The two of them dropped through the open cellar door and rolled down the steps, landing hard in a heap on the earth floor, gritty dust pluming up around them.
Chapter Eleven
Martha
With two pairs of bucket seats positioned opposite each other, the passenger compartment of the EC135 held four people. Martha Chan and Sanford Harbin sat next to each other, facing Russel Fravel and Joy Reiber. Keenen Holt, Brian Tomes, and Brenna Hauff were in a second chopper following behind them. They were airborne within a few minutes of boarding, and although Martha could see the pilot’s lips moving, she could no longer hear him through the headphones—apparently, he was speaking on another channel. She had hoped to gather additional information—locations, size of deployment, general chatter. You could learn a lot listening in on an open radio channel, all those voices speaking to one another sometimes forgot you were there. Any child could tell you the best information was always gleaned from adults speaking in hushed voices one room over, thinking you were asleep.
“Who do you suppose was late to the party?” Harbin said, his voice thin over the headphones. It seemed the passengers were all on the same channel, at least.
Martha turned to see a pensive look on his face. “What?”
“Our lovely handler, Mr. Holt, said we were expecting one other person. Someone he wanted at that little dog and pony show but not someone he felt important enough to wait on.”
Joy Reiber pulled the elastic band from her hair, gathered her blond locks together again, then replaced it. “That shit was hiding something.”
Beside her, Russel Fravel chuckled. “DIA hides everything. That’s their job. If you caught him with his pants down and his pecker in his hand and asked him what he was doing, he’d tell you he was brewing coffee and make you believe it. We’ve got to assume everything he’s telling us is utter bullshit and piece together whatever is happening on our own. He’s just as likely to feed us disinformation as the truth.”
Reiber frowned. “Why bring us all this way and lie? How can they expect us to determine anything without all the relevant facts?”
Harbin nodded in agreement with Fravel, then told Reiber, “We’re here to find all the jigsaw pieces scattered about, someone else has been tasked with putting the puzzle together. Most likely Frederick Hoover, the man in that video message. That’s the only way to explain the involvement of DARPA.”
“You said you knew him?” Martha pointed out.
Harbin nodded again. “And I know how he works. In that video, he looked tired, run-down. When he’s on a project, particularly something time-sensitive, he goes all in, to the point of self-neglect. I’ve seen him go days without sleep or a shower. He doesn’t eat unless someone reminds him. Doesn’t shave. Whatever is going on here, he’s been working on it for several days at this point, maybe longer.”
“An alien invasion,” Reiber said flatly, looking at Fravel. “That’s why you’re here.”
Fravel waved a dismissive hand at her. “I’ve spent my entire adult life staring up into the cosmos, and I can tell you with relative certainty if there was someone else out there close enough to stop by and visit, we would have found them by now. This is something else.”
“Then why bring in an astrophysicist?”
He shrugged. “No idea. My work focuses on the study of a star’s life cycle. I can’t imagine how my particular skill set is useful here. Besides, if something as far-fetched as an alien spacecraft approached this planet, I would have heard about it through a colleague. We have a worldwide network and tend to share data. Even the Chinese and Russians are cooperative. We try not to let politics dictate our work.”
Harbin leaned forward. “There must be a reason each of us is here. What are you working on at this moment? Of all the astrophysicists in the world, why you?”
Fravel thought about it for a moment. “Lately I’ve been following QV89, an asteroid about the size of a football field. Catalina Sky Survey first found it back in ’06. Its current path will bring it close to earth this September, but it doesn’t pose a risk.”
“Are you sure?” Harbin pressed.
Fravel chuckled again. “If you’re concerned that it’s really going to hit the planet, and the government’s lying about it in order to avoid a panic, I can safely tell you it is not. I’m the guy tracking its trajectory. If we were all going to die, you’d see me on the internet, on television…I’d tell everyone. They’d have to lock me up to keep me quiet. This is something else.”
