The code worked and the locks guarding the stairwell door disengaged audibly. We made our way up the flight of stairs from the parking garage and stacked on the door leading to the lobby.
“You sure you’re good?” Rogan asked, looking directly into my eyes.
I nodded. We knew from Taya’s passive hack earlier, before she took over the system for real, that there were at least two security guards in the lobby. They were going to be a problem that we had to deal with. Ideally, we’d shoot them in the leg or something, then zip tie them up, but sometimes shit went south. It couldn’t be helped.
Rogan pulled the door open a crack and peeked through. He held his HK-45 Tactical pistol near his pelvis. He’d screwed the silencer on it as we drove over in the van. The weapon had been a gift from his SF team when he promoted to Sergeant First Class. It was chambered for .45 ACP, which meant it would put somebody down and they would stay down. It was much better than my Glock 17’s 9mm round. His had the stopping power, but mine had the advantage in magazine size at seventeen rounds versus his ten. Tomato, tomato, right?
“You get the guy at the desk,” he whispered. “I’ve got the rover. He’s by the front doors.”
I tapped him twice on the shoulder to let him know I was ready. Let’s do this.
He slipped through the door and I followed. I couldn’t watch what Rogan did, I was focused on the guard at the desk. His head was down, making it impossible to shoot him in the arm or anywhere but the top of his head.
I advanced quietly, making it to within ten feet from him when I heard the muffled sound of Rogan’s suppressed pistol going off. There’s a misconception about suppressed weapons. The movies always make it seem completely silent. You can get fairly quiet if you use subsonic rounds that are packed with less gunpowder, but they are not nearly as effective since they don’t have the punch of a regular round. We didn’t have access to subsonic rounds, so it was a moot point anyway.
The desk guard’s head snapped up at the sound of the weapon. He met the barrel of my pistol, pointed directly at his face. “Don’t do it,” I warned. “There’s a button under your desk. If you push it, we’ll know and I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
He nodded in understanding, raising his hands. I realized it was the same guard that Rogan and Plummer had tased when they rescued me all those months ago. Some guys just can’t catch a break.
As the guard came around the desk, I fired one round into his shoulder. He screamed and clutched at his arm, falling. I rushed over, kicked him hard in the face and his body went limp. If the CEA was looking for an inside man, I wanted to make sure they didn’t think it was this poor schlub. I took his pistol from the holster on his hip and put it into my pocket. The Resistance needed all the weapons we could get in the impending shooting war. Next, I used the heavy duty zip ties to secure his hands behind his back and another to bind his legs together.
“I’m headed to sixteen,” Rogan shouted. The plan called for him to go up to the CEA offices and smash all the computers up there. The idea was that they’d think our goal was to eliminate the CEA network and wouldn’t think to check the server stacks until it was too late and Taya’s worm had done its job.
When I rounded the corner to ensure the manual locks on the front doors were locked, I saw the guard that Rogan had shot. The man’s gun was in his hand and he lay face down. The back of his head was missing. The security guard must have seen Rogan and started to pull his weapon, so he made the only choice he could: shoot to kill and not jeopardize the mission. I was glad that I didn’t have to make that choice because I’m not sure that I could have made the same one.
The doors to the outside were secure, so I ran over to the elevators and took them up to the third floor. The door opened onto a small lobby. Directly across from the elevators was a heavy steel door with a magnetic lock. As I got closer, the lock disengaged and I slipped inside the darkened room.
I depressed the button on the flashlight mounted to the barrel of my Glock and made my way deeper into the room. There were several workstations with desktop computers and signs telling visitors that no one but employees were allowed into the server rooms.
Taya had shown me the video feeds. There were two server rooms, each set up higher than the workstations on raised floors that they used to run all the cabling underneath. I’d need to place a USB device on computers in each room. I had a third in case I lost one of the others that I was to hold onto unless absolutely necessary. Each room held about forty boxes that had an array of LED lights. I figured the best place to put the thumb drive would be on a computer in the middle of each room. My logic was that somebody inspecting the servers would likely start at one end or the other, so it would give the worm the longest opportunity to work its way through the system.
