Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  No one in the squad had said a word since lift-off. Most of the men were fighting back tears. John wasn’t. He was too angry.

  “Ten mikes to touchdown at Leatherneck,” the pilot called out.

  It was impossible to look at Mike Entwistle’s body bag without looking into the swollen face of the man who’d killed him. Fazal Toofan was on his side, wrists and ankles zip-tied, moaning. He slowly came to, his eyes blinking open. He tried to lift his head and one of the weapon’s sergeants pushed it down with the sole of his boot.

  “Keep your fucking head down, motherfucker,” the sergeant shouted.

  The shouting seemed to clear the cobwebs away and the Taliban commander said crisply, “Where are you taking me?”

  “Don’t talk to him,” John raged.

  “Are you the one in charge?” Toofan asked.

  John said nothing.

  “What are you, Seals? Marines?”

  The sergeant said, “Green Berets, motherfucker.”

  “For the last time, I said don’t talk to him, goddamn it!” John shouted. “And you, shut the fuck up!”

  But Toofan wouldn’t shut up. “This one, the one in the bag. Is he the asshole I shot? Are those the asshole’s brains on my leg?”

  John rose as high as the helicopter ceiling would allow.

  He didn’t say a word as he grabbed Toofan by the hair.

  He didn’t say a word as he lifted Toofan to his knees.

  And he didn’t say a word as he threw him out the open door into the blackness of the Afghan night.

  The pilot and co-pilot swiveled at the sound of Toofan’s fading screams.

  John sat back down, breathing hard.

  “Turn your asses around,” the sergeant yelled at the pilots. “Nobody saw anything, you understand? You understand? He was never on this chopper. That’s the end of it. It’s the fucking end of it.”

  That’s when John began to cry.

  John awoke in a cold sweat to see Trotter sitting near him, staring.

  “You were talking in your sleep,” Trotter said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Sounds like quite the nightmare.”

  John sat up. “I don’t remember my dreams.”

  “Everyone has their demons.”

  John had half a cup of beer by his side. He drank the rest of it. “What are yours?”

  “I don’t think we know each other well enough for me to bare my soul. Perhaps when we get back to London, the real London, we’ll have a few drinks.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  Trotter feigned offense. “Really? Do you have something against me?”

  “Yeah, maybe. At best you’re a greasy little shit. At worst you’re, well …”

  Trotter wouldn’t let him finish. He was on his feet saying, “Let me tell you something, Camp. I don’t like Americans. Never did. I work with the CIA on a regular basis and I’d say it’s the absolute worst part of my job. Give me the Germans, the Poles, anyone, even the bloody Turks any day of the week. I leave a meeting with Americans and I generally want to vomit. I hate your pseudo-Boy Scout rectitude, your black-or-white simplistic worldview, your appalling lack of subtlety and class. I’m going to sit by the stinking vats now, Camp. The air is fresher over there.”

  Trevor came to the rear of the tannery and handed John the rifle.

  “Two of you getting into it?” he asked.

  “Not really,” John said, “but I’ve got a feeling he and I are going to have a reckoning one day.”

  The following night John and Trevor tried again. Creeping up on the barge they saw only a handful of soldiers onboard.

  “This might be as good as it’s going to get,” John whispered.

  “I agree, guv.”

  John pulled a knife and said, “Use the rifle as a club but no shooting.”

  Most of the Earthers were near the front of the tannery anxiously awaiting John and Trevor’s return. Leroy Bitterman looked around and noticed that Trotter wasn’t with them.

  Stuart Binford and Matthew Coppens went looking for him, circling around the tannery from opposite directions. It was Matthew who found him standing over Smithwick.

  “What are you doing?” Matthew asked.

  Trotter palmed his knife and said, “I thought I heard her choking. No one was about and I was trying to help.”

  “She seems all right to me.”

  There was a small commotion near the door as John announced they’d secured the barge. He came to the rear of the forge to get Smithwick and on the way he called John the tanner out of his bunkroom.

