by Mel Odom
The bag sank beneath Delroy’s hand, giving way immediately and not stopping till his palm reached the table.
“No.” He didn’t even recognize his own voice at first.
Quickly, struggling with all the emotions that were suddenly cascading within him, Delroy slid his hand down the length of the body bag. It was empty. At least, it was empty of a corpse. However, there was something inside the bag.
Before he could stop himself, Delroy reached for the zipper and tugged it down, freeing the zipper’s teeth so the bag could fall open.
Empty. The realization filled the chaplain with a mind-numbing cold that the refrigerated room couldn’t even begin to compete with.
With the bag open, Delroy saw the clothing lying inside. The lump he’d felt had been Dwight’s favorite shoes, a pair of Birkenstocks that his wife had given him a few Christmases ago.
Stunned, his mind reeling and snatching at possible reasons for this unbelievable turn of events, Delroy left the empty body bag and crossed the room. He pulled the door open and stepped into the main hallway of the medical department.
Cary Boone, in his mid-thirties and one of the ship’s best surgeons, stood in the hallway with a puzzled look on his face and a PDA in his hand. Tall and powerful with short dark hair, and right now a heavy five o’clock shadow, Boone was one of the regulars in Delroy’s pickup basketball group when Wasp was in her homeport.
“Chaplain Harte,” Boone greeted him distractedly.
“Dr. Boone,” Delroy replied. Navy doctors were called “doctor” until they reached the rank of commander. “Do you know if anyone moved Chief Mellencamp’s body?”
Boone looked irritated. “Why would anyone do that?”
“I don’t know. But Dwight—” Delroy halted himself. “The chief’s body is missing.”
“I thought you were in there with him.” Boone covered ground rapidly, opening hatches along the hallway and peering inside.
“I thought I was, too, but just now, when I checked the bag, the chief’s body was missing.”
“I’ll ask around.” Boone tried another door. “Have you seen Nurse Taylor?”
Jenna Taylor was a favorite among the crew and the doctors. She was a vivacious young redhead from Ohio and one of the most levelheaded, kind, and considerate people that Delroy knew.
“No,” Delroy answered.
“I swear that she was right here,” Boone said distractedly. “I was going over these files with her, in preparation for the wounded we expect to take on from the border skirmish, and Jenna was talking to me from one of these rooms. She stepped in here to get something.”
“She’s been working this morning?” Delroy asked.
“Yes.”
“Then maybe she’ll know where the chief’s body is.” Despite the calm, rational exterior he held carefully in place, Delroy felt frantic. No one would take Dwight’s body. There was no reason. But the body had disappeared and he had no explanation for that. He joined Boone in his search, both of them calling out Jenna’s name.
A pile of scrubs lay inside the second room Delroy checked. He froze, not believing what he was seeing. “Cary.” His voice was a harsh desert croak that barely freed itself from his lips.
“What?”
“Come look at this. Tell me I’m not going crazy.” Slowly, Delroy squatted, hearing his knees pop and crack, because basketball hadn’t been the kindest of sports to his body.
Boone joined Delroy in the open hatch. “What?” the navy doctor asked.
Delroy pointed at the blue scrubs lying on the floor inside the supply room. Right on top was a name badge with Jenna Taylor’s name and rank on it.
“She left her clothes here?” Boone asked.
“The chief’s clothes were still inside the body bag,” Delroy said in a low voice.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No,” Delroy admitted. “It doesn’t.”
Running feet slapped against the steel floor. A young midshipman in scrubs rounded the corner at the end of the hallway. “Dr. Boone,” he gasped.
“What is it?” Boone replied.
For an insane moment, Delroy thought the young man was going to say that the chief’s body had been found, or that Jenna Taylor—as impossible as it sounded—had been caught streaking through the medical department or had even made it out onto the flight deck.
Stress did strange things to people, and the coming hours and probably days of dealing with wounded troops and the battle that raged along the Turkish-Syrian border promised plenty of wear and tear on the nerves.
“They’ve disappeared, sir,” the midshipman said.
“Who?” Boone asked.
The midshipman shook his head. “I don’t know exactly, sir. Dozens. I’ve found piles of clothes throughout the medical department. The missing people are leaving their clothes behind. But nobody’s seen them. It’s like they disappeared right off the ship!”
United States of America
Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, Colorado Springs
Local Time 2321 Hours
In the last six months of his new posting in the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, twenty-eight-year-old U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant James Franklin Manners had never before seen an attack as large as the one now spinning across the huge wall screen monitors. The feeds came directly from the satellites watching over the action that had broken out along the Turkish-Syrian border. The other men and women around Jim worked diligently at their assigned tasks, collating the real-time information and moving it on to the command post in Turkey.
Buried two thousand feet beneath the mountains that gave the complex its name, Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center remained the backbone of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). The United States and Canada had jointly maintained the command post since 1957, with subdivisions responsible for delivering warnings about aerospace dangers, missile attacks launched against North America or the United States, surveillance and protection of U.S. assets in space, and geopolitical events that could threaten the U.S. as well as troops abroad. The command center gathered, assembled, and interpreted data from numerous sources.
