by Brandt Legg
The small space erupted in gunfire. Chase, wrestling the lead Russian for an automatic pistol, slammed his elbow into the man’s nose while the bullets sprayed in all directions. The others dove for cover.
Bull and Wen both had guns, and crawled along the floor, trying to get position. The last two Russians not tangling with Chase returned fire. Debris, drywall dust, splintered wood, plastic, and flying glass created a toxic cloud in the middle of the darkened space as bullets shredded everything.
Chase scooped up a handful of dust from the floor and jammed it into the Russian leader’s eyes. Instead of releasing the gun as Chase had hoped, the enraged Russian swung around with renewed strength and fired at Chase. Several rounds escaped the chamber, but fortunately the temporarily blinded man couldn’t see well enough to aim, and instead glittering, eggshell-like glass from the long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling rained down on them.
Chase squirmed out from the weight of the Russian’s legs and was able to knee his already tortured face. After the laptop slamming, dust to his eyes, and fluorescent storm, the blow from Chase’s knee had extra impact, weakening him just enough. Chase grabbed the man’s wrist while repeatedly pumping his knee into the Russian’s face, snapping his wrist against the hard floor several times, which allowed him to finally pry the gun from the Russian’s strong hand.
Now in possession of the firearm, Chase was left in an awkward position. All he could do was push the gun against the Russian’s gut and pull the trigger. A messy explosion of blood and flesh coated Chase’s chest, face, and arms, but the man still wasn’t dead. He flailed about menacingly, yet ineffectively, as Chase crawled away and sat against the wall, exhausted, shaking from the strain. He wished for more light so he could see where everyone else was because he didn’t know where to shoot.
Wen, figuring there was no more than one opponent remaining, stopped shooting. The space became eerily quiet except for the angry moaning of the leader, slowly dying as he bled out. Wen crawled along the side of the wall where she could see Chase’s silhouette faintly backlit from the main hall outside. Along the way, beam-down in pile of wood scraps and sawdust, she found one of the bigger flashlights that had belonged to the Russians, still powered on. She held it against her gun and spun it into the room, searching for enemy targets. There were none.
She yelled out, “How many Russians were there?”
No answer.
“Damn it, how many Russians were there?”
“Seven,” Bull answered. Wen shined the flashlight around the room again, counting dead Russians. She got to six, not counting the moaning man. Then the light crossed Lenny, still alive, but badly injured, not far from Skrunch’s body.
Wen stood up, shining the light toward Bull. “I guess you’re the real hacker who found horUS?”
“Yeah,” Bull answered.
“You want me to finish this guy off?” Wen asked Bull, pointing the light toward the Russian leader, who gave a defiant grunt. “Or do you want me to let him suffer? Or maybe you want to shoot him yourself?”
While Wen continued to shine the light at the Russian, Bull walked over and pointed her gun at his head.
“No, I’d rather him die slowly,” Bull said, looking at the pool of blood.
Chase joined Wen. “That was not fun,” he said. “And you’re going to need to put my leg back in again.”
“I think the fun is just beginning. These weren’t even the people who have been trying to kill us.”
“Good point,” Chase said, limping over and grabbing the Antimatter Machine and the laptop with the horUS data on it. “Let’s get out of here before someone else shows up.”
Sixty-Two
A conference call between, Tess, Travis, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director, and the head of the NSA had not gone well. Each of them were part of the nine horUS originators, and as the CIA Director said, “The odds of our program leaking have increased with each bombing. That means even with all of our protections in place, the possibility of one or all of us going down with the drones is very real.”
The pressure had been mounting for days. Tess believed they could end the nightmare as soon as the identity of the source could be revealed. “Who the hell is giving this information to the bombers?” she asked them all again. They each agreed it could not be one of the nine, but possibly someone in their respective departments. Tess had been working through lists and had even set several traps, but thus far had nothing. She told them that her top analysts believed the source was at the Pentagon, to which the Deputy Assistant took great offense.
“My people believe it’s someone in the intel community,” he shot back.
The call deteriorated after that, and each agreed to double their efforts at finding the source.
In the weeks since Tri-Knight Avionics became the Fire Bomber’s first victim, the firm had leased a new building and moved all their employees. A few days earlier, they’d started producing components for horUS again. Gunner had been expecting the news, but it forced him into a difficult decision—one which would mean probably losing Powder. He realized the only way to stop the program long enough would be to kill the employees, too.
“Buildings and equipment can be replaced almost instantly,” he told a subordinate. “People take a long time to replenish.”
“Agreed,” the man said.
“Phase one is nearly complete,” Gunner continued, scraping mud off his boot. “Phase two, although much shorter, will make that look like a picnic.”
“And phase three?” the man said. “When do we start the daytime strikes?”
It was an excruciating decision for Gunner, killing Americans, but he believed the employees were complicit in the betrayal of the country by its leaders.
