SHADOW ROOK RED
Brian Trent
His flight to Lucerne, Switzerland, had been a night hop from Heathrow, and he’d barely stepped from the private airfield when his local contact pulled up in an unmarked car. The man looked grim.
“There’s been a development,” his contact—and friend of twenty years—said. “We’re going straight to the safe house.”
Kiernan Rayfiel of the Central Intelligence Agency climbed into the car, laying his briefcase in his lap. The night was dark. The car pulled away from the airstrip and was suddenly barreling along deserted streets, hemmed in by quaint houses. “This war has been one endless series of developments,” he muttered. “What’s going on, Charlie?”
“Our asset failed to check in. He never fails to check in.”
Kiernan looked at his watch in the gloom. “It’s just past three thirty a.m. Maybe he’s asleep. Isn’t that what normal people do? Sleep?”
There was enough starlight that the worry lines on Charlie’s forehead were visible, not so different from the topographical maps Kiernan had been studying on his flight over. “Hell if I know. I haven’t gotten eight hours of sleep since ’74. Since . . .”
“The paradrop,” Kiernan finished for him. Not wanting to dwell on that six-year-old memory, he added quickly, “When’s the last communication you had with the professor?”
“Thirty minutes ago. He radioed me from the yacht, said he was typing up his report. I left to get you, and was pulling into the airfield when the guys at the safe house called.” He touched the car phone.
“And?”
“The professor’s boat had revved up and was making its approach to the safe house when it just . . . stopped. Like it had gone dead in the water. It’s sitting there now, on the lake. And the professor isn’t answering our calls.”
Kiernan felt a thrum of tension. Charlie steered the car down one twisting street after another, arriving at last at the pier of a lonely boathouse on Lake Lucerne. There, they stepped out into a crisp, star-bejeweled night. Kiernan felt his breath catch as he gazed at the lake and the snow-capped Alps beyond it. He’d never been to Switzerland before—the Swiss were adamant about preserving neutrality in the war between NATO and the Soviet Union. Consequently, they tolerated neither CIA nor KGB operatives working in-country, and they kept a watchful eye on their borders—both on Earth, and in the shadowy parallel world next door.
Nonetheless, Kiernan had always wanted to see the country. In a world at war, it seemed to epitomize a safe haven. An idyllic pocket-universe.
Charlie pointed across the lake to a large yacht. “That’s where the professor lives.”
“On the boat?” Kiernan asked, surprised.
“Remember how paranoid he was at CIA briefings? He’s gotten worse. Comes ashore for supplies and to deliver his reports, but otherwise stays out there.”
“But the safe house is right here . . .”
Charlie shrugged. “Says it isn’t safe enough for him, even under the protection of the Shadow Rooks. To be honest, I can’t blame him. You know there’s been incidents elsewhere. Bombs being gated into offices. People disappearing. And he knows the world of Arali better than anyone . . . been studying it since the Montauk breakthrough in ’64. He’s made more trips there than anyone.”
Kiernan considered the solitary boat. “So he stays on the boat to avoid a Soviet snatch-and-grab?”
“It makes sense. You’re seeing a lake here, but this same location in Arali—”
“—is a three-thousand-foot chasm,” Kiernan remembered suddenly, and clicked open his briefcase to consult his dimensional readout box. The device resembled a compact Tandy TRS 80, attached to a vinyl strap for easy carrying. Its oblong screen displayed green vector graphics peppered by varying sea-level altitude readings and topographical features of Lucerne. Kiernan flicked a silver switch, and the graphics flushed red, showing a wildly different landscape on the other side of the dimensional membrane: Instead of a tranquil lake, a massive chasm stretched like a mighty scar, running south through the middle of the country. He squinted at the numbers there. “Three thousand and sixteen feet, where the yacht is.”
Charlie took a deep drag of his cigarette. “Exactly. It’s not like the Soviets can just walk out there, toggle into his yacht, and toggle back with him as their prize.”
