by Wesley Cross
After the two men secured him to the table, one of them turned to Schlager. “You’ll be taking turns, yes?”
“Of course,” Schlager slurred and spat in the man’s direction. “Who’d want to miss that much fun.”
Hunt closed his eyes and tried his best to concentrate on his own breathing. It wasn’t working. Even with eyes closed, all he could see was the terrifying array of instruments that were about to tear into his flesh. A raw, primal panic started to cloak him like a cold, wet blanket.
He opened his eyes and looked at Schlager, a horrible truth dawning on him for the first time. Schlager didn’t have an easy way out, and if Jason was going to check out early, Victor Ye was surely going to make his friend pay for it in spades.
If you can hear me, clear your throat.
The voice coming through the radio implant sounded garbled and unrecognizable, but for a second Hunt was grateful for being paralyzed as he would’ve jumped otherwise. Instead, he cleared his throat as asked.
Great. How many hostiles are in the room? Cough once for each person.
He coughed twice.
Okay. I want you to count down from ten and then yell at the top of your lungs. Make it loud. I need those guys startled.
He was about to follow the command as a flash of blinding white-hot pain exploded in his right foot. He had never experienced anything like that in his entire life. It was all-consuming. It had no beginning and no end, and had he had the ability, he would have reached down and ripped his own foot off his body to make it stop. A guttural wail forced its way from his lungs, filled his throat, and exploded into the small room.
There was a loud crash and then a double-clap of a silenced weapon echoed through the room a second later. Hunt opened his eyes in confusion. His foot was still throbbing with a horrible pain, but Victor’s doctors were no longer standing next to the bed and when he strained his eyes to look down, he could see someone’s foot. It wasn’t moving.
Another moment later, Connelly’s face came into his view. There was a freshly stitched deep cut above the man’s left eyebrow, but his eyes were smiling. “Missed me?”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
“You yelled too early,” Connelly said as he helped him to sit up. “Threw me off.”
“Sorry about that.” Hunt looked at the great toe on his right foot. The nail was missing and fresh blood was trickling down on the table. “Getting your nails pulled apparently causes people to yell. Who knew?”
“Can you guys walk?”
“No. They gave us some kind of paralyzing agent. It’s wearing off fast, but not fast enough. And it intensifies everything you feel. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
“You too, Max?”
“Afraid so.”
“Okay, we can do this.” Connelly moved the table with Hunt on it to the wall and leaned him against the cold, wet stone. “Stay here. I’ll be right back, okay? I’ll bring you some clothes, too.”
“Sure. I’ll just hang here,” Schlager quipped, rolling his eyes at the bonds that secured him to the wall.
“Wait,” Hunt pleaded. “Do you know what happened to the silo?”
“All’s fine. Engel hit Silo 3, which wasn’t occupied yet. And it wasn’t a direct hit—it landed a few hundred yards due north. The other silos fared well. Some minor damage on the inside. No serious injuries as far as I know. A few scratches and bruises. The equipment held up too. Some broken furniture, a few cracks here and there, but nothing crucial.”
“How’s…” Schlager said, but then stopped, unable to continue.
“Helen’s fine,” Connelly said. “She’s the one who found you.”
“That was her on the comms?” Hunt said. “It was all garbled; I couldn’t understand if I was picking up a signal from one of ours or if it was some random radio station.”
“Yep. That’s how we’ve found you. She tracked down your beacons to this general area, and then Rovinsky was able to give us the exact coordinates. But we better go. We don’t have much time.”
“Did you evacuate?”
“No. Lucky for us, we have Helen Chen. She wrestled control of Project Thor assets from Engel. For now, there’s a stalemate. He has an overwhelming force, but we have a doomsday weapon. Nobody wants to make a decisive move first. At least for now.”
“Lucky for us indeed.”
By the time Connelly came back with a man from his security team, Hunt was mobile enough to climb off the table and even attempted to free his friend. The knots around Schlager’s ankles proved too tight and complicated for his one hand, however, and he was happy to pass that honor to Connelly’s tactical knife.
“Where are we?” he asked as he struggled to put a pair of jeans on. “I have no recollection of getting here.”
“Northern Virginia. Or maybe Maryland. It depends whom you ask.”
They walked out of the cell into a dark corridor, and Hunt leaned on Connelly’s shoulder to step over two dead bodies near the cell.
Hunt squinted as the door opened, letting bright afternoon sun in. It seemed Victor had been keeping them in a basement of what looked like an old farmhouse. Three more dead bodies of Victor’s guards were laid out on blood-splattered snow.
“Mike, you didn’t tell me. How did Jim know? He might be in jeopardy, if Engel finds out we escaped.”
“He said it used to be a safe house for the CIA. I don’t think his position was compromised.”
“Okay.” Hunt shivered, the cold, hard snow crunching under the soles of his bare feet. “Now what?”
“Now this.” Connelly pointed at the road leading away from the house. “Sorry about the shoes. There was no time to look.”
“I’ll live.”
