“If we draw the adversary away, make clear we’re not inside, there wouldn’t be any reason to continue the attack.”
“Unless they just want to kill people. These are terrorists, right?”
“This isn’t random. It’s targeted. Like Damon said. And burning the house down would make a good diversion.”
Lauren said, “This is a trap. We can’t stay still.” She turned to Damon. “What’s your plan?”
Damon turned to Archer and Senator Seymour. “Is there anything sticky in here?”
Archer wiped a red spatter from his face. A deep cut across his forehead oozed. “Apart from my blood?”
Chapter 6
LUKE HUNG IN the air at the edge of the stairs leading up into the house. My son was in his sneakers and red shorts and the English rugby league T-shirt I gave him in the summer. The senator held him up by his waist, and they both hung onto the side of the steel cabinet that was leaning against the wooden pallets.
Archer had jammed one of the red gas canisters in the heart of the pile of wood. We soaked a rag in the gasoline and stuck this into the top of the container. He made sure it was half empty. An improvised explosive device, he explained, and splashed the rest of the fuel across the pallets.
The senator grunted as he tried to hold my son in place.
With one shaking hand, my little boy held the lighter closer to the rag. “When should I do it?”
“Don’t do anything yet,” I called back. “Luke! You hear me?”
“I hear you.” His voice caught. He was as terrified as I was.
The limo’s engine raced.
I glimpsed at the tachometer. In the red.
In the confines of the garage, it felt like we were toying with a caged rhinoceros. We had the two back wheels of the twenty-foot Escalade stretch limo jacked off the ground, and the monster swayed and vibrated as the twelve-cylinder engine roared.
Exhaust spewed from the dual tailpipes.
Chuck held my belt—in case this went sideways, and I got snagged in the limo if it fell off the jack—while I balanced headfirst through the open driver’s-side door. My face right down, below the seat. I jammed a log from the woodpile against the accelerator, so the pedal hit the floor. “Pull me back,” I yelled over the noise.
Archer was at the rear, hanging onto the fender with his weapon slung across his back. “We good?”
“Now, Luke!” Chuck screamed. “Luke, light it now!”
I took two steps toward my son, but Chuck held me back with his good hand. “Let him do it.”
Luke clicked the lighter once, then twice. A small orange flame appeared. It leapt onto the rag stuffed into the gas canister. His eyes wide, my son looked back at us.
“Hurry, get back here,” Chuck said to the senator.
He lowered Luke to the cement as the flame licked higher and engulfed the whole red canister. We waited for them to run to us, both crouching, and I grabbed Luke and lifted him from the ground as we cleared the other side of the limo at a sprint.
Archer was already by the garage door in front of the limo, next to the keypad.
I ripped up the edge of a gray tarp we had drizzled with contact cement we’d found on the workbench. Lauren crouched under the tarp with Olivia in her arms. Damon knelt beside her with his backpacks. The senator, Chuck, Luke, and I huddled beneath it with them and did our best to hide.
The tarp trapped the exhaust stink. Dark beneath the cover, except for the dim glow of Damon’s phone. He had it in front of him, watching it intently.
Archer must have pushed the garage door opener, because I heard the clicking groan of the mechanism come to life over the roar of the limo’s engine. The tarp lifted into the air as Archer pulled himself under. Through a gap between the edge of our cover and the cement, beyond the garage door as it pulled open, I glimpsed a hovering cloud of beady red dots.
“Get the edges down,” Archer whispered urgently.
A gush of wet autumn air slid past my hands against the pavement. With Olivia wrapped around her neck, my wife had hold of a frayed brown rope with both hands.
The garage door whirred and clacked further open. The whine of the ornithopter bots grew louder, but now there was no wall between us. We had only the crinkled cover of the tarp to protect us.
“Now, do it now,” Chuck said.
Lauren pulled on the brown rope.
Olivia squealed. I grabbed her from my wife and whispered, “Honey, quiet, quiet,” as softly as I could and put my hand across her mouth.
