Fall Back

by Riley Flynn

  Jax had been in enough situations in his career to know when fingers were about to squeeze triggers, and the look on the cop’s face was enough to make him square his feet and prepare to reach for the barrel. He would try to pivot as he caught it, enough to either pull it from the cop’s grip or a least immobilize the man’s trigger finger, lessening the risk that he’d be shot.

  Then a throb of adrenaline shot through his belly as he realized Hayley was directly behind him, in the line of fire.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  Three mini explosions filled his ears in the space of a quarter-second. Jax’s training kicked in before his brain as he dove forward in a roll on the floor and emerged hunched over one knee, facing the direction the shots had come from. In his mind’s eye, he saw Hayley lying in a pool of blood on the airport’s gleaming tile floor.

  Instead, he saw the man from first class levelling a nine-millimeter pistol at the men in riot gear. A thin wisp of smoke escaped the barrel.

  Jax snapped his head in the direction of the cops just in time to see the three who had been threatening him slowly collapsing into heaps on the floor. Each of the three rounds had entered through the men’s face guards, leaving them shattered and drenched in blood. Jax caught sight of the first man’s face as he dropped—there was a crimson and black cave where his right eye had been. The hollow-point round had exploded on impact with the back of the man’s skull, ripping a jagged hole in the Kevlar and plastic of his helmet as it exited. The other two’s heads were in a similar state.

  The sounds of panic were spreading through the terminal as whitecoats bolted in all directions, but the members of Echo stood their ground. No one breathed as the shooter calmly approached the remaining three cops—at least, Jax assumed they were cops. They could have been civilians for all he knew.

  He glanced up at Hayley to see that all the color had drained from her face. Still, a wave of relief washed through him. Thank God she was all right.

  All right? She watches her mother die, now she sees three men murdered right in front of her, all in the space of two days? This is about as far from all right as you can get.

  The shooter stopped ten feet from the rest of the men in riot gear, his non-regulation hair drooping down to his eyebrows. “If you want to live, get out of here,” he said in a flat tone, like someone ordering from a drive-thru window. “Go find the people you care about and spend as much time with them as you can.”

  The nine-millimeter was still pointed in their direction. The men looked at each other, wide-eyed. Finally, one of them thumbed the safety into place on his rifle and tossed it to the floor.

  “Fuck this,” he breathed, pulling off his helmet. “Fuck all y’all!”

  He tossed the helmet and took off down the concourse at a jog. Ten seconds later, his colleagues followed suit, leaving the soldiers unopposed in their journey to the other side of the airport.

  By the time Jax had processed all this, the shooter had holstered his weapon and was walking toward Archer and the other brass as they marched in his direction. Jax thought the old man looked even more shaken now than he had back in Germany, and his companions’ faces shared a similar pale coloring. Whatever this was, it didn’t originate with them.

  The soldiers milled around for a few moments, staring at the bodies and muttering, before Archer shouted: “You’ve got your orders! Sixteen-thirty hours! Double time!”

  Jax closed the gap between himself and Cruz. He briefly thought about taking Hayley’s hand, but he doubted it would do her any good. Beside him, he saw the sergeant stroking the girl’s calves as she held her in place on her shoulders. He couldn’t begin to imagine what was going through Hayley’s head right now; he was having a hard enough time processing it himself, and he was a highly experienced combat veteran.

  A moment later and Ruben was at his side again.

  “What’d I tell you?” his friend said quietly. “This is egregiously fucked up.”

  Jax wanted to tell himself to leave it to the people above him and just carry out his orders; this was beyond his pay grade. But he couldn’t get Archer’s words in Stuttgart out of his head: Are you ready to point your weapons at your fellow citizens on American soil, Jax?

  He wasn’t prepared for it, and he doubted anyone else in Echo was, either. But they’d all just seen one man who was more than prepared to do just that. And that man had the support of their superior officers—or at least whoever was on the other end of that satellite phone had it. The result was the same.

