THREE
HANDLING
THE TRUTH
Raine walked out into the cold mountain air, where an Air Force jeep stood by, engine running.
“I assume that this jeep is for us, Jackson?”
“Yes.”
Raine walked over and got in the back while his escort went around to the front passenger seat. The jeep pulled away fast, before Raine even had time to get settled.
“We late or something?”
No response. Of course not. Raine looked out at the quiet airfield, the hangars with bright lights inside showing massive bombers and jets as if on display. A few ground crew walked around, but other than their arrival, there didn’t seem to be much happening at the base.
He looked over his shoulder at the small jet. Already it had started taxiing, turning in the other direction.
As the jeep raced toward a distant corner of the base, Raine felt his apprehension—if that’s what it was—grow.
He had been thinking what this might be about. Being picked up in the middle of the night. Flown here. The private jet. Not getting anything from his apartment.
It would be as if he had simply vanished.
Not that there was anybody to notice. With his family gone, and his last attempt at a relationship crashed months ago on the reality of his steady deployments, who’d really be looking for him?
The landlord maybe. For rent. But even that was automatically sucked out of his checking account.
So what was this?
He didn’t know; but he knew one thing. Whatever this was about, he would be finding out shortly.
Raine looked down at his hands: clenched tight, resting on his knees.
Relax, he commanded them. Ease up. Whatever the U.S. government had planned for him was—quite literally—out of his hands.
The jeep streamed on, and they’d soon left the main part of the base with its hangars full of expensive hardware. A massive building loomed in the distance, four, five stories tall. It looked like something NASA might need, but prefab and put up fast.
Raine leaned forward as the jeep went straight to that structure in the early Colorado morning.
The building was surrounded by a fence topped with concertina wire, and at the gate post, four soldiers stood with their M16s at the ready.
And inside the fence—in case no one got the point—an Abrams battle tank, another soldier manning the .50 caliber from the open turret.
Probably more security inside the building itself. Raine’s intrigue was growing. Something pretty important was happening there.
The jeep screeched to a halt, and he didn’t need to be told this was their next stop. He opened the jeep door.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said to the driver.
Following Jackson, he went to the gate. Jackson flashed something from his back pocket, one of the soldiers gave a signal, and the gate opened.
Raine came up beside him. “Y’know, stopping for a warm coat might have been a good idea.”
Jackson was dressed only in his suit.
“Tell me about it.”
A joke? Interesting.
Jackson led the way to a side door. Raine could see this building had giant hangar-sized doors as well. Something big was going on in there.
Or was going to come out of there.
Another solider at that door, but he already had it open, and the two men walked in. Raine noticed that Jackson walked with the quick, direct stride of someone who knew where he was going.
He’d been here before.
He made a sharp right at entering and went down a long corridor with corrugated metal walls on either side. It seemed to Raine that there was no way to go deeper into the building.
But then the corridor turned left, and right again, like a maze. Jackson moved quickly, leading him down a warren of hallways before they came to an open service elevator. It was a wire mesh frame, designed to get big things up and down. Jackson slid it open, the elevator’s gate rattling.
Raine looked up, the roof of the building high above them, then at the elevator keypad.
After a zero, all negative numbers.
“We’re going down?” Jackson nodded as the elevator gate closed. He slid his card in front of a reader—too fast for Raine to see—and a light turned green. The elevator started down.
And it kept going down for what seemed a long time.
When it stopped, someone was there to greet them.
“Lieutenant Nicholas Raine. How are you, Lieutenant?”
Raine looked through the mesh and saw his old captain.
“Captain Hill?” Raine saluted.
Hill opened the gate. At first he was surprised to see his captain, but then Raine noticed the scene behind Hill, and it seemed the surprises might only have begun. It resembled Hollywood’s fantasy version of a war room. Banks of computer screens, some showing images, other data. People walking around quickly with a grim sense of purpose. And toward the back, a raised stairway up to a door.
Two more soldiers at that door.
Raine walked out of the elevator. “Didn’t expect to see you here, Captain.”
