Alien Hunter: Underworld (34 page)

Finally, there was the surprise attack with the disk. So Morris wouldn't be in it. Far too dangerous.

So where would he be?

They arrived at the main building, and Mac was loaded off and carried toward the infirmary. Flynn's leg injury had flared up and he was hobbling, too, but at least he could walk.

He looked out across the water, a blackness touched here and there by the light of a fishing boat.

He stopped. He thought back. “Diana, where's the helicopter?”

“Now?”

“Right now.”

“It took off after it dropped me. I guess the traffic director would know.”

“Never mind—is there a boat? A fast one?”

“There are two boats that I know of.”

He ran after Mac. In the infirmary, a sleepy-eyed nurse in a bathrobe was cleaning Mac's leg wound.

“Can you walk?”

“Can you?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

“We have a chance to get Morris. It's our last chance, maybe for years, maybe forever.”

“I can walk. In fact, I can run.”

“Same here.”

Mac got up off the table.

“Sir?” the nurse said.

Mac gave her a rictus grin, tight and hard. “I like pain, ma'am. In fact, I enjoy it so much, I'm going out for more. I'll likely come back later. In a bag.”

Back in the corridor, they were met by a captain who looked like he'd pulled on his uniform over his pajamas.

“This is Captain Gilbertson, island chief of security,” Diana said.

“I want both boats to converge on the south of the island. Make a wide loop, no lights. And I want that chopper called back. What I want it to do is start patrolling the Connecticut shore with its searchlight on.”

“Excuse me, Miss Glass, is this the man you were telling me about?”

Flynn said, “There's a fishing boat out there with three individuals on it. It's going to be heading for the Connecticut shore, but slowly. It won't want to be drawing any attention. That boat is to be taken, and the individuals on it not just shot, but destroyed. Do you understand this? I want their bodies detonated, ripped to pieces.”

The captain's face had turned to stone. Horror rimmed his eyes. “Shot? Destroyed? What are you saying, here? This sounds highly illegal.”

“Diana, is there anybody on the island who's on our side of the line?”

“No, there is not.”

“What about Evans and his crew?”

“They're not cleared for bio.”

Flynn returned to the captain. “Captain, this is a national security matter, and you're not cleared to know even what you already do. You and your unit are ordered to stand down.”

“On whose authority?”

“Do it, Captain, or you will be in a world of trouble. Trust me.”

“He's right, Captain,” Diana said. “Just get us the boats.”

“A boat,” Flynn said. “One boat. Your fastest.”

Captain Gilbertson started a call to his superior officer. Flynn took his cell phone from him. “Prepare the boat at once, or you'll be charged with insubordination, dereliction of duty, and aiding a terrorist in the commission of acts that lead to loss of life. The last charge carries the death penalty, and it will be imposed, I can assure you. Now, get your ass in gear and get that boat prepped, and I want three high-powered rifles, scoped, on it, some flash bombs, and some hand grenades.”

“We don't have grenades—”

Flynn grabbed Captain Gilbertson by the lapels and went close in.
“Don't lie to me.”
He thrust him away so hard, the soldier flew across the corridor and hit the wall with a thud that shook the place. “Do it now!”

Ashen, his hands trembling, Gilbertson pulled himself together and rushed off.

“Let's move,” Flynn said.

They headed for the island's small boathouse.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

AS FLYNN
guided the boat around the island, Mac lay on its long prow, watching the water. The boat was a Donzi, lean and low, powered by a 300hp MerCruiser engine. It was in excellent condition, kept ready for patrol and intercept duty.

Diana was beside Flynn, watching the boat's radar under a hood made of her coat. No light could be allowed to show, none at all.

As he ran the boat, Flynn kept a careful lookout to the sides and back. His chief worry was that Morris had anticipated this maneuver and was planning to ambush them. Given that he was almost certainly down to his last two entities, he would be desperate. As far as Flynn was concerned, Morris could appear anywhere, anytime—just not with the disk, and thank God for that.

