Never Again Page 23

  Stryker grabbed the steering wheel, parked next to Mia’s police cruiser, and hopped out of the car.

  The sheriff stood behind the police cruiser, her hand covering one of her ears as he approached. “Answer, damn it.”

  She shifted her gaze from the building to another car in the parking lot and back again.

  Then, with a loud sigh, she shook her head. “The old coot probably fell asleep again. He isn’t answering his phone.”

  “Old coot?”

  “Wendell Litchford. He’s a sweet old man who runs the radio station.” Mia hitched her thumb toward the old Buick sitting in the parking lot. “That’s his. It wouldn’t be the first time he fell asleep at the console and the station began broadcasting dead air. I’ll go ahead and check things out.”

  “Hold up a second.” Stryker motioned for her to wait as he walked over to his car. Cohen hadn’t yet arrived with the CID team and he wasn’t supposed to interfere with Mia doing her job.

  He also couldn’t tell her about the signal jamming. Yet something didn’t feel right.

  Unlocking the trunk to his car, he opened a large duffle bag and extracted a camera-like device.

  “What’s that?”

  Stryker turned on the FLIR unit and peered through the eyepiece at the building. “It’s a thermal imaging camera.”

  He panned the camera across the building. In the viewfinder, it was almost like the outer walls had vanished as he stared at various shades of blue and one orange-red object inside the building.

  “Looks like we’ve got one person in there on what looks to be the second floor.”

  “Is he moving?” Mia asked.

  After Stryker stared at the color-enhanced thermal image for a few seconds, the figure moved from a sitting position. “Yup, whoever is up there isn’t asleep.”

  Mia huffed. “Well, I seriously doubt I’ve got much to fear from a seventy-something-year-old grandad.”

  Putting the camera away and closing his trunk, Stryker hurried after the sheriff, who’d begun walking to the building.

  The old guy was probably preoccupied with trying to figure out what was going on with the station’s radio signal.

  Mia tried the station’s front door and it swung open. She walked in and called out, “Mister Litchford?”

  Stryker heard a metal clang coming from the stairs and he reached for his sidearm.

  Mia moved toward the sound, and he noticed her unfastening the catch to her service weapon. “Mister Litchford?”

  A maniacal laugh reverberated through the concrete corridor, followed immediately by the sound of sobbing.

  Stryker spied a balding man in his seventies sitting at the base of some metal stairs. He was pressing his hands against the sides of his head and bobbing back and forth, mumbling something.

  Moving alongside Mia, he motioned toward the man and whispered, “He’s got something in his left hand.”

  The sheriff moved closer, with Stryker following, his weapon at the ready.

  The old man sobbed and kept repeating “I’m sorry” over and over again.

  “Mister Litchford,” Mia called with a soothing tone. “What’s wrong?”

  Litchford looked up at Mia and then shifted his bloodshot gaze toward Stryker. “The voices ... I couldn’t help myself.

  “But now, the voices are gone. I’m not sure what to do anymore.”

  Stryker couldn’t quite make out what was in the man’s clenched right hand, but his blood ran cold when he noticed a wire running down his arm.

  Mia took a step closer, and Stryker grabbed at her belt and hissed, “Pull back!”

  The old man groaned. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I can’t do it anymore.”

  Without waiting for Mia to respond, Stryker yanked her backward just as the concussive wave blasted them both off their feet.

  The world tilted at odd angles as Stryker crashed onto the floor, his breath exploding out of his chest as Mia landed heavily on top of him.

  Smoke immediately filled the passage, and the coppery taste of blood coated his lips.

  Clambering to his feet, Stryker picked up Mia’s limp and bleeding form and struggled toward the building’s exit.

  Just as he stumbled into the daylight, a half-dozen hands grabbed hold of him, and he barely heard Cohen’s voice as the sergeant began yelling orders to his men.

  Stryker’s knees buckled, and he felt arms lifting him as the men rushed him from the building.

  His vision blurred and he closed his eyes. He felt an overwhelming wave of nausea.

