by Jim Heskett
No. The United States needed to be lifted out of the depths of hell through power and respect. This new country would require a leader with the strength to silence rebellion and push people into a better way of living. One free of the corruption of the old ways. A country built on might and justice, not wavering values and compromise.
Anders thundered down the metal steps outside the concourse to the ground, each step invigorating him and making him more sure that the path was correct. The encumbrance of LaVey had been lifted from the plan. Now they would unite against Chalmers, then march on Washington and start the healing process.
On the ground, two hundred men and women huddled in small circles. Not participating in drills, as they should have been. Instead, they were chatting and eating.
He resisted the urge to point his pistol into the air and fire it. It might misfire again, which would look weak. Plus, he didn’t know how many bullets he had left in the clip.
“Listen up,” he said, his heart thundering so hard in his chest he could barely hear himself speak.
Most of them looked at him and hushed their conversations. He had their attention now, and that was good.
“What the fuck are you doing? There’s no time to stand around. We have to be ready to leave at any time I order.”
Nadall emerged from the group and came forward. “What can we do for you?”
“You can get these men ready to march. We’re leaving for Chicago tomorrow morning.”
Nadall laughed, a smug little chuckle out of one side of his mouth. “Is that right? We’re not going anywhere until Castillo gets back.”
“You’ll do what I say, soldier.”
Nadall crossed his arms and cocked an eye at Anders. “Who was that you threw off the top of the parking garage?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I say we’re ready to go, you make it happen. Get all our gear packed up and these men prepared for the mission.”
Nadall merely shook his head.
“Wait,” said a voice from the crowd. A woman stepped forward, and Anders recognized her as the same woman who had entered his quarters uninvited before. The creepy one with the bushy eyebrows.
“We don’t have time for this,” Anders said. “Get back into formation and attend to your duties.”
“I have a message for you,” the woman said as she pulled even with Nadall. “Someone you know sent me here to deliver it, and I think you’re going to want to hear this.”
A cold nerve shot up Anders’ back. “Who sent you?”
“A friend of yours who is no longer with us, but still has a voice. Blessed are the destroyers of false hope.”
The woman drew a knife and slammed it into Nadall’s neck before Anders had time to even open his mouth to protest. Nadall staggered, trying to grasp at the blade while spurts of blood ejected from his flailing body.
She then lunged for Anders, and he lifted his gun and put a bullet in her chest as she slammed into him. They landed on the ground, and he felt the air rush out of his lungs, but he managed to knock the knife out of her hand, then force her body to the side. When he stood up, he could see that half of his troops were attacking the rest. Gunshots. Screams.
Beth. The curly-haired woman had been talking about Beth.
Three of the men in the squabble left the group and ran toward Anders. He turned and sprinted away, barely staying upright and accidentally letting the gun slip from his fingers. The woman he’d shot was on her feet and running down the tarmac, but he could only think of getting away from the men chasing him.
His lungs burned and his legs felt like they were ready to collapse at any second, but he pushed ahead as fast as he could, until he’d reached the stairs. He turned around, and the pursuers were still there.
Weapons storage. If he wanted to live out the day, that’s where he needed to be.
He climbed step by step until his chest was on fire and he didn’t think he could go any further. When he stopped to catch his breath, he looked out over the horizon as several hundred troops descended over a hill less than a mile away.
And, they had tanks.
15
Coyle watched the canvas domes made to look like mountains at Denver International from Kellen’s car, which he had parked on a hill to the south of the airport. He opened the manila envelope and removed pictures of LaVey and Anders, which he folded and shoved into his pockets. Wouldn’t need the one of Castillo anymore.
He heard something, sharp and loud, but distant. Could have been a gunshot or any number of things. He had no idea what to expect at the airport other than resistance, but with the element of surprise on his side, he could at least add that to his assets. After stuffing as many of Kellen’s explosive goodies into his pockets as he could manage, he left the car.
According to the maps, the best route would take him across the tarmac and inside via the baggage line. That fed into the terminal, and from there, he could search. Seemed reasonable that LaVey and Anders would be holed up in some offices or secure areas, or possibly in fortified locations in some of the individual concourses on the opposite side of the terminal. But there was no way to know without getting up close and exploring the inside.
A rumbling sound came from the west, and Coyle heaved his aching body to the top of the car so he could see over the hill. Hundreds of foot soldiers and as many as five tanks were advancing, not far from the airport. Looked like Chalmers’ forces had decided to carry out the attack without her.
This was a complication he’d hoped to avoid. Instead of an espionage mission, he was looking at a frontal infiltration during a full-scale war between two armies. Staying hidden and quiet during something like this would be next to impossible.
So the airport was about to come under siege. That might mean LaVey and Anders would end up dead.
Coyle watched the troops crest the hill and descend toward the airport as he pondered whether or not their deaths would make the mission a failure. He’d been tasked with bringing LaVey back to Washington. But if LaVey and Anders died, would it be the same result? Agent Williams had died. Former Vice President Rappaport had sponsored this mission, but without Williams, Coyle had no way to contact Rappaport. He might bring LaVey all the way across the country for nothing.