Captain Stephen Hill, a man Raine had always respected even if he didn’t always agree with him, laughed. “To be honest, Raine, never expected to see you here as well.” The smile faded. “In fact, I never expected to see you again.”
“I—um—”
“I know. You’ve got questions. Well, I’ve got answers. I have an office down here. It’s small and a bit of a mess, but it will serve.” Hill took a breath.
“I’m ready to tell you everything.”
Hill had his eyes locked on Raine’s.
For what?
“I think I’m ready for that.”
A bit of a smile returned.
“So, Lieutenant, you think … you can handle … the truth?”
Such a line. An old movie scene that every officer Raine ever knew could quote verbatim.
“Always preferred truth to its opposite, Captain.”
“Yeah. I know that about you. Okay—follow me and we’ll get started. ’Cause, you see … you don’t have a lot of time.”
As they walked toward Hill’s office, the captain pointed to a little kitchenette off to the side. “Coffee? Glass of water?”
“No, sir. I’m fine.” Why is he stalling?
They reached his office, and Raine took a seat facing Hill’s desk. It was piled with papers, stacks of photos, and an open laptop. Behind the desk, another computer screen. On it was a paused video, cued to run.
“Tell me, Raine. What do you know about Apophis 99942?”
“Asteroid. Doing a flyby of our planet. Big. Seen the pictures.”
“Right.”
Hill hit something on his computer, and the frozen video on the screen began running. It showed a massive object moving through space. The asteroid.
“That animation?”
“No. Real. We’ve had some deep solar system projects out there. Not public knowledge, but they do intersecting loops of our solar system. Give us video feeds. Mainly to watch what other countries might be doing in space. At least, that was the idea.”
“Jesus, Captain. That is mighty big.”
Raine stared at the live image. This careening hammer threatening to destroy anything in its path.
If this rock from space actually was to hit Earth, we wouldn’t have a chance.
“God. The size of a city. Over three miles wide. Good thing it will miss—”
“But here’s the thing, Raine. It’s not going to miss. It’s going to be a hit. A direct hit.”
The words hung in the room like the pronouncement of a death sentence.
Because in that instant … Raine knew that’s exactly what they were.
“An asteroid that big? It would be—”
“A slate wiper.”
The screen changed. Now it was animation, showing the asteroid plummeting through the atmosphere, a massive shock wave racing before it, walls of ocean water rising up, screaming away from the impact well before the asteroid hit.
Then—impact.
No sound. But there might as well have been, as the animation showed an explosion that seemed to bite off a massive chunk of the planet, sending country-sized pieces of Earth flying upward.
Hill touched his laptop.
The animation paused.
Raine shook his head. Hill had been his captain for two major counterinsurgency efforts, a by-the-book officer who stood by his men, and definitely stood by the truth.
So Raine didn’t question what he’d just been told.
But it seemed unbelievable, unreal … impossible.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “The whole world thinks we’re safe. They’ve been told.”
Hill nodded, and gestured to the control room they had passed.
“Couldn’t miss it. Like Canaveral.”
“Yeah. This is just one of many sites with a similar purpose. Here in America, and in other countries, too. Apophis is coming, and there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about stopping it.”
“So …” Raine took a breath.
The whole mad night had turned surreal. Maybe he’d blink, wake up, and find himself sleeping off the boilermakers from The Hook.
“… we’re doomed?”
Hill sat down. He leaned close. Raine thought—God—that he saw something in the captain’s eyes he’d never seen before. Not in all the bloody streets and valleys of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as bad went to worse.
Were his eyes watering up?
“We couldn’t stop Apophis,” Hill said. “But that didn’t mean we couldn’t do anything.”
He had looked away, and only now looked up at Raine.
A small smile, and Hill looked away again.
Something else was going on inside his captain, Raine realized.
“Ready for your orders?” Hill said.
Raine actually hesitated before responding. He was a soldier, though, and an officer was about to give him a mission. Somberly, professionally, he said, “Yes, sir.”
Hill stood up.
“C’mon, then.”
And Captain Hill led the way out of the office.