Chromatophobia Read online

  Chromatophobia

  by

  W. D. County

  Also by W. D. County:

  Sammi

  Quest for the Blue Crystal

  The Scent of Distant Worlds

  Copyright © 2019 by W. D. County. All rights reserved.

  Acknowledgments:

  Special thanks to Ed Frownfelter, Jerry Horne, and Stephanie Edwards for their insights and recommendations on this novel.

  Published by Summit Scribes Press. Lee’s Summit, Missouri.

  Chapter 1

  The voice in my earpiece said, “Okay, Sergeant. Target coming into view.”

  I hadn’t met the man behind the voice, which was probably typical of CIA spooks. They asked for the best shot in the Corps, and DoD happily cut orders for my special assignment. The mission made me nervous. Not the killing; as a sniper I’d retired hundreds of threats. The uneasiness came because for all those past jobs I’d been in uniform and in hostile territory, never in civilian clothes inside a friendly city.

  “I see her.” The woman walking down the gangplank of the cruise ship matched the photographs I’d been given: thirty-something, five foot eight inches, hundred and twenty pounds, straight shoulder-length dark hair, wearing dark slacks and a light-colored blouse. She carried a thick, shiny briefcase in her left hand. I didn’t know her name and preferred it that way. My briefing covered when and where. The who was a black-and-white photo of the target. I give targets pseudonyms. Hers was Sea Hag.

  My room on the tenth floor of the Grand Chancellor hotel in Hobart, Australia, gave a perfect head-on view of the icebreaker Ywam Liberty and the pier where she’d docked after returning from a supply mission to Antarctica. Several disembarking people surrounded the woman, making a clean shot impossible.

  The voice said, “Take the shot.”

  I hissed into the mic. “Negative. Too many noncombatants.” The man walking behind Sea Hag presented a problem, as did the preteen girl hanging on his arm. The bullet would go through the woman and into the man. Or a bit of bone might deflect the shot, sending it into the girl.

  “Take the shot. Collateral damage acceptable.” Irritation permeated his words.

  I stared through the scope of the M40A5 sniper rifle at the target four hundred yards away. The .300-caliber Winchester Magnum ammo had a 180-grain bullet and a muzzle velocity of 3,000 fps. I mentally factored in the other variables: elevation at 150 feet above sea level, air temperature of 73F, and wind at dead calm. I rarely refer to a ballistics chart. The bullet would drop twenty-one inches on its way to the target. I adjusted the elevation on the scope accordingly.

  The ability to turn off emotions is a useful skill. Unfortunately, that empty, quiet place eluded me today. I wondered if the man, woman, and child were a family. They looked happy. The uneasiness I’d felt at the beginning of this mission intensified. What the hell am I doing here?

  “Take the shot, jarhead. Target’s nearly off the ramp. I’m ready to grab the case.”

  Mystery man’s irritation started to bug me. As a Marine sniper scout, I was used to working alone.

  I stopped breathing and became aware of my pulse in order to squeeze the trigger between heartbeats. I could do this. I’d never backed down from a mission. I always followed orders. Lawful orders.

  My gaze strayed to the little girl. Was this lawful? Why did it feel like an act of terrorism? I imagined hearing the crack of the rifle shot. The blossom of blood on the woman. The bullet continuing its trajectory into the man. The screams. The panic. A child left orphaned.

  “Negative. I don’t have a shot.”

  “She’s right there for Christ’s sake. Take the shot, Reardon. You hear me?”

  A CIA operative ought to remain professional when a plan goes south. Using my real name signaled incompetence.

  The trio reached the pier and proceeded toward a black limo. Government car, judging from the little flags fluttering on short staffs affixed to each fender. The flags consisted of three vertical stripes. I can’t see color, so the country represented could have been Ireland, Italy, or a half dozen other nations. My bet was France, given the ship’s port of call had been Dumont d’Urville, the French scientific research station.

  A man in a suit exited the front passenger side of the car and opened the rear door for the woman. Her fellow male traveler waved goodbye and stepped away with the youngster.