  “We’re off now,” he said. “You’re a good man, John.”

  “Not half as good as you are,” the tanner said.

  John gave him his last gold coin.

  “I haven’t earned this one,” the tanner said, though he quickly pocketed it.

  “Sure you did. We drank all your beer.”

  36

  Emily reviewed the latest computer simulations from Geneva and looked away. “I think we should be operational by tomorrow morning.”

  Loomis drank his tea. Even after a week, he let it be known that each sip was marvelous, something to be savored. “You don’t seem happy,” he said.

  “You know why.”

  He nodded. “I’m concerned about the modifications we’ve made to the particle guns,” he said. “Bit of a chewing gum and Sellotape job.”

  “Of course it is,” she said. “If we were using uranium gas in the normal course of business, we’d have spent a year or two in design and manufacture with input from dozens of experts.”

  He clenched his fists then rapidly dealt out his fingers while turning his palms upwards. It was a magician’s gesture. Presto! She’d forgotten he used to do it all the time. “We’ll just have to push the button and see,” he said.

  She got up from her workstation. They were in the new, makeshift control room set up in the recreation center.

  “Maybe we should hold off until we’ve done more prep work,” she said.

  “Emily, I realize you’re worried about John but you’ve heard the powers-that-be on the conference calls. They want this done and they want it done now.”

  “Yes, but I’m the one who has to push the button, as you say. If I refuse to do it there’s nothing they can do.”

  “Is that really the way you wish to play it?” he asked. “Personal good over the greater good?”

  “That’s ripe coming from you, Paul, for God’s sake.”

  She stormed out and went to the washroom where she splashed her face and stared into the mirror trying to calm herself.

  When she returned, Paul had something in his hand.

  “What are these doing here? I found them on the floor,” he said.

  “A few of the people in the control room were armed the day of the last restart. The MI5 guards, Anthony Trotter too, I think. There’s metal and synthetics all over the place, all of it left behind.”

  She took the guns and slid them under a table in the corner.

  Then she apologized to him but Loomis said she was right to point out his hypocrisy.

  “Selfishness has become a way of life for me,” he said. “I wasn’t always like this. I hope you can remember the man I used to be. I suppose I changed the moment that I madly and selfishly killed my wife, depriving my children of their mother and her parents of their daughter. And then I compounded it by selfishly taking my own life.”

  “Paul, please …”

  “No, let me finish. Unfortunately, I’ve become an expert on the subject. You can’t survive in Hell unless you have a laser-like focus on your survival and creature necessities. I was luckier than most. I was quickly dealt to Stalin and though I was essentially a slave, I was a high-class slave because what I carried in my head wasn’t viewed as a commodity. I could have refused to work for this monster who wanted me to be an engine for weapons manufacture, weapons which would cause pain and misery on a mass scale. I could have made a dogged effor
t to escape. But I didn’t. I protected my own hide. Why tell you this? It’s because you’re not like me. You’re a wonderful, altruistic person without a selfish bone in your body. To save the world from doom you will push the button, even if it means trapping your lover in Hell.”

  “You’re correct when you say I’ll do the right thing. But you’re wrong about the universality of selfishness in Hell. I saw people there who transcended their narrow survival concerns for the greater good. My first time there I was rescued by a group of women who survived by looking after each other. And I’m inspired by Garibaldi and the people who’ve cast their lot with him to try and bring a modicum of humanity to Hell. Yes, there are terrible people doing terrible things, and yes, that may be the status quo, but I’d like to dwell on the goodness that can exist even inside people who’ve done evil. Are you hearing me, Paul? You’ve got so much goodness still inside.”

  He broke down and put his head in his hands, a weeping mask. She came over and put her arms around his chest and held him for a long time.

  “I’ll try to make you proud of me,” he said. “I’ll try to make my children proud. I know it won’t be easy with them. With a bit of luck I’ll have twenty, perhaps thirty years of life ahead of me before I die and have to return. Even if all of it is spent in prison, I’ll try to do some good, in my work, in my writings. I’ll figure it out.”

