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  As the pilots reached the end of the catwalk, a panel slid open on the side of the craft and a short boarding ramp extended. The pilots entered the ship, the plank retracted, and the door slid shut.

  Admiral Xiè moved to the handrail and leaned on it, eyes narrowed to study the craft. So much was riding on this. The seven previous craft, though successful in one way or another, had also been spectacular failures. Whole laboratories had been destroyed, there had been test-firing side effects of catastrophic proportion, the loss of valuable staff, and the waste of so much money. After the first debacle in Tangshan, Hebei, back in 1976, the whole project was nearly scrapped. Back then the creation of the Dragon Engine was deemed a fanciful waste of time and resources. Only the scope of the disaster itself was the thing that saved the project from termination. That one prototype engine had exploded, causing the single largest earthquake of the twentieth century.

  That was power.

  It demonstrated a potential that was unlike anything previously guessed. If it could be harnessed, there would be none of the suicidal clumsiness of nuclear power, none of the slow process to enrich plutonium. No radiation, no contaminated waste to be hidden somewhere. The Dragon Engine, for all of its terrible destructive force, left no chemical or energetic signature behind. This was the true face of clean energy, and it eliminated the threat of mutually assured destruction, leaving in its place only the destruction of the enemies of the People’s Republic.

  It meant that for the first time since the dawn of the age of superpowers, a global war could be fought and won, with a guarantee of life on a living planet afterward.

  That kind of power could not be ignored, and so the program continued. So did the disasters. The Kunlun earthquake of 2001, Ruichang earthquake of 2005, and the Sichuan quake of 2008. All failures of prototype Dragon Engines.

  Of course, the very fact of that kind of power made everyone in Xiè’s division curious to the point of paranoia. How close were the Americans or the Russians or the British? Was the Haiti earthquake of 2010 a natural disaster, or the spectacular failure of someone else’s own prototype engine? One of Xiè’s spies even worked up a credible paper to suggest that the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 was an early attempt to fire an engine. Xiè believed that report. It fit the estimates of where the Americans were at that time. And it explained why their progress had been stalled for so long after that.

  His aide stepped forward to be noticed. When Xiè nodded to him, the aide said, “The pilots report that they are ready, Admiral Xiè.”

  “Tell them that they may proceed.”

  The aide hesitated. “Admiral Xiè, perhaps you would be more comfortable in the telemetry room?”

  That room was in a reinforced bunker on the other side of the island. A quick trip by underground air car. Xiè shook his head.

  “We will all witness it from here,” he said.

  The aide nodded and stepped back. He, too, was trained not to let his emotions show on his face. Xiè was faintly amused.

  The craft remained perfectly still. Although there were lights all around it, there was no glow from its metal skin. The entire ship was coated in nonflective polymers. On a dark night, with the running lights off, the ship would be invisible at a hundred yards. Against a night sky, it would vanish entirely except where it passed across the moon or a star cluster. There were plans in research phase now for the new generation of cloaking technology that had been developed by the Americans. Thousands of tiny cameras on the upper surface of a craft fed real-time images to LED panels on the bottom so that a ground observer would see what he expected to see when he looked up at the sky. The American Locust bomber program was being used to test the latest generation of that technology, and Xiè’s team would have those results and all related science within a few weeks.

  That was part of a barter whose specifics had taken many years to work out. The American government was not involved, of course. Xiè dealt with Howard Shelton for such matters. That man — that reptile of a person — was sometimes willing to throw scraps to Xiè and thought that his generosity gave him a clear window into the status of the Dragon Engine project. The view Xiè provided, however, was very much a window display. Shelton had no idea what the true status of this project was. Or so Xiè told himself, hoping that his intelligence was accurate.

  As Xiè waited, his eyes flicking over the craft, he tried to discern the exact moment when its main drive systems went online. There was supposed to be absolutely no exterior signature. No heat bloom, no shudder as the engine went from its station-keeping mode to full operation. If there was so much as a tremble, Xiè was going to have someone shot.

  After three long minutes, Xiè turned around to glare at one of the scientists.

  “Am I to stand here all day?”

  “Admiral Xiè,” said the scientist, a sweaty little stick-bug of a man, “if you please.”

  He gestured to the ship. Xiè sighed heavily and turned around.

  To see nothing.

  The ship was gone.

  That fast, that silently. Gone.

  Xiè’s mouth hung open.

  When he could speak, when he could command himself enough to form a thought and put it into words, he stammered, “W — where is it?”

  The scientist indicated a large status board mounted high on the wall to the left of the bay. Everyone turned toward it. It showed a satellite image of the Shanghai area, with Chongming at the top and the midstream islands, Changxing Island and Hengsha Island, lower down. There were two red lights glowing on the board. One indicated the laboratory here on Changxing. The other identified the craft. As they watched, the second light moved away from Changxing at incredible speed. It flew high, paralleling the G40 Hushan Expressway toward the mainland. Within seconds it was moving toward the heart of Shanghai. And this, Xiè knew, would be the ultimate test. It was a cloudy night and the sky would be a featureless and uniform black. Even so, Shanghai was the most populous city on Earth, with twenty-three million people, and so many of them with cell phones and cameras. If there was one picture, one clip of video, then the great secret would be out.

