Invaders: The Chronowarp Page 15

  “You’ll have to give me directions eventually,” Sergei said.

  I suspected I would only know when I saw the place. I studied the grid map on the panel screen. The plane approached the orbital space of Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula.

  I focused on each part of Iraq. There was nothing in the north. The central region…? Nope. Hadn’t Ancient Sumer been nearer the coast? I felt something stir in me. The farther I looked toward the coast, the more that seemed right.

  “Try there,” I said, pointing on the grid map.

  “The Basra Marsh?” Sergei asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  I shrugged.

  Sergei frowned until he tilted his head. With a sigh, he began bringing us down. We used a large spiral pattern to slowly work down from low Earth orbit to stratospheric levels and lower still.

  An alarm began to sound as our air speed slowed even more. Outside, I saw tiny toy vehicles on a highway. Then I saw something more sinister coming fast at us.

  “What’s that?” I shouted.

  Sergei leaned forward. “Missile,” he said tightly.

  “Who’s firing at us?”

  “Iraqi Air Defense, I imagine.”

  “Are they using American weapons?”

  He checked a gauge and nodded, and gripped the flight controls with both hands. “We will attempt to evade,” he said. “Hang on.”

  -39-

  The first missile exploded harmlessly in the air—almost harmlessly, I should say. The blast shook the plane. The cockpit shivered as I swayed in the navigator’s chair.

  Sergei threw switches, taking us down faster—

  “Look!” I shouted.

  Another missile streaked up at us. Sergei used electronic countermeasures. I figured they should easily fool Earth-built missiles.

  I was wrong.

  This one struck the plane’s underbelly. We saw that on a camera. The warhead ignited, ripping away most of the undercarriage there.

  The plane lurched and nosed down. My stomach crawled up to my throat. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

  “Pull up, pull up!” I shouted.

  Sergei shivered as the entire cockpit shook. The noise became deafening. He battled manfully, and we stopped nose-diving toward the approaching surface.

  For a second, Sergei stared at me. He grinned wildly. I didn’t know what that was about. He even laughed. Then he winced in pain, raising a shoulder, groaning.

  He kept fighting for our lives.

  No more missiles rose up to greet us. That helped.

  The next eight minutes proved to be a harrowing experience. The plane bucked, twisting like a corkscrew until Sergei leveled out. He sweated and panted, and every time he hesitated, he winced in pain.

  I could only surmise that Hap forced him to give it his best. That proved to be darn good, if not exactly what I needed in order to make a secret landing.

  The Ungul space plane roared a hundred feet across the Iraqi sands. We moved fast, going lower, lower—

  “Get ready, my American friend.”

  I did, hanging onto my armrests, having already made sure my straps were cinched tight.

  Then, it happened. Sergei took us down onto the sand. The underbelly scraped, screeched, shed metal, and we shook horribly. The plane slewed, threatened to flip, straightened and finally rolled in seeming slow motion. Everything turned and spun. I smelled fire, electrical fire, and heard hissing all around me.

  At last, we came to a stop.

  I hung upside down in my seat. I made a quick check of my torso and legs. I couldn’t see any puncture wounds. Everything felt in one piece.

  It was daylight outside, late morning, I thought.

  With deliberation, I unbuckled, hanging from my seat and lowering myself to the ceiling. Sergei did the same for himself. He was bleeding from a cut above his left eye. Otherwise, he seemed okay, if shaken.

  “You going to make it?” I asked.

  “We shall see,” he said.

  We walked across the ceiling, found Jenna battered about some, but breathing and ready to walk out. She unbuckled and I caught her.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes. You can set me down. I won’t break.”

  After I did that, I kicked open the door, looked around and jumped out. The ground rushed up, but I landed okay. Sergei crumpled onto the sand. He didn’t have the benefit of my strengthening.

  I caught Jenna for the second time. This time, I set her down before she asked.

  I didn’t have time for anything else. In the distance, I spied sand clouds. We had company coming.

  ***

  Sergei scrambled to his feet and grabbed my arm. “Move,” he said. “Run.”

