"Yes," Bella said. "If we think Solly and the others will succeed, and soon, then we should fight. If we don't, or we think they'll fail, then we should surrender so the children get a little more time."
Maddie got up from the table and squeezed into the armchair next to a surprised Ross. "I think we should have faith in Dad," she said, as she snuggled closer.
"There's another reason why we should fight," Jaxon said.
"What's that?"
He slammed his fist on the table. "Cos we might win! I'm with Ross and Maddie. I say we give them the middle finger."
"But we can't beat the Reaper," Bella said.
Skulls took her hand. "Maybe we can at that," he said, looking across at Al.
When the hour expired, they told Cruickshank they needed time to prepare the children. Again, he couldn't hide his surprise. So, his team had simply stumbled across the farmhouse. They knew nothing of its history or its connection to the resistance, or the fact that Alison had been tracked to a mile from here. Cruickshank, who'd thought he would be bringing in a family or small community, now had the prospect of a truck full of children. It would probably be his biggest ever haul.
The sun dropped low as they talked and, reluctantly, he agreed to allow them to surrender in the morning.
"Don't try anything," he said. "I've got guards on all the approaches."
"Tell them to be careful where they step if they go up into the woods," Skulls said.
Cruickshank's eyebrows disappeared beneath the peak of his cap. "You were expecting us?"
"We were expecting some assholes to come spoil things for us," Skulls said. "You've had your warning, now leave us 'till morning."
The man's face tightened. "I advise you to adopt a different attitude tomorrow, or you'll regret it." He turned on his heels and marched down the darkening lane. Bella saw him bring a walkie-talkie to his mouth and bark commands into it. So, he had intended to put guards in the woods.
"I'll go get ready," Skulls said, as soon as Cruickshank was out of hearing range.
Bella reached up and he bent to kiss her. "This is insane, Steve."
"It's the only chance we've got. That thing has to be destroyed before it's turned on. The Army left us some ordnance and Al's used some of it in the woods, but we still got enough plastic explosives to take that truck out and whatever's inside it."
"But they'll catch you!"
He shook his bald head and his yellow beard parted in a broad smile. "Someone as inconspicuous as me? No chance!"
"I'm not joking, Steve. Jaxon volunteered. Let him go. He's smaller and more agile than you."
"My old mom always said to never have someone else do somethin' you could just as well do yourself."
"Please, Steve. I can’t lose you," she said, pulling him into an embrace.
"I don't wanna lose me neither," he responded. "But I'm gonna go anyway."
Bella stood looking out of the landing window as the sun came up the following morning. They'd used the time to prepare for the assault. Guns and ammo had been placed in strategic locations around the house and Al had led the children into the basement where they were now being cared for by Miss Prism. Her father had persuaded Maddie to wear the only bullet-proof vest they had, but there was no way she was going to skulk underground. She stood beside Ross at one of the bedroom windows, her arm around his waist. Bella wondered where Luke was now. Would they ever find out what had happened to him?
There had been no explosion in the night, and Skulls hadn't returned. So, he'd been taken, and she waited now to find out whether he was dead. Her numb soul was drained of all hope; she felt like an observer of someone else's emotional apocalypse.
Movement from below snapped her back to the present.
"Bella, someone's coming. It's Skulls!"
He was walking slowly along the lane, little puffs of cloud rising from his mouth as he went. He looked like a zombie, shuffling along without a trace of life or interest. He looked utterly defeated.
Then, out of the uncertain light emerged a floating black object and, beneath it, walked Cruickshank.
She kissed Maddie, then went down to face them, refusing any company.
"Foolish," Cruickshank said. "To think we would not carefully guard our most precious asset. As you can see, it is fully operational. And now, you will see it in action."
She looked into the red eyes of Skulls as he stared back at her. She sensed regret and failure. She saw fear there also. It was the expression of a man saying goodbye.
