by Jeff Gunhus
“What are you saying?” Rick said.
“America will once again be the lone superpower in the world because an hour from now she will be the only country left alive.”
Rick felt his knees go weak. His first thought was that it was an exaggeration, but one look at Keefer’s face and he knew that it wasn’t. It didn’t matter whether he could pull it off or not, but for some reason Keefer thought he had the ability to promise the destruction of the world outside the borders of the United States.
Maybe he could or maybe he couldn’t, and Rick hoped to God it was the latter. Either way, one thing was now clear.
Keefer was completely insane.
46
Cassie stood in front of the elevator trying to decide what to do. She hadn’t chanced a look around the bend in the tunnel until Rick and his armed guards were already gone, but this was clearly the end of the line.
The problem was, she had no idea what would happen if she called the elevator back. For all she knew, it would return filled with soldiers to take her into custody, laughing at her foolishness for handing herself over to them so easily.
Even if the elevator returned empty to her level when she pressed the button, she assumed someone would notice. Then when it arrived at the lab level, there were certain to be men with guns waiting for her.
All the options seemed to end with her being captured. She closed her eyes and tried to think through the problem. If she was in her developmental lab, she wouldn’t accept either solution. Her entire career and her pioneering work in organic computing and brain-machine interactions was predicated on her ability to eschew orthodoxy and discover alternative paths no one had ever before considered.
Where her scientific colleagues were content to search out the best path to take in the system of known streets previously uncovered in their field, she was the ultimate off-road junkie, blazing her own trail. Sometimes that meant crashing or getting hopelessly stuck in the mud, but it also led to great discoveries.
The greatest lesson was that when the menu of options didn’t offer anything, then simply toss the menu.
As she thought through it, she knew one of her challenges was that she was outside her area of expertise. In her computer lab, she was one of the preeminent minds in her field. Even though she’d worked in the deep lab for years, she knew very little about mine construction and layout.
Still, it was just a problem to be solved.
If the tunnel she stood in had been put into place as an escape, she reasoned, then the elevator was designed to aid that escape. Based on how straight and functional the tunnel coming in had been, with no offshoots or signs that it’d been used for actual mining, she guessed it’d been drilled expressly for the purpose. Therefore, it was likely the elevator was built for the same purpose.
But what good was an escape tunnel if it couldn’t be reached? And what good was an elevator as the sole means of transportation, an elevator reliant on a power supply and subject to the possibility of a mechanical failure? Any safety system she’d ever worked in or designed in her labs had always contained multiple redundancies.
She pulled on the accordion-style gate covering the elevator entrance and exposed the gaping hole in the rock face. Leaning forward, she looked up and down the elevator shaft, carved out of solid rock. On two sides were the crawler tracks on which the elevator traveled, its gears turning to climb up or down the shaft. It wasn’t the fastest way to go, but it looked sturdy and reliable. If the elevator had been on a pulley system, the weight of a half mile of metal cable would be hanging above the elevator compartment. The tracks were deep, providing the strength and stability the platform needed for such a large size.
She leaned farther forward and looked left and right. A smile spread across her face as she spotted exactly what she hoped to see.
Two metal ladders were bolted into the wall, slightly sunk into a carved indentation to keep them from being hit by the elevator in motion. Anyone climbing would stick out so that the elevator couldn’t operate at the same time, so they were for use only when the elevator was broken. It was exactly the redundant system Cassie had hoped to find. If the elevator malfunctioned, then the workers could climb to safety. Or, in her case, if the mine was filled with armed mercenaries trying to kill thousands of people, she could climb to their nest and try to stop them. A scenario she would bet had never been envisioned by any of the original designers.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Cassie stepped onto the nearest ladder, gasping for air as she dangled over the deep shaft. She clung to it, panting, gripping the smooth metal with sweaty hands. Slowly, she reached down with her left foot, poking it around to find the next rung below her. The gap was farther than on a typical ladder, but it was there. She shifted her weight and began the slow climb down.
At least she stood a chance of remaining undiscovered a while longer. She still had no idea what she intended to do once she reached the lab level, but she decided to take on one thing at a time. Hand by hand, foot by foot, she worked her way down, moving as quickly as she dared. She just hoped she would reach her destination in time to do any good.
47
Rick shook his head, trying to think through what Keefer had just told him. There was no part of the man’s demeanor to suggest he was being anything other than literal. He wasn’t talking about some new initiative to push America forward, he was talking about something far greater. The scale could only mean one thing.
“You have access to nuclear weapons,” he said, speaking slowly as if Keefer were a rabid dog. “You can’t seriously be considering using them.”
Keefer smiled and Rick caught the glint of a zealot’s fanaticism. “In an hour, I’ll have access to everything. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Fleets of ships and planes. Electrical grids. Hydro-power stations. Food supplies. Manufacturing facilities. Financial markets. Everything.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
Keefer waved his hands in the air, indicating the room around him. “This will become the center of the world. Right here.” He stopped and gave Rick an exaggerated puzzled look. “You don’t believe me? Of course you don’t. Why would you? I must sound like a lunatic.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Rick said. The other thought crossing his mind was how fast he could close the space between himself and Keefer. And just how fast he could break the man’s neck. Almost as if they were reading his mind, two kill drones silently floated off their perches in the front corners of the room. Keefer gave the illusion of facing Rick alone, but he was still well protected.
