Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  Nimziki broke the stunned silence. “Thirty-six ships, possible enemies, are headed this way, Mr. President. Whether we like it or not, we must go to DEFCON Three. Even if it causes a panic, we must recall our troops and put them on yellow alert immediately.”

  No one in the room could disagree.

  *

  An alarm went off, a red light flashing in time with a piercing beep. A door opened and the alarm died. David’s arm reached through the door and pulled out his Cup-O-Noodles. It was lunch hour at Compact Cable. David had hardly left the feed room. As if there wasn’t enough equipment in there already, he had gone and retrieved two additional suitcase-sized machines and his laptop computer. They were set upright in the middle of the floor. David was sloppy when he was concentrating. He sat with his feet under him in the chair, elbows between his knees, coiled in concentration. He stared intently at the screen of his laptop computer, watching a visual display that repeated itself about every twenty seconds.

  “Hello, you handsome genius.” Marty peeked around the corner, all smiles. “I’m not here to pressure you. I’m just checking to see if there’s anything you need.” Which was, of course, a bald-faced lie. Whenever there was a problem, a mother hen like Marty had to be there.

  “Marty! Old pal! Have a seat, relax.”

  Marty tiptoed in like a leper trying not to scratch. David had already kicked him out once for looking over his shoulder and asking too many questions. He had promised himself that he wasn’t going to bug David, and for the first ten seconds he didn’t. Then his willpower broke down. “David, tell me you’re getting somewhere. I’m begging. Say you’ve got it figured out.”

  “Well,” David said, very leisurely, “I’ve got good news and bad news. Which would you like to hear first?”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The bad news is you’re in meal penalty for disturbing my lunch.”

  Marty put a hand on his hip and got sarcastic. “Don’t tell me. The good news is: you’re not going to charge me.”

  “Actually,” David took a last spoonful of soup, “the good news is I found the problem.”

  Marty clutched his heart and took a few deep breaths, hamming it up. “Thank God. Okay, so what exactly is the problem?”

  “There’s a weird signal embedded in the satellite feed. A signal within a signal. I have absolutely no idea where it’s coming from. Never seen anything like it. Somehow, this signal is being cycled through every satellite in the sky.

  Marty stared back at him, mouth agape. “And exactly why is that supposed to be good news?”

  “Because the signal is following an exact sequence, a pattern. So the rest is simple! We just generate a digital map of the signal frequency, then translate it into a binary strand and apply a phase-reversed signal with the calculated spectrometer I built you for your birthday, and bingo, we should be able to block out the overlay completely.”

  “Block out the overlay?” Marty looked confused. “Does that mean we get our picture back?”

  “You’re quick.”

  “Does that also mean,” Marty asked slyly, “that we’ll be the only guys in town who are putting out a clean program?”

  “Unless we share what we have learned,” David suggested, angelically. He knew Marty was hypercompetitive with his fellow station managers and would luxuriate, wallow, and bask in this moment of triumph over them.

  “Ha-ha, I love it!” Marty erupted with savage glee. “Our secret weapon! The phase-reversed spectrometer calculation analyzer thingee! This is turning out to be a wonderful day.”

  *

  When Miguel finally found him, Russell had sprayed about a quarter of a 1000-square-yard tomato field. A group of field hands was gathered around their cars, unable to work while the spraying was going on. The field was about a mile long and bordered on one side by a row of giant eucalyptus trees that ran right up to the road. Instead of spraying parallel to the trees, Russell was flying straight down the rows and pulling up at the last possible moment, straining the old Liberty engine to clear the tops of the trees. Miguel couldn’t tell if he was drunk or crazy, but if this was like most mornings, Russell was both.

  The plane was a gorgeous old de Haviland biwing, a bright red two-seater built the same year Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. The retractable wings were made of cloth stretched tight over wooden frames. The U.S. Post Office had used de Havilands to open transcontinental airmail service in the twenties. The machine belonged in a Saturday air show, not out dusting crops. It was too heavy and hard to maneuver to begin with, but to make matters worse, Russell had an extra 200 pounds of spray equipment strapped to the back with twine and bungee cords.

