Interrupt

by Jeff Carlson

  Drew’s guts were in a knot. He was caught between two oaths, one to the Navy, one to ROMEO. His honor was at stake—and his memories of Julie.

  It wasn’t too late to warn General Strickland instead of helping Captain Fuelling. If he warned Strickland, Drew could ensure he wasn’t lining himself up for a jail sentence. He wanted his life to count for something. But he was convinced it was for the greater good.

  “Why us?” Bugle asked.

  He’s tired, Drew thought. Me, too. “The original data on China’s EMP weapons was ours, so they knew we’d believe it. More than that, the other bunkers in range of Aegis ships are too secure. ROMEO didn’t think there was any way to break a team loose.”

  “But the president—”

  “We have to do this,” Drew said. “If China keeps scratching at us for another month, or for a year, there won’t be any working electronics in North America even if the pulse stops.”

  Patrick said, “When do we go, sir?”

  “Three hours. The men sleeping in the barracks will relieve the guard shift outside. Our SEALs are ready to secure the complex doors. There’ll be no one inside except us and six or seven men in the command center.”

  “Why can’t we just grab the Osprey when we go back outside?” Bugle said.

  “The bunker personnel will know we took it. They’ll alert everyone else in the area. We need to control communications before we take off.”

  “Mutiny isn’t the answer,” Bugle said.

  “I know what you’re feeling—”

  “We’re supposed to be the good guys.”

  Bugle had never argued with him before, and Drew felt a glint of pride. He nearly grinned. In the moment, his reaction was perverse, but he liked this new Bugle. The angel who’d always sat on Drew’s shoulder wanted to steer him true.

  “I know what you’re feeling,” Drew repeated. “This sucks. But stepping outside the normal chain of command is what we’re trained to do.”

  “Not now,” Bugle said. “Not with millions of people lost or dead. You said it yourself. If we launch, the Chinese might empty their silos before they realize we’re only hunting their satellites. There’ll be a holocaust.”

  “Our guys can hit those satellites as they pass directly overhead, so the SM-3s won’t lift far enough to look like nukes. They’ll never reach suborbital trajectories, much less turn and reenter the atmosphere. Each strike will be done before China can react.”

  “They’re on a hair trigger. We both are. You might cause our own guys to launch if two of our ships go dark.”

  “You have your orders, Lieutenant,” Drew said, emphasizing Bugle’s rank. “This is a ROMEO directive.”

  Bugle retreated from Drew and Patrick. In doing so, he cleared room for his hands, but Drew couldn’t believe his friend would pull his sidearm. “Stop,” Drew implored him. “I know this is tough. I don’t like it, either.”

  “Then why—”

  “We need you.”

  “Let me finish,” Bugle said, chafing at the interruption.

  Drew was willing to let him have his say, but Patrick shifted to one side as far as the corridor would allow. A second later, footsteps walked lightly on the metal deck behind Bugle. Bugle glanced over his shoulder. Then his hand settled on the 9mm Glock at his hip.

  “Don’t do it,” Drew said.

  Emily walked into the intersection. Level One had a simple pattern of corridors in a square-cornered 8. The men stood in the central corridor. She’d entered from the east side of the complex facing the cavern and the labs.

  Her blue eyes were round with trepidation. “Drew, I’m sorry, I know you told me to stay below,” she said. “I—”

  Patrick lunged at Bugle.

  They crashed into the wall as Emily leapt back, screaming.

  Bugle cracked his pistol against Patrick’s head, once, twice. Patrick toppled. Bugle shoved his weapon at Drew and shouted, “We don’t have to do this! You can tell Fuelling no if we—”

  Patrick groped at Bugle’s legs, almost dropping him. Drew saw his opening. He’d drawn his own gun. But he couldn’t shoot his friend.

  They stared at each other in the white corridor.

  The standoff tipped in Drew’s favor when Patrick regained his feet, pressing one hand against his bleeding scalp. “Don’t fucking move!” Bugle shouted. His face was hectic with emotion, yet he held his ground.

