Tyrell’s mouth opened, then closed before he said, “I still protest.”
“Which you can do all you want.”
The truck slowed and turned.
Tar black outside the windows in the shadow of the high treetops. Ghostly lines painted on the front windshield’s heads-up faded away as the navigation system’s data exhausted known paths. It had been heading for the latitude and longitude coordinates Chuck had given us, but was now using radar, Tyrell explained. The wheels rumbled over gravel and dirt.
Selena slowed to a crawl to reduce noise.
I peered out.
The outline of fir trees painted a jagged black edge to the emerging carpet of stars, clear and bright at this altitude. To the south, straight ahead, the sky was black. Had to be clouds. Flickering lights danced around from the kid’s videos. I better turn them off soon, explain to them they needed to be quiet.
Archer lowered his voice. “Lauren, you take one of the submachine guns and stay with the senator and the kids. And keep an eye on those two.” He indicated Tyrell and Damon. “Mike, you get the second carbine. Your wife will explain again how to use it.”
Was he trying to be funny? Or practical? “Okay.” I grabbed the gun.
“Once Chuck and I go into the Baylor place, you guys go back along the main driveway and pull up to the front. If it looks good, you go ring the doorbell. We still don’t—”
A flash lit up the tree line, followed an instant later by a thudding detonation. The forest ahead of us seemed to light up like daylight. The staccato stutter of automatic weapons fire. We all looked up.
Everyone except Chuck.
Before we could stop him, the gull-wing door beside him slid open a foot. He ducked and darted out of it, then took off at a run into the black night, his dangling prosthetic hand attempting to hold his phone for illumination, his right hand gripping a submachine gun.
Chapter 21
“CHUCK, GET IN the goddamn truck,” I whisper-yelled as loud as I dared.
Tyrell switched to manual and guided the vehicle next to him as he ran.
Archer jumped over the senator in the middle seat, leaned out the door and snagged my friend by his shirt collar. Hauled him, legs still pumping, back into the left side of the truck, then grabbed the gull-wing door and pulled it closed. The truck didn’t slow.
The bright lights around Chuck’s cabin had just gone out, dousing the area in darkness. Another flash and a crunching detonation ahead of us.
And something else.
Smudges of light through the trees to the left. We coasted toward the turnoff to the Baylor house, and passed the bullet-riddled remains of a Mini. It had to be the one Oscar had brought up. He must have never made it to the house. Didn’t look like he could have survived the vicious attack.
“My wife and kids are up there,” Chuck gasped. “I gotta get—”
“Shut up.” Archer clamped a hand over my friend’s mouth.
Floodlights on tripods lit up the gravel path. A semitruck with two containers was stopped halfway down the driveway. No markings. “That’s the same one I saw at the beach,” I said.
Archer said, “You’re sure?”
“I think so.”
“I’m sure,” Lauren said.
Two Humvees were parked beyond it.
Already three men in ballistic vests, weapons up and pointed this way, hustled along the gravel drive toward us. Red dots appeared against the star field in the sky. Drones approached at high speed.
“Go, go, go,” Archer whispered.
The truck accelerated slightly. Wind swayed the treetops. The dark edges of the canopy flickered the stars and drone dots in the distance. We passed the Baylor driveway. The men’s heads didn’t follow our path but remained fixed on the dark dirt road behind us.
“Sorry,” Chuck said as Archer released his fingers from his face. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“I know what you were thinking. I can’t blame you. Anyway, it was a good diversion.” Archer’s head tracked back, his gaze now fixed through the rear window. “We didn’t break cover for more than a few seconds. They have no idea what just happened. Might have been a deer for all they know.”
Chuck slithered upright. The senator shifted in the seat to his right.
Burst of automatic weapon fire ahead of us.
A rattling barrage began.