  As Russell dove over the tops of the trees to begin another pass at the tomatoes, Miguel yelled and waved, calling for him to land. The farm workers understood what the boy was doing and a few of them joined in. The plane’s pilot waved back stupidly.

  “Come on, Russell, wake up,” Miguel pleaded. Over the last two years, Russell had been going downhill fast. He was drinking himself to death and losing all sense of responsibility for his kids. He’d straightened up for a while when the neighbors had reported him to the police, who in turn had called in the social workers. He’d always been crazy, but when Miguel’s mother got sick and finally died, Russell had plunged totally over the edge. He’d developed a death wish. Every few days, he’d snap out of it and promise to make a new start. Which meant that Miguel was usually the one left to take care of things like paying the rent, getting Troy’s medicine, and buying the groceries. That was one thing nobody could take away from Miguel: he was responsible. Russell was less like a parent to him than a burdensome roommate.

  As the plane circled around for another pass, Miguel suddenly started up his motorcycle and tore straight across the field, uprooting plants and splattering tomatoes as he bounced over the irrigation ridges. He stopped right in the path of the plane, which raced toward him, a white cloud of liquid poison misting out the back. Luckily, Russell saw him in time and shut off the feeder. As he passed, he focused his eyes and saw that the boy was waving him down. He turned around in his seat and smiled to Miguel, raising his thumb to show he understood. He could see the boy was pointing, trying to tell him something, but he didn’t understand until he turned back around in his chair and found himself face-to-face with a picket fence-lined row of hundred-foot-tall eucalyptus trees, and it was way too late to pull up.

  “Whoa, Lordy!” he screamed over the sound of the motor. Luckily, for Russell, there was no time to think. Acting purely on reflex, he rolled the plane ninety degrees onto its side and sliced through a narrow gap between trees. He had less than a foot clearance on either side. Rather than kicking himself for being so stupid, or thanking heaven for being so lucky, Russell let out a long, bloodcurdling victory whoop, delighted with his own skills.

  A few minutes later, the plane coasted to a stop on the remote highway. When Miguel raced up and skidded to a halt, Russell was just climbing awkwardly out of the cockpit. “Did you see that?” he yelled. “That was a damn trip!” He pulled off his leather aviator’s cap and lowered himself carefully onto the lower wing. At fifty-one, Russell Casse looked like a big little boy. He had full, round cheeks and a bush of curly blondish hair. He was large, over six feet tall and broad across the shoulders. Over the last couple of years, his drinking had turned his complexion from rosy to ruddy, and he’d started to develop a gut.

  “What the hell are you doing over here?” Although there was a sharp tone to Miguel’s voice, it didn’t penetrate his stepfather’s thick skin.

  “I’m bringin’ home the bacon,” Russell sang proudly, “Earnin’ my keep. And, if I do say so myself, doing a pretty fine job of it.”

  “This isn’t Foster’s place. It’s the wrong field,” Miguel told him. “You’re supposed to be on the other side of town.”

  Russell, still perched on the plane’s wing, took a long look at the field and the farmhouse down the road. “Are you sure?�
��

  “Damn it, Russell. He was doing you a favor. He was just at the trailer asking where the hell you were. And he’s gonna make you pay for the spray you wasted.”

  Russell climbed down to the pavement and stood there, a little wobbly, shaking his head. No use in getting upset about it now, he told himself. But this was the first work he’d had all season, and Lucas was about the only farmer in town who was on his side. He looked at his son, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Do you know how hard it is to find someone who doesn’t think you’re totally crazy?” the boy hissed. “Now what are we supposed to do? Where are we supposed to go now?”

  Russell didn’t have any answers. He badly wanted to promise Miguel things were going to start changing right then and there. But he knew the boy wouldn’t believe him and he wouldn’t have believed himself. So he stood mutely in the center of the road until Miguel kick-started the bike and drove away in disgust.

