Apocalyptic Visions Super Boxset (79 page)

***

The lab coat looked like he was going to wet himself right then and there when Perry arrived. He immediately jumped from his seat, the lines of stress and coat of grime that had collected over his face in the past seventy-two hours present over his expression. “M-Mr. Perry.”

“Sit down. Show me.”

The engineer did as he was instructed as the two guards armed with automatic rifles flanked him on either side, the barrels of their guns dangerously close to his head. “Once we made it through the last firewall, the encryption algorithms gave us some trouble, but—”

“You can skip the technicalities, Professor,” Perry said.

The scientist cleared his throat and quickly brought up the Taipan’s user interface. “As you know, the Taipan controls all the land-based nuclear missiles in the United States. There are 450 missiles spread across three separate military facilities in the country. Now, each of them have their own codes, sequences, and protocols we have to work through, but we’ve managed to break through to one of them so far. Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.”

“And you’ve kept off their radar?” Perry asked, licking his lips at the prospect in front of him. “They don’t know you have control?”

“No, not until we start sending commands.”

Perry clasped the engineer’s shoulder firmly, staring at the screen in front of them. “Good. Let me know when you have the other two up and running.” Perry went for the door, leaving the scientists alone, but one of them turned to stop him.

“Wait, are you going to let us out?”

Perry looked back at the man in his dirty clothes, oily skin and hair, a look of dazed confusion and fear etched across his face. The engineer looked to his peers, all of whom kept to themselves, leaving the speaker on the island he’d stranded himself on.

“I m-mean, we’ve done what you’ve asked.” The engineer pushed the glasses that slid down the greasy bridge of his nose back up to his forehead. “Shouldn’t we be allowed to leave?”

“What for?” Perry asked, walking around the table, examining the surroundings then making sure to step around the stain of dried blood that still occupied the floor from the earlier casualty. “You have everything you need here. Food. Water.” Perry suddenly stopped then squinted his eyes. “Or is it companionship you’re craving? If you like, I can bring your friend back here. I’m sure my team hasn’t buried him yet. I’ll call for him to be brought down.”

Perry motioned to one of his guards, who nodded, and the engineer leapt to his feet. “Please! No.” He walked over and fell to his knees before Perry, his hands clasped together, pleading. “I just want to go home. I want to be done.” He glanced over to his fellow captives. “We all do. I’m just the only one brave enough to say it.”

“Is that so?” Perry examined the downcast eyes of the man’s peers. “I’ll tell you what.” Perry stepped around the supplicant and made his way to the other sheep shivering in the corner. “You point to any of these men, I’ll have one of my guards shoot them, and then you can leave.”

Each of the scientists shuddered, and the engineer on the floor started to breathe heavily. “What?” He looked to his peers, all of them frozen in terror. “I-I can’t.”

Perry shrugged. “Then let me know when you’ve taken control of the other bases. I’m sure it won’t take you long, especially since there are still so many of you.” Perry stopped at the door once more then turned around. “But I wonder if someone else could. You.” Perry pointed to a shorter scientist, his hair completely gone and his skin pale and loose around his neck and cheeks. “I’ll offer the same deal as I did to your friend over there. Point to someone in this room. I’ll kill them. And you get to go home.”

Perry loved watching them squirm. He had the heel of his boot on all their necks, and it wouldn’t be long before one of them finally caved once the pressure became to great. When the scientist didn’t speak, Perry offered it to another. “How about you?”

“Yes.” The answer escaped the man like a demon being exorcised from someone.

Perry smiled. “And who would you like to sacrifice?” A few of the sheep were crying now, each of them muttering his own prayer to be spared.

The Judas took a shaky hand and pointed to the bald, loose-skinned scientist from earlier who sat across the table, who immediately jumped from his seat and rushed for the exit, where Perry’s guards stopped him. “No! Let me go! Let me go! You bastards!” He squirmed and writhed fruitlessly in the guard’s arms as they lifted him to the center of the room for the others to see.