They were quiet for a while, steeped in the night’s deceptive tranquility. Kiernan’s gaze returned to the mountains again—only this time, he imagined he was seeing through them to the Swiss-German border. The latest satellite images had shown Soviet divisions massing in West Germany. The Red Army had renewed its offensive in the hotly contested Fulda Gap, but the storied American Blackhorse Regiment continued to fight tenaciously in the most bitter and brutal theater of combat since Normandy.
Not so long ago, Kiernan thought, nukes would have been brought to bear to halt the Soviets. But now? There was no way to know if target cities were even viable targets anymore; the Russians were believed to have shifted essential military resources to secret Arali bunkers. They could just as easily toggle their tanks and troops out of harm’s way, too, the instant a launch was detected. If the West exhausted its nuclear coffers on improper target discrimination, the Soviets could pop back in and launch a more effective counterstrike.
The door to the boathouse swung open. Kiernan watched a black raiding raft glide onto the lake, pulling alongside the pier. A six-man squad operated the craft.
They looked like Navy SEALs, he thought. Yet they seemed unusually loaded down with equipment, even for a SEAL . . .
“These are our local Rooks,” Charlie explained. “They’ll take you to the yacht.”
Shadow Rooks. The best of the best. Handpicked from elite JSOC units like the Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, and Delta Force, they represented a fifth service that focused on interdimensional warfare outside the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps’s purview.
Kiernan approached the raft. It was a low-lying craft with an outboard motor. Looked as if it had been plucked straight from the Mekong Delta. “Who’s in charge here?”
The men eyed him with hard stares. The stares of men who were steeling themselves for the worst. One of them, a large, bald fellow, said, “I’m Commander Lawrence, Shadow Rook Red.”
“Mister Thompson. I’m with the agency,” he responded, using his cover name.
The man said nothing, making no effort to hide his displeasure. Kiernan could appreciate that. The Shadow Rooks had trained together for a spectrum of scenarios and contingencies. Having a CIA spook aboard added an unknown factor. A weak link to their chain.
On the pier, Charlie flicked away his cigarette. “Commander, the CIA has operational jurisdiction here. And Kiernan is the agency’s presiding expert on Arali. We need him to assess the situation.”
“But—”
“He goes with you, commander.”
The raft’s outboard motor sounded like a muffled chainsaw in the water as the seven men bore down on the professor’s yacht. The main cabin lights were on, visible through tiny portholes. Beyond the yacht, Lucerne was a sleepy Christmas village by starlight.
At a signal from the Rook commander, the raft cut engines and glided alongside the target vessel. Before Kiernan realized what was happening, the men deployed in a coordinated spread along the deck, carbines low and carried at the waist in anticipation of close combat. Kiernan waited on the raft for the all clear, anxiously clutching the briefcase in his lap.
After a minute, one of the Rooks signaled him. He stepped aboard and went straight to the main cabin.
Commander Lawrence was waiting for him inside.
“The boat’s empty.”
Kiernan glanced around. What did the floating office of the world’s premiere interdimensional cartographer look like? It was a mess—consisting of a desk, keyboard, and dot-matrix printer, but the floppy drive was gone. A file cabinet had been opened and pilfered. The professor had a cassette player, too; the floor was strewn with cassettes of Stravinsky, Bach, Mozart, and—oddly enough—Neil Diamond.
The yacht’s controls were installed in the bow-facing wall. The bulletproof circular windows looked out starboard and port.
“The door was locked from the inside,” Commander Lawrence reported. “We had to break it down to gain entry.”
Kiernan surveyed the room. There was a cup of coffee by the yacht controls, still hot to the touch. “He was just here. We couldn’t have missed him by more than ten minutes.”
“Then his abductors couldn’t have gone far.”
Kiernan set his briefcase down, pulled out the dimensional readout box. Its red display glowed bloodily in the cabin. “There’s a chasm around us. Maybe his abductors used a helicopter—”
“Not a chance,” the commander scoffed. “Due respect, have you ever been to Arali?”
Kiernan held the man’s gaze, fighting the urge to say: I’ve stepped through the dimensional membrane on three continents, thank you very much. Instead, he said, “Many times.”