The drone hovered a few yards from Skulls, its machine guns pointing at his back.
"No, please!" Bella said.
Skulls shook his head ever so slightly. There was the noise of a single shot and he collapsed to the floor.
"No!" she cried and ran at Cruickshank.
"Stop!" he said, drawing his sidearm.
She knelt beside Skulls who was lying on his face. Blood seeped into his denim jacket from the puncture wound beneath his left shoulder. Weeping, she turned him onto his back.
He blinked.
"You're alive!"
She pulled him to her, then helped him to his feet.
Cruickshank smiled like the Cheshire Cat. "You see, we can be merciful. Your lover has been spared. He has also been upgraded."
All the relief she'd felt vanished in an instant.
"He will now live a productive life serving the greater good, or he will find that our mercy is not limitless," he said, pulling a cellphone-like device from his pocket and pressing down.
Skulls fell to the floor, roaring with pain.
"Stop it!"
Cruickshank pressed again, and Skulls went still.
"You will evacuate the farmhouse in an orderly fashion as agreed. If you do not, the pain he just felt will be the least of his problems. He belongs to us now."
Chapter 16
Paulie looked out over the runway, her mind wandering back to happier days. In her memory, she saw a line of commercial airplanes waiting to take holidaymakers to vacation spots around the world. She'd spent a memorable two weeks in Cuba after it had rejoined the international fraternity. She found herself picturing the palm trees and golden sands of Varadero as she lay on a towel and watched a local chabón wandering by, flexing his bronzed abs.
Happy days.
This runway was different.
They'd made it to Wright-Patterson, all the time feeling as though they were surfers riding the lip of a tsunami rolling east. The wave had broken in Minnesota, where the Chinese and North Korean advance forces had halted. It was as if they'd reached some sort of agreed point from which to split the continental United States into two halves north to south. They couldn't possibly be in control of all the vast territory of the West, but they'd planted their flag in the soil and made their claim. Could anyone oppose them?
She and the other escapees from Arbroath had barely escaped the Chinese troops when they'd attacked that pitifully inadequate defensive line in Buffalo. Had Lieutenant Barker not given them leave to go at that instant, they would surely have been outrun a few miles up the road. She'd thought of the lieutenant many times since then. She wondered how many minutes he'd lived after she'd parted from him.
But she'd outrun the Chinese only to find herself surrounded by their proxies, the Lee Corporation. They'd only just made it inside the defensive ring of the Air Force base before they'd become completely encircled by black-uniformed troops in black vehicles. And that hadn't been the worst news.
Paulie had previously met Major Carraway when she'd visited the base on her way west. An affable man of early middle age, they'd gotten along well enough on those few occasions they'd come into contact before Paulie had left for her confrontation with the Chinese garrison in Arbroath. Carraway had been Colonel McBride's right-hand man for many years, but Paulie was far from convinced he was up to the current crisis.
McBride had gone to reinforce DC, taking half the troops and almost all the vehicles of the base with him, leaving Ca
rraway to defend the civilian population. Neither man had anticipated the boldness and speed with which the Lee Corporation would act—presumably triggered by the advance of their allies from the West Coast. After weeks of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the chess pieces were in place and they were now in the endgame. And all they had left to defend their king was a couple of pawns.
She wondered what Solly was doing now. He'd seemed to be the only one aside from her with any sort of drive. In all honesty, she hadn't liked him a whole lot at first, but he, at least, seemed motivated entirely by what needed to be done for the greater good, and that set him apart from most of the people she'd met since this had all begun.
"They're overdue."
Major Carraway joined her in looking over the empty runway.
"So now we've got another six hundred civilians to care for, with no sign of this squad of elite troops we were promised," he said.
Paulie didn't respond. There was every chance that the final plane had been shot down. One of the great puzzles of the Sino-NK invasion was that they had no air support, save from a small fleet of helicopters. But there were many ways to bring a commercial liner down from the ground, especially during takeoff.