The guards forced him to his knees and then handed Perry a pistol. Perry looked to the traitor who had sacrificed his friend and then extended the pistol to him. “Well, go on. Be done with it.”

The man’s eyes widened as he looked from the pistol in Perry’s hand to his colleague trembling on the floor. “W-what? You s-said you would do it.”

“I changed my mind.” Perry took the scientist’s hand, slammed the pistol’s handle into his palm, closed his fingers around the weapon, and aimed for the colleague on the floor. “Shoot him.” Perry took a step back, the pistol shaking violently in the scientist’s hand. “Do you want to go home or not?”

The man put a trembling finger over the trigger, tears streaming down his face. Then the colleague on the floor cried, his entire body shaking as he pleaded nonsense and curses. After over a minute of waiting, Perry rolled his eyes and ripped the pistol from the scientist’s hand. “I guess you didn’t want to go home as bad as you thought.” Perry aimed at the head of the man who had failed to shoot then squeezed the trigger.

The gunshot thundered through the room, and all the onlookers jerked, ducked, and covered their ears. Perry looked around to the rest of them, the gun hanging loosely at his side. “There is no hesitation anymore. I say do something and you will do it, or I will kill you. If you don’t have the conviction to want to stay alive, then you are of no use to me or yourself.”

Perry handed the pistol back to one of his men then left the room, again leaving the slain body to rot and fester with the rest of them. There would be time to deal with their issues later. Right now he had a call to make.

***

Dylan rubbed the flesh around his recently freed wrists. The cuffs had cut gashes and rubbed his skin raw. He was alone in the room save for the computer screen in front of him and a few cameras monitoring his activities. He shifted uneasily in his chair, knowing that whatever Perry had planned wasn’t to be taken lightly.

Everything that Perry had done to date had been calculated. He’d seemed to know everything even before Dylan thought it. Could Perry have known that he would be there, in jail? Or was it all a coincidence, and was he just caught in the middle of some mad man’s nightmare?

“Dylan.” The speakers positioned in the corners of the room boomed and echoed. He recognized Cooper’s voice. “Remember that you need to keep him talking for as long as possible. We don’t know how hard it’s going to be to lock down his coordinates. He could be anywhere.”

Dylan nodded. But there was something Cooper and the rest of them still seemed unable to grasp, and that was the fact that Perry only let you see what he wanted you to see. When the screen signaled an incoming call, Dylan jumped a bit from the high-pitched ringing. He hovered the mouse over the accept call button but hesitated. He closed his eyes. My family’s safe. He can’t hurt them. He can’t get to them. There is nothing he can threaten me with. We’re safe.

“Dylan, answer the call.” Cooper’s voice boomed through again, and Dylan clicked the green phone icon. A few seconds later, Perry’s face appeared on screen.

“Captain, so good to see you again.” When he smiled the coffee stains on his teeth were accentuated from the tint of the screen. “I see they let you out of your orange for more tasteful attire.”

“No more games, Perry. What do you want?” Dylan flashed a quick glance to the camera in the corner of the room.

“I understand that a new deal was presented to you in regard for your cooperation with me. I imagine that must leave a nasty taste in your mouth.”

              “It does.” And the fact that Perry knew about a deal sent a crack through that protective layer of knowledge that Perry couldn’t reach his family.

“Have you given any thought to our last conversation?”

Dylan’s mind returned to the field, the fires burning the tree lines. The screams, gunshots, and heat all flooded back to him, along with why Perry had picked him, why all of this was happening. Truth was, Dylan hadn’t thought about it much. He’d blocked it from his mind. With the future of his children at stake and the prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail, most of his brainpower was preoccupied. “If you think you can try and get something out of me, you’re wrong.”

“It’s a question you need answered, Dylan. And it’s one I want you to find out. But I suppose both of us have other pressing matters to attend to. I know Cooper and a cluster of intelligence goons are trying to locate my position, and as of right now they’re within two hundred miles. I’ll save them some time and tell them that I’m in Minot, North Dakota, heading for the Air Force base.”