It was easier to place the thumb drive than I thought it would be. The cabinets weren’t locked and there were several vacant USB slots on the back of each server. I slipped the first device into the port and the light on the end turned blue immediately and began to flash rapidly.
“Dammit,” I mumbled. Why had Taya chosen thumb drives that lit up like a goddamned Christmas tree? I arranged several cables over the device in an attempt to hide it, but anyone looking for something out of the ordinary would know immediately that it wasn’t supposed to be there.
I closed the cabinet and rushed to the next room. This one was not as clean as the first one. It was still being set up as a tertiary backup. The so-called backup to the backup. Taya wasn’t sure if it was legitimately just a backup or if there was something else going on with this separate system, so she thought it best to dedicate a separate worm to this room.
Wires ran this way and that across the floor and random tiles were pulled away from the lifted flooring system as technicians ran wires underneath out of the way. Turns out, I’m not nearly as light on my feet as I thought I was.
My foot caught on a bundle of cables in the darkness and I fell hard. The thumb drive I’d clutched in my hand flew from my grasp when my elbow hit the floor. I heard it skitter across the tile, but I couldn’t see where it had gone. I pushed myself up to my feet and immediately regretted it as pain radiated through my ankle. It came in waves, beginning at my weak ankle and flowing up through my leg into my hip. I didn’t have time to figure out if I’d rebroken the damn thing, I had to finish the mission and get out of there.
I scanned the area with my flashlight uselessly. There was too much crap everywhere. It could take me over an hour to find it, especially if I was limping or hopping around like I was.
“Goddammit!” I hissed, abandoning the search. I elevated my foot and hopped toward one of the server boxes, careful to keep the flashlight shining near my immediate path. When I got there, I placed the backup thumb drive I’d been given and hid it with the wires, the same as I had the first one. The damn thing began working just as quickly as the first one had. So, now that my mission was complete, I had to get myself out of there.
I turned and swept my pistol over the server room floor one more time and then I saw it. The second USB drive was only a few feet away from me. It’d been hidden from my angle of view the first time by a jumbled mess of cables. I hobbled over and fell again when I bent down to pick it up. The jolt of landing made me nauseous as the pain intensified. I was sure that I’d broken it at this point.
I slipped the thumb drive into my pocket and pulled myself along the floor toward the door and down the stairs into the employee workstations. Then I heard the elevator chime.
I thumbed the flashlight off and rolled painfully onto my butt, pressing my back against the raised floor of the server room I’d just left. I wasn’t going down without a fight. I raised my pistol toward the doorway.
“Don’t shoot!” Rogan’s voice came from the hallway. “It’s me. Our Little Birdie told me you got hurt and needed help.”
“Oh shit, man. I almost gave you an extra nostril.”
The door opened and Rogan’s dark silhouette blocked
out the light from the hallway. He scanned the room until I waved my arm above my head. “What the hell’d you do?” he said, rushing over.
“Ankle.”
“Ah.” He squatted beside me and lifted my arm. Grunting, he helped me to my feet and we took a few tentative steps.
“Other side,” I winced. He switched to my right side where my ankle was injured and we made our way as quickly as possible toward the doorway.
“You finish?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Let’s get you home.”
We took the elevator to the lobby and passed the guard I’d shot and knocked out. He was struggling against his bonds, moaning with each movement. He saw us and yelled out, “They’ll find you fuckers! They’ll find you and kill you.”
“That’s not very nice,” Rogan replied. We did our best to ignore the useless threats from the bound and injured guard, making our way around the atrium to the parking garage elevators. We’d come up the stairwell from the garage, but Rogan decided to forgo that and simply ride the elevators down.
