Death Cry

Grant rubbed his jowls thoughtfully, brushing down the edges of his mustache. “The Annunaki have pushed humanity around for at least five millennia,” he told everyone. “If there’s the slightest chance of getting rid of their lizard faces once and for all, we have to take it.”

“Yeah,” Kane agreed, “that’s pretty much the way I see it, too.”

Brigid looked at the notepad that rested before her, its pages full of notations in her tidy, precise hand, before looking back at Kane and Grant. “If only we’d had this thing when they first revealed themselves,” she said quietly.

Kane reached across the table and placed his hand over hers, looking her in the eye. “Yeah,” he said quietly, the single word holding the weight of meaning that all four adventurers felt at that moment, survivors in a seemingly unending battle against an almighty evil.

Grant clapped his hands loudly, breaking the somber mood with his wide smile. “Well, kids,” he announced, “looks like we’re going to Georgia for the holidays!”

T HE FIRST RAYS of sunlight streamed over the horizon, turning the bronze-hued metal hulls of the twin Manta aircraft into twinkling, golden stars as they cut through the skies over the Pacific.

Kane and Grant took piloting duties in their respective vehicles, and once again Brigid took the passenger seat behind Kane. He sat before her, wearing a helmet that enclosed his whole head, forged from the same strange, bronze-hued metal as the Mantas themselves. Within the helmet, a heads-up display fed Kane vast streams of detailed information concerning wind speed, air pressure and a dozen other factors that might affect the pilot’s decisions. But for the purposes of this trip, dusting the clouds as they flew west, the Mantas would pretty much fly themselves. Which suited Kane and Grant just fine, well acquainted as they were with the concept of point and shoot from their previous lives as Magistrates.

The Cerberus field teams had been to Russia before, had encountered their local equivalent known as District Twelve. But for the purposes of this mission, Lakesh had agreed that keeping a low profile was for the best. If this Death Cry superweapon turned out to be a dud, bogus surveillance information or a theoretical project that never got off the drawing board, Kane’s team could potentially look very foolish to their Russian contemporaries. And, by contrast, if this Death Cry really did exist, there was no question that District Twelve would stake a claim on it, despite the actual discovery work being the province of the Cerberus people.

“We’ll take the Mantas in low,” Kane had proposed before they set off, “fly in via China and sweep up toward the location so we don’t spend too much time in Russian airspace. Chances are good they won’t spot us, and they’d expect us to come at them via the Atlantic route anyhow.”

Now, having passed his eyes across the various readouts to make sure that things remained steady, Kane tilted his head back and spoke with Brigid. “Any idea what this place is like?” he asked.

Brigid had been checking through the notes she had made the day before, refamiliarizing herself with everything she had uncovered. She glanced up at Kane, at the strange bronze helmet propped atop his neck, and watched as rain-heavy black clouds zipped past through the exterior view port. “The coordinates place the redoubt in the Caucasus Mountains, about seventy clicks from the Black Sea,” she replied. “A temperate area, the closest big settlement on the old maps would be Pyatigorsk, but satellite pictures show that’s long since gone.”

“Huh,” Kane grunted. “Probably bombed back to the Stone Age like most everything else during the nukecaust.”

“The state of Georgia was about as far west as you could go in the old Soviet Union,” Brigid continued. “It was actually one of the last states to be incorporated into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, remaining a semi-independent satellite district for the first twenty years of rule by the Communist Party.”

“That’s pretty strange,” Kane said thoughtfully. “Constructing a doomsday device outside your borders.”

Brigid shook her head, even though she knew that Kane couldn’t turn to see her while he wore the bulky helmet. “Not that unusual really,” she explained. “There are political benefits to keeping the really nasty stuff out of your own country, especially in a climate of worldwide hostility. The U.S.A. and other countries used similar tactics, storing nuclear missiles and the like in territories that were sympathetic to their political ideology rather than inside their own borders. Makes it less easy to get caught, and if you do, your government can simply deny all knowledge.”

“Ah,” Kane responded. “You’re talking that diplomacy speak again, Baptiste.”

Kane scanned the heads-up displays for half a minute before continuing. “It’s funny,” he told his flight companion, “I never gave much thought to the location of the Cerberus redoubt up to now. It’s kind of interesting that the military brass stuck the crucial development arm of their mat-trans system close to the border between the U.S. and Canada. Guess they didn’t want it too close to Washington, just in case something went askew.”

“Yup,” Brigid agreed, “there was certainly a time when the mat-trans was new—and potentially unstable—technology. Lakesh could tell you more about how things were in those days.”

“I’m sure he could.” Kane nodded. “So right now we’ve left one out-of-the-way mountain installation to go visit another.”

