Objekt 221 Read online

  “Yes and no. Not exactly,” he said. “Let’s keep walking.”

  * *

  “You know the idiot part of Jurassic Park?”

  Miles and Damon had walked past the terrarium of extinct flora and the corridor had fully returned to its normal state—regular lighting and doors on both sides of the hallway. Damon’s mind was racing, quietly, behind his ever-watchful eyes. This was no longer a trip around the enormous facility—there was something now troubling about what was going on. He had just passed a huge display case filled to the brim with living examples of extinct plants. He wasn’t sure what was coming next, and was only half-listening to Miles.

  “What?” Damon asked. “The book or the movie? And which movie?”

  “Either,” Miles answered without missing a step. “Either story. Entire series. Same flaw.”

  Damon shrugged.

  “I’m a bigger fan of Crichton than Spielberg.”

  Miles nodded.

  “Storytellers, both, but they share the same affliction. They get too caught up with the dino DNA, right? Thousands of words in the book explain what’s going on and scene after scene in the movie. There’s one critical flaw in the story, though.”

  Miles paused as if he wanted Damon to come to the right conclusion. Damon, for his part, was keen to show his college buddy that his mind wasn’t reeling from what he had just seen.

  “The irrational frog-DNA leap?”

  Miles shook his head.

  “Nah. This wasn’t even mentioned in the book. Or movie.” He walked three more steps in silence. “I’ll give you a hint. Assume that you could create the dinosaurs. What then?”

  Damon thought for a moment.

  “The environment.”

  Miles smiled and nodded.

  “Yep. You got it. Sort of. I’ll explain. In truth, the air would kill them.” They continued walking toward the quick-approaching end of the hallway. “Assuming all of the other stuff was possible, the atmospheric composition was quite different a hundred million years ago. Not only the air composition, but the particulate matter—everything. All of those movies like Signs or War of the Worlds—remember the big reveal? How Earth is able to defeat the alien intruders? It’s the Earth itself that kills the aliens.”

  Damon was smiling. He and Miles had had numerous conversations that went similarly at Berkeley. A study break. Relaxing over a Papi Blast pizza.

  “Like oxygen. Almost a quarter of our atmosphere,” he said. “A truly toxic gas that literally eats metal. We’ve evolved to breathe it, but it would absolutely melt a weary space traveler.”

  “Yeah.” Miles laughed. “Exactly. Jurassic Park, or, more accurately, Cretaceous Park, pulls a mixture of dinosaurs and plants into the modern era….”

  “The quaternary.”

  “Yes, of course. Into the quaternary era from the Mesozoic, before the K-Pg Extinction. The air likely contained much less oxygen and much higher levels of carbon dioxide. As well as elevated temperatures in general.”

  Damon glanced back at the terrarium.

  “I thought the air during dinosaur times had a higher concentration of oxygen,” he said. “I thought the theory was that the added oxygen was one of the reasons the big lizards grew so huge. Gigantism, I remember reading.”

  Miles shook his head.

  “Not so. Current estimates put the oxygen concentration closer to 10 percent. Much lower than our current 21 percent.”

  They continued walking forward, now at the end of the corridor. There was one door at the head of the corridor that was secured via keypad, voiceprint, and handprint panel. On the right-hand wall was a panel that was roughly two-meter by two-meter square. There was a small panel to the right of the door labeled “Auxiliary 5B.”

  “The dinosaurs couldn’t breathe,” Damon said quietly, almost to himself.

  With a huge grin on his face, Miles reached over and pressed the green button on the auxiliary control surface. The panel slid back.

  “Yep,” Miles said. “That’s why we need to wear these when we go back.”

  As the square metal panel split down the middle and slid to the left and right into the surrounding walls, Damon just looked on with wide-open eyes. Miles’ last comment—taken in conjunction with what the open panel revealed—was starting to sink in.

