Deep Silence

by Jonathan Maberry

  I looked at my team. They were already fighting. They were doing their jobs even though they’d heard the same news, that we were out here alone. It was a humbling thing to see. As if he could feel my eyes on him, Top looked over his shoulder at me. He gave me a single nod.

  I gave it back.

  To Church I said, “The sun’s going down. That will help us more than them. But I think that also means the clock is ticking down. It would do more harm to have the volcano erupt at night. Rush hour in some places, diminished workforce at hospitals and with first responders. I think that’s Valen’s timetable.”

  “I agree. It coincides with the last shipments arriving now. What is your plan?”

  I smiled. “My plan is to kill every last one of these evil sons of bitches.”

  I heard a sound. A rare laugh from Church. We were both standing on the edge of the abyss and I’d just told him I was going to jump. “Then good hunting, Captain,” he said.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX

  YELLOWSTONE CALDERA

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

  We huddled together and I told them my plan.

  They grinned like a bunch of ghouls. And, if there was fear in their eyes, too, and a little panic, then they kept it locked down and tightly secured.

  We had to dismantle some of our wall in order to get to the right equipment, and as each box was emptied it was put back into place but angled to give us loopholes for counterfire.

  Included in our gear were six pigeon drones, a hundred horseflies, grenades, night-vision goggles, more body armor, and more of Doc Holliday’s Toybox. Most of the latter, though, required application. They were booby traps to prevent pursuit rather than tools for a frontal assault. Didn’t matter. Smart soldiers improvise, and Tate was proving himself to be a devious bastard. Cole, Smith, and Bunny maintained a steady return fire. Not wasting bullets, but making sure we didn’t get rushed. Duffy still couldn’t get a good kill shot, but he punched holes in whatever the shooters were hiding behind, delivering eloquent warnings about what would happen if they got sloppy. One of them did, in fact, lean too far out, and Duffy blew his arm off in a very loud and messy way. The screams resulted in a shocked pause and then a new barrage of outraged automatic weapons fire. That was fine. Let them waste bullets.

  The sun was a tiny yellow ball that was rolling fast off the edge of the world. There were no clouds, nothing to reflect the sun and maintain the illusion of light. When the sun went down, it dragged the rest of the day with it.

  In combat, the largest force owned the daytime, because that’s when their numbers allowed them to dominate the landscape. Small and more mobile forces owned the night.

  “Do it,” I said, and Tate launched all six drones at once, steering them low so they flew no more than five feet above the ground. Four of us opened up with heavy fire and then two of the drones made their flash-bang faux gunfire as they moved out at right angles from our position. The incoming gunfire immediately split, firing into the dark to catch runners. That was the fiction we were selling, and anyone who’d had military or paramilitary training would buy it for what it seemed to be: shooters giving cover fire while runners broke cover and ran to flank the enemy.

  We reinforced it by sending two more drones and reducing our central fire to a pair of guns. The flash-bang effects now seemed to be coming from all over the landscape. It scattered the enemy fire, thinning what was aimed at us.

  Tate sent a swarm of horseflies out and I watched their infrared video feeds. The shooters were breaking up and spreading out to intercept us, not knowing that they were hunting ghosts.

  While Duffy was hunting them. He had his sound and flash suppressors in place, and as the truckers ran to cut off flanking attacks they were pinned against the darkness through his night vision. Duffy fired and fired and fired. Single shots, and any chance of them tracing it back to him was confused by Top firing straight up the pipe with a noisy Heckler & Koch 416. He’d even risked a magazine with tracer rounds as a dangerous way to reinforce our fake-out. When that mag was dry he swapped in one without tracers and shifted to the far end of our shooting blind, letting return fire pound a spot where no one was standing.

  Tate shifted the drones to our left as if we were running in a widely staggered line to try and claim the high ground. The incoming fire shifted that way, with a greatly diminished attack on where we actually were.

  “Time to go, Cap’n,” called Top.

  I slipped on my Google Scout glasses, switched them to night vision with a geodetic survey overlay, thermal scan, and distance meter. The others did the same, checked that they were carrying as much ammo as possible, and buddy-checked each other’s armor. The horseflies gave us a clear picture of the best route. It was tight and we had to move fast, but we’d scattered their focus. One by one Echo Team broke right and vanished into the darkness until only Top remained. He emptied a full magazine into the dark, paused to make sure it was clear he was reloading, then fired another, and during this pause he ran to catch up.

  We scattered as we ran, with Duffy and Smith heading uphill to establish an elevated shooting position at a distance that would, for most people, be too far away to do any good. Duffy wasn’t most people; and sharp-eyed Smith would be his spotter and bodyguard.

  Top and Cole split to circle the shed from the far side, while Bunny and Tate cut sharply left to come in tight on the blind side of where the knot of shooters were by the trucks. I sent Ghost ahead of me to scout the best path, and I followed his RFID chip signal on the glasses lens.

  Sure, the bad guys had numbers and position, they had some training, and they knew the terrain. But no matter how many times they’d chased each other around in the woods playing soldier, they were not soldiers. And even if they’d worn uniforms once upon a time, we were way the hell out on the cutting edge of military tech. It was going to suck to be them.