  “I know you will.”

  As was their habit, they joined Dirk and Duck for lunch in their unlocked cell, microwaving some frozen foods for them. They sat eating with chairs drawn up beside their bed, a muted Disney video playing on the TV.

  Emily brought up the subject foremost on their minds. “I did speak to Mr. Wellington about your plea to remain here.”

  “What did ’e say?” Duck asked, inhaling a baked, stuffed shell.

  “He said it was the government’s policy to repatriate as many Hellers as they could prior to breaking the connections.”

  “What’s that mean?” Dirk said.

  “I’m afraid it means you can’t stay.”

  “But we don’t want to go back!” Duck said. “We like it ’ere. Did you speak to my Delia?”

  “Not directly, no,” Emily admitted, “but according to Mr. Wellington, she did put in a good word for you.”

  Dirk pointed his plastic spoon at Loomis. “But you don’t ’ave to go back, do you?”

  “No,” he said, “I was able to make a deal.”

  “Paul has some very special skills which gave him the ability to make a bargain,” Emily said.

  “We’ve got skills,” Duck said. “Dirk can make the best beer in Dartford and I can, I can, well, I can ’elp him do it.”

  Emily smiled at them. “Look, I’m making no promises but we’re going to be very busy tomorrow, so busy we might not have the time to make sure you leave the building and make it to the soldiers at the edge of the hot zone.”

  “I always ’ave difficulty fathoming your meaning, Miss Emily,” Dirk said.

  Duck hit him with one of his sharp elbows. “She’s saying we can stay!”

  Emily didn’t sleep that night; she didn’t want to. To give her body a break she lay down on one of the mattresses she and Paul had dragged from the jail cells to the control room, but she stayed awake, straining her ears for any sign John had returned.

  At six o’clock she woke up Paul, made some tea, and checked on the cooling status of the twenty-five thousand magnets arrayed inside the MAAC tunnel like a giant string of pearls. Super-cooled liquid helium had taken the magnet temperature down overnight to 4.5 K, or -268.7ºC. If the schedule held, in two hours she and Paul would have to initiate the final cooling protocol to achieve 1.7 K, preciously close to the absolute-zero temperature needed to accelerate uranium protons to their maximal collision energy.

  “No sign of him,” Loomis said, leaning over her workstation.

  She shook her head and started calling out checklist items for them to implement.

  At seven o’clock the video link with Geneva opened and the full team at the Large Hadron Collider began mirroring the activities at MAAC and lending many pairs of virtual hands.

  At eight o’clock Emily logged onto a videoconference with Prime Minister Lester and his Cobra group in Manchester, Ben Wellington and his people at MI5, army personnel at SAS headquarters in Credenhill, and the Drone Warfare Centre at RAF Waddington.

  “Dr. Loughty, are we on schedule?” the prime minister asked.

  “We can be,” she answered. “If we have a final go decision we can fire the particle guns in two hours.”

  “Is it going to work?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said wearily. “As I’ve explained, we can’t be sure the rather primitive modifications we’ve made to the injection system and particle guns will work with the uranium gas. If it does work, we can’t be sure we’ll be able to obliterate the strangelets. It’s all based on hypothetical modeling.”

  Lester gave her a grim nod and said, “At least you’ve been consistent, but I was rather hoping for an answer of, yes, Prime Minister.”

  “I wish I could be more positive,” she said.

  The prime minister looked to his cabinet and asked, “Well, are there any objections to green-lighting this? No? MI5? No? What about Credenhill? Are your people in position?”

  Major Gus Parker-Burns, the Officer Commander of 22 SAS Regiment, said, “Yes, we are in position, Prime Minister. We have three, three-man extraction teams on the fringes of the Leatherhead, Dartford, and Sevenoaks hot zones. It is our continuing assessment that the group deployed to Upminster was likely over-run by Hellers three weeks ago and sending an extraction team into Upminster would, unfortunately, neither be safe nor productive.”