"By the way," Carraway said, turning to Paulie, "I appreciate your help with crowd control. You and your deputy have been invaluable."
"You're welcome, though heaven only knows what will happen when the Corporation forces break through. What d'you think they're waiting for?"
Carraway shrugged. "I don't know, but I've got the feeling they've planned this all to perfection. They'll attack when they can be sure of complete victory."
"Almost seems a waste to fight back if we can't win," Paulie said, though without conviction. They were between the hammer and the anvil and there was no escaping it.
"My orders are to defend the base," Carraway responded. "I just wish we stood a chance. Even a faint one."
She watched him leave. A proud man used to a disciplined, formulaic life and having the necessary resources to hand, he reeked of defeat. And yet he would fight on. True courage wasn't confined to conspicuous acts of bravery in a winning cause, Paulie thought. Carraway wouldn't turn and run, and neither would she.
The siren tore her from sleep that night. She fell out of bed and landed on her back on the cold concrete floor. The door swung open, and Marvin stood there. "They're attacking, Sheriff," he said, looking away as she scrambled to her feet, half naked. "Up at Gate 1."
"Mommy, I'm frightened!" Luna said, as she ran across the room to throw herself at Paulie.
Paulie hugged her daughter. "It's okay, sweetie. You know the plan. Go with Marvin—he'll take you to the shelter with the other people."
"Will he stay with me?" she asked, terrified.
"You'll stay with him," Paulie responded. "It's the safest place on the base." She looked up at Marvin, who returned her gaze. He hadn't been happy with the plan, but someone had to stay inside the shelter while Paulie and the handful of others tasked with civilian security protected it from the outside.
Marvin put his hand out to the child. "C'mon, kid. Get yourself into your jumpsuit and we'll do as Mommy says, okay?"
Paulie dressed herself, vaguely aware of the smell of freshly laundered clothes as she pulled on her shirt. She glanced across at Marvin, who was very deliberately looking at the wall as she and her daughter got dressed at opposite ends of the little room.
Moments later, they were running along the corridor, pushing through the crowd of people trying to get to the shelter. It was dark outside, and the moon rose above the HQ building as they ran to the assembly point she'd arranged with her co-opted deputies.
Nicky Friedman was waiting for them when they arrived. She'd made a remarkable recovery over the past week and Paulie had given up trying to persuade her to join the civilians down below. Had she agreed, then she could have looked after Luna, and Marvin would be up here, though Paulie realized that would be more for her comfort than for any other reason.
But Nicky Friedman had unfinished business with the Lee Corporation and its allies, and nothing would keep her from seeking vengeance.
The crackle of gunfire echoed around the dark buildings. It was concentrated in an area north of where they stood. "They're attacking the gate," Nicky said. "I don't think they've broken through yet. Good grief, I hope they haven't got Reapers."
That had been Paulie's greatest fear. Fighting a human enemy was bad enough, but those murderous drones were practically invulnerable and indefatigable—once they were on your tail, there was no escape.
"I'm going to the gate," Nicky said. "I don't want to wait for them to get in before fighting back."
Paulie thought about this for a moment. Her instinct was to stay here and protect the underground shelter that was, even now, filling up with the civilian population of the base. But she also knew that trying to fight off troops who'd broken through was utterly vain. Their only hope of staving off defeat, however temporarily, was to keep the enemy on the other side of the gate.
She gathered her team around her and gave them the choice. They couldn't leave the bunker entirely undefended and she was relieved that fully half of her volunteers agreed to stay behind while the other half went with her to the front line.
They had covered half the distance when the base was lit up by a flash of light followed by a roaring, rolling boom. Paulie ducked down, covering her ears with her hands and squeezing her eyes shut. As the rattling of gunfire resumed, she felt the ground beneath her rumbling. Had they brought tanks? Whether they had or not, she felt sure the gate had been breached, so she picked herself up and, signaling to the others to follow her, she tore through the night to join the battle.
