Ragnarok

THIRTY-SEVEN

Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH

3 November, 1000 Hrs

Sara Fogg walked with Anna Beck into the large aircraft hanger that housed the last airborne vehicle belonging to Endgame. The Black Hawk sat on the concrete floor of the hangar and Black Six, the suave young spy, stood next to it in a black flight suit. Beck wore a black flight suit herself.

“You get to ride with the hunk, huh?” Fogg joked. “I bet Knight won’t like that.”

“He’ll get over it. Besides, Six can pilot a Black Hawk-I can’t. He’ll come with me to the Pease Air National Guard Base in Portsmouth where we’ll wait around to rendezvous with a Blackbird out of Hanscom Air Force Base and haul ass to Norway. Half the pilots are in Europe with Bishop and Knight and the other two are in New York with King and Deep Blue.”

“Would be nice to have Queen and Rook back. They’ll help keep our guys alive.” Fogg looked at Beck and patted her on the shoulder. The two women had become close over the last two weeks. “Be safe and kick ass.”

Beck winked. “You know it.”

Fogg watched as Beck strode across the hangar and lightly punched Black Six in the upper arm. “Let’s go, Secret Agent Man.”

Fogg turned as the two got into the Black Hawk and it rolled forward out of the massive hundred-foot-wide doorway. It then took to the sky and the computer controlled steel door slowly lowered into place from where it had been hidden in the ceiling of rock and concrete. Fogg had heard about a mishap with that door when the base was being set up and she always made it a point to not stand anywhere near it.

With the door completely shut, and the daylight gone from the hangar, it was a dimly lit and empty place. Fogg headed back to the corridor off the hangar that led to the offices and the main computer center, where she would no doubt find Aleman and Pierce still frantically trying to make sense of the strange creatures destroying the world.

Fogg had already made sense of it for herself. This was just how crazy the world had gotten. King and the rest of Chess Team were always in the thick of it. Genetically engineered soldiers, reani-mated monsters, custom tailored bio-weapons and viruses, anthropological missing-link creatures, golems, artificially intelligent super computers, assassins, corporate megalomaniacs, modern-day pirates, terrorists and even black holes. This was King’s world and she was a part of it. The world would go apeshit nutso and Chess Team would stop it. That’s what they did. And if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a world to worry about. Armed with that knowledge, she was able to remain as calm and tranquil as a Buddhist monk.

Most of the time.

Seeing King ejecting from that plane and smashing into a skyscraper had been a jolt. So had the dire wolf roar that brought back her claustrophobia.

It’s strange, she thought. Being in this base under a mountain doesn’t weird me out, but the thought of a tiny dirt tunnel so close to the surface that I could dig my way there with my fingers gives me the heebie-jeebies.

She had a rock-solid inner belief in King’s invincibility, and that got her through each new crazy thing that arose. But she also found herself wondering if maybe there would be a time soon when someone else could become ‘King.’ A time when she and Jack could take Fiona and go off to some isolated part of the world away from corporate madmen and bio-engineered super threats.

She knew enough about lab-created viruses from her work at the CDC to realize that it was only a matter of time before some super-plague wiped out a good swash of the world’s population. Going off to live like a survivalist in a cabin in British Columbia was looking more attractive to her all the time. Of course, the forest would play havoc with her sensory processing disorder, but maybe she could learn to live with that.

As she stepped into the computer room, she saw Lewis Aleman and George Pierce, who had both clearly found the time to throw on new clothes-Aleman still in jeans and a t-shirt, and Pierce with a black sweatshirt with a white King chessman icon on the left breast. Both men hunkered over Pierce’s computer terminal at the side of the room, Aleman having abandoned the ergonomic chair.

“What’s up?” she asked.

Aleman stood straighter and stretched his back, turning to her. “We’re tracking the portals and trying to find their origin.”

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“No,” Aleman smiled weakly. “But we can look at the surrounding environmental disturbances that the portals create and make some educated guesses.”

“Environmental disturbances?”

Pierce placed his hands on his lower back and stretched as Aleman had done, then slid his glasses further up his nose with the tip of one finger.

“The weather,” he said. “Each event creates local disturbances in the weather pattern because of the amount of electricity-even the ones that have appeared underwater or underground.”

“Oh that’s genius,” she walked over to the screen to see a map of the globe and colored circles representing the placement and appearance of known energy portals based on storm patterns detected by weather satellites. She’d seen similar maps on the news.

“Thanks,” Aleman said. He pointed at the screen. “So we’ve factored in the likely weather phenomenon when one of these things appears, and we’re tracking the size of them as they keep appearing. They keep getting bigger. So George had the idea to try to find smaller ones from before yesterday…”

Pierce broke in, “Right, and Lewis realized we could use existing satellite data to find smaller occurrences of the portals before yesterday when the first really big ones appeared in Asia.”

Aleman continued. “Right now the algorithm is searching out likely weather patterns and making a list of possible portals. But even if we can trace their origins, it doesn’t mean we’ll be able to figure out how to stop them. It’s just something to do. More data to gather. Hopefully it will all lead somewhere.”

As they watched the screen, Fogg noted the date in the upper-left corner of the screen going backward as fewer and fewer possible incidents appeared in different populated areas of the world. Eventually they got so small that she realized these events had gone unnoticed in large cities around the world. Only the portals of the last few days had been large enough to gain the world’s attention. The number of portals on the screen got smaller and smaller until only two remained-in Kathmandu, and in northern Norway. Fogg pointed to the one in Nepal.

“How large would that one be?” she wanted to know.

“About the size of a panel truck, probably.”

The next date, a week earlier, was of a portal about the same size, and it showed up in Norway again. It was now the last portal on the map. Then another on the previous day in Norway. Then another a few weeks earlier. These events were smaller than the one in Kathmandu. But she noticed they were all in the same town.

“Fenris Kystby. Hey, isn’t that the-”

“-the town where Rook is.” Aleman’s face was shocked. “He’s been at the source this whole time.”