We hobbled to the waiting van and he helped me into the passenger seat. “What the hell did you do, you big oaf?”
I turned to see Taya with her laptop on her lap. Her eyes never left the monitor as she continued to type. “Well, hello to you too,” I grumbled.
Rogan got into the passenger’s seat as Jake started the van. “We’re in,” Taya said. “The data is already starting to be transferred.”
“Hot damn,” Rogan replied. “Y’all ready to get the fuck out of here?”
I nodded drowsily. The pain was making me delirious. I hoped Beth had some heavy-duty pain killers at the safehouse.
The escape from downtown out to Beth’s house took an extraordinarily long time as Jake drove in random patterns around town, trying to confuse anyone watching while Taya rerouted police cruisers away from our path. We were out beyond curfew now and if we got stopped, we’d have an additional confrontation on our hands that we didn’t need.
We made it without any incidents and Beth was waiting when we got there. I took four Motrin and collapsed onto the couch as Rogan and Taya discussed the data coming in and the CEA’s response to finding out that they’d been hacked. It was all a blur to me as I tried to focus and stay awake.
I lost the battle though, and drifted off into a fitful sleep.
FIVE
I spent the next week in the expert care of my hostess, Beth, who seemed to think that the key to healing my injured ankle was rubbing essential oils on the area three times a day, burning incense, and attempted rape. Okay, that last part is an exaggeration, but it could certainly be labeled as sexual harassment. My hopes that she’d hook up with my younger, much more available brother while I was gone hadn’t panned out. In fact, she elevated me even higher on her imaginary pedestal after my return from the raid on the CEA servers. I was a modern day folk hero and she was determined to be a part of my story.
The real doctor came to the safehouse on day two of my confinement to Beth’s bed. He had a portable X-Ray machine that he said was designed for use on large animals, like horses and cattle, but worked just as well on humans. This made me question whether he was an MD or a veterinarian, to which he simply smiled and said he was the only doctor that the Resistance had right now. I shut up after that and let him do his job.
Thankfully, my ankle hadn’t been rebroken. It was a severe sprain, made worse by the screws through the bones in my ankle and the titanium band wrapped around my tibia and fibula to keep them from shifting too much. I’d been high as a kite when the doctors at St. David’s had told me about their plans to perform surgery, so I’d forgotten all about the titanium band. It sort of made sense why I couldn’t shift side-to-side in a crouch if the bones in my lower leg were immobilized.
The doc gave me a bottle of pills for pain relief and to help reduce the swelling. The bottle was made of dark blue plastic—an indicator that it was a veterinary prescription medication, which was confirmed by the label that stated it was for a two hundred pound dog. I was supposed to take one pill every four to six hours as needed for pain and keep the weight off of my foot for a week or so. It would get better with rest and time.
While Beth’s attempted advances were annoying, she really did come through for me and help out a lot. She was right there by my side on most days, talking about art and the Revolution, as well as helping me to and from the bathroom when I needed to go. Her earlier insistence that she shower with me to “save water” also turned out to be helpful as I had to hold onto the wall awkwardly while trying to wash with one hand. I know what you’re thinking, millions of people have gone through the same type of injury and had to shower on their own, but it sure made it easier to just let her take over and wash me as I leaned against the wall.
I won’t say that I wasn’t severely tempted by the charms of my pretty, gracious, and willing hostess, but I did resist the urge to do anything sexual with her. I was married and my wife was back in Alabama expecting our first child. I would have been a total piece of shit if I succumbed to the temptation.
After three days, Rogan stopped by. It was the first time I’d seen him since the raid. “How’s the ankle?” he asked as a way of greeting when Beth opened the door.
We both spoke at the same time. “He’s better,” Beth said.
“I’m ready to go, boss,” I said from the couch. I’d moved there so I could watch the news or read while I recuperated, so it had been a stressful couple of moments while Beth walked to the door after the bell rang. I was a sitting duck if the CEA or some other federal agency came knocking.