  On the level above them, the floor clanged beneath other men’s feet. Behind him, Drew heard shouting in the barracks. He’d planned to approach their teammates one at a time with Bugle and Patrick, ganging up on each man, using their camaraderie to convince Macaulay and the others. Now that seemed impossible. The corridor would become a mob scene when the bunker personnel responded to their yelling.

  “It’s not too late for you to help us,” Drew said, aiming his pistol at the floor.

  Bugle’s eyes widened.

  Drew thought he could bring his friend back into the fold, but his mouth was working faster than his brain. “We can tell them you two threw some punches about something stupid,” he said. “A girl.”

  The word must have punched the wrong buttons in Bugle. He’d viewed Julie as a danger to their friendship. Then Emily had also chosen Drew.

  Bugle shook his head violently and yelled, “Security! Security!”

  Emily was extraordinary. She whacked her arm into Bugle’s hands with a simple kihon maneuver, knocking the pistol from his grip.

  Somehow Bugle caught the weapon as he crouched and bent. Drew and Patrick rushed him. Bugle’s gunshots were deafening in the narrow metal shaft of the corridor. Two bullets rocked through Patrick’s side. He grabbed Bugle’s uniform as he sagged, hauling Bugle down. Their momentum smashed Drew’s fist into Bugle’s cheek like a hammer. Bugle’s head snapped back. In the collision, all three of them dropped their pistols.

  Patrick’s blood was warm on Drew’s chest.

  Bugle sat up, groping for a weapon. Emily snatched it first and kicked another pistol away from him. Drew grabbed Patrick. The huge Marine weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. He coughed red splatters onto Drew’s leg.

  “You stupid shit!” Drew shouted at Bugle. “Get back!”

  The pain in Bugle’s eyes was more than physical. He stayed down.

  “Help me,” Drew said to Emily. “This way.”

  “Why you are fighting!?” she cried.

  On the west side of the corridor, five men charged into the intersection. They stopped in the skirmish line, one kneeling, four standing. Three held assault rifles. The other two brandished handguns. They were Air Force and Army, not his teammates. Drew knew them—but not well enough.

  “Freeze!” a soldier screamed as an Air Force major yelled, “What’s happening!? Commander Haldane! What happened here?”

  Drew shoved Emily away from them—east—the direction she’d come. He was slowed by Patrick’s bulk. “Go. Don’t stop.”

  “I said freeze!” the major yelled.

  Drew thought he could reach the command center before anyone sent a warning from Bunker Seven Four to U.S. Command. Radio transmissions were always hampered by the pulse. First he needed to rendezvous with Fuelling and the SEALs, but he was ten feet from the bend in the corridor. He couldn’t move fast enough with Patrick. The nearest door led to an AC unit. Drew glanced back at the armed men.

  “Don’t make me shoot!” the major yelled.

  Bugle must have had second thoughts or, at least, he didn’t want to see Drew killed. He rose between Drew and the airmen.

  “Drew!” he shouted.

  He bought them enough time for Emily to reach the corner. Only Patrick and Drew remained in the corridor when the major ran after them.

  The major shoved past Bugle and opened fire.

  In his trailer, Marcus eased through his door as the guard shouted in the front room. The linoleum floor squeaked. But the guard didn’t hear.

  “Say again?” the guard yelled. He was on the phone.

 
Outside the trailer, people were shouting. Marcus had heard two dull bangs. He hadn’t been sure if those noises were pistol shots until a rattle of gunfire drifted through the thin trailer walls, but the sound was muffled. Someone was shooting inside the complex.

  “I don’t know, sir!” the guard said. “I’ll check, sir!”

  He would have seen Marcus if he’d turned. Instead, he juggled the cordless phone in one hand as he grabbed his M4 and flicked off the safety, moving toward the trailer’s window, which faced the complex.

  General Strickland did not station his best people in the trailer with Marcus. The soldier was a castoff from a Guard unit who’d been rescued in Sacramento almost as an afterthought. He probably considered Marcus an old man, and he was absorbed with the phone. “I see our guards at the complex hatch, sir,” he said. “There are no civilians in the tunnel.”

  Marcus took three more steps up the short hall, testing for creaks. Once he pulled his toes back from a soft spot. Otherwise his feet settled perfectly into the linoleum. His thoughts were a quiet gulf completely unlike the guard’s excitement.

