by Jeff Gunhus
The best part was that the power cable coming from inside the tunnel had torn the door off one hinge when the Blazer pulled it free. They had their way in.
Cassie looked satisfied. “See, I told you it’d work.”
Rick pointed to the heavy cable twisting on the ground like an angry snake, the end sparking. “Hopefully they didn’t electrify the door too.” He hefted a large rock from the ground, walked carefully over to the power line and dropped the rock on it to pin it down.
Cassie bent over and picked up Rick’s penny from the dirt. She tossed it at the door and it bounced off harmlessly with a quiet ting.
“Works better when there aren’t any holes for it to go through,” she said. “See how that works?”
“Were you this snarky when we were together?”
“You used to think I was witty.”
“No, not really,” he said, pulling a flashlight out of the Sheriff’s Department duffel bag he’d taken out of the Blazer. “I’m pretty sure you were the only one who thought that.”
He tossed her a flashlight and took a second one for himself. He checked the contents of the duffel to see what was worth bringing. He kept the roadside flares and first-aid kit, but tossed the spare ticket book and the two reflective road hazard signs. He didn’t think writing Keefer a speeding ticket would have much of an impact. As far as the hazard signs went, there was no one left to warn.
He flipped on the flashlight and was happy to see that the batteries looked strong. He wasn’t sure the last time they’d been changed. Cassie did the same and hers looked good too. Perfect. The last thing they needed was to get stuck in the labyrinth of tunnels with no lights.
“Turn yours off to save the batteries,” he said. “We’ll use one at a time so we have redundancy. Here’s a knife.” He tossed her a closed blade from the bag. He nodded to the handgun she had stuck in the beltline of her jeans. “Make sure that safety’s on.”
She pulled it out, checked, and then put it back. “Do you know how to get to the lab level from this entrance?”
Rick slung both the rifle and the duffel over his shoulder. “This was designed as an emergency exit. My memory is that there are signs with arrows marking the way. If we find the signs and go the opposite way, it should get us to the right general area.”
She nodded. “That’ll at least get us to the main trunk. As long as they didn’t remove the signs or mess with them. You know, point them in the wrong directions to get people lost on purpose.”
Rick thought about it. If Keefer really wanted to take care of anyone who got through the electric fence, he wouldn’t do it by playing games with the exit signs.
He pulled back on the metal door. The broken hinge made it possible to lift one edge enough for them to slide through. “Hold this open,” he said. “Let me go through first.”
“Why?” Cassie asked. “There’s no one in there. If there was, we’d know it by now. I can handle myself.”
“Suit yourself.” Keefer would have known that electric fence wasn’t going to keep out any serious infiltration force. Rick doubted it was the only countermeasure in place. “Go ahead. Just keep an eye out for landmines and explosives.”
Cassie stopped, shining her flashlight toward the mineshaft opening. She waved Rick aside and took his spot pulling back on the door.
“How about you leave the snarkiness to me?” she said.
Rick grinned and got low to the ground, exploring the path ahead with his flashlight as he crawled under the door and into the mine.
“And here I thought I was just being witty.”
41
Keefer stood in his command center, a large rectangular room that was a remnant of the old Genysis lab that had once been there. There were three rows of workstations facing a wall of television screens. Although there was only one tech in the room controlling everything, each work station still had a desktop that showed additional images from around the installation.
Keefer’s eyes roamed over the screens. One showed the elevator landing and the most recent trailers being unloaded, his men moving bodies from the staging area to the main cavern. The mess hall and supply center were on two screens next to one another but in the wrong order to match their actual proximity to each other. It was a small thing, but he knew small things sometimes made all the difference. It annoyed him to see someone walk off the right side of the screen and then have to look at the monitor to the left to see the man appear on the left edge. He walked up and tapped a technician on the shoulder.
“Switch monitors 36 and 37,” he said.
The soldier nodded, but didn’t otherwise move. There was a keyboard and other physical inputs on the workstation, but those were secondary systems. A metal band fit over the soldier’s head, and his hair was shaved down to smooth skin to ensure the best contact possible. Keefer knew the man’s brainwaves were all that were needed to manipulate the system, the same way modern aircraft no longer needed a joystick controller, or that unmanned drones needed a visual readout display. Everything happened within the Genysis brain machine interface. It was how Brandon Morris had changed the world. Taking the idea to its inevitable conclusion was how Keefer would make the transformation complete.
