by Ted Bell
He flicked his mini-light on and played it down below. The spacious floor looked to be painted concrete, spotless and shiny. In the center of the floor was a circle. Just a faint line, really, with a diameter about sixty feet across, maybe more.
Homer moved left along the yellow-painted catwalk hung from the ceiling and extending all the way around four sides of the building. Across the way were two office doors like the one he’d just come out of. But he wasn’t curious about those doors.
What got his full attention was the fact that the Yankee Slugger cab he’d seen pulling inside this very building about an hour ago, had now disappeared. He certainly hadn’t heard that big diesel crank up, and he would have, wouldn’t he? Even when he was hiding out there in the boneyard, he would have heard that monster cranking up, backing out into the street and roaring off. He hadn’t heard a thing. But the Slugger was gone.
He saw that the catwalk had a single staircase leading down to the ground on the street side of the building.
He moved toward it along the narrow metal walkway carefully, not because there was anybody to hear him, the place was obviously empty, but because if he tripped and went over the rail, well, that would be all-she-wrote for damn sure.
He went downstairs slowly, keeping his light aimed on the steps all the way to the ground. The big main door, so cracked and peeling on the outside, was a shiny brushed steel on the inside. No handles or locks. It just slid up into the wall above it. He turned away from his inspection of it and looked at the faint outline of the circle in the center of the floor. Had it changed? It looked different than it had when he’d been up on the catwalk. He went over to check it out, kneeling down inside the circle to feel its outline with his fingers.
Now he could see that the big sixty-foot circular section was slightly lower than the rest of the floor. Like a tiny depression. The outline he’d seen from above was due to the fact that this section wasn’t flush. There was about an eighth of an inch of dull steel showing all the way around. Something, a sound maybe, made him lean forward and put his ear to the floor.
It was that gear noise he’d heard earlier up in Smokey’s office. A deep whirr, and then a soft hiss.
And suddenly the whole center section was moving. He was dropping down through the floor.
He stood up and quickly stepped off the moving platform. He stepped away from the hole, watching wide-eyed as the huge round section of floor descended slowly and steadily. Almost noiselessly. A foot. Two feet. Still dropping. He could hear something down there now. The noise of whatever machinery below supported a huge round section of concrete floor. A massive hydraulic lift of some kind. And now, another noise. A big diesel firing up. Then, a second one started. A third. More.
Wait a minute. Trucks? In the basement?
He lay down flat on his stomach, trying not to hurt his wounded arm any more, and inched forward until he could see just over the edge. There was a faint reddish light down there, swirling with diesel fumes. It was too thick to see anything but shadowy shapes in the red mist. He shoved himself forward a few more inches, lowered his head, and peered down inside.
If there was somebody down there aiming to blow his head off it was going to happen now. He hadn’t heard anybody and he thought he would have. But, you never know.
Nobody shot him. But what he saw beneath him took the breath right out of him.
Monster rigs. A whole lot of them, tractor trailer trucks, in fact. Maybe fifteen, or even more, he thought. At least twenty. But that was only all the ones that he could see from this angle. The underground garage was big, he could see now, lowering his head even more, because the great oval section had now descended flush into the lower level floor.
All the way at the back of the lower level was a well-lit tunnel.
So, that was how they did it, got the ghost trucks cross the border with nobody catching on. He’d seen all the reports of Mexicans building tunnels under the border. Big ones, with air-conditioning even. To move illegals and drugs into the States. But this tunnel was something else entirely. It was large enough to accommodate eighteen-wheelers. Must have taken years to build this thing. Rawls owned a construction company in addition to everything else. He was in cahoots with the Mexicans somehow. Bringing trucks in for some reason.
Homer’s case was starting to add up. J.T. had been a smuggler, a crook. And a traitor. He’d never killed a man before, but if he had to start, it wasn’t a bad place.
There was a loud snort of a big diesel engine revving. He watched in wonder as, below him, a truck pulled forward and stopped right in the middle of the circular lift. It wasn’t the Yankee Slugger he’d seen pull in earlier. No, this was an ancient road warrior, an old fifties vintage Mack truck with faded green paint on the cab and trailer. Yellow road lights, now lit up a row of rusty chrome-plated horns mounted on top of the cab. He couldn’t see into the cab. Blacked-out windows, of course. He watched, unable to tear his eyes away, as the whole center section started turning clockwise, turning the rig around so it’d be facing the street.
When the lift platform had rotated one hundred-and-eighty degrees, it stopped.
Then the beat-up old Mack truck started rising on its hydraulic pedestal. It was a truck with a big juicy tomato logo and Ocala Farms Inc. painted on the trailer. At the same time, the main door of the building started sliding up inside the wall. All this crap going on, Homer thought, and not a single solitary human being on the property besides himself and the man he’d killed.
The whole thing was, what, automated?
Homer figured it was way past the time to beat feet the hell out of Mr. J.T.Rawls’s haunted truck graveyard and that is just what he was fixing to do. He ducked underneath the half-opened street door and took off at a run, darting across the ghost town’s main street to the burned-out Texaco where he’d parked the Vic.