Martha turned to Reiber. “You’re with the Department of Agriculture, right? What are you currently working on?”
Reiber glanced out the window, then back to Martha. “I study pollination. Specifically how it’s impacted by the decline in the world’s bee population. That’s what my speech today was supposed to be about.” She let out a sigh. “God, I hope I don’t lose my grant over this. In a few hours, several hundred academics are going to gather at the Babson in DC, and I’m clearly not going to be there. The timing of this couldn’t be worse.” She looked out the window again. “If we’re in Oregon, I don’t think this is about bees. The closest large-scale decline in honeybee population is north of here, in Washington—a good three hundred miles away. I must’ve been dragged here for another reason.”
Harbin’s eyes were back on Martha. “And you? The focus of the paper I read was overpopulation. That’s hardly a problem out here. What’s their interest in you?”
Much of what Martha did was classified. She weighed what she could tell him. “I’m typically brought in to help deal with the psychological effects of large-scale medical emergencies—bird flu, SARS, Ebola, coronavirus. Lately I’ve been focusing on isolated measles outbreaks. Like Dr. Reiber said, Washington State would be the closest. I’m not aware of anything in Oregon. What about you?”
Harbin sighed. “For the past three years, I’ve been studying the impact of fluctuating tides on coastal urban centers. We’re heading in the opposite direction of the ocean right now. I can’t think of a single reason for the powers that be to rush me out to this place.”
Martha looked back out the window at the landscape below. There was no denying the beauty—deep green forests, icy blue lakes. Wild, still relatively untouched by the barbarism of humans. The land below them looked so peaceful, serene. As they flew by the peak of Mount Hood, she couldn’t imagine what could possibly be happening—
She saw it then and gasped. “Oh, God.”
Chapter Twelve
Martha
Sanford Harbin leaned over Martha and looked out her window. “Well, I find that very odd indeed.”
Across from Martha, Russel Fravel adjusted his glasses and peered out his own window. He spoke slowly, processing his thoughts as he said them aloud. “Difficult to say from this height, but I’d estimate the width to be around twenty yards. Looks like it starts at that crevasse and peters out somewhere in the woods.” He glanced over at Harbin. “You’re right. Very odd. Why would they bring us in to investigate tornado damage? There’s not a single meteorologist on the team.”
“We didn’t bring in a meteorologist, because what you’re looking at wasn’t caused by a tornado,” a voice said over the radio.
Holt.
You could learn a lot listening to an open radio channel. All those voices speaking to one another sometimes forgot you were there.
Damnit.
Joy Reiber blew out a frustrated breath. “If you brought me here for a tornado, I’ll be—”
“It’s not a tornado,” Holt insisted. “The average width of a tornado’s path is three to five hundred yards. Obviously, this is nowhere near that wide. I’ve been told the width of this path isn’t on par with the destruction left behind. If this had been a tornado, the estimated wind speed necessary to create this damage would be around two-hundred-fifty miles per hour. That would make it an F4 on the Fujita–Pearson scale. The minimum width of an F4 is point-three miles. That’s a little more than five hundred yards. Our pa
th is no more than twenty or thirty yards wide. A tornado of that size would be considered an F1, with wind speeds of no more than one-hundred-twelve miles per hour—not strong enough to leave this kind of damage. Like I said, this wasn’t a tornado.”
Harbin was shaking his head. “I don’t think you could make that determination from this swatch of land. An average is just that, an average. I’ve read about F4s and even F5s with maximum wind speeds that didn’t conform to the norm. I recall one in Kansas about fifteen years ago that clocked in at two-hundred-seventy miles per hour and only left a path thirty yards across—what we’re looking at is on par with something like that, an anomaly as you called it earlier.”
Reiber had unfastened her safety harness and was bent over Fravel with a hand on his shoulder. The physical contact clearly made him uncomfortable, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes were on her black sports bra under her loose tank top. When he noticed Martha watching him, he turned back to the window.