“Then you know about the constant, gale-force winds over there. Helicopters can’t navigate that for long. Sure as hell can’t fly in from Arali parallels of Moscow or Berlin. Besides, the Swiss watch their borders on both worlds.”
“So maybe they grabbed him by boat. On Earth.”
“We were watching the boat!” the man snapped, and—seemingly more to himself than Kiernan—added softly, “I was watching it approach. No other vessel was out there. I saw the yacht turning about, start its approach, then bang . . . the engines cut.”
Kiernan tasted bitter adrenaline in the back of his throat. There were some wounds that didn’t heal, he thought. Ever since his violent wake-up call to the grim new realities of combat in ’74, he was cursed by a constant anxiety. What people in another age would have called “jumping at shadows.” Crazily, he wondered if the expression was still around, and if so, if it had the same dismissive meaning as before.
Professor Lumet had been in his yacht. Behind a sealed security door. Yet someone had popped in like a nightmarish jack-in-the-box, grabbed him, and whisked him away.
The world was far more terrifying than the public understood.
Shaking his head, Kiernan said, “His abductors came in from Arali, regardless of the chasm there. I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they built a three-thousand-foot step ladder. What’s important is that your team get him back before . . . before . . .”
He trailed off as a peculiar sound filled the cabin. It was a sudden, persistent rattling. Briefly, he wondered if it was just the vessel creaking in the water. But no . . . this was distinct and close-at-hand. Kiernan paced around the room, aware of the Rooks watching him dubiously.
What the hell is that sound? he wondered. It’s like the clicking of many small teeth.
Then he looked to the floor.
To the compact cassettes strewn over the carpet.
They were trembling in place, their spools vibrating in response to some unknown tremor.
Kiernan seized an edge of the carpet and yanked it back, exposing a closed storage hatch. Quickly, he swung the hatch open and there, in the narrow space, was a round, silver device with a display showing bright Cyrillic characters . . . counting down.
“It’s a toggle!” he screamed, jumping back to his feet. “Commander—”
The Rook commander reacted with astonishing speed—an operator’s speed. He seized Kiernan’s arm, yanked him out of the room, shoved him toward the raft. “Fall back!” the man screamed. “Everyone fall back now!”
The air was suddenly thick. As if molecules were condensing around them, like an invisible python tightening in a death squeeze. Kiernan recognized the sensation. He leapt over the yacht’s rails to the raft. Commander Lawrence leapt aboard next, followed by one, two, three of his men. The remaining operators were further back, running full tilt, eyes wide in fear . . .
. . .and then the yacht vanished.
The screams of the men were snatched away as they were pulled through the dimensional membrane.
The night was quiet once more.
A toggle bomb.
The activation hadn’t just taken the yacht, but some of the water, too, leaving a temporary hole in the lake. The raft was near enough that it tipped, as if at the edge of a waterfall, nearly pulled along with the disappearance. Then the membrane closed, and lake water sloshed into the hole where the yacht had been.
Kiernan clung to the raft, heart pounding. He couldn’t stop thinking of the missing men. Their strained expressions. Their bulging eyes. Their screams right before the universe shut the door . . .
Those men are falling to their deaths right now, he thought. Screaming the whole way down . . .
That was the challenge in toggling to Earth’s shadowy parallel neighbor: The terrain rarely lined up. You might leave Earth from sea level and end up buried in a mountain. You might depart from a hilltop and find yourself falling into an abyss.
Using Arali as a new theater of war, therefore, depended on accurate surveys of where it corresponded—and where it didn’t—with Earth. Intelligence suggested that the Soviets had so thoroughly mapped their country from Moscow to Vladivostok that they’d managed to build interdimensional offices that lined up room for room.
The space race had been tense enough—and that had just been the threat of a Communist moon. Now, the anxiety was of red shadows pooling across the world’s dimensional backstage . . .
Someone seized him by the shirt, hauled him to his feet. Kiernan found himself staring into Commander Lawrence’s face.
“I said suit up,” the man said. “We’re going in.”
Kiernan couldn’t seem to make his mind form coherent thoughts. “What?”
