The SONG of SHIVA

by Michael Caulfield

  “You’re kidding!” Lyköan erupted.

  “No,” Fremont replied, “not at all. Actually, except for the pathogen exposure risk, this is something of a typical ― even routine ― Special Forces assignment. A small contingent of well trained personnel under competent command, following a well-considered plan with an excellent chance for successful execution. Under the circumstances, it’s our best shot ― possibly our only shot.”

  “Maybe,” Lyköan grudgingly agreed. “But what happens if you bust in and don’t catch everybody in the joint half asleep? How many times have your boys run through this hypothetical attack with real crowbars and peashooters ― against real bogeys?”

  “In mock-mode, over the past two days, we’ve already run the mission parameters half a dozen times here on the base,” Bremer answered. “But you raise a valid point. So you can see, the value of any information you might be able to provide could prove the difference between a smashing success and all the unthinkable alternatives. And I assure you, even the smallest viral release into the atmosphere would be considered an abject failure. Unfortunately, as you know, Pandavas has plans of his own. We can’t afford to devote any more time to dry runs. It’s time for action.”

  “If you’re right about Innovac possessing a Brit Intel conduit,” Fremont added, “then any delay on our part only increases the risk Pandavas gets wind of our intentions.” Neither representative of His Majesty’s civilian government so much as shifted in his seat at this overt accusation. If either had taken offense, there was no hint of it.

  “And there’s something else adding to the urgency. While we have been arguing over mission minutia, news reached the NSA that the TAI-2 outbreak has spread from Vietnam to peninsular Thailand. By the way, Doctor, you might be interested in knowing that Langley’s theoretical biologists agree with you. The Asian outbreak is a completely different microbe than the one Innovac is producing in the Node. So even with the inherent exposure danger, we either attempt to contain the secondary threat inside that hill or risk two simultaneous pandemics.”

  “There were already armed guards patrolling inside before we escaped,” Lyköan countered. “You think the place is just going to roll over for you now? More likely they’ll have put additional men on patrol, increased their number and frequency ― probably their firepower too. Knowing Doctor Carmichael and I are still on the loose, Pandavas is bound to be nervous ― more vigilant ― preparing for something exactly like you’re describing.” There it was again, that same old, second-guessing Tanner logic.

  “When I monitored the Node the night before our escape,” Nora added, realizing where he was headed, “there were at least eight armed security guards ― patrolling in tandem ― partners. Your strike force is only carrying small arms. What if you run into trouble and can’t get to the control room without a firefight?”

  Lyköan’s thoughts raced along the same path. “You may want to think about contingencies if you’re held up along the way somewhere between the hangar door and the control center.”

  After allowing the firebrand exceptions to cool, Bremer responded. “Besides the clandestine entrance, the light body armor and automatic weaponry, we’re also carrying tasers, incapacitating gas and concussive grenades, even some concentrated explosives. Each operative is lightly enough equipped, however, to carry his full issue of armor and armament at a dead run. And no, to answer the question you haven’t asked, nothing as powerful, nor as heavy, as say, an RPG. In every decision we made, it seemed prudent to consistently choose mobility over firepower.

  “We’ll mop up the details and any spoilage after Doctor Carmichael has supervised the hot zone shutdown. A contingency squadron of disinfectant-laden Harriers and Blackhawks will be held here at the base for backup support and cover if additional operational forces are needed. But if everyone does their job, we shouldn’t have to activate them.”

  “You’re only shy a few million details, you know,” Lyköan said, spying an opportunity. “But if you want my help with any of it you’ll have to take me along ― in the first wave. If you have any doubt that I might not be able to hold my own with your boys I’d be happy to prove otherwise. Whatever it takes to show I deserve a spot on the roster. You can keep me on the periphery if you like, but if you want the inside information you’ve been asking for, you’ll have to promise I’ll be there when that hangar door opens. I’ve got a score to settle with the master of Cairncrest. Watching this little donnybrook on some plasma screen just won’t cut it.”

  While it reeked of braggadocio, Lyköan meant every word.