In the dim light, I could make out the edges of the gravel road opening up into the clearing of the cabin’s parking area. The bright lights of a few seconds ago, now gone dark, had to be the exterior floodlights of the cabin. Muzzle flashes lit up the semidarkness in the woods to the north.
But they weren’t firing at the house.
Their target seemed to be the hunting blind that Chuck had built for the kids in the fir trees to the south of the house. We’d gone up there on our brief stop. Red dots hovered in the distance, then grew in intensity. Getting closer.
Twenty feet to our right, a man crouched by the cover of the workshop, the back of his torso and head lit up by a solar pathway lamp. A body lay face down in the dirt by his feet.
The crouched man didn’t see or sense us approaching but kept his attention forward.
The house became obscured.
“Those are 37-millimeter smoke bombs,” Chuck said after a moment. “Susie must be trying to get inside.”
“Or she’s already inside and someone is trying to get close,” Lauren said. “You can’t know those are your smoke bombs.”
“Then why would they be firing at the blind?”
“Can Ellarose fire a gun?” Lauren asked.
“She can.”
“Maybe she’s—”
“Stay still.” Archer had his thick left arm locked around Chuck’s neck, his right holding my friend’s weapon pinned to the leather seat. “We need to get some situational awareness.”
Chuck grunted, “I need to get to my wife. My kids.”
“We don’t even know where they are.”
The interior lights had all been turned off. The kids’ screens now dark. Lauren had Olivia back in her lap. My eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Luke peered over the seatback in front of him and pointed. “There’s Aunt Susie!”
About a hundred feet south of our position, she looked straight at us as she sprinted the last ten feet to the deck through the wafting fog of the smoke bombs. Did she see us?
Luke squealed, “Look out!”
Chuck grunted and squirmed to get free, but Archer squeezed the lock-grip around his neck, the man’s bicep bulging as Chuck’s eyes did the same. He gurgled what was surely intended to be a roaring, cursing howl, his face going beet red.
Susie reached the patio door on the deck, but a man advanced along the garden path to her left and fired straight at her. The rounds nailed her, snapping her arms and legs like she was a toy doll. She spun around. Lauren put one hand over her mouth to stifle a scream.
“She’s got armor on,” Archer said.
The man surged up the stairs at her, the muzzle of his weapon flashing, the cracks echoing. Susie spun around, launched herself straight at him, and yanked back on his neck. A steel blade flashed in her hand.
“That’s...my...girl,” Chuck gasped.
Nobody breathed for two beats. Susie reappeared and staggered up the stairs. We exhaled together. Olivia sobbed. Lauren shushed her, said to keep quiet.
I said, “What in God’s name—”
An animal burst from the trees to our left. In three awkward-but-graceful leaping bounds it crossed the hundred feet to the deck. Sailed into the air over the railing. The black-bodied beast slammed into Susie just as she opened the glass patio door. She bounced hard off the door and disappeared from view.
“That’s a robotic carrier,” Tyrell said, pointing to the deck.
“I’m in,” Damon almost screamed from the front.
I said, “In what?”
“Their network. I got control of that thing as it passed by us. Not control, exa
ctly, but I’m accessing its internal systems.”
“What thing?”
“That robotic carrier. It had an open near-field communication channel. It looked like a troop support model. Sloppy, but I guess they didn’t expect anyone to be this close. Not someone with a signal sniffer, anyway.”
Ahead of me, Damon’s fingers worked furiously across his laptop’s keyboard. I looked back at the house. The robot-animal hesitated on the deck. Susie got to her feet and grabbed the door again.
“That’s it,” I said, “just get in—”
A red dot flitted in from the left. Susie’s head disappeared in a flash of orange flame.
“No!” Chuck’s body writhed as he tried to escape Archer’s grip.
I said, “She’s up. She’s okay. I can see her inside.”
On her knees, Susie slid the door closed behind her. But slowly. She looked hurt. Bad.
