by Brandt Legg
A ringing startled him. He didn’t recognize the tone, but it seemed to be coming from his pants. Hoping it was a call from Bull, Lenny fished the phone from his pocket.
“Hey, mangy dog, you are awake,” the Russian said.
“Where’s Bull, you son of—”
“What a silly name for a pretty girl,” the Russian said. “We think she should be called something nicer, like rose petal or play-thing, or—”
“Where is she?”
“Listen to me, dirt-for-brains, you do not ask the questions. You want to see your girlfriend again, then sell your score and bring me the money.”
“What score? I don’t—”
“Shut up! You have forty-eight hours. Do not lose this phone.”
“Wait!”
Nothing.
“Damn it,” Lenny said, about to throw the phone against the wall before realizing it was his only lifeline to Bull.
I don’t have the score. Bull didn’t . . .
But then he remembered.
There is a way.
“Lenny,” a familiar voice echoed down the alley—a voice he hated, a voice he would like to hear wheezing for her last breath: Skrunch.
He turned, summoning draining strength, searching for a brick, a pipe, anything that could inflict pain. She had to suffer like he and Bull were suffering—but her appearance halted his rage.
Skrunch looked awful, torn clothes, a bruise on her face, and her eyes were scared. Then he noticed the blood.
“Lenny,” she called out again. Their eyes met and suddenly her expression turned to pure fear.
His anger shifted to panic as he felt the world begin to spin. His legs went rubbery, and he crumpled to the ground. The last thing he heard was Skrunch yelling his name one more time.
Twenty-Six
Towering, raging flames closed in on the ForeRunner as Chase and Wen continued to choke on the heat and increasing smoke.
“There’s no way out!” Wen yelled above the roar of the fire.
Chase cut the wheel hard to the right—the direction the flames had last filled—and floored it, driving straight into the blaze. The ForeRunner bounced over small fallen trees and burst through burning foliage. The sizzling heat seared a warning into their minds that time was running out. They couldn’t see anything but fire.
“I don’t know if we’re still going the right way!” Chase yelled.
“There is no right way!”
Chase, hoping they could reach somewhere that the fire had already burned through before the ForeRunner became engulfed, kept his foot pressed all the way down. The ForeRunner hit a rise, caught air, and went soaring into the torturous abyss. It felt as if they were flying over the canyons of hell, and that an evil, glowing claw might snatch them at any second.
This isn’t going to end well, Chase thought, envisioning them dropping into a volcanic cauldron.
They didn’t see the tree—a towering Ponderosa Pine—until the front of the ForeRunner buckled like an aluminum can as it rocketed into its mighty trunk. Airbags hit Chase and Wen as the SUV held—partially wrapped around the broad trunk—suspended in midair among the burning branches for a mere moment, before plummeting to the charred ground. A stand of young cedars in full flame broke their fall as the vehicle hit the blackened earth on the two driver’s side tires, rolling twice before its continuing momentum pushed it sliding down an open slope. When the ForeRunner met one more tree, a cottonwood, gliding almost slow motion into the trunk under still-green leaves, they were both conscious and gasping, gulping in fresh air like a free-diver coming up from the depths.
“Are you okay?” Chase asked, surprised at the sound of his own voice as the battered—nearly unrecognizable—silver SUV stopped, upright and flame-free.
“Alive. You?”
“Good enough. Let’s get out of this thing before it blows up or something.”
“That only happens in the movies.”
“Isn’t this a movie? Sure feels like 007 should be showing up any second,” he said, untangling from the airbag and pulling off the seatbelt that had just saved his life.
“You are 007,” Wen said, unsuccessfully trying to get her belt off. “I’m stuck, something must have jammed the thing.”
Chase pulled out his Leatherman-Wave multi-tool and quickly cut her belt.
“See, you really are James Bond,” she said, freeing herself and grabbing her pack.
Her door was mashed into the cottonwood and his wouldn’t open, so they both slid out the driver’s side window. The metal of the door was still hot to the touch, and the ground was smoking.
They scrambled to get away from the fire, the flames flicking just feet away from the mangled ForeRunner and the miraculously saved cottonwood tree, then they saw the only thing that could save them.
“Water!” Wen yelled.
“It must be Shasta Lake,” Chase said as they ran through a break in the fire and down the hill. “I remember seeing it on the way up.”
“Look at all that water,” Wen said, reaching the bank. “And you were right—this must be a movie. Look!”
Chase followed her gaze and saw a faded old canoe, with two oars and a cooler sitting in it. Chase checked the cooler, hoping for a cold beer, a wet anything. “Empty.”
“Let’s go!”
Minutes later, they were forty feet from shore and rowing into the middle of the largest reservoir in California. Wen and Chase could see the fire had expanded to both sides of the lake, but forty-seven square miles of water now protected them.
“We’re safe,” Chase said.
Wen looked to the open sky as the wind carried the smoke to the north. “We’re never safe.”
“Tess, we got ‘em,” Travis said, calling her away from a phone call in a corner of Mission Control.
She went to the giant monitor. A technician shifted the view.