He’d get on the radio and call in the dead man’s location. Then he’d get off the radio and get to the bottom of whatever the late J. T. Rawls had been up to in this little ghost town.
50
LA SELVA NEGRA
H arry Brock slapped in a fresh mag and jacked a round into the chamber of his semi-automatic rifle. Then he said, “How old is Caparina, anyway?”
“Almost thirty,” Saladin replied.
“Yeah? Told me she was twenty five.”
Harry and Saladin nervously eyed the low, blunt structure on the opposite rim of the canyon. They were nearing the end of the bridge. So far, they’d seen no movement and no more of the hellish little lead-spitting Trolls. But neither man had any illusions about a champagne reception immediately upon arrival on the other side.
Hassan flicked the selector on his weapon to full auto. He, like Harry, was crouched down behind the flared steel mudguard that covered the tank treads. This was all the protection the little green battlebot afforded the casual rider and, as they had witnessed, it was precious little.
“Don’t believe everything Caparina says. You’ll find yourself one day wishing you hadn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I believe you’re trying to make me jealous. My ex-wife had many lovers before you, Mr. Brock.”
“Doesn’t seem to bother you much.”
“Maybe that’s because I view all of her lovers, such as you, not as a rival, but as a fellow sufferer.”
Harry grinned at him and cocked his gun. “Lock and load, Saladin,” he said, “We’re about to go find that loose woman of yours or die trying, I guess.”
As the tank neared the last third of the bridge, both men were relieved not to have seen Caparina’s charred corpse lying in the smoking ruins of the tank. And they were mildly shocked that no one had bothered to kill them yet.
“Drone aircraft formation,” Saladin said suddenly, “Get low as you can. Hug steel, Harry!”
“Shit,” Harry said, flattening himself as best he could in the cramped space between the fore and aft mudguards. Both of them were wearing jungle fatigues
the same shade of camo as the battlebots were painted. Harry hoped that it afforded a small measure of visual protection. It all depended on how alert the operator flying the UAV was at this precise moment.
“No movement!” Harry said. “Don’t even blink!”
He watched three sleek silver craft bank and turn as they flew up the ravine directly toward them. He saw the telltale red tips at the ends of the wings and knew the goddamn things were armed with air-to-ground missiles. The drone squadron was now on a collision course headed straight for the bridge. All you could do was wait for a launch and watch one of those little red bastards home in on your dead ass.
Nothing of the kind happened.
The lead drone dipped its inverted-spoon nose at the last possible second. Harry held his breath as it streaked directly beneath the bridge with about six inches of clearance. The two flankers streaked across overhead, where they began a lazy turn, climbing to the south. Probably on a search circuit that would route them along the southern perimeter of Top’s compound, Harry thought.
If Top was on his game, which he surely was, he’d be scheduling these drone recon flights at odd hours, eliminating any predictability that would allow intruders inside unnoticed. The two intruders aboard the tank whipped their heads around and watched the lone silver bird dart and twist its way up the deep green ravine, finally disappearing around a rocky promontory and into heavy mist. When Hassan and Brock faced forward once more, the Troll was rumbling off the bridge and onto a wide apron of crushed sandstone.
“That was good,” Harry said, his eyes darting back and forth, looking for any movement in or around the seemingly abandoned pillbox fortification.
“Why?”
“Nobody sent that drone squad to take us out, or, believe me, it would have. That last flight was on routine patrol and the operator didn’t pick us up.”
“Asleep at the wheel.”
“We got lucky.”
“Better lucky than smart.”
The remote operations post had been well guarded. Now, it was pockmarked with bullet holes. It was a squat, ugly, rectangular sandstone building, bristling with damaged video cameras and mast antennas. Camouflaged, it also sat just far enough inside the green wall of jungle to be invisible from the air. Like the suspension bridge it guarded, it was disguised with a mat of leafy vines. This was not the camp’s main approach, Harry and Hassan figured, it didn’t look sufficiently fortified or important enough. God knew how many of these manned outposts lined this stretch of ravine.
But, in his gut, Harry knew they might have found a backdoor to the heart of darkness.
“The entrance to this pillbox is here at the rear,” he heard Hassan call out from behind the structure, and Harry went cautiously around back to check it out.
When he turned the corner, Hassan was sticking his boot under one of the three dead guards on the ground. He flipped him over. Harry checked out the other two. All were dressed in jungle fatigues. Each man had a single bullet hole in his forehead.
“What the hell?” Harry said.
“Caparina.”
“She did all this?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“It’s what she does best, Harry.”
“Holy shit. She’s still alive.”
“You’ll find her hard to kill. Let’s have a look inside.”
This small command post was a more sophisticated version of the operations shed they’d first found at the airstrip. The controller, dead no doubt of a bullet to the back of the head, was slumped forward at his monitor station before an array of flickering flat panel screens.