  Jax didn’t need to be a company commander to know what the soldiers were thinking: Who the fuck was this guy? And what was waiting for them in Colorado?

  Chapter 4

  The 10th SFG was based at Fort Carson, less than ten miles from the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, so Jax had seen it before. But now, with its face looming in the distance through the windshield of the army transport bus, he couldn’t shake a particular word out of his mind. It was like a drowsy wasp at a late summer picnic that just wouldn’t leave him alone.

  The word was fortress.

  The complex had been built by in the eponymous mountain by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 1960s to house the nerve center for the nascent North American Air Defense Command. It was essentially a hollowed-out mountain that had been filled with more than a dozen three-story buildings, along with an anthill of tunnels to house support systems. A self-contained electrical plant and life-support system, along with millions of liters of fresh water courtesy of a natural spring, allowed it to keep as many as a thousand people alive at any given time, regardless of the circumstances outside the mountain.

  The U.S. government had spent the equivalent of billions in today’s dollars to ensure as many government types and generals as possible would survive a nuclear attack on American soil. Cheyenne was a monument to Cold War paranoia.

  At least that’s what Jax had thought up until a few days ago. Here, now, with Hayley snuggled next to him on the old vinyl bus seat, he wasn’t so sure.

  The checkpoint outside the entrance to the complex was a riot of soldiers milling about, looking at papers and gesturing frantically. Behind them, the mountain looked cheery and green in the bright sunshine, as if trying to distract from what was going on underneath it.

  “Well, that inspires confidence,” Ruben drawled from the seat behind him as the bus rolled up on the security gate. “Classic clusterf—” He suddenly remembered Hayley and didn’t finish.

  “Archer’s already here,” said Jax. “We’re pre-cleared. I couldn’t get much out of him, but based on what he did tell me, I think Echo is here for a specific reason. The rest of the 1st Battalion is still in Germany. The other four battalions are up the road at Fort Carson, but none of the members are here.”

  “Huh. Why you think they need counterterrorism specialists to deal with a pandemic?”

  “Ours is not to reason why.”

  Ruben glowered. “Ours is but to sit around and wonder what the f—heck is going on.”

  Jax glanced down at Hayley as she stared silently at the commotion outside the bus. She was starting to look as bedraggled as the panda she hadn’t let out of her clutches since they left the hotel in Boblingen.

  “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’ll find people here who can contact your grandparents.”

  She hadn’t spoken much since the incident in Atlanta, and had slept—or at least pretended to—for the entire flight to Colorado Springs. No one had been particularly talkative on the plane; Archer’s sidestepping of the incident at the airport had been as clear as if he’d given an order. Pay no attention to the dead men on the floor. Get your asses on that fucking plane.

  Are you ready to fire on them? Archer had asked. Because, God help us, I think that’s where this is headed.

  Hayley’s exhaustion was obvious, and Jax’s heart cramped at the thought of how much she’d already suffered, and of what very likely was still ahead of them before he could get her to Rachel’s parents. Cruz and t
he rest of Echo had gone out of their way to be kind to her, but she wasn’t some mascot for a company of battle-hardened soldiers. She was a sweet, innocent kid—at least she had been until she met him.

  He was prepared to get off the bus and show the guards the company’s orders, but they simply opened the big iron gate and waved them through. The crowd of soldiers parted to make way for them, then reformed behind them as the bus rolled slowly toward the entrance to Cheyenne Mountain Complex. For the first time ever, the sight of the hole in the mountain made Jax think of the mouth of a giant monster.

  ***

  “Okey dokey,” said the compact redheaded corporal behind the stack of electronic components. “Jenny and Richard Townshend, where are you?”

  Her name was Brown and she appeared to be all of twenty years old. Around her, the small room was chock-a-block with wires and boxes. It was one of a half-dozen communications centers that had been set up at Cheyenne in an attempt to either work around whatever computer virus had been hobbling electronics across the U.S. for the past few several weeks, or to leapfrog over it with technology that didn’t need to follow established Internet channels for comms.