  I tried to disengage my arm from him.

  “No,” Sergei said, urgently. “You must run. Field Agent Jones, run, please.”

  Jenna seemed puzzled with Sergei.

  “Come on,” I told Jenna. “Listen to him.”

  I grabbed her arm and ran, forcing her to run. Sergei sprinted with me. We made it about three hundred feet away before the plane exploded.

  Sergei opened his mouth. He might have been shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything. He dove against the sand, clutching the back of his head, shoving his face against the ground.

  I threw Jenna down and followed Sergei’s example.

  A powerful blast blew over me, washing me with heat, sand and grit. I became hot—a bigger blast roared with a second explosion. That lifted me and caused me and the others to tumble head over heels.

  Finally, I lay panting in the cooler air, normal air. I felt exhausted. Wearily, I raised my head. There was little left of the space plane. That little bit burned fiercely.

  I dragged myself upward to my hands and knees and crawled to Jenna. She’d stopped breathing. I immediately started mouth-to-mouth. I breathed, watched her, breathed—

  She began to choke and cough as tears streamed from her eyes.

  “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay.”

  She lurched up with a sob, grabbing my neck and hugging as tightly as she could. She had a fierce hold, and it began to hurt.

  “Okay now,” I said. “Lay back, rest.”

  She inhaled sharply.

  I twisted around to see what she was staring at.

  Sergei had sat up with his mouth open. His eyes were wide and staring. Smoke trickled from his ears. I realized intense pain gripped him. At that moment, he screamed like I’d never heard anyone scream. He stood, then fell and thrashed on the ground. More smoke trickled from his ears. Abruptly, his head exploded. It was grisly and evil.

  “Hap,” I whispered.

  Jenna whimpered. I think she was near her limit. She hugged my neck tighter than ever.

  “Let go,” I said, gently prying her arms from me. “We have company coming.”

  It was her turn to turn around. Hummers approached. It was reminiscent of Nevada. These Hummers had big antennas with whipping American flags on the ends.

  Jenna and I sat in the desert. The Hummers were aimed at the wreckage. Someone must have seen us. The caravan swerved toward us.

  The two of us stood up.

  The Hummers braked, throwing up yet more dust. American soldiers wearing armored vests and toting M-16s piled out of the vehicles. They kept the assault rifles aimed at us, mostly at me.

  Finally, an overweight captain wearing dark sunglasses stepped out of a Hummer. He approached us, stopped and pulled a glossy Hollywood-style photograph out of an inner pocket of his uniform. He looked at the photo and then Jenna.

  “Are you Jenna Jones?” he asked.

  It took Jenna a moment to say, “Yes.”

  “Field Agent Jones of the CAU?” he added.

  “Yes,” she said faster than before.

  “I’m to hold you in custody, Field Agent. If you try to escape, I have orders to shoot to kill.”

  “What?” Jenna asked.

  “Take her,” the captain said. “And take him
along too,” he said, pointing at me.

  -40-

  It didn’t take a genius to realize Hap hadn’t wanted Sergei Gromyko running free. I did wonder if that meant Hap was stuck up there in orbital space with no way to get down to the surface.

  I wondered about something else. Had the Ungul plane held Sergei’s clones, or had the clones been aboard Hap’s dump-truck-sized escape pod?

  I asked the captain why they had picked us up, instead of some Iraqi patrol as I’d have expected. He told me to shut up. He had direct orders that we were to remain silent. If I refused to shut up—the overweight captain turned in his seat to stare at me through his sunglasses.

  I got the message. He would do what he had to in order to comply with his orders.

  I sat silently, thinking. The captain had a photo of Jenna. Why would the CAU send her photo in particular and give orders to shoot to kill if she tried to escape?

  What had Captain Bright of the Swordfish reported before the torpedo destroyed the submarine? Bright might have reported that Jenna and Tony, along with Logan, had not returned in the bathyscaphe with Mouse. That might have been CAU’s last communication with Bright. Would HQ assume we three had something to do with the submarine’s destruction?

