X war infestation, p.9
X WAR: Infestation, page 9
Qyss remained poker-faced. The mission meant doing intelligence gathering and then a target extraction. "Anywhere in particular?"
"Europe. Probably in the United Kingdom."
"I... get it. I guess this means we'll be doing it either under the noses of the Brits or the EU, is that correct?"
Jokinen nodded. "This could be a very sensitive matter, as I've said. This is why Miss Zoe here requested an all-American unit to do the job, but I would prefer to get input from our actual assault team leaders on this."
Qyss leaned back in the chair. "From what you're all implying it seems the target in question is another human being. TFZ assault teams are geared to fight aliens, so why choose us?"
"I would have preferred nothing more than to have made this be an all-exclusive CIA operation," Zoe said. "But I have to take into account that the Agency may be compromised too."
"How do you know we haven't been compromised?"
"Two things. The first is that my team did their homework on everyone in this base, and other than a few possible ones—whose names I have given to the general so he can get them out of here—this organization is small and isolated enough to be cleared—for now."
"And the second reason?"
"If this base was compromised, the aliens would have attacked it already. Since they haven't, then I can say this unit is secure."
Wegener glanced towards Jokinen, but neither man said anything.
Qyss nodded. This woman is a killer shark. Are all Agency people just like her? "Okay, so who's the target?"
"A deputy director of MI5—British counterintelligence," Zoe said. "He's been traveling around Europe lately, and we need to have a team in place to pick him up."
Qyss gave a low whistle, glancing at his commanding officer. "Boy, you weren't kidding, General. This could really turn into a mess alright."
"That's why you need to choose your team carefully," Jokinen said. "I don't think we can include any of the SAS troopers on this—for reasons that are fairly obvious."
The Delta Force operative hunched forward. "So we'll have to do this without British consent then. Has the target been alerted in any way?"
"After reading his dossier I'm sure he's savvy enough to know that people are watching him," Zoe said.
"That's going to make it tough. With his contacts inside the government and in the intelligence community, he could blow the lid wide open and get us arrested or thrown out of England for starters."
"Which is why it is better if we do this," Wegener said. "Task Force Zero is allowed to operate in British territory and in all of Europe as well. If we arrange it so that it will be under a cover of say, a routine training exercise, we can both insert and extract your team without the British being alarmed."
Zoe stared at the Delta Force operative. "Can it be done?"
"Sure," Qyss said casually. "We might be going up against our own allies too, so it'll be tougher than normal, but we can do it."
"Good."
"Taking down other humans is easy compared to fighting aliens."
"If he is in league with the aliens then you might expect to face them too—so be prepared, Master Sergeant."
"You don't have to tell me twice," Qyss said.
Wegener faced the CIA senior officer. "Let us assume that the mission goes as planned. Do we turn the target over to you once we're back in American territory?"
"No, I'd rather you keep him here. I understand you have detained a number of Russians somewhere in this base too, so I'll be bringing my team here instead of interrogating them at Langley."
Jokinen frowned. "You realize that all of this is will be in violation of the TFZ alliance protocols, yes?"
"I know the stakes, General," Zoe said. "But if these things aren't done then we've lost the shadow war, and if that happens then we lose everything."
Wegener shifted his focus to the Delta Force operative. "What are your thoughts on the political ramifications of this, Master Sergeant?"
Qyss gave a faint smile. "Hey, I'm just a soldier. It's way above my pay grade, so I just do what I'm told. I leave all that political stuff to others."
19 Prague
CONSTRUCTED LESS THAN a year before, the European headquarters of China International Finance Corporation was the tallest building in Prague 7, its highest office suites overlooking the district's numerous parks and the sprawling convention center grounds by the Industrial Palace. Being the centerpiece of China's growing economic influence in the continent, the building's main lobby was a strange fusion of nineteenth century Art Nouveau style and traditional Chinese motifs.
Less than ten minutes before closing time, an elderly man wearing an old-fashioned dark suit and bowler hat walked gracefully through the main doors and proceeded past the small crowds of office workers heading out on their way home.
Even though his hat made him stand out, Thorne was able to effortlessly intermingle with the company employees and was hardly noticed by the plainclothes security guards near the ground floor's entrances. Making his way up the first flight of stairs, gliding by a small gaggle of young secretaries who were debating whether to go clubbing that night, he quickly pivoted into an alcove fronting the executive elevators and out of sight.
Silently counting up to ten, Thorne wedged himself in between a pair of standing columns to partly conceal himself and then waited.
He heard a soft chime and felt a slight whoosh of air, indicating that one of the elevator doors had opened. Just as an outgoing executive passed by the pillar he was hiding behind, Thorne twisted forward, slipping behind the high level corporate officer without the other man noticing him. Daintily stepping in silence to his destination, Thorne made it into the elevator just before the doors automatically closed.
Pressing the button for the top floor of the building, Thorne stood to the side of the doors and waited as he felt the lift ascending. He'd hope that no one else would ride the elevator with him, and since everyone left in the offices wanted to go down rather than up, luck was with him and the doors opened to reveal the deserted penthouse suites beyond.