  * * *

  Walking across the tarmac to their quarters in one of the now dilapidated barracks that had been hastily erected between the run up to Kosovo and the wind-down in Iraq, Lyköan excused himself from the group and asked Nora innocently if she wanted to take a stroll around the inside of the perimeter fence before rejoining the others for dinner. Passing between a long line of tethered, mottled-grey Harrier GR7s, they crossed a well-manicured baseball diamond together, stronger testimony of the American presence at Fairford than all twelve of the B-2s secured behind hangar doors.

  “Oh six hundred hours,” Nora exhaled wistfully when they were out of earshot, echoing Bremer’s last pronouncement concerning the morrow’s mission launch. As they walked, she strummed her fingers along the razor-wire-topped steel mesh fence.

  “Almost midmorning, for God’s sake,” Lyköan muttered. “Sun’ll already be up. Daybreak would’ve made a lot more sense. But since Bremer wasn’t entertaining any more suggestions, it seemed the better part of discretion to let him determine the particulars. He’d already given me what I wanted – a seat on the first bus. No sense pressing my luck.”

  “When tomorrow morning arrives, you don’t seriously believe he’s actually going to risk his precious mission by taking you along, do you?” Nora laughed.

  “He’d better. I meant every word of what I said in there.”

  “All Bremer wants is to keep the evil genie in his bottle, shut down the Node and capture Pandavas. That’s Fremont’s overriding concern too. You and I are almost extraneous now that we’ve told them everything we know… They’re certainly not going to allow us to make any of the life-and-death decisions. Besides, if that report out of Asia is true, plenty of trouble’s already brewing even without the Node.”

  “Maybe. Pandavas sure knew all about it.”

  “Well,” Nora replied, “if Fremont’s right and the epidemic is spreading, things are going to change for everyone ― real quick. Airline travel restrictions will be mandated, countries will begin announcing national states of emergency, closing borders, imposing martial law. Large venues in affected countries ― stadiums, amphitheaters ― will be commandeered for use as makeshift hospitals. Quarantines will be imposed at every confirmed outbreak location: Vietnam and Thailand now; Taiwan, Brussels or New York next ― wherever the virus is suspected. Work stoppages will follow as fear and panic spread ― all of it resulting in food shortages, famine, riots, maybe worse. If things really get bad, governments will fall. I’ve seen the models. An entire department at FEMA is dedicated to nothing but developing them.”

  Nora stopped at a corner of the fence. Leaning against the chain-link, she looked across the deserted landing strip and then up into Egan’s face.

  “It may be a year or more before the 60 million doses of vaccine needed to even begin combating the TAI-2 strain alone can be produced. By then, tens of millions will be infected; a good number will have died. And that’s without the introduction of Innovac’s designer pathogen, which is likely to kill orders of magnitude more.”

  Lyköan had nothing to say. The future Nora was painting was almost unimaginable, a far cry from the old English churchyard and riotous, bright gardens fanning out around the tiny, tattered village that stretched for a short distance north of the airstrip behind her, each differently colored cottage door sentried by hanging flower baskets.

  Far off in one of the surrounding fie
lds, a small herd of fallow deer lazed in the shadows, almost invisible under a stand of hedgerow elms, one enormous buck standing guard with his great antlers still swaddled in soft summer felt, dull grey in the late afternoon light. In another direction, shimmering behind rippling thermals rising from the runway macadam, a clutch of pheasant strolled single-file across a dainty, high-grassed hill. Only a few yards outside the fence, two blanketed horses nipped innocently at one another in the low-lying meadow, then galloped off effortlessly into the pale distance. The world felt so warm, so simple, so innocent, so oblivious of this threatening storm. With a deafening roar, a Harrier jet swept in out of the sun and the deer and pheasant melted into the landscape.

