The Rising(34)

“Beginning of what, Sam, beginning of what?”

Sam saw the shock and sadness in his wet eyes, wished there was something she could say to make him feel better.

“We have to do what your mother said,” she reminded him instead, thinking of the severed arm spewing wires instead of veins, and skulls that dented like car fenders. “Now, Alex,” she continued. “Please, we need to go.”

“Where, Sam, where are we supposed to go?”

She swallowed hard. “I have no idea.”





FIVE

TRACKERS

The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.



—ALEXANDRE DUMAS





33

THE BUNKER

LANGSTON MARSH STUDIED THE scroll on his computer as he did every morning and whenever time allowed. Hours spent in darkness broken only by the light of the screen, absorbing incident report after incident report into his psyche until he found what he was looking for. In a few minutes, the new man would be ushered into his office, located in the sprawling bunker he almost never left.

There was a war coming, and he needed to be ready for it at all costs. The new man, who came highly recommended, was extremely well versed in military matters, a worthy addition to the army, and the cadre at its top, Marsh was building.

The beautifully furnished office in which he was working offered a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean through its expansive window-wall of glass. The scene was even more beautiful to him at night, the way the moonlight reflected over the currents lopping over the shoreline and filling the room with the steady crash of cascading waves. Other than the spill of moonlight and a single standing floor lamp, the room’s only illumination sprang from the glow off the computer screen through which he continued to scroll.

The complex software constantly scanned the Web sites of every newspaper and television station in the country in search of stories containing several preprogrammed key words and phrases, prioritizing those with the highest concentrations. The software left the most mundane stories in black, ones of some note in green, and those of the highest interest in red, which were accompanied by a pinging sound when his computer received one.

The stories pulled were confined mostly to accidents, crime, and particularly murder, the vast majority of which were mundane and easily dismissed. Disappearances interested Marsh the most, along with sightings of strange lights, machines acting up in inexplicable ways, animals behaving strangely, and other unexplained phenomena. The software organized the most notable among these incident reports by region in search of geographical patterns. Other data banks were searched for patterns as well, including large migrations from some areas and influxes into others.

Marsh knew what he was looking for; he just didn’t know how exactly to find it. This war was his life’s work, something that had driven him to amass the vast fortune he had for the power that came with it. Power he intended to use to fight an enemy the rest of the world refused to acknowledge. Why should they? After all, that enemy hadn’t yet struck at them, as it had at Langston Marsh, changing his life inalterably and setting him down this path when he was a mere child.

A buzz emitted from an unseen speaker built into his desk.

“Colonel Rathman is here, sir,” the voice of his assistant followed.

“Send him in.”

Marsh rose from his chair, turning toward an elegant section of wood-paneled wall as it parted into a doorway, allowing a huge man dressed in black 5.11 tactical gear to enter. Rathman stood as close to seven feet as six, even without combat boots. He was strangely and utterly hairless, not from birth, Marsh had read in his dossier, but from the heat wave loosed from a terrorist bomb. He had no eyebrows or hair and his arms bared beneath a tight short-sleeve T-shirt looked slathered in oil. The heat had been so intense that it had burned off Rathman’s tattoos as well, something Marsh hadn’t thought possible, leaving a patchwork of embroidered scars behind.

Then again, Marsh’s entire life’s work was based around what nobody thought possible.

“A pleasure to meet you, Colonel.”

Rathman came to a rigid halt ten feet before Marsh, virtually standing at attention. “And you, sir.”

“You saw duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“I did, sir. Eight tours.”

“Which ended rather unceremoniously in your discharge. What was the procedure called again?”

“It was called an Article Thirty-Two hearing,” Rathman explained routinely, no trace of embarrassment or indignation in his voice. “I accepted a nonjudicial punishment in exchange for agreeing to resign my commission.”

“And this was over the alleged murder of civilians.”

“There was nothing alleged about it, sir. But ‘civilian’ is a variable term. My superiors didn’t see them the same way I did.”

“But, then, your superiors weren’t there, were they?”

“No, Mr. Marsh, they were not. The rules of engagement, apparently, had changed, while I didn’t.”

Marsh followed Rathman’s gaze as it swept the office, his eyes flashing like a camera, seeming to record everything he saw.

“Anything strike you as odd, Colonel?”

Rathman looked toward the sprawling window offering a majestic view of the sea and waves beyond. “We’re inland, sir. The Pacific Ocean is hundreds of miles away.”