Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

-1-

“Something has crashed on an island south of Hawaii,” said Mr. Church, frowning at me from the videoconference screen in my office.

I was not dressed for a teleconference. I was wearing ancient, ragged board shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with images of old fifties roadside diners on it. My feet were bare and propped on the edge of my desk next to an open take-out box of Wahoo’s fish tacos. Five empty bottles of Gift of the Magi golden ale I’d brought back to the Pier with loving care from the Confessional in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, just up the road. The Magi has spicy hops balanced with moderate malt sweetness and an aroma like nuts and honey. It also has 12 percent alcohol and I was on my sixth.

It’s entirely possible that Church did not have my full and undivided attention.

Two teams of enthusiastic and talented college women were playing volleyball outside of my office window and I had Art Pepper blowing cool jazz from the four Bose speakers in my office. The Pier was nearly deserted except for me, my big white shepherd, Ghost, and a few disgruntled employees who had to man the battlements on a gloriously warm Saturday in December. Quite frankly I couldn’t care less if Air Force One had crashed in my own parking lot.

“As I recall,” I said, “we have a field team in Honolulu. They love playing with boats. Send those guys.”

“I did,” said Church.

“And…?”

“We’ve lost all contact with them.”

I sat up. “What?”

“They are the third investigating group to have visited the island since the crash,” he said. “Following the crash, the Coast Guard tried to contact members of a small Nature Conservancy research team on the island, but they were unable to make contact via radio or satellite. A Coast Guard cutter was dispatched and they launched a drone for flyover. The live feed from the drone terminated as the aircraft crossed into island airspace. Contact with the cutter was lost within minutes. A navy ship, the USS Michael Murphy, an Arleigh Burke — class destroyer, was within three hundred miles and it sent in a Seahawk helicopter, which has since vanished along with its crew of six. This occurred four hours and ten minutes ago. The Michael Murphy was ordered to maintain station fifty nautical miles from the island until the DMS can send a team.”

“What do we know?” I asked. “Do we have an eye in the sky on this yet?”

“Yes,” said Church after the slightest pause. “And that’s why this has been handed over to us.”

The screen split into two windows and the second showed a good-quality satellite black-and-white image of Palmyra. Church explained that it was one of the Northern Line Islands, and was about a thousand miles due south of the Hawaiian Islands and about a third of the way between Hawaii and American Samoa. The nearest continent was thirty-three hundred miles away. Nicely remote.

Palmyra Atoll is in the middle of nowhere. Seriously. Nowhere. The whole thing was a bit over four square miles, with sand and forested land wrapped around a seawater bay. It might have once been pretty, and parts of it still were, but it was scarred by a long trench that started from the southeast tip and drove inland for half a mile. Sand had been pushed up on either side of the trench, speaking to the force of the impact, and there was evidence of a forest fire that destroyed a lot of palm trees. The trench was shaped like a big spoon, with the bowl part of the spoon being the final impact point.

In the center of the bowl was an object.

Big. Triangular. And definitely not a chunk of space rock.

I recognized that shape and it immediately turned me cold frigging sober and dropped the temperature of my blood to that of ice water.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

“Yes,” said Church.

“It’s a T-craft.”

“Yes,” he said. “But it’s not one of ours.”

“Whose?” I demanded. “The Russians? The Chinese?”

Several of the world’s superpowers had been conducting a very quiet arms race to launch triangular-shaped craft like this, based on technologies recovered from places you might have heard of. Kecksburg, Rendlesham, Roswell. Like that.

Yeah.

Exactly like that.

Church said, “I don’t believe this craft is of local manufacture.”

An hour later I was on my private jet, heading to Hawaii. My two most experienced and reliable shooters, Top and Bunny, were with me. And Ghost. All of us rushing headlong to a place where no one seemed to come out.

I hate my job.

-2-

The captain of the destroyer was a friend of a friend of a friend, but that didn’t make him a friend of mine. In fact, he was pretty frigging unhappy to have me and my team delivered like an unwanted pizza onto his aft deck in the middle of a bad night. The fact that we were pretty damned unhappy to be there made it a real party. At least we’d changed into attire more appropriate to one of Uncle Sam’s clandestine Special Ops gunslingers — black BDUs without any trace of unit patch or rank insignia. I offered no credentials to the deck officer and was not asked for any by Captain Tanaka. We shook hands, but there was no warmth in it.

He studied us for a long, silent time. First Sergeant Bradley “Top” Sims was a forty-something stern-faced black combat veteran who looked as if he could eat live crocodiles. He smiled exactly as often as he wanted to, which wasn’t all that often. Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit — known as “Bunny” by everyone including his parents — was a six-and-a-half-foot-tall white kid who looked like an Iowa farmhand but was really a surfer and volleyball player from Orange County. They had joined the DMS with me and we had walked through all kinds of hell together. And I use the word hell a lot less metaphorically than I’d like to. Our after-action reports could qualify as horror short stories, or so we’ve been told. Ghost was 105 pounds of combat-trained attitude, and after losing six teeth in a battle in Iran, he’d been gifted with titanium replacements. He loved showing those gleaming fangs to anyone he doesn’t like, and there are a lot of people he doesn’t like. He wasn’t overly fond of Captain Tanaka.

