“You show up right when we’re being attacked by super-sophisticated drones,” Chuck added. “Which, excuse me for saying, seem like exactly the kinds of things you might have on hand.”
“You said you were coming here to get Damon,” I said.
Tyrell held up his hands and turned in his seat. “Are these questions or accusations or merely observations?”
“Just explain yourself, bawbag,” Archer said.
“What’s a bawbag?” Chuck frowned.
Tyrell said, “I tracked down Damon because he’s the only one I trust. He back-hacked the”—he paused to choose a word—“terrorists and brought down my constellation of satellites.”
“Which I think is part of some bigger plan,” Damon said. “Otherwise, why would they still be here? Their game is up. Unless their game is not up.”
Tyrell nodded. “Exactly, Mr. Indigo. What is the bigger plan? That is the real question. And, Mr. Mitchell, you asked already why no help seems to be coming? The senator’s house just exploded, ten miles from DC, and yet no jets are scrambling overhead.”
A question tickling the back of my mind bubbled up. “Earlier, when we talked about the first anti-satellite attack by India, you said, ‘If you say so.’”
“Because India still denies the attack,” Tyrell replied.
The senator said, “Our military chain of command confirmed the launches by India. Satellite photos. The works. Our own government independently verified it with allies.”
“And I think that is exactly the problem,” Tyrell replied. “And it’s why I didn’t contact anyone in the past eleven days. And why I think you might want to be cautious going back into DC. Why I went to ground, so to speak. Mr. Mitchell, why do you think these so-called terrorists have not yet left the country?”
“I’m guessing this is a rhetorical question?”
“Anyone here is free to answer.”
“Mike, I got a bad feeling,” Chuck said. “Whatever you’re going to do, I need to get up to the cabin. Right. Now.”
“Senator,” Archer said. “Why don’t we get going? I’ll walk you back to Washington myself. It’s ten miles. You can walk that?”
“You want to saunter past those killer drones?” Lauren said. “They were hunting for my uncle not even five minutes ago. My mother was just killed by them. They’re still out there. Are you insane?”
“I’m going with Lauren,” the senator replied to Archer. “She’s my only remaining family. Her and the kids”—he looked at me—“and Mike.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Archer muttered under his breath.
“Mr. Mitchell?” Tyrell waved a hand from the front. “You have not yet answered my question.”
“You want to know what I think?” I paused to gather myself. “I think Irena is hunting for me, not the senator. I killed her brother. And I think they’ve got something else they’re going to hit America with. Before he died, Terek said, ‘This is just the beginning.’ Of what, I don’t know. Why don’t you enlighten us as to why you’ve been hiding?”
“And it better be crystal clear,” Archer said, “because if there’s even one word I don’t understand, I’m dumping you on the pavement and taking Selena for a joy ride.”
“Mr. Mitchell, I have been avoiding all contact with anyone in government, and especially anyone in the secret parts of it”—Tyrell smiled at Archer, but not really a smile, more of a grimace—“because I do not believe this was an attack by terrorists. Not in the usual sense of the word.”
“You want to call them freedom fighters?” Archer said.
“What I would call them, Mr. Archer, is our own government.”
“Excuse me?”
“I believe these attacks have been perpetrated by someone inside the American ruling regime, and that’s why I have not contacted anyone within or even remotely connected to it.”
“Mike.” Chuck squirmed in the back seat and looked forward through the windscreen toward the mountains. “We need to move. I got a really, really bad feeling.”
Chapter 16
“NO, NO, NO!” Susie cried out as she sloshed through the cascading water streaming with blood.
A jumble of pallid skin and blond hair blocked the stream fifty feet toward the road, claret liquid gorging into the brook from a mass of twigs and leaves. Gray tendrils from her smoke bombs wafted through dripping yellow foliage lining the burbling stream. The bony trunks of stripped young birches wove into a swaying chapel over an inert body submerged in the water.
What had Ellarose put on when she went out? Her North Face? The black jacket? Please, God, no, please—
Her modified AR-15 held high, Susie dropped to her knees in the water and wrenched her half-shattered visor and nose guard up. She threw her weapon into the muddy bank and gently put her hands under the blond hair.
Something wasn’t right.
The head was twice as big as her little girl’s. The man had on a ballistic vest. His lips blue, skin paper-white.
It was Thomas.
The security guy who had arrived the day before. Susie had gotten him a coffee and a muffin this morning. They were probably still in his stomach. Maybe the muffin still in his pocket. He didn’t like muffins, his partner had said with a smile, even after Thomas had taken the offering she had just baked. The man had lied and said he loved the carrot ones. Nice guy. He’d come up here to protect her family. Had shown her pictures of his wife and their little boy.
Susie had asked him to keep an eye on Ellarose. She paused and closed her eyes.
Pictured that little boy in the photo. Oh, God. She opened her eyes.
Another body was wedged under a fallen log twenty feet upstream.
Susie didn’t need to go look. Dark skin. That was Morty. Mortimer, she said his full name silently. He also came here to protect her. She scanned the underbrush and stream up and down from her. No smaller lumps with blond hair appeared between the trees.