  The craft kept going.

  And going.

  As he watched, Xiè thought of who he wished he could tell about this. No, not tell … Xiè thought about whose nose he would like to rub in this. It was easy to conjure an image of the man’s sneering face and superior smile. Shelton, who loved to brag about how far along the M3 Project was … and offer false sympathy for the many setbacks in the Dragon Engine’s development. Xiè would have given much to see Shelton’s face at the precise moment when he discovered the truth.

  Well, he mused, now the worm has turned. And in turning, revealed itself to be a dragon.

  Xiè was not a man much given to profanity, but there were moments for everything. As he held the image of Shelton in his mind he murmured, “Cào n zzng shíb dài.”

  Fuck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation.

  Admiral Xiè closed his eyes and took a nice, long, deep breath of perfect contentment.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The Warehouse

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Sunday, October 20, 8:38 a.m.

  “So,” said Top to the five members of Echo Team, “that’s what we got so far. Questions?”

  They were in a mission briefing room and Top had brought them up to speed on the president, the Black Book, the video, and everything else that had happened.

  “UFOs?” said Lydia Ruiz, the only woman on the team. “Holy shit.”

  Bunny had a pair of Oakleys pushed up on his head, a mouthful of pink bubble gum, and an expression of profound indifference on his face. “We are not alone. Got it. What’s the big?”

  The others looked at him.

  “Um, dude,” said Sam Imura, the team’s new sniper, “aliens and all? That’s kind of big, wouldn’t you say?”

  Bunny shrugged. “After all this shit we’ve seen you guys are actually surprised that this
was going to happen at some point? Wait till you cats have rolled with the captain a couple of times, Sam. Aliens don’t even seem that bad. I mean, on my first gig with Echo we did zombies.”

  “Read about that,” said Sam. “Zombies. Jee-sus. I wish I could tell my little brother, Tom. He’s a total Night of the Living Dead freak.”

  “I did genetic supersoldiers when I was on Hotrod Team in Detroit,” said Ivan Yankovitch, a lantern-jawed piece of granite who had transferred to Echo right after the Red Order mess in Iran. “A Russian kill team that had twenty percent more muscle and bone mass. The smallest of them could bench six-fifty. That was some serious mad scientist shit.”

  “Well that’s my whole damn point,” complained Bunny. “I mean, after all that stuff, if they told us the op was taking down radioactive cockroach ballerinas I’d just lock and load, but I wouldn’t get my panties in a bunch. I am officially not surprised by anything.”

  There was a ripple of laughter, but it all sounded a bit forced. Top said nothing, letting them absorb it and deal with it in their own way.

  “But,” continued Bunny, “we have an even longer list of stuff that wasn’t anything at all. ’Member that thing in May, when Al-Qaeda said that Bin Laden’s ghost was advising them? Fricking stooge dressed up as Bin Laden. And remember how everyone panicked when we got a report that there was a seif al din outbreak in Times Square on New Year’s Eve? Turned out to be a flash mob dressed as zombies doing the Thriller dance. More than half the stuff that comes onto our radar is bullshit. We get all worked up, teams get scrambled, and half the time we find out that our supervillain du jour is some toothless hillbilly cooking meth in a cave.”

  “My little Bunny’s got a point, Top,” said Lydia. “Do we even know if this is real? I mean, how do we know if the shit is about to hit the fan or if somebody just farted in a draft?”

  “We don’t know,” Top said, “but, to paraphrase Mr. Church, do you really think we have the luxury to wait and watch?”

  Sam shook his head. “No, First Sergeant, we do not.”

  Ivan cleared his throat. “What’s the status? Are we at DEFCON One?”

  “We’re in an elevated alert state,” said Top. “The official status for the military is REDCON-2 as part of an unannounced training exercise. The DMS status is FPCON Charlie.”

  There were five levels on the Force Protection Condition scale. FPCON Charlie was the fourth level, one used in situations when intelligence reports that there is terrorist activity imminent. Similarly the military had its Readiness Conditions. REDCON-2 had all personnel on alert and ready to fight, but they had not yet kicked the tires and lit the fires on the fighter jets.

  Top added, “All of this was initiated when the president went missing because it was presumed that terrorists had somehow infiltrated and therefore compromised White House security. The joint chiefs advised the acting president to maintain that alert for now, at least until we have some confirmation that there is no immediate threat.”

  “What kind of confirmation they lookin’ for?” asked Pete Dobbs, a shooter recruited from an ATF team working the drug wars in the Appalachians. “ET hanging ten on a monster wave rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue?”

  No one laughed.

  The phone rang and Top took the call, listened, said, “Yes, sir.”

  As he hung up he grinned at Echo Team.