We stood in a cluster and endured the officer’s inspection, allowing him to draw whatever conclusions he wanted from our appearance, our lack of credentials, and our presence. Tanaka’s only comment was, “Well, this should be interesting.”

Not said with a smile.

He knew our combat call signs and addressed me as “Cowboy,” which meant that he had been briefed. The DMS does not have any official rank in the U.S. military command structure. We operate on a very special and highly secret executive order that gives us extraordinary powers and freedom of action. The captain had been contacted and told to offer us every assistance and cooperation. He did that. He hadn’t been ordered to be warm or fuzzy, so we got none of that. And for the record, experienced captains of ultrasophisticated guided missile destroyers do not, as a rule, like having someone else come in to solve their problems. Particularly where their own crew members are involved. His ship carried everything from Tomahawk missiles to Harpoons and lots of other goodies, and the crew of three hundred enlisted men and twenty-three officers were among the finest in the service, which made them easily world-class. In almost any other circumstance, Echo Team would have been, at best, a mildly annoying bit of extra baggage or, at worst, a useless pain in the ass. A good case could have been built either way.

This was not one of those other circumstances.

And in every way that mattered this was my case anyway. There was a standing order that all incidents involving T-craft or even suspected T-craft were to be handed over without pause or interference to the Special Projects Office of the Department of Military Sciences.

To me.

That order had been put in effect following the Extinction Machine case, in which a rogue group of DARPA called Majestic Three had built a small fleet of T-craft using taxpayer dollars but for very private purposes. The man behind all of that was Howard Shelton, and that fucking maniac had wanted to use the craft to start, and win, World War III. You see, Shelton had discovered a fact that eluded the other superpowers involved in the recovered-technologies part of the arms race. While their experimental T-craft kept exploding every time one of the engines was fired, Shelton figured out how to stabilize the ships. Doesn’t sound like too big a thing until you step back and look at what’s happened when T-craft have exploded over the last thirty years or so.

The engines were typically built in remote spots, far away from prying eyes and in areas where large amounts of hydroelectric, nuclear, or geothermal power was available. The energetic discharge from an exploding engine delivered a blast several orders of magnitude larger than the apparent fuel. It was a kind of zero-point energy that has resulted in some of the world’s biggest natural disasters. Mount St. Helens. The tsunami that slammed into Japan. The massive earthquakes in China. Like that.

Shelton figured it out. The trick was to play a long game and breed pilots who had a small percentage of DNA from “other sources.”

Yeah, E.T. phone home. You get the point.

The biomechanical connection allowed the ships’ engines to stabilize. Shelton then rigged his ships to kill the pilot as soon as a T-craft was over a target city. Like Beijing or Moscow. He launched his ships to force a confrontation that began with the demonstration of a weapon so powerful that the other nations could not risk fighting a war like that. A fully powered T-craft could stroll past any fighter jet in existence because it used alloys based on what was learned from stripping the wreckage of alien craft. Fiber optics, microminiaturization, and other sciences in common use have quietly benefited from those same technologies. Even Velcro.

Sure, some urban legends are true.

The DMS went after Shelton and took him all the way down. However, the ship he sent to destroy Beijing was destroyed by someone else. We never met them and I’m very, very cool with that. An eloquent message had been conveyed to us to turn over all materials related to the development of T-craft. Or else.

The “or else” part was scary as shit. We did, and E.T. went home. No good-byes, no wet, sloppy kisses with our friends from wherever.

Actually, we never really found out where they were from. I had a theory, but I was pretty badly concussed when I came up with that theory, so no one has leaped up to say that I solved one of the great mysteries of the ages.

That was all years ago. Since then things have been very quiet. UFO sightings around the world have dropped considerably, except in cases where people are seeing drones, actual weather balloons, airplanes, the Goodyear Blimp, or other ordinary things.

Side note, I fucking hate drones, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that reliable sightings of saucers, T-craft, mother ships, the Death Star, Firefly-class space freighters, X-wing fighters, and the starship Enterprise have dwindled to a precious few. Which has made everyone in the know sleep a little more soundly.

Past tense.

Now we had a T-craft crashed onto an island in the middle of the South Pacific.

“We’ve had no contact with anyone since the object crashed,” said Captain Tanaka. “And except for the one image that was sent to you, we’ve had nothing from the satellite.”

“No images?”

“No telemetry, no feed, no signal. If it’s up there we can’t find it.”

Bunny murmured, “Oh, shit.”

“Yes,” Tanaka agreed dryly. “Though I was hoping for a bit more than that from you fellows.”

Tanaka was a middle-aged man who looked fit enough to run a marathon while carrying me on his shoulders. One of those guys you can’t even imagine with a hangover, love handles, or a hair out of place. Steely eyes and a hero jaw. Made me feel like a grubby beach bum with indifferent hygiene.

“Was there any evidence that your chopper crashed?” asked Top.

“No. Same goes for the Coast Guard drone. There is apparently some kind of line out there near the beach, and once something has crossed it all transmission ends. I sent a drone in to circle and photograph the island at a distance, standing half a mile beyond the surf line. We have lots of pictures of burned trees and mounds of dirt, but we can’t get a good angle on the object from that distance. We don’t know how firm the dead zone is, or even if it is still active, because orders came down to wait for you.”