Jim tapped commands on his keyboard, bringing up the information from the geosynchronous satellites as well as the low-earth orbit satellites that still maintained a visual window on the aggressive combat theater that had erupted eighty-seven minutes, forty-three seconds ago. He adjusted his headset and listened to the ground communications streaming through the computer links.
“Excaliber, this is Phoenix. Are you prepared to take on wounded?” The transmission was slightly garbled by the cacophony of explosions taking place around the speaker. Despite the dire straits he’d found his group under, First Sergeant Samuel Adams Gander performed his job and reported the events as they occurred.
“Affirmative, Phoenix. Excaliber is ready, willing, and able to transport wounded back to Wasp. The cap’n has the ship’s hospital standing by if we can’t make use of local resources in Sanliurfa.”
Jim studied the terrain, spotting the wing units put into the air from USS Wasp’s deck out in the Mediterranean. The Marine pilots kept their aircraft flying smoothly, staying close to the hard deck. Tracking the Marine wing had been Jim’s primary job, and the task had been relatively simple—until now. Once the Syrian forces were engaged, tracking would become complicated. One of his main priorities was to keep the friendlies separated from the hostiles.
Jim’s guts churned as he watched the aircraft moving. He tagged them again with the computer, converting the visual feeds into digital tactical information that showed on the wall screen in front of him. A Syrian MiG popped onscreen as well. Jim noted that he already had a designation for the craft but reaffirmed the tag with frantic trackball movements and a couple keystrokes. He glanced at the computer monitor on his right.
The computer monitor showed the American air forces as blue triangles. The Syrian forces were red. Any unknown aircraft, and thank God there were n
one of those, would be rendered in green, all of them marked with digital readouts of elevation from the hard deck. The resulting effect would be viewer friendly, like a kid’s video game.
Suddenly, many of the blue triangles veered from the LZ the Rangers had set up along the ridgeline behind the border. In a heartbeat, that tightly knit group of helicopters became a tangled confusion.
Glancing back at the satellite visual, Jim watched in disbelief as highly trained Marine pilots somehow managed to crash their aircraft into each other. Only a few escaped the immediate destruction. Even so, others dropped from the sky without ever being touched.
In one split instant, the rescue effort became a catastrophe. What had once been efficient fighting machines suddenly became ripped and twisted debris. As Jim watched in stunned amazement, one of the Cobras blew up when it struck the ground. Somewhere in the areas of his mind that cataloged, identified, and reasoned out such occurrences, Jim knew that the Cobra’s ordnance must have blown. Fire wreathed the battered hulk, letting him know there would be few—if any—survivors.
“What just happened?” someone demanded.
“Man, this reminds me of what happened to the Russian air force when they tried to pull off that surprise attack on Israel in January last year.”
“Yeah,” someone else said nervously. “But that shouldn’t happen to us. We’re the good guys.”
Jim remembered the Russian attack and the way the Soviet aircraft had been swatted from the sky as if by an invisible hand. Footage of the failed attack still rolled on the Learning Channel and on The History Channel when Cold War programs aired.
Spinning in his chair, Jim gazed back at the observation post where the officers stood. Brigadier General Hamilton Farley stood with Canadian Brigadier General Victor Williams. General Farley was commander of the Cheyenne Mountain Command Center and General Williams served as second-in-command. Both men were stern and alert, not showing any signs of having been rousted from bed.
Jim looked for Colonel Morris Turner, the Canadian officer in charge of Charlie Crew, which was currently on duty. Colonel Turner had been standing in his customary position behind Jim, who was the newest member of the team. When he didn’t spot the colonel there, Jim glanced around the room. At present time, Charlie Crew consisted of thirty-seven individuals. Even considering that someone might have stepped away from their post, an event that Jim figured was never done during an alert situation because he’d never seen that happen, losing a person in the room was next to impossible.
Then he saw the uniform lying on the floor only a few feet from his chair. Colonel Turner’s name badge poked out from one of the buffed shoes.
Despite the training Charlie Crew had undergone, despite the stress that the team had faced on a number of occasions that threatened North American security, the men and women manning their posts came undone. As it turned out, several people were missing.
“It’s like they got beamed out of here,” Sterling Thompson said. He was a couple years Jim’s junior but had such an affinity for all things cybernetic that he had been a natural candidate to post at Cheyenne Mountain. Sterling was also big into science fiction. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at Jim. “There’s no other explanation, man. We’re two thousand feet down in solid rock, locked up tight behind doors that weigh twenty-five tons each.”
“Calm down,” Jim advised, pushing himself to his feet. The satfeeds streaming in from Turkey had faltered as well, but he wasn’t sure if the problem lay there or within the Cheyenne Mountain complex. “There’s an explanation.”
“Yeah,” Sterling agreed wholeheartedly. He tapped keys on his keyboard, bringing up a view of space. “And we’re going to find it out there. Man, we thought we had problems in Turkey?” He shook his head. “I think we’re about to be invaded. These people missing? They’re just a sampling for whoever’s waiting out there.” He pointed at the screen full of stars.