  That seemed like a stretch but not an impossibility. CAU knew about the space planes. Obviously, someone had tracked us as we entered Iraqi airspace. That someone had launched surface to air missiles. Immediately thereafter, a U.S. patrol arrived with orders to arrest Jenna.

  Did the CAU coordinate directly with U.S. military units?

  There was another problem. If the Eshom had survived the Swordfish’s destruction by riding inside a corpse to the Arctic surface, how long would it take the Eshom to travel…wherever it planned to go? How fast could the Eshom assimilate information and begin giving orders in a new host body?

  Could the Eshom be behind the space plane’s destruction and our detention? I didn’t know enough to give odds.

  Meanwhile, Kazz and Philemon still lurked in the background.

  I looked past one of the bodyguards beside me in back. I wore handcuffs behind my back again, and they’d taken my knife. We moved along a highway, passing normal Iraqi vehicles.

  Fifteen minutes later, our caravan slowed and stopped at a checkpoint along the highway. There was a sign with foreign lettering. I had no idea what it said.

  The Hummers continued down a long gravel road. We soon reached a chain-link fence with a gate, checked in at a guard post and sped to an inner walled compound. My Hummer parked before a concrete building. I twisted around in the seat just in time to see Jenna’s Hummer turn out of sight.

  We got out; the guards removed my handcuffs and escorted me to a bathroom in the concrete building. Afterward they escorted me to a small room with a bolted metal table and two bolted-down metal chairs. The guards indicated the nearest chair.

  “I’ll stand,” I said.

  There were three of them with me, beefy, tough-looking soldiers.

  “My orders are that you sit,” the sergeant said. He had a bull neck and thick traps, a weightlifter for sure.

  Soon, I drummed my fingers on the metal table. I hated spinning my wheels like this. I—

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you have a map of Iraq?”

  The sergeant thought about the request, rapped his knuckles on the door and a slot opened. He whispered to someone outside. The slot closed and the sergeant told me nothing.

  Ten minutes later, the slot opened again. Someone passed a rolled up paper through. The sergeant took the paper and brought it to me.

  I took the plastic-coated map and unrolled it. It was a map of Iraq and the surrounding countries.

  I studied it for a time, trying to jog whatever the Polarion machine might have put in my mind. I concentrated on the lower area of the two rivers. That was the general location of Ancient Sumer. If I remembered correctly, Sumer had been older than Ancient Egypt.

  A Sumerian site—the one I wanted, anyway—should have been in the lower area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The longer I studied the area, the more it seemed wrong to me.

  Yet that didn’t make sense. I was supposed to go to a Sumerian site. But if I had no idea where it was, what was I supposed to do?

  I let go of the map and watched it roll up at the edges.

  I imagined the captain was interrogating Jenna. How long would that take? Would the captain and CAU eventually believe her story?

  I had become thoroughly bored and sleepy when someone finally rapped against the door. The slot slid open and mumbled words passed through to the sergeant.

  “You’re leaving,” the sergeant told me. “Get up.”

  I didn’t care for his tone, but I was glad to be going somewhere else. We marched through the same corridors, stepped outside and reentered a Hummer.

  The same bodyguards sat on either side of me. The sergeant sat behind the wheel.

  “What’s going on, huh?” I said. “Shouldn’t someone check me out? I did just survive a crash landing.”

  The sergeant and the other two ignored me. Soon, the passenger-side front door opened and the overweight captain slid into the seat.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  The captain turned back to regard me. He no longer wore the dark sunglasses, but that wasn’t the only thing that seemed different. His facial skin was tighter and his eyes—

  I knew a moment of panic. To hide it, I grinned. “I’m still supposed to keep quiet, huh?”

  The captain nodded and sat forward. The sergeant must have taken that as a sign. He put the Hummer into gear. Three other vehicles joined us. As a caravan, we left the compound, traveling on the same gravel road as before.