Dimly, he realized that in his horrified stupor, the surviving Rooks had been busy, climbing into harnesses, discarding some pieces of equipment, and gathering up others. Now, the commander signaled one of his operators, and Kiernan felt his arms being pulled through a body harness, a heavy device strapped secure to his chest. He glanced down, saw the scratched plastic casing of a toggle activation unit. Its central display was simple—simpler than many toys Kiernan had seen in mall display windows.
It consisted of a large dial flanked by a single metal switch.
Yet within the casing was the most advanced technology ever produced by mankind . . .
“We’re going in after the asset,” Commander Lawrence explained. “It’s your idea, and I agree with it.”
“But—”
“If we don’t grab him now, we lose him forever.” Another nod, and Kiernan’s arms were again being pulled through straps—this time, a parachute harness. He felt his blood turn to cold slush.
“Wait a second! I can’t—”
“You said you’ve been to Arali before.” The commander slung a pair of goggles and a breathing mask over Kiernan’s face, fitted them securely in place. “‘Many times,’ I believe were your exact words.”
“Under controlled circumstances!” Kiernan protested, voice tinny behind the mask. “At CIA listening posts! On stable ground!”
“In other words, you’ve used a toggle before. So you know: Crank the dial, let it charge, and flick the switch.”
“But—”
“I just lost three of my men, Mr. Thompson. Professor Lumet is being smuggled through an Arali canyon while we waste time here. Have you ever paradropped before?”
Kiernan numbly touched the parachute’s ripcord. “Six years ago . . .”
The commander hesitated, seeming to do the math and realizing suddenly the grim reality behind it. “I see. You deployed at what—a thousand feet? Clear conditions? Well there’s no such thing as clear conditions where we’re going. When we go through, you count to three and pull that cord, understand?”
Kiernan felt himself nod, heart pounding. Crazily, he remembered the set of orders he’d received straight from JSOC just a few hours earlier: Rendezvous with Lumet in Lucerne, and debrief him on his latest findings. It was to be typical CIA business. Sitting in a comfortable room. Poring over dry research papers. Comparing topographical surveys. Drinking coffee. Firm ground under his feet.
And yet here I am wearing a parachute! How the hell did I get into this situation?
“I swore I’d never jump out of a plane again,” he muttered.
“We’re jumping out of a boat, not a plane.” Commander Lawrence fitted his own breathing mask over his face. “So technically, you’re keeping your oath.” He turned and muttered quickly to his three remaining men, using mostly hand signals that Kiernan could neither see nor concentrate on in his dark and panicking state of mind. “All right, we go in five! Four! Three! Two! One . . .”
Kiernan twisted the dial.
The device at his chest began to thrum.
He closed his eyes, gripped the switch with two fingers, and flicked it up.
Heavy pressure. Like being crushed in a trash compactor. His body turning to lead, dense as a star . . .
Then Switzerland vanished, and he was abruptly in a copper-green sky, falling like a meteor.
The dimensional shift never failed to startle him. The calm terrestrial night air was replaced by a stinging crosswind, nipping at his exposed cheeks and hands. He was plummeting—not into the calm waters of Lake Lucerne—but to a sprawling canyon of greenish stone. Freakish geological formations like mammoth tusks thrust out toward the sky. It was a surrealist landscape, reminding Kiernan of some nightmarish Omni covers he’d seen.
He sucked crisp oxygen through his mask.
The blood pounded at his wrists. In his head.
And for a moment, he was back in 1974.
Back in the ill-fated paradrop on the outskirts of West Berlin.
The news had come down that East German forces had somehow bypassed the Berlin Wall and were in the streets, capturing the French, British, and American sectors. Like the Greeks suddenly—impossibly—behind the walls of Troy. NATO quickly approved a combat drop of several thousand US paratroopers to try retaking the city, and Kiernan—a private stationed in West Germany at the time—found himself in a C-130 with his fellow soldiers, flying low.