Dylan gave a long, sideways glance at the camera through which Cooper and the rest were watching. “And what are you doing in North Dakota?”

“Cooper will know. Let’s just say I’m on my way to collect a few things. But I have something to keep them busy in the meantime. You asked for my demands? Here they are: I want every United States soldier that is stationed overseas to be brought back home. For every two hours that an American soldier is still on foreign soil, I’m going to blow up a city within the United States. Tell Cooper that clock starts now.”

The signal died, and the computer shut off. After that, the door to the room burst open, and Cooper poured inside with the rest of her team. “Check the laptop now!”

Dylan was pulled from his chair as one of the men immediately turned the computer over and ripped off the cover and yanked out the hard drive. “I’ll run a diagnostic on it, see what we find.”

“What the hell happened?” Dylan asked, still being subdued by two men even though he wasn’t struggling. “Did you find him?”

Cooper motioned for the guards to let Dylan go. “No, when we tried tracking the signal, he countered us with a virus trying to hack into our servers. We managed to cut it off just in time, but we wanted to make sure nothing happened to the laptop. It has a connection to our network that Perry could have accessed.” She walked closer, so when she spoke, only Dylan could hear her. “What was he talking about? What conversation did the two of you have?”

Dylan wasn’t sure if he should tell Cooper or not; he wasn’t even sure what to make of it himself. “The night we made the exchange for my son with the device, he spoke to me before the ambush. He asked me why I thought he chose me for all of this. I didn’t know what it meant, and I don’t know why he keeps bringing it up.” He watched Cooper’s face process the information, slowly nodding. “Is there something you know that I don’t?”

Cooper shook her head. “I’ll let you know if I find anything out. In the meantime, you’ll be staying with a few members of the CIA and DEA. They’ll be putting you up in a safe house in case Perry calls again.”

Before Cooper turned away, Dylan grabbed her arm and spun her around. “What about the threats? The demands?”

“If Perry thinks he can storm a military base—” Cooper cut herself off, and Dylan noticed a rising bout of panic in her voice. “He doesn’t have to storm the base; he already has what he needs to take it.”

***

The air had a slight coolness to it, much nicer than the stifling Boston heat that Perry had been plagued with all summer. In the distant darkness, the only light came from a few specks that shimmered from the Minot AFB. And just when Perry’s patience was about to run thin, the pair of scouts that he’d sent came rushing back in through the bushes. Perry was the first to pounce on them. “What did you find?”

“Security is tight.” The two men panted, trying to catch their breath. “Constant patrols, and they’re working on sending up surveillance drones.”

With Sefkh dead and Kasaika still behind bars, the number-two position in charge of the Egyptians had been given to Ozier, a stout, middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and ears that looked as though he could take flight at any moment. But Perry knew what the man lacked in looks, he made up for in brains, and he’d appointed him the number two the moment Sefkh was dead.

“We won’t be able to hide our numbers from them once that happens,” Ozier said.

Perry nodded and went over to the guards holding the scientists hostage. Their eyes had turned into something less human now, but their higher faculties seemed to work well enough to still handle the complex systems of the Taipan. “Activate the Minot Air Force Base command system. We’re going to say hello.”

The computer screen lit up, and three-dimensional scans of the base and its missile systems came online. In coordination with the movements on the screen, the sounds of metal churning against metal echoed in the distance then were quickly followed by sirens blaring their alerts.

“I want nonnuclear strikes at the barracks, administration building, and the weapons depot,” Perry instructed. The scientists didn’t hesitate, entering the necessary detonation strikes, and a few keystrokes later, Perry watched the billow of smoke trailing behind some short-lived missile that blasted the base and sent up a ball of fire on the horizon that lit up the night.

Gunfire erupted sporadically before the next two missiles struck, but after that, even the sirens were silenced. “Shut down the rest of the power on the base,” Perry said then turned to Ozier. “Send in everyone. Rendezvous point Alpha.”

