The Armageddon Machine Read online

THE ARMAGEDDON MACHINE

  A Novel

  by Mike Ramon

  © 2014 M. Ramon

  This work is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0). To view this license:

  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

  If you wish to contact the author you can send e-mail to:

  [email protected]

  Web addresses where you can find my work:

  https://www.wattpad.com/user/ZeroTheHero

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  glossary

  Chapter One

  Xining Military Complex, Qinghai province, People's Republic of China

  February 14 -- 17:12 UTC/1:12 am local time

  The guard tossed the cigarette butt to the ground and mushed it into the snow with his boot. He could still see his breath in the air; it was a cold night, too cold to stay outside for long, but Captain Lin hated smoking--he was scared that second-hand smoke would be the death of him--and he had banned all smoking inside the building. Some guards were brave enough to try and sneak a quick smoke when Captain Lin wasn’t around, but the way this guard saw it was why take a chance?

  He turned to go back inside, but stopped when movement caught his eye. He turned back and scanned the powdered white surface of the ground, perfectly smooth except for a few well-beaten tracks leading to and away from the main building. He couldn’t see anybody. He took a few steps forward and strained to make out the fence line fifty yards away. He could just make out the chain-link fence by the reflection of the security lights glinting off of it. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Your imagination can play tricks on you on a dark night, he thought. He laughed at his own paranoia as he turned again and started toward the door, which he had kept propped open with a flashlight--also against Captain Lin’s rules, but what the hell, it was only a minor infraction.

  There was a rattling sound, the sound of something brushing against the fence. The guard spun around quickly and stood still, scanning the fence line again. There was no one there, but he was sure he hadn’t imagined the sound. Could it have been a gust of wind that rattled the fence? He didn’t think so. Something wasn’t right. He unslung the Type 03 assault rifle from his back, and checked to make sure that the safety was still on. He walked out farther away from the building, forming a new set of tracks in the snow.

  He held the rifle down in a low-ready position. His boots crunched in the snow with each step he took.

  “Is anyone out there?” he called out in Mandarin.

  There was no response.

  He stopped and listened. All he heard was the howl of the wind, and the far off sound of city traffic. Then there was the crunch of snow off to his left. The guard swung around and lifted the rifle to a high-ready position. He could just make out the silhouette of a man about forty feet away, hidden mostly in shadow.

  “Stop there!” the guard demanded. “Identify yourself.”

  The man in shadow lifted his arms into the air.

  “I am unarmed,” the man called back.

  “Identify yourself immediately,” the guard repeated.

  The man in shadow didn’t respond; he just stood there, as if waiting for something to happen.

  “Step forward slowly!” the guard commanded. “Come into the light.”

  The man in shadow made no move except to lower his arms.

  “If you do not follow my commands, I will open fire on you,” the guard said.

  “Do not shoot,” the man said. “I am unarmed.”

  He wasn’t pleading, exactly. In fact he sounded awfully calm for a man with a gun pointed at him.

  “Come into the light so I can see you. Right now!”

  The guard never felt the shot that ended his life, the bullet entering his skull from behind and then fragmenting, each fragment digging a different path through his brain matter. He fell to the ground and lay there with a pool of blood expanding around his head, creating a halo of blood in the snow.

  The man who fired the bullet into the guard’s head lowered his pistol and looked down at the dead man. He thought the halo of blood looked strangely beautiful against the background of pure white snow. He holstered his silencer-equipped weapon. The man in shadow hustled over to him, and they exchanged a series of whispers.

  “Good shot, Viper,” the man who was no longer in shadow said.

  “Thank you, Cobra,” the shooter said. “Let’s go.”

  Suddenly the ground around the two men seemed to heave itself upward in a swirl of snow--it was only an illusion, however. Fifteen men in white camouflage suits picked themselves up off the ground, the drifts of snow that had covered them shaking down. These men in white, along with the two men with reptilian nicknames, crouched and ran for the door that the guard had left propped open with a flashlight. They poured inside the building, eerily silent for a group of rushing men.

  The men split up in halves, each taking a different route through the large building. They moved quietly and confidently, each man sure of where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do. One or two at a time more guards were dispatched as quietly as possible.

  Captain Lin was in the Black Room--ominously (and appropriately, he felt) named to reflect what the room contained. In the late hours of the night, and early hours of the morning, when all was quiet and still, he often liked to come into this room, something that few people on the base had the clearance to do. Whenever he came he would stand tall, with his hands clasped behind his back. That’s exactly how he was standing just then, looking at the device that sat in the Inner Room--a small room formed by four Plexiglas walls and a Plexiglas ceiling. The device--which was about the size of an old VCR-- and the metal table it sat upon were the only objects inside the Inner Room. Even Captain Lin did not have the clearance to enter that room.