I met his stare and said, “And that wasted almost a full day where you don’t know if your people are injured and in need of assistance. I get it, and I’m sorry, but this situation is complicated and sensitive.”

“And clearly above my pay grade,” he said, barely hiding his contempt of any policy that did not allow him to protect his people.

“Yes,” I said, “it is. I’m sorry for the inconvenience and the obfuscation but—”

“But you’re not really sorry.”

“Frankly, Captain, I’m sorry any of us have to be out here, but this is how it is.”

Top and Bunny both muttered, “Hooah,” under their breath. Ghost whuffed.

Tanaka took a moment and I could see the muscles bunch and flex in the corners of his jaw. He had a lot of control and knew enough to think and compose his thoughts before he opened his mouth.

“Let me know what you need from me and I’ll make it happen. Weapons, equipment, people…”

“Thanks,” I said. “We brought our own toys. What we need is a boat and a whole lot of rope.”

“How much rope?”

“Enough to run a line from a second boat out in the water to the one I’m going to take all the way in. This might be a stable or repeated null field.”

Tanaka frowned. “Wait… like what was used two years ago?”

I nodded. A rogue CIA agent had gotten his hands on a man-portable device capable of canceling electronic power within a certain range. Unlike the EMP cannons DARPA was developing, this did not destroy electronics but merely interrupted them.

“You think someone on the island has Kill Switch technology?” he asked.

“That,” I said, “would be best-case scenario.”

He gave me a funny look. “What exactly do you do in the DMS?”

“Mostly?” I asked. “We get the shit scared out of us on a regular basis. Better than a high-fiber diet, but my blood pressure could pop rivets on a submarine hull.”

-3-

The Michael Murphy carried two RHIBs, or rigid-hull inflatable boats, that could zip across the water with great speed and surprising grace. Bunny was good with boats, but not as good as the chief running the second RHIB. Top and I had our rifles ready and we studied the shoreline through sniper scopes. Saw a few seabirds and a turtle, but nothing else.

Bunny asked, “If I say that it looks quiet, will one of you cats say, ‘Yeah, too quiet’?”

“If I wrap an anchor chain around you and drop you in the water, will the cap’n cry the blues?” was Top’s reply.

Bunny grinned.

When we were five hundred yards from the beach, the chief cut his engine and stopped, but we kept going, spooling hundreds of yards of thin line behind us as Bunny drove toward the beach at reduced speed. The counter on the spool on the chief’s boat would record how much line had paid out before we hit whatever electronic barrier was present. I was surprised that we made it all the way to the mouth of the lagoon before the engine died. There was no sputter, no spark trying to catch inside the motor. One second the engine was running normally at fifty knots and then it wasn’t. Just like that.

“Now we know where the fun and games start,” muttered Top.

“Just like with the Kill Switch,” observed Bunny.

The day became very quiet very fast.

Bunny had to wrestle for steerageway and used a passive rudder to angle us in toward the shore. There was just enough impetus to allow him to beach the nose of the boat; Top and I jumped out and dragged it onto the sand. Ghost bounded out past us and ran up and down the beach like a silent gust of white smoke, then he returned to me and sat. It meant that he detected no immediate threat. Not sure if that was a good thing or not. We all moved toward the shelter of a stand of palms.

Top tapped his earbud and shook his head. Mine was just as dead, not even the white noise of an empty channel. Nothing. We checked all of our electronic gear and it was all down.

Bunny made a rude noise, then said, “If some ISIL dickheads are out here with one of those Kill Switch machines, I’m going to get cranky.”

“You’ll have to wait your turn,” I said.

Even my flashlight didn’t work, which wasn’t much of a problem because the sun was up. I looked out to sea and saw the other boat about half a mile beyond the farthest point of the island. The faint thrum of its idling engine drifted to me on the humid morning air. They would keep the engine on to allow them to maintain a safe distance. There was a quick two-pulse flash of light as a signal. I stood up and waved my arms three times to indicate that I was safe. Then I turned and moved into the dense foliage, vanishing from their sight. Not, I hoped, from history.

The island was not big enough to get lost on, which meant it was small enough to get found on. So, I was very damn careful as I made my way along the southern reach of it, staying inside the trees, pausing to listen. Hearing nothing. Not a bird, not a bug. Nothing but the sway and hiss of palm fronds moving in the sluggish breeze. Ten minutes in, I heard a sharper hiss and looked up to see a flare rise in an arc from the direction of the other RHIB. It popped high above me and stained the sky with green smoke. It was intended to both signal any survivors on the island and draw the eye away from the beach — away from us.

Without saying a word, we moved, spreading out, weapons up and ready, eyes and gun barrels moving in unison, fingers laid along the outside of the trigger guards, going fast but no faster than good caution allowed. Ghost ranged ahead but not too far, and if there was something to see, he didn’t see it. That was comforting, but only if you didn’t look too closely at it. Just because a dog didn’t see, smell, or hear something did not mean it wasn’t there.

We swept along the strip of jungle fifty feet in from the sand, using the slanting rays of morning light to pick our way.

Top was on point and he stopped with a raised fist. Bunny and I immediately knelt, alert and ready. Top pointed to something ahead and off to our right, then gestured for us to approach. We came up on it quickly.

