Ragnarok

FIFTEEN

Chicago, IL

3 November, 0100 Hrs

Well, this is embarrassing.

King thought he was going to die. Clutching the pants of a dead man with one hand, and the eject lever between the dead pilot’s knees in the other, King held on for dear life as the rockets on the underside of the ejection seat slammed him out of the crashing plane and across the sky laterally at close to 100 mph. He had just enough time to see that the thrust from the rockets on the seat were going to slam him, the pilot and the seat into the side of a building with darkened glass windows and five vertical stripes of dark tan concrete. Even in the brightly lit night scene, and at a point of view from which he had never seen it, he recognized it as the Park Hyatt building.

Then his next thought as the chair blasted across the sky was to try to crawl lower down the pilot’s legs toward the blasting rockets-so he wouldn’t end up between his impromptu getaway vehicle and the oncoming wall of stone and glass.

His brain didn’t have time to complete the next thought.

I hope I don’t get roasted The rockets died. The chute section in the headrest exploded outward with a pop, slamming into King’s shins and flipping him over the footrest of the seat toward where the rockets were propelling the craft just a second before. His body arced out and away from the seat and he lost his hold on the ejection lever. He clung for all he was worth to the dead pilot’s flight suit and twisted hard, scrambling in mid air to get his other hand back on the pilot before the impact.

When it came, it rattled him, but the impact was far less than he had expected. Two men, one chair. The normal propulsion of the seat might have pitched them through the glass and out the other side of the building, but because of the weight, the propellant had quit and their velocity had died down before the crash. The window around them shattered into tiny safety glass crumbles that rained down to the street. The chair lodged itself just inside the building, but King was dangling from the pilot’s ankles and swinging from the bottom of the chair, on the outside of the building, with the wind tearing into him and lightning strikes from the several-story glowing orb below him crashing into the surrounding structure.

Well. This isn’t too bad. If I can just…

King felt the chair shift and start to slide, and then it was in freefall-above King. He didn’t have time to wonder whether the parachute, which had already deployed but had yet to have time or airflow to inflate, would open in the plummet to the Water Tower park several hundred feet below him. He knew it wasn’t far to the ground and it would be a close thing. He scrambled up the pilot’s legs, now trying to get on top of the pilot before the seat separated from the pilot’s corpse.

Tom Duncan stood on the street craning his head up. He stared up at the spectacle of King’s amazing ejection and wondered if it would somehow be possible for the man to survive. He had approached the edge of the glowing, lightning-spitting ball, to see if he could gain some readings from it for Aleman, when King’s F-16 had come ripping into the sky overhead. Lightning struck the plane and then it faltered. Duncan could see it would crash. A second or so after praying that King would eject, he zoomed in with the camera lens on his helmet’s heads-up display to see King making his way into the pilot’s seat.

Then everything had gone crazy. Lightning began shooting from the glowing orb even more than it had been, striking the buildings all around the Water Tower park. The canopy on the jet burst off, and King, riding on the pilot’s ejection seat with the pilot, was fired sideways through the air and straight at the side of a building. Duncan’s heart was climbing up his throat like a mountaineer moving up a chimney of rock as he watched in fear for his friend.

Then a more immediate concern. The broken, crashing 20-million dollar jet was spinning and falling right for Duncan’s position. With the crackling dome wall of energy that now reached close to 80 feet high directly behind him, Duncan could only move ahead along Michigan Avenue or dodge to the side in either direction, but the plane was spinning erratically as it came down out of the sky at him and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Time slowed as he heard shrieks from the nearby onlookers, where the military and police had set up a cordon down by the Walgreen’s store on Chicago Avenue.

The plane was almost on him and Duncan simply threw himself forward onto the rough asphalt of Michigan Ave., scraping the palms of his hands. The falling plane, its engine completely shut down, flew over his head soundlessly. The lack of noise was eerie. The crowd down the street quieted.

Duncan rolled over and sat up to look back up Michigan at the energy sphere. There was no sign of the plane or its wreckage. Duncan tapped at the keys on his wristpad and a display from a CCTV camera mounted on the John Hancock Center’s roof, looking down on the street on the other side of the energy ball, appeared on his helmet’s display. No sign of the jet on the other side.

The energy dome had simply swallowed the crashing plane. Then Duncan remembered King.

He scrambled to his feet and looked back up to the top of the Park Hyatt and there was King, dangling from the bottom of the ejection seat, which had lodged into what his faceplate told him was the 67 ^th floor of the building. Hold on, King, I’m on my way, Duncan thought. He was about to start running diagonally across the park to the building, when the chair, its dead pilot and King, all shifted, lurched and fell.

Oh no.

Duncan watched, spellbound as the chair separated and King scrabbled up the dead man’s body as the parachute inflated and slowed their descent. Thank God.

Then the strong winds ripping between the skyscrapers, made stronger by the atmospheric disturbance caused by the pulsing dome, slammed into King and the pilot, blasting their parachute north across the Water Tower park and directly toward the sphere of light. They were still a few hundred feet high when the roaring wind shifted and their parachute moved sideways, with King furiously working the toggle straps.

They plummeted faster, King and the dead man, just ten feet in front of the wall of electric light, and Duncan held his breath. King was 100 feet off the ground, but still too far to let go of the dead pilot and leap to safety. Lightning blasted from the sphere again, barely missing the parachute.

Duncan was sure King would make it now. Fifty feet off the ground.

The wind gusted again, hard. Duncan was almost blown off his feet. The dome was playing havoc with the atmosphere around it, like an electrical storm.

King was blown into the wall of the energy dome. He and the dead pilot swung in toward it at a 45-degree angle away from the parachute. As their bodies hit the wall of energy, they disappeared inside it, until only the lines of the parachute and the black canopy could be seen. King went into the dome at probably 30 feet off the ground. Duncan couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Then the wind shifted again and the parachute gusted back and away from the dome, yanking King and the pilot back out of it and over the park until they slammed onto the ground just to the side of the concrete fountain in the park’s middle. Duncan sprinted over to the crashed men.

King stumbled to his feet, after the dead pilot’s body had taken most of the brunt of the hard landing.

“King!” Duncan arrived and saw the haunted look on King’s face. “What is it?”

“On the other side. I saw them. They’re coming.”

“How many?” Duncan pulled the strap of a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 submachine gun over his head and handed the weapon to King, then pulled out a Browning 9 mm from the leg holster he wore.

King looked at the MP5 and then at Duncan. “More of them than we have bullets.”