Freeman must have had an Explorer hidden somewhere or he wouldn’t have been able to get the SEALs. I hoped he had a more common bird as well. He’d stand out flying a hundred-year-old self-broadcasting antique.
I asked, “Do you have a plane hidden somewhere?” and he said, “We’re going to hitch a ride on a cargo ship.”
Watson shook my hand, but he didn’t wish me luck. I think he wanted me to fail. Emily hugged me. She kissed me on the cheek. She said, “Wayson, think about what you’re doing. You’re making a mistake.”
I said, “Emily, I’m doing what I have to do.”
She didn’t answer.
Emily and Travis wouldn’t be safe, so Freeman went with them. I hoped he’d return.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SIX
Date: August 30, 2519
He wasn’t as skilled as the late Jeff Harmer, but Naens knew his way around computers. He knew how to search and how to find back doors into encrypted information.
Using Freeman’s computers, he tapped into networks that had changed owners several times over the years. The Unified Authority built them, then the Enlisted Man’s Empire captured them, and now they belonged to the Unified Authority again. Each new owner had built its own level of security on top of past security measures, but when Naens went hunting, he never came up dry.
He checked the computers several times to see if the Unifieds had spotted Freeman or Watson as they traveled south. He looked for information about the sixth U.A. ship, the one that vanished. He looked for any movements suggesting the Unifieds had located us. Now I added a new search to his routine; I had him look for MacAvoy’s tunnels.
“Do you think they made it to the Territories?” I asked Naens, as he played with the computer.
“Yes.”
“Do you think it or do you know it?”
“I think it.”
Freeman might have set up the computer system, but Naens navigated through those computers in ways that Freeman never dreamed of. His fingers were long, round, and sharp; it was as if they had been made for typing. When he typed, his fingers tapped the keys so quickly that it sounded like one long click.
Naens brought up one map of the capital, then another and another—some showed buildings, some showed streets, some showed patterns I didn’t recognize. He examined each carefully. I hoped he was looking for MacAvoy’s tunnels, but I couldn’t be sure.
I excused myself to go look through our inventory.
Freeman had charges and guns, but he didn’t have anything big—no missiles, rockets, or bombs. During the final days of the Unified Authority, as the aliens sped through the galaxy incinerating planets, Freeman had developed a new respect for human life. It didn’t stop him from killing enemies, but he worried about preserving life. In that way, he wasn’t all that different from Watson and Emily.
I wasn’t sure I wanted him to return from the Territories. If he came back, he might try to stop me.
I found some grenades and RPGs. He had a couple of rifles and a rack of M27s. He had a complete set of combat armor, something I desperately wanted, but it had been customized for his seven-foot frame. Had I put it on, the knee joints would have been somewhere near the tops of my thighs.
Naens called, “Hey, Harris, I found your tunnels.”
I went back to have a look.
Naens sat at the computer studying a three-dimensional wire-frame display. He said, “This wasn’t just a train track, Harris; it was a commuter system that went everywhere, even under the rivers.” He pointed to thick stripes that he identified as “Potomac” and “Anacostia.”
“If you detonated a couple of tactical devices down there, you could destroy all of Washington, D.C.,” he said. He meant nuclear weapons. I felt like the ghost of Perry MacAvoy had just tapped me on the shoulder, and this time he wasn’t threatening me with a pearl-handled pistol.
I said, “We don’t have any nukes.”
“Yes we do,” said Naens. To the SEALs, an objective was an objective. Once they accepted an operation, they didn’t worry over questions about morality.
“Where did you find a nuke?”
“We have three tactical devices; they’re already in the tunnels,” said Naens. “General Pernell MacAvoy checked them out of the National Armory on August 21.”
“MacAvoy,” I whispered. “MacAvoy.” He’d already placed the nukes in the tunnels by the time he brought up the idea. Why didn’t you pull the trigger? I asked the ghost with the pearl-handled pistol.