  In his mind, he could now clearly see the dead man’s switch attached to the old man’s suicide vest.

  He’d seen those before ... in Romania.

  As he felt himself being laid on the ground, his mind wandered to the sheriff.

  “Mia,” he groaned, as someone pressed something against his forehead

  Someone pinched his arm, and he heard Cohen yell something about an IV.

  Stryker struggled to open his eyes, but the world closed in on him, and everything became silent.

  ###

  Neeta climbed up to the top of the large concrete building in the middle of the Ecuadorian jungle as Dave stood at the base of a ten-foot metal tower with a flashing red strobe light at its top. He focused on a large tablet PC with a foot-long antenna poking out its side, aiming toward the sky.

  Despite being on the roof of a forty-foot building, Neeta felt and heard the hum of the electrical substation that was operating underneath her. She glanced over the edge and noticed that the soldiers had formed a ring around the station, and shook her head. “Well, it looks like we’ll be safe in case Bigfoot or the Chupacabra tries to attack.”

  “They’re just doing what they’re told.” Dave cracked a smile as he tapped on the touch screen. “If you look up, it should be breaking through the clouds in three ... two ... one....”

  Shielding her eyes from the sun, Neeta craned her neck and looked up just as a dark object broke through the haze a couple hundred feet above. Her heart leaped as she yelled, “I see it! But it’s not quite above us.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dave remarked as he stepped away from the center of the roof. “The clouds probably shifted the homing signal a bit, but the rover should auto-center above it. Just watch.”

  Neeta stared as the dark gray speck grew larger, the sound of its engines growing louder as it approached. She was about to ask if the graphene ribbon had somehow snapped when she finally saw the glint of sunlight reflecting off the nearly-transparent material trailing above the descending transport.

  As the object got ever closer, the details of the four-wheeled vehicle under a controlled descent became evident. She glanced at Dave and asked, “You used a lunar rover for the descent?”

  Dave covered his ears and nodded as the staccato of the rover’s horizontal thrusters altered the course of its fall.

  Cringing as the whining sound of the jets grew louder and louder, Neeta watched the four-wheeled vehicle descend slowly and finally touch down on the roof of the building.

  Walking toward the rover, Dave touched the end of the 23,000-mile-long ribbon and looked up, a toothy grin spreading wide across his face. “Worked like a charm.”

  Neeta stared at the clear ribbon as it rose as if by magic into the sky. Her mind had trouble wrapping itself around what she saw. “Amazing.”

  With a light nudge, Dave pushed the rover forward a few feet, covering the center of the roof where the homing beacon had automatically receded. He tapped on the screen of his tablet, and a slit opened up in the roof. “Time to link the first spoke of DefenseNet to its power source.”

  “Is there a danger of shock?” Bella’s worried voice echoed from the corner of the roof where she’d been watching silently.

  Dave shook his head as he fiddled with something on the top of the rover. “No. The current won’t be flowing through the connection until we flip a manual switch accessible from wi
thin the substation. Even then, the flow of energy is computer controlled, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Opening an access panel on the side of the rover, Dave pulled a previously hidden lever, and the metal bar at the end of the ribbon began to flow from the back of the rover.

  Hopping to the back of the rover, Dave held up the three-foot-wide ribbon with the heavy metal bar and fed it through the slit built into the roof. “Time to marry the two anchor points together.”

  Neeta watched as Dave tapped once again on the tablet PC’s screen and the slit slowly closed, swallowing the end of the ribbon. With a quick lifting of several latches, and a few more taps on the tablet, the rear top portion of the rover flipped open, leaving the ribbon free of the heavy vehicle.

  “Um, Dave, now what?” Neeta asked.

  Dave leaned closer to the tablet. “Hey, Byron, you read me?”

  “Roger that. I’m still sitting here in the shuttle’s cargo bay watching it spill its guts, waiting on you, boss.”

  “All right, Byron. We’re all hooked up here. Launch the anchor into its orbital position and we’re all set.”

  Dave talked back and forth to the shuttle’s cargo engineer, who was in charge of putting the business end of the DefenseNet laser and targeting system into place.