  The device didn’t look like much; it certainly didn’t look like the technical and scientific marvel that it was. Though it didn’t look like much to a casual observer, Captain Lin thought it was beautiful, and just gazing upon it filled him with great pride. Captain Chung had once confided to him that he felt uneasy in the presence of the device, but Captain Lin couldn’t imagine why; it was perfectly safe--even if you shot it, or tried to blow it up, the device would do nothing. Only someone who knew what they were doing could turn it on and use it; the Inner Room was just a precaution, really. They didn’t want anyone messing around with the de
vice, didn’t want it damaged because of someone’s curiosity.

  There was a loud knock on the secure door that served as the only entrance and exit to the Black Room. Captain Lin ignored it--it was probably some soldier who wanted to ask him if he could take a day’s leave to visit an ailing uncle, or to visit a sister in town, both of which really meant that they wanted to go see a girlfriend or mistress, or visit Miss Lao’s .cathouse on the outskirts of the city.

  The knock came again, louder and more insistent this time. Captain Lin sighed--why was he cursed to be in command of such useless incompetents?

  “I will be out shortly” he called.

  “Captain Lin, please hurry,” came a muffled response from the other side of the door. “There is an emergency.”

  An emergency. To his men, a backed up toilet was an emergency.

  “What is the emergency?” Captain Lin asked, raising his voice to be sure he could be heard on the other side of the secure door.

  The knock came again, even more insistent.

  “Please hurry, Captain.”

  Captain Lin let out another sigh of exasperation as he turned away from the Inner Room. He walked to the door and punched in the security code into the pad on the wall. There was a loud clicking sound as the locks of the sliding hydraulic door disengaged, and then the door slid open.

  “What is it that is so important?” he asked, then fell silent.

  He was looking at a group of men in white camouflage that stood facing him, each with a weapon in hand.

  “What do you think you’re--”

  Three quick shots ripped through his chest, and he fell down dead. One of the men dragged his body away from the entrance, and the men called Cobra and Viper entered the Black Room. They stared into the Inner Room, at the device sitting on its table. Cobra turned to Viper.

  “Is this it?” he asked. “Just this?”

  “Do not be deceived by looks, tongmu,” Viper said, using the old revolutionary term for a comrade. “That thing in there is lethal.”

  Viper turned to the door.

  “Get this door open,” he commanded, gesturing toward the door to the Inner Room.

  One of the men rushed forward carrying a small bag. The man set the bag on the ground and opened it. He took out what looked like a chunk of white clay and slapped it against one wall of the Inner Rom; when he let go it stayed stuck there.

  “It would be much easier if we had the security code,” Cobra said.

  “We were not able to get the codes,” Viper said. “No matter; this will be easy enough.”

  The man kneeling by the bag took out a small metal device and stuck it into the white clay, then grabbed the bag, stood up and nodded to Viper.

  “All right,” Viper said, “Everybody out of this room.”

  The three men left the room, leaving the door standing open. They turned a corner and walked partway down the hall. The man with the bag took out a small black device with two buttons on it. He pressed one button and a little green light on the side of the device lit up. He looked to Viper, who nodded. The man pressed the second button and there was a loud concussion from within the Black Room. Viper and Cobra rushed around the corner. Captain Lin’s body was still lying on the ground near the entrance to the Black Room, and his uniform had caught fire. They walked around the smoking body and entered the Black Room; two men followed.

  One Plexiglas wall of the Inner Room was gone, and the others had large cracks running through them. The two men who had followed Viper and Cobra into the room rushed to the device, which had been knocked off the table by the blast. One of them held a canvas bag; he set the bag on the floor, and both men lifted up the device and placed it in the bag. It took both men to lift the bag off the ground.

  “Okay, let’s clear out,” Viper said.

  The group of men hustled through the halls and corridors, passing several dead soldiers along the way. They left the way they had come in, through the door that the guard had propped open. The other group of men--the group they had split from when they first entered the building--were already waiting for them outside.

  “All set?” Viper asked one of these men.

  “Yes, sir; everything is ready.”

  “Good.”

  The men hurried away from the building, found the hole that had been cut in the fence, and slipped out. They came to the bottom of a hill where three large vans sat idling. They piled into the vehicles and started away. When they were nearly out of site of the big military complex a dozen near-simultaneous explosions rocked the night, sending a large fireball into the black sky. The main building, the building the masked men had just left, collapsed in on itself; in the morning it would just be a black, smoking ruin.