Ragnarok

TWENTY-NINE

Midtown, New York, NY

3 November, 0830 Hrs

King was sweating profusely inside the body armor and helmet. Although the suit contained a state-of-the-art liquid cooling system, it wasn’t as comfortable as it could have been. Each time he took a step and the armor between his legs rubbed, he was reminded of the corduroy trousers his mother had gotten him at Goodwill when he was ten. He hated those things. With the sound dampener technology in the helmet activated, he couldn’t hear the noise of the armor rubbing, but he could feel the vibrations on his skin.

He knew he wasn’t sweating because he was hot, though. No, he was certain the cause of his dampened skin was the small suitcase nuclear device he wore on his back.

“How you doing, King? I’m sweating like a pig in this thing,” Deep Blue’s robust voice came through King’s helmet microphone as they rode the elevator to the 40 ^th floor of the Exxon Building.

“Thank God, I thought it was just me.” King looked at their reflections in the shiny brass elevator doors.

Deep Blue grunted a laugh. Still, King could tell the humor was forced. Neither one of them liked the current plan, but it was all they had.

“These things don’t smell too good either.”

Deep Blue ignored this latest quip, but King felt certain the man was cocooned in his own foam stench. The putrid smell wafted over King, threatening to ruin his focus.

“Remember you are not to engage any dire wolves if you can avoid it. I’ll cover you as best I can.” Deep Blue was back to business.

“I’m sure you’ll be better at it than I would be. That targeting software in your helmet is kind of like cheating,” King said, as the elevator reached the 40 ^th floor and both men felt their stomachs lurch at the abrupt stop.

“Wasn’t time to get you one,” Deep Blue said.

“Yeah, but Christmas isn’t far off,” King quipped, and then as if throwing a switch, he shut off his sense of humor and readied himself to kill anything that wasn’t human. If someone’s pet chihuahua jumped out, it was toast.

Both men raised their MP5 submachine guns and stepped to either side of the doors as they slowly opened. King smiled briefly inside his suit. Deep Blue might have been out of action in the field for years-since he had been a Ranger and subsequently served in politics-but the man was still sharp, and he and King had very quickly learned each other’s moves. They had gained an almost precognitive awareness of each other in battle-something that often took many battles for other soldiers to gain.

King moved into the lushly carpeted hallway and crouched. Water rose from the rug, surrounding his foot. Everything was saturated. “Looks like the sprinkler system went off.” He eyed the sprinkler head poking out of the ceiling above him. A single drip of water maintained a tenuous grasp. It fell and smacked against his facemask. “Let’s hope there isn’t a fire. I don’t think there’s any water left in the system.”

Deep Blue took up a position right behind King. About forty feet down the wood paneled hallway, the glowing yellow curve of the portal’s wall emerged from the wood and seared into walls, floor and ceiling, completely blocking the corridor.

The total lack of sound was eerie. King had gotten up close to one of the portals before- hell, I’ve even been though one — but the last time, according to Aleman’s theory, the portal was still ‘flickering’ into our world. This one was stable.

No fluctuations.

No lightning.

No sound. Though King couldn’t be sure if that was just because his helmet made him deaf to the outside world. It was a tactical disadvantage, but in this case, with dire wolf roars that could incapacitate a Chess Team member with crippling fear, Deep Blue had insisted. King had pointed out his previous immunity to the roar in Chicago, but Deep Blue wouldn’t be moved. Their communications between each other were voice activated as well, so unless Deep Blue or Lewis Aleman spoke in his ear, all King could hear was his own breathing. It reminded him of HALO jumping, which might have been somewhat calming if not for the nuke in his backpack.

King advanced down the hall, staying to the left, Deep Blue covered the right. The plan was simple: a few feet away from the portal wall, he would unsling the backpack, arm the heavy device it held, remove the safety remote control and pocket it, then hurl the thing through the glowing yellow wall. Keasling had a second failsafe that could shut off the device if the backpack passed harmlessly in and out of the portal and plummeted to the ground forty stories below them. The General and his men would be watching for anything to come out of the bottom of the orb. The team wouldn’t take any chances with destroying New York. The city had seen enough hell already.

King squatted a few feet from the portal and pulled the strap of his MP5 over his helmet, freeing his hands. He slid the backpack off his shoulders and then slowly stood, facing the wall of light. Then he dropped the pack on the carpet and froze.

Deep Blue watched King’s motions ahead of him as if in a trance. King was getting ready to deploy the bomb and then just stopped for some reason. The man hadn’t moved in a minute. At first Deep Blue thought King had heard or sensed something. But their helmets had sound dampeners and King hadn’t moved at all.

Something was wrong.

“King? What’s going on?”

Nothing. No reply.

Deep Blue took a cautious step backward, away from where King stood facing the portal. He pulled his arm up and tapped quickly on his wrist-keypad that he’d attached to this battle suit from his last. He tested the ambient audio. Had a dire wolf roared? He thought he would have felt it vibrating in his chest, even if he couldn’t hear it because of the audio dampeners. The faceplate display in his helmet told him no such sounds were present.

“King? Are you okay?”

Still no reply.

Deep Blue activated another scanner on his wrist and waited an impatient twenty seconds, until a display came up on his faceplate indicating a foreign substance in the oxygen content of the air. Not a huge amount, but whatever it was, it was an unrecognizable chemical substance. Could be something to worry about, or it could just be the electrified atmosphere from the portal and the stench of the cleaning chemicals used in the hallway. He couldn’t be sure.

But one of the small features Aleman had built into Deep Blue’s new tactical helmet was an air-scrubbing filter. King’s armored helmet didn’t have one. Must be something in the air. He wouldn’t know more until he approached King. But the stiff way the man stood worried Deep Blue.

He stepped forward and reached his hand out to King’s shoulder.

A blur erupted from the wall of light, moving around King’s static form, slamming into Deep Blue’s chest. Something flung him halfway back down the corridor where he hit a wall and crashed to the floor. He was surprised that the suit took the brunt of the impacts-both when he was hit and when he landed in a heap against the wall.

The optic displays in his helmet’s faceplate were going nuts.

Dire wolves.

He lifted his MP5 and prepared to stand, but one of the fast-moving creatures swept him up and threw him over its shoulder. Its claws raked across his back, but the armor deflected the blow. With his rifle arm pinned under him, the beast streaked headlong toward the other end of the corridor with him as its captive-away from King’s still-frozen form. Three more dire wolves clustered around King, but they weren’t attacking his inert body for some reason. Deep Blue fumbled with his free hand, searching for the knife on his left leg. He had just wrapped his fingers around the blade’s handle when he and the dire wolf hit the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of the carpeted hallway.

Deep Blue’s armored back smacked the glass and he barely felt the window shatter. He couldn’t hear it, either. But he could see the dire wolf’s mouth opened wide in a roar, as his body separated from it and they both began to fall through the shower of glittering glass particles toward the pavement forty stories below.