The Eighth Day Read online

  Cindy tried to move her head, but couldn’t. A wave of panic welled up from deep within her. Instinctively, she lashed out, trying to push the man off her, but with each movement, sharp slicing pains radiated through her body.

  ∞§∞

  Suddenly, there was a momentary dimming of the lights. Hiccock stopped speaking, the chandelier in the center of the room rattled, liquids in cups rippled, then the whole room jolted. A percussive wallop attacked the eardrums of everyone in the room, followed by a sound like rolling thunder. The excitement felt just seconds ago morphed into stunned silence.

  ∞§∞

  Cindy realized that her head was turned toward the window while her body faced the other way. There was a momentary stillness within her, a split second of painless neutrality, a warm silence and quelling calm. In her mind, she wondered if this was death, numbing her in preparation for the transition from this life to … something caught her attention. She was pinned between the two men, just barely able to see over the shoulder of the one on top of her. In awe, she marveled as she saw a white light coming through the window of the tilted car. The White Light, she thought as a reassuring blanket of peace covered her while she attempted to focus her tearing eyes on the bright glow approaching outside the cracked window.

  ∞§∞

  Distracted by the huge flash off to his right, the engineer of the northbound New Haven express did not see the derailed cars of the local train at the station. Not that it would have made any difference. At 90 miles per hour, there was only time enough to brace himself.

  ∞§∞

  Cindy watched as the bright light’s halo gave way to a black hulk in the shape of the oncoming express train that rapidly filled her view through the window. The last things she sensed were a bludgeoning jolt and a cracking sound as she and her two row mates were crushed together for all of eternity.

  ∞§∞

  As it slammed into the deadweight of the derailed train, the front of the onrushing express crumpled like a beer can under the 133-feet-per-second momentum of a million pounds of railcars behind it. The ten gleaming silver commuter cars piled up and crunched with horrendous metal groans and muffled screams. Explosive, electrical arcing from the ruptured 22,000-volt overhead catenary wires eerily illuminated the scene.

  The spreading pileup sent the commuter cars, weighing 100,000 pounds each, sweeping over the platform, flattening and crushing departing passengers and collapsing the station structure. The force of the blast continued outward in an ever-widening concussive wave, eventually leaving Cindy, and 600 other commuters, dead in its wake.

  ∞§∞

  A mile away, a small suburban neighborhood was rocked as all the windows of the two-story houses lining the street first deflected out and then imploded simultaneously as the shock wave hit. Car and house alarms were triggered instantly.

  At the offices of Delta Home Security Services, a dispatcher sat in his usually catatonic state before a huge display of Westchester County. Suddenly, in a fast widening circle emanating from the exploding building’s location on the map, he saw the red lights, denoting tripped alarms.

  “Holy shit!” he muttered as he watched the crimson circle grow.

  ∞§∞

  “Holy shit!” Mike Casigno said. “In all the years I’ve been hacking for this car service, I never saw so many flashing lights.” His cab crept toward the sea of red, yellow, and blue emergency vehicle strobes that were scattered over every conceivable inch of space surrounding the train station and the industrial park beyond. From the backseat, Hiccock noticed the rising column of dark smoke, just visible against the inky black suburban sky. “This is as far as I can go. I got a cop waving me off already,” Mike said.

  “Thanks, I’ll hoof it from here,” Hiccock said as he handed him a twenty-dollar bill and slid across the backseat, not waiting for change. As he walked toward the scene of mass destruction, he noticed two areas of concentration. One was at the site a few hundred yards away that looked like it was once a building. The other was at the train station to his right. Train cars were strewn across the tracks and some had jumped the platform and collapsed the station structure. Firemen, police, and EMTs scurried all over. Guys in hard hats and cops in helmets were already cutting into the steel cars with big gas-powered saws, spewing golden sparks in firework-type arcs as they bit and chewed into the twisted metal. There was the constant chatter of police radios coming from every direction. Adding to the cacophony was the staccato interruption of “squelch,” the rasping static noise from scores of transmit buttons being triggered and released.