Fravel said, “The damage, though. The ground cover has been flattened. Some of those trees are snapped in half. Others appear to be ripped from the ground and tossed aside. That looks like tornado damage.”
Martha had to agree. The chopper hovered above the crevasse, angled so they could get a better look. As Fravel had said, the path was about twenty yards wide, nearly a straight line, virtually everything within that path either flattened or gone altogether, as if someone had run a wide bulldozer through the tall redwoods in preparation for a road.
In the cockpit, the pilot spoke silently into his radio, then pulled right on the stick and slowly began following the path through the woods, hovering no more than twenty feet over the ancient trees.
“It’s damn near a straight line,” Harbin said to nobody in particular. “No variation in the width.”
Reiber pulled a pair of field glasses from a black mesh storage bin beside her seat and peered down. “This happened recently. I’d say within the past several hours.”
“How can you tell?” Martha asked.
“There’s no discoloration in the fallen trees or flattened shrubs. Everything’s still bright green.”
Harbin glanced at her. “How long, exactly?”
She shrugged. “Hard to tell from this height, but to me, the fallen trees appear no different than the live ones. Discoloration begins immediately on branches separated from the trunk, the moment they lose their water supply. I’d guess more than two hours but less than six.”
Harbin said nothing to this, only frowned.
Martha understood what he was getting at. “They started pulling our team together before this happened.”
He nodded. “That means they either anticipated this event—”
“—or caused it,” Fravel finished his thought.
The helicopter followed the path for nearly a mile before coming upon a large clearing. From the far end, another helicopter took off and buzzed past them, most likely heading back toward base camp at Zigzag. The ground was teeming with people, some in yellow hazmat suits. Various types of equipment stood—some of it still in cases. A large, white tent occupied the far corner of the clearing.
Harbin said, “We’ve got the leveled remains of several buildings down there. Houses, maybe? Some kind of colony?”
“Probably preppers. I’ve hiked Mount Hood, came out here with a boyfriend about five years ago,” Reiber said. “These woods are full of doomsday preppers, survivalists, naturalists…thousands of people living off the grid. They break from society and make a life out here. Some even raise families.”
Martha thought of her twins back home. “I can’t imagine raising children out here.”
“Look there.” Fravel was pointing toward the east. “We’ve got another path. Not as wide as the first one we saw.”
“I’ve got three more on this side,” Reiber said. “They converge below, in the clearing.”
Harbin glanced at each of them, then pushed the microphone on his headset closer to his lips. “Holt, are you still with us?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Multiple paths through the woods, all converging here. Like streams feeding a river. Equal damage on all. Is this what you meant? Why you’re certain it wasn’t a tornado?”
“Yes.”
Harbin went on. “They come together here, consolidate, then continue to that crevasse, end there, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What’s at the bottom of the crevasse?”
Holt fell silent for a moment, then: “We’ll discuss that back at Zigzag. In a moment, we’ll set down. I’d like to remind you of your instructions—you’re welcome to study anything you find, but we’d like you to keep your opinions to yourself until we debrief. You’ll have one hour and forty-seven minutes on the ground.”
Chapter Thirteen
Martha
Martha shielded her eyes from the rising sun. “Where are Tomes and Hauff?”
“The two from NASA?” Harbin asked.
Martha nodded. “Weren’t they right behind us?”
Their helicopter had set down on the far end of the clearing, about ten yards from another one. A half dozen more tents were going up. There were more people here than Martha had first thought.
Holt was on a sat phone, pacing about ten feet away. He covered the mouthpiece. “You’ll see them back at Zigzag.” He pointed at one of the newly erected tents. “That’s you. You’ll find all the gear you need already inside. One hour, forty-five minutes, then back in the chopper.”
Martha still had no idea what specifically she was supposed to do here. She opened her mouth to ask him, but he had paced off in the other direction, back on his call. “I really don’t like that guy.”
Harbin didn’t answer. His face had gone white. He was staring at the ground.
