Ground Zero (The X-Files) (28 page)
Victor swallowed, waving the phone headset. “And then his transmission cut off entirely. I can’t raise him.”
“What the hell’s going on here?” Dooley bellowed. “We’ve only got thirty-five minutes until detonation. We can’t afford screwups now!”
Then all of the power went out in the blockhouse, plunging them entirely into blackness.
253
USS
Dallas
Saturday, 4:30 A.M.
Captain Robert Ives didn’t know how he could possibly remain standing in the turmoil—but a captain wasn’t supposed to fall on his butt on the bridge of his own ship, not even at the height of a typhoon. With his muscular legs planted widely apart and feet braced firmly on the deck, he rode the churning roller-coaster of waves. Loose objects on the bridge deck, from pencils to notepads to crates, slid back and forth. Fists of rain pummeled the bridge windows, and the sickly sky was filled with an unnatural greenish light. Ives checked his wristwatch, knowing it couldn’t possibly be dawn—not yet. The eerie glow made his skin crawl. He had seen hurricanes before, and they always seemed otherworldly, but none more so than this one.
“Wind wall levels reaching one hundred fifteen miles per hour, sir,” Lee Klantze shouted from
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GROUND ZERO
his exec officer station. A three-ring binder that listed international signals and codes popped off its shelf and crashed to the deck, making Klantze jump. “That’s well beyond the maximum expected levels for this storm. Something’s pumping it.”
“How far away is the eye?” Ives asked.
“We don’t expect it to come through for another half hour, and then we’ll get a little coffee break. For the time being, we just have to hold on.”
Ives gripped the rail at the captain’s station with white knuckles. The tendons in his neck stood out like steel cords.
“Brace yourselves. I expect it’ll get much worse.”
Klantze looked at him, amazed. “Worse than these levels?”
He glanced down at his weather readouts again, then grabbed for balance as the deck lurched. “On what do you base that, sir?”
“On the sense of unrelenting dread building in my gut, Mr. Klantze. Run a check,” Ives said crisply. “Make sure every station is secure. Get all nonessential crew belowdecks.”
“Already done, sir,” Klantze said.
“Do it again!” Ives snapped, and the young executive officer staggered on rubbery legs across the bucking deck to carry out his captain’s orders.
“How much longer until Bright Anvil goes off?” Ives said without taking his gaze from the writhing whitecaps in front of the
Dallas
. Though he could look at the chronometer himself, he knew he needed to keep his crew busy doing routine tasks they could understand; otherwise they would spend too much time fearing the damage the typhoon might inflict upon them.
“About half an hour sir,” answered one of the tactical crewmen.
“Thirty-eight minutes,” said another simultaneously. 255
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“Thank you,” he answered. Ives left unspoken his thoughts of how insane these weapons designers must be even to consider conducting a delicate test shot under such circumstances. A foamy wall of water slammed into the side of the
Dallas
, making the entire hull ring like a struck gong. The destroyer listed to starboard, then slowly righted herself, like a killer whale regaining its balance. Captain Ives held on, riding the motion. He was glad the
Lucky Dragon
was no longer tied to their hull.
Executive Officer Klantze staggered back up to the front of the bridge, leaving behind the intercom station from which he had spoken to various parts of the destroyer. “All stations have checked in secure, Captain,” he said. “We’re lashed down and ready to withstand anything.”
Ives looked at him, forehead furrowed above his salt-andpepper eyebrows. “Anything, Mr. Klantze? You’re an optimist.”
“I’m in the Navy, sir.” Klantze must have thought his ridiculous answer would impress Ives.
“Captain!” the tactical officer shouted. “I’m picking up something on forward radar. There’s—my God, I can’t believe it! It’s so big.”
“What is it?” Ives said swiveling around and nearly losing his balance as another large wave slammed into the side of the destroyer. “Give me details.”
The tactical officer remained at his station, peering down at the flickering screen. His eyes were wide and disbelieving.
“The thing is huge—and it has extremely high energy. It’s heading this way. Other sensors are picking it up as well—even sonar shows a great turmoil in the surface layers of the water, far exceeding the storm disturbance. I don’t understand these readings, sir. An electrical storm? A power surge?”