"I'm not getting anything from ATC," the captain said as Nathan Woods stared through the cockpit glass, trying to make out the landscape below. "What if they've already fallen to Lee Corp?"
Nathan cursed. If they were too late, then it was his fault. He'd forced the captain to turn the plane around and, risking the lives of everyone on board, land again at Colorado Springs. The pull of the promise he'd made to Bella all those months before had been too powerful to resist. And he had to know, he simply had to know, whether Su-Mi was alive or dead. Of all his fears, uncertainty was the worst.
He'd taken a half-dozen Rattlers with him and they'd arrived just ahead of the Chinese main column. Jake had called to them out of the darkness as he sheltered behind the smoking hulk of the truck, the wreckage of the destroyed Reaper lying beside him.
The unconscious body of Su-Mi was under the other truck. She had been hit twice by the Reaper and lost a lot of blood, though Jake had done his best to stem the flow by ripping up his shirt to use as bandages.
They got her onto the plane just as the first Chinese tanks rolled onto the far end of the runway. Nathan could have sworn he'd heard a shell whistle past as they'd taken off.
His first command decision as a commissioned officer, then, had not been exactly textbook. He'd risked them all in what might have been a vain attempt to rescue two of his team. But, as with so many risky decisions, what mattered was that it had paid off. Because of that, those of the Rattlers who were new, and in many cases reluctant recruits, believed he had that most valuable of military assets—luck. And they'd seen that he would go to any length for his soldiers. After the terror of the second takeoff had abated, and Su-Mi's condition stabilized, he'd noticed a palpable sense of them coming together as a team.
"There! I can see the landing lights."
Captain Santini kept her eyes on the instrument panel. "I know where it is, Nate. I can land us, but we don't know what we'll find when we get down there."
An orange flash erupted from a position just north of the runway.
"They're under attack!" Nathan called. "Get us down there as quick as you can!"
"Seriously? You want me to land in the middle of a battle?"
Nate grabbed her arm. "If we don't land now, where do you imagine we'll go? We're needed."
Santini locked eyes with him, then gave a brief nod and began an emergency descent.
Paulie crouched behind a concrete post, peering through a gap between it and a brick wall. The air was full of acrid smoke that bit at the back of her nose as she waited for someone to wander into her field of fire. Her ears were ringing and her heart thumping. It would all be over in a few minutes.
She fired, wincing as the sound of the discharge stabbed her eardrums in the confined space. Something dropped, something she couldn't think of as human. Not if she wanted to carry on fighting.
Another eruption of fire from the right and, quite suddenly, the gunshots seemed to be coming from all around. She sneaked a look over the post as dozens of figures came running through the smoke, met by a deafening response from the defenders.
A flash of light and she was thrown backwards to land sprawling on the fractured concrete. A face appeared over her. "Nicky?"
Paulie took her hand and began to haul herself upright when, quite suddenly, the grip disappeared, and she fell back again. Rolling onto her side, she lifted herself onto her elbows and looked into her friend's dead eyes.
"Nicky!" she cried. A shadow moved. She raised her weapon, saw a black uniform and fired instantly, roaring in her rage. The attacker dropped.
"Fall back!" came the call from all around her. They would be overwhelmed. She had to go. She kissed Nicky and scrambled backwards, joining the others in an undignified retreat that would soon become a murderous rout.
Gunfire spat around them, and the man next to her fell to the ground. She didn't stop. She couldn't stop. Any moment now, she would feel the stabbing of hot metal in her back and all the struggle would be over. Part of her yearned for it to happen, but then she realized. Her limit had been reached. The time for running had passed. Paulina Ramos wasn't going to go gently into that good night. She spun around and stood her ground, firing shot after shot into the smoky darkness. Let them come. She would take some out before they got her. She pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened. She drew her knife and waited for death.
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