by John Bromley
Both men laughed at the absurdity of the notion, but their mirth didn’t last long. A new round of gunfire began, as another unit of Secret Service agents came into range.
“Buck, let’s go!” Jim shouted, herding his men into the building as fast as they could move. Buck and his platoon returned fire briefly before he heeded Jim’s order and raced into the building. Mike and Sam found themselves as the last men out in the open, and they provided covering fire for the rest of the soldiers.
They ran through the corridor, but before they descended the staircase, Jim ordered the prisoners to the front of the formation. He reasoned that any enemy agents down in the station would hesitate to shoot if they saw their own men coming down, but after what Sam had said about the cannibalistic tendencies of the SS, Jim wasn’t so sure of this tactic. Nevertheless, it was the best idea he had.
It made no difference as it turned out, for no one stood between Jim’s men and the train. They boarded as quickly as they could.
The two-car subway train was designed to shuttle up and down the train track without turning around, so it was equipped with controls for the engineer at each end. This placed the “front” of the train at the south end, farthest away from the stairwell. Jim wanted to be behind the engineer again, and was the last man to board. Sam was sitting in the second row.
“Peter, you’re going to—”
The words were unnecessary; Peter had already assumed “his” engineer’s position.
“—drive,” Jim finished the thought anyway. Peter looked up at him, a determined expression on his face, his brand-new gun within easy reach at his side. His hands fondled the control levers as he waited for the command to move out. Again, Jim ordered all the doors to be left open, this time with no objection from Peter. In addition, he instructed that the captured Secret Service agents be placed in the doorways, to induce that same “hesitation factor” in the enemy that he had counted on earlier.
“I like that plan,” Sam told Jim, adding a ridiculous idea of his own and causing both men to laugh. “When I get to be President, I’ll want you for my Secretary of Defense.”
At Parker’s command, the train began to move rapidly down the tracks. They did encounter heavy resistance but, as Jim had hoped, the sight of fellow agents in the train’s doorways delayed the enemy fire long enough for the soldiers to get the upper hand.
Buck was worried that someone would cut power to the tunnel, bringing the electric train to a halt, and made this concern known to Jim. Parker reassured him that was not likely. First, he explained between shots at enemy agents, the train was equipped with battery backup for its motors, or so he had been told by Peter. Second, cutting power would also turn off all the lights, making it even less likely that the Secret Service men, lousy shots already, would emerge victorious in a firefight.
After traveling down the tracks as fast as the train would go, they emerged into the station, and the men began jumping out of the cars even before Peter had brought the machine to a stop. Jim was glad to see that the station was deserted, but fully expected to encounter more enemy troops at the top of the landing. Strangely, they did not, but after proceeding down the luxuriously carpeted hallway, they heard gunfire coming from the lobby. Jim signaled his men to hurry, knowing that the soldiers he had left on guard in the entry were very likely outnumbered at this point.
Sam and Mike were the last two men in line, and at the sound of weapons fire, Sam stopped and leaned against the wall. He began to walk quickly back up the hall, telling Mike to follow him.
They entered the fancy dining room and found it empty. Even the bodies of the three agents Buck had shot earlier had been removed.
“What’s the matter?” Mike whispered, “You shoot these goons in the dark, but now you’re afraid of a little skirmish in the daylight?”
“Hardly,” Sam scoffed, “but I was thinking, we need to do one of those ‘flanking’ things, like Jim had your boy Buck pull off, back in the Ghetto.”
As they advanced through the canteen, Mike noted, “This place doesn’t have a back door.”
Sam stepped up to the only window in the room and blasted it with his submachine gun, shattering the glass and setting off an alarm in the process.
“It does now,” he shouted over the shrill siren, and jumped through the broken pane. Mike followed suit, and was thankful that the dining room had been on the first floor.
They rose to their feet and Sam led them around the building toward the front door. He moved cautiously but not quickly, as he explained to Mike, “We’re hardly the first ones to try that trick. See, once in a while these Stork suckers realize what’s about to happen to them, and they try to make a break for it. They bust through that window, and invariably keep on running east, and they get hunted down quickly, by the boys Stork has out there just for that purpose. But nobody’s gonna expect us to charge through the glass and then go west to the front of the building like we are. And, when we get to the front door, I think you’ll know what to do.”
Jim and the rest of his men burst through the door from the hallway into the lobby, firing as they did so, and encountered a ghastly scene. Of the four men that Jim had left on guard, only two were left alive, and they were outnumbered six to one by enemy soldiers. Moreover, the many bodies in Secret Service uniforms scattered around the room were making it difficult for the Army men to move between hiding places. Worst of all, they were running out of ammunition.
Jim’s arrival more than evened the odds, and soon the Army troops had control of the counter area, forcing the enemy up against the front doors. Even so, it looked like they wanted to make a last stand, but at that moment the doors opened. Mike and Sam entered, guns blazing, and a few seconds later only one of the goons was still on his feet. They looked at him, and he looked at them, dividing his attention between Mike and Sam on his left, and everyone else on his right.
