The man pinned under the truck screamed.
A thundering wind tore through the wrecked kitchen wall in a swirling whirlwind of paper.
Stuttering fire of an automatic weapon. Flashes as bullets dented the hood of the BullyBoy and impacted its windshield. Billy fired straight at it, not ten feet from us. The right gull-wing door began to swing open.
With one hand, I grabbed Lauren’s shirt and dragged her up. I fumbled with the other for the assault rifle. Lauren grabbed it and got to her knees. We crouched and ran to the side of the truck.
Someone yelled above us.
A man appeared on the mezzanine, his rifle out ahead of him. Two men from the stairs leading to the garage, also yelling, and not in English. Russian? Chechen?
A burst of gunfire.
Where was Chuck?
Agent Coleman was on his knees by the back wheel of the BullyBoy. He wrenched the gun from the hands of the screaming man beneath. Agent Coleman spun around in one clean motion and unleashed a burst into the mezzanine.
The man up there staggered back.
Billy retreated to the far wall and shielded himself behind a couch, the muzzle of his rifle visible. The two men coming up the stairs had their rifles out and scanned the room, up and down and side to side.
Irena and Katerina were on the floor.
The man guarding them sat on his haunches, his rifle up, but turned away from us, watching the blown-open entranceway.
The wind boomed and swirled the mess of papers.
“Get down!” Agent Coleman screamed at me.
Where was Chuck? A growling rumble overpowered the shrieking wind. A gray-brown wall of water exploded at head height through the shattered opening in the kitchen wall.
The foaming mountain poured down onto the screaming men in the stairwell, extinguishing their yells. The swell heaved into the room. Picked up everything like matchsticks. Chairs and tables and people. Irena and Katerina got to their feet, then were swept away.
A quick flutter like a bird flew past my face. Bullets. Close.
Staccato pops of automatic gunfire.
Someone yanked me by the neck of my T-shirt and I fell onto my ass. Lauren. She crouched in the cover of the BullyBoy’s front fender with the assault rifle balanced over it. Let go a stuttering burst low into the front wall where Billy hid.
Water sloshed around my midsection.
“Mike!” Chuck yelled. “Get in the goddamn truck!”
He was in the driver’s seat, tapping on a large touch screen in the center console while cursing at me to hurry up.
Another burst of gunfire.
Then another.
Muzzle flashes all around us.
How many of their men had been up here? Bullets ricocheted off the truck’s stainless hull. Chuck yelped as I scrambled on all fours past Agent Coleman, who stood and swept left and right as he fired a suppressing round.
Another thundering reverberation as a second wave gushed through the opening.
“Get in, get in!” Chuck’s voice forced. Choked.
“Wait!” Irena screamed from the other side of the room.
I grabbed my wife’s right arm and pulled.
She resisted for an instant so she could get off one more round, but then followed me into the futuristic interior of the BullyBoy. An acrid stink of cordite mixed with fresh car plastic. I slid in, squeaking on the leather of the back seats. Water rushed through the open door.
Bullets clanged and punched white dots into the dark glass.
“Hurry!” Agent Coleman shouted across the room.
Lauren jumped into the back seat with me, her assault rifle in hand. I grabbed the muzzle to push it away, howled, and let it go. It was red hot.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” Chuck said in a pained voice. He keyed something into the flat panel on the dashboard.
I was blind to the outside now. Couldn’t see anything beyond the truck’s dark windows except for Agent Coleman, who leaned against the open gull wing. No more single bursts of gunfire. A steady chattering barrage over the clamor of the waves and wind.
“Leave them!” I shouted.
Agent Coleman stumbled back.
A surprised look on his face as rounds caught him square in the chest. Knocked him off his feet. Lauren didn’t hesitate. She launched back out through the door, gun in one hand.
“We must leave quickly,” said Irena. She squirmed through the water toward the opening of the door, with Katerina close behind.