It was the Coast Guard RHIB, a seventeen-foot Zodiac Hurricane with a 100-horsepower diesel engine and M240B machine guns mounted fore and aft. Very fast and fierce.

It sat on the sand. Empty, abandoned, undamaged.

There was no one there. Not even footprints in the sand. No sign at all of what happened except for something Ghost found. He jumped into the craft and stood growling at something I couldn’t see until I climbed in. Top and Bunny provided cover in case it was someone or something nasty hiding there. It wasn’t.

On the back of the pilot’s seat was a muddy handprint. Full palm and fingers.

Only here’s the thing. The fingers were way too long and each finger ended in wickedly sharp points.

And there were four of them.

I’m not talking about a hand with a missing finger. What we saw was a handprint of something that had a thumb and three fingers. Three clawed fingers. Like a bird’s, except that’s not what it was.

All the hairs on Ghost’s back stood up in a stiff row. The hairs on the back of my neck did the same thing. Ghost growled at the handprint and took a slow, fearful step backward.

I looked from the print to Bunny and then to Top, and then we all slowly turned and looked at the thick wall of shadow-filled forest.

“Fuck me,” whispered Bunny.

“Don’t touch that shit,” warned Top.

I almost laughed. “There is not one chance in ten trillion that I was going to do that.”

We backed away and then climbed out of the boat. We all wanted to talk about that print, maybe we needed to. We didn’t. Instead we moved off down the beach and then edged back toward the trees. The jungle seemed a lot less inviting now than before. Instead of seeming to offer cover it had a feeling of occupation to it, a vague presence that was impossible to define. Could have been my imagination running hot after seeing that print on the boat. Just as easily could have been my rational mind wondering why in the wide blue fuck I was on this island and in this line of work. I used to be a cop in Baltimore. Not once in all those years on the force did I encounter a four-fingered monster handprint. It’s not the sort of thing you tend to encounter, even in Baltimore. Made me long for a boring life of being shot at by gangbangers and cartel pistoleros.

I was on the island right now, though, and tough as they were, my men looked to me for guidance, for leadership, for the kind of stoic toughness that makes great copy in speeches about Special Operations. So I kept my poker face in place and shifted to take point. Top yielded that position without argument.

Inside the wall of the forest the ground was a soft mixture of sand and soil, with many palm fronds knocked loose by the crash. As we moved, we began to smell the stink of burned foliage and torn earth. There is a distinctive smell to land that has been torn by cataclysm, be it a bomb, an earthquake, or a plane crash. The richer soil is ripped up and exposed to the air, releasing microparticles of nutrients and rotting plant matter, and infused with it are the smells conjured by great heat. Of silica sand fused into glass and wood burned to charcoal.

We did not find a single human footprint. Nothing to indicate what had happened to the sailors from the boat we’d found. No prints, no shell casings to indicate a fight. Nothing, and that was very spooky.

I stopped the team because Ghost suddenly crouched low and bared his teeth. Thirty feet in front of us was a thick tangle of vines draped between a stand of pines and an ancient overgrown aloe plant. I couldn’t see anything, but Ghost did. His titanium fangs gleamed with reflected sunlight, making it look as if he had bitten down on raw fire. His eyes were fixed, unblinking as he stared at a spot just behind the stiff, serrated aloe leaves.

I felt it then.

That strange, unnerving sensation of being watched. Not suspecting that you are. Knowing it. I snugged my rifle stock into my shoulder and aimed at the aloe plant. At what was behind it.

It’s such a strange feeling, and your conscious evolved mind wars with the instincts of the lizard brain as to whether to believe it or not. Good soldiers don’t ignore those kinds of feelings. I may fail at a lot of important things in my life, but I am a good soldier.

We shifted around and found cover, each of us kneeling, aiming, waiting, straining with our senses to justify what we knew was there. The jungle was unnaturally still and even the soft slosh of the waves on the sand was muted. The breeze died as if the world held its breath, silencing the whisk of palm leaves and the creak of tree trunks. It was a silence so complete that you become unnaturally aware of your own shallow breathing, certain that it is far too loud, that it can be heard all the way across the forest floor, that it draws the ear, the eye, and the aim of whatever weapon is seeking you from the shadows.

There was no good play here. If we fired, we could hit someone hiding in fear, and that could be a sailor from the navy or Coast Guard, or one of the scientists from the nature research team. Or maybe we’d be firing at a bunch of plants and trees and accomplish nothing more than revealing our location and our numbers. Or we could hit one of them. Whatever they were.

I signaled my guys and sent Top cutting left in a wide circle, indicating that Bunny should go right down to the sand and circle around behind the trees. I’d wait for them to get into position and then go up the pipe. They moved off, though I could see from their expressions that they didn’t like the plan for the same reasons I didn’t like it. But there was no better way to play this.

Cold sweat trickled down my back between my shoulder blades and zigzagged over the knobs of my spine. Ghost was still crouched low, still caught in that animal zone where fear and anger are the same thing. I could relate.

Top and Bunny reached their points and gave me nods.

I moved first, went in with my own zigzag, cutting left and right to make use of natural cover and spoil aim. Ghost was right at my side because I did not want him to rush into a blind spot like that without my eyes on him.

“Cowboy!”

