Chapter Thirty Nine
Over Los Angeles, California
“Just where the blazes is he?” Commander Mike Wong pulled his F-18H around, allowing its radar to scan the volume over Los Angeles. An older radar would have been swamped with returns, so many aircraft were crowding into the airspace over the City. But, the AESA radar could cope with the workload and, in any case, they had a E-3 AWACs up controlling the air battle. Or what would be the air battle if they could find somebody to battle against.
“Not up here, Squid.” The voice on the radio was gently mocking. An Air Force pilot taking the opportunity to goad his naval equivalent.
“Cut the unnecessary chatter.” The controller in the AWACs bird snapped the order out. “We’ve got enough to do making sure you hot-shots don’t fly into each other.”
“Say again, Coronet, he’s not up here. All contacts are accounted for. He’s got to be on the ground. Unless he’s already made a run for it.”
“Negative on that Dolphin-One. Ground reports the attack is still continuing, First deaths are being reported now.”
Wong’s mouth twisted as he pulled his F-18 into another turn. The theory was that the deaths from a Uriel attack would be exponential, a mere scattered handful at first but picking up numbers quickly as people’s strength gave out. “If he is on the ground, he could be anywhere. We’ve got a real problem here.”
Aboard E-3G “Coronet”, Over Los Angeles
It was lucky Coronet had just arrived from the upgrade facility with her new displays and data processing computers. She’d been sent to Edwards for testing before the rest of her kind were pulled in for similar upgrades. Now, even the advanced data handling capability was being strained as far as it would go.
“The Squid is right, Sir. He just isn’t up here. He’s got to be on the ground somewhere.” Captain John Lacrosse stared at the displays showing the aircraft orbiting Los Angeles. He had a strange feeling that he was looking at Uriel’s location right then, but he just lacked the insight to dig the answer out of the data. “Colonel, let’s assume he is on the ground right?”
“We can take that as being pretty definitive.”
“Well, he usually flies over the target but he’s learned that’s just too unhealthy for him. So, he’s going to do the next best thing. Find himself some high ground and look down from there.”
Colonel Findel thought that one over. “Do we know Uriel’s capability is line-of-sight?”
“Do we know it isn’t?”
“The DIMO(N) network location on the portal just said Los Angeles, it wasn’t specific as to where. I don’t think its accurate enough for that. Uriel’s down there somewhere. Even on the roof of a building.”
“Doubt that Sir. Everybody with a heavy-caliber hunting rifle would be shooting at him. What we need is a display that shows us where the effects of the attack are being felt. That’ll give us an idea. Problem is, we can’t do it. Our equipment isn’t set up that way. Now if we had a JSTARS here it could be different. They’re built to give land pictures.”
Findel stared at the displays of the fighters circling the city, then glanced down at the brilliant lights of the city below. Finally, the penny dropped. “We have got a display, we’ve got the biggest one ever built.”
The communications center was a few feet further forward from where he was standing. He took the few paces needed and patched through to the emergency control center on the ground.
“Report center? We need help up here. Uriel’s grounded and we can’t find him. We need to know what parts of the city are under attack and which ones are not…… Yes, killing the lights in the unaffected part of the city will do fine. Just a minute or two should do it.”
Down below, the lights covering more than half the city winked out. The E3Gs electro-optical system recorded the picture and by the time the lights came on again, the image was displayed in the airborne command center. The computers had superimposed a map on the image. Findel looked at it. Everything north of a line from Pico Rivera to Culver City was blacked out. So was everything east of a line from La Habra to Huntington Beach.
“So it is line of sight.” Captain Lacrosse was relieved that his guess had been right. “And the only place that can give us that pattern is here, Hacienda Heights. If he was on Beverly Hills, he’d be hitting the whole coastline, not just this segment of it. And if he was south by lake Irvine, we’d have more coverage east. It has to be Hacienda Heights. All we need is to flush him out.”
“We can do that. If we assume he’s in an unpopulated bit, it has to be around here, by Turnbull Canyon. Get those two Bones on the line. We won’t flush him out, we’ll blast him out.
Harvelles Blues Club, 4th Street, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California
People were weakening, slowly but surely. Fantasia could see it and feel it within herself. The animals weren’t doing so well, a tank of fish had already died and were floating on the surface of their aquarium. The reptiles were doing just as badly, the snakes and lizards were dead or dying. Looking around, she could see the dogs were doing best but even they were in grave distress, drooling helplessly and whimpering. There was a distinct pattern, the animals that bonded best with humans were surviving, those that did not were dying. As her drinks tray was refilled, Fantasia had a flash of insight, was the time-honored alliance of man and dog a relic of the time when both had sheltered together against the fury of a Uriel attack?
She was suddenly aware that her vision had almost dimmed out completely and she was on the verge of fainting. That would be certain death. She forced herself to breath deeply, sucking oxygen into her lungs and echoing the beating of her heart in her mind. Up on the stage the band was still playing but the drummer had peeled away from the score and was now tapping his drums in a fair simulation of a heartbeat. Fantasia focussed upon the sound and imagined her heart beating in time to it. The fuzzy gray from her vision cleared slightly.
“You OK Fanny?” The barkeep’s face was a waxy white-gray with sweat beading his forehead and lips.
“Yeah, think so, just slipped for a moment there.”
“Well, don’t do it again.” The mock severity was as near as anybody could get to being funny. “Your customers are getting thirsty out there.”
She was halfway across the floor when the whole room seemed to shudder. That’s all we needed. An earthquake. But, the rolling thunder wasn’t like any earthquake she’d heard. In fact, it wasn’t like anything any American city had ever heard.
Israeli Army Road Block, al Za’im, West Bank
“Turn back, can’t you see the Scarlet Beast is down there?”
The Israeli sergeant commanding at the road block tried to wave the truck down. His men were setting up their machine gun to stage a last-ditch defense of this point against the beast that was now barely a kilometer away. Husni al-Sohl brought the truck to a halt and wound down his window/.
“Let me throught. I am of Hamas and this truck is loaded with explosives. I can hurt that abomination much more than you.”
The sergeant did a double take at the words. Not so long ago, the words would have caused the truck to be raked by machine gun fire. “You’ll never get close enough.”
“I will. Just put my foot down hard. I have the explosives on a simple dead man’s switch, It’ll work. And Sergeant, there are two RPG-7s in the back and a dozen rockets. Your men will need them.”
Al-Sohl felt the truck rock as the soldiers scrambled into the truck bed and unloaded the rocket launchers. He heard on of them whistling. “Just how much explosive is in the back of this thing?’
“Six hundred kilos of the best anfo Hamas can make. And another two hundred kilos of nails. Iron nails.
“Be careful you could damage the suspension carrying that lot.” The sergeant grinned at al-Sohl then snapped out something almost unknown in the Israeli Army, a reasonable approximation of a decent salute. He and his men held it as the truck drove through their checkpoint.
The Scarlet Beast had moved some more and was across the highway that led east from Jerusalem. Al Sohn floored his accelerator and headed straight down the road at the great monster that was carving a swathe of destruction through the valley leading up to the city. He had his windows up tight and the air conditioning turned off, hoping that the seal would be enough to keep the strange dust the Whore was using to wipe out those who stood against her. The truck was shaking and shimmying on the rough road surfaces, for all Toyota’s efforts, their pick-up trucks just didn’t have the strength and stability of the Dodge and Chevvy rivals. The speedometer
