by Kenny Soward
Yi walked to the right-hand side of the road, making sure to keep in the shadow of the trees. It appeared that there was an effort to sweep everything away, paltry at best—a rushed job.
Yi took two more strides toward the edge, eyes narrowing and head tilting to the side as he studied the disturbed dirt. Katrya stalked behind him, her eyes also narrowing as she began to see the pattern. Coming to the very edge, Yi looked down upon what appeared to be a line of wreckage covered in branches and bits of leaves and shrubs.
Yi pointed down into the gully. “Two vehicles covered by shrubbery, Katrya. I may have found your missing soldiers.”
Katrya’s jaw dropped as she squinted down at the wreckage. Then she turned and motioned to the cars behind her. “I need three people to bring the climbing gear.”
Ten minutes later, three of Katrya’s soldiers landed in the gully and began crawling around in the debris. They tossed branches and shrubs aside, and soon the shape of Jacques and Victoro’s car became visible.
“Look for their bodies.” Katrya’s lips formed a thin line across her face.
The soldiers nodded and began digging around the edges of the cars for another ten minutes before one of them stood up and raised a hand. “Found them.”
“Jacques, Victoro, and Reggie?”
The soldier down in the gully nodded. “Do you want us to bring them up?”
Yi started to answer, but Katrya cut him off with a seething glare up the road. “No, come up. We’re going to end these Good Folk once and for all.”
They only knew of the name of the militia group after briefly “questioning” one of the survivors who had been left behind. Despite Yi’s internal objections to Katrya’s methods, he’d not intervened because they needed the information. And a knife beneath the fingernails would make a normal man shriek many truths.
“Hold on, Katrya,” Yi said, his voice just above a whisper.
Katrya’s eyes rolled up into her head with impatience, and her body tensed. “What is it, Yi? Are you going to suggest we invite them all for borscht and vodka? Maybe we have party and make friends?”
“That is not what I am suggesting at all.” Yi stepped away from Katrya to the center of the road as his eyes wandered up the hill. “I’m saying we should scout ahead. You and I.”
Yi and Katrya jogged up the curvy mountain road, keeping out of sight of the lookout tower. They reached a scattering of single cabins set into the hill, though none of them appeared to be occupied.
Being in excellent physical condition, Yi’s heartrate increased smoothly, and his breathing remained steady and deep. However, despite how hard he pushed, Katrya’s long legs kept her a few steps ahead, which reminded him that the woman was not only wicked-minded but physically formidable as well.
He would need to keep that in mind should the right moment arise to kill Katrya. Yi’s skin itched as he thought about raising his weapon and gunning the woman down. The one thing that stopped him was that Ivan, Chen, and his last three dragon warriors were down there with Katrya’s soldiers. Katrya’s sudden death would certainly anger her loyal followers, and it would likely get Yi’s men killed.
Yi’s eyes slid from Katrya’s back to the road ahead as they jogged past a row of cabins on their left. Based on his experience in the Tennessee mountains so far, these structures were built to accommodate vacationers as a type of resort. It made sense that the Good Folk would build their base on top of a mountain, as it would be easy to defend against attack.
The hill grew steeper, and the curves tighter. On their right was the mountain, rising high and ominous against the sky, while on their left was a guardrail and a steep drop off the side. Yi realized that if one of the Good Folk drove down the hill, they’d have nowhere to hide. He wanted to warn Katrya to be careful and stick to the brush, but part of him wanted them to get caught or make a fatal mistake that might get her killed. Then, with her competency clearly in question, there would be no mistake who should lead the fighters. It should be Yi.
The road ahead curved sharply to the right, and Katrya jerked back as she rounded the corner, pulling Yi into a small row of wild bushes poking up out of the scrub.
“What is it?” Yi asked. A drop of sweat trickled down his face, and the wind instantly chilled it.
Katrya motioned him to follow, this time slower. They crept around the corner, Yi staying low as he craned his neck to see. A row of cabins came into view with six vehicles parked in front of a heavy roundwood gate. A dozen locals armed with rifles milled around one of the cabins, sometimes glancing at the front door as if curious about what was going on inside. Three people sat in the back of one of the pickup trucks, apparently on guard, although they mostly chatted quietly and huddled against the wind. Another man stood on the lookout platform, gazing toward the west.
“This must certainly be their base,” Yi said. His eyes moved past the cars, gate, and people to where he spotted the familiar maroon Subaru parked up near the first cabin. “And there is the car we have been looking for.”
Katrya spotted the vehicle, clenched her gun tighter, and raised it. “I will call up the team and we will destroy them. Look, they are weary from our first engagement.”
“We cannot simply attack them outright.”
“And why is that?” Katrya no longer seemed so impatient.
“We need the Box, correct?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What if they hid or buried it? If we kill them all, how will we get it?”
Katrya shrugged. “We keep two or three alive and question them.”
“And what if only one or two people know where the Box is?” Yi found it hard to believe the woman was so daft when it came to high-level tactics, although it made sense, considering what she’d said on the cellular tower about having a vendetta against the world. She was a kill-first-ask-questions-later type of operative. “Would it not be better to consider a more certain approach?”