  Hiccock was impressed by the response. It had been less than thirty-five minutes since the blast and already hundreds of emergency workers were on the scene. He noticed that the ambulances and fire trucks around him were from places further out like Stamford, Connecticut, and Rescue 1 from FDNY Manhattan. This, no doubt, was an infamous benefit from the heightened alert status and coordinated efforts of all first responders in this New Age of Terrorism. He approached a cop trying hard to direct a snarled knot of ambulances, fire trucks, and other emergency vehicles. Hiccock saw the familiar metal numbers 47 on the cop’s collar and realized he was NYPD, the 47th precinct, where Hiccock grew up, being the nearest Bronx cop house to Westchester County. Hiccock reached into his tuxedo back pocket and flashed his ID.

  “What kind of …” was all the distracted cop could muster.

  “It’s my White House ID. I work for the president.”

  “I dunno what I’m supposed to do with that. Wait here.” He then turned and yelled, “Come around him, come on … let’s go!” at an ambulance squeezing by a rescue truck whose crew was probably atop the pile of railcars. He then keyed his radio mic, which was attached to a belt slung over his shoulders. “4-7-Charlie-portable to Central K.” There was some more squelch and he added, “I need a supervisor at the north end of the station. I got a VIP here from the White House.”

  A noise pricked at Hiccock’s right ear, turning his attention from the cop to part of the collapsed station and he wandered off in that direction. It was like a hideous light show. The arcing and sparking from the torches, saws, and short circuits made the shadows jump and images shake. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he made out a shape. He started toward it double time. At the sloping end of the fallen station roof, down in the crook created by the flattened end, was a woman screaming for help. She was in agony. He saw that her right leg was pinned under the rubble. He removed his tux jacket and covered her. “I’ll be back with help. You’re gonna be okay.” He ran back toward the traffic jam and grabbed an FDNY Rescue 1 officer, “I got a woman pinned under the station. Come on.”

  “Hey pal, look around,” the big bruiser of a fireman said without stopping or looking. “Everyone here is dying. I got twelve people trapped over there. I can’t help you right now.”

  Hiccock searched for another emergency worker but he could see they were all busy. All involved in one hundred individual battles with death. He ran to the abandoned Rescue 1 truck. All the tool lockers were open and empty. No medicine, no radios. Then he got an idea. He went around the back and looked for the spare tire. They hafta have a spare on this rig. Off the back and below the chrome-coated diamond plate he found the tire well and the heavy-duty hydraulic jack. It felt like it weighed a ton but he cradled it in his arms, along with the pipe that fit in the jack, and headed back to the woman. Halfway there he heard the Bronx cop call out to him.

  “Hey, stop. Where are you taking that thing?”

  “I got a woman trapped here, get someone to help me!”

  He reached the woman and assessed the situation, not sure what he was going to do next. The woman was losing consciousness. “Hey! What’s your name? Lady, what’s your name?”

  “Shelly,” she said distantly.

  Hiccock saw a place where he might wedge the jack. “Shelly, huh? Is that short for Michelle?”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Bill. At you
r service!” He inserted the pipe into the jack and started pumping it.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting you free. How are you doing?”

  “I think I’m going to ... throw up. The ... pain is so ... horrible.”

  The jack tightened up under the twisted beam. Hiccock continued pumping. The concrete below the jack started to crack. He guessed the woman was about fifty and she was fading again. “Shelly! Shelly! Stay with me, Shelly!” He saw her snap out of it. “Shelly are you married?”

  “Yes. Oh God! My leg … it hurts.”