I heard Top yell out my combat call sign, but it came one-half second too late. The whole front of the forest seemed to move, to pulse outward toward me as if it were a door someone was kicking open. The huge aloe plant crashed into me before I could even think about stopping. There was no time to evade, no time to brace. There was only time to feel it.

It was hard.

It hurt.

It was like a tidal wave of plant matter and it struck me with enough force to knock all the light out of the world.

-4-

I was nowhere.

It was the strangest feeling.

I had a body and I was aware of it. Breath wheezing in and out of my bruised chest. The gunfire rattle of my terrified heartbeat. The pain of shocked and abused skin. The ache of muscles.

But there was something missing.

There was no downward pull. It’s something you never take notice of day to day. The pull of gravity. You feel lead-footed when you’re tired, but otherwise it’s normal to be tied to the earth, to be pulled into standing, sitting, falling, lying down.

Not now.

There was no actual sensation of gravity, not in any specific direction.

I’ve never been in space, but I’ve been in a reduced-gravity aircraft. A vomit comet, they call them. They’re fixed-wing aircraft that provide a brief near weightless environment for astronaut training. Hollywood uses them for making movies about space travel.

It was like that.

But not like that.

In reduced-gravity aircraft you feel your skin become rubbery, your hair and clothing tend to float on you. I could feel my clothes hanging normally on me, as if gravity applied to that but not to me. Which made no sense at all.

It was absolutely pitch black. So dark I had to blink to make sure my eyes were even open.

No sound. I was neither hot nor cold. No sensation of air passing my skin, no wind. Nothing like that.

A smell, though, and a taste to go with it. Metallic, like copper. And a bit of ozone, like after a lightning strike.

“Hey!” I yelled, and my voice was strangely distant, the way it sounds when you’re in a wide-open place and there’s no wall to bounce or trap your noise.

Yelling did not help, but it gave me something to do. I could hear my own voice, so I kept yelling. It was a long, long time before I heard another sound. I think it was a long time because time itself had no meaning for me.

A voice spoke. Male. Heavily accented, but it was a kind of American accent I’d never quite heard before. New England, but not. A rough voice, used to yelling in order to be heard.

“Captain, there’s a reef two points off the port bow,” called the voice. “A mile or less. God’s love and we’d have struck ’em if we hadn’t dropped anchor last night.”

I listened for more, but that was it. There and gone.

“Hello!” I yelled, then as I replayed what the man had said, I tried, “Hello the boat.”

Nothing.

“Ahoy the ship.”

I’m not a sailor, but I hoped that was the right thing to say.

Nothing.

I drifted in nowhere.

Maybe I fell asleep. Maybe I just stopped thinking. No way to know, but I was jarred to awareness by the unmistakable sound of something heavy and wooden smashing into something immovable. Men screamed. Many men. I could hear the pop and snap of cloth. Sails? People cursing and calling orders out to shorten this and belay that and plug something else. Lots of nautical terms that I barely understood, and the gushing sound of water rushing in where it wasn’t supposed to be. Even a landlubber like me could figure it out. A ship had hit the reef of the island.

Right?

I remembered seeing the reef on the chart, but the RHIB had hydroplaned over it and Bunny had steered us around the fangs of rock that had jutted out of the water. The destroyer was steel and I doubted they had any wooden boats aboard. Why would they? This was the age of metal, of plastic and rubber.

So what was I hearing?

The men screamed and called out for help, yelled orders, cried out to God and their mothers, and gradually, gradually, the voices faded as if drowned by the sea. But it wasn’t the sea that took the voices away. It was the nothingness in which I floated.

I tried to make sense of it.

Was I dead?

Was I in a coma? Or dreaming? Or, had I finally gone mad? All of those were real possibilities with me.

Sounds came and went. The creak of oars and the splash of the oar blades in the water. Men slogging through surf. Laughing, joking, telling stories. None of it made sense, though. They talked about whales. They talked about the brown-skinned girls of Hawaii, but they spoke of them in the rude exaggerations of simple men to whom such things were rare and magical. Some of the voices were American, though crude and strange; and some were clearly British. One of the men said something about making a legal claim for Queen Victoria, and that made no goddamn sense at all.

Queen Victoria?

Jesus H. Christ.

I slept again.

And woke when someone kicked me in the ribs.

-5-

“Aufstehen!”

The voice growled it as he kicked me again. Harder.

I twisted away and sand shifted under me and all at once there was light. Not much of it. Moonlight spilling down and painting everything around me in silver. I saw two figures standing above me, silhouetted against the moon. Men. Big, young, broad-shouldered. Wearing black skin-diving outfits. Fins and old-fashioned tanks lay on the wet sand.

“We bist du?” said one of them, and all at once I realized two very strange things.

The first problem was that they were speaking German in a tense, secretive whisper. The man who’d told me to get up and asked who I was. I understood it; I’m good with languages.

I was less good with the second thing I realized.

Their equipment was wrong. Very wrong. The one who kicked me held a Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr semiautomatic rifle. It was a classic example of a weapon known as a Volkssturm rifle, a “people’s assault” rifle, a cheap last-ditch kind of gun used in combat in the final months of World War II. The other guy held a Luger. Not the modern P38 used in Germany nowadays. No, that might have made a fraction of sense. This was the older model, the one collectors prized and hundreds of U.S. soldiers smuggled home after the fall of Berlin. A P04 or maybe the P08. Hard to tell because it was dark, I was scared, and there was a cheap-looking silencer screwed into the barrel.