At first, Hunt couldn’t see anything, but as he kept squinting against the sun, he noticed a black dot on the horizon. It grew in size and a minute later, a large black Suburban pulled up in front of the house.
“Come on,” Connelly urged, and the group loaded up into the SUV. “Get in the back. I’ll ride shotgun.”
“Good to see you, boss.” Chuck Kowalsky craned his neck from the driver’s seat and gave a small wave.
“Hey, Chuck. Can you guys fill me in?” Hunt asked as the SUV pulled away from the farmhouse. “What the hell happened on that bridge? We’d never been blindsided so badly before.”
He watched Connelly’s face as his head of security contemplated the answer.
“I think we either have a mole, or we have been hacked,” he finally said. “Not something I’m saying lightly, but I don’t see any other explanation.”
“We could’ve been hacked,” Schlager said. “Engel and Victor have some top talent too. Besides, Engel now has the entire force of the NSA at his disposal. I think it’s a greater possibility than a mole.”
“Because it’s more likely or because it’s easier to swallow?”
“Not to be a Debbie Downer here,” Connelly said, turning to face the passengers. “But it could be both. And I’d suggest until we know otherwise to treat it as such.”
45
The new arm was integrating well. Jason Hunt looked at himself in the mirror, his left hand’s index finger tracing the red, swollen fresh scar that ran around his right shoulder. The sensory input hadn’t been calibrated properly yet, and from his previous experience he knew he had to be patient. It was going to take some time to dial it in. For now, he was going to have to contend with sometimes mismatching information between what he saw and expected to feel instead of the actual sensory reaction uploaded from the receptors on his artificial arm. It was jarring at first, but as time went on and the sensors fine-tuned, at some point he’d get where the flow of information would become more nuanced from his bionic arm than the one from his real arm had ever been.
There was a knock on the door and he pulled on a black T-shirt before answering.
“Yes?”
“Sorry to disturb you, sir,” a man said. “Darius Price is here. His helicopter just landed. Should I
bring him here, or you’d rather meet him outside?”
“Bring him in. I’ll meet him in the blast lock area.”
“Right away, sir.”
As the man disappeared, Hunt put on a jacket, stepped out of his living quarters, and took a flight of metal stairs to the lower level that used to be the launch control center. From there, he went into the tunnel—the cableway—that connected the former control center with the actual missile silo. Sitting roughly in the middle of the cableway, behind the two sets of massive three-ton steel blast doors and a meter-thick concrete walls, was the blast lock area, which connected the outside world to the underground missile complex.
A minute later, Darius Price came through the access portal doors with two bodyguards in tow. Dressed in a leather bomber jacket, a pair of khakis, and a pair of dark-brown combat boots, he looked more like a general visiting the troops in a theater rather than a politician.
“Darius.”
“Jason.”
His handshake was firm, but he withdrew his hand a touch too soon, as if he wanted whatever the part he had to do here to be over as soon as humanly possible and not a second longer.
“Come on in. Your boys will have to stay here, though.”
Price nodded and Hunt led him through the cableway back to the control center.
“It’s smaller than I had imagined,” Price said as they climbed the stairs.
“Please, make yourself at home.” Hunt went around the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “Take a seat.”
“You know,” Darius Price rapped his knuckles on the steel door without moving; the sound was muted, almost too quiet to hear, “I’ve always wanted to check out one of these installations. I was once in Tucson, Arizona, and they have this museum built in a Titan II site. We even had the tickets, but then Henry, my youngest, got sick, and we had to cut the visit short. It’s hard to imagine that at some point two people sat here with the power to launch a weapon that could kill millions.”
“It is.” Jason Hunt looked around the small space. It was partitioned into three sections. One doubled as his living quarters, with a Spartan military-style bunk bed with a computer terminal on the lower level by the wall and another standing workstation built into the opposite wall. The second served as a miniature bathroom with a shower stall barely wide enough for him to squeeze in. The main room had been cleared from the old equipment and now had a slick round table in the middle, doubling as a second computer screen. The place had the feel of a miniature modern home, but the thick metal door that Price was leaning on stayed the same as a remnant of what the place was meant to be. “Luckily for us, it was built to withstand almost anything except a direct nuclear hit. Now that Engel put it to the test, we know it wasn’t an exaggeration.”
“I’ve read about them a lot. Nuclear weapons fascinate me. It’s hard for us to understand, but when I was growing up, my dad used to tell me how he always had nightmares about the nuclear war. They had drills at school, you see. And watched videos about the effects of the weapon and what to do if there was a war. As if there’s actually something you can do except pray for a quick and painless death.
“Did you know,” Price continued, “that the operators had no idea what the actual targets were? They only knew them as Target 1, Target 2, and Target 3. Do you know why?”
“Secrecy?” Jason volunteered. He didn’t think his answer mattered. Price wasn’t speaking to him. It was his way of working through the problem. Distracting himself while his brain worked on it in the background. Once the solution had been found, he’d then allow himself to let it float to the surface and get it ready for dissemination.
