An hour later I was on my private jet, heading to Hawaii. My two most experienced and reliable shooters, Top and Bunny, were with me. And Ghost. All of us rushing headlong to a place where no one seemed to come out.
I hate my job.
-2-
The captain of the destroyer was a friend of a friend of a friend, but that didn’t make him a friend of mine. In fact, he was pretty frigging unhappy to have me and my team delivered like an unwanted pizza onto his aft deck in the middle of a bad night. The fact that we were pretty damned unhappy to be there made it a real party. At least we’d changed into attire more appropriate to one of Uncle Sam’s clandestine Special Ops gunslingers — black BDUs without any trace of unit patch or rank insignia. I offered no credentials to the deck officer and was not asked for any by Captain Tanaka. We shook hands, but there was no warmth in it.
He studied us for a long, silent time. First Sergeant Bradley “Top” Sims was a forty-something stern-faced black combat veteran who looked as if he could eat live crocodiles. He smiled exactly as often as he wanted to, which wasn’t all that often. Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit — known as “Bunny” by everyone including his parents — was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall white kid who looked like an Iowa farmhand but was really a surfer and volleyball player from Orange County. They had joined the DMS with me and we had walked through all kinds of hell together. And I use the word hell a lot less metaphorically than I’d like to. Our after-action reports could qualify as horror short stories, or so we’ve been told. Ghost was 105 pounds of combat-trained attitude, and after losing six teeth in a battle in Iran, he’d been gifted with titanium replacements. He loved showing those gleaming fangs to anyone he doesn’t like, and there are a lot of people he doesn’t like. He wasn’t overly fond of Captain Tanaka.
We stood in a cluster and endured the officer’s inspection, allowing him to draw whatever conclusions he wanted from our appearance, our lack of credentials, and our presence. Tanaka’s only comment was, “Well, this should be interesting.”
Not said with a smile.
He knew our combat call signs and addressed me as “Cowboy,” which meant that he had been briefed. The DMS does not have any official rank in the U.S. military command structure. We operate on a very special and highly secret executive order that gives us extraordinary powers and freedom of action. The captain had been contacted and told to offer us every assistance and cooperation. He did that. He hadn’t been ordered to be warm or fuzzy, so we got none of that. And for the record, experienced captains of ultrasophisticated guided missile destroyers do not, as a rule, like having someone else come in to solve their problems. Particularly where their own crew members are involved. His ship carried everything from Tomahawk missiles to Harpoons and lots of other goodies, and the crew of three hundred enlisted men and twenty-three officers were among the finest in the service, which made them easily world-class. In almost any other circumstance, Echo Team would have been, at best, a mildly annoying bit of extra baggage or, at worst, a useless pain in the ass. A good case could have been built either way.
This was not one of those other circumstances.
And in every way that mattered this was my case anyway. There was a standing order that all incidents involving T-craft or even suspected T-craft were to be handed over without pause or interference to the Special Projects Office of the Department of Military Sciences.
To me.
That order had been put in effect following the Extinction Machine case, in which a rogue group of DARPA called Majestic Three had built a small fleet of T-craft using taxpayer dollars but for very private purposes. The man behind all of that was Howard Shelton, and that fucking maniac had wanted to use the craft to start, and win, World War III. You see, Shelton had discovered a fact that eluded the other superpowers involved in the recovered-technologies part of the arms race. While their experimental T-craft kept exploding every time one of the engines was fired, Shelton figured out how to stabilize the ships. Doesn’t sound like too big a thing until you step back and look at what’s happened when T-craft have exploded over the last thirty years or so.
The engines were typically built in remote spots, far away from prying eyes and in areas where large amounts of hydroelectric, nuclear, or geothermal power was available. The energetic discharge from an exploding engine delivered a blast several orders of magnitude larger than the apparent fuel. It was a kind of zero-point energy that has resulted in some of the world’s biggest natural disasters. Mount St. Helens. The tsunami that slammed into Japan. The massive earthquakes in China. Like that.
Shelton figured it out. The trick was to play a long game and breed pilots who had a small percentage of DNA from “other sources.”
Yeah, E.T. phone home. You get the point.
The biomechanical connection allowed the ships’ engines to stabilize. Shelton then rigged his ships to kill the pilot as soon as a T-craft was over a target city. Like Beijing or Moscow. He launched his ships to force a confrontation that began with the demonstration of a weapon so powerful that the other nations could not risk fighting a war like that. A fully powered T-craft could stroll past any fighter jet in existence because it used alloys based on what was learned from stripping the wreckage of alien craft. Fiber optics, microminiaturization, and other sciences in common use have quietly benefited from those same technologies. Even Velcro.
Sure, some urban legends are true.
The DMS went after Shelton and took him all the way down. However, the ship he sent to destroy Beijing was destroyed by someone else. We never met them and I’m very, very cool with that. An eloquent message had been conveyed to us to turn over all materials related to the development of T-craft. Or else.
The “or else” part was scary as shit. We did, and E.T. went home. No good-byes, no wet, sloppy kisses with our friends from wherever.
Actually, we never really found out where they were from. I had a theory, but I was pretty badly concussed when I came up with that theory, so no one has leaped up to say that I solved one of the great mysteries of the ages.
That was all years ago. Since then things have been very quiet. UFO sightings around the world have dropped considerably, except in cases where people are seeing drones, actual weather balloons, airplanes, the Goodyear Blimp, or other ordinary things.
Side note, I fucking hate drones, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that reliable sightings of saucers, T-craft, mother ships, the Death Star, Firefly-class space freighters, X-wing fighters, and the starship Enterprise have dwindled to a precious few. Which has made everyone in the know sleep a little more soundly.
Past tense.
Now we had a T-craft crashed onto an island in the middle of the South Pacific.
“We’ve had no contact with anyone since the object crashed,” said Captain Tanaka. “And except for the one image that was sent to you, we’ve had nothing from the satellite.”
“No images?”
“No telemetry, no feed, no signal. If it’s up there we can’t find it.”
Bunny murmured, “Oh, shit.”
“Yes,” Tanaka agreed dryly. “Though I was hoping for a bit more than that from you fellows.”
Tanaka was a middle-aged man who looked fit enough to run a marathon while carrying me on his shoulders. One of those guys you can’t even imagine with a hangover, love handles, or a hair out of place. Steely eyes and a hero jaw. Made me feel like a grubby beach bum with indifferent hygiene.