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“Contact the Bright Anvil team on shore,” Ives said, with a deep foreboding. “Let them know.” He lowered his voice so that no one else heard his words. “Maybe it’ll give them time to prepare.”
“Could it be a glitch in the instruments?” Klantze asked, making his way over to the tactical officer’s station.
“Not likely,” the officer said. “It’s consistent…and the speed—the thing is getting closer and closer, just like we’re in a targeting cross.”
Ives whirled to look through the rain-splattered bridge windshield. He saw a sickening, washed-out glow across the waves, like a fire far out on the water. It reminded him of a high-intensity miniature sunrise coming out of nowhere.
“There it is,” Klantze said, pointing—as if Ives couldn’t see it. “What is that thing? It’s like an inferno.”
As the bridge crew watched, the wall of light grew into an incandescent sphere that rushed toward them, brighter and brighter, even through the murky air of the hurricane. Ives had seen something very much like this several times at nuclear tests back in the 1950s. The light and the shape of an H-bomb explosion was something he would never forget—and now it came toward him again. Ives grabbed the ship’s intercom at his station and switched it to all decks. “All hands! Brace for impact.”
The blaze of radioactive light hurtled toward them, riding the crest of a sharp, boiling wave, a line of angry seawater that churned up and vaporized with the hot blast of a holocaust. Ives stood at the captain’s station staring helplessly out the window. He had no eye protection, but he knew from the depths of his clenched stom257
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ach that nothing would make any difference at the moment. So he stared and kept staring as the force slammed into them. The last thing his eyes registered before his optic nerves surrendered to the onslaught was the sharp bow of his heavily armored Navy destroyer slumping, melting, as the steel plate vaporized.
Then the wall of light and fire swallowed the
Dallas
whole. 258
Enika Atoll
Saturday, 4:40 A.M.
In the sudden black chaos following the power outage in the blockhouse, Mulder grabbed one of the emergency flashlights mounted on the wall. He switched on the beam, shining it around the control bunker like a bright spear, hoping that its illumination would restore calm and order to the seamen and technicians there.
Instead, he witnessed Bear Dooley and the other Bright Anvil engineers scrambling around, blindly trying to rescue their subsystems.
“Somebody get that generator restarted!” Dooley roared.
“We’ll lose all our data if it’s not up in half an hour.”
Mulder shone the flashlight in a slow circle over the rest of the panicked bustle. He saw no apparent damage to the blockhouse itself. Scully stood beside him, holding on to his arm to keep them from being forced apart in the confusion. 259
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“But we just checked the generator,” one of the bedraggled sailors said. “It was working fine.”
“Well it’s not working fine now, and we don’t have much time to fix it before Bright Anvil goes off. Get outside and check it out.”
“Excuse me, Bear,” Victor Ogilvy said, his thin voice quavering with anxiety. “I don’t think it’s just the generator.”
Mulder shone the flashlight over toward him, and the bespectacled engineer held up the phone. “This phone is on the backup source, and it had a full charge—but I can’t raise the
Dallas
. I can’t even get a whisper of static. It’s dead. Everything’s dead. All the control panels, all power, even our secondary systems.”
Mulder pulled his satellite-uplink cellular phone from his pocket, wondering if he could possibly get anything on that system. But the phone was a silent lump of plastic against his ear; he should have at least heard a hiss or the beep of an improper connection.
Dooley stood with his fists balled at his hips, suddenly overwhelmed. Mulder knew the big man had been just barely holding onto his composure.
“But what could drown everything out like that?” Dooley asked. “What sort of accident did this typhoon cause?”
“No accident,” Miriel Bremen said in a calm, strong voice.
“Bear, you know what can cause those effects.”
“The
Dallas
reported something huge on its radar,” Victor said. “With a high-energy signature.”
Dooley swung his face toward Miriel, his expression open and lips trembling as uncertainty set in. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She looked squarely at him. The light from Mulder’s flashlight reflected in the sheen of perspiration on her face.
“Electromagnetic pulse,” Miriel said.