  “Turns out the thugs who pissed off the cap’n this morning work for Blue Diamond Security.” He saw sour and hateful expressions blossom on their faces. Like their chief competitor, Blackwater, Blue Diamond was a global security company, which is a polite way of saying that they provided top-of-the-line mercenaries to power players in American politics and big business. They were the go-to company for everything from protecting U.S. oilmen in Iraq to serving as “advisors” for commercially inconvenient political uprisings in third world countries.

  “Mr. Church would like us to go have a few words with them.”

  All five of them grinned liked wolves.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Over Maryland airspace

  Sunday, October 20, 8:43 a.m.

  “Hey, Bug,” I said into the phone. “We anywhere yet?”

  He told me what Jerry Spencer had found out about the Blue Diamond connection. “Top’s heading over there with Echo Team.”

  “Great, they get to have fun while I heroically sit on my ass in a helicopter.” I sighed. “Look, what can you tell me about this Junie Flynn character? Why’s she so obsessed with UFOs and that stuff? She see a flying saucer once?”

  “Not that she’s ever claimed. In fact I bet she’d give a lot to see one. She’s very harsh with people who claim to have seen craft but who Junie thinks are faking it.”

  “Why would someone fake a claim like that?” I asked.

  “Why do people claim to have seen Bigfoot, Joe?”

  “There’s that.” I scratched Ghost between the ears. “Is the Black Book her only message or is she a general interest conspiracy nut?”

  “She’s not a nut, Joe. Junie’s one of the most lucid speakers I’ve ever heard. But … to answer your question, the Black Book and Majestic Three are pretty big with her, but she also talks a lot about the need for disclosure. She keeps throwing challenges out to the U.S. government to ’fess up and admit that there are aliens and that we’ve recovered crash vehicles.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “She’s been leading up to something. She’s been talking about something she’s going to reveal to the world this week. I think it was on last night’s podcast. I have it taped.”

  “Dude, don’t you think we should already be on that?”

  “Sure, but you wouldn’t believe how many things the big man has me on right now, just related to the president. Besides, her podcast is like three hours long, so I have to find the time to go through it.”

  “Find the time.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Oh, and other areas she hits a lot — alien-human hybrids.”

  “Really? What’s that all about?”

  Bug laughed. “Jeez, you really are clueless.”

  “I have that on my business cards. C’mon, Bug, hit me.”

  “Okay, Junie says that the reason we haven’t figured out how to make maximum use out of the alien tech is that it requires a biological interface. Now I know you know about that because we sat through that lecture.”

  “That was DARPA, not Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

  “Junie says that DARPA is only one group working on a way to develop technology that will allow a human being to bond with an aircraft on a biomechanical level. Maybe on a psychic level, too. That way a craft will move with the speed of human thought and without the lag time between thought and physical action on, say, a joystick or any other instrument.”

  “So how does that involve alien-human hybrids?”

  “She said that bodies were recovered from some of the crashes, and that we’ve been trying to do gene therapy with alien DNA so that an alien craft would recognize the pilot and respond according to how the ship was designed. Junie said that the hybridization program began in the seventies and viable hybrids were born or grown or whatever in the mid-eighties. The hybrids were supposedly raised in labs and trained in special camps, but some of them were seeded into the human population so scientists could study how well they blend in.”

  “I’m really sure I saw this movie.”

  “Just telling you what she says on her podcasts.”

  “Sure, but, since you believe in this stuff, Bug, what do you think about all this?”

  “If I tell you are you going to make a snarky comment?”

  “Snarky? Me? You wound me, Bug. Wound me, I say.”

  “Joe — I’m being serious here. This is something that matters to me.”

  And there it was. I really liked Bug. He was a true innocent and definitely one of the good guys. He was also way too easy a target for a barbarian like me, who tended to throw stones at everyone.

 
; “My word, Bug,” I said. “Serious business.”

  That seemed to mollify him. “Well, yeah … I think there are aliens and I think they’ve visited us. Consider the math, Joe. There are somewhere between one hundred and four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. That’s a lot of wasted real estate if there’s nothing out there.”

  “Lot of empty space in Antarctica, too. Not a lot of life.”

  “Tell that to the penguins. Besides, there’s all sorts of bacteria and viruses frozen there, and some of it is viable when thawed.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like Dr. Hu.”

  “Bite me in an ugly place,” said Bug. He and I both hated William Hu, the DMS science director. “Look, Joe, there are some things to consider. In 1976, the Mars landers detected chemical signatures indicative of life. The following year, the radio telescope at Ohio State University detected a very weird thirty-seven-second-long signal pulse of radiation from somewhere near the constellation Sagittarius. The signal was within the band of radio frequencies where transmissions are internationally banned on Earth, and natural sources of radiation from space generally cover a wider range of frequencies. Now, understand, the nearest star in that direction is over two hundred million light-years away, so this was either a massive astronomical event that was not visible to any other telescope, or an intelligence with a very powerful transmitter created it.”