  Behind the steel panel were 20 face masks lined up nicely on hooks. Shatter-proof acrylic. Hermetically sealed. Temperature resistant. Each mask had a notch in the bottom that held a canister roughly the size of a can of soda. The bottom of the opening was lined with nearly 100 such canisters. They were labeled O4BC – Breathable Air.

  “Oh shit,” Damon said.

  “You’re going to have fun working here.” Miles smiled.

  * *

  “Christ on a cracker,” Britta said, leaning forward in her desk chair.

  She was sitting in the comfortable leather chair with Marcus Osborn and Jason Beale flanking her, slightly behind. They had each watched the video a dozen times, but this was the first time it had been presented to the boss.

  Marcus was holding a tablet, inputting commands. The video image on Britta’s laptop screen came to its conclusion and froze.

  She didn’t move, remaining pitched forward in her chair, only the balls of her feet resting on the floor.

  “Run that back again,” Britta said to Marcus without turning her head.

  They had watched footage of Building 5’s west corridor from this morning. It was mostly footage from Beale’s visor camera, but also elements of the rest of his team’s recordings.

  The blood smears.

  The destroyed gear.

  The 10-foot predator.

  Uncategorized.

  Four heavily muscled arms.

  Giant, spiked tail.

  Eating a world-class soldier like an after-school snack.

  The amalgamated footage ran its course a second time.

  “Data is set to burst-upload,” Marcus said, again, pressing commands on his tablet. “We’re having trouble retrieving the visuals from Harrison’s team.”

  Britta, again, not looking back at the two men, addressed them.

  “You find me footage of the attack and you find out what was causing your glitch.” She reached forward and wound the video back to an earlier portion. She froze the screen on a ghastly image—when the sensor had first picked up the predator. It was standing in the harsh light of the camera, chewing on the shoulder of a headless warrior. Blood and gore were dripping down its jaws, coating its chest.

  Marcus gave a small shudder—it was a horrifying image. Beale just looked at him and shrugged.

  “The egg-heads are running their version of the recordings through the necessary filters,” Beale said. “Prelim results are in the folder. They’re calling it UC-0104 until they can get a clear picture of what’s going on.”

  Britta put her hand on the folder and slid it closer to her laptop. Finally, she turned to look back at the men.

  “When are you going back out?” she asked Beale.

  He shrugged.

  “There’s nothing on the schedule as yet, ma’am,” he said. “NR-401G was the final specimen on the current order sheet. I’m sure they’re working up a new list, but there’s been nothing approved so far. It’s SOP (standard operating procedure) to give the men 48 hours downtime between excursions.”

  Britta nodded.

  “When do you think they’ll be ready to grab one of these?” she said with a head-bob toward the monstrosity that dominated her laptop screen.

  Beale shrugged.

  “All due respect, no idea. It’s been a while since the lab coats have come up against a predator of this nature. The last time, it took about two weeks—four missions—to gain enough data to try and snag one. Ma’am.”

  She nodded.

  “Right. I remember. CX-2978. I’ll talk to Carter later and see about coming up with a schedule.” She looked from Marcus to Beale and back. “Thank you both for bringing me this data so qui
ckly.”

  The two men nodded and took the hint that they were excused. After they had left the office and closed the door, Britta leaned forward, pushed the laptop about a foot further across the desk, and rested her elbows on the surface. She put her chin on her two balled-up fists and stared intently at the laptop screen.

  “Well, fuck,” she said.

  And then smiled.

  * *

  The lab was bustling with activity and Miles didn’t seem to notice. He led Damon across the huge room, past numerous partitions piled high with both chemical and electronic workstations, and to a corner desk. There were separate rooms walled off, but they seemed to Damon to be reserved for toxic or otherwise dangerous experiments. There were no private offices in the lab.

  This, however, was clearly Miles’ desk. Lofton sat in the rolling chair and waved Damon to one of the two plush red leather visitor’s chairs. Damon sank about an inch into the rich padding.

  “Okay,” he said, looking across the desk at his college friend. “What the fuck?”

  Miles smiled.