Ozier nodded then radioed the rest of the Egyptian militia Perry had ordered into the area and that were stationed around the base. He’d called in every single terrorist still stationed in the country to help with the attack. All the chips were on the table now.

Perry hung back with the scientists, waiting for them to pack up their gear and go mobile. Once a good amount of distance had been put between Perry and the front lines, he, along with the scientists, started the march toward the base.

The horizon was filled with plumes of smoke, and Perry made the long walk across the open plains surrounding the base casually, each thundering gunshot adding a pace to his steps. When he crossed over the mangled fence that was the base’s border, the carnage was in full view.

Smaller fires had broken out and spread across the base. He saw Ozier and his men engaging a unit of soldiers still trying to hold their own behind one of the only structures not leveled by the missiles. Perry came up behind Ozier and shook his shoulder, shouting above the noise of the gunfire. “We need to get to the rendezvous point. They’ll have planes here soon, and with the high-level security risk, they won’t second guess bombing their own people.” Perry grabbed one of the spare rifles and fired into the cluster of soldiers, adding to the lead flying back and forth. “Tell the men to move, now!”

Ozier shouted commands and waved the men forward. Up until now, most of the missions had been nothing more than dropping off packages at locations, with the occasional skirmish with local police or federal authorities. This was the Egyptians’ first true test.

The heat from the growing fires blasted the right side of Perry’s body as he moved with the unit past the wreckage that was the base. Gunfire echoed in all directions as other units converged on their location. A lanky Egyptian standing to Perry’s left took a bullet to the leg and collapsed to the pavement, his hands clawing at the wound gushing blood that looked black as night in the glow of the fires. The man screamed in agony, his shrills overpowering the gunfire around them. Perry aimed the rifle at his head and squeezed off three rounds that put the man out of his misery. While the Egyptians looked at him with mixed expressions of shock and anger, he simply shouted for them to keep moving. There wasn’t any time for the wounded.

With the rest of Perry’s men clearing out the base, all of them engirding the remaining soldiers to a single point, Perry saw the entrance to the bunker, which was where the soldiers were retreating, too. He grabbed Ozier, nearly taking his arm off. “We can’t let them barricade the bunker! We have to take it ourselves.”

Ozier nodded but was soon distracted by the distant humming in the air. The rest of them noticed it as well, and it wasn’t long before everyone was looking into the sky, but Perry recognized the bombs before they came into view.

Perry sprinted as fast as his thin legs would take him while the bombs fell and detonated all around him. The explosions thundered and rattled the earth like nothing Perry had ever felt or heard before. The powerful blasts obliterated buildings, planes, tanks, and the ground itself. One of the explosions landed behind him, and the blast propelled Perry another five feet forward, where he skidded on the pavement, the flesh of his palms shredding against the harsh ground, along with his left cheek.

Perry pushed himself off the concrete, the fires from the bombs spreading, the heat around him so intense the metal from a fleet of Humvees started to melt. The cuts along his palms stung, and the heat and sweat that mixed into the gashes on his face burned even worse, but Perry had danced with fire before.

With the flames continuing to circle Perry, he looked up into the night sky, streaks of blood running down his face and onto his neck and shirt. “Is that it? Fire? You can’t kill me with fire. You can’t burn something that’s already dead!” He picked up his rifle and fired into the empty night sky. He screamed, pumping round after round into the air, until his throat was raw and chafed from the smoke.

A few soldiers stumbled into Perry’s circle of fire, and he unloaded the rest of the clip and dropped them to the ground. His eyes were bloodshot from heat and rage, and he looked for a way out and found the small gap where the soldiers had stumbled through. He squeezed his way through the flames, the heat licking his stomach and back.

Perry found Ozier with a group of their men, gathering together at the entrance to the bunker, each of them bloody with their own wounds, some of them barely able to walk or even stand. “Where are the engineers?”

“I don’t know,” Ozier answered. “The bombs took out a lot of our men. Radios are down.”

