“Where’s Chuck?” Lauren asked the second he was within earshot. Spattered blood and cuts crisscrossed her face. Her body covered in dirt and ash.
“Still out there,” Archer grunted.
“I’m out of ammo. You got anything? Shotgun shells?”
He shook his head as he stumbled down the stairs and almost collapsed into the cement at the bottom. He had taken at least two, maybe three or four rounds—he hoped into his vest and armor. With all the adrenaline jacked through his system, the pain was blotted out.
Usually he fed off it, let the hurt and confusion fuel his anger and sharpen focus, but the gas tank was sucking fumes. He hadn’t slept in days, had no time to recover from previous injuries, and had barely eaten in longer than he could remember.
He was playing hurt. His hands shaking. Vision swimming. Stomach convulsed to retch, but he gritted his teeth and held it back.
This had the feeling of a CIA counter-insurgency operation he ran in Donetsk, Ukraine four years ago. That had taken two years off his life in convalescence. He swore he would never let himself get dragged into one of these messes again. Hadn’t signed up for this, but what choice did he have?
“Help me up.” He felt arms pulling him.
Archer watched the flames gorging in a conflagration from the roof of the church as he had run in. The missile hit the spire first, and wasn’t a bunker buster, so the detonation had spared the lower levels of the full impact. That said, the church’s exterior walls had shredded as if it was a sixty-foot white-paneled firecracker.
Flaming hunks of charred wood still rained down around the stairwell.
Even if there weren’t another missile strike, he realized this place might become an inferno within minutes. They might have to evacuate, but where to?
Archer limped into the middle of the control room with the help of one of the women; he thought her name was Rhonda? He thanked her. Scanned the room. Maybe forty or fifty terrified people crouched under cover of whatever they could find, half of them kids, the other half elderly. Travis and Damon were in the middle of the fifty-foot-square room surrounded by monitors and cables.
The ceiling of the storm shelter held against the first strike. The cement overhead was cracked, fragments falling from it, but still intact. One more hit and this place would be a smoking pile of rubble.
“What do we have left?” Archer asked Travis.
“Three of the corn heads are KIA. I’m still chasing some of their guys but had to circle back as they’re trying to lead us off. Maybe they’re retreating?”
“They were testing our defenses. What about the main formation of drones circling at a few hundred feet?”
“Mostly staying at altitude.” Travis checked a video feed. “Cancel that. Parts of the swarm are breaking off.”
“Leaving?”
He checked video from other screens. “Hard to tell exactly but looks like they’re lowering in altitude.”
“Get everybody in,” Archer said. “Get everyone left out there back here.”
“Shouldn’t we spread out?”
“Back to the church.” Archer glanced at an elderly man and woman under a table by the back. “This will be our last stand. We need to concentrate firepower.”
Archer slumped into a chair.
The attackers had to realize by now there was no clever plot to send up the EMP by drone into the cloud, or something else they weren’t expecting. The corn heads rewired as remote-control tanks had been clever, as had the nets and signal jamming and using the metamaterial sheaths, but even with all that—this had always been a losing battle.
An Alamo.
Archer had known it even as he’d planned the defense. Their attackers had cut them off from the outside world, were professionals with far superior technology and numbers. At minimum they could wait it out, burn down the town and pick off anyone who tried to escape. Or rain down more missiles. Or just brute force attack with the cloud of miniature drones.
There was no escape from this. They were going to kill everyone in this town.
“Where’s Chuck?” Susie limped over from beside Damon and faced Archer.
“He, ah—”
“What?”
Archer bowed his head. “We got separated.”
Susie’s eyes teared up. “Did you see…I mean…”
“I don’t think he made it,” Archer said in a flat voice.
“You know he didn’t, or you think?”
“It’s a mess out there.”
“He’ll be fine,” Susie said. “He’s always got a plan.”
There wasn’t time for this. Archer stood from his chair and addressed Damon. “Is Mike ready to go?”
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Susie asked in a rising voice.
“Damon,” Archer repeated, ignoring her, “is Mitchell ready? Answer me.”
Ellarose began screaming, asking what happened to her dad. Luke jumped off his chair from between Damon and Travis and went to Ellarose.
“Ah, ah, yeah, I think so,” Damon replied after a second. He checked one of his screens. “Should we tell him about Chuck?”
Archer shook his head. “No point. It’s now or never. Everything is converg—”
Through the open door to the storm shelter, a ground-shaking rumble began and then mounted in intensity. The shuddering growl grew into a deafening roar.
“Get him going now!” Archer yelled. “Right now!”
Chapter 42
I WAITED.
And waited.
While everyone else took their stations and prepared, I sat on Travis’s dirt bike at the curb in front of the farmhouse. The senator got behind me and helped balance the shield around us. I didn’t keep the bike running. We needed to be as silent as possible.
Stay hidden.
We were the football, Archer had explained to me.