  Russell brought a flask of Jack Daniel’s out of his jacket. He was pretty sure something had just ended. Maybe it was just the end of him pretending to put up a fight. The last few years had broken him. His wife’s degenerative illness and eventual death, the night he was abducted, the news that Troy had inherited his mother’s adrenal cortex deficiency. Screw it. If life was going to be that painful, he didn’t want any piece of it. If it weren’t for his kids, he would have climbed back into the old plane, flown it to its top altitude, then cut the engine and let her freefall back to earth. Instead, he uncapped the flask and took a long swig of whiskey.

  *

  Deep in the desert of Northern Iraq, Ibn Assad Jamal squatted before a small campfire, preparing his morning coffee. A Bedouin, he’d been forced off the land his tribe had claimed as their own for countless generations and had been herded into a squalid, crowded tent city along with several other Bedouin clans. It was still an hour before the first light of dawn, but by force of habit, the whole makeshift village was stirring to life.

  He reached into the fire and retrieved his grandfather’s coffee jar, boiling a thick brew of Arabian coffee. As he was waiting for the grounds to settle to the bottom, he heard a single scream pierce the night air. A second later, many people were screaming and calling out in a panic.

  Jamal stood paralyzed from the sounds. At the top of the dunes, he saw the outlines of a dozen figures rushing toward him. His first thought was that the camp was being attacked by the army, but as the people came sprinting past him, shouting and whimpering, he saw what they were running from.

  “Ensha’allah,” he muttered to himself. He saw something that knocked his knees out from under him. A giant piece of the sky was on fire. A mountain-sized fireball, flaring orange, white, and gray, was plunging through the sky like a flat rock splashing into a river. The fire cast a dark reddish glow on the sand as it sank deeper in the sky. Jamal stared up at the phenomenon for several moments as a pounding terror grew in his heart. Finally, he got back to his feet, stammered something unintelligible then turned to run, screaming just like the others.

  *

  A few hundred miles away, in the approximate center of the Persian Gulf, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Georgia was plowing along the surface of the dark water, its antenna array rotating atop the conning tower. Inside the sub’s radar room, all hell had broken loose. A loud klaxon alarm was blaring, triggered by unusual readings on the radar scopes. Jittery crewmen, who’d been sleeping only moments before, poured through the bulkheads to their combat stations. The sub’s commander, Admiral J. C. Kern, stepped through the forward hatch and yelled over the noise for a report. “Ensign, status?”

  A sailor wearing a headset wheeled around in his chair. “Sir, we have a total radar blackout over a seventeen-kilometer area.” The admiral moved to the main radar map and studied the incoming signal. A large portion of the upper screen was blank, but it was obviously not an equipment failure, because the blank ellipse on the screen was moving.

  “Admiral.” One of his officers stepped closer. “I’ve ordered a complete diagnostic run. The auxiliary radar units—”

  “Sir, excuse me, sir,” shouted another sailor from the opposite side of the cramped room. “Radar may be malfunctioning, but infrared is completely off the map. No reading at all.” He pushed away from his monitor to give Kern a view of the infrared tracking system. The entire screen was a bright pool of red light.

  “Lieutenant,” Kern barked, almost amused at the chaos.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Get Atlantic Command on the line.”

  *

  The Oval Office was crowded with military leaders and the president’s advisers. Thirty phone calls were taking place at once, but the noise level stayed at a hushed murmur. Extra tables had been carried in and there was a constant stream of foot traffic in and out of the room. The joint chiefs had arrived an hour earlier having recalled the nation’s armed forces. The fleet of nuclear submarines was maintaining launch readiness, and battleships were deployed along both coasts. Civilian advisers had taken over the sofas, and the president sat under the north windows behind Resolute, the impressive desk given to Teddy Roosevelt by the Queen of England. There were also representatives from the Atlantic Command, NATO, and military attaches from the British, Russian, and German consulates.