“Zoom in,” she demanded. A second later, they were watching Chase and Wen rowing across Shasta Lake. “If it wasn’t for the ring of fire surrounding them, they could be lovers on a romantic picnic,” she mused.
“Well, they’re about to have some uninvited guests,” Travis said. “The first IT-Squad will be splashing in on them in about seven minutes.”
Twenty-Seven
Chase and Wen paddled out to the middle of the reservoir. It seemed as if they were trapped in a volcano, with flames racing to the shore all around them. The winds, gusting over fifty miles per hour, tossed their little boat in the choppy water as if it were a toy in a bath.
“Our crazy movie has turned into an Armageddon sequel,” Chase said, brushing glowing embers from his hair as burning debris and ash continued to pelt them. He scooped handfuls of water on his head. “Get your hair as wet as possible. There’s fire everywhere!”
“Not there,” Wen said, pointing to the dam. “If we can make it to the dam, maybe there’s a vehicle we can ‘borrow,’ or at least a working land line.”
Chase pushed the oar faster to match Wen’s stride. The smoke-filled air made the exertion difficult.
“Chase!” Wen shouted.
He turned quickly to see a small fire burning right behind him. Wen splashed up some lake water and doused the flames the wind had sent.
“Your shirt!”
Chase patted several sparks off his shirt. “I thought we’d be safe in the water.”
“Would you rather be where we were?” Wen pointed back to the shore they’d come from, which was now a wall of fire.
Chase shook his head. A few harrowing minutes later, they saw a sign:
WARNING DAM AHEAD - RESTRICTED AREA - DANGER
DO NOT GO PAST THIS POINT
“We can’t turn back now,” Chase said, resuming his paddling.
The suction of the dam suddenly pulled them fast through the water. The smoky winds swirled.
“This is crazy!” Chase said as the canoe became unstable. “We’re going to capsize.”
“Would James Bond say that?” Wen asked.
/> “In this case, I think he might.”
Their boat slammed into the concrete wall, the force of the water rocking and battering the boat.
“We’ve got to get out,” Wen said as the boat was pulled away from the wall and then slammed back again.
Chase, who’d spent a summer climbing skyscrapers for his brother’s window washing business, spotted a handhold—a pipe or conduit just out of reach. “If we can get to that, we might make it to the catwalk!”
Wen looked up as the canoe smashed into the wall again. There was a walkway hanging on the backside of the dam next to the spillway intakes. She wasn’t sure the leap was doable, but knew Chase could make it. “Go!” she yelled.
Timing the rocking motion, Chase thrust the blade of the oar into the tiny space behind the pipe. It didn’t hold, but he used the momentum to swing himself up and clutched at the pipe, which was bigger than he thought. While kicking at the wall, his hands somehow gained purchase and held. “Do the same thing!” he yelled back while climbing higher.
Wen’s oar broke as it struck the concrete, but she was already flying through the air. Chase saw she wasn’t going to make it and slid down the pipe, swinging his legs out in a desperate attempt for her to have something to grab.
Her left hand caught his right foot as she expelled a silent scream from the pain of her body slamming the hard slab. Wen’s strength and concentration, honed by years of training in the Chinese elite MSS, came forth, and she pulled her body up until they were both holding onto the pipe. A minute later, they climbed onto the catwalk.
“Well, that was fun,” Chase said, grabbing her for a quick, celebratory kiss. “You okay?”
“Good enough. You think that was exciting, we still have to get through that,” she said, holding her side while pointing to the towering flames and smoke consuming trees at an incredible rate.
“Maybe we can get the Antimatter Machine up and call in some help,” Chase said as they rushed onto the deserted dam.
Tess took the call from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Many joked that he’d been a permanent fixture in Washington since the days of Abraham Lincoln, but Tess knew there was nothing funny about the Under Secretary. The two of them, more than anyone else, had been responsible for developing and protecting horUS, the most secret government project in the more than seven decades of the CIA’s existence. They both knew that as much good as the horUS project could do, its exposure would be the biggest scandal in all of American history.
“They’ll riot in the streets,” the Under Secretary said.
“We still don’t know that this is about horUS,” Tess said as a driver opened her door. She got out and walked briskly across the hot tarmac. “New York is not on the list.”
“You’re smarter than that, Tess. The Bombers may have multiple agendas, but they clearly know about horUS.”
“I disagree,” she said, climbing the stairs of a waiting plane. “There are a lot of tech firms on the list. So far less than half of the Fire Bomber’s targets are horUS companies.”
“That’s a load of guff! You need to get Squads at every horUS company and catch these bastards.”
“Even if I had the manpower, how would I explain that to the media? Why those companies and not Apple, or Oracle—”
“They’re big enough to take care of themselves.”
“Really? What about Texas Instruments, Emerson, Qualtech—”
“Who?”
“Exactly. There are too many companies that fit the target profile.”
“I don’t care. We can make the media do the story the way it needs to be.”
“This story is too big. Sure, we can control all the larger outlets, but the internet is filled with fifty, a hundred, even more so-called news sites that will pick us apart.”
“We can’t let them do any more. If you won’t do it, then I’ll send troops.”