“Who wants him?” Jim asked. The soldiers all made motions, as though deferring to their colleagues.
“I’m out of ammo,” Mike said.
The Secret Service man thought that confusion reigned, and that he actually had a chance to win this confrontation.
“I’m not!” he shouted, raising his weapon and aiming it at Jim.
Mike beat him to the punch by a good half second, planting a bullet in the man’s brain before he knew what had happened.
“Just kidding,” he said, his words falling on deaf, dead ears.
With the Stork building now empty of Secret Service agents, Colonel Parker and his men made ready to return to the Fourth Battalion campsite. As the men were filing out of the lobby, Sam pulled Jim aside.
“If you can spare us, Jim, I’d like to look around in this computer system of theirs for a bit, before going over there and taking on them boys. We saw something strange in the files earlier, but didn’t have time to check it out, since we were heading into the Ghetto.”
“You’re not under my command, Sam,” Jim responded, “so I guess you can come and go as you please, but... who’s ‘us’?”
“Well, if you don't mind... I’d like Mike to stay here with me.” Seeing the surprised look on Parker’s face, Sam explained, “You were right about him, of course—he’s a fine boy, nothing like his rotten ancestor. And, you did say he’s a computer whiz, and right now I can use me one of them.”
At this point, Mike came over and joined the other two men.
“Jim, I’d like to work with Sam—“
“Permission granted,” Jim said. “Sam beat you to it, Mike. He said he wants your help checking out the files.”
“What do they say about ‘great minds thinking alike’?” Mike smiled, looking at Sam.
Jim turned to go, but stopped at the door and asked, “You can get to the Fourth’s base when you’re done, right? I have a feeling I’m going to need both of you.”
“I got wheels,” Sam assured Jim, but after the colonel left, he added quietly, “Last time I checked, anyway.”
Mike
and Sam got to work, calling up various displays on the computer screens, and attempting to gain access to the underlying programs and data. Although these were protected by passwords, the codes were all variations on a central theme. It took Sam, who knew a lot more about the Secret Service and their processes than they would have liked, less than two minutes to determine what that was. Once he and Mike had the files open, they could browse through them at will.
They quickly found the item Mike thought he had noticed earlier, along with something else. Both things were unsettling, to say the least.
Mike remembered that General Chambers had earlier said, during his rant against Parker, that Jim was no longer in the Army and in fact had been “given” to the Secret Service. Here in the data files, as Mike thought he had seen before, was confirmation of that. Jim’s name was part of a list of men scheduled to report... he couldn’t tell from the code—somewhere... for “indoctrination and training.” Sam looked at the data, and he did know what the code meant.
“It’s the Ghetto itself,” he explained. “Jim's been ‘volunteered’ for the next execution squad. Basically, they’ve sentenced him to death.”
“Again,” Mike added.
He turned away as his cell phone rang. Talk about timing, he thought as he saw the number readout. I was just about to call you, and here you are, calling me.
“Is that you, Dad?” he asked into the phone. Assured that it was, he listened as his father spoke of receiving two strange pieces of mail that day, one addressed to each of them. Mike had been expecting this, as he and Sam had just found Stork’s “guest list.” A brief reading from each letter only confirmed what they had just learned.
As the Founding Document allowed, the elder Wilkins, being a descendent of a Charter Member, would be “invited to participate, at a time of Stork’s choosing.” That time, evidently, was “now.” Mike’s father was scheduled to arrive in that very building the next day, with Mike himself to appear the day after that, presumably to learn that in nine months, he would become a father. A parent to his own father’s child, he thought derisively, certain that the Stork representative would somehow fail to mention that insignificant detail.
Unless, of course, his mind reminded itself, they just dispense with all the preliminaries and kill him outright, as an accomplice of the dangerous Colonel Jim Parker.
“Hang tight, Dad. Let me think about this for a bit, and I’ll get back to you as fast as I can.” He hung up the phone and looked dejectedly at Sam.
“Maybe you were flying under their radar before, Mike, but you've been discovered,” Sam said. “They're attacking you through the wallet.”
CHAPTER 33
The soldiers from the Fourth climbed into their vehicles for the trip back to base. It was much more cramped in the trucks this time, as there were many more men now than when they came out. Jim was anxious to return, having no idea what conditions would be like when he got there.
The red flare had only told him that his unit was under attack, but could not tell him who the aggressor was. His gut told him “Secret Service,” but he didn’t think that even they were stupid enough to go up against an Army battalion. On the other hand, given what he had seen from them in the past few days, he was ready to allow that anything was possible where they were concerned.
The ride back fortunately proved uneventful, and this only reinforced Jim’s idea of the SS as the enemy. No cars chasing and shooting at him, no agents popping out of the bushes, did not mean that they had abandoned their pursuit. More likely, it meant that they had gathered their resources in one place and were preparing to attack en masse.
“Thank God you’re here, Colonel,” Lt. Dirk Tedeschi said, standing at attention as Jim and Buck entered the command tent, along with General Chambers. “It’s a mechanized unit of the Secret Service, set up about a thousand yards to the east.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing,” Buck commented.