Suddenly, pieces began to fall into place. Now that the Unifieds had control of the armory, they’d know that MacAvoy had checked out a trio of nukes.
The Unifieds hadn’t found us because we weren’t their top priority. They needed to know what happened to the nukes.
Suddenly, I was glad that Freeman had left with Watson and Emily. If he knew what we were discussing, he might have shot us both.
“How big are the bombs?” I asked.
“Sixty-two megatons apiece,” said Naens.
“Big,” I said. I’d seen what nuclear weapons can do. I’d fired a few in my time. If we detonated three sixty-megaton bombs under Washington, D.C., the entire Unified Authority would go up in flames. Watson would be safe. So would Kasara.
No more Washington, no more Unified Authority, I thought to myself, and as I thought that, warmth and strength returned to my limbs.
Pugh could become the de facto leader of the New Olympian Territories. Wouldn’t that be rich; he’d be in a position to legalize his own organization.
Something somewhere in my psyche nagged at me, warning me not to pull the trigger on MacAvoy’s bombs. I didn’t know why. All I knew, truly knew, was that the idea sounded glorious. I would take out the bad guys and the people who had turned their backs on me and my kind.
And then I came up with an idea that made absolutely no sense, except in principle, but making sense no longer mattered. I decided that I would kill Andropov . . . I would snap his neck or maybe shoot him right between the eyes. I would have the pleasure of watching him die, then I would detonate my nuclear crematorium, and Washington, D.C., would erupt like a volcano. I’d be in the middle of it, but that was just fine.
“Do you mind dying?” I asked Naens.
“Depends on where and how.”
“Underneath the Linear Committee Building,” I said. “We kill Andropov, then we set off the nukes.”
Naens smiled. I don’t know if I’d ever actually seen a SEAL smile before that. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. He had a face like a bat—a snout of a nose, tiny dark eyes that looked like black beads, and gray leather skin. He had sharp teeth. He said, “There will be a lot of collateral damage.”
“An entire city,” I said.
He responded, “The city of my enemy engulfed in flames; now that is a death I can live with.”
We started making plans, looking at maps, figuring out details. I liked the idea of waiting a day, but I changed my mind when Ray Freeman called.
He began the chat by saying, “Our friends are safe in their new home.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said.
“Have you made plans?” he asked.
Have I made plans? Have I made plans? There’s no way he can know what we’re planning, I thought. But this was Freeman; he might have bugged his own nest. “Sure,” I said, giving out as little information as possible.
“Plans involving tunnels?” he asked.
I looked back at the computer. I should have known. He’d bugged his own damned computer, the paranoid bastard. He’d want to know if anyone had accessed it. He had some remote screen that let him see exactly what we were seeing.
“It’s just like I said, they’re under the LCB,” I said, hoping to all hell the bastard didn’t notice the three nuclear bombs.
“And you’re planning to storm the castle,” said Freeman. I heard no suspicion in his voice. I couldn’t read his expression.
“Do you want to share in the fun?” I asked, prayi
ng to the war gods that he’d decided to stay in the Territories.
“There’s a plane leaving the Territories in a couple of hours,” he said. “It’s headed straight to D.C.
“I wouldn’t want you to start the show without me.”
When he hung up, I told Naens, “We better get started ASAP.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVEN
Under other circumstances, I would have preferred to wait for Freeman. He knew the city better than I did. He knew all about explosives, and his rifle would have come in handy as well.
Only, he might have turned that rifle on me. If he were here, he’d fight against us. I hoped he stayed in the Territories; I didn’t want to kill my only old friend.
We set out for the tunnels that night.
The nearest train station was only a few miles away. Over the centuries, it had been abandoned, then sealed, and the entrance had been filled with concrete, but according to the records, the station itself had not been touched. It would still be down there, dark and silent, just as forgotten as the men who built it.
There were nearby sewers and pipes. After searching antiquated city plans, Naens located a sewer that nearly intersected with one of the old train system’s ventilation shafts.