“Oh, the media will love that. Troops surrounding every business in America affiliated with technology.”
“The media will love it if we spin it the right way. They sure as hell don’t like the Fire Bomber crapping all over us like this.”
“Are you trying to prevent them from stopping horUS, or exposing it?”
“Both!” the Under Secretary barked. “And I’m trying to win World War III—or hadn’t you noticed it’s started?”
Twenty-Eight
Wen and Chase stood atop Shasta Dam, looking at the fire running up to the lake on three sides.
“Incredibly, we made it,” Chase said.
“It’s still a long walk,” Wen replied.
“Look at that.” Chase pointed to a sign. “When Shasta Dam was completed, it was considered one of the greatest engineering feats in history, and was the second-tallest dam in the United States. Only Hoover dam was taller. It’s six hundred and two-feet straight down to the Sacramento river.”
“Great,” Wen said. “Forgive me if I’m not in the mood for sightseeing.”
“I’m an engineer . . . it’s cool . . . ”
“Cell service is still out, but we might be able to get a satellite link from here.” She started to pull her pack off to retrieve the Antimatter Machine when four armed men appeared at the north end of the dam.
“Who are those guys?” Chase asked, exasperated, recognizing them as the original crew from the ForeRunner.
“I don’t know, but they must be fireproof,” Wen said, motioning toward the acres of forest burning behind the men. “Here they come!”
The four started running at them, guns pointed. Wen and Chase ran in the opposite direction until they spotted a large SUV squealing to a stop on the south end of the dam. Five more heavily armed men jumped out.
“Makes you kind of miss the fire,” Chase said as they stopped running.
“We’d rather not do this here, Malone!” a husky man in black fatigues yelled from the north end. “Surrender now, make it easy on yourselves.”
Chase had no idea how the men had found them, or how they’d even gotten through the apocalyptic fire with a vehicle and managed to surround them. But he knew that even with Wen’s skills and all three of their guns, it was unlikely they were going to live through a shootout against nine machine guns.
“We could go at the four,” Wen said, indicating the man on the north end. “No vehicle, one less shooter. We get them shooting, maybe we get lucky and one or two of their guys go down in the crossfire.”
Chase scoffed. “We’re the ones most likely to go down.”
“I’m giving you three seconds Malone!” the man shouted as all nine adversaries inched closer to them.
Chase wondered where “Dam Security” was, if there was such a thing, or any personnel at all, but assumed they were all busy elsewhere with the fire. Still, he clung to the hope that the cavalry would show up at the last second. These goons weren’t even trying to conceal their weapons as they marched closer. Chase fumbled with his pistol. Wen had both her guns out, waving them at the two groups as if she were some sort of cowboy in the middle of a showdown—it still felt like a movie to him, but he didn’t like the way it was going to end. Chase had been close to death before, however, this time there appeared to be no escape.
“Put the guns down,” the man said loudly, now less than twenty feet away. “No need to commit suicide by getting yourself shot. We’re just gonna take you two for a nice ride. Get you out of all this smoke.”
Wen pointed the gun at him. “Not another step!”
The man halted. They all did. He smiled. “Why don’t you just let us take you to someplace safe?”
“We’re good here,” Chase yelled, pointing his gun at another one.
The man laughed hard. “I’m sure you are, but just the same, why don’t you come with us? We’ll all get a beer. You’re probably hungry after rowing that boat clear across this big, ginormous lake.”
“No thanks, we had a nice breakfast.”
Wen kept fanning her guns between the groups. Then she suddenly hea
rd a noise that told her what to do.
“Look at you,” the man said loudly. “You’re all black and dirty.”
“Shut up!” Wen shouted. She knew he was talking for two reasons—one, so she couldn’t think, and two, so they could get close enough to shoot them without any trouble.
“Okay darling,” the man said, taking half a step toward them. “No need to get all riled up. Hey, I’m trying to be real social, and you—”
Wen shot him. A chunk of his face blew off as he dropped straight to the pavement. She instantly aimed her guns at two other men. Remarkably, for an instant, everyone froze. Chase couldn’t believe they hadn’t been shot instantly; surely they were in range now, but the men hadn’t returned fire at all.
“Do you trust me, Chase?” Wen whispered loudly.
“Completely,” he replied in the same tone, surprised she would even need to ask such a question.
“Then follow me, and don’t stop.”
“Okay.”
She made brief eye contact with him. “I mean it. No matter what. Don’t. Stop.”
The men, shaking their momentary shock, began advancing again, all their guns aimed.
“Ready?” Wen said under her breath. “As soon as I’m done talking, shoot somebody on the north end.”
“Wait, shoot who, what?”
“Then follow me, and don’t stop.”
Wen shot the two men she’d been aiming at. Chase fired toward the other one, and immediately bolted after Wen, toward the western edge of the dam. Bullets whizzed all around them.
A van screeched to a stop behind the SUV on the south end. Five more armed men got out and started running onto the dam.
Wen kept firing her guns as she closed the distance to the edge of the dam. Chase, right behind her, only realized Wen’s intention as they leapt onto the round guardrail. In that instant, he understood where she was going, and knew it was too late to turn back.