Most of the C-130s never made it through Soviet air defenses. Despite a heavy bomber escort, Kiernan watched in horror as Soviet surface-to-air missiles incinerated the aircraft carrying many of his fellow soldiers from the 82nd Airborne. Only a meager four hundred souls survived long enough to make the jump.
They jumped at a thousand feet. He deployed his parachute. Landed in an exposed German airfield. No one around . . . the mysterious invasion had not yet taken that corner of the city . . . but he could hear the chatter of gunfire. Kiernan had taken his first step toward the front . . .
. . .and then the enemy planes appeared.
As if by magic. The night was split by wave after wave of enemy planes.
Soviet planes.
As the American troops stood amazed, the planes dropped their payloads. In seconds, the entire drop was decimated. Four hundred soldiers reduced to a couple dozen survivors standing amid hellfire and sizzling corpses.
The planes vanished as easily as they’d appeared. Pop! Gone like a nightmare before dawn. But then enemy tanks and troops toggled in, cutting off their retreat. The op dissolved into chaos, Kiernan and Charlie and their fellow survivors were forced into a desperate escape while being pursued by hostiles at every turn. In two days, ninety percent of Germany was firmly under Soviet control, and six goddam years later Kiernan still woke up, heart pounding, tasting the adrenaline, thinking he was back in the city, being stalked by interdimensional soldiers . . .
Until that infamous episode, no one had known the Soviets had toggle technology. It had been pioneered by the US in the infamous Philadelphia Experiment of ’43. Too unstable and dangerous at that time. In ’64, the Office of Naval Research resumed its study. Success was achieved. The first, tenuous steps were taken into a realm the team nicknamed Arali after the shadowy underworld of Sumerian mythology.
But no technology stays secret for long. Soviet scientists—working behind the Iron Curtain—had figured it out for themselves. And in 1974, they showed their hand. Operation Red Shadow. A first strike against NATO. The opening salvo of a new age of war.
That disastrous intelligence failure had been the reason Kiernan had joined the CIA in the years that followed. Intelligence was of the essence in warfare, Sun Tzu had written two thousand years earlier, and Kiernan wanted to do his part to make certain the US was never surprised like that again.
Kiernan forcibly buried the memory. Falling, the rip cord in his hand, he focused on the now.
The stinging wind.
The acid-green sky above him.
Far below, he spied the shattered remains of the professor’s yacht. Like an egg smashed open on an alien landscape.
At a thousand feet, Kiernan pulled the rip cord. The canvas snapped open, and he was immediately jerked eastward by the crosswind. Around him, the Shadow Rooks swept down like little spiders riding strands of silk.
Kiernan narrowly missed a rocky spire and landed hard, spilling over, the chute whipping out ahead of him. It dragged him a hundred meters before getting caught on a mushroom-shaped boulder. He cut it loose and stood, trembling, regarding his surroundings. Sand hissed around him, driven by the relentless wind.
Gloam Canyon.
On Earth, Switzerland was a country of mountains, but its parallel coordinates in Arali were a frightful landscape of empty canyons dividing high plateaus. The largest of those canyons, Gloam, ran south from Lucerne to northern Italy like a knife wound.
Kiernan noticed two figures dashing toward him through the sandstorm—Commander Lawrence, and one other Rook operator. They hunkered down with him by the boulder.
“We saw a van moving south,” the commander said. “Looked like a local vehicle, but my guess is it’s not driven by any Swiss citizen. The Russians must have their own safe house in-country. I think I understand how they captured the professor.” He hesitated. “You okay?”
Kiernan squinted through his goggles. “Just three of us now? What happened to the kid who helped me into this getup?”
“Sergeant Kuprin. I ordered him to take the raft to Kapellbrücke—it’s a bridge that runs over the River Reuss. More importantly, it parallels an Arali cliff south of us. While you, me, and Sergeant Scott here pursue the enemy van, Kuprin can provide supporting fire, cutting off their escape.”
Kiernan glanced to the overcast sky. He saw only dark green clouds, but he pictured what was occurring on Earth right now: The operator named Kuprin was driving a raft directly over their heads.
