CVN-76, USS Ronald Reagan
Five miles northeast of Playa Norte, 12:51 PM
The aft port-side elevator was making a horrible grinding noise, the number-three arrestor wire was in the process of being replaced along with one of its leaf springs, the approach radar was picking up all sorts of ground-effect transients generated by the offshore thermocline, and one of the coffee machines in the forward officers’ mess was giving off the distinct odor of peanut butter for some damn reason, but all things considered, it was a beautiful sunny day in the South Caribbean. The Gipper, as CVN-76 was affectionately called, was nothing short of a stretch of sovereign American real-estate just under eleven hundred feet in length. Its complement of over eighty aircraft included two evaluation squadrons of the brand-new F-35C low-observable strike fighter, and the Reagan’s strike group included guided-missile cruisers, anti-submarine frigates, nimble destroyers, a squadron of supply ships, and a pair of Virginia-class multimission submarines which, like the carrier itself, had the theoretical capability to launch a nuclear attack. It was probably the safest place to be in the entire Caribbean, which suited Vice Admiral Jeremiah Beauchamp just fine.
Jeremiah – the first black three-star admiral to command a carrier group in the U.S. Navy – was only one of a long line of shrewd, disciplined sailors to emerge from a family that traced itself back to Gulf-fishing Creoles who quietly relocated to the North shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Ever since the armed forces had fully integrated after the Second World War, an unbroken succession of Beauchamps had risen progressively higher up the chain of command, and Jeremiah dreamed of the day when his son Marcus – who had just graduated from Annapolis as a lieutenant – would earn a fourth star. Until then, he was carrying the family’s aspirations quite admirably, having commanded with distinction and consequently drawing a number of enviable peacetime assignments, such as this Caribbean cruise accompanying the Secretary of State on an historic diplomatic mission. The Gipper’s strike group had been augmented for the occasion by the first of the America-class amphibious-assault ships, which itself carried a squadron of vertical-takeoff F-35Bs, eight V-22 tilt-rotor transports, and about a battalion’s worth of Marines from the 26th Expeditionary Unit; the massive assemblage of American military hardware had spent the last two days sailing around and flying over La Perdita, “trailing the colors” in full view of the delegations from the many countries here for the signing of IMPET. Thus far, the trip had been fairly uneventful with the exception of the occasional fishing boat wandering into the widely-spaced group; fortunately a quartet of speedy guided-missile destroyers had been able to politely and safely guide all such interlopers toward clearer waters, usually after exchanging pleasantries and cordially declining frequent requests to come aboard and inspect the various ships in the formation.
But for the past half hour or so, electronic-intelligence officers aboard the Reagan and the two cruisers had noticed peculiar fluctuations in radio, cell-phone, and satellite traffic, and fifteen minutes ago two of the island’s three non-automated television transmitters had dropped off completely. Three minutes ago, the last TV station and all cell signals had gone dark, plunging La Perdita into an apparent communications blackout. There were no electromagnetic or meteorological phenomena Beauchamp or any of his staff knew of that could impose such conditions, and in a world of constant informational bombardment, for a population of nearly three hundred thousand to just go silent like that was… unsettling. Two more Lightnings had just catapulted off the deck, doubling the orbiting patrol to four aircraft. The futuristic fighters’ own electronic-warfare gear scanned the skies over the island, hoping to at least pick up short-range radio traffic and convey it back to the Signals officers on the third floor of CVN-76’s island. No fewer than eight transport helicopters were either spooling up or already airborne in the event an emergency extraction of personnel was needed. Part of Jeremiah hoped it was just a large-scale invasion of gremlins playing havoc with the island’s telecommunications equipment, but nearly four decades of military experience had taught him better. His suspicions were confirmed when Signals chimed in.
“Got something for you, Admiral,” a voice came over the intercom. “Police band.”
“Let’s have it,” Beauchamp replied.
{…cial Agent Knowles, authentication Sierra-Sierra-Four-Br… -otel-Seven-November.} The transmission came from a handheld police radio, picked up and amplified by an F-35’s avionics and electronically relayed to the Gipper. {…repeat, multiple hostile armed combatants present on the island… -ntown area appears clear but reports of gunfire fr-… at least five other locations…}
“Guessing we can’t talk back to him,” the admiral ventured.
“Negative, sir.”
