Godzilla at World's End (22 page)

Colonel Briteis locked eyes with the youth. "Don't screw up," he said, and then dismissed the brand-new corporal.

What Bright Eyes didn't tell me was how many chances I would get to do just that!
Brennan thought bitterly.

"Corporal," Tucker Guyson said, interrupting his thoughts. "What should we do?"

Brennan could not make a decision. But salvation came from an unlikely source.

The elevator doors on the tower attached to the airship's cargo hold slid open. Two young women were standing inside the steel cage.

"Let's go, GI Joe," Robin Halliday said with a smile, motioning the men to board the elevator.

"Yeah," Shelly Townsend chimed in. "We're getting out of here."

"Wow!" blurted Jim Cirelli, who spent way too much time watching television. "You're Robin Halliday ... Wow! I'm a big fan of yours."

"Get in the elevator and I'll give you an autograph," she quipped, tugging his arm.

"Let's go, soldier!" Shelly said, looking out the door at the airship floating above them. She could hear the turbofan engines powering up. "We don't have much time."

"I ... I mean,
we
can't ... we can't go," Sean Brennan announced. "We've been ordered to stay at our post and guard this airship."

"Well," Shelly retorted, "your post is leaving ... Now, do you want to go with it, or stay here and say hello to the monster?"

Sean turned to his men, then looked out at the crowds surging around the park. Some of the Peruvian policemen had already melted into the stream of refugees. The others were getting ready to.

"Okay," Brennan decided, turning to the men he commanded. "Grab your gear and get in!"

The ten soldiers swiftly entered the huge cargo elevator and rode the steel car into the bowels of the
Destiny Explorer
.

In the streets of Lima ...

Simon Townsend was helping two American soldiers dig a woman out from under the rubble of a shattered structure. As they pulled her free of the wreckage, she kept shouting something in Spanish. Colonel Torres approached, and the American asked him to translate.

"She wants you to find her baby," the colonel announced before moving on.

Townsend swallowed hard and continued to dig through the ruins. He found the baby a few minutes later, trapped under its crib. Miraculously, the child was unharmed, though stunned. As soon as he picked up the infant, it began to cry.

After he placed the baby in its mother's arms, Simon stood erect and wiped away the sweat that streamed down his face. He pulled loose the wet cloth he had placed around his mouth and nose, but immediately began to cough from the smoke.

The heat was intense this close to the blaze, which was still consuming whole sections of Lima.

Belatedly, firefighting crews arrived at the scene, but there were too few of them. Far too few.

Then, as he prepared to go back to work, a shadow passed over Simon Townsend. He looked up in time to see the
Destiny Explorer
cross the sky over the inferno. As the airship flew above the heart of the conflagration, the valves on the airship's hull were opened and the ballast was dumped. That maneuver was meant to lighten the ship so that it could rise higher into the sky.

But this time the maneuver had a beneficial effect. Thousands of gallons of water spilled down onto the burning buildings. It was not enough to extinguish the flames or even stop the firestorm from spreading, but it helped.

Then the airship turned lazily in the sky and flew off toward the Pacific Ocean, away from the destruction. Simon Townsend watched it go with little regret. He figured that he and Colonel Briteis could reestablish contact with the
Explorer
later and set up another rendezvous. But in the meantime people here in the streets needed his help.

"Godspeed,
Explorer
," he muttered aloud before he went back to work.

Sunday, December 10, 2000, 4:15 P.M.
Over the Pacific coast of Peru

Grupo 21 had first been alerted forty minutes before. They were scrambled from their new base near Iquitos, on the border with Ecuador. The squadron, made up of U.S.-built A-37A Dragonflys and British-built Canberra bombers, usually patrolled the disputed zone on the border. Interest in the area had heated up when some valuable and exploitable minerals were discovered there.

The timing couldn't have been worse for the squadron.

A Canberra bomber had crashed two days before, during a routine training mission. The rest of the Canberra fleet was ordered on a stand-down until extensive safety checks could be completed. The scramble alert came right in the middle of those safety checks.