We’d enter unlit sewers, rappel in shafts that hadn’t seen electricity in over three hundred years, then traverse train tunnels so old that even their ghosts would have abandoned them. Now that we had our route to the LCB, I needed gear; I needed a Marine combat visor with its multiplicity of lenses and sensors. Once we entered the LCB, we’d run into an army of guards and soldiers. Cowards like Tobias Andropov surround themselves with protection. If I wanted to kill Andropov, I’d need shielded armor, the armor used by U.A. Marines.
I said, “This job would go more smoothly if I had combat armor.”
“Let’s go shopping,” Naens said. “Shopping,” that was SEAL terminology for finding some unlucky Marine and taking the armor off his cold, dead body. I liked working with the SEALs.
* * *
Naens and I split up. He went to find the train station while I jumped into the jeep and drove thirty miles south to a place the Unifieds wouldn’t think to search for me, Marine Corps Base Quantico.
Night had fallen, by the way. I reached Quantico township at 21:30 and drove through the sleepy little burg unnoticed. If there’s one sight the people of Quantico have grown used to, it’s jeeps, and I had stolen a jeep.
Quantico township sits like a civilian oasis in a military wasteland. The giant Marine base surrounds the quaint little town on three sides. Driving down those streets, I saw plenty of Marines, but none of them wore combat armor, so I drove on, into the dark woods.
The Marine base in Quantico is big—one hundred square miles that includes expanded living facilities, a golf course, and a cemetery. I’d been to that base many times, but as I viewed it from pine-covered hills to the west, I spotted something new, a freshly turned mound of dirt that was thirty yards long and no more than ten feet wide. I knew what it was and who lay beneath it.
Summer was ending, and fall had not yet begun. A languid breeze filtered through the darkened woods, swinging branches, revealing stars blocked by trees. Below the hills, lights sparkled around the mostly empty Marine base. A few jeeps drove along the roads. Lights shone in some of the barracks. Guards in armor patrolled the perimeter.
I didn’t need to make a house call in this case. Once I rang their doorbell, the Marines would send armor my way on the hoof.
The ownership of MCB Quantico might have changed hands, but the operating procedures were static. The Unifieds had placed sensors in these woods. During my brief stint in management, I saw no reason to remove those sensors. I stood beside a three-inch-tall stake at that very moment. The nub at the top of the staff contained a camera and a microphone. I placed my foot on that nub and smashed it.
The loss of a ground sensor would not set off alarms. Deer walked through these woods. So did the occasional poacher. The men monitoring the security station would see that they had lost contact with their sensor, but they wouldn’t assume the worst. After all, who would spy on a Marine base?
Still, procedures are procedures; Base Security would send a couple of sentries to investigate. I hoped they’d send a single Marine, and I hoped he’d come wearing armor.
An hour passed before my knight in shining armor appeared. I wanted him to come alone, but the deliveryman arrived with a companion.
They came in a jeep. I watched them through the scope of my rifle . . . well, Freeman’s rifle. I could pick one off. If I got lucky, and the second one was dense, he might try to help his buddy before booting up his shields. Once those shields went up though, everything would change.
They parked. Because they wore their helmets, I couldn’t tell if they were chatting or kept focused on their work. More likely than not, they would let their minds wander. Why not? Checking a faulty sensor—could orders get more mundane?
The moon was bright enough for me to keep an eye on them while they stood by the road, but the woods were dark, and they disappeared behind trees as they walked. Beams of moonlight filtered through the canopy, silver, slanted rays as faint as mist.
The men didn’t carry any weapons other than the fléchette cannons on their right wrists. I’d been hit by fléchettes before. The ammunition the fléchettes were made out of was depleted uranium fragments coated with neurotoxin. A shot through the head or heart would kill you in an instant. A shot through a finger or toe would kill you, too, but it might take a few seconds for the poison to do its job.