  This impressive collection of decision-makers, one of the most powerful groups ever to assemble at the White House, had adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Many of them had advocated a preemptive strike against the object lurking behind the moon. NASA engineers had been consulted as to the feasibility of sending the space shuttle to attack with nuclear weapons, but, for many reasons, they had eventually arrived at an uneasy consensus not to do so. They waited tensely for the thirty-six segments to enter the earth’s atmosphere. When the line from the Pentagon rang, all the major players in the room fell silent.

  General Grey, as commander of the joint chiefs, stepped forward to answer the call. “This is Grey,” he growled into the receiver, his face as expressive as chiseled stone. “Where in the Pacific?” he asked. After listening for a moment, he turned to the president. “They’ve spotted two coming in over the west coast, both over California.”

  “Send the plane from Moffet Field,” Whitmore ordered. The plan had already been set in motion. An AWACS aircraft from the facility near San Jose was already in the air, waiting for the order to begin a close-up inspection of the incoming craft.

  The door flew open and Connie marched toward the president’s desk. “CNN is doing a live shot from Russia. They’ve got a picture of this thing.”

  “Put it on,” Whitmore said, glancing at Lermontov, the worried Russian ambassador. One of the staffers pulled open the armoire doors and switched on the television.

  The broadcast was coming live from Novomoskovsk, an industrial town two hundred miles south of the Russian capital. A local reporter stood at the edge of a wide boulevard which ran through the city’s most fashionable neighborhood, shouting over the mayhem that surrounded him. Although it was just past six in the morning, the street was choked with panicked residents, running headlong in every direction. Cars sped past the camera, swerving to avoid pedestrians. The reporters words were being translated by someone in CNN’s Atlanta studio.

  “…sightings of this atmospheric phenomenon have been reported here in Novomoskovsk and other parts of Russia. Again, this phenomenon is moving too slowly to be a comet or meteor. Astronomers can’t explain this baffling occurrence.”

  The camera then panned away from the reporter and upward. In the distance, it showed the grainy image of a fireball hanging in the early morning sky. As the camera zoomed in, the flame-spitting giant filled the screen, towers of fire erupting in all directions as the surface of the speeding object moved against the sky, its friction burning up huge amounts of oxygen.

  Everyone in the Oval Office stared at the television, grimly transfixed by the strange spectacle. The boiling cloud of fire looked like God announcing himself in an old Char
lton Heston movie.

  “As you can see from our live picture,” one of the CNN anchors broke in, “a sense of panic has gripped the people of Novomoskovsk. We have learned this same type of reaction is happening in all parts of the city. The Russian equivalent of the Red Cross reports there have already been scores of injuries, most of them traffic-related as citizens scramble to get as far away from this strange phenomenon as possible. The situation is even worse in Moscow, where the craft is thought to be headed.”

  “Mr. President,” General Grey interrupted, “our AWACS from Moffet Field has an ETA of three minutes with the contact point. We can put a line from the cockpit through this phone.”

  “Put it on the speaker phone.” Whitmore saw no reason for the others not to hear the report.

  Worried faces gathered in a rough circle around the president’s desk, looking at the phone and one another as the sounds of the AWACS’s cockpit were radioed to the Oval Office, three thousand miles away.

  *

  The plane was flying south, several miles off the California coastline. The AWACS, Airborne Warning and Control System, was capable of scanning a four-hundred-mile area and tracking five hundred enemy planes simultaneously. But the state-of-the-art radar system, like so many of the earth’s communications systems, was malfunctioning.

  The calm, professional voices of the aircraft’s crew came murmuring over the phone line. “Radar Two, I’m drawing a blank. Forward radar doesn’t see a thing and side radar is impaired—what’s your status? Over.”

  “Absolutely correct, sir. Forward radar is totally gone. We’re flying IMC blind. Over.”

  Inside, the aircraft was packed with wall-to-wall computers, instrument banks, radar scopes, and other intelligence-gathering equipment. Technicians in headsets and orange jumpsuits were talking frantically to one another, trying one experiment after another, racing to adjust the navigation systems.