Nothing. She didn’t see anything else. Didn’t see her daughter’s body anywhere.
Her heart began beating again.
She released the man’s head gently back into the water.
A second ticked by. Another. She needed a tactical plan.
Surrender?
Her attackers had made it clear that they weren’t trying to take her hostage.
Surrender was not an option.
Time was ticking, seconds she couldn’t get back. Susie knew these woods like she knew her own children’s faces. Ellarose was good in the forest too, even better than Susie when it came to evasion. Like when they played hide-and-go-seek out here. She was smart. Like her dad. Crafty and suspicious. She wouldn’t have gotten caught.
“Ellarose!” Susie called out. “If you can hear me, you stay where you are. Stay quiet, do not answer me. Stay away from anybody you see, anybody but me.” She paused. “And go to Uncle Tony, you hear me? You meet me at Uncle Tony’s in ten minutes.”
If anyone was listening, they would think that meant the other cabin.
The brook chattered and bubbled in the silence.
Susie brought her visor and mandible and nose guard back down. Her own blood seeped into the stream from jagged wounds where the blackberry thorns had ripped through her yoga pants between gaps in her armor. That stuff could stop bullets, but apparently not brambles.
Her senses felt heightened. A red maple leaf floating by in the water seemed iridescent, even in the flat light. The ice-cold water stung her wounds, numbed her legs and feet.
She took hold of her weapon.
In a crouch, she headed into the long grass by the side of the creek. She broke into a jog, her head down but scanning through the trees. Following the slope down into a hollow that provided cover from the top of the ridge and parking lot, she could double back to the house. She had the keys to the security system in her pocket. The place was a fortress. Nobody was in there yet, that she was sure of.
Nobody except her little boy.
Scared and by himself. Al
one and terrified.
There might be twenty or more of them and only one of her, but these assholes had just picked on the wrong family. You didn’t attack her kids and get away with it. She picked up her pace and let the anger burn into her veins. She loaded an explosive grenade round into the launcher under her rifle.
Nobody messed with the Mumfords.
She and Chuck had planned for this, as crazy as it might have seemed to outsiders at the time. Paranoia sometimes paid off, like a stopped clock that was right twice a day, Chuck liked to joke. Today the clock wasn’t broken. Right now, it was ringing loud and clear in Susie’s ears.
Chapter 17
TWILIGHT DESCENDED ON Virginia as we swept along the darkened streets. No lights twinkled between branches. No other cars on the road.
A sullen silence had fallen over the interior of the truck after Tyrell re-engaged Selena and fed in the address to the cabin. It was an hour drive back along Interstate 66, the infernal road I had walked along six years ago, into DC and back, starving to death in a delusional waking nightmare of my own creation. Today started to take on that same deranged cinematic sensation, a tight hamster wheel of spiraling speculation.
Everyone was lost in their thoughts, taking a moment to gather themselves in this brief calm at the eye of the storm, the cabin quiet apart from the faint thrum of the vehicle’s electric motors and the wide-tread tires against the pavement. It was capable of faster speed, Tyrell said, but Selena calculated the optimal velocity for its stealth mode.
No new-car smell anymore, the interior now reeked like a wet dog. Blood caked on my arms and face that I didn’t bother to try and clean off. Olivia nestled in my arms. She was thirsty, she said, but Tyrell didn’t have any water and refused to stop. Just fifty-two minutes to our destination, he added.
But what exactly were we heading into?
The rear half of the truck’s occupants thought the forward compartment was the enemy, and the front felt the same about the back—with the middle seats occupied by Lauren and me somewhere in between. My wife and I had taken on the uncomfortable role of referees between the two emerging factions.
We headed to Chuck’s cabin, using Tyrell’s signal triangulation as a guide.
He had explained to Archer exactly how he deduced this, and the man seemed satisfied that it made sense. If he was telling the truth. In less than an hour we would find out—if we got there—and for Archer, this was the way to resolve the conundrum. No need for overthinking.
Just go straight into the teeth of it.
We had no idea of the size of the monster we were heading toward, but I got the feeling Archer had faced worse odds in worse places than Virginia. Probably in places whose names I couldn’t pronounce without help.
Of course, neither did we have any way of knowing if this meant the signal was coming from Chuck’s place, or from the terrorists who were there. Or even that it was them controlling the bug-drones that attacked us at Senator Seymour’s.
What were the odds?
There were no coincidences, as Chuck liked to say.
We’d been at Chuck’s cabin three days before, with two of the Chechens. It made a perfect mountaintop lair for conducting operations, which was why Chuck liked it so much himself. Isolated. Up high. And their base of operations by the water had been demolished. If the signal was really coming from Shenandoah Mountain, it seemed too much of a coincidence for it not to be related to Chuck’s cabin.
Chuck nearly had to climb into our row of seats to explain to Tyrell that the coordinates to his cabin in the navigation system weren’t right. He had purposely gone in and changed the location of his house in all the online databases—Google and so on, using Damon’s help the year before—so that nobody could find the cabin, even if they entered the address.
He gave Tyrell the latitude and longitude, which Chuck of course knew by heart. Which brought up another question.