{-ber of hostiles or of civilian casualties unknown at this time… -vise establishing comprehe-… -rial surveillance and reestablishing two-way comms… Repeating, this is Special Agent Know-…}
Captain Oliver Gwinnett was technically the commanding officer of CVN-76, but the admiral of a carrier strike group held more authority than anyone below the President when at sea. He was of a rank where he didn’t have to salute Beauchamp except during official ceremonies, but the captain’s stance indicated deference to his superior officer. “What do you need, Jer?”
Beauchamp thought a long moment. They had actually conducted a drill for getting over, around, and onto the island yesterday morning, but that one had revolved around disaster relief… “Detach one of my frigs and a pair of cans and sail ‘em around to Del Mar, quick as you can,” the admiral ordered. “The rest of the group will space out to three, four klicks. Get 76 ten-kay out, keep one cruiser seaward of us and have the other one take up station between us and downtown. Everyone else except the logistics column should push to three klicks offshore and use their commo gear to try and blanket as much of Mibela as we can cover.”
“Air assets?” Gwinnett probed.
“I want a complete and continuous picture of everything moving on, around, or over this island,” Jeremiah responded with far less hesitation. “Run us down to reserve fuel if you have to, I’ll take us up to Alert 3 if I have to, but we have to be up to speed on everything that’s going on. Launch as many aircraft as we need for coverage, and we especially need to watch out for counter-air threats. If we have to launch choppers for any reason, I don’t want some punk kid with a Mistral on his shoulder puttin’ a hole in one of our birds. And keep civilian traffic way the hell away from us. No news choppers, no jet skis, and no more damn fishermen.”
“Got it.” Gwinnett glanced across the bridge and made eye contact with his XO to make sure he was keeping up. He was. “And the Marines?”
“Still prayin’ we don’t have to send ‘em anywhere,” Beauchamp admitted. “The 26th just came off a training rotation and weren’t expecting to leave their ship until we put in for shore leave at Curacao. Still, better tell ‘em to gear up and prep their birds, just in case.”
“Fair enough.” Gwinnett shook his head. “This is gonna play havoc with our mess rotations – not to mention the maintenance we’re catching up on.”
“If that’s the worst that comes of this,” the admiral replied, “I’ll take it.” He nodded to the captain as Gwinnett prepared to relay Beauchamp’s orders to the rest of his ship. “Let’s get going.”
- - -
K-336, ballistic-missile submarine Korystnyj
Four miles east of Lighthouse Rock, 12:55 PM
“Periscope depth,” the dive officer announced. “Deploying sensor mast.”
“Very good,” the XO acknowledged from the conn. “Carry on.”
Even after eleven years, First Officer Vladimir Karpotsyn still felt a little uneasy at times when he realized where he was and what he was doing. Karpotsyn was, of course, not a superstitious man, but there was something unsettling about the knowledge that he was sealed in a metal pipe almost one hundred and eighty meters long that had been designed and constructed with the capacity to help bring about the end of the world. Once upon a time, Korystnyj had carried twenty R-39 intercontinental rockets, each of which could carry up to ten independently targeted thermonuclear warheads. For years, this boat and his brothers – Russians used male pronouns to describe their naval vessels – had played the world’s deadliest game of cat-and-mouse with the American Los Angeles-class attack submarines and even the occasional Ohio-class missile submarine, its closest counterpart. Now, all but two of what NATO once called the Typhoon class of nuclear submarines had been scrapped, along with almost all of the Ohio boats. The nuclear Sword of Damocles an American President had once warned the world of had mostly been reduced to sharper-than-average razor blades. And yet, Korystnyj – which roughly translated to Fortune – still glided silently beneath the waves, carrying men for whom this metal pipe had for years been the only home they could count on as their beloved Rodina languished in economic and political chaos.
Today, however, Vladimir had good reason to be on edge. His captain was ashore, insisting he be present for the signing of this treaty Sigma had helped bring about. The lifelong Navy man still couldn’t bring himself to completely trust Sigma – a man who had been eight men, named using an engineering term for the sum of many things – but he trusted his captain implicitly, and if Genya wished to sail three thousand kilometers to visit someone he considered an old friend, then of course Korystnyj would sail. Besides, they had not been to Havana in nearly four years, and the already memorable… atmosphere had only been improved by the relaxation of the Western embargo.