Keefer laughed. “The real insanity is in the world out there. People feel it, the slide into chaos. They’ve seen it happening for years. It’s a tired cliché to call the Jihadis a cancer, but it’s the most apt description. They started off as a tumor called Isis, an ugly growth that might have been cut out and discarded, but the moment passed. It was allowed to metastasize and spread unchecked. First the Caliphate, followed by the Great Migration that poured Jihadis throughout Europe. That was the cancer entering the lymphatic system, spreading into every corner of the patient, sealing its fate.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” Rick asked.
“To convince you that what we’re doing here is for the greater good. I want men like you to want to be part of the new world we’re building.”
Rick shook his head. “Bullshit.”
Keefer didn’t like the reaction, but Rick was past caring about that.
“I think that whatever you have planned, you’re getting cold feet. I don’t think you’re trying to convince me, sounds more like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Rick said. “I’m just a convenient excuse. You’re talking about genocide on a scale the world hasn’t seen since Hitler. There’s no way to justify it. I think you know that. I think that’s why you brought me in here, because your conscience is catching up to you, Keefer. You should listen to it.”
Keefer’s manic smile was gone
. He paced the floor. “I thought you were smarter than this. I want you to understand what we’re doing here. I want the world to appreciate the necessity of the sacrifice being made.”
“And here I just want to kill you,” Rick said. “I hope at least one of us gets what we want.”
Keefer smiled, but there was no humor in it. Rick glanced at the kill drones, half expecting the audience to come to an abrupt end with an order from Keefer. But they didn’t shoot, not yet.
“You’ve seen what the Jihadis can do. I’ve read your service records. Seventy-one men died under your command during your three tours facing the Jihadis. Thirty-seven of them in the ambush in Istanbul. I saw that report. I read what they did that day. You can’t tell me that an enemy that can commit that kind of atrocity deserves to live. You can’t tell me that if you had the power to kill them all with the push of a button, you wouldn’t take it.”
Rick tried not to reveal anything as images of the firefight in the streets of Istanbul flooded through him.
“Tell me what happened,” Keefer said.
Rick shook his head. “Sounds like you already know all about it.”
“I want to hear it from you,” Keefer said. “Soldier to soldier. I want you to tell me what happened, and explain to me why any of these people deserve to live another day.”
Rick felt his hands trembling. He didn’t want to go down this path, but he had Cassie to think about. Every minute he kept Keefer occupied was a minute he gave Cassie to figure out a way to stop him. If the man was here listening to his story, he wasn’t out where he might find Cassie. As much as Rick hated the idea of dredging up the most painful memories of his life, he knew he had to do it.
“Istanbul was already a mess,” Rick started. “The bio-attacks had wiped out half the city before we got there. We were working on intel that the Jihadis had rounded up new recruits from the poor part of the town. Forced conscription, even of kids, wasn’t unusual. But what made this different was that they took all of them. Every boy between five and ten from a large section of town. Ripped them right out of their homes. Beheaded any parent who even objected, let alone tried to stop them.”
“How many did they take?”
The question annoyed Rick. It was in the report and Keefer damn well knew the answer. But he needed to stall. “Close to three hundred from what we could tell. My team got the call; it was the kind of mission headquarters loved. A chance to show US forces playing hero.”
“Great press,” Keefer agreed. “US soldiers reuniting three hundred kids with their families. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.”
Rick nodded. “The whole thing had been a setup. The Jihadis had taken the kids all right, but they were never going to be trained as soldiers. They knew we couldn’t resist coming after them. I led forty men down a street, three-story-high rooftops on either side of us. Our drones collapsed first, some new jamming tech the Chinese had given the Jihadis. Then coms with our sniper covers went offline. Next thing I knew, dark shadows began to rain down on us from above. Thump, thump, thump.
“My men took cover, thinking they were improvised explosives or Molotov cocktails. But it was nothing like that.” Rick’s voice caught and he stopped, staring at the ground.
“Go on,” Keefer urged. “Tell me what it was.”
“You already know.”
“I want to hear you say it. I want you to remember the enemy we’re facing.”
Rick swallowed hard. “It was the kids. The ones they’d taken. Parts of them anyway. Arms, legs, sections of torsos. Flying through the air from both sides of the road.” Rick’s voice was monotone, it had to be. If he let emotion into his voice, he knew he’d lose it completely. “Then the heads came. Dozens at a time, the faces still frozen in expressions of pain and horror.”
“And how did your men react?”
“These were good men,” Rick said. “Hardened soldiers who’d seen more than their share of insanity in the war. But this was too much. They broke from cover, shooting at the rooftops, launching RPGs at shadows, anything they could do to stop the body parts raining down on them. I shouted for them to take cover, but it didn’t matter. Not really.”