  “Hah hah, yeah. Usually, the process is a little more, um, gentle. People are recruited for months or even years. Your recruitment, though, was about 45 minutes. We need you, man. We’re on the brink of something big and we need your cross-section of talent.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” Damon said. “We’re talking dinosaurs, time travel, and abandoned Russian military bases. Is there anything else I should know about? Sentient toasters? Android prostitutes?”

  Miles, still smiling, shook his head.

  “No, nothing so crazy. But you gotta admit—that’s the bad-ass trifecta, though, right?” He paused for a moment, leaned forward, and rested his forearms on the desk. “Allied Genetics is on the forefront of a lot of advanced technology all across the world. This facility is the crown jewel of the company—where all of the latest research is funneled—but it remains only Alpha Complex. O221. Anvil Canyon.”

  “Okay, sure,” Damon said. “How about we go to the next piece of the puzzle. You explained Objekt 221. Talk to me about traveling back in time.”

  Miles sighed.

  “I’ve got a room with about 300 inches of binder space dedicated to nothing but equations that I can let you read through, but I’ll spare you the exciting details.” He smiled. He knew that one of the first things Damon would do was read through all of that data. “Thumbnail version for now?”

  “Yeah,” Damon said. “Sure. Get me in that neighborhood and then I can figure out the rest while unearthing my role here.”

  Miles nodded.

  “Fair enough.” He paused as if summoning the strength to give the same speech he’d given a dozen times before. “There are soft spots in the world. Places where electromagnetic energy is focused. Places where life and plasma and karma and energy and all that seem to come together causing strange connections.”

  “You’re talking about ley lines. The Vile Vortices. The Bermuda Triangle. Stuff like that?”

  “Sure. Yeah. You’re on the right track. The natural, metaphysical properties of these places—when combined with modern and ultra-modern technology—can lead to extraordinary results. Objekt 221—perhaps unbeknownst to the original designers, perhaps they knew—sits atop one of the strongest phenomena in the northern hemisphere.”

  Damon remained silent. Rubbed his chin.

  “We learned that with the right balance of heavy energy, we could travel through these soft spots, these rifts, into the past.”

  Miles stopped as if he was expecting Damon to ask a question. Damon had a question, but he wasn’t sure if it was the one Miles was waiting for. He decided to ask it anyway.

  “We might be getting to this,” he said. “But if you can travel through time, why are you collecting plants rather than killing Hitler or preventing 9/11 or derailing the extinction of the spotted huckaloo? Seems there are millions of things you could be doing. Is it because of the grandfather paradox? The butterfly effect?”

  “Hah,” Miles exclaimed. “The butterfly effect. You’re adorable.”

  “What?”

  “There is no such thing, rookie. Think about it. What’s the central tenet of the theory? A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and there’s a rainstorm in Nebraska? Nope. It’s a fun idea, but any big system—the stock market, weather, life—is going to absorb those types of small changes and proceed on its intended course. The fun is determining if it was going to rain in Nebraska whether the butterfly got stepped on or not.”

  “Cascading changes. Growing ripples. Every decision we make impacts those around us in ways we can’t even imagine.”

  Miles was smiling and shaking his head.

  “Save the planet,” he said, and paused.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Look,” Miles said, rubbing the palms of his hands together. “We’re going to have a ton of these types of conversations, so I’ll cut to the chase. You, as a human, would have to do something enormous to even have a small chance at causing a ripple effect. We’re not talking about stepping on a butterfly—we’re talking about stepping on every butterfly. We’re not talking about breaking a branch—we’re talking about burning down every tree on the planet. Something of that magnitude. So, no, your butterfly effect is just not real. The world simply absorbs those small changes and continues on its intended course.”

  “Hmm,” Damon grunted. “Okay, leaving all that aside, since the Earth moves through time and space, how are you not reconstituted on another part of the planet—or, for that matter, hurtling through outer space in the past?”