Most of the Canberra bombers in Grupo 21 were all but dismantled. It would be days before they were ready for service. Not so the Cessna Dragonflys.

Built by the Kansas aeronautics firm famous for manufacturing light planes for civilian use, the Dragonfly was created by Cessna designers in the late 1960s for duty in the Vietnam War. The light COIN - counter-insurgency - aircraft was designed for bushfire wars and so was perfect for use in South and Central America.

The Dragonfly was short and squat and wide and klutzy-looking. On the ground, the belly of the aircraft was mere inches off the tarmac, and when fully loaded, the airplane lumbered down the runway like an overstuffed turkey. Its long, straight wings were tipped with sleek instrument pods reminiscent of warplanes built in the 1950s.

On eight hardpoints beneath the wings, the Dragonflys carried six high-explosive rockets and two 100-pound iron bombs. Each warplane was also armed with a GAU-2 six-barreled Minigun.

Inside the two-seater, the pilot and weapons officer sat in tandem within a large bubble canopy, which was not pressurized. The Dragonflys were low-level attack planes powered by twin General Electric turbofan engines with a top speed of 500 miles per hour. The Peruvian Air Force warplanes wore the tri-color markings of their nation and were painted a dull, misty gray with splotches of darker hues.

Commanding the eight Dragonflys of Grupo 21, Captain Salazar piloted the lead aircraft with his weapons officer, Lieutenant Abelle. The squadron had followed the Pacific coast down from the disputed zone, each crew wondering what they were about to encounter.

Fifteen kilometers away from Lima, they saw thick billows of black smoke rising from the city.

Captain Salazar also noticed a strange blot on the horizon. He squinted into the distance in an attempt to make out the details. Then he glanced at his "wizzo," who'd had the new search radar screen added to the cockpit in a recent upgrade.

"It's the airship," Lieutenant Abelle announced presently.

Ah
, Salazar recalled.
The great Yankee airship.
The elongated shape was moving away from Lima and out to sea.

Good
, the squadron leader thought with relief.
At least that lumbering thing won't get in the way ...

Presently, Captain Salazar tipped his wing, and the eight warplanes banked toward the city. The leader of Grupo 21 felt his pulse quicken. He was anxious to get a look at this "monster."

But as the Dragonflys approached Lima, the city was completely obscured by thick, rolling smoke from a thousand fires. The eight warplanes warily approached the dark, oily columns of dense smoke. Suddenly, out of that cauldron, a bolt of electric fire lanced out and struck the Dragonfly cruising on Salazar's port side.

The airplane detonated with a loud report that rocked the squadron leader's plane. The explosion, fed by fuel and high-explosive rockets, unfolded like an evil orange and scarlet flower. Secondary explosions rolled like thunder through the boiling black smoke as the aircraft and its two crewmen plunged into the streets below. Salazar's aircraft was buffeted by the powerful shock waves.

"Pull up! Pull up!" Salazar shouted into his command net. The Dragonflys rose as one, and then scattered in all directions as another bolt of energy stabbed at the sky. Out of the corner of his eye, Captain Salazar saw another bright flash in the smoky sky.

A few minutes later, clear of the city limits, Salazar ordered his men to regroup over the Pacific Ocean. When the squadron was reunited - minus two aircraft - they formed up and dived for the attack once again ...

Sunday, December 10, 2000, 6:21 P.M. EST
The entire world

The blackout was instantaneous and affected every corner of the globe. At the exact moment in time, every form of communication beyond human speech ceased to function. Phone lines went dead. Television and radio stations went off the air. Cable systems lost their ability to send or receive signals via satellite or hard-wiring. Computers connected to phone lines were scrambled, their memories fried.

If the signal was sent through the air, or over a wire - by electronic impulse or as a beam of light through a fiberoptic system - it simply stopped working.

The world was effectively rendered mute.

Governments all over the world scrambled to find the cause of - and the solution to - the calamity. But no one could have possibly considered the immediate or long-range consequences of such an impossible event. Within minutes, the tragic results became evident to thousands of horrified eyewitnesses.