Jim barely handled his own rising panic. He reached down and touched Colonel Turner’s uniform, trailing a finger along the edge of the name badge. It felt real, but this couldn’t really be happening. He watched as Sterling flipped through the different sectors of space available to them through the satellites they had access to.
General Farley strode from the observation post and stopped near Turner’s uniform. “Attention.” His voice was crisp and powerful.
The command center crew obeyed immediately. There was nothing like a general’s voice to bring an enlisted man up short.
“I’ve notified security. Whatever this matter is—” Farley glanced down at Turner’s abandoned uniform—“it’s being looked into by professionals. At this moment, I need all of you to be professional, to be the soldiers you were trained to be in this field, and I need that from you right this instant. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir!” The reply boomed from the twenty-three people left in the ranks.
“I need those information lines back up and running,” Farley said. “You’ve got American soldiers and our allies dying over there. If we don’t watch over them, give them some kind of heads-up, we’re going to lose more of them.” He paused. “I’m not going to stand for that on my watch. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then get back to it. I want everything you can find out, and I want it yesterday.”
Jim settled back in at his console. This was why there were generals, he thought. When the world got crazy, an order was still an order. But he remained uncomfortably aware of the vacated uniform lying behind him at the general’s feet.
He slipped his headset back on and cued the audible stream.
“Phoenix Leader, this is Alpha Two. We’ve lost men, Goose.” The man’s voice cracked with rising hysteria. “They’ve disappeared! There are empty uniforms everywhere!”
Jim lifted his head and gazed across the empty seat where Donna Kirkland had once sat. She had been warm and friendly and helped him familiarize himself with the demands he faced. Only her uniform remained in the chair now. He locked eyes with Sterling. “You listening to this?”
Sterling nodded. “It’s happening everywhere, Jim. It wasn’t just us.”
For a moment, Jim felt a little relieved that the disappearances weren’t held just to the Cheyenne facility. Then, a millisecond later, he realized that the other disappearances indicated that whatever enemy they were up against could strike possibly around the globe—at the very least on the other side of the world—at the same time and with apparent impunity. How were they supposed to deal with something like that?
18
United States 75th Rangers 3rd Battalion
Field Command Post
35 Klicks South of Sanliurfa, Turkey
Local Time 0824 Hours
Even five miles back of the front line and safely entrenched—for the moment, at least—in the abandoned cinder-block building he’d selected as his field command post, Captain Cal Remington could smell the stench of war. Acrid explosive cordite and smoke gnawed at his lungs while dust particles coated the computer screens and irritated the eyes. The wind coming from the south had carried all of those things to them during the last hour and more.
But those things were logged in the back of the Ranger captain’s mind. His full attention was divided between the computer monitors and the uniform sitting in the chair where a young corporal had been only moments ago.
The preliminary head count among the intelligence crews showed 20 percent of Remington’s on-site teams had disappeared. One moment, those men and women had been at their stations, manning the computers and maintaining the perimeter around the building, and in the next moment they had been gone. All of them had left at once, and none of those who had been left behind had seen anything of the process that had carried those people away. They had left or been taken between heartbeats, as though everyone in the room had blinked at the same time.
Remington chafed over his inability to act on either the missing men or along the fro
nt line where his men were. He didn’t like taking a hit and not being able to retaliate immediately. But the communications lines had gone down yet again, interrupting the flow of information sent from the Cheyenne Mountain intelligence people as well as the feeds from USS Wasp.
The com teams had promised Remington that they would be back on line in a matter of minutes, but the war along the Turkish-Syrian border drew a terrible cost with each second that passed. Men died and military strength withered in seconds. And Remington knew he was losing precious time, resources, and ground that would be hard to do without or nearly impossible to replace.
The monitors relaying the satellite feeds showed grainy pictures of current activity. Bar lines scrolled slowly through the screens, showing the actual repixelization of the digital images passed along.
“Base, this is Cerberus Leader,” a voice called over the walkietalkie headset Remington wore. The field command post’s communications still worked up to three klicks away with only slight static.
Five klicks back from the front line, at a time when all the intelligence networks were on the blink, Cerberus was the perimeter security team charged with defending the command post. During the SCUD attack, a few of the missiles had landed nearby, but the cinderblock building had remained standing if somewhat battered.
Until the moment the people went missing from the unit, Remington had felt they were divinely protected, and that was a stretch for him. He believed in God, but he’d never once thought God had any interest in him or knew he’d been born.
“Go, Cerberus,” Remington replied.
“You can add three more to that list of MIAs,” Lieutenant Don Carmichael told him. “We found the uniforms and gear of one of the outer perimeter guard posts.”
“Affirmative, Cerberus Leader,” Remington replied. The information continued the trend of confirmed disappearances that had started only minutes ago. Everyone within the three-klick radius who hadn’t responded had been verified missing. Remington had ordered the others into search-and-rescue teams to sweep the area and systematically check on units that had gone missing in action. “Secure whatever gear you can salvage and continue your search. Supplies are going to be hard to come by for a time.”