The shields were the key. I had to kill both of them before they powered their shields. My rifle wasn’t the right tool for the job. The scope helped me see in the darkness, but I could have shot by the light of the moon almost as easily. Rifles are hard to aim at close range, especially in a forest with trees blocking your line of sight.
I let them walk past me, then I slipped away. I trotted to my jeep, which sat hidden behind an alcove of trees.
Working silently, I slid Freeman’s rifle into the back of the jeep and pulled out a pistol, an S9. The S9 was made for close combat; I’d have chosen that baby for any kind of close-range combat except hand-to-hand.
Now that I had a weapon, my next trick would be to use it on the delivery boys. I needed to find them and shoot them. I kept my breathing soft and even, watched where I stepped, and moved in a crouch. Step on a branch, and they might hear me. This was a forest; there were a lot of branches on the ground.
I didn’t lean against the trees, but I used them to conceal myself as I walked. Those Marines had every advantage. Their helmets hid the sounds of their breathing. Their visors let them see in the dark. The interLink gear in their visors would let them speak to each other without my hearing them.
I circled back and found the place where I’d been hiding. I wanted to ambush them as they returned to their jeep. Time passed slowly, and I began to worry.
Had they already found the broken sensor? How long could I wait? How long should I wait? If they found it, did they dismiss it? Had they already started back toward their jeep?
I took a few steps toward the broken sensor, now more keenly aware of the darkness than I had been before. The moonlight provided a stripe here and a stripe there, but I was more blind than not. I had to walk slowly. They had night-for-day vision. Their depth perception would be limited, but they could see everything around them.
I heard the snap of a dried branch breaking. Could be an animal, I told myself, but I knew that it wasn’t. They were near. Was I in their path? Would they see me before I spotted them? They didn’t know about me, but they could see in the darkness. I was looking for them, but I was nearly blind.
I pressed against a tall pine tree and circled around it, my pistol ready, my breath stuck in my throat. I stepped and stopped, stepped and stopped, moving around the trunk of the tree slow and ready to pounce, like a cat sneaking up on a bird.
I found them. O
ne stood over the sensor, a tall, lanky fellow, just about my size. The other guy was short; I couldn’t have fit in his armor. The short one knelt over the sensor.
It would have been good if they separated. The courteous move would have been for the short one to go warm up the jeep while my armor bearer tried to fix the sensor that I had so thoughtlessly smashed.
They stayed together. The guy on his knees gave up on fixing the sensor and they started back to their ride. Shit, I thought. I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything; I barely allowed myself to breathe.
They moved slowly, and I circled ahead of them, found a tree that was thick enough to hide behind, and waited. Hidden behind the tree, I’d be invisible. Hell, even if they tried to scope the area out using heat vision, they’d only get a trace of me behind this wide trunk. A moment passed, and another, then they stepped into view.
Meaning to shoot the taller Marine in the head, I waited as they approached my position. I kept my S9 low and ready and held my breath. They stepped closer, maybe ten feet away. Closer, just a yard. I’d shoot him through the side of his helmet. There’d be blood in the helmet, but I didn’t care so long as the visor still worked. They stepped past me without a sideward glance. I drew in a final breath, brought up my gun, and the son of a bitch looked right at me as I shot. My fléchette hit him square in the face, killing the Marine but also drilling a hole through the front of his visor.
The tall one dropped to the ground and started twitching. His partner surprised me. He reacted like a trained Marine. Instead of ducking for cover or shooting at me, he powered up his shield and fast. He had good reflexes; he had his shield up so fast I never got a shot. An orangish gold envelope of light formed around him, and I ran away.
I didn’t know if the man in the shielded armor had had time to raise his wrist cannon or not; I was too busy weaving around trees, sprinting across the forest floor. I leaped a fallen log like a hurdler.
Scrambling through the dark forest didn’t go well. I rolled my ankle and brushed my shoulders against trees. I ran too close to a low-hanging branch and it scratched my cheek and neck. Had it been two inches higher, it might have stabbed my right eye.
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