So, here we are. A couple of big blond guys with new-looking antique gear. The wrong moon in the sky. What the actual fuck? At that moment I was pretty sure the world had fallen off its hinges and that I was in deep shit. The two men weren’t tourists. These weren’t gun nuts that got lost at sea. And they weren’t amused to find me.

Crazy as it sounds, crazy as it felt, I was absolutely certain I was a lot more lost than I thought. This may have been Palmyra Atoll, but I was lost.

They were Nazis.

-6-

I smiled my very best I’m not your enemy and the world isn’t bug-fuck nuts smile. They seemed to expect me to raise my hands, so I obliged.

“Wer bist du und was machst du denn hier?” demanded the man with the Luger. He had the officer look, expecting to be answered at once.

Who are you and what are you doing here?

The rifleman gave me an evil look and said, “Amerikanisch.”

They were not happy at all with the thought that I was an American. Although I could speak German, I was pretty sure there was going to be some kind of need for a code word, which I did not have. On the upside I wore no insignia or other markings. Nothing in my pockets other than a folding knife clipped to my inner right-hand trouser pocket, some nonfunctioning electronic doodads, and the SIG Sauer P226 Combat TB snugged into my shoulder rig.

The moment was surreal.

The moon was full and bright, and when all this insanity started it was bright morning. Last night’s moon had been a sickle slash of a crescent. So there was that. The island — what I could see of it in the moonlight — was different. I was on the same part of the beach where we’d stopped by the aloe plant and knot of palm trees. There were plenty of aloe plants, but none of them were the right size or in the right place. The trees looked strange, none of them squaring with my memory of the landscape I’d traversed with Top, Bunny, and Ghost.

The officer ticked his head toward me and barked an order to his companion: “Suchen seine kleidung.” Search his clothes.

The rifleman stepped forward to pat me down. He paused for a moment, staring at the handgun I wore. Even in bad light he had to know it was a model he’d never seen. There wasn’t much I could say that would turn this situation in my favor. These cats were up to no good, and if I played it wrong I was going to die on this beach.

I kept my hands up and tried to look dumber, shorter, and slower than I am. The rifleman switched his gun to his left and reached out to take the SIG while his boss kept the Luger trained on me.

That’s where they made a mistake.

As soon as the rifleman grabbed the polymer grips of the handgun, I pivoted my body real damn fast, clamping his hand to the gun with my left and shoving him hard with my right. It put his body between me and the Luger and I ducked and drove, using his center-mass as both shield and battering ram. The Luger barked twice and I could feel the impact of the bullets punching into the rifleman, knocking wet coughs from him. I rammed the dying man into the officer and they went down hard onto the sand. Unfortunately, I caught a glimpse of my SIG Sauer flying from the rifleman’s hand, turning over and over as it spun through the air and then landing barrel first in the wet sand. Shit.

No time to worry about it, though, because the officer was quick and much stronger than I thought. He shoved the rifleman to one side and came up off the ground with a disheartening degree of rubbery agility, the Luger still in his grip. There was a fragment of a fragment of a moment open to me and I took the long reach and knuckle-punched the back of his hand. The Luger fired and the bullet tugged at the loose fabric of my upper inner left thigh. Half an inch more and I’d have been singing castrato in the celestial choir. His gun vanished, but the German did not gape or hesitate. Instead he punched me in the face with a pair of rapid-fire jabs that loosened the light bulbs inside my brain. I staggered back and tripped over the rifleman’s outstretched ankle. I went down just as something silver whipped past my face. I turned the fall into a backroll and came up on fingers and toes, spitting blood from my mouth, and saw the knife in his hand. It was another relic of a war that ended decades before I was born. A brass-handled German navy diver’s knife. Twelve and a quarter inches overall, with a wickedly sharp seven-and-five-eighths-inch blade. Sturdy and lethal. He came at me, moving well and low, nicely angled and well-balanced, with the blade shielded by the other hand, doing it all the right way, very smooth and professional and deadly.

I pushed off the ground and danced sideways as I reached for my own knife. The Wilson Tactical Combat Rapid Response folder sprang out of its holster and thudded into my palm and I flicked the blade open with a snap of my wrist. The German saw the knife and smiled. My blade was only three and a half inches long.

I smiled, too. There’s a reason I prefer the shorter, lighter weapon. It’s so light that it puts no drag on my hand speed. He darted in, trying to close the deal with a fake lunge and high short-slash across my throat. He was good and the tip of that knife nicked the point of my chin as I lunged back, but I caught him, too. The key to good fighting is never purely attack or purely defend. There needs to be elements of both in play, otherwise the fight is too long and too fair. As I slipped his cut, I whipped my blade in a very tight slap down across his forearm. The speed and force of his own attack added cutting length and depth to my counter.

A stupid fighter pauses to admire his work. In the movies there’s an exchange of witty taunts, or there’s banter. In the real world, it’s all about killing the other guy as quickly and efficiently as possible. I had a moment, so I took it. His lacerated nerve endings tricked him into recoiling from my cut, and I followed that reflex movement with an attack, elbow-checking his injured arm, cupping my hand around the back of his neck, stepping my right leg in around the back of his leg, and leg-wheeling him down to the ground while my blade chased his throat down and cut him from ear to ear.