Dozens of passenger airliners crashed while attempting to land without guidance from air-traffic controllers. Radar ceased to function, and there were many midair collisions, and even collisions on the runway. Two passenger planes collided over Queens, New York, while trying to land at LaGuardia. Much of the debris landed atop the Arthur Ashe Tennis Stadium in Forest Hills, destroying the famed sports arena.

Ships at sea, small and large, were suddenly lost. Without geo-positional satellites to guide them, or navigational beacons beamed from land, several ships ran aground. A European cargo vessel crashed into the fog-shrouded coast of Spain. A Libyan tanker rammed a pleasure cruiser off the coast of Greece.

In the worst sea disaster of them all, a Japanese supertanker collided with a cargo ship, spilling millions of gallons of oil into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Osaka. Already, oil slicks a hundred kilometers long were washing ashore around that ancient, beautiful city.

Emergency calls in every metropolis in the world went unanswered. Thousands died in fires and traffic accidents, as victims of crimes, from heart attacks and strokes - all because help could not be summoned in time to save them.

Within hours, riots swept through the major cities of the world. Some were caused by panic; others were by design. Civil order all across the world broke down. Without communications, the very fabric of civilization began to unravel ...

Monday, December 11, 2000, 9:16 A.M.
Bridge of the
Destiny Explorer
Over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile

"This is
Destiny Explorer
, calling anyone, come in, please, anyone ..."

Nothing but harsh static sounds emerged from the radio. Shelly rose from the communications station and lowered the volume. The bridge was suddenly silent.

"How about your communications equipment, Corporal?" Shelly asked Sean. The soldier, who stood at the huge window staring out at the ocean, cleared his throat.

"We've tried our command nets, and they're dead," he replied. "I sent Rocco and our communications man, Mike Templeton, up to the top of the hull to set up their satellite gear. They haven't reported in yet, but I don't have high hopes, Miss Townsend."

"What about the computers?" Shelly asked, turning to Leena Sims, who sat at the navigational computer.

"The internal computers are still working," the intense dark-haired girl answered. "And we can pull up the maps we need, so we pretty much know where we are. But anything that involves long-distance communications, like the satellite net or the geo-positioning system, is down. Everything is gone ..."

Her voice dropped an octave. "It's like the end of the world," she murmured, a shadow crossing her face.

"Sunspots?" Michael Sullivan asked. Leena shook her head. Captain Dolan and Second Mate Gil Givers did, too.

"I would bet that this is not a local event," Captain Dolan stated. "Communications have been spotty for days, and GPS satellites have disappeared as if they fell out of orbit. Something weird was going on long before this happened."

Then the bearded captain smiled proudly. "For the last two days I have been navigating the old-fashioned way - with a compass!"

"So what
is
going on?" Shelly asked no one in particular. Captain Dolan, at the helm, replied. "I think I can answer that question," he announced. "Perhaps I am the only man on Earth who
can
."

All eyes turned to the captain, but it was U.S. Army Corporal Sean Brennan - the man who, because of his temporary rank, was supposed to be in charge of the airship and its passengers - who finally spoke first.

"I think I should brief you all on the situation in the Antarctic," Brennan said. "I suspect that you know something about what's happening. It's time I told you the rest, just as Colonel Briteis explained it to me."

Captain Dolan faced the youth. "You tell your story, son, and then I'll tell mine ..."

***

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Dolan stood before the group seated in the crowded briefing room of the
Destiny Explorer
. On the table in front of him was a stack of battered journals and tattered maps scribbled with handwritten notes.

The group had just finished listening to Corporal Sean Brennan, who told them all of the details of the briefing he'd received the night before the monster arrived in Lima. The briefing was very much like the one Simon Townsend received, minus the fancy graphics and an authority like Dr. Birchwood.

Brennan outlined everything he knew about the pit in Antarctica, and the mission that he and his Airborne troops were supposed to undertake once they got there.

Shelly Townsend, Nick Gordon, Robin Halliday, Ned Landson, Michael Sullivan, Leena Sims, and Peter Blackwater listened in stunned silence. Though Captain Dolan was hesitant to tell his story to everyone - especially the teenage passengers - Shelly insisted that they be present. Their future was at stake, too.