Having studied the blind spots of the surveillance cameras by the elevator the night before, Thorne crouched down and used the mirrored glass inside the lift to spot the current rotation of the cameras. The moment the surveillance devices rotated in the opposite direction, he dashed out of the elevator's interior and made it just underneath the swiveling cameras.
Catching his breath, he waited until the camera veered away from looking towards the adjoining corridor before he darted out into the passageway. He made it.
A sudden feeling of weakness in his wobbly left knee forced him stoop over and rub at the aching joint. I'm getting too old to keep doing these things, he thought. Hopefully this is the last time.
Thorne had obtained the interior blueprints of the building years ago, while preparing one of his many contingency plans. Even though he had managed to amass a small fortune by being part of the Cabal, he had already spent most of it in order to get things ready, just in case. With the other members now hostile to him, it was imperative that he do all he could in order to survive.
Opening the door to the office at the end of the corridor, he managed to surprise a young Chinese man in a blue suit. The nameplate on the desk read: Peter Lai, Executive Assistant. Thorne gave a gentle smile as he stood and waited as the younger man recovered from his initial shock.
Lai returned his smile in an effort to save face. "May I ask, sir, what you are doing here?"
"I wanted to speak with the Dowager. Please tell her it's Alasdair Thorne."
"I am sorry, sir. There is no 'dowager' who works in this company. How did you get up to this level?"
Thorne slowly made his way closer until the other man could clearly see the wrinkles on his face. "I don't have time to argue with you over the intricacies. I know this firm serves as a front for her, and I know there are scrying crystals somewhere in here. I need access to them right away, please."
"I'm afraid I have no idea what you are talking about, sir. I must ask you to leave."
"We'll do this the hard way then."
Lai's eyes opened wide in slight surprise as Thorne drove the webbing between his right thumb and index finger into the younger man's throat. Lai doubled over in pain while Thorne shifted to his right, delivering a rabbit punch to the back of his victim's neck.
With the young man now groaning on the floor in a half-conscious state, Thorne took out two plastic zip-cords from one of his coat pockets and bound Lai's hands behind his back before tying up his ankles.
Thorne opened the door to the rear office and stepped inside. The master suite had a sunken floor, with a pair of plush leather couches overlooked by a large black desk facing the currently opaque wraparound windows. Overpriced paintings made by post-modern artists were hung along a number of walls.
Making his way up to where the desk was, Thorne began rummaging through the drawers, using a letter opener lying on the counter to force open two locks. After breaking through the lower drawer, he found what he was looking for: a clump of what seemed to be jet black obsidian glass.
Holding the chunk of rock with both hands in front of him, Thorne began moving around the room, hoping to reveal a larger, polished column. He could already feel the mental waves of energy surging around him as the fused glass he was holding began to emit an eerie golden glow.
Thorne was slowly moving along the sides of the large room when the flooring suddenly began to shift, nearly throwing him off balance. A solid patch of tiled flooring near the western end of the room suddenly slid back, and a two meter tall monolith made out of smooth, flattened black crystal quickly jutted out.
That's it, he thought while stepping closer. A slight ringing noise began reverberating in his ears, and he could feel a tightening along his cheekbones, just below the lead lined hat he wore. As expected, she put up some sort of mental defenses in case anyone made it this far.
The flattened boulder in front of him began to vibrate slightly, as if its crystalline form was about to shatter. Thorne kept holding the smaller clump of glowing glass in front of him, all the while concentrating on bringing the scrying images to the forefront.
A series of mental clamps began to press on the sides of his head, and Thorne wished he had brought along a lead lined helmet instead of just a hat. He had been anticipating some form of pain, but the intensifying headache was proving too much, and his knees began to wobble once more.
Argh. The pain. It feels like a vise, crushing my skull.
He tried to shake the agony away, only to realize he was now on his knees. The mental pounding he was suffering through made his eyes water, and he had to fight off the urge to close them and swoon away.
The simulacrum of images began to display themselves on the flattened facade of the monolith. Thorne grimaced as the memory transference began. He had to ignore the physical pain in order for the device to transplant the information he needed into his mind.
A series of images flashed across his awareness. A hidden base beneath the ice, somewhere in Antarctica. The crystal labyrinth within Ordos. The exact layouts of Mordrake's sanctum on the West Coast of North America.
The final sets of images were the most unnerving of all. An alien landscape surrounded by swirling vortexes of purplish energy. Cyclopean, pyramidal structures jutting out from crags beneath a creamy amber sky. At its heart lay a web of pulsing, fleshy membranes, and finally, a spheroid being with a million faceted eyes, all of them staring directly back at him.
Thorne gasped for air as the images faded, and the vibrations around the room finally stopped. Blinking his dry eyes to moisten them, he realized that he was lying on his stomach, the skin on his upturned face having been burnt by some unknown energy that had emanated from the now silent block of crystal in front of him.
As he slowly got back to his feet, Thorne heard a choking noise coming from the doorway to his side. Turning, he saw Lai standing there, blood oozing out from the young man's eyelids.
Thorne quickly backed away as Lai uttered an inhuman growl while straining against his bound arms. Within two seconds a snap was heard. Lai pulled his free arms towards his sides, revealing the reddish cuts caused by the now snapped plastic zip-cord.
