The red mote behind us flashed into an orange fireball that tumbled into frothing water in our wake.
“There’s more coming,” she yelled and pointed. “Mike, Damon, get guns and start firing.”
Through the rain in the distance, flickers of scarlet.
A blast of air and something whirred skyward beside me. I thought it was one of the attacking drones but then recognized the heavier black bulk of one of Damon’s rising into the air. Somehow, he launched it.
“I’ll try to draw them away,” Damon said.
I scrambled to find a gun on the deck. Found one and picked it up. “What do I do?”
“Mike, goddamn it.” My wife put her weapon under her shoulder and took mine. She pulled back a handle on its side, then let go. The mechanism clicked into place. She flipped a switch on the side. “The safety is off. Just aim and pull the trigger, put the stock into your shoulder.”
I swore that the first thing I would do after taking swimming lessons was go to a firing range. I said, “Damon, do you see them?”
We had cleared the big standing waves at the head of the rapids and shot down into the choppy water curving toward the right. The engine gunned high as the senator tried to put as much distance between us and the tiny killer drones as he could.
“Do you see Chuck?” I asked again.
Damon had a bird’s-eye view from the camera on his drone. I held my weapon up and scanned the clouds for red dots, my finger trembling on the trigger. The boat sped into the calm waters at the bottom of the rapids. We just might outrun the little bastards.
“Damon, any sign of Chuck? Archer?”
“I don’t trust that guy.”
“Archer?”
“You think it was a coincidence he was the only government agent that survived the attack?” Damon was close enough to me that we didn’t have to yell over the grinding of the engine. “He’s not FBI. He’s not Secret Service. Who the hell does he work for?”
I hadn’t thought about it. Leo seemed fine with him, so I assumed Archer was part of the team. My mind flitted back to seeing him in the bathroom, a black pouch filled with needles and syringes open on his knees.
“Mike, twelve o’clock,” Lauren said.
“I can’t draw them away,” Damon said. “They’re not following my drone. They’re coming. I’ll bring it back around and try again.”
A red dot wavered in the rain behind us. The wind rushed through my hair. We had to be doing thirty or forty miles per hour. How fast were these things?
The pinprick of light grew larger.
Faster than we were moving.
Our diversions and cover had been clever enough for us to escape the house, but now we were out in the open. And the machines knew where we were.
I raised my gun. Tried to aim it. Pulled the trigger.
The recoil spun my weapon tilting high into the air. Lauren’s gun stuttered beside me.
“Go to the right!” Damon said. “Right. Right!”
Lauren fired again. I aimed and pulled the trigger, this time doing a better job of keeping the muzzle down. Another red dot appeared in the rain. The boat angled almost forty-five degrees to my left as Leo turned us.
“Do you see them?” I asked Damon. I held on to stop from toppling into Lauren.
He pointed almost at the bow. Just visible on the shore, a figure waved at us.
“Who is that?” Leo called out. “Secret Service?”
“No,” Damon said. “But head over.”
Lauren fired again in a staccato burst, then again. “Whatever you’re doing, hurry,” she yelled.
The boat slowed. The senator said, “Mike, you sure about this?”
I wiped away water dripping down my face. “Damon, who is that?”
“Trust me.”
“Mike?” Leo called out again.
“Two more bogies,” Lauren yelled. “Three. Four. Move this boat!”
She pulled the magazine from the submachine gun, tossed it to the deck, and reloaded. She knelt to a stable position, took aim, and fired in an unending stream, sweeping the weapon back and forth. I looked back at the red dots racing toward us and realized they were now hunting my wife. I held Luke behind me and clumsily raised my own weapon.
Chuck thrashed in the swirling brown water. He knew getting Mike anywhere near a boat was a bad idea and had planned ahead. Made sure he was in front of his friend, had hold of him when he got near the boat.
Mike had defied the odds and gone straight into the drink anyway.
A wave swept over Chuck and he gagged in a mouthful of water and spat it back out.
The tarp had swept away from the boat when he’d fallen in after hauling Mike out of the water. With only one good arm and one real hand, Chuck had to give it his all. Which was too much, as transferring momentum had sent him sprawling over the edge.
At least Chuck could swim.
With two arms.
He wasn’t doing very well with just one. His left had been in the sling, which he’d taken off when they went down over the grass, but the arm was still useless. He took a bullet in the shoulder three days before. Not even three days ago. More like two and a half.
Chuck took in a deep lungful of air and held it. Better to float at the top than sink.
He used his good hand and arm to flutter the water and try to orient himself feet-first to the rapids. From his perspective in the water, the frothing waves looked ten feet high. He glimpsed the boat roaring into the waves and going airborne before he lost sight of them.
Rapids weren’t a big deal.
The key was not getting caught in growlers. Those recirculating currents in the big standing waves. He just had to float down, keep his feet up and—
“Chuck!” someone yelled.
It was Archer. The man took powerful strokes like a water polo player, his head high in the water, his weapon still slung across his back. Chuck thought he had made it back into the boat. What was he doing here?
Chuck didn’t need rescuing.