He looked back to the commander. Beyond the man’s shoulder, the yacht wreckage lay scattered. “I’m sorry about your men.”
“We all know the risks,” the commander said. “I’ll retrieve their bodies when we complete the op. Follow me.”
Kiernan trailed the Rooks west, where the cliffs hemmed them in like a massive wall.
“We’re right below where the safe house is,” he muttered, consulting his dimensional display, tied by its strap around his right arm. He squinted at the cliff wall, not really expecting to see the safe house.
It wasn’t there, of course; all he saw were exotic, precipitous peaks. Yet he spotted a narrow trail zigzagging down the cliff wall.
Commander Lawrence followed his gaze. “That’s how we travel back and forth between the safe house and canyon.”
“It’s why the CIA purchased the house,” Kiernan remembered, nodding. “A natural footpath, letting our people come down here without Swiss authorities knowing. I understand the professor used it plenty of times to conduct his research down here. We . . .”
His words died as he saw the Rooks do a remarkable thing. The two men had gathered around what seemed to be just another boulder in the canyon. To his amazement, the “boulder” was revealed as a camouflaging tarp; the men tore it away to reveal an FAV—a Fast Attack Vehicle.
“Hop in,” Commander Lawrence said, taking the wheel. As Kiernan rode shotgun, Sergeant Scott climbed into the back to helm a mounted fifty-caliber machine gun.
Then they drove off, turning south along the canyon in pursuit of their quarry. Driving at the head of the alien storm.
“Don’t suppose you can tell me what the professor likes to do down here,” the commander said as he navigated the FAV around several enormous boulders.
Kiernan adjusted his breathing mask. “You’ve accompanied him, right?”
“We have, yes. Each time he heads down, we act as chaperones. He sets up equipment, takes rock samples, scurries into caves like a rabbit. Never tells us what he’s doing.”
“And you’ve never asked?”
The commander jerked the wheel around a particularly massive boulder. Sergeant Scott clung to the mounted machine gun in the back, scanning for signs of their quarry ahead. “Sure, I’ve asked him. Told me it was classified.”
Kiernan nodded. “And his answer stands, sorry.”
“Don’t mind if I speculate, do you?”
“Go ahead.”
The commander drove around one natural obstacle after another with the skill of a professional stunt driver, and then floored the vehicle as they reached an open stretch. “I think he’s looking for oil. That’s the real goal here, right? The professor is tight-lipped, but he mentioned that Arali used to have oceans. No surprise: You can see the rocks here look like dead coral. So I’m guessing that whatever alien plants were here might have turned into oil. Vast, untapped reservoirs deep underground. That would have a big impact on the global stage.”
Kiernan said nothing for a moment. “Interesting theory. But I have a question for you, commander: How the hell did the Russians grab the professor? You said you had an idea . . .”
“The van we’re following? It must be Russian, outfitted with a toggle. Somewhere in south Lucerne, they would have gated in . . . wherever the terrain let them access the canyon. They could have driven until they were directly beneath the yacht. Then a few of their Spetsnaz commandos exited the van and toggled to Earth. Still under the yacht, but now underwater. Swam up to the boat. Probably hopped onto the roof and toggled through it—like ghosts. Grabbed the professor. Toggled back the way we did—parachuting down with him in tandem to . . .” He broke off, leaning toward the windshield. “Contact dead ahead!”
Kiernan saw it. A gap in the sandstorm had opened; a dark van was revealed. It was bumping and jostling along the canyon floor at high speed. Only a thousand yards ahead of them.
Commander Lawrence floored the accelerator, closing the distance. “Tires!” he shouted to the sergeant.
At the mounted gun, Sergeant Scott opened up with the fifty cal. The van’s rear right tire was shredded. The van swerved, its driver fighting for control.
“Remember that the professor is in there,” Kiernan warned.
The back doors of the van flung open. A man leaned out, hefting something like a rocket launcher. Commander Lawrence cursed, veering aside as the man fired.
It wasn’t a rocket launcher.
Twisting around in his seat, Kiernan saw a hole appear in the sandstorm where they had just been. It looked, for all the world, like a vortex of muddy water circling a drain. A sudden hole in reality.
