Deep Silence

by Jonathan Maberry

  “You disappoint me,” she said in a voice that almost sounded gentle. “From your reputation I expected more. But … I suppose it does not require much to stab from a shadow or fire a gun through a window. A pity.”

  Gadyuka cringed in the tub. She was able to breathe, and weep, and talk. So many other things were beyond her now.

  “You still have a chance, my pet,” said Lilith. “You have to make a very important decision now. What means more to you—your cause or your skin? And I am not speaking in the abstract.”

  “Please…,” begged Gadyuka. “I … I … can’t…”

  The head of Arklight cocked her head to one side. “Is that really true? I wonder.”

  The aria playing was Maria Callas singing “Suicidio!” from La Gioconda. Very appropriate.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE

  THE HANGAR

  FLOYD BENNETT FIELD

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  Church stepped away from Doc Holliday and Junie to take the call.

  “Lilith,” he said. “How is Violin?”

  “Alive. But that’s not why I’m calling. Do you know the name ‘Gadyuka’?”

  Church stiffened. “Yes. Why?”

  “We had a long conversation,” said Lilith as casually as if she were discussing yesterday’s news. “About earthquakes and green crystals and God Machines and destroying America. In any other circumstance I would think she was lying, but trust me when I say she was very earnest in convincing me of the truth of everything she said.”

  “I believe you,” said Church. “We already know quite a bit and have made some guesses about more. Did she say anything about Wyoming?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Tell me you have a team there already.”

  “They are on the way.”

  “Then they may already be too late.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

  YELLOWSTONE AIRPORT

  WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA

  “How we going to get there?” asked Bunny as he bent over a map. “Map says that you have to go all the way around the damn thing to get there by road. Four and a half damn hours.”

  Top and I leaned down next to him. I grunted. “There’s got to be another way if they’re bringing in parts. A service road somewhere.”

  “There,” said Cole. She tapped the glass on one of the windows. There, a few thousand feet below us, we could see a semi creeping along a dirt road through the rocky terrain.

  “Not on the map,” said Bunny. “They must have put it in for the venting job.”

  Since Nikki had found out about the truckers, she backtracked into state and federal records to find the details on the venting project. It was there, but it was hidden. Not under top-secret labels, but behind veils of what had to be deliberate obfuscation. Someone did not want it found, and by the time we were wheels down, Nikki came back to us with the name of the official go-to person in Washington.

  “Who’s Jennifer VanOwen?” asked Smith.

  “You’ve seen her,” said Tate. “Blond chick who stands behind POTUS and nods a lot.”

  Smith shrugged. “She one of our bad guys?”

  “I’m not liking her much right now,” said Top.

  “She had the road built,” said Bunny.

  “Jesus, Farm Boy, you took a nap on the plane and woke up stupid. Yeah, that road’ll get us there, but it’s how these motherfuckers have been getting their God Machine parts out there in the first place.”

  “Just trying to make lemonade, old man.”

  “Fuck you and your lemonade.”

  The jet thumped down, jostling us all since none of us had bothered to buckle up for safety. By the time it was done rolling, we were locked and loaded. Tate disarmed and opened the door and deployed the collapsible stairs.

  “Wheels?” asked Duffy, but the answer was rolling right toward us. A huge Toyota Sequoia painted in the colors of the National Park Service. “Well, there is a God.”

  Shorthand is, we commandeered the truck, crammed enough weapons and ammo to storm the gates of hell, and squeezed all of Echo Team into the SUV. Top drove like the world was on fire.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

  THE HANGAR

  FLOYD BENNETT FIELD

  BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

  It took too long for a call of this kind to make it through channels. In previous years, and even in the early days of this administration, the call would have gone straight through. Ultimately, he had to fudge the math and have Bug force it through the cell towers and security barriers and make it damn well ring in the president’s hand. While he waited for POTUS to answer, Church calculated the number of laws that call broke. Seven, he concluded.

  “How in the hell did you call me?” demanded the president. “I blocked your number.”

  “Mr. President,” said Church, “I need to inform you of a grave threat to national security.”

  There was a beat and for a moment Church expected the line to go dead.

  “You have one minute,” said the president.

  Church told him of the conspiracy involving Russia, Gadyuka, Valen Oruraka, and Pushkin Dynamics. He named all the right names and offered to provide substantial evidence to back it all up. It took more than a minute, and the president was still listening at the end of ten minutes. The ensuing silence was a great deal longer.

  Then, “And you can prove this?”

  “I can, Mr. President.”

  “Do you understand that you’re asking me to declare this an act of war?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that I’ll have to respond by declaring war.”

  “There may be other strategies to deal with that,” said Church.

  “This is a hell of a lot to ask me to believe. Wyoming? Since when is there a volcano in Wyoming?”

  “For quite a long time now.”

  “Well, I’ve never heard about it.”

  Church found it difficult not to smash the phone against the wall. Brick, standing a few feet away, his big arms folded across his chest, raised one eyebrow. Church shook his head.

  “And,” continued the president, “you want me to believe that Jennifer VanOwen is involved?”