The river angled down. The current accelerated and sucked him over the first ledge into a big standing wave just as Archer reached him. The man grabbed the tarp floating in the water behind them. “Get under this,” he yelled as he pulled the plastic cover over them both.
“I don’t want to get—”
Chuck’s mouth filled with water and he submerged. Kicking his feet and pushing water down with his right hand, he spun back up to the surface, but not into clear air. His face was pressed straight against the plastic tarp now pinning him below the surface.
He felt Archer’s body roll over top of him. The man’s thick arms and torso submerged Chuck again. The water roared in his ears, spinning and turning him as they dropped through the incline and into another surging wave.
Chuck grappled with Archer on top of him.
What the hell was this guy doing?
Trying to drown him?
Chapter 8
“MIKE!” LEO SCREAMED over the blazing submachine gun’s stuttering fire.
The figure waved at us again from the shore. Red dots raced below the clouds.
“Just move!” I yelled back. “Head for whoever that is.”
Was it a hiker? That didn’t make sense. A passive observer would have heard all the gunfire, seen the flames. They wouldn’t be waving at us to come to them. They would be running, if anything. Away from us. And if it were the attackers, they would be firing at us.
Wouldn’t they?
The boat surged forward again. I stumbled as the deck tilted back. Luke had his hands over his ears. I shouldered my weapon, did my best to steady myself, and took aim. Pulled the trigger. Almost fell backward again.
We got lucky with the first one Lauren hit.
How she even managed that was a miracle.
I counted six. Seven. Maybe a dozen dots raced toward us. We needed a miracle now. Twelve more of them. At least.
“We’re going to hit the shore hard,” Leo yelled over the noise. �
��It’s a muddy incline right ahead so we should slide up—but we’ll stop fast. I’m going to get Olivia. Damon, help Luke get up on the side and jump when we hit. Mike. Lauren. You guys gear up to get clear as well.”
Lauren released her trigger and stood.
She gripped my arm to steady herself. We both looked back at the red dots, then at the tree line racing toward us. Thirty feet from the shore, Leo pulled back on the throttle, let go of the wheel, and leaned over to get Olivia. He clambered to the side of the boat.
Damon had Luke in his arms.
“I love you,” Lauren said. She hopped on the gunwale to her side.
I just had enough time to swing myself to the side when the bow catapulted up. I spun out and through the air, the weapon flying from my hands, my body cartwheeling into open space before impacting wet dirt and grass. The boat shot forward into the trees and bushes as I tumbled to a stop.
And sprang to my feet.
Leo had jumped early and landed in the water. He was just getting up. Olivia in his arms, wailing. Damon and Luke had leaped to my right and flew into bushes.
I didn’t feel any pain.
Didn’t feel anything at all.
I scanned for my weapon, then looked back at the red dots descending on us.
I had no gun. All I had was my body to protect my family.
Where was Luke?
“Mike!” Lauren screamed in an agonizing wail.
The buzzing whine of the attacking drones grew to a crescendo.
A buzzing red dot fell from the sky, headed straight at Olivia and Leo. He did his best to lunge through the foot or two of water by the muddy water’s edge, but he wasn’t fast enough.
Chuck gagged up a mouthful of sludge. Now he knew how Mike had felt on the Mississippi when he fell in. Chuck sloshed on all fours through the water and mud by the edge of the river. Almost on all fours. His left arm was still mostly useless. His crawl was more of a three-ring circus act.
He spat up another gob of brown. “Were you trying to kill me?”
“Not very successfully,” Archer replied.
The man was already out of the water and crouched behind a rock. After Chuck had almost drowned underneath it, the tarp had been sucked down the river. So much for camouflage. Chuck had struggled out of the main current by himself, but Archer grabbed to help him when they neared the sludgy bottom in the eddy current.
“Do you see them?”
“I don’t see anything yet.”
The river had dragged them a few hundred yards below the rapids. Chuck was certain he’d heard gunfire when he was rolling through the last of the waves, but then everything had gone silent. Which could be good. Maybe they got away.
But it could be bad.
Chuck heaved himself from the water, stumbled over jumbled rocks, and collapsed into cover between scraggly bushes. The rain had diminished from a downpour, but heavy raindrops still dotted the turgid waters of the Potomac. “Anything in the air?”
“Nothing I can see.”
The steady, distant hiss of the rapids and birds singing in the canopy of oaks wasn’t reassuring. The smell of a campfire drifted through the trees. Had the boat raced ahead of them? It couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes down the Potomac to DC from here, maybe less aided by the strong current. That boat was small but looked fast.
The relative silence was unnerving.
That smell of smoke wasn’t a campfire.
The house.
The fire.
No sound of sirens. No distant flashing lights through the trees. No helicopters on a rescue mission. No sounds of screaming jets.
The four hundred acres of Scott’s Run Nature Preserve occupied this side of the Potomac just downriver from the senator’s mansion.
Over the past few days, Chuck had come down here for walks through the trails. It was amazing this slice of nature was so close, next to the Capital Beltway. Yesterday, he had a packed lunch in the preserve at the site of Burling Cabin, a homestead from the old days.