  As they were talking, the ribbon attached to the roof of the building snapped taut, and the engineer announced, “The anchor is in position. It has unfurled its communication array, and the business end of the anchor is aiming away from you guys. So I think you did good, boss.”

  Dave drummed his fingers on the translucent graphene ribbon, and it was pulled so tightly it sounded as if he were drumming on a wooden surface. Tossing a thumbs-up in Bella’s direction he brought the tablet’s microphone closer to his face. “Byron, good job. Now get your ass back down here. We’ve got another run at this in a couple days.”

  “Roger. Closing the cargo bay doors now. See you back at Canaveral.”

  With a final tap on the tablet, Dave looked up with a satisfied expression. “Between the time it takes to load the DefenseNet modules onto the shuttle, bring them up there, and drop the ribbons, we’re going to need every moment we have to get this done.”

  Doing the math in her head, Neeta realized that he was right. There would be almost no spare time before testing had to begin. “Dave, other people can also do this and we can run things in parallel.”

  “No,” Dave snapped, suddenly looking flustered. “I don’t trust anyone else to—”

  “Dave,” Bella interjected as she gently placed her hand on his upper arm. “Neeta is right. The thing that takes the most time is for the controlled descent of the ribbon. Why don’t you set up two shuttles at once, and then you could stagger the launches? While you’re connecting one spoke of DefenseNet, the other spoke is descending.”

  Thankful that someone was on her side for once, Neeta exclaimed, “That’s exactly what I was going to suggest. You can still make sure it’s being done right, but parallelize the effort a bit.”

  With a troubled expression, Dave glanced back and forth between the two women, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Fine, you’re probably right.”

  “We are,” Bella remarked matter-of-factly.

  Neeta waved away a mosquito she swore was the size of a grapefruit and groused, “Now that the women have had a minor victory, can we get out of here?”

  Bella jutted her chin at the rover and asked, “Dave, how are you getting this thing off the roof?”

  Dave waved dismissively at what Neeta had thought was an exposed metal beam running along the side of the roof. “Every one of these stations had a crane built into it.” He walked closer to the edge and pointed at one of the flat-bed military transports. “It’s also why we brought an extra vehicle, to bring the rover back.”

  Neeta looked at the line of vehicles, and her stomach began acting funny again. “Oh, God, let’s get this over with. The sooner we’re out of here, the sooner we’re done.”

  Neeta’s cell phone rang, broadcasting Burt’s caller identification in her ear.

  “Burt! We just finished setting the first spoke in the DefenseNet ring. It’s amazing to see something just drop out of the sky like that. You should have seen it.”

  “Neeta, that’s fantastic, but not what I called about. I pulled some rabbits out of the hat, and you guys should have about 1.1 million miles of that graphene scaffolding for the elevators in the time you need it. I really need you back in Los Angeles at JPL while I’m here in DC fending off the politicians and ever-widening list of idiots who’ve been given clearance on Indigo. I can’t effectively run the NEO program from here, and you’re the only one I can trust who has the clearance for Indigo matters.”

  Neeta glanced at the receding figures of Dave and Bella, who were walking toward the stairs. “When do you need me to be there?”

  “Uh, how about yesterday? I’ll send you an email with the details, but there’s a whole bunch of things I need to get astronomical surveys on and I need someone local who I trust to run roughshod over some of these people.”

  Unable to hide the smile growing on her face, Neeta jogged toward the stairs. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get out of this disgusting jungle.”

  “Jungle? Oh yeah, I guess some of those substations are in less than ideal areas. I know you hate getting hot and sticky. You must be in hell.”

  “Burt, I can’t explain how much I love that you said that. I’ll be back in L.A. as soon as I can.”

  “Thanks a lot, I owe you big time.”

  With a playful tone, Neeta blurted, “And I expect a big payment in return.” She froze as what she’d just said registered with her.