  “Last chance!” shouted the voice in my ear. “Perfect shot. Now.”

  I centered the crosshairs on the woman’s chest.

  Suddenly, I didn’t have a shot. The male companion from the ship dashed forward, leaned over for a kiss. He shielded the woman’s body from view. Had he sensed my presence, sensed death circling above the woman like a hungry vulture? Some people seemed to have a sixth sense like that. The government man in the suit separated the lovebirds and slammed the door when Sea Hag slipped inside. The blacked-out windows concealed the interior.

  The CIA jerk bitched incessantly. I yanked out the earpiece, disassembled the rifle, and stuffed the pieces in my duffel bag. I’m a soldier, not a political assassin. The CIA can go fuck themselves. I left the hotel, donned my Oakley shades, and caught a cab to the airfield. A military transport waited there, assuming the upper brass didn’t order it to leave without me.

  That could be a real possibility. Uncle Sam flew me here from Kabul in the back seat of an F-15 Eagle. That bird was fast, covering the six-thousand-mile trip in four hours, with a single midair refueling over Indonesia. Someone high up on the food chain considered the mission important enough to pull out all the stops. And I’d just blown the mission.

  A C-5 Galaxy waited for me on the tarmac. The big-ass mother of a plane can haul an entire platoon and their equipment and still have room for a few tanks or helicopters. Fully loaded, the sucker had a range of 4,800 nautical miles, farther than the Eagle, but we’d still need refueling, probably over Indonesia again. It’d be a longer flight, too. I wondered who’d be sharing the ride with me.

  A black sedan, complete with striped flags, pulled into a hangar at the far end of the airfield. The one that picked up the woman? No way to be sure, but I don’t believe in coincidences.

  A Marine MP handed me a set of orders and waved me on board. I glanced at the papers. Report to Colonel Hauser at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Detrick? An army base, stateside? Why not send me back to Afghanistan for the rest of my tour? I jogged up the boarding ramp and entered the huge cargo bay. I was the only passenger. The uneasiness got a whole lot worse.

  Chapter 2

  I placed a fresh uniform on the bunk and used my handheld colorimeter to ensure everything matched. Satisfied, I dressed, checked myself in the mirror, and double-timed to Colonel Hauser’s office. I hadn’t been to Fort Detrick before and didn’t know much about Hauser, but he must have pulled strings to get me shipped back to the States ASAP. Sometimes the brass did that if there was a death in a soldier’s family, but I had no living relatives. Maybe they were going to give me a medal—a little recognition for a mission last month where I put a bullet through the eye of an al Qaeda leader from twelve hundred yards away. It’d be fun to celebrate with a few drinks. I might even get laid.

  On the other hand, I screwed up in Hobart. A formal court-martial seemed unlikely given the black ops nature of the mission, and I couldn’t imagine why they’d send me stateside for punishment when they could easily dump my ass back in the desert.

  “Sergeant Miles Reardon to see Colonel Hauser,” I said to the adjutant. He pointed to his eyes, and I reluctantly removed my sunglasses. He scrutinized my ID and had me recite my social before ushering me to an office at the far end of the hall.

  I snapped a salute as the colonel looked up from his desk.

  “Come in,
Sergeant. I’ve heard good things about you.” He gestured toward a chair.

  “Thank you, sir.” Were his words a prelude to disappointment? Medals were formal affairs, not one-on-one sit-downs.

  “I have a mission that requires your particular ability.”

  “Great. Sir.” Stateside missions didn’t interest me. Too many people, expectations, misunderstandings, rudeness, and quick tempers. Too few sanctioned targets. The combination made it easy to forget who the bad guys were. Made it hard to forget what I was. Like at Hobart.

  “The government is assembling a team of civilian experts to analyze a peculiar and potentially hazardous anomaly. I’d like you to provide security for this team.”

  I stiffened in surprise. “Sir, I’m a sniper, not a bodyguard.”

