and there’s no guarantee of success.”

  “Then that’s not an option. The general has been quite clear that running production is a priority,” she said. “We need the network up as soon as possible.”

  “Then that means a hard reboot from backup, like I was planning to do, which will kill the virus but also any information we could have used to track down its true origin. By the way, that’s precisely the way I would have done it if I’d tried to hack into SkyLeap. Whoever did it knew how to cover his or her tracks.”

  “Do whatever is necessary to get us back online, Rajesh.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Olivia hung up the phone, stood, and paced her lab, hands behind her back, lips pressed into a scowl. The gamma-ray glass accelerator, Olivia’s creation—along with her colleague, Dr. Salazar—monopolized almost half of the R&D floor space, though its fifty-foot diameter was nothing compared to the colossus at CERN.

  She stared at it with mixed feelings. As much as she despised being held hostage to work on this project, the scientist in her was amazed at the groundbreaking achievements of the SkyLeap team.

  And that’s just the beginning, she thought, realizing that they had only started to scratch the surface of what was possible with gamma-ray glass accelerator technology, which had completely obsoleted CERN’s copper-based accelerator. Though no one at CERN—or anywhere outside of SkyLeap—would know for some time, or maybe ever, if Hastings got his way.

  It was indeed too bad that such a promising discovery was under the control of a madman. But as long as that madman had a way of hurting her daughter, Olivia would continue to play ball. Which was precisely what she did as she reached for the phone to call Hastings. But before she could pick it up, the phone rang.