“It’s a toggle launcher!” he cried.
The FAV wove around a jutting spire of rock. Sergeant Scott squeezed off another controlled burst and the van’s front right tire disintegrated.
“We got ’em!” the sergeant cried joyfully. “We—”
And suddenly he was gone
Kiernan was watching him when it happened. The enemy with the toggle launcher must have fired another round, because Sergeant Scott—along with the mounted machine gun, a fuel bladder, and a rear chunk of the FAV—was messily torn away. As if an invisible monster had clamped its teeth down and . . . and . . .
Jesus Christ, Kiernan thought, staring.
The sergeant’s torso-less waist slumped forward, spurting blood into the FAV’s two front seats.
The toggle effect had snatched the rest of him, pulling with enough force to rip him away above the waist.
His body has just burst into the River Reuss. It might wash up somewhere, and people will wonder where it came from . . . this legless corpse and portions of a vehicle and gun . . .
Somehow, Commander Lawrence kept control of the FAV. Kiernan saw the enemy van swerving wildly on its rims. It spun out, sideswiped a boulder, and flipped over.
The commander slammed the brakes and leapt out. Using a low boulder as cover, he aimed his carbine at the van. Kiernan followed him out into the storm, drawing his own sidearm.
The van lay like a downed animal. Sand skittered against it, blowing out like plumes of jet exhaust.
The back doors reopened. A man emerged—the bastard with the toggle launcher. He staggered into the wind. He froze as he saw the FAV. Raised the launcher.
A shot rang out. The van’s windows were painted red as the man’s skull blew open. He collapsed in place.
It took Kiernan a moment to realize that he had been the one to pull the trigger.
Another shape stumbled from the van; Kiernan almost reflexively fired again, and it was Commander Lawrence who stayed him. The shape emerged—two shapes, actually, one holding the other at gunpoint and using him as a human shield.
One was Professor Lumet. He wore a breathing mask and goggles, and the same winter coat and gloves Kiernan had seen him wear in Arali expedition footage. The man resembled some out-of-place Arctic explorer.
The second man wore a full-body black toggle suit, complete with headgear that reminded Kiernan of World War I gas masks. It had a snout and two inset eye lenses. The man pressed a pistol to the professor’s head.
“Put down your weapon!” Kiernan shouted, and switched to Russian: “Opustite oruzhie!”
The crack of a sniper rifle rang out from the cliffs above the canyon. Commander Lawrence grunted in pain and slumped to the ground.
Kiernan instantly dropped beside him, pulled him to the cover of a boulder. “Shit!” he cried, seeing the spreading patch of blood from the commander’s shoulder.
The commander blinked behind his goggles. “There’s another goddam Russian out here. Shot came from above.”
Kiernan consulted the dimensional display box tied around his arm, flicked its screen to green. “We’re almost directly below the Kapellbrücke. I’d say they had the same idea as you: They posted someone at the bridge to provide supporting fire.”
Commander Lawrence pressed two hands against his wound, staunching the blood. “Then they’ve got us pinned down here.”
Steeling himself, Kiernan risked peeking out from behind the boulder. It was just a glance; he pulled quickly back as a bullet thumped the ground where he’d been. But he’d seen enough: the gunman with the professor as hostage, slowly retreating up a natural ridge to higher ground. Trying to get above the waterline.
And then?
Then he’d toggle back to Earth with the professor.
They’ll smuggle him out of the country. Maybe at the Swiss-Italian border. Maybe through some Arali fissure, cave, or pass the Swiss don’t know about or don’t have the manpower to guard. Hell, no one has the manpower to guard national borders on two goddam worlds. Strategy now involved multidimensional thinking . . .
Kiernan stiffened. He had an idea.
“Wait here,” he muttered.
Commander Lawrence frowned. “Where are you going?”
“To get the professor. I’ll come back for you.”
And with that, he cranked the dial on his chest, flicked the switch, and—
—was underwater.
Beneath the River Reuss.