  “RAF Waddington, what say you?” Lester asked.

  The Brigadier General in charge replied, “We have Greater London blanketed by our full contingent of Reapers and Predators supplemented by the twenty on loan from the United States. We are intensely monitoring the known HZs.”

  Lester asked, “In the event the MAAC start-up does not have the intended result but, in fact, exacerbates the problem, are all the drones fully armed?”

  “Yes, sir,” the general answered. “Brimstone missiles on the Reapers, Hellfires on the Predators.”

  “Mr. Wellington,” the prime minister said, “I know you’ve had the burden of authorizing missile strikes. At this point I feel I ought to shoulder that responsibility personally.”

  Ben sounded relieved when he said, “Of course, Prime Minister.”

  “And, Mr. Wellington, has your package been delivered to Leatherhead?”

  “It has. It is in the hands of the SAS extraction team.”

  “And finally,” Lester said, “we all know that in the event that the procedure today does successfully break the connection between our world and theirs, that we will have hundreds, perhaps thousands of Hellers permanently trapped in London. We’ll need to capture each and every one of them and determine their fate. However, that will be a problem for another day. Right, does anyone else have anything to say?”

  Emily nodded a few times. “I would just like to point out that we haven’t seen John Camp or Trevor Jones or any of the MAAC staff or visitors transported at the onset of the present crisis.”

  The prime minister stared gravely into the monitor; the videographer in Manchester zooming in so close that Emily could see the luminous blue of his eyes. “We know nothing of the fate of the others but we are very much aware of the heroism of Mr. Camp and Mr. Jones. I do know the implications of our decision this morning and so do you. So I ask you, Dr. Loughty, do you have an objection to initiating the final two-hour countdown?”

  She closed her eyes. “None,” she said. “We’ll initiate the sequence immediately.”

  On the outskirts of Leatherhead the sergeant in charge of the extraction team rapped his knuckles against the tinted window of the Land Rover.

  Malcolm Gough got out and went around to open the other re
ar door. The SAS team knew the nature of the package but they nevertheless seemed awestruck by the sight of King Henry in his doublet and cloak.

  “These men will be your escort, Your Majesty,” Gough said.

  Henry surveyed the scene. To the west was a mass of army and emergency services vehicles and personnel. To the east, the town.

  Turning toward the River Mole Henry said, “So this is the present-day town.”

  Gough said, “Yes. I believe you’ll be taken across that bridge.”

  “That’s correct, sir,” the sergeant said, staring at Henry with saucer-eyes.

  “I wonder what I shall find on the other side of that bridge?” Henry said.

  “You’ve been away for a good while,” Gough said.

  “Indeed. I do not think I shall still be king. I venture that Cromwell and Suffolk have fought for my crown like two rats in a bag. I wonder, will the victor fight me when I seek to reclaim it or meekly place it upon my head?”

  The professor said, “I’d really like to know the answers to your questions.” Then he smiled, “But not enough to come with you.”

  “I believe you will miss me, Gough,” Henry said.

  “I will, Your Majesty. More than you know. It has been the privilege of my life to spend this time with you.”

  “If you ever stray from the virtuous life of a scholar then perhaps I will see you again at the end of that life.”

  “I hope not, Your Majesty.”

  The three-man SAS team closed in and began walking the king toward the bridge.

  The professor recorded video on his mobile phone and kept recording until the soldiers and king reached the bridge and vanished halfway across.

  Then he called his wife and said, “I’m coming home.”

  37

  John pointed toward a spot on the riverbank. “There. That’s where we need to land.”

  John had anointed Campbell Bates as skipper when he learned the FBI director was an avid sailor with a fifty-footer on Chesapeake Bay. But John knew the river and the two of them successfully navigated the boat through the darkness and into the dawn.