At the moment, to Karpotsyn’s supreme displeasure, the bevy of Cuban beauties dancing through his mind would have to wait. The passive signal-gathering buoy towed above and behind the submarine had picked up an alarming trend – La Perdita had gone silent. Wireless Internet, cellular phones, radio and television, all bands of traffic save civilian and police shortwave had been cut off somehow. And now an incoming transmission indicated that Captain Kozlov had somehow managed to use his satlink-capable phone to access the secure Russian military networks that had once carried flash traffic from the Kremlin but now transmitted all sorts of audio, visual, and text communications. But the quality of the signal captured by the aging passive buoy was too poor to allow Korystnyj to properly receive the message itself, so Kozlov’s XO was forced to come up to periscope depth and ask the captain to repeat himself for the benefit of the updated and far more powerful antenna masts that telescoped upward from the massive sub’s sail.
“He is repeating,” the lieutenant at the signals-intelligence console reported. “Routing to conn.”
One of the more amusing anachronisms on the submarine was the small device mounted with Velcro below the main display screen on the periscope array that hung from the ceiling of the bridge. Despite all the millions of American dollars’ worth of military technology that filled the claustrophobic space, most relevant information was fed to the conn through Bluetooth links from the SIGINT and communications consoles and received on a two-hundred-dollar tablet about one hundred and eighty millimeters across – the same technological innovation that allowed children anywhere in Russia to update their Facebook statuses in the absence of their older siblings’ smartphones. But unlike the archaic early-nineties-era computers elsewhere on the bridge, it allowed Kozlov or Karpotsyn or whoever the watch officer was at the time to instantly consult charts of the sea floor, satellite maps of weather conditions on the surface, video messages from home, or just the cook’s list of what would be available in the officers’ mess that evening. A pair of sonarman's headphones that probably cost three times more than the device they were plugged into hung from one of the periscope's 'handlebars'; Karpotsyn slipped them on and tapped the screen as SIGINT shot the audio file to his tablet.
The first officer listened a moment. “Nyet...” His eyes widened. “Govno!” The bridge crew looked at Vladimir nervously as he listened to the remainder of Kozlov's communique. He stepped back from the periscope, dropped the headphones back onto their perch, and took a moment to collect his thoughts.
“Dyusha,” he instructed the dive officer, “prepare to surface the ship.” He looked over at the deck officer whose American equivalent would be referred to as chief of the boat. “Alert the hangar deck and have the men prepare all helicopters.” Murmurs were circulating around the bridge now as Karpotsyn turned toward the SIGINT officer. “As soon as we surface, deploy a surveillance drone over the island.”
Everyone sprang into action. Most were quite eager to know what the hell was going on, but sailors – especially Russian sailors – knew better than to hesitate or ask questions before carrying out an order, even an indirect one, from their captain. They would learn what they needed to know when they needed to know it and no sooner. For the present, it appeared Korystnyj was about to see some action...
- - -
Haven
A time outside of time
“Can you show me more, Alice?”
your friends now arrayed
on the isle of the lost
will join one last affray
but at saddening cost
No further images, just a confused swirl as with any other time the mirror either couldn’t or wouldn’t reveal more detail.
“Dammit.” The massive man’s ham-sized fists clenched.
The footsteps were, as always, so soft he didn’t hear them approaching, but the powerful innate bond between them alerted him to her presence even before she spoke.
“I know you want to go help them,” the graceful redhead said softly as she put a comparatively minuscule hand on his shoulder – or at least the lower corner of his shoulder blade she could reach. “I wish we could.”
The black leather of his jacket crumpled quietly as he turned. If he had eyebrows, they would be knitted together in frustration.
The two figures stood on an outcropping above a picturesque waterfall spilling into a pool which fed the stream that trickled through a verdant valley lined with trees far taller and older than most to be found on Earth anymore. This particular corner of Haven would have reminded the casual human observer of Rivendell from the Peter Jackson adaptations, but it was in truth a place outside of places. If one were to attempt to describe it, it might be most useful to picture Haven as a multiversal nexus – one of precious few intersections of all possible and a few impossible realities. It was literally the center of Creation, watched over by Avatars of Creation – two of whom stood on this rock hoping to catch a glimpse of what was transpiring on a tiny island in a world of mortals. Life was in this case personified by a slight red-haired woman of supernatural beauty who spoke in a voice more enchanting than music, while Death took the form of a giant in black motorcycle leathers with a wickedly-glimmering axe strapped across his back and a bare skull for a head. To refer to them as an odd couple was a study in understatement.
