Extinction Machine

Chapter Eighty-six

Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 12:23 p.m.

The sky got very loud. Craning my head to look up as I ran, I could see both of the unmarked black helicopters up there. But the noise was bigger than that. There were other engine sounds, rotors with a different signature coming hard from the south.

I broke from cover into a clearing that circled a small pond. There was a mound of sandstone rising on one side of the pond and I scrambled up to get the best possible view. The two black helicopters were moving slowly, rising from a low-level search and moving through a climbing turn to face south. It took ten seconds before I could see the other chopper. What I wanted to see—needed to see—was a different kind of black helo. Also black, but with a higher gloss to the paint and the distinctive weapons array that marked it as a DMS bird. I wanted to see thin red lines around the doors and down the tail.

What I saw instead were two helicopters, neither of them Black Hawks, neither of them black. The first was a hulking HH-60J Jayhawk and its companion was a much smaller AgustaWestland AW109. Both were painted with the bright white and blood red of the Coast Guard. Both, I knew, would be armed. M240D belt-fed, gas-operated medium machine guns firing 7.62mm NATO ammunition.

Under any other circumstance, two Coast Guard choppers would be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to anything troubling the shores of Maryland.

This was a different kind of day.

So far, it wasn’t a good day for the good guys.

The Black Hawks could have fought it out with their own machine guns, and they certainly had the edge. Kind of hard to pit the M240D against a minigun. The Guardsmen could spit out nine hundred rounds per minute. The minigun uses the same caliber of ammunition, but it blasts it out at a staggering six thousand rounds per minute.

But the Closers weren’t interested in a gunfight, not even with bigger guns.

There was a big, clunky gun mounted on the underbelly of the chopper. The distance was too great for me to make out details, but I knew that it would have four curved prongs instead of an open barrel. There was too much noise for me to hear the tok sound, but I saw a brief shimmer in the air as a focused beam of microwaves shot from the Closer’s bird and hit the first of the Coast Guard helicopters.

At first I thought that the shot had missed. Then suddenly the lead helo blew apart in a massive ball of intense red flame. It could not have been a full second later that the second helo exploded. It was so fast. So ugly. So thorough. Starbursts of flaming debris flew outward like the petals of some grotesque flower.

I screamed at the sky as the burning wreckage fell in strangely slow motion onto the rifling green treetops below.

I raised the stolen MPP in a foolish, wasteful, suicidal, and pointless attempt to strike back. My finger pulled the trigger. Tok! Tok!

And then something happened …

Something that seemed completely impossible.

As I fired at the closest Black Hawk—it exploded!

I gaped. It was impossible. At that distance, with the small gun I held—it was impossible. It was so freakishly absurd they wouldn’t have put it in a movie. Only as an afterimage did I see the arrow-straight trail of silver-black smoke.

I whirled to follow the back trail of the smoke to its source.

And there it was.

A gleaming black UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, the body detailed with lines of red the exact same color of blood. Men crowded the open bay door, hunched over the machine gun. I knew those faces. Even from here, I knew them.

I spoke one name.

“Top…”

You could almost see the other black helicopter freeze in midair in a WTF moment. Then the closer helo spun toward the DMS bird. Both helicopters were evenly matched for this kind of fight. However, there was a moment that echoed the confrontation between the black helos and the Coast Guard—a moment when this could have turned into a shooting match with machine guns.

But I knew Top. He had to have seen the two Coast Guard birds die. All those brave men, incinerated in an instant. Top’s son had been killed in Iraq in the first days of the war. His daughter had lost both legs when her Bradley rolled over an IED. “Fair” was never really part of the kind of war we were fighting. M3 and their killers had opened up on us with no declaration of war, no agreement of rules, no promise of quarter. They’d come like butchers onto the field. The death toll for today was already too high. Hector and the others aboard my chopper, the two Coast Guard crews.

Fair?

F*ck fair.

The DMS Black Hawk blew those sons of bitches out of the sky.

That’s fair.





Part Five

The Truman Engine



It was the darndest thing I’ve ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and it was about the size of the Moon. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing’s for sure, I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.

—PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER


I can assure you that, given they exist, these flying saucers are made by no power on this Earth.

—PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN, press conference, April 4, 1950