Managing to grab the knifelike letter opener from the top of the desk, Thorne quickly sidestepped away as Lai charged. The younger man attempted to grapple, but narrowly missed him.
Both men circled each other, Thorne using the desk as a sort of obstacle, while Lai bared his teeth as clear mucous drooled out from the sides of his mouth.
Lai made another lunge, this time managing to wrap his arms around the older man's body. Unable to twist away in time, Thorne instinctively made a sideways stab, impaling the letter opener into his opponent's collarbone. The younger man's momentum was too much for him to overcome, however, and they both crashed down onto the floor beside the desk.
Thorne's hat had rolled away, and he tried desperately to free himself from the grappling move, but the younger man's arms were now wrapped tightly around his body, and Lai wasn't letting him go as the younger man tilted his head up and began to make coughing noises.
Cursing in desperation, Thorne used his left elbow as a wedge against Lai's neck in a furious effort to keep the young man from biting down on him. Lai's grip felt like an iron vise, and the Chinese man slowly brought his mouth closer towards Thorne's vulnerable neck.
Thorne used whatever adrenaline he had left as he managed to twist out the letter opener from Lai's shoulder and stabbed the young executive a second time, through his left ear. As Lai began to convulse in his death throes, his grip around Thorne's side weakened, and the older man was finally able to push himself away.
Crawling to where he had dropped the lump of black crystal on the floor, Thorne looked behind him once again when he heard a strange squelching noise. What he saw made him temporarily gawk in terrified silence.
Lai's mouth was open, and a wormlike creature slithered out from the corpse's blood-soaked throat. It had a transparent, snakelike body with numerous glass spikes jutting from its sides, using these digits as a form of locomotion.
Knowing that he had moments to live without any protection, Thorne threw himself forward onto the floor and reached out to grab his fallen hat from the ground. He had begun to feel a sense of mind-numbing drowsiness just as he placed the headwear back onto his head.
Within a few seconds he was thinking clearly again. The mind worm crawled helplessly on the floor less than a meter in front of him before Thorne used the chunk of black glass he held in his hands to pound at the creature's brittle body until only a million tiny pieces remained.
20 Oregon
SINCE IT WAS THEIR turn, Elsner helped his son with washing the dishes inside the bunker's kitchen area. The encounter he’d had with the Sasquatch a few days before had jolted his urge to write again, and he had been using Sally's laptop after finishing his work at the greenhouse. A few more days and it ought to be good enough to get published, he thought. But who's going to read it?
Austin glanced up at his father while using a towel to dry the dishes on the tray by the sink. "You okay, Daddy?"
"Hmm? Sure. Why are you asking?"
"Nothing," Austin said as he took another wet plate from him. "It's just that you've been quiet since I took you to see Bruce."
"Oh, I'm just thinking about all the stuff he told us. Did you see him again today?"
The boy shook his head. "No. I really did go fishing because Seth was starting to suspect I was up to something else."
Elsner nodded. Levi and his family had already turned in for the night and Sally was fixing things outside at the cabin so it meant there would be no eavesdroppers. "I thought you talked to that Bigfoot every day."
"No, not all the time. Anyway, Bruce is pretty much walking around now, and he told me he was going to another part of the forest."
"I just hope it doesn't bump into Seth while the kid is out hunting or something. Maybe we ought to tell Levi about it."
"Not yet, Daddy! Bruce doesn't want a whole lot of people to know about him."
"You're right," Elsner said. "I just wish we could go to the government so they could negotiate an alliance or something."
"Remember what Bruce said? He told us there's, like, aliens in our government."
"Yeah, but then how are we going to resolve anything by keeping secrets like this?"
"Maybe you could find another way."
"Well, I'm close to finishing up a news article, but unless I can produce some evidence to go along with it then people will think it's just another alien conspiracy theory. There's tons of them out there on the internet."
"What could Bruce give you? He doesn't have anything."
"Maybe some of his poop? It might prove Bigfoots exist but I'll still have to find evidence that they're intelligent and willing to help us fight the other aliens."
Austin giggled. "Poop? That's too funny."
"Yeah, it is, isn't—"
The unmistakable sound of gunfire coming from outside of the bunker jolted them both. Austin's hands shook and he nearly dropped the plate he was holding.
Elsner gestured at him to stay where he was. "Stay here. I'll be back."
Ignoring the boy's protests, he dashed out into the main corridor. The dinner he had eaten quickly turned to bile as it crept up his throat, as a lurking fear began to grow in his gut.
Stopping near the entryway, he spotted Levi and his family rushing in towards the bunker. The head of the Brown family was in his skivvies and carried a Remington pump shotgun in his hands. Elsner stood by the doorway as Hazel pushed her daughter Faith into the corridor before continuing on deeper into the shelter, while Seth and Levi stood beside a low wall at the mouth of the cave.
Elsner couldn't think. "What's going on?"
Levi reached up and pulled the power switch, turning off the single spotlight over the entrance. "I'm not sure. The dogs started barking and when we checked we saw a group of people heading into the valley using the trail."