“They’re my friends, Rowe,” Grimm reminded her. “They’re not as many or as strong as they used to be, and this could be the biggest threat they’ve faced since Manhattan. Maybe bigger than that. I can’t just sit here and watch them get blindsided by it.”
“I understand your frustration,” Rowena began as a sorrowful expression clouded her lovely face. “But you and I both know there’s no one here who can open those doors anymore.”
Haven had for ages been a staging ground from which the Order had leapt off into the innumerable streams of reality to restore balance and peace to the universe. A succession of avatars of Space had made this possible by opening and closing portals between worlds, and for years an eccentric but delightful young woman named Nida Zbinden – just “Z” to her friends – had thrown open the tunnels from reality to reality for their passage. But sadly, nearly half a year ago in mortal time, the Order itself had been ambushed. Drawn into a rarely-visited corner of existence in pursuit of an unauthorized breach between universes, they had been attacked by what they’d assumed were mere humans – humans wielding alien weapons of a sort never encountered before. Somehow, these gun-toting assailants had been able to neutralize many of the strongest members of the Order and of Vanguard, who had swarmed through the looking-glass in a desperate effort to aid them. Many were seriously wounded, but Z worst of all, and as she lay dying, the woman had used the very last of her ebbing strength to hurl the heroes all back to their respective realities. Her death crushed the surviving members of the Order, but none so much as the Vanguardian with whom she had shared a brief and supremely improbable but indescribably deep love.
Now, the Order was effectively confined to Haven save on matters of the utmost importance, and Grimm doubted the Courts of Light would make an exception for him. “Think I should ask Turkish to put in a good word for me?”
Rowena laughed, a sudden but welcome change in mood that seemed to brighten the already-sunny sky above them. “I think you already have. You forget I know you.”
Fortunately, Grimm lacked the facial features for a properly sheepish expression. “Like I said, they’re my friends.”
“And you haven’t heard back yet.”
The avatar of Death shook his head.
The avatar of Life sighed. “Even gods need a while to deliberate sometimes.” She looked at Grimm and smiled faintly. “But I know you won’t give up until you get your answer.”
The massive biker stared a hole in the ground. “Here’s hoping I get it soon.”
- - -
Muelle de los Pescaderos, 1:02 PM
Mick eased off the gas as he watched a native urge his cart-towing burro across the road ahead. He was making decent time through the sparsely-populated strip of land between the green northern reaches of the Bosque Interiór and the coastlands lining the northern bay – one of the few shorelines where dark volcanic sand could still be found at the surface eight years after Hurricane Jason had reshaped the island. This two-mile stretch of two-lane highway had only recently been completed – it still didn’t show up on most travel agents’ maps and didn’t merit a street name on Google Earth just yet – but in addition to linking Tres Rios to Vista del Mar and finally closing the circuit around La Perdita, it linked a number of native settlements to the big cities for the first time in the isolated villages’ history. That necessitated dodging a lot of burros, and children playing with dogs, and wild hogs nosing around for discarded scraps, and even the odd ocelot, though it still befuddled researchers how the cats had managed to get to the island. At the moment, Mick didn’t mind – he’d always enjoyed taking in the sights and sounds and even the scents along this picturesque length of road.
But the more he thought about it, the more he realized his Spidey-sense was on edge today for some reason despite the cocktail of drugs they were making him take these days. As he looked out over the bay ahead and to his left, he saw two dagger-like shapes rapidly ascending from a huge grey brick-shape out beyond the northeast point of the island. Some kinda fighter planes, the new invisible ones, maybe, taking off from what was too big to be anything but an American aircraft carrier. One had flown over the house earlier, probably flying over Del Mar, but it didn’t look like any airshow he’d ever seen. Not that he was all that into military hardware and shit, but Chicago’d had a bitchin’ airshow every summer when Mick was growing up. No, those jets were watching the island, and while he didn’t know why, he figured it probably wasn’t a good thing.