  “Just a little longer; this is starting to work.” He was lying. The beam hadn’t moved, but the concrete below the jack was turning to powder. He stopped. He scrambled over to the edge of the platform on his hands and knees and looked at its underside. There were steel cross-members at even intervals supporting the slabs of concrete. The jack was just a few inches to the right of one of them. He flipped the pipe and fitted the notched end to the valve on the base of the jack that released the hydraulics. The piston relaxed but didn’t lower enough to free the jack. He reached in and pulled down on the piston with all his strength.

  “What’s your husband’s name, Shelly?” His voice was strained with exertion.

  “Mario.”

  The piston budged only about half an inch but it was enough. He repositioned the jack over the seam in the concrete right above the steel crossbeam and started pumping again.

  “What’s he do? Shelly! Your husband, Mario, what does he do?”

  “He, he imports ... I can’t feel my ... ”

  “Imports what, Shelly? Keep talking to me, what does he import?” The beam started to groan as the jack applied enough lift to raise a truck.

  “Dried fruit and nuts.”

  “That’s a new one on me, Shelly!” The beam was lifting ever so slowly. As it rose, other pieces of the fallen structure started to snap and buckle, each threatening to re-collapse as the pressure from the jack fought upward against the weight bearing down.

  Hiccock caught sight of a cop from the corner of his eye. “Good, you’re here! I almost have her free. When I say, pull her out.”

  The jack was now bending the beam as it lifted it. Hiccock saw that the whole thing was starting to tilt toward him. He kept pumping but tried to keep his action purely up and down.

  “Officer, this is Shelly. I told her we were going to get her out of here.”

  “Yes we are,” the cop said, as he wearily looked up at the collapsed structure.

  The jack and the beam were starting to tip over. Hiccock placed his foot on the jack and pushed with all his might to keep it upright.

  “I think I can pull her out now,” the cop said.

  “Now or never,” Hiccock said, his leg fully extended.

  The cop grabbed Shelly under the shoulders and started to pull. She screamed. Her leg was coming out shattered, bloody, and flattened, but moving out. Hiccock felt the jack tipping, the weight of the station starting to overcome the height he had created.

  “Come on. Hurry, I can’t hold it much longer.”

  “Just another few inches,” the cop said over Shelly’s screams.

  Hiccock looked up and saw the whole roof and structure start to fall over to crush him. From the corner of his eye, he saw the cop drag Shelly clear to the edge of the platform. Hiccock was now in a helpless situation; if he stayed where he was, he would be crushed by the tons of stuff on top of him. If he moved, the jack would give way and cause it to happen anyway. The sweat poured from his forehead. He decided he couldn’t just wait for the thing to fall over. Mentally he counted to three, then pushed off from the jack in an attempt to scramble out from under the falling debris. But the jack went the other way when he pushed off from it and the whole structure started to come down.

  Suddenly ten poles hit the concrete like javelins. They formed an instant wedge of protection as the weight of the roof was counter-levered by them. Hiccock got out from under the overhanging mangled roof to see ten firemen, straining with their pike poles, staving off the collapse.

  As soon as he was out, the big bruiser, who didn’t have time for him before, commanded, “Let her go.” The firemen jumped back with their tools and the remaining part of the structure fell with a huge crash.

  “Thanks,” Hiccock said, watching the wreckage he could have been buried under.

  “No problem,” was all the fireman said before he and the rest of his Rescue 1 men went off to save someone else.

  Catching his breath, Hiccock looked over at Shelly. “How’s she doing?” he asked the cop.

  “She’s out cold but she’s still breathing.”

  Two EMTs with Fort Lee New Jersey Volunteer Ambulance Corp patches on their sleeves appeared with a stretcher. “We’ll take it from here.”

  Hiccock turned to survey the nightmare around him. There weren’t going to be a lot of happy endings like Shelly’s tonight.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Two Years & Six Months Earlier

  “SIXTY SECONDS TO DETONATION,” squawked the box.