Cold water slammed him, knocking him about. Kiernan struggled to orient himself in the currents. He twisted, kicked off toward where he’d seen the ridge . . . where back in Arali, the Russian was making a slow retreat with his hostage.
The water was dark around him. His only light, in fact, came from his dimensional display box, glowing like a flare from where he’d tied it. Kiernan swam, lining himself up with coordinates just above his target’s trajectory. He oriented himself again, hanging in the cold darkness. Then he cranked the dial on his chest, flicked the switch again.
He snapped back into Arali.
Three meters above the ground, as it happened.
Kiernan managed to land on his feet despite the height and a rush of river water appearing with him. The Russian spun around with his hostage, nearly losing his balance in the torrent of water swirling around his ankles.
Thinking fast, Kiernan untangled his dimensional box, wound back, and swung it like a medieval flail. The Russian was fighting to regain his footing when the blow caught him in the side of his head. He was knocked out cold, crumpling like a discarded doll.
Professor Lumet turned in wonder to his savior. Eyes wide behind his facemask, he cried, “Kiernan? Is that you? How—”
Kiernan threw the harness back over his shoulders, cranked the dial again, flicked the switch. Wrapping the professor in a bear hug, he was suddenly—
—back in the river.
The professor still in his arms.
Professor Lumet, to his credit, didn’t panic in the water. Together, they kicked for the surface and breached. The Kapellbrücke spanned the river overhead. They pulled themselves onto the ancient wooden bridge. It was deserted at the early hour. The snowy peaks of the Alps were aglow with sunrise blushing in the east, painting the river and surrounding city in autumn hues.
Panting, shivering, Kiernan looked across the river and spied a raft out there, only fifteen yards away. The raiding raft! He could see that Sergeant Kuprin was aboard, too; the man appeared to be asleep, sprawled out, as if staring at the sky.
Shit, Kiernan thought. In the dawning light, he saw the hole in the man’s chest, center of mass.
“There’s a sniper nearby,” he whispered to the professor. “We have to get you to the safe house before he reappears.”
The professor gave an anxious nod. Together, the men ran along the bridge. At the end of its length they stepped onto the road there.
And froze in place.
A man had appeared across from them. Arriving like a magician’s trick, in a swirl of greenish sand. He wore a full-body toggle suit like his comrades in Arali. A sniper rifle was cradled in both hands.
Kiernan stood, dripping and cold and afraid. The Russian raised his rifle. Squinted through the scope. Lined up his crosshairs.
In a burst of sound and movement, the FAV appeared and plowed into the sniper at high speed. The man was flung across the street, rifle skittering away. He flopped over once, and didn’t move again.
Kiernan and the professor stared as the vehicle circled around and braked. Commander Lawrence sat in the driver’s seat, looking pale and pained, but a little proud, too.
“Figured I’d come back for you,” he said, and waved them over.
By 1900 hours, Kiernan was on a return flight to Heathrow. He’d barely had a chance to glimpse his idyllic Switzerland from the safe house windows. In a quiet corner office, he’d debriefed the professor, reviewed the man’s latest Arali findings, and was then being driven by Charlie to the airfield for a hasty jaunt out of the country . . . all while local news percolated with stories of a hit-and-run in Lucerne, the body of an unidentified gunman, and shots fired near the River Reuss.
Kiernan leaned back in his window seat, a coffee clutched in both hands.
He wasn’t thinking of the local news, though. Wasn’t thinking of Switzerland, either. To his surprise, he wasn’t even thinking of the infamous paradrop of ’74—a memory never far from reach—when Operation Red Shadow had first unfurled its terrible claws.
Rather, he sipped his coffee and reread the professor’s report. It lay opened before him, printed out in dot-matrix text on a spool of white-and-green paper. Kiernan trembled as he read, and reread, the opening lines:
My explorations of the cave system beneath the canyon have now yielded the proof I’ve long suspected, and which the attached photographs and documentation will attest. What the United States, and indeed the rest of the world, will do with this I can only wonder. But here’s the situation:
Arali is not a dead world.
There are things slumbering beneath it.
And they’re beginning to wake up.