“The killings will start in forty-eight hours.”
Lenny and Bull headed to the doctor who had helped him before. Afterward, the plan called for them getting out of the country. Wen had hastily arranged for WOLF people to hide them, at least until horUS was exposed, because that’s exactly what Chase planned to do as soon as they found out who the Fire Bombers were, and they had tracked down Ryker and Damon.
Back aboard the Bombardier-8000 jet, en route to Las Vegas, Chase and Wen reviewed the data from Lenny.
“It’s called horUS,” Wen said, reading from the Antimatter Machine, where they’d transferred all the material, as well as sent them to the Astronaut. “The acronym stands for High Optics Reconnaissance United States. Horus is the Egyptian god of the sky, meaning ‘the distant one’ or ‘one who is above all others.’ He is depicted as a falcon headed man. The eye of Horus . . . ” She paused and looked at Chase. “The all-seeing eye.”
“They’re watching every American.”
“Why?” Wen asked, already knowing the answer. China had been doing the same thing for years with their mass network of hundreds of millions of cameras.
“It’s by far the most invasive surveillance system in the world. Privacy is gone and no one even noticed. They’ll claim, like they always do, that this is about terrorism or protecting the population, but it’s not. These drones are about one thing: controlling the people,” Chase answered
After landing in Vegas, they headed toward the Bellagio to meet up with a team of fifteen hired guns that Flint had put together to help them. Although, at Wen’s insistence, Chase had not informed his head of security why he needed the extra force. Flint had pushed, and speculated that they were on the trail of the Bombers, but, in the end, he gave in and arranged for the unit to join Chase and Wen at the casino, figuring a busy, crowded, central location would be safest.
On the way from the airport, while Wen drove the rental car, Chase called the one person other than Ryker and Damon who he blamed for his father’s death.
Sixty-Three
“When were you going to tell me about horUS?” Chase said as soon as Tess answered the phone.
“I shouldn’t be surprised you discovered it,” Tess said, at home, hopi
ng for an early evening after a long day trying to pinpoint the Fire Bomber’s next target, searching for Chase, and trying to uncover the Source. Now that was shattered. The wall, carefully built around horUS, was cracking before her eyes. “After all, it was your brilliance and tech-savvy experience that made me want to bring you on board.”
“Really? It looks more like you got me involved so you could use me and my connections to further your agenda.”
“No, I thought you could find the Bombers. That was the reason.” She was growing impatient with Chase. Her home was her refuge—a mini-estate overlooking the Potomac River just outside Washington. “I needed to stop them.”
“Before anyone found out.”
“Yes. I needed them found before the FBI, before the media, or anyone else, discovered their motive.”
“To protect horUS!”
“Of course. Can you imagine the outcry if horUS got out?”
“Oh, it’s going to get out. I’m going to make sure it gets out.”
“Think that through, Chase.”
“What are you thinking? What are you people trying to do?” He motioned to Wen to slow down.
“Don’t be confused about horUS,” Tess said. “It’s not a bad program.”
Chase laughed. “I think you might actually believe the garbage you’re spewing.”
“The program is designed to save American lives. To protect us. This isn’t the world where you grew up. It’s changing astonishingly fast because of technology, some of which you helped to create.”
“Wait, this is my fault?” Chase asked, reminding himself to sound calm. The Vegas strip was blazoned with its lights, billboards, casinos. The reflected images danced on the windshield, as if tattooing their opulence, cheap dates, and easy money on his life. It disgusted him.
“Do you think the Chinese, or Russians, or any number of the thousands of extremist organizations around the world care about your right to privacy?”
“Oh, is that how you’re going to frame this? Defend it by saying all we have to do is give up a little bit of our rights to protect everyone? Do you recall what Benjamin Franklin said about that? Let me remind you: ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’”
“Benjamin Franklin died more than two hundred years ago. He couldn’t have even remotely imagined the world as it was a century ago, let alone what we are dealing with now.”
“Then tell me, I really want to hear how you think spying on Americans twenty-four seven, their every move, helps protect them.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, and I would’ve thought with your relationship with Wen you might have, Communist China is bent on taking over the world. They’ve managed in just a few decades to steal most of our technology and a huge portion of our economy. Their influence in the world is growing by the day while ours wanes. And it’s not just them. It’s all the criminals and other hostile governments and groups that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Our traditional military is becoming less effective. If we’re not watching the country, we’re going lose it.” She started pacing back and forth in bare feet, loose pajamas and a glass of wine, which she’d just topped off for the second time.
“Orwell was right in 1984, Big Brother is—”
“Don’t be so dramatic. This is no different than people putting security cameras around their home.”
Chase thought of his father crawling to the photo album and the cameras that had allowed him to see that horrible image. The cameras that had allowed his father to see the intruders, had shown him the monsters Damon and Ryker. Chase was thankful for that footage.