  Jax watched the woman’s eyes flit across the three screens in front of her. He couldn’t begin to make sense of the stacks of dusty old radio equipment that had obviously been hauled out of a storage closet. It seemed like she was somehow working the two technologies together, which he supposed wasn’t all that strange: on a fundamental level, wi-fi relied on radio waves. That was about the depth of his understanding, though.

  Beside him, Hayley gripped his hand with a strength he wouldn’t have thought possible from a ten-year-old.

  “O-kayyy,” Brown muttered, more to herself than them, as her fingers tap-danced on the keyboard. “That’s not you… uh-uh… nope…”

  “Are you getting a lot of demands on your time?” Jax asked, hoping to break some of the tension. Searching could take some time, and he wasn’t sure his hand was up to the punishment from Hayley’s grip.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. Her eyes never left the screen. “Even when people can get onto the Internet, there are thousands of sites down. All social media, Amazon, YouTube. Every dot-gov site comes up blank.”

  “Guess we have to resort to actually talking to each other on the phone,” he said with a half-hearted smile.

  “Cell coverage is pretty spotty, too. And when people can get through, a lot of them are saying that no one is answering. Even texts.”

  Jax rubbed his unshaven cheeks. He’d been hearing similar stories from the members of Echo Company. He himself didn’t have anyone to get in touch with; his parents were long gone and he’d been an only child. Special Forces was his family. Rachel’s had been the sole civilian number in the contact list of his cheap Chinese smartphone.

  Darkness was the order of the day, it seemed. Ever since they’d arrived at Cheyenne, Echo had been relegated to getting stowed away in their new quarters in the sprawling complex. Jax hadn’t heard from Archer at all, which rankled him. He’d never seen such a breakdown in the chain of command in all his years in the army. Orders kept the machine moving; when you didn’t have them, it was too easy for the machine to seize up, which made it that much harder to get moving again when you needed it.

  At least Hayley had perked up a little bit at the sheer novelty of the complex. Buildings inside of a mountain never failed to impress visitors to Cheyenne, and she was no exception. They had been allowed to wander some of the corridors to get oriented, but while she took it all in, the knot in Jax’s gut had continued to grow. There should have been more people there. It was built to hold upwards of a thousand, but he estimated he’d seen less than half of that, and 68 of those had been Echo Company.

  “I think I may have something, sir,” the young woman said, pulling Jax out of his thoughts. She turned the right-hand screen toward them so they could see it. On it was a photo of a middle-aged couple seated side-by-side on a hay wagon. The woman’s eyes looked so much like Rachel’s that Jax felt a stab in his heart.

  “That’s them!” Hayley cried, letting go of his hand. “I remember! That’s them!”

  “I managed to get into a Facebook archive that was hosted off the main site.”

  “Can you get to the profile page?” Jax asked.

  Brown scrunched her freckled face. “I can try, but I’m betting they don’t have a phone number listed. The best I can do is to send an email to the address on the account.”

  Hayley’s face dropped. Jax knelt beside her and looked her in the eye.

  “It’s something,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait a bit for them to answer. When they do, we’ll get their number and we’ll call as soon as we can. Okay?”

  She fixed him with a look that was becoming far too common on her young face: bitter disappointment. Each time he saw it, it crushed him a tiny bit more.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “I’ll get in touch the second I hear back from them,” Brown said with a sympathetic smile.

  “Thank you,” said Jax. Hayley was already out the door and headed back into the hall.

  “I wish I had had more,” the corporal said, then leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “To be honest, sir, we haven’t been getting a lot of responses from outside of El Paso County for the last 24 hours. Even on official military channels.”

  He frowned. “The computer virus is getting worse, then?”

  “I don’t think it is a virus,” she said. “The more we see of it, the more it looks like it was a weaponized code of some sort. But even the analog channels are quiet. This base has the most secure military communications system in the Western hemisphere, even without the Internet. The messages are getting through—people just aren’t picking up.”