  No, let me go a step further with that. These were militiamen who hid behind Second Amendment protections and then tried to use those same laws to hurt their countrymen. They were traitors to everything they claimed to stand for. It didn’t matter if they knew they were working with the Russians or thought they were somehow defending their own skewed view of America. The truth was that they were the enemy and Echo Team was going to war with them under a black flag.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN

  YELLOWSTONE CALDERA

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

  The drones kept popping their fake rounds and there was scattered return fire as the truckers chased phantoms through the night-black landscape. Ghost led the way and I followed through a weird green world. Night vision always turns the world into something from a science fiction or horror movie. Intense blacks and whites, and a thousand shades of green. Of all the colors that I did not want to see, it was that one. My imagination kept populating the darkness with green-scaled giants, writhing tentacles, and creatures too bizarre to even comprehend, let alone describe.

  When I saw an actual shape detach itself from the dense shadows I felt a brief but intense flash of irrational fear. But it wasn’t a lizard man or even a Closer. It was a burly trucker with an AR-15, and he was swinging the barrel to track movement. Ghost, probably, but my dog knows the game. I saw Ghost circle fast and come up behind the shooter and then stop because I had not given a command to kill. It was dark and quiet and I needed to get to the shed without raising an alarm. I knelt and went still and let the trucker chase movement that wasn’t there. He came within six feet of me, and if he’d turned toward me I’d have shot him. I carried a Sig Sauer with a Trinity sound suppressor and he was in my kill zone the whole time.

  “What you see?” called another trucker.

  “Nothing. Deer maybe,” called the guy near me. “Coming down to you. I think those pricks are up on the east ridge.”

  He moved away and for now that meant he got to stay alive. For now.

  I rose and moved, and Ghost moved with me.


  The shed was close, and I came in from a corner angle, keeping my eyes on two sides of it. There were four guards out front and two more standing at a distance. I could see light streaming out from under the shed’s door, but there were no windows. It looked like the kind of simple structure they placed at the top of mines, betraying a much more complex facility below.

  I knelt again and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Spartan, what’s your twenty?”

  “About seventy yards upslope and to your right,” said Duffy. “I can see you and the pooch. Got a good view of the shed. Count six targets.”

  “I’ll take the four out front as soon as you drop the others.”

  I never heard the shots, but the two men standing farthest from the shed spun away and fell. Then I was moving, yelling, “Ghost, hit, hit, hit!”

  Even as Ghost surged forward I began firing as I ran. The truckers were looking at their fallen comrades and turning to look for the shooter. They expected him to be coming from where they thought we were. I came at them from the side and slightly behind, firing, firing. Two of them went down right away and Ghost did as ordered and hit a third, snapping his metal teeth down on the wrist of his gun hand. The fourth swung his gun at me and I jagged right and shot him in the chest, but all it did was stagger him. Must be body armor under his coat. Fine. I put the next round through the bridge of his nose and his head snapped back on a broken neck as blood splashed on the shed door.

  I pivoted to see if Ghost needed help. He didn’t. There was a severed hand on the ground and a savaged throat gaping beneath a face filled with profound surprise. As I watched there was a final, feeble spurt of blood from his carotids and then the man slumped over.

  The whole thing had taken about three seconds.

  There are a lot of myths about the bite strength of dogs. Sure, wolves can chomp down at 400 pounds per square inch on average and up to 1,200 PSI when defending themselves, but dogs can’t. For dogs, the common American breeds with the strongest bites are Rottweilers, who have the strongest bites at 328 PSI, and bull terriers at 235; but shepherds are in the number-two slot with average bites at 238. Now, add a lot of combat training designed to teach Ghost how to destroy bone and tendon with six titanium teeth, and the math gets ugly.

  “Good doggy,” murmured Duffy in my ear. “Coast is clear, Cowboy, but you better haul ass. Pigeon drones are picking up a shitload of thermals coming your way.”

  I ran to the shed door and amped up the thermal imaging, but it bloomed way too hot, from the lava down deep. Thermals were going to be useless in there; so was night vision. I took off the glasses, swapped in a full magazine, cautioned Ghost to be as silent as his name, and eased the door open.

  The space inside was built to allow access to an elevator and a set of spiraling stairs. It was hot as hell in there and my clothes were instantly soaked, despite the whole “but it’s a dry heat” thing. It felt like every drop of moisture in my flesh was being leached out. Every other spare inch of floor was crammed with stacks of equipment, and along the walls were racks of black coveralls of a kind I’d never seen before. They looked like rubber but when I touched them the material felt more like a flexible plastic. Thick, though, and a quick examination revealed that each was double-lined to allow for tubes and wiring. Small harnesses and rows of tanks gave me the answer. These were some kind of advanced coolant suits to allow Valen and his team to work down near the thermal vents.

  I wasted no time and put one on. As I did, it occurred to me that Ghost could not go with me, and he couldn’t stay in the shed because there would be nowhere for him to run if the truckers came in. So I told him to go find Top. As usual, Ghost didn’t like it, but he gave the soft whuff that’s his version of “hooah.” He ran out into the night. It bothered me to see him vanish into so deadly a darkness, and I had a horrible feeling that I might never see him again.

