LINE OF FIRE

Ramirez looked down at the path of destruction from the height of his FA18 Super Hornet. The line of burning trees, scrub, even some houses, extended from the coast into the far distance. It was a line of golden fire, eating a ragged path across this darkened country.

Six wings of Tomcats, some thirty-six planes in all, had worked for hours to create the flaming barrier. A fence of fire to keep the deadly fog trapped on one side.

It hadn’t worked entirely. The fog rolled up to and over the burning hilltop. But it did have some effect. To the north of the line of fire, he could see dense banks of fog rolled up into tight blankets, painted in silver by the light of the moon. To the south, the fog was a light haze, and streetlights and some buildings were vaguely visible through the light gauze curtain.

To the south of that were the busy lights and black shapes of the men and machinery of the defensive line. He wished them luck and even said a quick prayer for them. He was glad to be in the embracing seat of the Deus ex Machina, not dug into a hole in the dirt, waiting for the battle to arrive.

They had been ordered to stand off and to ascend, and now he saw why.

A river of dots showed up on his radar scope to the south, and when he sought visual confirmation, the moonlight showed a squadron of small aircraft approaching. They were just silver dots in the sky, too small to make out any features, but he knew what they would be from the radio traffic.

Just about every crop duster in the whole of the Waikato farming district, south of Auckland.

         

The fog was merely a few hundred yards from their line, Crowe realized. The massive searchlights mounted on the ridge behind him illuminated the front edge of the mist, making eerie patterns in the shifting clouds, in the darkness.

The moon helped, too, frosting the top of the mist and giving it a half-light glow.

Where the hell were those fire trucks?

Troopers had been dispatched to every fire station in the vicinity with orders to bring every machine they could find.

A smart supply sergeant had suggested a water blaster import company in West Auckland, and a small convoy of army supply trucks had been dispatched there immediately.

The first fire appliance arrived even as he was asking the question. A few more fire trucks, blood-red in the moonlight, were close on the heels of the first, and Crowe barked orders, positioning the trucks at intervals down the highway. They seemed few and far between.

A convoy of water tankers crested Sunset Ridge and made their way carefully down toward his position. Crowe swung up onto the running board of the first truck as it drew up near him.

“Seawater? You have a tank full of seawater?”

The trooper nodded. Crowe didn’t ask where they had found the trucks and didn’t much care. He jumped down and showed the trooper, with hand signals, where to go.

An explosion sounded, just over the highway. Then another, and another. The fog was getting closer and so were the blasts of the claymore mines as the creatures passed in front of their sensors. A new sound now. A low buzz from the sky. Many moving stars to the south. That would be the crop dusters, loaded, not with fertilizers or herbicides, but with water.

Salt. Water. Salt water. If they survived this long night, he was going to see that that girl got some kind of medal. They could make her the prime minister if they wanted; he’d support it. If she was right about the water, and the salt, then that might just turn the battle in their favor.

He hoped she was right. She could be right. It made scientific sense. But then, when you thought too hard about it, so did her explanation for the jellyfish and the snowmen. Certainly they had not yet come up with any other explanation for them. He shook his head violently, trying to shake out the ideas. Four of his men were dead. He wasn’t going to let her call them germs.

Rebecca was less than ten miles from Devonport when she realized that she was not going to be able to get through. Devonport was at the end of a long peninsula, stretching from the North Shore like a finger pointing across the harbor. The road had clearly clogged up early in the day, and both sides of it were choked solid with empty vehicles.

She had avoided the motorway and come down the coast, on Beach Road. There had been fewer abandoned cars and blockages along that route, but here at Takapuna there was no way through. The center of the town was a tangled web of metal.

She stopped in the middle of the road, alongside a shiny silver Porsche sports car. A large theater complex, the Bruce Mason Center, lay to her right. To her left, a series of tall towers, apartment blocks, dominated the smaller shops and terraced houses on the other side of the street and the side roads.

Lights were on in many of the apartments. People who had been unable to escape and had decided to just wait it out.

The upper two floors were alive with light. People congregating as high as they could, she thought, hoping to get above the fog.

“What do I do now, Xena?” she asked the chimp, who was curled up, apparently sleeping, on the passenger seat. “And why aren’t you wearing your safety belt?”

Xena said nothing.