  “Bye!” She croaked the word out and abruptly hung up, her cheeks suddenly felt like burning embers. “Bloody hell, he probably thinks I was chatting him up! What the hell is wrong with me?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was nearly 11:00 p.m. when Stryker, hefting a large duffle bag over his right shoulder, approached the door to his midtown apartment, praying that he didn’t wake the kids. He was going to get enough shit from Lainie as it was for not calling ahead of time.

  The last three days had been a whirlwind of activity.

  It started with him nearly being blown to pieces by an old man bent on committing suicide and taking anyone he could with him.

  Stryker remembered scrambling out of the building, carrying Mia’s limp body on his back, but that was about it. The next thing he knew, he’d woken up at the hospital in a really sour mood and with stitches along his hairline from the explosion.

  The army docs at Madigan kept him under watch for twenty-four hours and he’d made himself as much of a pain in the ass as possible. After enough grousing and just a little bit of begging, they finally let him out. After all, despite the cuts and bruises he’d received, they didn’t really have any other excuse to keep him. He was fine.

  In fact, he’d felt a lot better the moment he’d learned that Mia hadn’t been killed.

  Her death had been weighing heavily on his conscience. Evidently, she’d been struck by several pieces of shrapnel coming off the old man’s suicide vest and needed some surgery. Nobody would tell him where she was or any other details, aside from that she’d eventually be okay.

  After the doctors at Madigan cleared him for duty, he reported back to his commanding officer, and that’s when he was told that he was being redeployed to New York City. He had less than a day to square away any loose ends and catch the first C-130 heading east.

  He’d boarded that transport nearly twelve hours ago, and finally he was home.

  Stryker put his key in the lock and slowly opened the door.

  He was expecting the place to be dark, but almost immediately, he saw Lainie’s wide-eyed expression as she stood midway between the living room and the door, staring directly at him.

  Shit.

  She approached with a stormy ex
pression and whispered, “You—”

  “I know, I know. I should have called, but I didn’t know I’d be here nor did I have a clue they’d let me bunk at home.” He shrugged off the big duffel bag and began rotating his shoulder, trying to work out a kink he’d developed.

  Her expression softened as she approached. Lainie reached up and touched his temple. “You’re hurt.”

  Stryker touched the bruised area where the ball bearing from the suicide vest had creased his skull and shrugged. “It’s not bad.”

  Lainie’s face clouded up with emotion, and Stryker stiffened, preparing himself for the lecture he knew was coming.

  Suddenly, she wrapped her arms around his chest, pressed her head against him and squeezed. “They sent you back because you’re hurt worse than you’re letting on, I know it.”

  He sighed and rubbed her back as he felt hot tears against his fatigues.

  “Lainie, I’m not lying to you. I’m fine. Hell, I’ve got three days home and then I’m reporting back in.”

  She pushed herself back and wiped her face. “You’re leaving again?”

  “No, at least not that I know of. They actually have me and a team assigned to patrol midtown. Kind of like my NYPD job, just in a different sort of uniform, instead.”

  “So they’re finally bringing the army in?”

  Stryker stared at his ex-wife, trying to read the expression of the woman he’d known for more than a decade. She seemed agitated, maybe because he was home and she wasn’t expecting it ... but, no. There was something more.

  “What’s—”

  “Daddy?”

  Warmth spread through him as he looked up and to his left.

  “Daddy!” Emma shrieked as she wiped the sleep from her eyes. She ran down the stairs and jumped into his arms.

  “Dad’s home?” He heard Isaac’s sleepy voice yell from upstairs, and within seconds all four of them were hugging. For a few moments, Stryker forgot everything else in the world, focusing only on what mattered.

  ###

  Trying to ignore the small army of Secret Service agents and military that always hovered around him, Dave sat back on the beach-side lounge chair, sipped at his piña colada and took a well-deserved break. The pleasant sound of the ocean was something he’d missed when on the Moon. He glanced at Bella, who seemed to be relaxed despite the hectic pace they’d set for installing and checking the connections for all of DefenseNet’s spokes. As the salty breeze blew in from the South China Sea, Bella closed her eyes, with only the slightest hint of a smile.