“It won’t—” Lauren hauled back on the rope again.
The limo’s engine roared.
The cement beneath my sneakers vibrated through the soles and into my legs as I squatted and tensed, making myself ready to run. It seemed insane to sit still. I sensed the machines searching beyond the cover of the tarp, the unfeeling minds processing and assessing, the image of the open garage door imprinted in a million matrices and distilled down.
Her teeth bared, Lauren grimaced and yanked again.
“Pull, baby,” I said, “you gotta—”
She tumbled back against Damon and knocked him to the pavement as she fell. A deafening squeal over the clattering of the jack skidding across the cement. The stink of burning rubber. The furiously spinning wheels bounced off the pavement once, twice. Flecks of shredded tire skittered under the tarp. The limo careened into the side of the garage door in a rending screech of metal.
Olivia’s body tensed as if an electric current coursed through it. I felt her scream through my hand clamped over her mouth. “It’s okay,” I whispered, “quiet, baby, be quiet.”
The squeal of the limo’s tires receded as it pulled away and sped up. The suffocating stench of burning rubber made my eyes water and burned my throat. Through holes in the old tarp, orange flames flickered. A blast of heat and light flattened the tarp against us, and the plastic cover felt like it melted against my face.
“I’m away,” Damon whispered.
Another screech of metal and distant roar as the limo hit the outer brick wall of the driveway. That was a hundred feet away. The noise of it receded as the car bounced and raced off, replaced by the crackling pop of burning wood. The flames had already spread across the ceiling of the garage.
“Stay still,” Archer commanded. In the dim light and shifting shadows under the tarp, illuminated by the glow of the flames spreading above us, his hands and arms were dimly visible, the fingers spread wide. “Hold still. Damon, you see anything?”
“Three or four in pursuit, the rest went after the limo.”
“Any signal?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Is it still there?” Archer asked.
“Yeah, it’s still there.”
I released my hand from Olivia’s mouth to let her breathe. She whimpered but didn’t scream.
Luke was beside Damon, their faces lit by the glow of the screen. We had positioned one of Damon’s drones by the edge of the garage door, so once the limo cleared it, he used his controller to fly the drone away. It gave us the only clear set of eyes outside.
That, and maybe the cell phone strapped to the bottom of it, might get us a line of communication out, if we could get it high enough. If someone else was close enough.
I leaned over to have a look. For an instant, a grainy image of the limo flashed on the screen as it raced up the road. The image wobbled. Damon urged his drone higher and away.
“Let’s move,” Archer whispered. “Follow my lead.”
I handed Olivia back to Lauren, and with her and Luke and the senator in the middle, Chuck and Damon—who left the drone on automatic pilot as it climbed away—and I formed a perimeter as we began to crouch-walk out of the garage with the tarp covering us.
We had spread the leaves across it, and hopefully enough of them stuck. As many, Damon had decided, as needed to fool the image recognition. Break up any solid areas. Confuse the pattern detection systems.
It seemed a good plan five minutes
ago, but as we cleared the edge of the house, I felt naked. Those things were out there, above us, hunting. Searching.
I tensed, expecting the buzzing whine of one of the little bastards diving at us.
“Dad, I’m scared,” Luke whimpered. He held onto the hem of my T-shirt.
“Me too. Listen to Archer, okay?”
As one, we inched onto the asphalt of the driveway, then sideways onto the concrete walkway. Archer pulled the tarp forward. Away from the walkway. To the grass. Damon had said to avoid anything that would give high contrast. We needed to blend in. They trained these things to hunt for the outlines of people, for faces and arms and limbs. Don’t present them a target, move slow, Damon had explained.
Fat drops of rain pelted the tarp pulled tight over us. They hammered down on it like it was a drum. Loud. We hadn’t talked about that. Was it too noisy? Did these things listen?
“Keep moving,” Archer said. He didn’t bother to whisper.
He crab-walked sideways, quicker, but not too fast. I wanted to run, to sprint away as quick as I could, but I gripped the tarp and willed myself to keep pace with the others. We edged past the bushes by the side of the garage.