“What is—” Martha followed his gaze and felt something drop in the pit of her stomach. “Oh, my God.”
Harbin glanced at her, then knelt. He took a pencil out of his pocket and tenderly picked at what he had found. “I think this is a chicken. Was a chicken.”
Martha lowered herself beside him and fought back the urge to vomit. “It’s been pulverized. Flattened.”
“By what?” With the tip of the pencil, he pried a couple of the feathers up. The ground was saturated with fresh blood. “Look at that, that was its beak. Bones are mush, like roadkill that’s been on the highway for a week, ground down to damn near nothing.”
Martha looked around. “This isn’t a road. I don’t think you could even get a vehicle out here. Nothing substantial.”
“We’re in the middle of that path we saw from the helicopter.” He raised a hand and pointed west. “Look at the ground—branches, twigs, grass—decimated. Like something carved a trench through the wilderness.”
Reiber walked over and pointed at a small group about thirty feet away, all dressed in yellow hazmat suits. “That team, they’re using Geiger counters. If they’re worried about radiation, why weren’t we given suits?”
“Holt’s not wearing one, either,” Harbin pointed out. “I’d think if there were truly a concern, he’d be the first to put one on.”
Reiber turned and looked toward the east, followed the path as far as she could see. “This couldn’t be some kind of asteroid or meteor crash, right?”
Harbin shook his head. “Anything like that would cause immense friction. This entire area would be scorched. Nothing’s burned, just flat.”
“Airplane crash?” Reiber offered.
Martha had ruled that out from the air. “Not wide enough. No debris. And Harbin’s right about the scorch marks. We’d see that with an aircraft, too.”
Then there was the smell.
Martha had been to crash sites before. The scent of death drifted through the air here, but it wasn’t right for an aircraft. Not the sickly sweet odor she remembered. This was more like meat that had turned. She wandered over to the edge of the anomaly, amazed at how obvious that line was. The flattened earth, the damage t
o the trees and brush, all of it ended in a perfectly straight line, like a wall—small branches to thick trees, snapped off. She felt that was important—they weren’t sheared or cut, they’d been broken.
Some of the branches had blood on them. Sticky, nearly dry. Flies buzzed about, hungrily collecting what they could.
“Dr. Chan!”
Martha turned.
Harbin was standing near the tent Holt had said was theirs. He gestured her over and disappeared inside.
She found him with Russel Fravel, both staring up at a topography map taped to a whiteboard, a satellite photo next to it. Notes were written along the right side in blue ink. Black plastic cases lined all the walls, the covers open—an electron microscope, four laptops slotted into foam in another, collection containers and labels in the third, audio and video recording equipment, measuring tools, a Geiger counter similar to the one the other team was using…a relative crapshoot of scientific instruments, nothing specific to the task at hand.
Reiber had crouched next to one of the cases. She was studying the outer shell. “This one is Navy, that one over there is from NTSB.” She frowned and looked back out the mouth of the tent. “If this isn’t a crash, why would NTSB be here?”
Martha and Harbin both shook their heads.
Reiber considered this for another moment, then removed a small video camera from the case, snapped off the lens cover, and switched it on. She panned the room, studying the image on the display. “Night vision and FLIR built in. Nice.”
“FLIR?” Harbin asked blankly.
“Forward-looking infrared radar,” Reiber said without looking up. “Thermal imaging. Great for mapping hot and cold spots.”
Fravel motioned Martha over and tapped on the satellite image. “This was taken three weeks ago. I count seventeen different structures. Clearly some kind of settlement. These larger buildings look like bunkhouses or maybe some type of central meeting space. This looks like a barn. Then we’ve got a number of smaller buildings, probably single-family dwellings—most have chimneys.” He pointed at a cluster of shadows next to one of the larger buildings. “Those look like ATVs to me—probably how the locals got in and out of this place. The terrain is too rough for anything larger.”
The Noise Page 4