  “Now that’s a great question,” Miles said. “And the truth is that we don’t know. Not exactly. It has something to do with the Earth’s magnetic core keeping us grounded. In conjunction with the fact that the rift is somehow stable, we always come back to the same area on the planet. Roughly the same time.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And that gets to another point you made,” Miles continued. “You asked why we don’t go and kill Hitler or prevent the Kennedy assassination. Our rift sends us to the same era. Over and over again. The Cretaceous. That’s just an element of the phenomenon. It’s our designated research spot.”

  He paused for a second.

  “We can discuss the nature of a true time paradox later.”

  Damon sat back in his chair. He looked around the small office area. Rather mundane desk. Average chairs. Miles was some sort of supervisor, but you couldn’t really tell from his personal office space. There were a few framed internal letters. A couple awards. Some items with the Cal logo on them. There was a signed football with UC Berkeley branding on it resting on the top of an over-stuffed bookcase near the wall. No family photos.

  Damon leaned forward, a question suddenly becoming apparent.

  “What’s the goal, here?” he asked.

  Miles held out his hands, fingers splayed wide, palms toward Damon.

  “Strictly observational. We collect data and continue to build a coherent picture of the Cretaceous period. Eventually, we’ll release our findings to the world for educational purposes.”

  Damon sat back.

  “Okay,” he said. “Great.” Even though he knew, instinctively, that wasn’t true. Whether Miles was intentionally lying or he simply hadn’t put two-and-two together, Damon knew there was more at stake than simple observation. An uncanny valley of information had just formed.

  Chapter Four

  The Mysterious Island

  PORT RADNOVICH was a postage stamp floating unfettered amidst the enormity of the Gulf of Mexico. It was 150 kilometers southwest of the extreme tip of Florida and was too small to show up on all but the most efficient satellite searches. Even so, the government quietly scrubbed the tiny island from all surveys and published maps in 1975.

  The island essentially covered the same surface area as the city of Los Angeles and was, for all intents and purposes, uninhabited. However, even with the questionable significance, dubiou
s importance and nonexistent strategic positioning, Port Radnovich was about to be invaded.

  In the dead of night, the Wraiths came. It was a massacre.

  * *

  Sergott Solutions was a multinational conglomerate—a worldwide security force. With hundreds of ex-military and ex-law enforcement officers on the payroll, SS stood ready to provide security for events from mundane birthday parties held in dangerous neighborhoods to political debates in regional hotspots. If you had the money, Sergott had a solution for you.

  As profitable as protection was to this organization, they also maintained a highly trained para-military force known internally as the Wraiths. With the best weaponry, most expensive gear, and intense training regimen, the Wraiths were often hired out for the jobs that couldn’t look like a job.

  Made up of a strange combination of Navy SEALs, British SAS, Russian Alpha Group, and Israeli Mossad, the Wraiths were rumored to have been involved in dozens of military coups, hostage liberations, and terrorist cell eliminations.

  Rumored, but never proven.

  Now, an assault force of six Wraiths was sent in advance of a 25-man support team in the occupation of Port Radnovich.

  * *

  The island was no bigger than a large American city but had four interesting features. One, a clearly marked—yet horribly overgrown and positioned in the worst strategic part of the island—concrete helicopter landing pad. Two, a long, straight path of prairie grasses that looked totally unremarkable, unless, of course, you happened to be approaching the island in a small, single-engine aircraft. Three, the ruins of a large dock on the only protected side of the island. Four, a single-story building with no windows, one door, and walls made of a meter-thick combination of steel and concrete.

  Curiously, an armed sentry stood guard outside this solitary door.

  Wraith Field Commander Rick “Ahab” Everson held his force back from the door. They took cover and his recon man started using whatever equipment—night vision, thermal vision, field glasses—was available to assess the situation. In 30 minutes, Lonny “Doc” Watley came back to the team.

  “Intelligence was accurate, sir,” Doc said, quietly, into his throat microphone. “He’s armed with an MP-5. Holstered Colt. Wearing NVG.”