I swiveled in my chair to see my wife hauling Agent Coleman into the back seat as Chuck leaned his forward. Lauren held the big Secret Service agent under both armpits and pulled.
Grabbing the back of the seat in front of me, I leveraged myself up as if I was about to give Irena a hand.
I gripped the seat.
And straight-kicked her as hard as I could, flat in the nose. She screamed. Blood exploded from her face. I kicked at her hands and pulled myself into the front seat.
“Close the door!” I screamed at Chuck.
He stared at me with wide eyes. Blinked. Tapped the screen. Blood spatters on his face. Dark splotches on his shirt.
Irena slipped backward, her hands grabbing the bottom edge of the door. She screamed as she tried to hang on.
A flurry of bullets clanged off the metal and thudded into the side window and windscreen. The glass was bulletproof, but that only meant it didn’t let them through. The windows were shattered and crazed. I wasn’t sure how many more hits it could take before the glass would collapse under the incoming onslaught.
“Go, go, go!” Lauren yelled.
Chuck didn’t need convincing.
The wheels of the BullyBoy spun. A whirring vibration filled the cockpit. The door almost but not quite closed, I saw Irena stand up, a hand to her face. A man in camouflage appeared ten feet away, running, his weapon out. He swung its muzzle at us.
A deafening burst of gunfire echoed in the cabin.
Lauren fired her rifle as she leaned back with Agent Coleman on top of her. A spray of bullets from outside clanged off the stainless steel. Hissing pops inside the cabin.
It felt like a rocket engine had been lit.
My forehead slammed into the dashboard. I slid into Chuck, almost knocked him out the still half-open door. The truck spun. Chuck hauled himself back to the steering wheel.
Gunned the accelerator again.
The truck squealed. Three men stood and fired straight at us through the mostly wrecked windshield. We flashed past them.
Another crunching impact and thudding boom. We hit the mangled kitchen wall. A lurching burst of speed. The truck launched through, spun weightless for an instant.
Slammed broadside into churning water.
I cracked my head against the door. Agent Coleman and Lauren flew forward and bashed into the front seats.
“Chuck, Chuck!” I shouted. “The door! Get the goddam—”
“I know, I know!” He gripped the steering wheel and tapped the big screen.
Gray water flooded in from the almost-closed door. A wave tumbled the truck sideways. I yelled. Lauren screamed. Chuck cursed. The door finally closed.
We were back upright in a tangled mess, water sloshing all around us.
The truck surged forward on a wave, and in the moment of comparative calm Chuck leaned back to the console and keyed something. A whine and a hum and I heard the wheels get going again. But no acceleration.
The truck almost tumbled over again before being pulled back by a swell. Through the dark crazed glass, the house and the streetlights faded from view. We were being sucked backward and out onto the beach—but there was no beach anymore. We were being pulled into the Atlantic, into the middle of the raging hurricane.
Another wave. The force and volume of it submerged the truck. We pinwheeled over and over, blood and water and bodies churning one into the other.
No fear, though, and no pain. Only one thought in the tumbling darkness.
They have my
children.
CHAPTER 43
FOR TWO HOURS, Damon tried to find a connection to somewhere, anywhere, along the Virginia coast, but there was nothing.
He tried dialing the senator’s meshnet number, but there was no answer. He sent a text message, left the address of the house on the Virginia coast, said that Mike was in trouble and needed help.
Damon had a feeling his messages weren’t getting through.
He tried the landline, which still worked, but he only managed to get as far as one of the senator’s aides, who said the senator was in a classified briefing and there was no way to reach him. Damon said it was an emergency. They said everything today was one.
Damon needed to be careful how much he said. He knew they were listening.
Whoever “they” were.
The attackers were probably aware that Damon knew something was wrong. Damon had sent a flurry of messages, and he was sure they would be able to decode them in a few minutes. He was a sitting duck.
And that’s what he wanted them to think.