  Even in the air-conditioned, electronically filtered environment of the SSC, a slick sweat covered Professor Richard Parnes’s face as the concluding stages of FINAL SWORD played out on the large-format displays in front of him. He was fully aware of the massive amount of death and destruction this operation could create. Nevertheless, for the safety of America, he had to continue with this mission in order to guarantee that the United States would remain the dominant power on earth.

  “Disable safeties, arm firing circuits,” Parnes said into his headset. From his raised console, he looked down at members of his team throwing switches twenty feet in front of him. Mentally he retraced his wiring design and the triggering sequence, the precise timing of which would release the initial impulse of focused energy into the dirillium base. From there on it would be nature’s sequence of neutrons smashing into atoms releasing more neutrons to smash more atoms’ nuclei until the whole thing exploded into a rough approximation of hell.

  “10, 9, 8, 7 …” the firing sequence officer said.

  “Fluctuation in gamma 10 … 2.34 over nominal level.”

  Parnes’s finger instinctively flipped up the safety cover of the abort switch, as his brain calculated the effect of increased gamma on the energy budget he so painstakingly fought to preserve. Then he remembered his duty. Only a few more seconds left, and it would all be over.

  “4, 3, 2 …”

  The hell with it. He withdrew his finger from the red-guarded abort switch as the count passed one. No turning back now. It must be done.

  Suddenly, all the monitors in the room flashed brilliantly. A large screen in the center of the room displayed a graphic representation of what was happening. Based on estimates and experimental research the yield was expected to be 200 megajoules of energy per nanosecond, or about the output of a small star. Instead, and post analysis would tell him why, the actual yield was closer to 500. The team cheered. It was a brilliant success.

  On the big screen, the image of the kill zone and collateral area reached out to a circumference of forty miles. Parnes knew it was the new hyper-shaping in the first stage that multiplied the yield so significantly. This was his team’s sole focus for a year. Operation FINAL SWORD ended in victory.

  “Well done, Parnes,” the four-star general next to him said as he closed his mission briefing book. “Congratulations to you and your team, a truly major achievement.”

  “Thanks, Bob. Too bad it’s all for nothing.”

  “That detonation didn’t just wipe out Moscow, it took out the premier’s dacha, thirty-seven miles away,” the Bomb Damage Assessment Officer said.

  Parnes nodded. “A great way to end this program.”

  “Well, maybe if the Cold War comes back, we’ll actually build the data you just generated into an online weapons system,” the general said optimistically.

  “Til then it will remain a simulation exercise report in some digit
al archive of the DARPA library.” Parnes realized he probably just wrote the epitaph of his program.

  “What’s next for you and your team, Parnes?” the general asked in a manner that usually accompanied opening his belt a notch after another fine meal.

  “There isn’t any ‘next.’ We spent ten billion on this simulation alone. No way that kind of money will ever be available again without a national emergency.”

  To the general that was a gray area, best left to the politicians. Absentmindedly he went to shake Parnes’s right hand, only to realize his error mid-gesture. He turned the attitude of his hand from a shake to a pat on Parnes’s shoulder, just above his severed limb.

  Parnes had become the most highly paid civilian advisor to the military, despite his physical handicap. At his level, they paid the big bucks for his brain. Legend falsely accredited the loss of his right wing to a cataclysmic discharge of electrostatic plates during a cyclotron experiment gone awry. The story went that the discharge of millions of volts exploded the cells of his arm, leaving amputation the only option. In truth, he lost the limb in a Jeep accident as a young radioman drafted into the Army. However, legends die hard and professors do not get many romantic notions hung on their identities. And although he toyed with the most feared weapons of all mankind, being five-foot eight and on the thin side of fat, he hardly cut an imposing figure. So eventually he stopped denying the legend. Having long ago mastered typing and mouse clicking with just one hand, his absent limb did not impede his work on his chosen specialty, computer technology—specifically, virtual engagement protocol and anti-computational warfare. A complicated name for what simply was anything that processed strategic or tactical military data and computer simulations.