  “It would appear so. At least as far as facilitating deliveries to our chief suspect, Mr. Oruraka.”

  “Jennifer’s been here in Washington. She’s all over the news. She’s a damn American hero. Hurricane VanOwen.”

  “I’ve seen the coverage, Mr. President,” Church said with forced patience. “It does not change the facts. And it does not alter the timetable. In the short term we need to evacuate Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho for a start. I have a team on the ground, but we need to be proactive to protect as many American lives as possible.”

  “What do you mean by a ‘team’? What team? Who’s running the ground operation? It had better not be that criminal Ledger.”

  “He is my finest field team operative, and he is the one who I trust most to run point on this. His team is on the ground in Wyoming and we have National Guard converging to provide support and containment.”

  “No.”

  “Sir?”

  “No damn way. I didn’t authorize that.”

  “Not to be indelicate, sir, but the DMS charter allows for necessary shortcuts like this in order to get ahead of any threat of this kind.”

  “Did you hear me? I said I didn’t authorize the National Guard.”

  “I heard you, Mr. President.”

  “When I get off this call I am going to call the governors of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho and tell them that you do not have my approval for this operation.”

  “Mr. President, we need to act together and with a great deal of urgency in case my team is unable to—”

  The line went dead.

  Church looked at the phone, wondering if it would feel good to smash his phone to bits. He did not, but it was close.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK

&nb
sp; The semi had a forty-minute lead on us and the driver had the pedal down. It was a rough grade, though, and the sheer mass of the truck kept its top speed down around fifty.

  Top Sims went a hell of a lot faster than that.

  This time we all buckled up, or there wouldn’t have been enough of us left to pour onto the ground. My aching back felt every goddamn rock and divot along every goddamn inch of that goddamn road. It hurt, but more than that, it made me mad. The truth is that if you eat enough pain you want to vomit fury.

  Even so, even with Top racing at full speed, every second seemed to take an hour.

  “Hey,” yelled Smith over the roar of the engine, “I think we’re good. I mean, think about it, these guys aren’t going to set off the volcano while they’re here, right? They’re not stupid; they don’t want to die. Right?”

  Tracy Cole turned her head and gave him a long, withering stare.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “During that whole conversation about those doomsday prepper truckers being part of an Apocalypse Cult, were there any words in particular that stood out?”

  He started to say something. Didn’t. Turned tomato red, avoided her eyes, and checked that the magazine in his gun was properly loaded. I thought I could hear Top chuckling.

  There was no actual way to get there straight as the crow flies. Hills, slopes, craters, thermal vents, and downright dreadful terrain made even the access truck route a snakelike fifty miles. Ghost yelped a few times. I could sympathize.

  The truck was in sight now, though mostly veiled by a drifting wall of brown dust. I turned to look at the team. They were all tense. None of us had gotten enough sleep on the plane. They—well, we—were all wired and scared. Angry, too, but that was as much resentment as it was animosity toward this country’s enemies. When someone is trying to kill most of the population of the nation in which you live, it actually stops being purely patriotic and gets very personal.

  Let’s face it, true patriotism is personal. It’s connected to more than the physical substance or a land, and a hell of a lot more than a piece of cloth, no matter how symbolic it was. We did not pledge allegiance to the flag. Not really. Anyone who did was missing the point. It was always a love of who we were, and what our country represented. Not when it stumbled or erred, and there are a lot of times it did that, from slavery through its attacks on civil and human rights; but for what we all aspired to. We all wanted the country to live up to the best ideals implied by our Declaration and Constitution. All the rah-rah “America first” and “my country right or wrong” histrionics is so much bullshit unless it’s built on a foundation of deep love for what truly made America great in the first place. A desire for freedom, diversity, democracy, and as a machinery for making positive change.

  Tate took some pigeon drones out of a case, synced them with his tactical computer, and hurled them out of the window. They rose high and flew away. They were faster than either vehicle, but they had to circle around the dust cloud or risk having grit clog their engine intakes.

  “Wish I was driving a Betty damn Boop,” groused Top. “Could use me some rocket pods right up in here.”

  “Chain guns’d be nice,” agreed Bunny almost wistfully.

  “I’d be okay with a couple gunships in the air,” said Duffy. “Some recreational hellfire missiles. You know, just to start a conversation. A minigun on rock ’n’ roll.”

  “We have air support on the way,” I said. “Wyoming and Montana National Guard are both sending air and ground forces. We got here first, so we get to be the opening act.”

  “We know how many of these truckers are here?” asked Smith.

  “Depends on how many were in each truck,” I said. “And how many of them stayed. If Valen needs them to help him finish assembling the machines, and if there are as many machines as we think, it could be upwards of forty and as many as ninety.”

  “Not enough,” said Tate.

  “Captain said we have backup on the way,” said Cole.

  “No,” replied Tate, “there won’t be enough of them.”

  She studied him a moment, and at first I thought she was going to blast him for trash talk. She didn’t. Instead, Cole held her fist out for a bump. “Hooah,” she said.

  “Hooah,” he replied. And we all echoed it.