Because Terek had given him two whole hours to think.
Damon set his target file down behind a set of carefully constructed firewalls. He set up an intrusion detection system and laid out an almost impenetrable perimeter. Almost no way in or out.
“Almost” being the crucial word.
He made another cup of coffee and watched the rain. It fell in huge gob-droplets that quickly overflowed the gutters and spilled onto the paved back deck, then ran in streams down the grassy incline to the Potomac. The Calico rapids were engorged.
Damon took a sip of coffee and looked at his computer.
Silent for the past half hour.
No messages. No nothing.
Maybe he was wrong.
Terek looked terrified when he left. Maybe Damon should have gone with him. His mind flip-flopped. How could he decide what to do? What had happened to his friends?
It felt like a hundred-pound weight pressed down on his chest.
He looked at his watch. Almost noon.
He had sent a meshnet message and told Mrs. Seymour to take her time. He knew Terek or the attackers would see the message. With this rain, he couldn’t imagine Mrs. Seymour going for much of a walk, and he doubted they would go near the city center given the looting and riots. What was she doing?
He was all alone.
The tension sucked the air from his lungs.
Damon had already given away a lot, but he might confuse his attackers by staying still. He assumed Terek had planted a man-in-the-middle attack within the home’s routers. As much as Damon wanted to run and scream and punch something, he needed to stay calm.
Sometimes a predator had to lay quietly.
A twinge twisted in his gut.
Maybe he was like the big tarpon they’d hunted. Maybe there was something hovering over Damon right now, something he couldn’t see and didn’t understand. Had he miscalculated?
The TV in the next room detailed the ferocity of Hurricane Dolly as it lashed the shoreline. “Our experts believe the storm managed at least a sixteen-foot storm surge, but without satellite data or ground stations it’s only possible for them to have a rough idea. Two Hurricane Hunter aircraft are circling the storm as we speak, and Doppler radar indicates it is losing intensity as it comes inland.”
There was one call Damon could make on the landline that wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. He picked up the receiver and dialed a number by heart. Just about the only number he’d always known.
It picked up on the first ring.
“Is that my little Demon?” asked a gravelly down-home Cajun voice.
“Yeah, it’s me, Grandma.”
Damon felt a warm current of calm run through his scalp and down his spine. She was okay. They’d exchanged text messages, but it was nice to hear her voice. Mike and Chuck had their families, and he loved them too. Would do anything to protect his friends. But his own, real family? All he had was Grandma Babet.
“You staying safe?” Babet asked.
“Yes, Grandma.”
“You helping people?”
“Much as I can.” He didn’t want to worry her. Nobody wanted to worry their mom, which was what she’d always been to him.
A pause on the other end. “You meet any girls?”
It was a question she asked him every time they spoke, no matter the circumstance. “Actually, yeah. How are things in New Orleans?”
“Store shelves are empty. Some people shooting each other in the streets, but that’s not unusual. Not much police. I guess they’re going to fix this mess given time. I’m keeping to myself. Social distancing. Like last time.”
She’d been through a disaster or three, his grandma. Katrina. Corona. Now this. She was cool as a bayou sunset, though.
“You have food?”
“If I need to, I go fishing. Now what about this girl? Not that Irena? I hope not, I mean, she’s real pretty and all…”
“I met a farm girl named Pauline, up in Kentucky.”
“Farm girl? I’m liking the sound of that.”
Damon closed his eyes. Sunk into this tiny oasis of normality outside of the tilt-o-whirl. But there was another reason he’d called.
“You said there was something unusual at the port. Something to do with Irena or Terek, some containers they were involved in moving around? Or something like that?”
A pause. “Some big trucks came in, no paperwork, and took ’em. Just the containers they signed in. And I heard they took ’em up to that Tyrell’s place. Uncle Louis, you know, the cook? He was walking his dog—”
His grandma told him a story about how some people said, rumors mind you, that they had been out to the GenCorp headquarters. Something strange was going on. Damon told her to stay clear, because men with guns were on their way there, if they weren’t there already.