“Because it was a trap,” Keefer said.
“The guns appeared from the windows all around us, from the buildings that were supposed to have been cleared and sealed shut by local forces. Then all hell broke loose.”
Rick heard the screams as his men were cut down around him by a withering cross fire that he’d led them into.
“Me and two others crawled into the burned-out shell of a French tank. It was stripped out and rusted, but it gave us cover. The firefight lasted less than a minute. Not a fight, it was a slaughter. We hunkered down in the tank, waiting for the end to come. Either an anti-tank RPG, or gasoline to burn us out. Even small arms would have probably penetrated the old tank. But nothing came. They knew we were there, but they let us live.”
“Because they were proud of what they’d done,” Keefer said. “They wanted witnesses to carry the story back.”
Rick felt like he was outside of his own body. He recognized the feeling. It was how he’d felt for years after that day. “The other two men who survived shot themselves in the head within a month. I wasn’t far behind them, but I wanted to die in the field. So I just took risks that should have gotten me killed. Instead, I only lost my arm and got a ticket home.”
“But you fought back,” Keefer said. “You’re still here.”
“I’m still here,” Rick said. “Not because I kept fighting, but because I finally allowed myself to stop fighting. That was the difference.”
Keefer pointed at a screen even though it was still blank, his teeth clenched. “But those people, those animals, they’re still out there. And the Chinese are no different. The Indians. You’ve seen the pictures from the slave camps. The repression of the rioters with flamethrowers. It’s what they’ll do to us if given a chance. How can you not see the only way to save our way of life is to clean the slate?”
“You can’t just kill seven billion people. It’s insane.”
“It’s the only solution.”
“There are good people everywhere,” Rick said. “Innocent people. Families just trying to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. You’d kill all of them? Even the kids?”
Keefer nodded. “Sacrifices have to be made.”
“That’s bullshit!” Rick yelled. “Why can’t you see how crazy this is?”
Keefer waved the question away. “I will burn down the world to save the three hundred million Americans. Because if I don’t, they’re destined to live in a world of radicalized fanatics that just gets darker every day. That’s three hundred million who will inevitably be enslaved by our enemies if nothing is done. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me America’s best days aren’t behind us unless something changes.”
Rick shook his head, not wanting to agree. “There has to be another way.”
“Like what? A jobs program?” Keefer said. “Another five-year plan? A cease-fire with the Jihadis? Politely asking Imperial China to stop her eastern expansion? We’re rotting, we’re isolated, and our adversaries are out to destroy us. And we’re doing nothing to stop it. And you think I’m insane?”
“No, I don’t think you’re insane. I know you are.”
“Is it insane to choose to save what you love, no matter the consequences? I think there’s not anything more understandable. Nothing more human than that impulse.” Keefer paused. “But let’s not argue philosophy. Why deal with hypotheticals when we can see what you actually believe?”
The screen turned into an image of Dahlia holding Charlie’s limp body in her arms. Keefer pointed to the screen.
“What if the only way to save those you loved was to condemn the other two thousand people in this mine to die, what would you choose?” Keefer asked. “Let’s find out. It’ll be fun.”
48
Cassie was halfway down the ladder before she had a problem.
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br /> There was a rattle of the metal gate below as two soldiers entered the elevator. She knew there were two because the elevator’s roof was a metal grid with holes about an inch wide. If either soldier looked up, they’d have a big surprise.
She clung to the ladder with her left hand. Trying to make her movements as economical as possible, she pulled her gun from her waistband. She didn’t know if it would do her any good trying to shoot through the metal grid, but if the men spotted her and opened fire, she sure as hell wasn’t going to just hang out and wait to die.
“Is maintenance up or down from here?” one of the men asked.
Cassie held her breath. If the elevator headed up, she was in real trouble. Jumping onto the elevator roof would be her only option but there was no way that was happening without tipping off the men inside.
“I think it’s up,” the other soldier said.
Cassie tensed. She looked back up the ladder. She was at least fifty feet from the nearest opening. There was no way she could make it up there, especially without drawing unwanted attention from below. She hooked the ladder with her elbow and fumbled with the gun to find the safety.
The elevator growled into action, the metal treads churning slowly, eating the tracks on either side of the shaft. She took aim at the top of the soldier’s head as the distance closed. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
“No, look,” the first soldier said. “Says right on the wall. It’s level N. That’s down from here, dumb ass.”
He hit the control panel and the elevator ground to a halt. Cassie froze, the gun at the ready in case one of them looked up. She was so close that she could smell the sweat on the men.
“Who are you calling dumb ass? You were looking at it too,” the other one said. “Go ahead then, hit it.”
The man did and the elevator lurched back into action, but now going back down. Cassie pressed herself flat against the ladder on the off chance one of them might still look up. But the elevator crawled down through the shaft, past the door to the lab level, and then continued to the lower levels. She waited until it got some distance, then continued her climb down on shaking legs.