“That sounds about right,” Knight added. “Good to know I’m not a wuss.”
King, who was the only field team member to be unaffected by the dire wolf roar, was unperturbed. “So if we hear it, we’ll either fight harder or run away? Not that big of a problem.”
“Oh, but it is, King,” Sara Fogg stepped toward the center of the room to speak. Pierce noted that her eyes were still baggy, but her face had come alive at a chance to participate in the conversation on a medical topic, with which she could relate. He also noted that she remembered to use his operational callsign, instead of calling him Jack. “In a life-threatening situation, the human ‘fight-or-flight’ response involves an involuntary increased heart rate, increased blood flow to the muscles, pupil dilation and a whole host of other symptoms. You won’t be at your fighting best, and what’s worse, adrenaline dumps into your lungs, your liver, kidneys and heart. With the dire wolf roar activating such a heightened fight-or-flight, your heart could seize up with adrenaline and crash. You’d drop dead just like with the Brugada strain from a few years ago. The dire wolf roar can actually scare you to death.”
Deep Blue cleared his throat. “Lewis, you said you have a plan for dealing with the dire wolves?”
Aleman replied without hesitation. “Yes sir, I think we should nuke them.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
London, England
3 November, 1600 Hrs
“ That’s not good.”
Bishop tilted his head to the side and looked out the open door of the Crescent, as it hovered on its thrumming VTOL engines. Rain lashed the late afternoon London sky, but both he and Knight had a perfect view of the River Thames and the 443-foot tall white Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye. The bizarre cantilevered support struts and several of the steel tie rods of the structure were hidden inside a large crackling dire wolf portal that covered over a fourth of the surface of the wheel. Both Bishop and Knight understood that when the portal winked out, it would take the central hub of the giant structure with it.
But that wasn’t what had caused Bishop’s comment.
Despite the lousy overcast weather, the ride-one of the largest tourist attractions in Europe that saw 3.5 million visitors a year-had been full when the portal appeared out of thin air. As the Crescent moved the men into position above the wheel, they saw hundreds of passengers from the remaining egg-shaped capsules around the edges of the wheel. A storm of brightly colored tourists attempted to climb down the superstructure after having freed themselves from their steel-and-Plexiglas prisons. Some were still trapped in their capsules. They frantically hammered on the glass as they watched the immense sphere of pulsing light engulf the wheel like Pac Man gobbling up tasty snacks. Bishop noted that some of the people were leaping to the river far below them from the upper reaches of the rim, almost 400 feet above the water.
Others leapt off the ride on the other side-to the concrete pedestrian path and the trees, which were turning dark red from the frequent human impacts.
The panicked tourists fled in terror as the portal disgorged its swarm of milky white occupants. Hundreds of dire wolves leapt out of the yellow wall of light. Many of them lunged up the London Eye’s struts and scampered across its surface like manic children on a playground.
“Get me close, Black One. Now!” Bishop shouted into his helmet microphone to the pilot of the Crescent and readied a rappelling line at the door. Their plan had been to keep the creatures at bay as much as possible while the Ministry of Defense arranged to get a small nuclear device to them. Domenick Boucher had handled convincing the US President of the plan to drop a nuclear device inside a portal with a timer. The device would be shut off by remote control if the timer ticked down and the portal hadn’t shut. If it did close, as all of the portals had done so far, then the device would detonate, hopefully stopping the dire wolf incursion. A device would be attempted both here in London and in New York. The US President convinced the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom only an hour before the Crescent arrived. As far as both the US and the UK were concerned, Bishop and Knight were US Delta members, acting on US orders-not independent operators.
No one liked deceiving the President, but all involved agreed that a typical Special Forces unit would be a liability. While other soldiers would still be reacting to the freakish events unfolding around them and the dire wolves trying to tear them apart, Chess Team would be acting. They had grown accustomed to the strange and horrible, and weren’t distracted by it. Deep Blue and General Keasling had agreed that they would deal with the political ramifications after this event, if they lived through it. Boucher had concurred and the plan was set in motion. If Bishop and Knight failed, King and Deep Blue would attempt the same strategy in New York or in the next event location.
But after seeing the chaos up close, Bishop was not content to sit and wait for the device to arrive with its British couriers.
Knight squatted in the open doorway, one arm looped through a nylon safety strap on the door’s edge. He knelt to the floor of the doorway and began picking off targets. He was using a new rifle-a Barrett M82 he had snagged from an armaments closet on the Crescent after they had boarded in Shanghai. He knew he wouldn’t find a better vantage point for sniping the dire wolves than right where he was-above them on the gently hovering troop transport plane.
Even with the new helmet he wore, equipped with sound dampener technology to protect him from hearing the roar of the dire wolves, Bishop could still feel a vibration every time Knight took a shot with the. 50 caliber rifle. The climbing creatures moved slower than they did on the ground; Knight had no problem executing them one by one. Still, no matter how quickly Knight fired, more of the dire wolves darted from the portal. Bishop was tempted to open fire with his newly replaced XM312-B as well, but he couldn’t risk hitting tourists. He needed to get down onto the Eye.
Bishop looked down at Knight, who wore one of the impact-absorbent suits. It seemed to double his size. If Knight looks big, I must look like the Goodyear Blimp.
Bishop hated the helmet. The sound dampener allowed him to hear nothing but his own breathing and he found the faceplate’s view limiting. With more time, they could have had helmets that only blocked certain frequencies, but time was short, so they blocked everything, and it just about drove him nuts. Still, he wore it for protection against the fear-inducing roar. Better to have limited eyesight than to bolt in fear from a dire wolf only to realize, like Wile E. Coyote, that he had run off a cliff-or in this case, off the top of the London Eye.
He leaned down and placed his hand on Knight’s shoulder, then rocked the man slightly-a tap to the shoulder would do no good with the armor. Knight quickly retracted from the doorway, allowing Bishop to exit the craft.
With two MP5 submachine guns stretched across his chest and the XM312-B across his broad, armored back, Bishop leapt out the door, splaying the 11 mm black rappelling rope out his titanium belay device at his waist. The rope ran through his gloved fingers. He cleared the Crescent and began his drop toward the Eye.