A year or two ago, Mick would’ve flipped the switch and taken off into the sky himself to see what all the fuss was about. But his current therapist – the fifth one he’d gone through so far – kept telling him he’d only get control over everything if he stayed Mick all the damn time. Although honestly, whether or not he’d dreamed the imp up in the first place, John Michael Harrison missed the hell outta Mxy sometimes.
Mick’s thoughts were derailed by the sight of brake lights ahead – way more than he was used to on this road. He slowed to a stop behind an old school bus which had been converted into a rolling produce market-slash-taquería and squinted ahead hoping to catch a glimpse of what the hell was going on. No sooner had he become enmeshed in the budding traffic jam than not one, but two grey LIME vans passed him by going the other direction and didn’t respond when they saw him waving to get their attention. Mick rolled his eyes. Of fucking course. Well, he had to get the tomatoes for Shirley now, so may as well…
A downed utility pole appeared to be the source of the delay. Splintered wood and wires were strewn across this lane of the road, and a third grey van sat pulled off to the right-hand side of the road as two blue-shirted maintenance guys stood there trying to direct traffic but otherwise not really doing much of anything. In his rearview, Mick saw one of the vans that had passed him making a U-turn for some reason. Did anyone know what the fuck they were doing out here?
The second van stopped behind him, but nobody hopped out to join the technicians ahead. Probably some kind of confusion – maybe the cable was acting up all over the island and they couldn’t decide where to go first? Eventually, one of the two cable guys standing by the van up ahead stepped out into the road and started waving vehicles heading into Tres Rios around the obstruction while his partner circled around to the passenger-side door. Mick moved up as one, then two, then three vehicles advanced around the roadblock before the procession ground to a halt again and cars started coming from the other direction again. May as well park it at this rate. Dammit.
Mick heard the characteristic rumble of an approaching jet aircraft, but a bit louder than usual. The technician by the van opened the side door, and the blast of the old bus’s horn drowned out the sound of the shotgun door of the van behind Mick opening. Oddly, the tech seemed to be either staring at something or conversing with someone inside as he looked down at his walkie-talkie and then held it out as though showing it to someone. Mick saw movement to his left and spotted one of the military jets coming in only about two hundred feet overhead. He figured the engines were probably supposed to be quieter than other airplanes like that, but this low to the ground they were getting really fucking loud. As he looked back at the van ahead, the dark grey-painted jet zipped overhead with a deafening roar. The noise clearly startled the tech and whoever he was apparently talking to, because as he jerked his arms up reflexively and his radio flew up out of his hands, Mick saw a dark, angular object come tumbling out of the van past him to the ground.
It was gone from view in an instant, but that split second was just enough for him to identify the unmistakable outline of a submachine gun.
Since when did cable guys carry fucking Uzis around La Perdita?
And at least one of those vans was heading back the way he’d come.
Shit. Fuck. ShitfuckingshitSHIRLEY!!!
Mick sat bolt upright in his seat. The Range Rover was blocked in. Only one way to get to her. “MX-”
An arm – a strong one – around his right shoulder. A hand, reaching up to cover his mouth. A white-hot pinprick stabbing into the left side of his neck, followed immediately by a familiar burning rush of…
Most people would be sedated by this dosage within about ten or fifteen seconds. But when you spent most of your waking hours already mostly sedated – and especially when the guy hurrying to measure out the right dosage while riding shotgun in a moving vehicle guessed high on Mick’s weight – it was virtually instantaneous. By the time the passing jet had receded from view, the interaction of pharmaceuticals had plunged him, still buckled into the driver’s seat of the handbraked SUV, into an almost comatose state.
His blue-shirted assailant hurriedly tossed the syringe aside as he reached in to snatch the keys from the ignition. He still wasn’t sure why he’d been ordered to put his target under when he could just as easily shoot him. Maybe that was already someone else’s job. Now he needed to hurry and-
The cable guy dropped the keys as he heard the wail of a siren approaching. He darted back into the van just in time as its driver quickly extricated the vehicle from its place in line and managed another awkward U-turn that carried it off and back onto the narrow road. By the time the late-model police cruiser in Tres Rios precinct markings negotiated its way through the roadblock and approached the Harrisons’ vehicle, both LIME vans were rapidly fleeing the scene, leaving a puzzled and increasingly angry queue of motorists and one deeply unconscious Vanguardian behind.