“Neither did I,” Jim concurred, “but obviously we were wrong.”
“This does not bode well at all,” General Chambers said. “Given what we’ve seen in the last couple of days, how little value they place on human life, even their own—they could try anything, no matter how bizarre it might seem to us.”
“They started the attack only a few minutes ago, sirs,” Dirk continued his debriefing, “and I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to hold them off, considering what we’ve got for weaponry.”
“We can probably do this,” Jim said. Noting the raised eyebrows, he quickly added, “No, really. We’ll start out with some basic defensive maneuvers but, as the general noted, we have to ready for some truly outlandish actions on their part.”
“They told me that we had two hours—”
“What do you mean, they ‘told’ you?” Jim interrupted. “Have they communicated with you?”
“When we first noticed them, sir, I went down to their encampment, to see who they were—if they were our ‘war games’ opponent,” Dirk explained. “I spoke to their commander, and he said that we had two hours to produce an ‘item’ that they were interested in, after which they would take it from us by force.”
“And, what is this ‘item’ that they want so badly?” Jim asked.
Dirk looked at the colonel and answered, “You, sir.”
“I think we’ve learned all we can from these computers,” Sam said to Mike. “Time to be about our other task—helping Jim and his boys win this battle.”
“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “Nothing in these data files was very helpful. I just wish I knew what to do about my father.”
“What time is he scheduled to arrive here?” Sam asked as he collected his equipment.
Mike consulted the “guest list” again. “Three o’clock, tomorrow afternoon.”
Sam thought for a moment. “All things considered, I think it would be best for him if he came up here, like they want him to.”
Mike was doubtful. “You plan on being here when he arrives and whisking him away to… somewhere?”
“I think that, between you, me and Jim, we can come up with a plan that lets at least one of us be here to intercept him, and then take him into the Ghetto. Believe it or not,” he added quickly when he saw that Mike was about to object, “with all the shooting going on around here, that might be the safest place for him to be.”
Mike looked hard at Sam for a few moments, then picked up his phone and hit the “callback” button.
“Dad?” he said when the phone was answered, “you know that ‘appointment’ you were telling me about? We want you to keep it.”
Michael Wilkins the Eighth wasn’t totally convinced, and let his son know it, but the captain was adamant. “Trust me on this, Dad—I know what’s it’s for, I know who it’s with, and we can help you avoid getting hurt, because we’ve got a plan,” even though they didn’t.
“Oh, and Dad?” he added before he ended the call, “Don’t go making any serious purchases for the next few days. That ‘vast hoard’ of ours—you know, the one that you’ve never told me about—probably isn’t as huge as you think anymore.”
He closed his phone and pocketed it. Let Dad wonder what I meant about the money, he thought. If nothing else, it’ll take his mind off his other imminent problems.
As the two men walked out of the lobby, carefully stepping around bodies, Sam said, “So, tell me something about these tanks your Army has. I heard somewhere that parts of them are computer-controlled.”
“They’re entirely computer-controlled,” Mike replied. He added, with a laugh, “Now you’re going to try to make me believe that you didn’t already know that.”
“Actually, I didn’t,” Sam said with a straight face. “I keep tabs on the Secret Service, not on you boys. Now, would you think that this ‘enemy’ you’re facing probably has the same kind of weaponry?”
“Most likely—you can’t hope to beat a state-of-the-art tank with anything less.”
Sam mused as they walked out
of the parking lot toward his hidden truck. “Totally run by computer… this is better than I had hoped,” as he thought of all the possibilities that were now open to him.
“Mike,” he asked, “what do you know about computer ‘viruses’?”
“Only that they’re illegal.”
Sam looked at his partner and chuckled. “I thought Jim said you were a computer expert. You’ve never written a virus?”
“Afraid not—as you know, it’s a capital crime…”
Which was true enough, thanks to a very computer-literate and virus-intolerant President Donald Thompson, about five hundred years earlier. As soon as it became punishable by death, virus creation all but ceased.
“… and I was a very upstanding and law-abiding young man. That, of course, has changed recently.”
They arrived at Sam’s truck, which fortunately was still where he had left it. As they climbed in, Mike asked, “So, what good is a ‘computer virus’, anyway?”
Sam handed his own laptop to Mike and told him where to look in it. “See, the thing is, sometimes you don’t want a computer to run right…”
“Those tanks and guns they have used to belong to the Army,” Dirk added, still upset about the SS appropriation of his materiel.
“So, technologically, we’re on an even footing, at least,” Buck observed, as the four men left the tent, heading for the munitions dump. They made the trip quickly, as enemy fire was continuing. Luckily, shells from the SS guns were impacting mostly to the south of the camp, the direction from which any reinforcements would come, and the men were heading toward the north end of their base.
“Yes, sir, except for the fact that we have mostly blanks, and they have live ammo.”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Dirk,” Jim said. He led the way to the heavy artillery ammo dump and instructed one of the men there to open a crate. When he had done so, the officers could see that, despite its exterior markings, the box was full of live rounds for mortars. Opening other crates showed that they, also, contained the real deal.