  The panic had come from what I’d seen in the captain’s eyes. There had been a hint of silver in them. The strange color had only lasted a second, if that long. How the Eshom could possibly be in the man—no, it didn’t matter how.

  My panic changed to a sense of foreboding. What had happened to Jenna? Was she in one of the other Hummers or had she remained at the base? Why did I have the feeling the Eshom was taking me to the place of my execution?

  -41-

  The caravan moved along an Iraqi highway.

  I wanted to ask about Jenna and about my fate. Instead, I waited. That was hard, though. If the soldiers knew an Eshom controlled their captain, they might help me kill it. Yet, how did one kill an Eshom? Before I got that far, how did a prisoner convince soldiers that an alien entity had taken over their commanding officer?

  I wrestled with the problem like a dog gnawing a bone. Before I reached an answer, we arrived in a small but ultra-modern looking Iraqi town. The Hummers pulled up in front of a three-story glass building. The soldiers hustled me out. To my relief, Jenna waved to me from a different group.

  I waved back. She seemed tense, and she never once looked at the captain.

  The captain gestured, and we entered a carpeted lobby with a uniformed woman sitting behind an information desk. Half of us took the stairs. On the second floor, the captain, sergeant, my two bodyguards and me, along with two other soldiers and Jenna, entered a swanky conference chamber. It had a long table with many comfy chairs around it.

  “You two, sit,” the captain said.

  I sat on one side of the table. Jenna sat on the opposite side. The soldiers lined up against the walls, Jenna’s on her side and mine on mine. The captain sat at the head of the table.

  “This is all rather mysterious,” I began.

  “Wait,” the captain said.

  I wanted to say so many things. But I waited. How was the Eshom going to play this? The Eshom was in the captain, right?

  The door opened and an Iraqi national, I presume, in a white lab coat over a western-culture shirt and tie, entered the chamber. He had a Saddam Hussein-style mustache and a similar build to the former dictator.

  “You wish to speak to me?” the Iraqi asked in British-accented English.

  “Could I have a
moment alone with you outside first?” the captain asked.

  “I am quite busy,” the Iraqi said, irritated.

  “It will only be for a moment, sir,” the captain said. “I have also been instructed to offer you one hundred thousand American dollars for your time.”

  The Iraqi’s brown eyes widened. “That is…that is quite generous. I suppose—”

  “Don’t do it!” I shouted, lurching to my feet.

  The sergeant guarding me drew a gun. The man was on the ball. The sergeant stepped behind me, pressing the gun against the lower part of my back.

  “Is the man dangerous?” the Iraqi asked the captain, nodding toward me.

  “No,” I said. “But he is.” I pointed at the captain. “Don’t go anywhere alone with him.”

  That startled and upset the Iraqi. The captain frowned. “Just a moment,” he told the Iraqi.

  The captain came around the table, approaching me. I remained standing. The captain made shooing motions. The sergeant backed away. So did his men.

  The captain took one of my arms, drawing me away from everyone else. “Logan,” he whispered so I could feel his breath on my face. “You must not spoil this. Your woman will die if you do. These soldiers will die. You will die. Do you want that on your conscience?”

  That confirmed it for me. I was speaking to the Eshom.

  “I’m not willing to sacrifice the rest of the world to save me or them,” I whispered.

  “Logan, Logan,” he said, as if we were long-lost buddies.

  The words had a hypnotic quality. I swear I could feel pressure against my mind. It was a beguiling sensation, and I found it harder to concentrate.

  “You took me seriously before,” he whispered in a jovial manner. “I was upset then. Upon further review, I find that I intensely dislike your world. It is too grungy, too cold and far too wet. I want to leave. You want me to leave. What could be simpler?”

  That seemed so sweetly reasonable. If he wanted to leave…that was a good thing. That would solve the problem. Yet…a few facets of this troubled me.

  “How did you get here so fast?” I whispered. “You were in the Arctic.”

  The captain drew back from me. “Sergeant, please take the field agent and the others to the next room. Sir,” he said to the Iraqi. “I will be with you in a moment. I have a few necessities to discuss with this gentleman first.”