Mac came down. “There's one fisherman out there with three guys in it, heading for the Connecticut shore.” He pointed to a faint light. “Two miles out. Moving slow, like they were trolling.”

Diana said, “I see him.”

“We need that chopper,” Flynn commented. He wanted it doing a grid search along the shore, making it appear that the focus of their interest was not on the water itself. Hopefully, this would cause Morris to turn around and head for Long Island. The farther they were from witnesses when what was about to happen went down, the better it would be.

“I've got a point-to-point measure on him,” Diana said. “He's moving at about five knots.”

“Mac, what's your maximum confident range?”

“Give me a thousand yards.”

“At night? Are you sure?”

“I can count the number of threads in a shoelace.”

Flynn did a quick mental calculation and increased speed to 7.8 knots.

“Keep watching. I'd like a positive ID before we can do this.”

Mac, who had returned to the front of the boat, slid back down again. “You aren't gonna get positive. Positive is impossible, even for me.”

“What will I get?”

“The best I can offer. But it's never going to be absolute, not at three thousand feet.”

“Then if we make a mistake, that's what happens.”

“I'm not a murderer, Flynn.”

“With certain exceptions.”

“Which don't include innocent civilians.”

“We can't risk not taking the shot.”

Saying it made him feel kind of sick.

Diana, he noticed, had not protested. She remained huddled under the coat, peering at the radar.

“Diana?”

She came up. “Yes?”

“Did you hear?”

“I heard. They could be innocent bystanders.”

“Let's hope it's them,” Flynn said.

“Let's hope.” She went back under her coat. The faint glow of the radar reappeared around her feet. “They've increased speed. By an additional five knots.”

Morris had detected this boat and was testing it. If it increased speed when he did, he would know its intentions. Flynn held steady.

“We'll be in range shortly,” Diana said.

Flynn's hand hovered over the throttle. The boat would do thirty knots, easy. All he had to do was push it to the firewall, and they'd leap up on plane. If Morris's boat was just the little fisherman that it appeared, he wouldn't be able to get away.

“An extra six and a half knots. That makes eleven and a half knots.”

Morris was slowly increasing speed. In other words, he was running. That meant two things: First, they had the right boat. Second, Morris was vulnerable.

“He'll be at the mouth of the harbor,” Diana said.

“How many yards ahead of him?”

“Fifteen hundred and fifty.”

“Too far. What port is it?”

“A little community called Easterly. Couple of marinas, a fishing fleet of maybe five boats. He's up to twelve knots.”

Unless Flynn increased speed, he would never come into Mac's range at all, because Morris would reach port first.

He gripped the throttle. But then a realization came, which was that, if Morris had enough speed available to him, he was already close in enough to beat the Donzi.

Morris had won again, as always by thinking farther ahead. No matter what Flynn did, he wasn't going to catch the psychopath.

“Chopper's up,” Mac said.

“I don't see it.”

“You will. Two minutes.”

“He's at thirteen knots. Four thousand one hundred yards ahead of us. Opening the gap now.”

Flynn held steady.

The seconds practically crawled—five, ten, twenty.

Flynn watched the dark shore.

Two minutes came and went.

“We're losing him,” Diana said.

A spear of light came down from the sky above Easterly, then ran along its shore. A moment later, another, farther down, appeared. Then a third one up the coast a few miles.

Three helicopters instead of one.

“Slowing. Ten knots. Five. Dead slow now.”

Was he buying it? Or just being cautious?

The Long Island shore was dark.

Five searchlights now swept up and down the Connecticut coast, centering on Easterly.

Diana said, “He's increasing speed. Fourteen knots.”

“What in hell?”

“No, wait he's going dead slow—no—oh, Jesus, it's a turn, a tight turn. He's heading this way! He's still turning. Now he's going for the opposite shore.”

It had worked—maybe. Flynn held steady.

Diana said, “On his current heading, he'll be in range in two minutes.”