And found the first one.
Damon stepped carefully over the body of one of the Secret Service.
“Senator,” Archer said, “retrieve the weapon.”
Leo reached down and pulled the submachine gun from the fingers of the dead man. The grass was slick with blood.
“Luke,” Damon said, “get the bits of the drone.”
Scattered fragments of the bots that had killed the agent were in the grass. My son did his best to collect what he could as we frog-stepped past, putting the bits into the pockets of his shorts.
Step by careful step, we edged as one down the slippery grass slope. Through the dripping holes in the tarp, I saw flames leap into the dark sky from the front of the garage. Tiny red dots hovered high, but they didn’t dart toward us.
Rain battered against the tarp.
The smell of cut grass and damp leaves and wet earth.
At the next dead body, the senator collected another gun, and then another. He had to hand one to Luke, which was terrifying. Seeing my eight-year-old gripping a submachine gun seemed wrong, no matter the circumstance, but Lauren and I didn’t have an extra hand as we held up our sides of the tarp.
We edged down the incline.
Another noise rose above the drumming rain and the crackle and roar of the inferno engulfing the house—the growing rumble of the Potomac rapids.
The water.
It felt like spiders crawled up and down my arms and back as my hands shook and I tried to keep hold of the covering. Just three nights before, I had almost drowned in that white water, and now I was going back into it. There was still brown sludge from the Potomac swilling in the bottom of my lungs.
I couldn’t swim, I had explained to Archer when he came up with the plan. We won’t have to, he’d said. There’s a boat. The Secret Service had moored one to a small dock they had secured in an eddy current by the bottom of the garden, just before the whitewater of the rapids in front of Turkey Island.
Damon had checked that the craft was still there, using visuals from the drone as he flew it up and away before we left the garage—hopefully taking a few of the nasty drone-bots in pursuit—otherwise we would have tried to quiet-walk away through the forest in the rain and dim light.
I almost wished the boat hadn’t been there.
Not almost.
My legs burned from crouching. My hands trembled. My breath came in heaving gasps.
We reached the dock. Its wooden boards creaked beneath my feet. Water sloshed against the rocks by the water’s edge.
The roar of the rapids grew.
Rain battered the tarp.
Distant flames disgorged into the sky over the house. We edged farther out and stepped across another dead body. The senator collected the weapon and fumbled for a magazine from the man’s vest pocket.
“Everybody in.” Archer knelt by the edge of the end of the dock, one hand on the gunwale, the other holding the tarp high.
The craft bobbed and heaved in the waves coming from the river. Damon hopped in first, holding the plastic high so Lauren could hold Olivia as she stepped over the watery gap and in. Luke, with two submachine guns under his left arm, hopped in next, followed by the senator with two more weapons. Chuck knelt by the back, holding up the cover with his right hand while he fumbled with his left to untie the rear rope from its cleat holding the boat in place.
My eyes following the water to the cresting white waves a hundred feet away. The tarp flapped in the wind, out of my grip, and I realized I was unprotected. I looked up.
Chuck reached out to grab me. “Mike, just keep calm, we’re almost—”
I tried to jump into the back, but one foot caught the edge and slipped. I went down hard. My left arm grappled for the edge of the boat, for anything to hold on to, but it drifted away.
I fell face-first into the water.
My arms windmilled. I corkscrewed and squirmed, then gasped in a lungful of water. Panic flashed hot in my veins. I catapulted my legs down and suddenly shot out of the water to my waist. It wasn’t even three feet deep.
“Mike!” Chuck yelled.
He was in the boat, which spun away from me into deeper water. Luke hung over the gunwale, reaching out.
I realized Archer was behind me, thrashing through the water. He shoved me forward. “Go, go, go,” he yelled.
I did my best to push through the deepening water, trying to high-step forward. Strong hands grabbed my waist. Chuck leaned over the edge to me, our hands almost touching. Then Chuck and Luke grabbed me and pulled. I flopped over and into the boat.