So if they did die, the mission would still be a success, based on that analysis. But then, a nagging question lingered in the back of Coyle’s mind: if LaVey and Anders died at someone else’s hand, would he still feel right about it? Would it still be the right kind of atonement?
He listened to the sound of M1 Abrams tanks crunching dirt as he thought it over.
No. It wouldn’t be the same. The instigators needed to die, and Coyle needed to be the one to pull the trigger.
16
Coyle covered the car with a tarp from the trunk and walked a wide arc to the north so he’d be out of sight range of the Chicago army. He could still make it to the concourse baggage area, but not before the troops attacked. That would have to be an acceptable risk, and he had to hope that his targets would survive the initial assault. If those tanks unleashed fury, they might leave nothing but rubble.
By the time he’d reached the tarmac, the chaos of gunfire masked his approach. At least a hundred lay dead on the runways, and what remained were either running away from the airport or headed for the terminal. He hid behind the wheel of an airplane, safely blocked from anyone still living.
The tanks had taken up position on the elevated road connected to the airport. They fired blast after blast at the building, demolishing concrete and sending glass showers hundreds of yards in all directions. Smoke rose from multiple points of the structure.
Coyle waited until the tanks stopped firing and the action moved inside. He took one last look at the tanks, smoke rising from their guns. He switched off the safety on his SMG and sprinted in a zig zag pattern across the tarmac toward the baggage entrance, a set of door-sized black flaps between two jetways.
Two bullets streaked
the ground at his feet, but he couldn’t tell if they were strays, or if someone had shot at him. It didn’t matter. The mission was the same whether they knew he was here or not.
When he reached the flaps, he hefted one up, poked his head inside, and waited a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The warehouse-sized room was a maze of metal conveyor belts and grated catwalk-type platforms, raising forty or fifty feet high into the air.
Coyle listened, turning his ear into the room. Muffled gunfire and explosions came from far way, but nothing from inside the room, at least that’s what he figured. With his SMG ready, he proceeded onto an angled conveyor to take him to the second floor.
Feet clanked on metal grating, then he paused as a bullet whizzed by his ear. He raised his weapon, frantically searching the complex array of locations all around. Another bullet missed him, and he honed in on an area of the conveyor belt fifty feet to his right. A man laying on his side, looking through the sight of an AK-47.
The man’s finger wrapped around the trigger.
Coyle lifted the SMG and spit a volley of bullets. Most of them clanged off the belt and railings, but one hit the man square in his face. The man lifted his head for a second, then collapsed. The AK slipped from his fingers, slid to the edge of the catwalk, then tumbled off the edge, banging against metal until it came to rest on a platform twenty feet below.
Coyle breathed in and out, waiting for others to start shooting. When nothing came, he continued up the conveyor belt. Ten steps, then twenty, but he stopped when a droplet of blood splatted the belt in front of him.
He pointed his weapon up and saw a figure on the grating above him. Alive, but injured, and hadn’t noticed him. Coyle eased one foot in front of the other until he was high enough to get a good look. Tall woman, long curly hair, dying from a gunshot wound to the chest.
She opened her eyes and shuddered. “Who are you?”
He didn’t see any weapons near her body. “It doesn’t matter who I am. If you don’t try to kill me, I won’t have to kill you. Deal?”
“We are Infinity,” she said. “We are a million strong and don’t care about dying.”
“You’re the burned ones. I think I’ve met some of your people before.”
“I failed. I was supposed to kill him, but he shot me.”
“Who shot you? Was it LaVey?”
She shook her head. “Peter Anders. She said not to worry about LaVey, he was a puppet. She gave me this last task before they killed her and now I have failed her.”
Coyle didn’t know who she was, and he didn’t much care.
“Our mistress was smarter than all of them. She fooled them all; made them bring her close and then took all of their power. Killed their soldiers and took control of their launch codes.”
This piqued Coyle’s interest, because he never knew who’d turned those missiles on America. Maybe she was the one who burned all of the oil reserves, too. “Who was your mistress?”
“A glorious woman who died at the hands of a common thug, claiming to be a judge. But she lives on, through us. She lives on in the chaos we cause, until this infected country is cleansed through fire.”
The woman closed her eyes. Coyle didn’t feel like puzzling through any more of her riddles. He left the woman there and continued up the conveyor belt until he was so high off the ground he didn’t dare look. He followed the twisting path around as the sounds of gunfire and bellowing increased to a fever pitch.
At the top, the belt ended in a crawlspace covered with two small flaps. He pushed one to the side to peek. On the other side was a baggage carousel, a set of windows, and a lot of smoke in the air.
He poked his head through as machine gun fire rattled through the room. The nose of a gun poked above the far side of a row of check-in kiosks and spit a burst of bullets. Someone from outside of Coyle’s view returned fire.
A sign attached to the ceiling indicated check-in to the right, and Concourse A to the left. He leaned out further and looked for the person returning fire but couldn’t see anything, so he pushed himself all the way out into the large item baggage carousel. A set of skis rested next to him, still bundled up in a bag. The bag claim ticket said they had come from Des Moines.