Very quick, very messy. His heart stopped beating and the arterial spray hissed down to nothing. I pivoted toward the rifleman, saw a dark bubble form between his parted lips as he struggled to breathe. I clamped a hand over his mouth and corkscrewed my knife into his heart, felt him settle back, removed my hand as he let out a last wet breath against my palm.

The whole fight took about two seconds. From when the rifleman had tried to frisk me, call it five. Fights should be short or you’re one of the dead ones on the ground.

I cleaned my blade on the rifleman’s clothes and my hands in the surf. My SIG’s barrel was choked with sand but I holstered it anyway. Something caught my eye and I peered out to sea and saw moonlight glinting on the conning tower of a submarine. A U-boat? Probably.

I think that’s when the shakes hit me.

I’d survived the moment, but this wasn’t my moment.

There was no reason to stay where I was, so I moved along the beach, running fast in the cold moonlight, trying to find my way out of here.

It took only a few minutes to run to the end of the atoll and then I skidded to a stop. That end of the island was mostly flat and sandy, with trees rising up from the middle of the arms that reached around a kind of small bay. I expected to find nothing but empty sand and dark trees.

That’s not what I found. I stood staring at something that continued to shove the world toward a steep drop-off into the impossible.

The T-craft was there.

It lay in a bowl of ruptured earth at the end of the long impact trench, with burned and shriveled trees on either side of it. But that couldn’t be. The moon was wrong. There was a German U-boat in the water and I’d killed two Nazi frogmen. It was night instead of day.

Then I heard a sound behind me, and as I turned, I knew whatever it was could not be good. It wasn’t.

A ship rose up on night-black waters and then slammed into the hungry teeth of the line of sharp volcanic rocks. Not a World War II submarine. Not a modern navy destroyer. This was an old wooden ship. A brig, I think, though I’m no expert in sailing ships of the nineteenth goddamn century, and I’m pretty fucking sure I was watching one tear its guts out on the rocks. The impact jerked the hull to a stop with such force that several masts snapped, dragging rigging and sails down. I saw men fall, heard them scream as they hit water or stone or debris.

Then behind me a dog barked.

I whirled.

And there was Ghost, running from the exploding forest wall, chased by bits of torn aloe and palm. Top and Bunny dove for cover and I stood there like a goddamn idiot, too shocked to move, or speak.

Or duck.

A big piece of tree trunk slammed into me and I was gone.

-7-

It was the sound of metal clanking on metal that woke me.

I opened my eyes and realized that I wasn’t stretched out on the ground or hanging in zero gravity. I was on my feet. Daylight was warm on my face and there were insects buzzing in the humid tropical air. The greens of the surrounding forest were very green. Intensely so. Unnaturally bright, as if lit from within each leaf. The same with the blue water I glimpsed through the trees, and the sky above was eye-hurtingly vivid.

The metal clank sounded again and I turned. My body was strangely leaden, as if I were sleepwalking. I saw Top and Bunny. I saw Coast Guard and navy. A couple of marines, probably from the Michael Murphy. But there were other people, too. Men dressed in clothes from some weird mix of History Channel wardrobe department. Heavy coats with embroidered cuffs and fringe epaulets, barefoot bearded men in ragged shorts and simple shirts, Germans in the uniforms of the Kriegsmarine, people dressed in lab coats and others in casual sailing clothes from throughout the last century. There were at least three hundred of them.

They each held a tool of some kind. Some of the tools looked vaguely like wrenches or drivers or hammers, but many were so strange that I could not even guess at their purpose. Everyone who held a tool, though, seemed to know what to do with it. All across the bowl of the impact point, all around where the T-craft lay, men worked. Some carried pieces of metal or plastic, but most were hard at work doing repairs on machines. And again, I had no idea what any of the machines were. Some were of metal, but most seemed to be blends of metal, plastic, cloth, and something else, something that pulsed and throbbed and looked as if it were alive. Maybe it was alive.

The T-craft was propped up on some kind of hydraulic struts, and as I watched, Top and Bunny helped two German U-boat sailors lift a glowing device into place and hold it there while a navy helicopter pilot, still wearing his helmet, set to work with a kind of spot welder.

It was then that I realized I was not standing still. I looked down at my legs and saw them moving, walking. And I saw my hands. There were tools in them. A long, flat device with curling wires sticking out of one end, and a pair of something that looked like pliers but had bright blue glowing pads on it. I watched myself walk over to where a piece of machinery lay on a plastic pad near one of the hydraulic jacks; I felt myself kneel; I stared as my hands went to work on the device, using the tools with a precision and efficiency that did not belong to me.

I was aware, somehow, of being watched, but not by the other men. Or by Ghost. Or, in fact, by anyone I could see. It was as if the watcher were inside, looking out through my eyes. Watching me work but also studying me. There was some dried blood on the back of my wrist, a few drops I’d missed when I’d washed in the seawater. I raised my arm — or, it raised my arm — and I felt my nostrils flare as I sniffed. As it sniffed. My mouth spoke a single word.

I can’t spell it or repeat it because the word did not fit into my mouth. It was too awkward, too strange, better suited for the construction of some other kind of throat. And even though it was a word in a language I had never heard before, I knew what it meant.