A spray of white dots appeared in the glass behind her as she disappeared. The glass clouded up with the impact of dozens of rounds. The echoes of the shots almost deafening. How many attackers were hiding in the bushes and trees around us? I counted three, four muzzle flashes. Maybe more.
“Did you say you got into their network?” Archer said over the noise at Damon.
“I have access to that robotic carrier.”
“Now they know we’re here. I did not give you permission t—”
“I don’t think we need to worry about them knowing we’re here because of our network access,” Lauren interrupted. She pointed to her right and moved Olivia to her left.
Archer cursed.
The attacker who had been crouching by the workshop stood not more than two feet from Lauren. He had his weapon in his right hand and reached out with his left. Fingers outstretched, he hesitantly placed his hand flat against the window, right by my wife’s head.
Even in the fading light and with his face guard and visor down, I saw his frown of confusion. He pulled his hand back and shouldered his weapon. Pointed it straight at Lauren and Olivia. I cringed, expecting him to pull his trigger, then flopped my body to the right to try and cover my wife.
Instead of firing, he prodded forward with the muzzle.
Archer barked, “Why aren’t we moving?”
“Because there are targets coming from behind us,” Tyrell replied.
The senator said from the seat behind me, “Is that who I think it is?”
I didn’t have time to turn and see what he was talking about.
The man to Lauren’s left knocked the glass with the tip of his barrel. His look of confusion changed, his expression hardened. He swung forward with the weapon again, but the truck was already accelerating backward and to the right. His gun swung into open space, just missing the front side window where Damon was still focused on his laptop screen, unaware of the man swinging a rifle barrel almost at his head.
Cool air washed over my left hand as I extricated myself from my wife’s lap. Chuck was upright in the seat behind me, rubbing his neck, but where was Archer? Another draft of cold air. The left side gull-wing door was a few inches open.
I turned in my seat.
Chuck pointed to the front.
The man in the ballistic vest and armor was prodding the open air in front of the truck. He began swinging his weapon, then lifted his wrist to his mouth and started speaking. A dark shape materialized behind him. One hand darted, viper-like, around the man’s neck. Archer pulled a steel wire tight into the unfortunate’s windpipe and hauled him back, dragging the man into the shadows of the tall grass by the side of the drive.
Just in time.
Six more men marched in quick time past us. The barrage of gunfire died down. The truck edged to a stop on the gravel. Echoing cracks of gunfire went silent. Crickets chirped. The six men walked on the left side of the gravel drive and didn’t seem to notice us. They were fixated on the house. Except it wasn’t six men.
One of them was blond.
A very small one.
“Ellarose,” I whispered.
Right behind her, holding the back of her neck, was a familiar face. The men had flashlights on their vests, and in the reflected light I saw her clearly.
Irena.
She fast marched Ellarose toward the house, flanked by four guards. Irena had her phone out and looked like she was calling someone.
“Chuck,” I whispered. “Chuck, did you see—”
A trilling wail echoed in the night air. So close I thought an owl had flown into the truck. I looked into the rear row, but only the senator remained back there. The leather bucket seats beside him were empty. The gull-wing door to that side open a foot.
Where was Chuck?
“Oh, no,” Lauren whispered. She pointed.
Chapter 22
“I’M COMING OUT,” Susie said into the phone. “Do not shoot.”
In the phone’s display, tears streamed down Ellarose’s face, but her daughter seemed to be beckoning to her.
Irena said, “A little courtesy can go a long way. Of course we will not shoot. This is a ceasefire.”
“This is an invasion.”
“This is no invasion, Susan. Your own American misadventures have proven that invasions of an uncooperative indigenous population will always result in failure. Despite my comrades regarding you to be soft as a nation, I believe the average American would be very uncooperative. You have more guns per capita in Virginia than Yemen.”
“You’re a terrorist.”
“We can debate that when you come out.” The woman’s voice echoed in the hallway. She was now in the upstairs living room. Susie recognized the wood paneling in the image on the screen.