“How does Selena know where she’s going without GPS?” I asked.
“Inertial tracking and visual cues,” Tyrell explained. “Like most military positioning systems, if it loses GPS, it reverts to backups. First the European GNSS, Galileo. Then GLONASS. Any L1C international timing signals. Failing that, it takes the last known position and overlays inertial tracking and checks current imaging data with known databases.”
“Like Google Street View?” Luke said.
“Exactly like that. You have a smart kid, Mr. Mitchell. Extra-large batteries. Selena has a range of over six-hundred miles.”
“Or we could just take the wheel and drive,” Chuck said. “Can we do that?”
“Manual override switch is here.” Tyrell indicated a mechanical switch beside the flat-panel display. “Brakes and accelerator just like you’d be used to.”
He seemed to be trying to earn our trust.
“But we have no internet,” I said. “How do you get Street View? How is Selena getting her data?”
“Onboard storage of ten petabytes. We have half the internet copied in here with us. That’s an exaggeration, but we store a lot of map data and personal information.”
“Personal information?”
“Places. Faces.”
“Peta-what?” Chuck said.
“That’s a thousand terabytes, Uncle Chuck,” Luke explained. “Do you have an iPad in here, Mr. Jakob?”
“I have something much better than that. Mr. Archer, can I engage the entertainment system? I would need to access the main display.”
“Just don’t do anything funny,” came the gruff reply behind me. “I am watching.”
“Would Peppa Pig classify as funny?”
“Now you’re being clever again.”
Olivia perked up in my arms. “Peppa Pig?”
“Mr. Mitchell,” Archer whispered in a raspy voice.
I turned in my seat. Olivia was in the seat beside me, watching cartoons on a big display in the seatback. Luke was doing the same. Both wearing earbuds that Tyrell had handed back. Luke was playing Minecraft. The entertainment system had games, too.
“Did you say something?”
Archer leaned over the seat to get closer to me, his eyes on Damon. “When we get there, I advise that you and your family stay close to me.”
What was I supposed to say? “I understand,” I replied.
The man sat back, apparently satisfied I was on his side.
Forty-one minutes till we arrived at Chuck’s cabin. My thoughts swirled around and around, my brain trying to plot a path through whatever was coming. What was true? What was real?
Someone in this truck was lying, one way or the other. That I was sure of.
But who? And why?
Archer had decided that his new mission was to protect Senator Seymour, after an entire platoon’s-worth of Secret Service agents had been killed trying to do just that. The senator, for his part, adamantly insisted on staying close to Lauren and the children, so Archer had no choice but to come along. A secondary goal, if I was interpreting Archer’s behavior with any accuracy—he didn’t like to talk, but mostly stared ahead with a blank expression—was to help protect our group.
Of course, this analysis of Archer depended on your point of view.
He was the most unknown quantity of anyone in the truck.
Damon’s revulsion toward Archer—I wouldn’t call it hatred, because he hadn’t known him long enough for that—was almost palpable. The air between them seemed charged with negative ions, like two magnets repelling each other. I hadn’t witnessed Damon really dislike anyone in the six years I had known him, but then, I hadn’t spent that much time with Damon in those years.
On the other hand, Archer had been grilling Damon back at the house, just before all this kicked off. It had gotten heated, and I had the sense Archer was digging under some corners of Damon’s life that my friend preferred to stay dark.
And what was Archer doing in the bathroom when I walked in on him? He had syringes out, some kind of chemical kit. Was he about to do somethi
ng to Damon?
Was he allowed to do that?
But then what were the rules when a massive terrorist attack was launched against your country? The normal codes of conduct went out the window, but should they? Did we have the right to do that?
And how well did I really know Damon?
Damon had been about to shoot Archer in the clearing in the forest. Kill him. To protect Tyrell. And Tyrell said he came here to find Damon. How well did they really know each other? Damon said he had met Tyrell twice before on trips to GenCorp. They seemed more friendly than mere business acquaintances. Would I threaten to kill a special ops soldier for someone I met on a business outing?
Then again, Tyrell wasn’t your run-of-the-mill businessman. The guy was literally a rocket scientist.
I had to admit, his star power put me in a bit of a daze. He was a celebrity, like George Clooney famous, especially among anyone in tech. He built space stations, rockets for journeys to Mars, and half the equipment the internet ran on—not to mention military equipment like this invisible truck we were in. If you had asked me two weeks ago, I would have said that anything coming out of Tyrell Jakob’s mouth was God’s gospel.
He was the smartest person in any room, but now my entire family’s survival depended on him. My children’s lives. Was my judgment being clouded?
And the reason he refused to allow us to stop and talk to anyone? He thought the attack was coming from our own government.
If I believed he was the smartest guy inside this futuristic Humvee—then should I believe, as he did, that the terrorists weren’t Chechens, but some faction of our own American government? He was convinced this was a false flag operation, that somehow Senator Seymour was a target, and that this was the beginning of a new civil war.
Which made things even worse than I could have imagined not three hours before.
Thirty-three minutes.
“Is it just me, or does this have the feeling of a funeral?” Chuck whispered to me.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 11