He clenched his fist.
Wen pulled into a convenience store lot and quickly went inside.
“It’s a hollow argument, Tess. Maybe, just maybe, you, and the other eight people involved, have wonderful intentions and are doing this for all the most noble reasons, but who comes after you? What will the next excuse be to tweak it, to push it just a little bit further, to arrest a potential revolutionary who may or may not have ever committed a crime, but entertains it out of frustration or simply to explore all the possibilities?”
“You have no idea what we’re facing every day. There are militias in all fifty states. Membership estimates exceed seventy-five-thousand revolutionaries, Antifa, dozens of anarchist groups, right-wing extremists, left-wing, NorthBridge, MS-13, domestic terror organizations too numerous to list, the Inner Movement, the Inner Force, the Aylantik, the Fire Bombers . . . ”
“I don’t need a laundry list—my point is how do you tell the difference?”
Wen returned with bottles of water and bags of trail mix. She offered him a handful, which he waved off.
“We will have safeguards in place.”
Chase laughed again. “Like we have safeguards in this country with the Constitution, the most incredible document ever written. It’s packed full of safeguards, and yet it’s now riddled with holes. It’s become a prop used by the elites in the overreaching governments, and the military, to control us.”
Wen smiled, thinking he sounded like a member of WOLF.
“Spoken like a true billionaire.”
“Hey, I earned my money by trying to make the world better.”
“Funny, that’s how I earn my paycheck, too.”
“What about the hackers?” Chase asked, getting back on track. “Even your most secure, sophisticated network, guarding the most prized secrets in the world, wasn’t enough to stop a twenty-something girl from getting in. I didn’t learn about horUS because of my wizardry and technology. I got it from a burned-out hacker.”
Wen continued driving slowly through the insanely chaotic town.
Tess stuttered something incoherent as she apparently realized the dangers she faced now weren’t just from Chase, but there was a hacker out there—maybe many of them—who knew. Suddenly, everything became unstable, as if the ground beneath her was shaking in a rippling earthquake that might never end. Still, Tess was Tess, and had been operating for years in the middle of an explosive battlefield. She recovered quickly, but her tone had turned icy.
“You’ve proven my point about hackers, dissidents, anyone trying to undermine the security of our great nation. And if you don’t think it’s great, look around for what system you would rather have, and don’t quote some Scandinavian country the size of Pittsburgh. There is no better place. We’ve got flaws, and we’re trying to fix them. But anybody, like these Bombers, who disagrees so strongly they’re willing to break the law . . . HorUS will let us find them and bring them to justice.”
“Anyone who would break the law?” Chase shot back “Like you, the president, and the others? How many laws have you broken Tess? What should we do with you?”
Sixty-Four
After ending the call with Chase, Tess poured herself another glass of Pippin Hill Cabernet Sauvignon, her favorite wine from a Virginia vineyard. As she enjoyed a long taste, she gazed out the window and watched a young fawn and its mother graze lilac leaves on the edge of the meadow of her two-acre back lawn where it met the woods. The innocence and simple presence of the doe and her fawn were like a salve to her mind, burning with turmoil of the Fire Bomber, horUS, and the missing Chase Malone.
Suddenly the two deer, clearly spooked, took off running. At the same moment, she heard a snap, as if a branch had broken, and slight scraping by the front door. Her gun was at the far end of the sprawling, one level ranch house. Instead, she reached for a large chef’s knife and tiptoed toward the front of the house.
Tess chose a spot where the French doors opened to the back patio—still visible, but giving her the best chance to surprise anyone coming through the front entrance. A four-story square tower at the other end of the home would have given her a commanding view of the property, but it would be too risky to get there.
Reminding herself to breathe, she waited, recalling the description of the attack on Chase’s parents. I’m im
agining all of this, she told herself. Yet she knew the Fire Bomber would target her. Perhaps that was the next stage, killing the nine orchestrators of horUS.
She pulled her cell phone from her bra, about to dial 9-1-1, when a shadow moved across the front veranda.
The police will never make it here in time, she thought. I’ve got to get my gun.
She crouched to make her way to the bedroom while staying out of the line of sight of the windows. She dialed 9-1-1 as she went.
Startled by a sudden knock on the door, Tess accidentally dropped her phone as she darted into the guest bedroom. Its window had a view of the front of the house.
“Son of a . . . Flint!” she said in a relieved sigh, jogging back around to open the door. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Surprising you.”
They laughed about her being worried as Flint checked around. She gave him a full tour, including the unique tower that a prior property owner had built, attached to the house so they could see the river and part of the DC skyline. Their walk ended with a dip in the pool to deflect the afternoon’s humid heat. Tess, being competitive and an excellent swimmer, challenged him to a race. Flint came up from their final lap the winner, but just barely.
“I’d better stick to dancing,” he said, laughing while getting out of the pool and trying to catch his breath.