Coyle kept to the wall and inched his way left. The two firing at each other didn’t stop, so he used that distraction to get to the corner, and prayed any stray bullets wouldn’t find him.
He peered around into a massive atrium-like room with a set of escalators going down on his left, and a hallway marked Concourse A on his right. No people in this corridor, but lots of gunfire coming from the bottom of the escalators.
He dropped to a squat and moved into the atrium toward the concourse. As soon as he got close enough to see, the room opened to an enormous area filled with bunk beds. At least fifty lay dead below, and a dozen more were still firing at each other.
A grenade blast propelled an arm twenty feet into the air. Glass rained down from above, and then one of the massive canvas fake-mountains toppled and crashed through the roof, covering a broad section of the room in fabric. Underneath the canvas, the gunfire continued.
Two men ran up the escalator, one of them apparently fleeing the other. As the one in front reached the top, he tripped and tumbled. Then the pursuer stood over him and fired a single bullet into the man’s face. He shot the bleeding man once more in the chest, then retreated back down the escalator.
Coyle edged up to the wall of Concourse A. Around the corner, a long windowed skybridge connected the terminal to the next concourse. It elevated at the end, maybe five hundred feet down. Moving walkways lined the middle, and rows of glass display cases were on either side. Sculptures in the cases, or something like that. Coyle didn’t bother to study them.
But no people, so Coyle turned into the hallway and crept toward the first glass case. No sooner had he reached it than it exploded in front of him, showering his face and hands with glass.
He hit the ground, aching, feeling shards of glass poking out of his face.
“Whoever you are, stay back,” a voice from down the hallway said. Maybe halfway down.
Coyle extended his arms and legs to make sure the fall hadn’t broken anything. Felt around his chest and stomach for bleeding. He seemed okay, aside from the ache in his shoulder where he’d hit the ground, and the knife wound the woman in Chicago had given him had reopened. Blood dripped onto the collar of his shirt.
He lifted himself up, keeping his body hidden behind the square metal base of the glass case. Above him was a giant clay pot, Native American or South American or something like that. Either way, it was old and brittle, and not likely to stop a bullet. He raised his head above the base and peered around the pot.
A shot sailed right past his head. He squinted, caught a good look at the man with an Israeli Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle hiding behind a display case a couple hundred feet away. Peter Anders. Coyle didn’t need to look at the picture folded in his pocket.
“Do you hear me?” Anders said. “I’m going to blow your damn head off if you come any closer.”
The man’s voice was shaky, bordering on hysterical.
Coyle took one of his hand grenades, pulled the pin, and hurled it as far down the skybridge as he could. The explosion filled the skybridge with smoke and blew out some of the windows. Down the hall, Anders cursed and yelled, but didn’t sound like he’d been injured.
Coyle popped up and squeezed the trigger of his SMG into the smoke.
He left his hiding spot and darted down the skybridge as he fumbled a fresh clip into the SMG, hoping to catch Anders disoriented.
As the smoke cleared, he got a good look at Peter Anders’ terrified face before all hell broke loose. A blast rocked the skybridge, ripping a hole in the wall and hurling Coyle forward. The tanks had started firing again.
Coyle’s body twisted along the floor, bumping into the moving walkway. He stopped spinning, and when his vision cleared, the section of the skybridge he’d crossed
was no longer there. It had been ripped away, replaced with the open air of outside, and a fifty-foot drop to the ground.
He felt broken and dazed. His back and legs and hips all screamed at him. Wind whipped at his face. He felt around for his SMG, but it was gone.
Peter Anders stood above him, with a grin on his face and a rifle barrel hovering a few inches above Coyle’s gut.
“Who the fuck are you?” Anders said.
Coyle scooted backward a few feet but stopped when he felt a rush of air. Any further and he’d fall out of the hole in the skybridge.
An explosion hit their concourse, and Anders wobbled. Coyle tried to move for the rifle, but his battered body was too slow and Anders steadied himself.
“Where’s LaVey?” Coyle said.
“Oh, it speaks, does it? Mr. Edward LaVey is no longer with us, I’m afraid. His commitment to the cause had always been suspect, but I hadn’t done anything about it before now. And you know what? I feel better already.”
“Is he dead?”
“I’ve answered your question, so you’re going to answer one of mine. Who are you with? Are you with Chalmers and her army or are you with Beth and her cult?”
“Neither.”
Anders leaned over, pointing the rifle inches from Coyle’s face. “So there’s a third party after me? Well, that’s great. Just great. Both of us are going to die today, and there’s so much work left to be done. It makes me sad, you know? All the things I could have accomplished, and the world will never know.”
“I’ll be sure and tell them.”
Anders cocked his head, a frenzied look of confusion and rage on his face. “Excuse me?”
Coyle snatched the nose of the Tavor TAR-21 and forced it to the side. Anders pulled the trigger while the barrel was inches away from Coyle’s ear, and the sound was so deafening that he felt something pop inside his head. But he didn’t take his hand away from the gun, and while they were fighting for control of it, he swept his foot behind Anders’ leg and jerked it back. Anders fell to the ground, losing his grip on the rifle.