  * * *

  Rotor blades thundered, filling the hangar with a concussive heartbeat. Repetitive blasts of hot air beat against Lyköan’s back, swirling dust madly into the poorly lit expanse ahead. Leaving two figures bathed in sunlight at each edge of its gaping maw, a dozen black-clad men fanned out into the hangar towards a line of pallet-laden forklifts. Bolting from his seat as they approached, one of the forklift drivers ran for an exit across the dark, Rorschach-stained cement. Two steps from his apparent goal, a bright red alarm button on the wall next to the door, a dual-pronged taser probe slammed into the center of his back, bringing the man down in an obscene, jerky dance, arms splaying convulsively, finally crumpling into a heap on the floor.

  Within inches of touching down inside the hangar, as Lyköan pressed flat against the far wall and watched, the entering helicopter suddenly rose abruptly toward the ceiling like an unsteady lumbering beast, two black-clad figures dangling from one side of its sled-like landing gear. At a shouted command, Lyköan and five other men dashed for the exits ahead of the other fleeing forklift operators.

  Behind them the air cracked once, followed immediately by another sharp report, then another, and then a staccato of thundering, shuddering echoes as the great beast, listing precariously, repeatedly drove its ever-shortening three-bladed rotors into pieces against the smoking floor in a great shower of sparks, spewing shards of concrete and metal in a screeching rhythm of flying debris. Before the cracking echo had ended, sirens were wailing to the accompaniment of whirling blue and red lights flashing through thickening smoke.

  “Mu-ther-fuck’r!” someone cried out of the cloud of dust. “Christ what a fuck-up. C’mon, Lyköan, let’s get hopping.” Seeing the dark figure rush into an open doorway, Lyköan hurriedly followed.

  Two steps into the corridor a bullet zipped past Lyköan’s ear, burying itself in the wall behind his head with a white dusty spray and dull sonic thud, followed immediately by a burst of four more rounds, rapid whizzing zips that shattered glass into a spray of shards, the last round passing across his unprotected body armor shoulder strap with a painful tear. He stared at the smoking wound in the woven black nylon, immediately recognizing the expanding dark crimson stain. Not life threatening, he caught himself thinking.

  Another burst of gunfire erupted from down the hall. The trooper who had led Lyköan out of the hanger ― Strainger or something he thought abstractly ― toppled forward headlong onto the hallway floor without uttering a sound,. An ugly gaping exit wound stared up at Lyköan, occupying almost all of the back of the man’s skull, brain matter and blood streaking in reflective gore down his flak-jacket from neck to waist.

  Pollock with a limited palette, Lyköan couldn’t keep from thinking, awestruck by his fascination with this picture of mortality. He wiped his face. It was dripping blood that had splattered when poor Strainger’s cranium had exploded. Standing over the fallen figure, slick crimson pooled in a hideously expanding, uneven halo on the polished linoleum around the man’s head,. He waited for a few heartbeats as the body continued to twitch in a mercifully brief but macabre afterlife.

  No chance, Lyköan thought, diving behind a protected corner. Crouching on his haunches, head level with his knees, he cowered behind his weapon, still virginally cold and unfired in his hands. One of the other rangers, taking cover in a shallow doorway a few yards farther down the hall returned fire, attempting to drag Strainger’s lifeless corpse to safety. It seemed so futile, such a foolish act. Another burst of gunfire threw a spray of slugs into the wall above Lyköan’s head. He instinctively covered his helmet with one hand, white chalk showering his head and shoulders.

  The overtly optimistic plan had already turned horribly deadly. They were trapped within feet of the wide-open hangar bay, pinned behind wallboard and glass, confronting an enemy, unknown in number and resources ― and still two levels and who knew how many defended doors from the control room.

  Heart pounding thunderously against his thigh, Lyköan ripped one of the concussive grenades from its jacket anchor, pulled the pin and left-handed, heaved the canister into the gunfire.

  “Taylor! Fire in the hole! Take cover!”

  Silently, counting one-one thousand, two-one thousand, he waited for the anticipated explosion. As he counted, three-one thousand, a distinct metallic skitting came to in his ears. Four-one thousand, five-one thousand. Curious, as the sound grew louder, he peeked around the corner ― six-one thousand ― saw the grenade come sliding back down the hallway ― seven-one thousand ― past the doorway where Taylor was hiding ― eight-one thousand ― and bounce off the wall at the T-Intersection where he crouched ― nine-one thousand ― and stop directly in front of his feet, spinning madly.

