Patrick Lee - The Breach

The man on the other end took a quick breath, then spoke evenly. "Trap Door, I agree with authentication. Go ahead."

Travis felt his mouth open to speak again-but stopped. He turned his ear to the open bay door behind him.

From far away came the sound of rotors. At the same time he felt the sphere in his hand tense somehow; the light flickered like a nervous twitch.

Then he was drawn back to the phone, and spoke rapidly: "Relay the following EAM to USS Maryland. By order of the president of the United States and the chief of staff, Navy, set condition four-alpha, immediate launch of two Trident ICBMs against Target Package 3261, Nanjing ballistic missile complex, East China, Jiangsu Province."

The man on the phone didn't reply right away, and Travis said sharply, "Commander."

"Yes, sir." Another pause, not even a second, and the man said: "In accordance with protocols governing the release of strategic weapons, the senior controller will ask you for the president's and the Navy chief's nuclear launch codes. Those are the final authorizations required."

"Put him on," Travis said.

"Go go go," Emily whispered in his mind. The light was strobing so quickly now it was almost smooth again, like a bad fluorescent bulb.

The rotors were getting loud; the echoes off the valley walls made it hard to guess the distance.

A soft-spoken man came on the line. "The president's code first, please."

"Six, one, nine, three, three, three, two, eight."

"Now the Navy chief of staff's."

"Four, nine, six, eight, five-"

Suddenly the chopper sounded much closer; it must have just passed the last ridge and entered the airspace over the valley.

"Sir?" the soft-spoken man said.

"I'm sorry," Travis said. "Starting over, four, nine, six, eight, five, seven, seven, one."

"Thank you, sir, EAM is authorized and will transmit about thirty seconds from right-"

The man's last word was cut off by a shriek of metal as autofire ripped through the Black Hawk. Instinct overrode Travis's euphoria and he threw himself clear, toward the back of the troop bay. His wrist collided with the rear bench, and the Whisper broke from his grip. It hit the floor and rolled to the back corner.

Travis cried out, not from pain but from a swell of anguish. Losing hold of it-her, losing hold of her-felt like losing a loved one. Like losing his only loved one.

The chopper passed overhead with a turbine scream and a downrush of air that rocked the Black Hawk. The gunfire stopped and Travis saw the aircraft arc out over the valley, making a wide loop to come back.

He got up on his knees and reached for the Whisper Three inches shy, he stopped.

Clarity filtered back in, like blood to a deprived limb. He withdrew his hand as if from a serpent. What had he done? What had he fucking done?

A voice, tinny and just audible, issued from the phone unit behind him. "Sir? Are you still on?"

The preceding minutes came back to him now, laid bare to his logic. Outside, the helicopter had completed its semicircle and was returning, ten seconds out.

"Sir?"

Travis spun, dove for the handset and screamed into it, "Call it off! It's bullshit! Call it off!"

"Excuse me?"

"Call someone and check on it, it's all bullshit!"

"Who the fuck is this?"

Through the window he saw the gunner's muzzle flash overhead. He vaulted backward and fell from the bay door into the dirt, as the Black Hawk was shredded by a much more sustained burst than before. He got to his feet and-catching a last glimpse of blue light under the bench seat-sprinted into the trees.

He was forty yards away when he realized the helicopter wasn't following. The thunder of its rotors remained constant; it had gone into a hover, and now the turbine pitch dropped. Travis reached a grove dense enough to provide a screen and stopped. Looking back, he saw the chopper descend and set down beside the Black Hawk.

The men inside had the look of the hostiles who'd tortured Paige. One of them, wearing heavy gloves that went to his elbows, jumped from the chopper and ran to the Black Hawk's bay door, his face momentarily bathed in the Whisper's glow. He reached in and took hold of the sphere, and despite his protection, he swayed on his feet, his face relaxing and then his mouth turning up in a child's smile. Behind him, two others hauled a heavy steel box from the chopper, roughly the size of the cobbled one inside the Black Hawk. They reached the man with the Whisper and had to shout and nudge him to get his attention. At last he seemed to notice them. Nodding, he opened the container and shut the sphere inside it.

Twenty seconds later, its cargo secured, the helicopter revved to a scream again and climbed away over the valley.

The Tangent personnel who arrived on the next Black Hawk were under stricter orders than the first group. They bound and hooded Travis, belted him aboard, and he heard nothing but the craft's engines whining at full power for the next two hours.

He thought of the Whisper. The euphoric-even erotic-sensation of holding it still weighed on him like a personal loss, in its absence.

Yet as strange and powerful as the experience had been, he was forgetting it. Rapidly. Even now, just this short time after the fact, his memory of the entire event had faded to something like a receding dream. He could recall how it'd started: picking the thing up, Emily Price's voice directing him to fire on the unseen killer. And he could recall how it'd ended: letting go of it inside the Black Hawk, after slamming his wrist on the bench seat, and becoming aware of what he'd done under its control. What he'd done with the satellite phone, and what was about to result from it, thousands of miles away.

But everything between those two points was now a bright blue haze. Like a drug high he couldn't remember, except for fading pieces. The thing's terrifying capability. Its impossible knowledge of everything-literally everything. It'd told him something about Paige. What, he couldn't remember. And it'd given him a street address, for reasons that now escaped him. Something that sounded German, he thought; he could resolve it no further than that. As the time stretched out aboard the Black Hawk, he found even these trace memories slipping deeper and deeper out of his reach.

The chopper landed. He had no idea where. The aircrew helped him outside onto pavement, and he heard the heavy turbofans of a large jet powering up. Someone guided him up a set of metal stairs, and then he was aboard the plane, his head still covered.

There were quite a few people on the jet, ten to fifteen voices, he thought. A set of hands led him to a seat at the back end. Outside, the engines rose in pitch, and the aircraft began to taxi.

He heard tension in the voices around him. Fear, too. Calls came and went, in a few different languages. From the context of those made in English, Travis gathered that the people on the other end were government officials in countries all over the world. For a moment he wondered if the Whisper's plan had been carried out anyway, and the ICBM launch against China had gone ahead. The man next to him assured him it hadn't; his screamed warning at the end of the call had been more than sufficient.

But something was going on. Something that concerned the whole world. Something that scared the shit out of these people.

A moment later the jet turned onto its runway. It stopped for a few seconds as its engines came up to full scream. Travis's interrogation started just as it lifted off.

Five times, for five different people, he told his account of what'd happened, starting with his discovery of the wrecked 747, Box Kite. The point of the repetition was obvious enough: to see if his story would break along the fault line of a lie. It didn't. All he kept from them was the part he'd lost: the now nearly impenetrable amnesia effect that hung over the minutes he'd spent with the Whisper.