Savages.

I knew as surely as I know anything.

My hands returned to their work.

The day passed. Seconds into minutes into hours.

I don’t remember when I fell asleep. I don’t remember when the lights went out. I don’t remember floating away.

-8-

Ghost woke me up.

He nudged my face with his muzzle, whined. Licked my nose and mouth. Barked once. He did everything short of bite me.

I woke up.

It was still daylight. I blinked and looked at the sun. Low on the horizon. Sunset? No, that was impossible. We were on the wrong side of the atoll for that.

We…

I realized that I was in the RHIB with Top and Bunny. In the water of the entrance to the lagoon. Drifting, turning slowly in the sluggish current. Ghost stood over me, staring at me with frightened brown eyes. He barked again, loud and sharp, and it chipped away a big chunk of my stupor. I sat up.

Top and Bunny were groaning softly, turning over as they moved upward from sleep to that pre-wakefulness where dreams and reality have no perceptible difference. I looked at my hands, my arms, expecting them to be badly sunburned, or covered with cuts from the debris from when the aloe plant and trees exploded. I looked at my palms, expecting to see calluses and blisters from using those tools for so many hours.

But, no.

“… to Cowboy…”

A fragment of sound in my ear made me jump, and I looked around.

The second RHIB was out there five hundred yards from the beach. The line snaked over the edge of our boat and vanished inside the seawater until it reappeared over their gunnels. Another sound made me jerk and suddenly a helicopter rose from behind the trees. A big Seahawk painted with navy colors. It wobbled in the air, then it rose and moved away from the island.

I heard the call again. It was Captain Tanaka calling me from the USS Michael Murphy. Top sat up slowly and held his head in his hands. I looked at my watch. It was running again. The last time I’d checked it was right before we crossed the dead zone. It had been 7:19. I watched the digital timer go to 7:20. At first I thought that it was simply starting up again, but when we compared our watches to those of the chief on the RHIB and the chronometer on the ship, they matched perfectly. As if no time had passed.

On the beach, I saw a handful of people come out of the jungle. Coast Guard and scientists from the conservancy station. Wandering a little as if dazed, but finding their footing. They stopped when they saw me. We all looked up at the helicopter, and then one by one we turned and looked toward the southeast end of the island. We could not see the burned trees or the torn ground. Not from that angle. But I knew what we would find there.

Nothing.

Not a goddamn thing.

Only the scar on the atoll. Only the memory in our minds.

I stood up in the boat and ran trembling fingers through my hair, trying to understand it. Trying to convince myself that it had been a dream. I knew — absolutely knew — that we would not find sailors from any antique ships. No. Not anymore. I glanced over to the spot where I’d fought and killed the two Nazi agents. The sand was smooth and undisturbed, as if no foot had stepped there in many, many years.

So it was what? A dream? Some kind of shared fantasy? A hallucination brought on by forces as yet to be understood? Magic mushrooms blooming? Some kind of virus? Some freaky weather thing that affected our brain chemistry?

Somehow all of those implausible theories would find their way into reports filed by the different agencies and branches of service involved.

I knew different, though. We all did, though as the day wore on and the debriefings began, most of the people on the island said that they couldn’t remember. None of them were willing to say so while hooked up to a lie detector, though; and no one made them.

The thing that bugs me, though, and the item that anchors me to that little spit of land a thousand miles south of Hawaii is this: There are three dots of blood on the sleeve of my shirt. I had them tested. They’re not mine.

I knew they wouldn’t be.

We flew back to San Diego without saying much of anything.

I mean, what was there to say?

Back home Church asked us a thousand questions. So did Rudy. So did the navy. So did everyone. Everyone had questions.

But we did not have the answers.

Not then. Not ever.

POSTSCRIPT

The navy has since sealed off Palmyra Island. Access has been revoked for the Nature Conservancy and all other research organizations. Maybe that’s an overreaction. Maybe there’s nothing left. No threat, no weirdness, no nothing.

Maybe.

But, really, would you want to take that risk?

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling novelist, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes the Joe Ledger thrillers, the Rot & Ruin series, the Nightsiders series, the Dead of Night series, and numerous stand-alone novels in multiple genres. His recent novels include Dogs of War, the ninth in his bestselling Joe Ledger thriller series, and Mars One, a stand-alone teen space travel novel. He is the editor of many anthologies, including The X-Files, Scary Out There, Out of Tune, and V-Wars. His comic book works include, among others, Captain America, the Bram Stoker Award — winning Bad Blood, Rot & Ruin, V-Wars, the New York Times bestselling Marvel Zombies Return, and others. His books Extinction Machine, V-Wars, and Mars One are in development for TV/film. A board game version of V-Wars was released in early 2016. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse and the co-founder of the Philadelphia Liars Club. Prior to becoming a full-time novelist, Jonathan spent twenty-five years as a magazine feature writer, martial arts instructor, and playwright. He was a featured expert on the History Channel documentary Zombies: A Living History and a regular expert on the TV series True Monsters. He is one-third of the very popular and mildly weird Three Guys with Beards pop-culture podcast. Jonathan lives in Del Mar, California, with his wife, Sara Jo. For more information, visit his website, www.jonathanmaberry.com.