He used to play football back in college. Running back. He didn’t say where he studied, but it was the closest thing I’d had to a real conversation with the guy. He said this was going to be a draw play, where the quarterback pulls the defense in.
That wasn’t quite accurate.
I’d watched my fair share of football over beers at my local pub.
Travis and Rick and Archer had designed the battle plan the night before. We would offer up the barn as bait, make that the first target and draw out any heavy weaponry. With bitter satisfaction, I had watched the barn go up in a roiling inferno as a missile streaked down from some unseen drone high in the sky.
We hadn’t seen anything like this in their capabilities, but Travis was sure they had to have something like a Predator lurking for when they might need it.
He was right.
Our only job—the senator and me—was to stay hidden. We used a roll of the metamaterial scavenged from the truck’s windshield. It was riddled with bullet holes but did most of the job in the semidarkness. We taped it together into a cylinder around us, held another sheet over our heads. At least it would divert most of our heat signature from whoever was watching from above.
We sat still in the cold and dark as the sun came up over the mountains to the east.
One of the attacking terrorists crept by us not fifty feet away, but he didn’t look our way. His eyes were focused on the corn heads ripping up the fences and trees in front of the church.
We sat still and shivered as Joe’s farmhouse detonated in a bloom of flames, close enough that we felt it sear our faces as it burned. The senator almost crushed my ribs, his arms around me, when the church was hit. It looked like the missile impacted the spire first.
Lauren checked in with us a second later on the walkie-talkie. Said everybody was fine. I had a hard time believing that.
But again, this was my idea.
It might have been Archer and Travis’s plan, but staying and fighting and finding a way to get Senator Seymour to Washington? That was all me.
Archer said that people only fought for things they believed in. He told me a
story of a battle in the Ukraine, when the soldiers from the other side wandered in with a white flag. They didn’t believe in whatever their politicians had told them, whatever cause they were supposed to be fighting for. Archer said you needed to feel it in your heart, right in your soul, if you were going to go all the way to the end.
He said my speech had been a good one, that I inspired the people around me, said they trusted me.
But was I right?
Six years ago, I was wrong.
So deluded that I almost killed my friends and family because of an idiotic idea I had fixed in my head. I had inspired them back then, too—into almost starving to death like some Japanese soldier on a far-off Philippine island I had read about, still fighting the Second World War twenty years after it was over.
He refused to give up, just like I refused to give up even when I was just as wrong.
And here I was again.
Did I really believe the story that man had given us on the bed the night before? I didn’t speak Russian or whatever language Archer and the man began speaking. They’d laughed and they talked like old friends for nearly an hour, the man drugged up on so much Xanax and painkillers I could hardly believe he was conscious.
Archer said I did a good job, but then, what was Archer’s job? What was the guy doing with us all this time? Archer said that I had to be the one on the bike, driving Senator Seymour into Washington, especially after I told him I used to have one when I was a kid.
He said that it couldn’t be him. He was CIA, off the books, nobody would believe him if he brought a story in like we had to tell. It couldn’t be Damon, there were too many connections to the Chinese. And Lauren was the better fighter. She needed to stay and protect the kids.
But was Tyrell really still alive? That question still circled in my mind.
I saw him die.
Right?
The farmhouse roared its flames into the azure sky. A surging cloud of drones circled. Screams of anguish. Stuttering automatic fire. Booming thuds of shotguns. The hissing slash of a missile as it flashed down and caught one of the corn heads three hundred yards away. The machine exploded in a crunching detonation of twisted metal.
Were we winning?
Someone ran past us, two hundred feet away, from the shadows of a stand of birches where a flotilla of drones had dodged in and exploded moments before. I swore it was Archer, but he didn’t look our way. It was hard to see through the sheath around us.
“Mike, you okay?” the senator whispered to me.
My body trembled. Sitting here doing nothing bordered on insanity. My son. My daughter. My wife. They were all in the flaming wreckage of the church behind me, yet I was going to leave them.
For what?
For an idea? For my country? What did that even mean? In a rush of panic, I started to get off the bike. I needed to get back to them.
The walkie-talkie on the handlebars crackled to life. “Go, go, go,” came Damon’s voice.
A screeching roar split the morning air, the noise rising over the tops of the mountains in the distance.
I picked up the walkie-talkie. “Go?” I yelled into it as I thumbed the button.
“Go!” came the screaming reply.
The circling mass of drone-bots lowered and fragmented, the ones at the edges sluicing off into columns. The roar over the mountains grew in intensity.
The ground shook.
I grabbed the handlebars and kicked down on the starter. The senator wrapped his arms around my waist. I kicked the bike into gear and squealed the back tires as we accelerated away in a cloud of blue smoke and burning rubber.
Two darts shot through the blue sky and roared over us, barely skimming the tops of the biggest oaks. The sky erupted in a conflagration of flames and detonations, the heat singeing my exposed forearms and face.
“Those are our F-35s!” the senator screamed from behind me.
The fast-moving darts angled high in the sky and turned for another run. They used aerial incendiary bombs to light up the masses of drones now scattering.