Rogan chuckled and slipped inside the house. “Finishing each other’s sentences, huh?”
“No,” I countered. “No, we are not.”
“He’s such a baby,” Beth said, hugging Rogan.
My old team sergeant squinted at the television and pointed at it. “You see the latest?”
“Uh, I think so,” I stated. “I’ve been watching it for a few hours. So…”
“They stormed Whiteman Air Force Base up near Kansas City. The zoomies had nukes loaded onto their B2 Stealth Bombers and the NAR couldn’t let them hold that over their heads. Apparently, they massacred the lot of them.”
“No. I hadn’t seen that.” I exhaled heavily. “How many?”
“There were about four thousand airmen plus families there before everything went down.” He sighed, mirroring my own nonverbal cue. “To be honest, we have no idea how many of them stayed once the commander declared for the Revolution, though. There were certainly some number of pilots and munitions techs though if they were able to load nuclear bombs onto the planes.”
“That’s terrible,” Beth cried. “All those poor people.”
Rogan stuck his chin out at the television. “I hadn’t seen the news today. It’s telling that even Fox isn’t reporting on the massacre. They’re in the NAR’s pocket too.”
“What other choice is there?”
“Not much,” Rogan agreed. “So, what’s worse is it was carried out by the First Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kansas. They never defected en masse like the 82nd or the SF guys did. Probably a lot of patriots abandoned their posts and melted into the plains, but enough of them stayed to do the job. It’s only about two hundred miles or so from Riley to Whiteman. They air assaulted in Blackhawks and Chinooks with Apache support. Word is, the attack formation was massive.”
I held up my hand like I was a kid in school trying to get the teacher’s attention. “I don’t know what those are. What’s an air assault?”
“Dammit,” Rogan grumbled. “I keep forgetting you’re not Army. Helicopters. Those are different types of helicopters. The First ID guys loaded up into a whole bunch of helicopters and flew to Whiteman. They put guys directly on the airfield, at the control tower, at the base headquarters, everywhere, even the housing areas. Satellite imagery shows hundreds upon hundreds of bodies, maybe even thousands of them, of all shapes and sizes.
They hit the base civilian population too.”
“Kids?” Beth asked, the tears flowing down her cheeks.
“Yeah, looks that way,” he stated.
“Bastards,” I cursed. “Why would the Army do that?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know, Haskins. I just don’t know. We took an oath to defend this nation against enemies both foreign and domestic. I guess some people interpret who qualifies as a domestic enemy a little differently than I do. I view it as the NAR being an oppressive enemy, but if you were so inclined, you could view the Resistance as the domestic enemy since our goal is to overthrow the government and start over.”
“So, what’s our response?” I asked.
“Can you walk?”
“Good enough.”
“Can you run?”
“I haven’t tried,” I admitted.
“Can you crouch down behind cover when you’re getting shot at?”
I cursed again. “Fuck. No. I can’t. This damn ankle won’t let me crouch. If I tried to do that, it would probably reinjure it right now.”
“I can crouch,” Rowan said. “And I can shoot. And I can listen to orders.”
“Rowan, no!” I shouted.
“I didn’t come all this way to sit here pullin’ my pud while the two of you are in that room doing who knows what,” he spat, pointing at the bedroom. “I want to fight. The NAR is a bunch of evil bastards and they need to be stopped.”
“Rowan…” I didn’t know what to say.
“We aren’t having sex,” Beth interjected. “Your big brother has stayed one hundred percent faithful to his wife and child back in Alabama. Hand on the Bible and all that.”
Rowan glanced from her to me and then back at her. “You promise? I thought you guys were, you know, hooking up.”
“I promise you, Rowan,” Beth said. “I’ve even let him know that I wouldn’t be too hard to convince to take a step or two in that direction, but he’s been a perfect gentleman, even when I had to help him shower because of his injury.”
American Dreams | Book 2 | The Ascent Page 4