  “You’re a soldier with a unique... viewpoint.”

  Alarms rang in my head. “Sir, I’m a loner, a long-distance shooter. I don’t have the right skill set for this.” It didn’t matter what “this” was—it had to be bad shit if a full-bird colonel took time to brief an E-5 sergeant.

  Hauser had my personnel file on his desk and tapped it with a finger. “It says you have an extremely rare form of color-blindness.”

  I gripped the arms of the chair. “It doesn’t affect my shooting, sir.” The condition usually made it impossible to qualify as a sniper, but exceptions were made when they discovered I could outshoot anyone who challenged me. Why was the colonel bringing the matter up now?

  “You can’t see any color, is that right?”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?” I should have added “sir,” but this conversation felt like an attack.

  He swung his laptop around where both of us could see the screen. “This video clip was made nine days ago by Barry Fletcher, a freelance photojournalist who was documenting three European Union scientists conducting research at the south magnetic pole.”

  The backsides of bulky parkas filled much of the screen as the scientists entered a jagged gap in a vertical cliff of ice.

  “Our journey to the south magnetic pole,” said a male voice in documentary style, “has taken us to a bubble in the Antarctic ice sheet. If the ice cave continues far enough, these scientists will set up equipment that may lead to insights on the migration of the poles.”

  The gap narrowed to an oval passageway, which the scientists traversed in single file. It opened into a large, dark void lanced by flashlight beams. A muffled, off-screen voice asked for more light. The view dropped to floor level, where a canvas duffel bag filled the screen. A zipper sounded, followed by the clank of metal pipes. Seconds later, light flooded the space.

  I pretended to be interested, wondering if Hauser planned to send me to Antarctica. How did any of this relate to getting color vision?

  The view rose and panned to reveal a circular cave with a high, domed ceiling. A dull gray tint suffused the ice of the chamber.

  “What the hell?” The camera swiveled to the scientist in the center of the cave. The other two hurried to join him.

  “What’d you find?” Barry asked.

  One of them faced the camera. “We don’t know.”

  Colonel Hauser paused the clip. “You have a colorimeter with you?”

  I nodded warily. The device had saved me from countless embarrassments, especially mismatched clothes.

  “Good. Check out the screen.”

  The frozen frame had minimal color intensity. Even the man’s face registered as gray. “The filming was done in black and white?” I said.

  Hauser shook his head and pressed play. The view shifted and expanded to reveal an object floating in a pool of water—an impossible object with too many square facets, all set at right angles, coming in and out of focus as it rotated slowly. “Check it now.”

  The meter went wild when scanning that portion of the screen. The object I saw as gray actually consisted of thousands of tiny patches of red, blue, green, and other hues. A shiver rippled along my spine like a San Andreas tremor.

  “Analysis suggests the object is a tesseract,” Hauser said.

  The camera zoomed in on a small patch of white on one facet of the object.

  “A what?” My voice seemed more of a croak. Get a grip, Miles!

  “A four-dimensional cube. Hypercube. An object that shouldn’t exist in our universe.”

  The white patch turned gray at the edges. The meter confirmed the spread of the color mishmash into that white zone. A scientist mumbled something about fractals before leaning closer to snap a picture with his cell phone.

  “Could it be a meteorite?” Barry asked. He sounded excited. I wanted to shoot the thing.

  “Frank! Your glove.” The camera zoomed to the glove holding the phone. I saw nothing unusual on the screen, but my meter indicated the glove and phone fading to gray.

  Hauser said, “Somehow the tesseract leached color from objects around it.”

  “The spot’s shrinking,” shouted a scientist. The view swung back to the hypercube.

  Hauser said, “I can’t deny it’s beautiful. Hypnotic, even.” His voice sounded far away. With apparent reluctance, he turned from the monitor to face me. “What do you see, Sergeant?”

  It took a minute to answer; I couldn’t seem to draw a breath. “A weird gray cube.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I need you with the civilian researchers. The weapon may have a hypnotic component, and if so, you’re immune to it.”