She couldn’t get through. But she had to get through. If she couldn’t, then Tane and Fatboy would be stranded on the waterfront as the fog rolled down from the north.

There was a chance that Crowe and the army would stop it, but she didn’t want to count on that.

To her left, a side road led down to the Takapuna boat ramp and onto Takapuna Beach.

The beach!

She spun the wheel of the Cherokee and bulldozed the expensive little Porsche out of the way. Rubber shrieked and metal crunched, and sparks began flying off something underneath the car, but then it was to one side and she was flying down the side road.

A trailer-sailer had been abandoned at the bottom of the boat ramp, but the nose of the Jeep turned that into match-sticks. The big tires dug into the sand, and she was moving once again toward Devonport. Toward the navy base and the Möbius. Toward sanctuary.

The tide was out and the hard-packed sand above the waterline made for easier going than the soft white sand at the top of the beach.

Rebecca kept her speed as fast as she dared on the beach, in the dark, not wanting to run into any driftwood or rocks, partially buried in the sand, that might damage the big tires, or throw the Jeep off balance.

Jeeps were made for this kind of driving, though, and it was almost a cruise until she got to the end of the beach and the rocky point that separated Takapuna Beach from the next bay beyond.

She gingerly let the wheels of the Cherokee pick their way up through the rocks, hoping that the Jeep’s clearance would be high enough to pass over some of the larger rocks between her wheels.

There were harsh scraping sounds from underneath, but she kept moving forward. Then she was up over the crest of the point and bouncing over boulders down toward the sand on the other side.

Tane surveyed the battle from the ladder above the crow’s nest, a sturdy ring of metal around the outside of the Skytower; it seemed to Tane no more wide or stable than a tightrope.

The countryside was alight. The fire was spreading, and the fog disappeared in those brightly burning patches. But all around the flames the whiteness gathered, moving always southward.

Looking to the south, they could still see long lines of taillights of thousands of cars, buses, and army trucks, jammed in a desperate race to get out of the city.

They hadn’t counted on the wind. It was gusting now, in from the sea, not in a steady breeze that they could counter by leaning into, but in irregular puffs, sudden gusts that wrenched at their hands and tried to knock them from the ladder.

Technicians did climb this ladder. But they did so on calm days, with safety harnesses. Tane and Fatboy had no harnesses. And this was not calm. Or even daytime.

Already they were ten yards above the crow’s nest. Around them now was a forest of satellite dishes and aerials, some large, some small.

Tane went up the ladder, shining a torch on the serial numbers stenciled in large black letters on the base of each dish. Fatboy was fastening the Chronophone to the metal grid of the crow’s nest by winding some strong wire through loops built into the corners of the case.

The wind tore at him again, and he lost the grip of one hand, clutching desperately with his other hand and winding one knee around the ladder until the gust subsided.

He looked down and saw Fatboy spread-eagled over the top of the Chronophone. He got up, though, and nodded to show he was okay.

A few yards more and Tane found the dish they were looking for. It was massive. He didn’t need to check the number; he had memorized that long ago.

“How the hell are we going to realign that monster?” he shouted over another gust of wind.

“No worries.” Fatboy climbed up to him and passed him the end of a black cable. An identical cable was already plugged into the base of the satellite dish. Tane tried to unplug it, then realized that there was a round silver ring that had to be unscrewed first.

He let the original cable hang loose from its fastenings on the side of the tower and plugged their cable in its place, tightening up the silver ring until he could tighten it no more.

Fatboy was just below him now, and Tane swung to the side, hooking his leg around, hanging off the thin edge of a narrow metal ladder, hundreds of yards above the ground, to let his brother past.

Fatboy produced a ratchet wrench from a pocket in his leather jacket and fitted it onto a nut on the base of the dish.

“Watch the numbers,” he shouted, the wind whipping his words out into the void around them.

The dish was calibrated. There were two adjustment bolts—one to control up and down, and one for left and right.

Tane looked down at the coordinates written on the back of his hand and watched as the mouth of the dish began to climb skyward.

“That’s it!” he called when the red line matched perfectly with the correct white line.

Fatboy moved the wrench to the other bolt, almost dropped it, but regathered it in time, and began to turn.

“Try the other way,” Tane yelled.

The dish began to align itself.

They were almost home.