  Somewhere between volition and reaction, he reached for the device, felt the cold metal cylinder in his hand, and instinctively threw it down the hallway where, in midair, barely beginning its flight, the grenade exploded. Thrown against the wall by the percussive impact of hundreds of atmospheres, ears ringing, tiny white flame pinpricks spiraling in the fabric of perceptual reality, he felt the expansiveness of Sun Shi’s fractal immersion program enter him with his first labored breath. Like morning mist into a meadow ― slow, silent, enveloping ― it grew in strength and control ― without any need for yíb or dawn or dusk or hypnogogic shudder. Once again, he was there and here and universally in control of what he was and all that was or would be or could be or…

  Shuffling through the vast expanse of the emptiness that comprises everything, accepting or rejecting from the limitless multitude of variously erupting alternate possibilities, a grand procession of exploding seeming-inevitables, projecting out into the invisible future. Slowing down the passage of time to a crawl when necessary, which allowed for the best possible selection from a palette of infinite choices, he headed for the control room. Occasionally forced to backtrack when the choice he first set upon proved less than ideal, he pressed onward as though slogging through a deep ocean of molasses, like straining against a relentless current that grew stronger the deeper he delved.

  A bullet approached. He shifted its trajectory, manipulated the spatial context in which it was suspended, altered the width and breadth and depth of space and time as he saw fit and so was no longer in its path when it passed. A figure barred his way, ready to lock a door. He moved the man aside, and others as well, by changing the space that surrounded and stood between them, then using their now two-dimensional forms like a succession of shields, drove them by sheer force of will through the filmy corridors of the Node, tossing one aside as another became available.

  All the avenues of the underlying multiverse emerged, prostrate before him like a sublime skeletal structure upon which the fragile fabric of reality lay draped and stretched, transparent and diaphanous. Each potential variance stood at his disposal, eager to obey his every whim. Plato’s shadow creatures entered and exited in the context of an infinitely varied and variegated tunnel of breathtaking light, along which his insubstantial soul or essence or being made its way, finally arriving at the control room door where, after ejecting all of its occupants, like pouring water from a glass, or sweeping dry leaves off cement, he locked the door from within and, sitting down in one of the molded workstation chairs, finally exhaled, allowing reality to solidify around
him once more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Omen and Oracle

  MUNDUS VULT DECIPI

  Unknown

  Easing forward on the yoke, the pilot dipped the Comanche’s rotors below the horizon. Dual turbine engines shifted in pitch. The attack helicopter hovered momentarily, then hurtled earthward, lifting Nora’s stomach uncomfortably into her throat. A few hundred yards ahead, a thick column of black smoke curled out of the base of Temple Burn hill and rose ominously into the cloud-mottled sky. Whether the aftermath of a hitch in Bremer’s assault or an even more dire scuttling response from the Node’s occupants, it was not a good sign. Neither was Fremont’s curt evasiveness over the phone.

  “Casualties?” Nora had asked. “Who? How many?”

  “Don’t worry, Lyköan’s safe,” he had replied, already a step ahead of her questions. “He got knocked around some ― but nothing serious. He’s fine, Doctor.”

  “What about the bio-seal?”

  “Far as we can tell it’s still intact, but why don’t you come out here and give the place a once-over before we sound the all-clear? I’m sending a taxi to pick you up. It should be honking any minute. We’ll discuss the details when you get here. Until then I’ve got plenty to keep me busy. Sorry, gotta go.” The conversation had ended without goodbyes.

  Within minutes she was circling above the smoldering hangar entrance, strapped tightly into the Comanche’s claustrophobic jump seat. Below, a tangle of men and equipment scurried in and out of the smoke-filled opening like ants around a disturbed anthill. The pilot slowed their descent, set down softly and trimmed the engines.