  “Getting a live feed, boss,” said Tate, and I opened the same screen on my wrist computer. There were eight big rigs parked haphazardly around a small prefab structure. Great mounds of dirt and rock were heaped near a couple of heavy-duty front-end loaders and a massive bulldozer. There were a dozen men there, some looking through binoculars at the approaching truck. One of them, though, stood on the roof of the structure and was looking past the truck.

  “We’re made,” I yelled, but at that moment a man walked out from between two mounds of dirt with an AK-47 in his hands, stood wide-legged in the center of the road, and opened fire. We all ducked down, the windshield blew apart, and hot rounds tore into the car.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE

  YELLOWSTONE CALDERA

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

  Top turned the wheel hard and skidded off of the road. The SUV bounced horribly over ancient lava rock. He stamped down on the gas, crashed through some withered brush, and crunched against a jagged ridge.

  “Out!” I bellowed, but Bunny was already shoving people toward the doors. Cole jerked up the handle and fell onto the hard-packed dirt and rock, with Smith nearly crashing down on her. They slithered like snakes to the crest of the ridge as more bullets punched chips of stone out of the irregular shelter. The others got out, too, but the two big men, Tate and Bunny, risked death to drag out the equipment bags and boxes. The metal boxes were lined with plate steel sheathed in Kevlar, so the others took them and built a stronger shelter. Duffy immediately opened his rifle case and took out his weapon. Top slid out of the seat and stumbled, pawing at his face, which was smeared with blood.

  “Are you hit?” cried Bunny, beginning to crawl toward him, but Top waved him off.

  “Glass cuts. Shit. Get your big white ass under cover, Farm Boy, before they shoot your dick off.”

  “Watch your own ass, Old Man,” grumbled Bunny.

  “How many shooters?” asked Smith.

  Tate was studying the video feeds from the drones. “Count three. Guy in the road, one on either side. And, shit, there’s two guys going around the truck, heading into the hill south of us. One of them has a scoped rifle.”

  “They brought a sniper,” complained Smith. “That’s just—”

  There was a crack and his head whipped around to see Duffy raise his head from the scope of his rifle. “Had a sniper.”

  “Nice damn shot,” said Top.

  “What was that?” asked Cole. “A thousand yards.”

  “Give or take,” said Duffy as he worked the bolt on his CheyTac M200. “Hold on.”

  Another crack.

  Tate snorted. “Other guy’s down. Tried to pick up the hunting rifle.”

  “Of course he did,” said Duffy. “That’s why he was with their sniper. Two hunters.”

  “Should have sent four,” said Smith.

  Duffy shrugged. “I brought more than two bullets.”

  “We get out of this,” said Bunny with a grin, “I’m going to get you drunk and laid in the town of your choice.”

  “Sexist asshole,” murmured Cole, but she was grinning, too. Then we all stopped grinning as the other shooters opened up with a new fusillade. From the drone video feed, it was clear there were five shooters now, and they had all taken cover.

  “I don’t have a good line on any of them,” said Duffy. “They’re shooting over stuff and around corners. Putting a lot of ordnance downrange to keep us pinned. Figure they got some other play.”

  Top met my eye and gave me a hard look. We both knew what that play was. Bunny caught on, too.

  “We need those damn helos,” he said.

  I tapped my earbud to get an E
TA and got the news. The National Guard had been recalled. Instead, state police were coming to arrest us, with the job to hold us until the FBI could take custody. My team all heard it. It was insane news. It was the kind of thing that could steal the fire from a dragon’s heart. We were seven people up against an army of survivalists, pinned down behind a nonarmored vehicle with sketchy ground cover. We were a handful of soldiers trying to save our entire country. We had every right to expect to see the cavalry come galloping over the hill, flags flying and guns a-blazing.

  There was a special bing-bing in my ear that I knew was the private line between Church and me. I held my hand up for silence. They nodded, understanding. They turned away and screwed their game faces on and looked for opportunities to return fire.

  “Captain Ledger,” said Mr. Church, “I’m sorry that it’s come to this. I spoke with the president and outlined the entire case. He believes that we are taking actions outside of our jurisdiction.”

  “Is he insane? Doesn’t he understand what’s going to happen?”

  “I would like to think that it is the devastation in Washington that has shaken him so badly that he can’t think clearly. That and the fact that he doesn’t have enough experienced professionals around him to keep things going if he loses a step. That isn’t what we have here. He either does not believe me or can’t afford to, because accepting the truth means having to address other issues within his administration, his career, and his life. I don’t think he can afford to spend that coin.”

  There was a lot of gunfire and I didn’t know if the others could hear me. Our mics are tiny dots beside our mouths and they have incredibly sensitive pickup. A whisper, a murmur, and that’s enough.

  I said, “We’re fucked.”

  “Are we, Captain?” he asked calmly. “This is the war. This is the job. We are in place because we are the select few who can think outside the box enough, act quickly enough, hesitate less often, and act more determinedly than anyone. I formed the DMS to be exactly that. Without ego or distortion of our own capabilities. We are our own backup. And if the situation is so dire that we lose faith, then there is no plan B. So, tell me, Captain, where does that leave us? Tell me if we are out of options. Tell me if we have already lost.”