Kane Gilmour - Ragnarok

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.

Black One piloted the transport ship just above the wheel’s curvature. As Bishop descended, controlling the rappel with one hand, he swept an MP5 up and began pummeling dire wolves with bullets.

In thirty seconds, he was down on the top of one of the abandoned capsules that sat parked hundreds of feet above the river. Most of the passengers were below him now, so Bishop took the opportunity to fire wildly, taking out dire wolf after dire wolf, sometimes with only a grazing shot, but enough of an impact to send the target tumbling.

The rain wasn’t helping either. Bishop lay down on his stomach on top of an abandoned capsule to cut the wind and rain against his body. He hadn’t detached from the rope yet, and decided not to. Instead, he crawled forward to the end of the egg-shaped passenger compartment’s roof and began to slide over its end toward a precipitous fall. With one hand on the rope, he allowed some slack to spool out. He grabbed the lip with his other hand and swung down and into the empty carriage, dropping to the floor. The rain spatting on the faceplate of his helmet and the wind pushing his armored body let up immediately. The view was fantastic, and Bishop knew that on a clear day you could see almost 25 miles. Today the visibility was not that good, but he could still see several more of the glowing portals that had opened in various parts of the city.

The center of the capsule had a white roof, but the ends of the egg shape were all windows. The end he’d come through had a set of double doors that retracted to the sides like in an elevator. A designer wooden bench filled the center of the space. Bishop knew from a previous visit in calmer times that the egg-shaped air-conditioned capsule rotated as the wheel moved, but at such a minimal speed that passengers barely felt the rotation. In fact, it moved so slowly that the huge Ferris wheel never stopped turning-tourists simply stepped into and out of the slow moving capsules at ground level. One complete revolution of the wheel took about a half an hour. But now the wheel wasn’t turning at all. Bishop guessed the operators must have hit an emergency stop before fleeing from the spectacle of the besieged Ferris wheel.

He was glad the wheel wasn’t moving, because it made aiming at the dire wolves easier. He lay down on the floor of the capsule, sliding his body next to the bench, with the barrel of his XM312-B pointing at one of the lower side windows under a pane with a huge British Airways logo in red and blue. His view was down the arc of the wheel to the next two lower capsules. He fired once, blasting the window out. Then he started obliterating any dire wolf in his field of fire. It was so easy that he started to wonder why the dire wolves kept pouring down that direction, as if they couldn’t see where he was in his capsule. As if they were afraid of the height themselves. He watched the limber creatures swing and slide their clawed grips along the white metal struts to the next lower capsule, and he realized there was something wrong with the dire wolves. These were not the same creatures he had faced in Shanghai a few hours earlier. Those beasts had moved with a surety and speed he had never seen before.

Bishop stopped firing for a moment and rolled to look up through the clear ceiling of his capsule, back toward the portal where even more dire wolves were emerging. There were far more of them in this attack than in Shanghai, but they were moving much slower. Pausing to tilt their heads, as if looking for something or smelling the air. Sometimes darting their heads from side to side, like a startled dog, when it hears a far off noise. His observations were interrupted when one of the creature’s heads exploded into white mist as Knight continued his barrage from the still hovering Crescent.

Bishop detached his rappelling line and turned to fire on the dire wolves that made their way past his shattered window, heading toward the passengers below. He fired a few volleys and then two things happened.

The first was that the rain intensified to a full-on deluge. His visibility reduced significantly.

The second thing was completely bizarre. The dire wolves-all of them, as if receiving a cue telepathically-simply stopped moving. Wherever they were on the Eye, on top of one of the capsules below Bishop’s vantage point, on the white metal frame or just emerging from the portal, they just…stopped. Frozen where they stood.

“What the hell?” Knight’s voice sounded in Bishop’s headset inside the helmet and it startled him. He had become so used to hearing only his own breathing inside the helmet, that any external sound was freakishly loud by comparison.

“No idea, man. It’s like they’re afraid of something.” Bishop replied, and then he began mowing down any stationary targets he could sight through the curtain of rain. Knight’s fire from above resumed and soon they drastically reduced the number of dire wolves on top of the wheel.