The center screen still carried a real time image of the bridge they’d just crossed. Another camera angle, mounted on the underside of the bridge, showed the tumult of the rapidly flowing river far below. The third monitor was broadcasting the view from the nose of a drone plane, probably the one they’d just seen, winding its way up the snaking ravine. The fourth was the interesting one. This camera, mounted on a Troll battlebot, was moving at a high rate of speed through the jungle. You could see it was headed toward some kind of low building at the end of a jungle trail.
That building looked extremely familiar.
Yeah. That robot tank was speeding toward the very building he and Hassan were currently inspecting.
Harry shouldered his Bizon and moved to door. “Let’s get outta here. Go take that little bastard out.”
“Harry, wait. It’s not a Troll. Look again at the monitor. Bottom right hand corner of the screen. What do you see?”
Harry squinted his eyes, looking carefully up at the monitor. “A piece of boot? Bouncing around on top of a footrest?”
“Yeah. Look familiar?”
“Hell, yeah. It’s Caparina’s boot. She’s coming back for us?”
“You’re a quick study,” Hassan said, rushing outside to greet his ex-wife, with Harry on his heels.
When Harry and Saladin stepped outside, they saw Caparina. But it wasn’t a Troll she was riding. Not at all. It wasn’t even a robot. It was a bizarre vehicle that resembled a lunar lander with four giant rubber wheels. It was driven by two carbon-bladed propellers mounted facing aft at the rear. Amphibious, probably. The thing was long and narrow so it could snake through jungle trails, Harry supposed. In addition to the video camera mounted on top of the heavy tubular roll cage, it had, Harry was surprised to see, a kind of steering wheel.
Caparina slid to a stop and smiled down at them from atop her centrally mounted buggy seat.
“I commandeered it,” she said before anyone could ask. “Called a Skeeter. Get up here! There are two seats on the back behind me. C’mon, jump! I’m only about one minute ahead of them!”
“Them?” Harry said, not liking the sound of that.
The two men scrambled aboard the vehicle and began to fasten the safety harnesses that secured them to the twin seats aft. Caparina had shed her rain jacket somewhere along the line. She had the sleeves of her mud-streaked white T-shirt bunched up over her sunburned biceps. The thin cotton shirt did little to hide her figure. Her face, too, had been war-painted with streaks of brown mud. She shoved the hand throttles forward and the buggy lurched forward. She fishtailed around the low building and raced out onto the bridge.
“Wait,” Harry shouted, “Where the hell do you think you’re going? We’ve got to find a way inside the central compound!”
“Not today, we don’t,” she said over her shoulder as they raced back across the bridge. “There are at least half a dozen assorted machines on my butt right now. The sun’s going down. They’ve got NV lenses that can see in the dark and we don’t.”
Harry didn’t like the word assorted, either, but he decided to keep his mouth shut for the time being. He was having a hard time getting the buckle on his seat harness fastened and there was going to be no way to stay inside this damned buggy without being strapped in.
“Run away to fight another day,” Saladin said with a wistful smile, lighting an unfiltered cigarette as if he’d just wandered off a goddamn golf course with a scratch round on his card.
“Fight?” Caparina said, glancing back at them. “You two have no earthly idea. I got a peek behind the curtain.”
“Tell me what you saw,” Harry said, leaning forward and putting his hand on her shoulder. “I need to check in. I need to know what we’re up against before I call Washington.”
“Tell them you’ve seen the future of warfare, Harry Brock.”
“Yeah? And what future is that, Caparina?”
“Robots, Harry.”
51
PRAIRIE, TEXAS
I love you, too, Sugarplum,” Daisy had said to her husband, marking her place in the old family bible with a sprig of bluebonnet wild-flower. She was talking on the phone, sitting on his side of the sagging double bed. She’d come in the bedroom for something when the phone by the bed had rung. She couldn’t remember why, what she’d been looking for in here, but she’d brought her bible with her.
She must have been thinking about her husband. How nervous he must be giving a speech in front of all those important people tomorrow. Standing at the bedroom window, watching the night fall, but seeing in her mind all those worry lines around his eyes.
That’s right when the phone rang, and sure enough it was Franklin.
One of those spooky coincidences. Serendipity, they called it. Not serendipity exactly, but something kin to that.
She’d leaned back against his soft pillow and listened to him worrying silently at the other end of the line. They had a bad connection, almost like he was calling from a cell phone. Which was silly, because he wouldn’t own one. Wouldn’t have one in the house.
“Franklin? You still there?”
“Yep. I’m here.”
“Who’s that yelling in the background?”
“Nice lady whose phone I borrowed. I guess I should give it back now.”
“All right, but you just stop worrying, okay? Go on back to the hotel and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s your big day. Especially with those tapes June got on video. I’m sure this Zamora fella is just a whole bunch of hot air. Just like the ones tried to scare us last time. And the time before that. All hat and no gun.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But please just do like I said, Daisy. Lock all the doors and windows and wait by the phone till the cruiser I called in gets out there. Okay?”
“I wish you hadn’t done that. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself. You know that.”
“I normally don’t bother you, Daisy.”
“I know you don’t. I’ll go close up the house right now, honey.”