“No.” The man separated himself from the door, took two steps closer, and sat at the table, opposite to Hunt. “It was to prevent the operator from weighing the morality of the launch. That time was too important to fuck things up. The men sitting in this room couldn’t be trusted with the information whether the missile they were about to unleash was going to hit a military installation with hardly a soul on it, or a city with a few million people.”
“You saw the ballots,” Hunt said, losing patience. “Engel doesn’t belong in the White House.”
“I don’t know what I saw.” Price slammed his hand on the table, sending a flurry of light flickering waves on its dark conductive surface like a swarm of spooked fireflies in a dark backyard. “You said give me three days, Darius, and I’ll give you unequivocal proof. Those were your exact words. I gave you my word. And what did I get in return? You disappeared for a while. I can’t find a single mention of a supposed massive firefight on a bridge on the news. And then, when you come back, all I get is a story in a few second-rate news sources from a washed-up journalist with pictures of blurry papers that may or may not be real.”
“They are real, damn it.” Hunt stood. “The firefight was real. And I didn’t disappear. We were ambushed. One of ours was killed. Victor Ye ripped my arm out of my shoulder with an ease of an angry toddler disassembling a toy that fell out of favor. They tortured me and Schlager. And do you think we faked the giant crater next to our base with the forest turned to ash in a quarter-mile radius just to sell you on a lie? It’s a miracle that all of us are still standing.”
“I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” Darius Price said, his shoulders slumping. “And I’m sorry I have to keep asking these questions, but I feel like those men who were supposed to send that missile. And in my case, I need to know what’s on the other side of its path. Am I about to strike a blow to the enemy’s military might, or am I to unleash suffering on millions of innocent souls? There are riots all over the country. Cities are burning, Jason. Black Arrow has now established itself as the de facto controlling force of the military, with legislation to follow as soon as Engel is sworn in. And Engel is in control of Black Arrow. Even if I take what you say as gospel, agreeing to your plan will mean the bloodiest conflict on American soil since the Civil War.”
“Yes.” Jason sat down again and studied the face of the man in front of him. Price seemed to have aged since their last meeting, deep lines creasing his forehead, his eyes teary and bloodshot. “The balance of power seems to be in Engel’s favor. And should we lose, you’ll find yourself prosecuted and most likely killed. But as a good friend had told me not long ago, the war was inevitable. It will happen with or without us. The only choice you now face is to be a mere spectator or to take sides.”
“Let me ask you something.” Price placed both hands on the table and leaned toward Hunt. “Why do you need me? If anyone could fit the role that you’re pushing me into, it would be you. People know you all over the world. The Times called you the Bionic Man and named you the person of the year when your company went IPO. Your tech is revolutionary. But most importantly, you are famous for beating Engel at his own game. They teach the story of the Asclepius takeover in every business school on the planet worth its tuition. If you came out against Engel publicly, people would support you. Hell, I would support you. And you have the resources I’d never be able to match.”
“That answer is simple.” Hunt smiled and leaned back in his chair. “If I did that, I’d be no better than Engel. For the same reason: a general of a victorious army can’t stay on as the president. You turn from the liberator into an occupant. People didn’t choose me to be their leader, Darius. They chose you. That’s what you’ve got to do. Lead. And I’ll help you any way I can.”
46
“GIVE US ENGEL OR GIVE US WAR” the sign said. The man who held it, a bearded, pot-bellied bear of a man in a tracksuit, leaned over the police barricades and yelled something as Chen’s car went through the checkpoint. She saw the spit fly off the man’s lips but couldn’t make out the words through the bulletproof glass. It sounded like something about freedom and dying. She didn’t care either way.
“It’s getting worse every day,” the driver said. “There was a shoot-out in Brooklyn Heights last night. Seventeen dead. It’s like a war zone.”
; “You should move your family to the silo,” she said. “Keep them there until the dust settles. They’ll be safer there.”
“Safer,” the driver spat, as if the word had offended him. “This is my city, Miss Chen. We’ve lived here for four generations. There’s no way—”
A crack of automatic weapon fire rattled across the street. Somebody shrieked in the crowd, and then everybody was running in all directions. A few seconds later, the barricades toppled over with people jumping over, stumbling and falling, trampling those who weren’t quick enough to get out of the way.
The driver stepped on the gas, trying to stay ahead of the crowd. Something smashed into the side of the car; there was a swooshing sound and a sharp smell of kerosene, and then the entire right side was engulfed in a roaring flame.
“Oh my God,” the driver exhaled, the car screaming through the intersection and swiping a trash can as it made a turn. “Hold on, Ms. Chen. We’re almost there.”
Thick smoke permeated the vehicle, and Chen moved as far away from the window as she could. A few moments later, they shot through the gates of the underground garage and then a few attendants descended on them, pulling her and the driver from the car and attacking the fire with fire extinguishers.
“Step back, Ms. Chen. Stay away from the car.”
Chen tried to help, but the driver and the attendants wouldn’t hear it. She watched them put out the fire and then walked to the elevator.