All that remained now was the stone chimney and some foundation rocks, but Chuck heard that old man Burling used to come here well into his nineties, before he passed in 1966. Chuck loved that the old codger had refused to allow even one tree to be cut to bring in power or telephone lines. Old school. Just like Chuck.
He struggled to his knees. Scanned the trees for Archer, who had disappeared.
The man was like a cat. Somehow, when he got out of the water, he didn’t seem wet, like the water knew better and slid off his hair and clothes before it got into trouble. Archer sprang up and into the underbrush the second they got here. Gave the impression that he would always land on his feet if knocked off a table.
Chuck, by contrast, felt like a wet sack of cardboard. He coughed up another mouthful of water. Searched his pockets and came up with a ballpoint pen as a weapon.
Not much of a prepper, he laughed grimly to himself. He gripped the pen in his fist. Better than nothing.
“Archer?” he whispered as loud as he thought prudent. Then louder, “Archer!”
“Keep quiet,” came the hushed reply. The man materialized from the underbrush to crouch beside Chuck.
The light was dim, the rainclouds low and moving fast above the treetops, but the air had a crisp and almost electric overtone above the drifting smoke. On second thought, the smoke didn’t smell like a campfire. It had the sickly sweet and acrid stench of burning plastic. Chuck searched between the leaves against the sky for any red spots.
“You got any more of those?” Chuck pointed at the carbine in Archer’s hands.
The man shook his head slowly as he scanned back and forth with his weapon.
“What were you interrogating Damon about back there?”
“Just doing my job.”
“Who was the Chinese guy you flashed a picture of?”
“His father.”
“Damon’s never met his father.”
“Strange that a colonel of counterintelligence at the MSS has never contacted his son.”
“MSS?”
“Chinese Ministry of State Security. Like the KGB on twenty-first-century steroids.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I read the report on you, advising Mr. Indigo not to lie to the state police about the terrorists at that checkpoint. He did anyway.”
“He was trying to be nice.”
“Uh-huh.” Archer scanned the tree line. “I’m no drone expert, but what’s one thing they all need to operate?”
“I didn’t know we had to study for an exam.”
“GPS. Especially autonomous ones. Bonus question: Do we have any GPS? And by we, I mean anyone in America?”
Chuck didn’t have an answer for that. He didn’t need to. Even the US military was flying blind, from what the senator had said.
Archer said after a pause, “Just keep down and keep quiet.”
“What’s in the backpack?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” He flashed Chuck a smile. “Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute. I think the boat hit the shore back there.”
In two bounding but soundless steps the man disappeared again.
Chuck planted his right fist, the one with the pen in it, into the mud by his knees and leveraged himself into a squat. At least he was now on his feet.
That weapon in Archer’s hands. Chuck recognized it. A Colt M4A1. A favorite of NATO special forces. Basically, a lighter and shorter variant of the M16. Not something you got off the shelf at Walmart.
He said he thought the boat landed upriver from them?
The birds singing and the pitter-patter of rain wormed nausea deep into the pit of Chuck’s gut. His first thought was of Luke and Olivia. The children. The sick-gut sensation morphed into brimming anger. He gripped the pen tighter in his fist and got fully to his feet.
If the boat landed farther up from them, maybe his friends were already looking for Chuck. Which meant they might be risking their lives to find him�
�either that, or they were injured or worse and needed him back up there somewhere.
“Mike,” Chuck whispered urgently. “Lauren,” he said louder. “Archer?”
He scanned the river.
Nothing.
He knew these trails. Better than Archer, he wagered. He had an idea of the topography. Chuck took one step, and then another, and began a staggering run along a trail at the water’s edge, his fist holding the pen out ahead and swinging for balance. Through the trees to his left, he spotted glittering orange. The growing inferno of the house flickered.
He skidded to a stumbling stop.
His blood felt like it drained from his spine and out through his feet. His stomach a bag of needles. He froze.
Behind him, he sensed that high-pitched whine, like a giant mosquito. A beat later, right ahead on the path, a beady scarlet eye blazed. A bug-drone beelined straight at him.
Chapter 9
ELLAROSE WONDERED WHAT her dad was doing.
“Honey, sweetheart, why don’t you go outside?” her mom said.
Even when her mom was being annoying, Ellarose still liked the sing-songy way she talked. She loved her mother’s long honey-colored hair and freckles. One day she would be just like her.
“Just five more minutes?”
“Honey Rose, you know the rules. Thirty min—”
“I know, I know.”
She was only allowed half an hour of video games a day, but Ellarose was right in the middle of a siege in Call of Duty. Modern Warfare was by far her favorite of the series, and she and her dad would play late at night sometimes. When her mom was asleep.
It was annoying that the internet had gone down earlier.
Ellarose couldn’t connect with the rest of her squad, so she played solo this round. The phone had cut out during the call with her father. That was the landline, her mother had said. The generator had come on, because Ellarose heard the noise of the diesel in the basement. Vented, of course. Dad always said to make sure you vented a generator.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 6