Susie stepped on the pedal by the floor again. Nothing happened. She should have heard the flares strapped by the chimney going off, seen their flickering red-and-blue lights illuminating the treetops in the exterior camera displays.
“Please come out, hands up,” Irena said. “One of my men disabled your warning device. Chuck explained the flares when we were here. He told me a few things about this house. He is immensely proud of it.”
Susie bowed her head and closed her eyes. Chuck, you idiot. A pretty girl shows up at the house and you can’t keep your mouth shut, can you? What else did he tell her? Part of her interior emotional wall crumbled.
“Please,” Irena said, “I do not want to hurt your children.”
Groaning, Susie got up from her chair, her feet slipping in her own blood. As terrified as he was, Bonham did his best to help her. She was scared too, but making no decision was also deciding. She had to do something, and this was the last gambit she could use to try and protect her children. Sacrifice herself. Susie opened the locks on the safe room door, strained to hold her hands up. Two men in ballistic vests, face shields, and visors, their weapons pointed at her, directed Susie between them. They forced her along the corridor and up the stairs.
Amina—who Susie had met as Irena—was in the dining room. She had Ellarose by the scruff of her North Face jacket. She let the little girl go, and Ellarose ran over to Susie and Bonham. Susie knelt, groaning in pain again, and wrapped her arms around her two little ones. They said they loved each other. Tears flowed down their cheeks.
Amina turned and said something to one of her men. He nodded and ran back out the patio door.
In addition to Amina, there were now seven men in the kitchen and dining room, all dressed in the same nondescript black armor and face masks and visors, each with a submachine gun and backpack. Two of the men were already unpacking a crate. One of the large dog-bots ambled over the patio and back down into the garden. It had just carried the crate up. Red dots hovered in the black sky.
“Please, sit on the couch,” Amina said to Susie. “I have a medic coming. I can see you are badly hurt. We are not animals.”
“I would prefer to stand.”
Susie was still crouched with her arms around her children. Ellarose grabbed her mother’s neck and whispered as low as she could, said that sh
e had something she needed to tell her. Susie said she knew, she loved them too. She said she needed them to be a big boy and girl, and that she was going to find out what these people wanted.
“That is the right question,” Amina said. “What is it that we want?”
“You want to destroy lives.”
“You think I am thousands of miles from my home for no reason?”
“No reason could justify this.”
“Susan, I want to save lives. Let me find the right language that you will understand as an American. This is an incursion. Maybe a police action? Did you know that I was a policewoman, once upon a time, before my mother and father were killed?”
“Whatever happened to you,” Susie said, “does not justify this.”
“You do not even know what this is. It’s not personal. At least, it wasn’t—until your friend Mike killed Pyotr. He didn’t need to do that.” Amina took a deep breath and looked at the floor. “Do you know that America has eight hundred military bases on foreign soil? In almost a hundred foreign countries?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It has to do with everything. By comparison, Britain, France, Russia, and China—the next largest military powers in the world—combined have fewer than thirty bases in foreign countries. Compared to America’s eight hundred. Even at the height of their power, the world-spanning British Empire, which was the largest the world had ever seen, only had two dozen foreign military bases. America has now garrisoned the entire planet Earth on a scale never before seen in history.”
“Excuse me if I’m not in the mood for a history lesson.”
“What we are doing now will serve as its own history lesson. We are using your own weapons against you. You kill us with drones, we return the favor. Your own medicine.”
“I just want my kids safe and away from you. Tell me what you want.”
“Seymour.”
“Lauren’s uncle?”
“Senator Seymour, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, with oversight of the drone program—the greatest terrorist on the planet. He kills hundreds of people a year in foreign countries, even his own citizens, without accusation, trial, evidence, or jury. You think this does not inspire terror around the world? Is this not terrorism? To borrow your language, in this operation, he is our Ace of Spades. And you think your friend Lauren Mitchell is so innocent?”
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 15