  “Roger that,” the guard said. “Where was—”

  The shouting outside increased.

  “I have men pointing weapons at each other, sir!” the guard said. “Our men! They’re ordering each other to stand down! The two soldiers at the hatch—Yes, sir. The men who jumped them are Navy SEALs. I count four against two if—The soldiers at the hatch surrendered! Oh, Jesus. They surrendered. One of the SEALs has them on the floor. The other three SEALs ran into the complex. Yes, sir.”

  The guard set the phone on the windowsill, perhaps needing an instant to steel himself. Marcus thought he’d been ordered into the fight, but whatever was happening, Marcus did not want the bunker personnel to regain control. Marcus wanted chaos.

  A short lamp rested on an end table by the TV. It looked like the desk lamp he’d used as a club on the first day of the interrupts.

  He reached for it.

  BUNKER SEVEN FOUR

  Behind Drew, the major’s rifle blazed through the corridor. Impact tore Patrick from Drew and knocked them off their feet.

  Patrick made one sound. “Guh—”

  He thudded into the floor. Drew rolled with their momentum, losing his knife as he scrambled forward.

  The corridor ended in a T. Emily was behind the corner. She latched onto Drew’s sleeve with her left hand. She held the 9mm Glock in her right. He would never forget her face. Most of her hair had sprung loose from her ponytail, framing one cheekbone. The rest of her hair sprouted in an unruly knot, but it was her eyes and mouth that held him. She bared her teeth and roared: “Get up!”

  Drew wasn’t hurt. A bullet had creased his left wrist, but Patrick had taken the other rounds. Blood pooled from Patrick’s motionless corpse.

  In seconds, the barracks personnel would follow him.

  Drew leapt up, clapping his hands on Emily’s pistol. He crushed her fingers against the trigger, firing twice. Both shots went low. Drew wasn’t aiming. He wanted to delay the people behind him.

  His second shot took an airman in the chin as the man ducked around the corner with his M16. Drew’s bullet swatted him back in a hideous burst of gore. Someone else yelled behind the airman, who warbled, “Aaaayaa—”

  The thrashing airman stopped the others as Drew wasted precious seconds in horror and remorse. He ripped the Glock from Emily, firing four rounds into the ceiling as they ran.

  They were up against the east wall of the complex. An exit into the cavern stood behind them. Another was in front. And beyond it, at the southeast corner, was a stairwell to the command center on Level Three.

  “Go!” Drew shoved Emily toward the stairwell. Captain Fuelling would join him in taking the command center if Fuelling and his SEALs were able to enter the complex.

  If not, this would be a short fight.

  “Stop! Stop!” Emily cried. “Why are we—”

  Ahead of them, out of sight in the exterior corridor on the south side, weapons blazed. Drew recognized the chatter of an M4 and the higher pitch of two MP5s, the submachine guns preferred by Navy SEALs.

  Fuelling is inside! he thought with jubilation. Anything except victory would be a sin. If they didn’t take the command center, Patrick had died for nothing.

  But the submachine guns were retreating. Who was there to oppose the SEALs?

  The people on Level One were Drew’s teammates. He couldn’t hurt them.

  Then there was a lull in the gunfire. A man sobbed, badly hurt. Drew heard Orion barking. In a whiplash of adrenaline, his confidence became dismay. He might reach the SEALs before he and Emily were caught, but then what? The SEALs would be outnumbered and pinned from both sides.

  The hatch leading into the cavern was open. Drew decided his course of action as a man backpedaled around the southeast corner with an MP5. He was one of Fuelling’s SEALs. He swung his weapon at them.

  Drew shoved Emily down and shouted, “Navy! Navy!”

  The SEAL didn’t fire. Instead, he yelled at someone out of Drew’s sight. “Hold ’em! Hold ’em! We got reinforcements!”

  Drew stayed with Emily, crab-walking her to the hatch. She tried to stand. He shoved her down again into the fresh air curling through the gun smoke. “Get outside,” he said.

  “What about you!?” she yelled.