  Jax tried not to think about the implications of that as he nodded his thanks and joined Hayley in the hallway.

  ***

  Deep in the heart of a mountain, it was impossible to tell that night had fallen as Jax put Hayley to bed in the bunk above Cruz. As the only female member of Echo Company, she’d never had a problem bunking with men, but she requested to be housed in the group of rooms that had been designated as the women’s barracks for Hayley’s sake.

  Jax had noticed a distinct lack of female personnel at Cheyenne—surely no more than thirty—which reinforced his suspicion that the upper brass was stacking the deck with experienced combat troops.

  A couple of off-duty Air Force airmen—he still shook his head at calling women “men”—offered to keep Hayley company for the night after hearing her story from Cruz. By the time he had settled things with them, the girl was snoring softly in her cot, her battered panda tucked tightly under her chin.

  As he made his way down to the mess hall that had been assigned to Echo, he could already feel Cheyenne’s sterile hallways closing in on him. How people managed to live here year-round was beyond him—it hadn’t even been two full days and Jax felt like he was bottled up in a submarine.

  The mess itself was another featureless building lined with long tables next to an open kitchen. It reminded Jax of the American Legion hall in his hometown back in Texas, except instead of the Ladies’ Auxiliary doing the cooking, it was soldiers on KP.

  Ruben caught sight of Jax and waved him over to a table. He was sitting with two other men—Jax could tell by the slight variations in their fatigues that one was an airman and the other a marine—and eating from a silver mess tray. Jax filled his own tray and joined them.

  “Gentlemen,” he said as he took a seat next to the airman. “Don’t get up. What am I about to eat?”

  Ruben wrinkled his nose. “Well, if I was going on looks alone, I’d say pig vomit. But I think it’s spaghetti and some kind of bean soup.” He motioned to the two men. “Speaking of pig vomit, this marine here is Gunnery Sergeant Lee.”

  Lee, a muscular Asian with a narrow face and a bare skull, saluted and nodded. “Captain.”

  “Sergeant,” Jax replied, retu
rning the salute. “Pig vomit is not official army policy regarding marines, just so you know.”

  “That’s a relief, sir,” he said somberly.

  “Long way from home, aren’t you? Closest marine base is Yuma.”

  “Yessir. Special assignment. Commercial flight from Bridgeport two days ago.”

  Jax chewed that over—Why did Bridgeport seem familiar? Before anything could register, Ruben nodded to the airman next to Jax, a wiry guy in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair. “This is Chief Master Sergeant Campbell.”

  Another exchange of salutes.

  “More reconstituted food,” Jax mused. It was all they’d been served since they got here. “Better than MREs, I suppose, but not a hell of a lot.”

  “We’ve been on MREs at Schriever for the past week,” said Campbell. “I’ll take this any day.”

  That surprised Jax. Meals Ready to Eat were combat rations—why would an air force base like Schriever be on rations? But it wasn’t his place to question another branch, so he kept it to himself.

  “So,” said Ruben. “Special Forces, with a few marine specialists, some army and air force support, all tucked into the world’s biggest bomb shelter. Eating food that only requires water and heat in a place that has an endless supply of both. Nothing to see here, right?”

  Jax sighed. “Did you join the army so you could be a smartass, Chief? Because if you did, you’re on the fast track to promotion. I’ll make sure to pass along my recommendation to Col. Archer.”

  “I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking,” he said. “Sir.”

  Ruben’s familiarity around outsiders bothered Jax a bit, but not enough that he let it show. These were extraordinary circumstances, to say the least. Still, at a time when the chain of command seemed to be missing a few links, he wondered if it might not be best to tighten instead of loosen.

  “So you both just got here, too?” he asked.

  They nodded. Lee said, “I’m just happy to be away from Bridgeport. Whatever this virus is, it hit there hard; the airfield was practically deserted when I flew out. I mean, yeah, I was vaccinated, but shit. That’s an ugly disease.”