  “Sergeant Rock,” I said quietly, “Ghost is coming to you. Can’t take him down with me.”

  “Roger that, Cowboy,” he said, then added, as if reading my mind, “We’ll keep him safe.”

  I finished sealing the suit and as the last zipper pull locked into place, the internal works activated. Cool air flooded through the outfit, but it did not blow up like a hot-room hazmat and instead kept a normal shape. That made sense, since Valen and his team needed to be able to assemble the God Machines. One precaution I’d taken was to remove my combat harness, and I buckled it on over the suit, allowing me access to extra magazines, grenades, and fighting knives.

  The suit’s cowl came complete with goggles with orange-tinted lenses that reduced glare but were nonetheless sharp. It was nice tech and I hoped I lived long enough to steal it for the DMS. Junie could probably find a use for it, too, maybe for firefighters battling California forest blazes.

  I removed the sound suppressor from my gun, ignored the elevator as a damn death trap, and started down the stairs. I had an unnerving flashback to my college days, when a comparative lit teacher had us read Dante’s Inferno. As the narrator passes through the gates of hell he sees an inscription:

  LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH’ENTRATE

  It amused me at the time, but absolutely chilled me now to reflect on the translation: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT

  YELLOWSTONE CALDERA

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

  Top Sims moved through the night like a murderous specter from some old folktale. That’s how Tracy Cole saw it.

  There were a lot of truckers out now, using flashlights mounted on rifles or shooting flares into the sky. Echo Team cycled its Scout glasses to compensate for the flashes of light and instead of being blinded, used them to pick their targets. Tate and Bunny were down among the trucks now, wiring everything with nasty items from the Toybox. Duffy was the finger of God, flicking people off the planet one bullet at a time. Cole had taken two of the militiamen out so far, both with double-taps from her Glock. She preferred handguns for night fighting.

  Top went another direction, using stealth and speed to bring him close and personal, and then he used vicious kicks and a bayonet to drop and kill. He never used a wide variety of techniques; instead, like most expert fighters, relied on a few simple moves over which he had great mastery. No one saw him coming, and he killed them. It was unadorned and frank, devoid of emotion or complication. It was strange to see it, because she knew that emotional fires had to be burning in Top’s head and heart. He was a passionate man beneath all that control. Maybe that was why he never hesitated and showed no mercy at all. There was too much at stake.

  They moved through the nightmare landscape of volcanic rock, twisted shrubs, and brutal death.

  * * *

  Bunny and Tate reached the truck that they’d followed here. Only three of the truckers were still using it to fire on the wrecked SUV. Those men were intent on their work and did not see the two hulking figures that came up behind them. They did not even hear the silenced shots that killed them.

  “Open the truck,” ordered Bunny, and when they’d swung back the doors they found crates of parts identical to what had been found at Pushkin. The truck was only a quarter full, though.

  “There’s not enough stuff here,” said Tate. “Shit. I think they have most of the parts already.”

  “Yeah, damn it,” growled Bunny, and he called it in. There was no answer from Captain Ledger. “He must have gone down to find Valen,” he said to Tate.

  “Want me to blow this stuff up?”

  “No. Rig it so it blows up whoever comes looking for it. Then we’ll go set up a playground between here and the shed.”

  Tate nodded and set to work. He heard footsteps and a man call out in inquiry, but didn’t turn to see what was happening because there was a sudden muffled cry of pain that ended in a wet gurgle.

  “Work fast,” murmured Bunny as he lowered a dead man to the ground.

  “Jesus, man, I’m working as fast as I can.”

&nb
sp; Tate cut a look behind him in time to see Bunny fire three shots with a silenced pistol. A running man suddenly lost all coordination and fell badly. Bunny put a foot on his throat and shot him once more in the head.

  “Work faster.”

  * * *

  “Christ,” murmured Smith, “they’re coming out of everywhere. How many of them are there? I thought there was supposed to be like … forty, tops.”

  Duffy looked up from his scope at the shadowy figures swarming across the landscape. He stopped counting at sixty.

  “No National Guard,” said Smith. “No backup coming at all.”

  The two men looked at each other, and some truth passed between them. An understanding of the reality of this mission.

  “Then we take as many of them with us as we can,” said Duffy. “We buy the captain enough time.”

  Smith licked his lips and he could feel something within him change. It was something he’d read about and heard about from other soldiers. When you think you are going to make it out of a fight, you cling to the hope of survival, and sometimes that keeps you alive, and sometimes it shines a light by which the bad guys can take aim. But if hope dies in you because you know—without a shred of doubt—that you aren’t going to walk off the playing field, then you become a different person. It is no longer about winning in order to go home. The fight becomes a hunt, where all that matters is clearing as many of the enemies off the board as you can so you can be laid to rest on a mountain of their corpses. It was old thinking, maybe going back to the Vikings or the Romans or the Celts or whomever. It was the battle madness they used to write about in old epics.

  So be it, thought Smith. If they want me, then they’ll have to earn it.