The entire base was going up in flames. The bombs from the U.S. planes had caused more devastation than the missiles that Perry had launched. Perry peered through the flames and spotted one of the scientists, face down on the pavement but his leg moving. “There!” Perry pointed, and Ozier and the rest of his men retrieved him.

Perry watched the sky, waiting for the inevitable return of the bombers looking to make another pass, killing whatever survived. Ozier propped the scientist up against the wall of the bunker’s entrance, and Perry gripped him by the collar.

The scientist’s head lolled back and forth lazily, his eyelids flitting open and closed. Perry smacked the man’s cheek, snapping him out of the daze. “I need you to go through the encryption codes for the bunker.” Perry shoved him over to the control panel then aimed his rifle at the man. “Now!”

The scientist shook his head, slightly wobbling back and forth on his own two feet. Perry held the Taipan for him as he hooked it up to the network. The distant hum of the bombers sounded in the night air once more, and all of them searched the sky except Perry. He jammed the rifle’s tip into the scientist’s temple. “Open the fucking doors!”

The encryption code ran through the Taipan, and the doors opened, accompanied by the rumble of the ground as the bombs once again decimated the base. Perry and the others jumped inside and descended into the elevator before a wall of fire consumed them.

The elevator rattled all the way down, the lights flickering on and off in time with the explosions. The farther they sank into the earth, the less the explosions rocked them. Perry reached for his rifle, and the others mirrored his actions. “They’ll have a team of six down here.” He reloaded the rifle, stealing a magazine from one of the Egyptians. “Could be more since they had an idea of what was happening. And they’ll be armed with pistols, but they won’t have any automatic weapons or artillery with them. It’s protocol.”

Ozier and the rest of them faced the elevator’s doors while the dazed engineer cowered behind all of them. Perry hung back, tucked behind the small sliver of space to the left side of the elevator’s entrance, and waited. When they finally slowed and came to a stop, the doors didn’t open. Everyone shifted uncomfortably, anticipating the moment to come, and when the doors finally separated, the silence was torn apart with gunshots.

Two Egyptians immediately went down, but Perry managed to get a good look at the guards in the bunker before they did. Ozier was on the opposite side, returning fire in the lulls from the soldiers. “Three on the left and two on the right!” Perry shouted between bursts of gunfire.

Ozier nodded then barked orders at what was left of the men that had made it down. He plucked a grenade from his belt, and another Egyptian did the same. The two pulled the pins then chucked them into the corners where the soldiers were hidden. Perry and the rest of them hid behind the side panels in the elevator, and the screams from outside were cut short by the explosions.

Before Perry looked up, Ozier and the others were already in the hallway, guns up, looking for any survivors. Perry waved the smoke out of his face and trailed behind Ozier and the team. He stepped over the bloodied arms and legs, his eyes focused down the hall, where Ozier turned the corner.

Another round of gunshots echoed from where Ozier had disappeared but then quickly died out. “We’re clear!”

Perry lowered the tip of his rifle, bounding around the corner to the sight of Ozier and his men standing over the body of another dead guard inside the control room, where a couple monitors revealed the images of the devastation at the surface.

Smoke and fire had consumed most of the base, and what wasn’t pocked with burnt scorches was covered in blood and bodies. Perry tossed the rifle on the floor and snatched the Taipan from the scientist, his eyes hollow and his motions that of a zombie.

Perry hooked it up to the mainframe and turned the power back on to the base, taking control of all its automated functions and, most importantly, its nuclear missiles. Even if the military decided to perform a nuclear strike on the base, deep beneath the earth in this bunker, they would still survive. The U.S. military couldn’t get to them. “Check the radio frequencies,” Perry said. “See if any of our men survived the bombs. We’ll need to get them below if that’s the case. The government will be setting up a perimeter on the facility, watching us, and using anyone that survived as an opportunity to catch them and try and make them talk.”

Ozier echoed Perry’s orders in Arabic, and the men started their search. Perry opened the computer hooked up to the Taipan and looked at the arranged display of nuclear weapons at his disposal.