“You have a better idea, then?” Katrya turned back to Yi as the impatience faded from her expression.
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
Chapter 4
Jake, White Pine, Tennessee | 7:23 p.m., Monday
The speaker buzzed and a line of foreign data cascaded down his laptop screen as Jake sat back in the computer chair, scratching his head in frustration. He’d been working on the code translation application for the past several hours and continued to come up with errors.
“Still having issues?” asked a tall, thin young man who peered over his shoulder. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. A kid, in Jake’s eyes. And he acted like it, too, always making smart, unprofessional remarks and smirking like a teenager who hadn’t been taught the most basic of manners.
Captain Stern had introduced the kid as Spitz, their resident computer hacker. The way Spitz had explained it—after Captain Stern left the room, of course—the army had shown up at his door in rural Ohio and enlisted him for the same reason they’d enlisted Jake: to look at some strange, foreign equipment they’d found out in the field.
In this case, it was a mysterious black computer Jake had transported from the Providence FEMA camp all the way to the White Pine troop facility. The computer itself was like nothing Jake had ever seen. It had a pull-out keyboard and screen, and the case held several compartments that he quickly established were used for material analysis.
According to Spitz, it was the fifth one they’d recovered, each of them rigged to melt when their cases were removed. The computer Jake had transported was the exception. With Spitz’s experience and guidance, they’d disabled the self-destruct protocol and removed the case without incident.
That had been their first small victory.
Jake had then peered down at the guts of the computer and determined there was a powerful transmitter connected to the computer core. After mapping out the wires on a piece of paper, Jake had deduced which ones connected the transmitter to the computer core and disconnected them. Then, using
equipment the military had on hand, Jake wired the transmitter into a cable switchboard which ran a single USB cable. Jake plugged the USB cable into a military laptop to feed the transmitter data to his laptop screen.
After they turned on the mysterious computer, lines of code had raced down the screen of Jake’s laptop, but it was difficult to read without a proper format. So, Jake was working on an application that would present it as something readable.
“Well, you’ve made it further than the last guy,” Spitz smirked as he walked away. He wore a T-shirt with the logo of a heavy metal band beneath a camouflage jacket presumably borrowed from a soldier. “As soon as we removed the case, it blew up in his face. He’s recovering in one of the FEMA hospitals.”
“Thanks,” Jake said absently. He’d learned to ignore most of what Spitz said. The kid seemed to enjoy talking a lot before lapsing into sudden bouts of silence. “Almost there, I think.”
Jake glanced into the guts of the mysterious computer and stared at the powerful transmitter in wonder. It made a low hum with soft clicking noises. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It seems to hop between radio waves, microwaves, and, I think, infrared.”
“Like frequency-hopping on the radio, but on a larger scale.”
“That’s exactly right,” Jake mumbled. “Pretty genius, when you think about it. This puppy can work in just about any remote location, using whatever available communications mediums. The military was right to keep cell phone towers and Sat-Fi communication dark.”
“Tell that to all the people trying to get news,” Spitz smirked as his eyes drifted to the ceiling. “I imagine a million Americans searching through their attics for old AM radios. Or sitting in their cars all day, listening to news until they run out of gas.”
“That’s how I got my news up in Boston those first few weeks.” Jake leaned back over his laptop, opened his application window, and fiddled with some lines in the code.
“That’s where the tornadoes hit. Must have been brutal.”
Jake glanced up at the kid with a dark expression. “It wasn’t a good time.”
“Did you see one of them up close? I mean, were you running for your life every second? Did you look back and snap a couple of shots on your iPhone? I would have snapped a couple.”
“We took a tornado to the face.” Jake recalled marching down the hallway of the Westin when the hotel was ripped apart. “You don’t really run from them so much as dive for the next available hole.” Jake shrugged. “Or just stand there in awe while people get sucked up into the funnel.”
Jake hoped that might have backed the kid off, but it only made him more curious.
“Wow, man. You actually saw that? People got sucked up into the funnel? I would have been—”
Jake pounded his fist on the table next to his laptop, rattling everything around them and cutting off Spitz’s words. “You wouldn’t have done anything, man. You would have stared up at it like a dummy until it picked you up and tossed you. They would have found different parts of you all over the city.”
“Sorry, man,” Spitz said, his enthusiastic tone dropping a couple of notches. “I get excited sometimes. My mom says I have a nervous condition. I’m borderline ADHD or something.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Jake said with a sigh, unsure if Spitz was telling him the truth or just playing the victim. He went back to his coding. “Sorry if I offended you.”
“Not at all, man,” Spitz chuckled. “I just get really nervous around people I don’t know well. Can’t stop talking.”
“No kidding.” Jake altered a couple more lines on the laptop screen and then saved the file. He put his finger on the laptop’s mouse pad and moved the mouse over the generic icon for his updated application. “Moment of truth.”
“Fingers crossed,” Spitz said.
Jake double-clicked the icon and waited. A spinning pinwheel icon showed on the screen, indicating the computer was thinking, and then several rows of data flew down the screen until a simple login box popped up, waiting for input.