A gray, lifeless face stared back at me.
The tarp slithered in the air past us to reveal gray clouds. Crimson dots danced in the wind and rain above us. I got up just in time to see Chuck falling over the edge, into the water.
The rapids thundered as our boat twisted and spun through the current into the maelstrom.
Chapter 7
“HOLD ON,” A voice yelled.
Leo, the senator, was at the controls.
We rocked back and forth in the waves. I slicked water from my face. Checked on Luke, who was doing the same to me. Two inert bodies laid at the bottom of the boat in a black pool of sloshing blood. Lauren was under cover of the hardtop at the front. She put Olivia beneath the dash of the controls, away from the open sky.
I looked up. Red dots raced through the rain.
“There!” Damon yelled.
The boat’s engine thundered to life and we surged forward, brown water boiling in our wake. A squall of wind dragged a sheet of rain over the churning river. I followed Damon’s outstretched hand and finger. Thrashing arms broke the surface. Chuck’s face appeared for an instant. The water had already swept him fifty feet downriver. Archer was in the water behind him, taking powerful strokes toward my friend.
Boats. I hated boats. I hated the water even more. Gritting my teeth, I leaned over the edge toward the swirling brown and extended my hand. “Chuck, Archer, over here!”
Chuck still had hold of one end of the tarp, but we were heading in opposite directions. Leo angled the boat. The nose swept up high and around. I lost sight of them.
“Where are they?” Leo yelled.
“Stay there,” I heard my wife say to Olivia.
“That way,” I hollered to the senator.
I pointed past the bow to the right, toward an outcropping of rocks and bushes I’d last seen Chuck being swept toward. The water frothed and sprayed fifty feet away at the first set of five-foot standing waves as the river tilted downward into the seething rapids.
“Mike!” Lauren was behind me. “Get down. Get hold of something. And Luke, grab your father.” She knelt on the deck and picked up one of the guns.
I grabbed a seat by the rear of the boat and crouched but kept my eyes ahead. I co
uldn’t see any sign of Chuck. Again, I looked up and shielded my eyes from the rain, strained to see any scarlet dots against the scudding gray clouds.
“Everyone get a tight grip and stay low. We’re going to shoot the rapids. I know this water. It’s a short stretch.” Leo brought the nose of the boat around again and headed straight at the foaming water rushing toward us.
“Are you sure we sh—”
The first crunching impact snapped my mouth closed halfway through the word. I had squatted for balance, but the floorboards rushed up and doubled me over. I slammed into the deck.
And went airborne the next instant.
Slow motion as the boat arced through the air. I still had hold of the seat with my left hand and hung tight as my body spun sideways in the air. Luke had wedged himself almost under the seat. A hand grabbed me from behind.
We hit the second wave.
I hammered back into the deck.
A mountain of water flooded over the bow and sluiced in a sheeting roar over the windshield and hardtop. Olivia screamed. Pain lanced in my right knee; my left shoulder felt like it dislocated as it wrenched behind me. The boat went into the air again, but not as high this time. It tilted sickeningly sideways.
Leo gunned the engine.
We lurched back upright and shot forward, skipping back into the air. I held onto a gunwale cleat and scanned the frothing whitecaps we sped through. A metallic tang in my mouth. I spat out a mouthful of blood. There. Was that a hand? “Leo, right there, they’re —”
A hand yanked me over again as I tried to stand up.
“Mike, I said to get down!” my wife yelled.
She crouched above me as I tumbled to the deck. She swept back and forth with one of the Secret Service weapons in her hands, the butt of the rifle against her shoulder. The boat bucked and twisted through the waves, spray flying over us, but Lauren remained steady, her eyes scanning the sky behind us.
The first volley of gunfire was almost deafening.
My head was right beside her weapon. I put my hands to my ears. The muzzle flashed. She repositioned and fired again, this time lowering to one knee. She swore and let rip another burst. I followed the line of her gun to the flickering dot racing toward us. I tensed to jump up and wrap my body as a shield around her.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 5
