Missing his son more than ever, Ford noticed another little boy, about Sam’s age, on the platform outside. The boy peeked out from behind his mother’s legs, while his distracted parents coped with their luggage and a map of the airport. Wide eyes stared in fascination at the toy soldier. Ford smiled back at him, amused. His dark mood lifted for a moment.
A chime sounded, warning that Ford’s train was about to depart. “Aloha,” the recorded voice said cheerily. “Please stay clear of the automatic doors—”
Distracted by the announcement, Ford forgot about the boy, until a woman’s frantic voice called out abruptly.
“Akio?! Akio!”
On the platform, the boy’s parents were looking around anxiously, having obviously misplaced their child. They cried out as they saw that the little boy, whose name was obviously Akio, had darted onto the train when they weren’t looking. Drawn by the toy soldier, Akio approached Ford. He pointed a pudgy finger at the miniature Navy man.
“Ban-ban,” he chirped.
Oh, shit, Ford thought, realizing what was happening. He leapt up to return the boy to his parents, but he was too late. The doors slid shut with a whoosh and the train began to pull away from the platform. Through the windows, Ford saw Akio’s parents reacting in consternation. They dashed frantically to the edge of the platform, shouting and throwing out their arms. The father grabbed onto his wife, as though half-afraid that she would rush onto the tracks. She sobbed hysterically.
“Stay there!” he shouted. “I’ll bring him back!”
The platform dropped from view as the train glided away on the elevated track. Exiting the terminal, the train cruised above the tarmac, where parked and taxiing jets could be seen through the train’s windows. A departing plane took off from a runway as Ford inspected a posted map of the monorail system. According to the map, the train would make a complete circuit of the airport before returning to the station they had just left. He hoped that Akio’s parents had heard him and would stay put long enough for him to get the boy back to them. They’d looked Japanese. Did they even speak English? Had they understood what he’d shouted?
Ford looked down at Akio, who had suddenly become his responsibility. He gave the boy a playfully stern expression.
“You’re under arrest, bud.” He glanced again at his watch, while keeping one eye on his new charge. “I better not miss my flight.”
It was going to be close.
The young petty officer led Serizawa and Graham across the CDC to another work station, where Admiral Stenz awaited them, a grim expression on his weathered features. He wasted no time bringing the two scientists up to speed on the latest development.
“We’ve lost all comms with a Russian Borei in the North Pacific,” he said, referring to a class of nuclear submarine. He turned toward the young analyst manning the console. “Martinez?”
An impressive array of data and video screens faced Martinez, an alert young officer in her early twenties. She was focused on various screens displaying what appeared to be night-vision helicopter feeds of a platoon of U.S. Special Forces soldiers trekking through a dense jungle. A spectral green glow tinted a view of dense bamboo groves and underbrush.
“Aye, sir,” Martinez reported. “Sparta One is picking up a distress signal northwest of Diamond Head.” Disbelief registered on her face as she confirmed the location. “In the midst of Oahu.”
Serizawa inhaled sharply. Oahu was no ghost town or remote mining camp. It was the most populous island in Hawaii.
The MUTO and humanity were on a collision course.
The Green Berets advanced through the nocturnal jungle, kitted out with hazard gas masks and night-vision goggles. The dense bamboo forest was lush and fragrant, abloom with wild orchids, hibiscus, and plumeria. Hidden waterfalls cascaded in the background, but any wildlife was unusually silent, as though the local fauna had made themselves scarce. They were only miles away from lively beaches and night life of Waikiki, but, from the looks of things, they might as well as have been deep in the Amazon rain forest. The dense underbrush made for hard slogging, but the soldiers maintained a brisk pace. They hacked their way through the jungle with machetes.
The leader of the team, Captain Bill Cozzone, was a combat veteran who had taken part in a wide variety of missions over the years, ranging from counter-terrorism to humanitarian assistance, but this assignment was a new one. Nothing in his extensive training and experience had involved tracking down a “Massive Unknown Terrestrial Organism,” let alone a missing nuclear submarine. He used a Geiger counter to guide them through the jungle. It clicked faster and faster as they zeroed in on their objective. Spotting something ahead, through the green-tinted view of his goggles, he raised his hand to signal a halt.
Whoa, he thought. There’s something you don’t see every day.
The Alexander Nevsky, a fourth-generation nuclear submarine, was standing upright among the trees, as though dropped from above. Nearly six hundred feet tall and more than forty feet across, the sub was encrusted with a hardening resinous secretion that dripped slowly down its side. It nose was buried deeply in the earth, amidst smashed and pulverized greenery. In theory, the submarine housed a crew of 130 officers and men. Cozzone found it hard to imagine that any of them could have survived the drop. They were almost certainly crushed to a pulp inside the towering metal shell.
The twelve-man team spread out around the base of the misplaced sub, gazing up at the surreal sight. Cozzone didn’t like the look of this. Submarines belonged in the ocean depths, not perched upside-down in the Hawaiian jungle, only a short hop from Diamond Head. This was wrong with a capital W.
“Guardian 3, this is Sparta 1,” he reported via radio. “We’ve located the Russian sub. Break—”
Something stirred above the jungle canopy high overhead. Craning his head back, Cozzone spied the MUTO itself, crouched above the upright sub. Despite his earlier briefing, the soldier was taken aback by the sheer size and freakishness of the winged monstrosity, which looked like a cross between a giant bug and a dinosaur. Its shiny black wings were folded in behind it like an ominous dark cloak. A thick orange secretion oozed from the creature’s segmented underside. The photos he’d been shown before had failed to capture how truly monstrous this “organism” was.
Holy mother of—
“Guardian 3, we also have eyes on your bogey.”
The command center aboard the Saratoga immediately responded. “Sparta 1, Guardian 3. Six Actual requests a sit-rep, over.”
To Cozzone’s relief, the MUTO ignored the stunned Green Berets down on the forest floor. Instead it had torn open the hull of the Alexander Nevsky and was gorging on the glowing plutonium core of the nuclear reactor, gobbling down the red-hot fuel rods like a pelican downing a fish. Cozzone was suddenly very thankful that the MUTO supposedly consumed nuclear radiation. Otherwise he and his men would be fried for sure, gas masks or no gas masks.
He tried to convey to Command what he was seeing.
“Guardian 3, tell the Six it’s… uh… well, it appears to be eating the reactor.”