  “You think it’s a weapon?” I certainly did. Color killed someone I cared about.

  “Watch.”

  Barry said, “This is the most amazing, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like staring into the eye of God.” At the center of the screen, the last bit of white vanished.

  Without growing or shrinking, the tesseract gained depth. One of the scientists shouted, “Let’s get out of here.” Another said, “As far as possible!” The words of the third were lost as they began to scream, but the screams grew faint. On the cave wall beyond the hypercube, three man-shaped shadows shrank to nothing.

  The video illumination reversed momentarily, as if someone had inserted a photographic negative. “The light of God surrounds me,” Barry said as if reciting a prayer. “The love of God enfolds me.”

  The tesseract spun rapidly now.

  Hauser said, “The colors blur into a rainbow that spirals in as if being sucked into a black hole.” The colorimeter confirmed his description.

  “The power of God protects me. The presence of God watches over me.”

  The tesseract grew smaller, as if speeding into the distance without leaving the cave. Air and water rushed in to fill the cube-shaped hole in space.

  “Wherever I am, God is.”

  Dark ripples played across the surface of the pool. The hypercube was gone. The scientists were gone. Barry choked back a sob and repeated the prayer.

  Hauser closed the laptop. “The scientists haven’t been found. Neither has the tesseract. Barry made his way back to the support base. Because he’s an American, the French turned him over to the CDC. Soon after that, the Department of Defense took over and transferred him here to our biohazard facility.”

  “CDC? Biohazard?” My pulse sped up. Color. My knuckles turned pale as if strangling the meter that now showed only stable, unchanging hues. I stuffed it into my pocket.

  “His body has a rash that resembles the color pattern of the tesseract. The rash spreads if exposed to anything with color. We could be under attack by an entirely new kind of weapon.”

  Color. The reality of the mission began to sink in. “You want me to defend the team from an enemy I can’t see?”

  The colonel grinned. “When I’m finished briefing you, we’ll head over to the facility. You’ll be there for the duration.”

  “Which is?”

  “Days. Weeks. Possibly months, but POTUS wants this fast tracked.”

  The fucking president? My mind spun. “Sir, the target in Hobart. Does she tie into this?” She had to, since thin
gs all connected to Antarctica.

  His grin vanished. “Above your paygrade. Any other questions?”

  I couldn’t afford to refuse a mission, especially now, but I hated dealing with something as treacherous as color. “What about the rest of the security detail?”

  “You’re it.” Hauser’s face hardened. “The president put the National Security Agency in overall charge.” Disdain crept into his voice. “You’ll report to a civilian, Gordon Maxwell.”

  Great. A civilian. No medal and no celebration drink, but I’d pretty much been screwed.

  Chapter 3

  We walked through an armed checkpoint on the way to the biohazard facility, which seemed to be a relatively small building until Hauser explained that most of it was buried deep underground. Once inside, we passed through two additional security checkpoints before reaching a stainless-steel elevator. It had no call button.

  Hauser seemed to sense my puzzlement even though I still wore my shades. “Security personnel control these remotely.” He pointed to overhead cameras. “This is Colonel Hauser. Send us to biosafety level five.”

  An outer set of doors slid open, followed by an inner set. Both sets appeared to be inch-thick steel plates surrounded by dark rubber gaskets. We stepped inside and the doors closed with a hiss. The hiss continued as we descended. My ears popped.

  “The shaft and elevator are kept at positive pressure to ensure no airborne pathogens can escape.”

  The car descended for over a minute. The walls were smooth; no buttons or emergency phone marred the polished surface, although I found the small grille where the hissing originated. Two video cameras stared down from the ceiling. Our descent stopped with a faint jerk, and the doors hissed open. “Level five,” said a mechanical female voice. We stepped out into a small lobby. Our reflections stared from a mirrored wall. The opposite wall had a dozen half-inch holes from which stubby metal tubes protruded. Gun barrels? Here?