Mac went back up to the front of the boat. Flynn held the boat absolutely steady, still on the same heading, now closing rapidly with Morris, who would cross their bows at 2,200 feet.

Without warning, without a flash or a sound, there came a tremendous shock wave, invisible until it hit the boat. Flynn was knocked back off the helm, sprawling into the seating behind him. Diana, whose head was below the level of the cockpit dash, lurched with the boat but kept her footing.

Flynn scrambled to his feet, grabbed the helm, and righted the lurching boat.
“Mac!”

“I got it, I'm okay.”

“Hold on, it
will
come again!” Then, “Di, you okay?”

“I'm good.”

“I hope it's the same shock wave weapon Geri used, because it didn't work worth a shit.”

Twenty seconds to go. Ten.

“It's speeding up, it's coming straight at us.”

Mac fired. A second time. A third.

Flynn pushed the throttle to the dash, and the Donzi leaped to life.

Mac came down, sliding into the cockpit. Flynn said, “We gotta stay up on plane—the bow's full of burst seams.”

Flynn swerved the boat so he could see ahead. The fishing vessel was dead in the water. In it, he could see slumped forms.

“Di, crack the grenades.”

“We can't set off grenades in the middle of Long Island Sound.”

“Maybe you can't,” Flynn said.

When they came up beside the fishing boat, which was wallowing in the water, Flynn surrendered the controls to Mac and jumped aboard at once. “Give me some light!” he shouted up at Diana, who turned one of their floods on the scene in the craft.

A figure lay sprawled on its back. It looked entirely human. “Jesus,” Flynn muttered. He turned over a second figure.

The face was not the same as that of the first, but its shape was. Flynn pulled out his flashlight and lifted one of the eyelids, and there staring up at him was the unmistakable steel gray of Louis Charleton Morris's eye. In his temple, there was a hole oozing blood. Geri's weapon was in the bottom of the boat, floating in the bloody water.

Morris's only mistake had been to trust it.

Flynn picked up the pulse weapon and put it in his pocket. Might be of some use to somebody. He'd turn it in to the tech team at HQ.

The third and last body had a human form as well, but the face of a biorobot. It stared, but not sightlessly.

“This one's rejuvenating fast,” Flynn said.

Diana handed down the grenades, and Flynn thrust one in each mouth, breaking jaws to ram them in. Morris seemed to be resisting, so Flynn used his knife to also cut back the muscles at the hinges of the alien's jaws, then rammed the grenade farther down, into his throat.

Morris began spasmodically attempting to regurgitate it.

Mac cut into Morris's thorax and put in another grenade.

They got back into the Donzi and pulled out, planing away at high speed. When they were a mile out, Flynn detonated the grenades by radio.

Modern hand grenades were not small explosives, and the boat burst apart in a deafening explosion that slammed from the Connecticut shore to the Long Island shore and back. In the distance, car alarms along both coasts began sounding. A deeper siren, perhaps a volunteer fire department, joined them.

“There are going to be water patrols from ten sheriffs' departments out here within half an hour, not to mention the coast guard,” Flynn said as they headed back to Deer Island at full throttle.

“Did we do it?”

“Mac, you're one of those guys who's going to get a medal you can't tell anybody about, because the answer is yes, we did it. We have sterilized our planet of a psychotic alien and his deranged posse of biorobots.”

As the boat ran on, Flynn looked up at the half moon now hanging in a deep purple predawn sky, and at the stars beyond, fading now. He thought of the scourge that Aeon had unleashed, and what must be happening there now, and of Geri gone on her perilous journey, taking with her the last echo of Abby that he would ever see.

Diana leaned against him for a moment. Nothing was said, and then she was gone from his side, back to her seat.

He drove the boat onward, staying up on plane to reduce leakage, toward the dark bulk of Deer Island and the life of the future, whatever might come, whatever lay beyond.

 

Tor Books by Whitley Strieber

Alien Hunter

Hybrids

The Omega Point

Critical Mass

2012