Jake blinked. “I thought it would be in a foreign language, but it’s English.”
“Makes sense,” Spitz said. “A lot of hackers use English. Especially European hackers. Chinese, not so much. Lucky for us you don’t have to plug in a translation program.”
“I’m definitely not complaining.” Jake glanced up at the kid. “Can you hack in?”
Spitz slapped his hands together and rubbed them. “Move over and we’ll see.”
Jake stood and stepped aside, gesturing to the chair with a flourish.
“Give me about an hour.” Spitz pulled a USB stick out of his pocket and plugged it into one of the secondary ports on Jake’s military-issued laptop.
The door to Captain Stern’s office opened, and the tall commander stepped inside.
“Hello, Captain.” Jake went over with a nod.
Captain Stern glanced over at Spitz before turning her attention to Jake. “Any progress?”
“A lot, actually.” Jake rubbed his bleary eyes. “I managed to make a connection to that strange transmitter. It uses multiple protocols to communicate, maybe even infrared light. It jumps back and forth to make it nearly impossible to jam.”
“No wonder we haven’t been able to keep the various crawler cells from communicating.” Captain Stern nervously bit her lip before she regained her professional composure. “Do you think you can make a jammer that would work?”
“I can try.” Jake gave her an exasperated expression before he gestured to the kid at the keyboard. “But it looks like Spitz can take it from here. Surely you have other communications people on hand.”
“None like you, Jake,” Stern assured him. When she saw Jake’s expression of frustration, she shifted her position and lowered a hard gaze at him. “Look, Jake. My husband was stationed in Europe when all this started. I thought they might send him home, but he has to stay due to the rising tensions between some of the old Eastern Block countries and our allies. And we jerked Spitz out of his basement to help us on this project. No one asked for this, but we need your help to see it through to the end.”
Jake was already nodding. “I know. Sorry. I’m just feeling really thin right now.”
“If we can cut off the crawlers’ communications,” Stern urged, “this will all be over sooner than later. We can kick them out of the country and retaliate against whoever was responsible for this. Thousands of Americans have died, and we can’t stop, you can’t stop, until the job is done.”
Jake knew she was right, though it was hard to keep saying “yes” over and over. He was missing out on something happening at home, and his instincts told him he needed to be there for his family. With civilian communications still down, there was no way to get a message to them despite that they were so close.
But Sara’s voice wasn’t telling him to come home. It was telling him to quit crying about his situation, remember his duty to his country, and do something that might save thousands of lives. That’s why Jake knew he couldn’t return home and face his family without doing everything he could for others in need.
Gathering his final wind, Jake ticked off the list of things he’d need in his head. “I need some soldering materials, various receiver and transmitter pieces, a processer board, and batteries.”
“Right this way,” Stern said, grinning thinly, thankfully, as she gestured to a door on the opposite side of the room.
Chapter 5
Yi, Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Later that evening, Yi looked up the sheer face of the cliff as the lead climber, the German named Elsa, drilled a hole for their last anchor. Ivan and Chen were several yards below him, waiting for climbers to move up. Elsa finished drilling her hole, dropped the drill on its tug line, and hammered in an anchor before clipping to the new safe spot.
The drill’s whirling and grinding sounds were swallowed by high winds that tore across the cliff’s face, and Yi clenched his body as a particularly brutal gust hit the s
ide of the mountain and came straight up, blowing him several feet off the rock before he settled against it once more.
It was a dangerous climb, but if Yi was correct, it would get them to the top of the mountain without using the road.
Elsa flashed Yi a thumbs-up sign before she climbed over the lip of the cliff and on to what Yi presumed was level ground. He glanced down to see he was at least five hundred feet above the base of the cliff. Trees swayed back and forth below him in a hypnotic, dreamy way.
“Don’t look at me!” Ivan’s cold eyes stared up at him, his face red and windblown. The big Russian looked about at home on the cliff’s face as a fish did on dry land. “Go up! Up, Yi. Up!”
Yi scoffed and turned his head upwards, then he continued his ascent. Once he reached the final anchor, he hooked himself in and climbed the last bit before coming to an angled mound of hard-packed earth that allowed him to fall forward and crawl. Breathing heavy, he kept going until Elsa reached out to pull him the last few feet.
Finally on solid ground, Yi began removing his climbing equipment and stepped into a small stretch of forest that ascended another thirty yards. Climbing through the trees wasn’t hard, but if Yi slid down, he would have a hard time stopping himself from plunging off the cliff.
Soon, Yi was standing beneath the wooden deck of a cabin, its anchor poles fixed firmly into the flat rock below his feet. He found a rock to sit on and waited for the others. From where Yi sat, the wind was quiet and even showed signs of dying down completely. Perhaps the worst of the hard weather was over, but he knew that a dreadful winter loomed just ahead—a winter he didn’t plan on seeing. It was growing into early evening, and the light was already beginning to fade from the sky.
He kept his eye on Elsa, and she certainly kept her eye on Yi. She’d been doing so for the last two days, ever since they’d resupplied their weapons. She was Katrya’s spy.