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“An EMP? But how? That would require a—” He suddenly looked at the protester in horror. “An air burst—a nuclear air burst! What if somebody
else
is using this hurricane as cover for another test? My God, I can’t believe it. Somebody else detonated a device—that’s what Captain Ives picked up on his radar. Somebody else is stealing our show!”
He spun around frantically, looking for something to grab, someone to tell. Victor Ogilvy cringed, as if afraid that Dooley would grasp him by the collar. “But who would do such a thing? The Russians? The Japanese? Who would have set off an air burst here?
Here
of all places. I can’t believe it!”
“There may not be such a facile explanation,” Miriel Bremen said coldly. The heartless conviction in her voice sent a shudder down Mulder’s spine. Outside, the wind hissed past the cement-bag walls like water in a boiling cauldron.
“It may not be something you can understand at all, Bear,”
she whispered.
“Don’t try to spook me,” Dooley shouted back at her. “I don’t have time for it right now.”
With Scully still grasping his arm, Mulder thought again of the story Ryan Kamida had told. Mulder himself had cobbled together an unlikely explanation from the unfolding tale and the bits of evidence he and Scully had collected.
“Hand me that flashlight, Agent Mulder,” Dooley demanded. “I’ve got work to do. This is no time for a
kaf-
feeklatsch
,” Mulder quickly handed over the light. Behind him, Mulder heard the
clank
of a dead-bolt being thrown, the click of the latch raising. Then the heavy armored door to the blockhouse blasted inward and the storm exploded into the confined chamber. Papers spiraled into the air on a whirlwind.
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In the eerie light of the storm outside, Mulder saw a silhouetted form in the doorway, braced against the gale, pushing himself outside into the jaws of the typhoon. Ryan Kamida had let himself out.
“It is time,” he shouted back at them. “They’re coming!”
Then, as if drawn by an invisible chain, the blind man plunged away from the blockhouse into the ravening storm.
“Ryan, no!” Miriel Bremen screamed.
Kamida turned back toward her for just a moment before the winds and the darkness swallowed him up. 262
Enika Atoll
Saturday, 4:55 A.M.
“Don’t just stand there,” Bear Dooley squawked. “Get that damn door shut.”
“Shouldn’t we try to get that guy back in here?” one of the sailors yelled.
“You can’t just leave Kamida out in the hurricane!” Scully cried, looking helplessly around her. “He’ll be killed for certain.”
The other team members appeared nervous, but Dooley only scowled. “He shouldn’t have run out there in the first place,” the big man answered petulantly. “We can’t send out search teams now to save an idiot from his own stupidity. Our power is out. The Bright Anvil countdown is still going—and we don’t get a second chance! Where are your priorities?”
Mulder watched as two Navy engineers wrestled with the heavy door, pressing their shoulders to it and shoving against the battering ram of wind. Silence fell like a stone in the darkened control blockhouse.
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Miriel Bremen stared stricken at the doorway through which Kamida had just vanished. Mulder was surprised to see her standing rigid, holding on to one of the control racks for support. He thought she’d have argued to rescue her friend—but the protester said nothing, apparently resigned to his fate and terrified of her own. “It’s what he wanted,”
she muttered.
The light from a new flashlight made a weird bobbing glow inside the blockhouse. Technicians scrambled to restore their equipment, to get the backup generator jump-started.
“How do we know the equipment out at the device is functioning?” Victor Ogilvy asked, blinking owlishly in the shadows and harsh light. “What if the countdown is frozen because of another dead battery? The EMP could have wiped out everything over there, too.”
“We have no proof of any electromagnetic pulse,” Scully said.
Dooley tugged at his hair in a comical gesture. “The device itself has a completely different power source, hardened against all accidents, rough weather—and even handling by Navy personnel,” he said. “Bright Anvil is one robust sucker.”
He frowned at Victor. “If you don’t believe me, how would you like to take a hike over there and check it out?”
“Uh, no thanks, Bear.” The young redhead quickly found something else to do. But from the queasy expression on Dooley’s face, Mulder knew that Victor had raised a question the bearded engineer would rather not have considered. Distraught, Bear Dooley rounded on Miriel, seeking a target for his frustration. He put his face close to hers and yelled so vociferously that in the flickering light from the bobbing flashlight beams