“That’s about the size of it,” she confirmed. “You were hoping for something else?”

Kane sighed. “Just once,” he told her, “I’d like to get a nice mission in the sun somewhere. You know, grab a few rays, maybe a spot of surfing, some fishing, build a sand castle.”

“The last time we tried that, I wound up a hostage for pirates in the Florida Keys,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, but at least you got to work on your tan,” Kane grumbled.

At that moment, the Commtact units that were attached behind the ears of Kane and Brigid clicked and Grant’s voice could be distinctly heard by both as though he were there in the cockpit with them. The Commtacts were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been found in Redoubt Yankee years before. They featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull. Theoretically, a deaf wearer would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact.

“Just coming up on the East China Sea now,” Grant said. “We’re at about the halfway point.”

“Let’s just fly steady,” Kane responded, “keep it nice and smooth.”

“That’s a roger,” Grant acknowledged before signing out.

The Mantas dipped below the clouds for a moment, and Brigid took in a sharp intake of breath as she saw the huge landmass that encompassed Asia and Europe stretching out before them. They were on their way.

Chapter 6

It was a little after midday local time when they arrived in Georgia. Kane and Grant took several passes over the mountainous area in the Mantas over a period of fourteen minutes. The Mantas split formation and separately took several swift runs across the Caucasus Mountains, surveying the general territory and ensuring nothing untoward was waiting close by to surprise them.

While they didn’t expect to run into any particular problems, Brigid reminded them that the local authorities might not take too kindly to their rummaging through their military sites for plunder.

“We’re not plundering,” Kane grunted, “just…finding.”

“How do you figure that?” Brigid asked as their Manta cut through the air for another pass at the location in question.

“You can only plunder stuff if it belongs to someone else,” Kane told her through the bulbous flight helmet. “Way I see it, anyone with any real claim to this Death Cry device is long since in the grave. No one’s seen fit to go look for it for two hundred years, right?”

Brigid shook her head, even though she knew that Kane could not see her. “Well, we don’t know that,” she admitted, “but it’s a pretty out-of-the-way location and redoubts tend to be well protected against casual intruders, so there’s every chance—”

“You see?” Kane cut her off, triumph in his tone. “Like I said—just finding.”

Brigid chose to defer to Kane’s judgment for now, but she knew that if District Twelve or another Russian agency got wind of their presence there, there would be a lot of explaining to do.

Once Grant had made his sixth pass, this time beneath the cloud cover and at what amounted to a slow crawl for his Manta craft, he confirmed that the area was definitely uninhabited.

“Think we can go in?” Kane asked over the Commtact, his own Manta hidden in a high bank of wispy, white clouds.

Grant’s even tone came back to Kane after a moment. “Now’s as good a time as any.”

The Cerberus field team had located evidence of a military installation nestled between two of the snowcapped mountain peaks and decided that this was likely the installation that they sought. A tiny concrete building, perfectly square and little more impressive than a tool shed, stood guard at the end of a small paved road. From the air, the short road curled around into the shape of a hangman’s noose, a turning circle for vehicles. The rusting remains of a military transport lurched to one side of the road, its canvas roof cover long since lost. Other than the black strip, there seemed little to distinguish the area from anywhere else in the mountain range, but Brigid confirmed that this area tallied with the coordinates listed in the decrypted surveillance files.

Kane deployed the Manta’s various scanning capabilities, but the data that came back was inconclusive. “Could be there’s an underground bunker there,” he told Brigid, “but it sure ain’t anything special.” He ticked off the basic scanning checklist for her. “No reactors, no indication of any power source, no personnel showing on thermal—no one alive, at least. No significant metallic content, nothing out of the ordinary for the mountain range in general.

“I’m no expert,” he continued, “but I think the best we’re going to find is an air-raid shelter.”

“How big?” Brigid wondered.

She heard Kane suck air through his teeth in thought. “That,” he told her, “is something that would require landing and maybe getting the shovels out.”

Shortly thereafter, Grant brought his Manta in for a fast vertical landing, bringing the craft down swiftly and smoothly to park beside the short strip of blacktop. Kane followed two minutes after, descending rapidly from high cloud cover once he was certain that no one was coming to investigate Grant’s appearance.

Grant waited across from the landing area that he and Kane had chosen, crouched within a small patch of scrub grass, clutching a Copperhead close-assault subgun, scanning the area with alert eyes and ears. The Copperhead subgun was almost two feet in length but looked like a toy in Grant’s huge hands. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed, and an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides the Sin Eater, the Copperhead was Grant’s favored field weapon, thanks to ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create in short measure.

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