  He didn’t answer. He pushed her through the hatch, intending to run to the SEAL. If she was out of harm’s way, he could help turn the tide. The battle for control of the complex might not be lost—

  An M4 raked the SEAL at the corner.

  The SEAL crumpled, his chest heaving as he bubbled and choked. Shouting men advanced on him. Behind Drew, two airmen dodged into the other end of the corridor. Bugle was with them. Drew began to throw down his pistol and raise his hands, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  The airman on point screamed, “Don’t do it!”

  The other airman opened fire.

  In the cavern, at the base of the complex, Emily stood shaking with her hands covered in blood. She’d fallen down the five-foot ladder from the hatch to the cavern floor, where she’d landed on two bodies.

  She didn’t see anyone else. People were shouting somewhere in the pools of darkness. They sounded like they were near the emergency access from the cavern into the main tunnel.

  So much blood.

  The slick fluid was on her arms and knees. It was in her hair. The dead men were a soldier and a SEAL. They sprawled in a heap.

  Emily lifted her eyes to the trailers along the cavern wall. The nearest was the trailer that served as the labs’ computer room and the jail. The door hung open. Another soldier lay in the entrance. She couldn’t see more than his arms and head, but she realized his skull had been crushed. The dent behind his ear was as large as her fist.

  Spent cartridges lay around him, glinting in the light. An M4 was on the concrete floor of the cavern. Someone had emptied the weapon from the doorway, probably after clubbing the soldier and taking it from him.

  Where is Marcus? Emily thought with a deep welling of loathing and fear.

  She reached for the ladder. Her instinct was to climb back to Drew. Then a spray of gunfire banged against the inside of the complex above her as someone hurtled through the hatch. His boot smashed into her shoulder. Emily fell. She scrambled up again, frantic to get away from him and the slick bodies. But it was Drew.

  “Marcus got out of prison,” she said urgently.

  He pulled her into the shadows. “They’ll think we did this!” he said, stepping over the dead SEAL’s bent legs.

  Emily was still staring at the dead men when a soldier crouched in the hatch with the wicked silhouette of an M16. She saw him take in the bodies, sweeping his rifle down and sideways to cover each human shape.

  Emily and Drew were fifteen feet away. Her shoes scuffed against the concrete.

  The soldier at the hatch fired. The muzzle flashes were blinding. Emily felt more than heard the 5.56mm ro
unds zip past her head.

  Drew dragged her beneath the complex. A two-foot gap existed between the raised structure and the steel pipes running along the cavern floor. Emily cracked her temple as they ducked in. Then they were through. The flat space was almost four feet tall between the cold dirt and the steel beams overhead. Thick steel coils stood every five yards, bearing the one-hundred-ton weight of the complex. There were no lights. Fifteen feet from the gap, she could barely see.

  “Do you have a weapon?” Drew hissed, leading her forward.

  The coils were a mathematically precise forest of smooth, ribbed tree trunks. Emily cut her palms on the gravel as they scrambled into the oppressive space.

  Claustrophobia made her paranoid. She thought she heard someone else crawling ahead of them, but every sound rustled and multiplied. She stopped in despair. “You took my gun and there wasn’t time to look for—” she said.

  “Give it up, motherfucker!” a man yelled behind them. “You’re trapped!”

  “Shh,” Drew whispered. “Over here.”

  Emily dodged after him and they hid by a coil, huddling together. He opened his arm. She pressed her bruised temple against his chest. There wasn’t time to look for a gun by the dead men, she thought. In fact, neither body had seemed to have a weapon except for their sidearms, which felt wrong.

  “Get some lights!” the man yelled.

  Emily made sense of the missing guns at the same moment she became certain she and Drew weren’t alone beneath the complex. Her voice was hoarse with terror. “Marcus took their rifles,” she said. “He’s in here.”

  “What are you—”

  Emily pointed through the dark space, remembering her comparison of Bunker Seven Four’s layout to a comma. The cavern was the round body, containing both the complex and the trailers. The tunnel to the world outside formed the comma’s tail.

  Two exits led from the cavern into the tunnel—the blast door at the front of the complex and an emergency access directly through the rock.

  “He’ll sneak beneath the complex to the far side,” she said. “Then he can surprise the guard at the emergency door.”