Outside the kitchen window, it was almost black as night now. The clouds thick and low. Rain came down like a river.
Mrs. Seymour should be back soon. What would Damon tell her? He would wait another half an hour and see if the bait would be taken. If it hadn’t been by then, he was wrong. Or they were onto him. Which wouldn’t be surprising.
He sat back and listened to Babet.
What had happened to Chuck and Mike? Not hearing something—anything—at this point was a bad sign. Damon’s computer pinged.
A message.
“Uh, one second, Grandma.”
He checked his machine. The message was from Terek. Despite the tension, a thrill of excitement tickled his neck and scalp.
The game was on.
“Grandma, can I call you back?”
“You always be saying that, but you never—”
“I promise.”
“You call that Pauline girl?”
“I will.”
“And say hello to Michael and Charles. They’re good people.”
His machine pinged again. “I really gotta go.” He hung up.
He sat down at the kitchen table. The thought of Chuck and Mike and Lauren out there made Damon’s stomach flip over. Made him wonder again where Mrs. Seymour and the kids had gone.
Right now, though, the game was afoot.
Damon opened the email from Terek. It contained a modified version of the GenCorp satellite data, along with Terek’s opinion of why the ground station relays were taking so long to respond. He said that maybe it was a phased array, but that didn’t add up.
Damon wasn’t interested.
He wasn’t playing that game anymore.
There was an attachment to Terek’s email. A file converted into a PDF. Damon shook his head. So messy. Terek, I thought better of you. And then he thought: Much better, as a matter of fact. Damon opened the attachment.
In another UNIX shell, Damon ran software that monitored his intrusion detection system and firewalls. One after the other, he watched with satisfaction as the worm from Terek’s email spawned and then instantiated itself again and again. The
exploit went to work, inserting itself into Damon’s memory and network file systems.
The fish was going after the juicy worm.
Now Damon just had to make sure the prey was hooked so tight that it couldn’t get loose. The attackers had to swallow this whole, deep into their guts.
His fingers worked the keyboard.
He had to make sure the bait looked alive, wriggling and squirming to survive the determined predator. Swim, little fish, swim.
CHAPTER 44
“I CAN’T SWIM!” I yelled into the darkness.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Chuck said calmly. “You can’t swim very well.”
“Dramatic?”
“This thing’s amphibious. Like a boat.”
“I hate boats. You know I hate boats! I can’t—”
“Honey, calm down.” Lauren’s soothing voice in the darkness. Her hand against my cheek.
My breathing came in and out in heaving gulps. My heart hammered like it was going to burst out of my chest. Out of the frying pan and into the what? The goddamn Atlantic?
“Mike, snap out of it.” Chuck grunted. “Get in the game.”
A light came on. His cell phone.
The four of us were in a heaped mess. Chuck on top of me in the passenger seat. Lauren and Agent Coleman in the back seat. The truck had flipped over in one of the bucking waves, tumbled, then righted itself. The interior stank of sweat and sulfur, a bit of leather and a whiff of vomit.
I wiped my mouth with the back of one hand as we rolled. I almost threw up. Again.
My kids. Luke. Olivia. They needed me. My fear subsided into a rising anger.
Chuck wriggled to get off me. He held out the phone with the light on. I slid forward and almost floated in the water sloshing two feet deep in the cabin. I took the phone from Chuck.
And got knocked over again by a hammering wave.
I turned and grabbed the seat for balance.
“He’s still breathing,” Lauren said.
She was on her knees on the back seat, up to her waist in water. Putting one hand under Agent Coleman’s head, she lifted him up. “He got hit, but his vest took most of it. I think.”
Chuck groaned. He tried to sit up but slipped back. I held the light to the water. Fresh blood swirled with the puke.
CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1) Page 28