The American Air Force had finally arrived.
I leaned down below the small windscreen to get aerodynamic and clicked up the gears. We accelerated past the cornfields, the wind ripping at my hair, leaving the burning wreckage of the farm behind us.
This was the last part of Archer’s plan, that if we created enough noise, the big boys would come in. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was two hundred miles to the northeast, the Kentucky Air National Guard in Louisville even closer. With everything going on, they would be flying patrols, on the highest level of alert. All we had to do, Archer had assured us, was last long enough in the fight for the good guys to get here.
And it had worked.
The draw play in football meant pulling the attackers in as far as you could, the quarterback weaving and dodging, and then letting the football go at the split second before the attackers took you down.
The jets screamed back overhead, letting loose another salvo of thudding bombs that blossomed into fireballs in the sky. They must have hunted these drones before.
I whooped and waved.
Lauren and the kids would be okay. The church had held against the onslaught. Damon had called me, right? They were still intact in the basement. I saw Archer running into the back, hadn’t I? We still had boots on the ground that could defend until the cavalry arrived.
What was the use of the attackers continuing their assault now?
At full throttle, we cleared the farm and continued up the incline of the foothills.
Here I was, taking the president of the United States back into Washington. We knew everything. We would be able to stop what was going on, I was sure of it. The senator knew what he was doing, he was going to be the commander-in-chief, for Pete’s sake.
Up in the sky, the jets circled and banked again for another run.
“What?” I yelled.
The senator was trying to tell me something.
“I’m getting radio reception,” he yelled over the noise of the engine. He had a set of earbuds in, connected to a pocket radio. We figured once we got out of the valley and the radio jamming stopped, we might be able to get some news.
“Chen has been sworn in as president,” the senator yelled into my ear.
“We’ll fix that, sir,” I yelled back. “Soon as we get there.”
At this speed, cutting through the roads, we would be in DC in four or five hours. Another voyage of mine into the nation’s capital, except this time as a hero.
The senator yelled, “They’re going to launch an attack against Ch—”
Water sprayed against the side of my head. I must have hit a puddle. I looked down and back but saw nothing. The senator’s head slapped into my back.
“Hey, be careful,” I said.
I turned in time to see Leo’s body peel away from the back seat, his face a scarlet mess of skull fragments and brain. His body flopped and rolled onto the pavement in a spinning mess of skin and blood. Terror kept my eyes glued on his body even as I felt the handlebars vibrating out of control. The President of the United States was just killed, my daughter’s uncle, Leo, my friend—
The bullet of the high-velocity round hit me before I heard the crack of the rifle shot. The front wheel of the bike spun in my hands.
I flew headlong into space. How fast was I going? Seventy miles an hour? Eighty?
The knobbled pavement rushed at my face.
Chapter 43
“MICHAEL,” SAID A voice.
I was drowning, the panic white hot in my veins. The blue water of the backyard swimming pool shimmered the outlines of the back of our house.
“Just keep moving,” the voice said.
It was my father. He’d thrown me in the aboveground when I was barely two years old. I had swallowed a lungful of water and almost drowned. I felt the water filling my lungs again, my hands scrabbling against the pavement. The sky blue above me.
“You just keep
moving,” said the voice again, but this time it was a woman.
I recognized the accent.
Boston. But foreign.
I groaned.
Lifted my face from the dirt. I must have skidded two hundred feet across the roadway. The bike on its side a hundred feet behind me. Didn’t feel anything, no sensation at all. Numb except for a burning in my face and knees.
Closed my eyes.
Ringing in my ears. An image in my mind of Leo’s body cartwheeling over the pavement, spitting blood and bone at every impact.
I opened my eyes in time to see and feel a thundering blast overhead. Two darts shot by in the sky between the treetops. The F-35s. Our jets. Strafing the valley, clearing it of the remnants of the attackers. Unless they were attacking us.
Had I miscalculated? Had I gotten it wrong again? I rolled over and stared up.
Tried to breathe.
“The senator is gone,” said Irena’s voice, still just a sound that carried on the wind. “There’s nothing to fight for anymore.”
I couldn’t see her to my left or right.
“He was our Ace of Spades. Our mission is over. A success.”
I rolled over again, farther away from the roadway and into the weeds on the side. Gravel stuck wetly to the blood smeared across and dripping from my face.
Fumbled with one hand and felt my nose—smashed to one side. I still had my front teeth, my fingers discovered. I stopped to blink, one eye and then the other. Both eyes working.
Groaning, I attempted to get to my knees.
“You never give up, do you?”
I stumbled forward into the bushes and small trees at the side of the road. The ground sloped downward toward the Ohio River, but we had come far enough on the bike that it had to be a mile or more to the water. No houses or towns this side of Vanceburg on Highway 9, not till Grayson, and that was another fifty miles through the forest.
Pain lanced in my right side. I dragged my left leg as I limped forward.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 28