Apocalypse Read Free Page B

electromagnetic fields hovering around the aircraft – and a sickening fear lurched through his
guts as he realized that he had absolutely no idea what was happening.
    A surge of G-force crushed him into his seat and he heard Sarah cry out as the Mallard plunged from the sky as though being dragged by a giant fist down through the clouds. MacDonald grabbed the
control column and struggled to pull the nose of the aircraft up again.
    Then, all at once, he saw the flight notes in his lap shoot upward past his face to land on the cockpit ceiling above his head. For a moment his brain could not understand what he had witnessed,
and then it hit him in a moment of pure terror. They were inverted and already out of control.
    ‘Altitude! Altitude!’ he shouted to Sarah.
    He heard shouts of alarm from their passengers as people and equipment were hurled around the fuselage as the aircraft spiraled down through the sky.
    ‘I’ve got nothing!’ Sarah screamed back, holding the throttles to the firewall. ‘All primary instruments have failed!’
    The turboprop engines wailed as the Grumman Mallard plummeted out of control, the instruments whirling uselessly and the horizon lost in a thick swirling fog that enveloped the entire aircraft
in an electrically charged halo.
    MacDonald reached out, his arm fighting against G-forces far greater than the aged aircraft was designed to take, and flipped an intercom switch to hear his own voice trembling in his earphones
as he cried out.
    ‘
This is your captain speaking! Brace for impact! Brace for imp—
’
    A flare of golden sunlight burst through the cockpit as it reflected off a perfect blue sea, and for a brief instant James MacDonald believed that they had a chance. Then he saw that they were
barely a hundred feet above the rolling waves. The glittering surface of the ocean raced toward his screen at two hundred miles per hour and then smashed through the thick glass to greet him.

4
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
    June 28, 07:15
    ‘
I’m right behind him, stand by.
’
    Ethan Warner sat back casually and watched the nearby freeway from his vantage point in a service alley between a Taco Bell and a hardware store. The breeze from the passing traffic ruffled his
light brown hair as his gray eyes squinted into the early morning sunlight. The disembodied voice of his partner, Nicola Lopez, sounded in the earpiece and microphone he wore.
    ‘
Turning right onto South Lake Shore, southbound.
’
    ‘Copy that,’ he replied. ‘Remember not to get too close. You know what happened last time.’
    ‘
It was just your fender, let it go asshole.
’
    Ethan smiled quietly to himself as he spotted Lopez’s sports car, a bright yellow convertible Lotus Seven, zip into view a quarter mile away as it joined the freeway. Ethan glanced ahead
of it and saw a large silver GMC Yukon suddenly swerve out of a line of traffic and accelerate away from her.
    ‘
He’s made me!
’
    Ethan sighed. Nicola Lopez was a 29-year-old Latino with long black hair who looked hot no matter what she was doing. She caught attention from most all guys, and unfortunately the driver of the
GMC knew them both well enough to have recognized her the moment she let her enthusiasm and desire for money get in the way of her professionalism.
    ‘I can see you. I’m on my way.’
    Ethan reached out and flicked a switch. An engine growled into life beneath him as he kicked the Erik Buell 1190RS superbike into gear, the twin-cylinder symphony echoing down the narrow alley
like rolling drums. The Yukon and the Lotus raced past in front of him as Ethan slipped the clutch and the superbike surged out of the alleyway and turned in pursuit. Frantic acceleration yanked on
Ethan’s arms as he twisted the throttle and the motorcycle raced up through sixty, seventy, eighty, the front wheel leaving the ground.
    Ethan eased the bike around Lopez’s accelerating Lotus, just able to hear the roar of her car’s engine above his own as he