As he watched the screens, images 36 and 37 switched locations, all because the soldier had thought the change.
“Adjustment completed, sir,” the soldier said, his voice flat and lifeless as was common when someone was plugged into a large computer system. Scientists couldn’t quite explain the phenomenon but the guess was that the brain-machine link seized up the speech centers of the brain. There seemed to be no harm in it, and it didn’t show up in smaller systems like those used with artificial limbs used by so many veterans, so they left it alone.
“Bring up 77,” Keefer said.
Instantly, all the TVs in the front worked together to form a larger view of the work crew sealing the main entrance shut from the inside, welding the iron blast doors with plasma burners.
He was glad to see their work was almost done. Once this thing started, he didn’t want anyone being able to shut him down, not even the US military.
He didn’t like to imagine the scenario where he was forced to fight against his own government, but he knew it might come to that. The corruption that plagued his country was a virus and it nested in the bowels of every institution, even within the military he loved so much.
Dishonorable men walked the halls of the Pentagon, men who’d forgotten what it was like to fight and bleed next to their brother-in-arms. Men who’d sold out to the interests of the military-industrial complex that profited from the wars. They were greedy, self-centered and short-sighted. Worse, they were too stupid to understand that the national decline, the very march to oblivion they were abetting with the politicians and the bureaucrats, would eventually eat them alive along with everyone else.
Not on his watch. He planned to right the ship. And when he did, he’d cast the rats into the boiling sea and watch them burn. No matter how many stars they wore on their shoulders.
His eyes darted from one image to the next on the television monitors, giving him a feeling of being everywhere simultaneously. It was only a small preview of what he expected at the culmination of the mission. No, not a mission, not anymore. The word wasn’t sufficient.
This was a goddamn crusade. In the most literal and non-politically correct form of the word.
He wasn’t a religious man; he’d seen enough in the world to know there was no benevolent being sitting on a throne in heaven, radiating an aura of love and goodness. If there was, then the son of a bitch either had a cruel sense of humor or He was totally oblivious to the pain and suffering of His people. Neither interpretation matched up with the teaching in the scripture or in the church house, so he’d decided long ago that it was all bunk.
His religion was America. His gospel, the Constitution. His saints were named Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison and Washington. The oath he’d taken as an officer in the United
States Army was his liturgy.
I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The founders had foreseen the times in which he now lived. A time when the outside world was filled with existential threats to the nation while domestic threats fractured her from within. They had been wise enough to make the men who answered their nation’s call to service promise to be on the lookout for both threats, and pledge to take action when it was necessary.
He stood in awe of the founding fathers. All of them risked everything to launch the greatest country in the world’s history. All of them certain to hang if the uprising failed. And even after the defeat of the British, the fledgling country had clung to its existence by only its fingernails, with a single bad decision capable of torpedoing the grand experiment of self-government. Those men would have recognized his circumstances, and he was certain they would have condoned the action he intended to take. More than condone it, they would have demanded it.
The work detail at the entrance appeared to have finished their assignment. As they pulled their equipment back, stacking their tools on the work truck, he had a better view of their finished product. It wasn’t pretty, but then it didn’t need to be. A twelve-inch-thick metal plate was held in place by giant bolts in the rock, welded into place and then supported with a crossing lattice of heavy bars. He knew this was the fifth such plate installed. If someone was going to get into the mine, it would be easier for them to dig through the solid rock than penetrate through the entrance.
The only real challenge was the thermobaric munitions, commonly called the bunker busters for their ability to get through rock and destroy a hardened target. But if the military was able to strike, it meant that Keefer’s plan had failed. In that case, and if they figured out what he was trying to do, he was sure the bunker buster bombs would rain down on them for hours regardless of how many of the civilians were still alive. While the explosions wouldn’t touch them fifty stories underground, they would seal off the upper levels and probably melt the metal plates his men had just installed.
At that point, the mine’s emergency exit was their only viable escape route. And if that failed, if he had to blow that tunnel to block an attack, then they had the provisions to last over two years underground. If things went really against plan, they had the ability to grow food and could remain in the mine indefinitely until he came up with an alternative plan.
“Back to 36 and 37,” he said.
The screen showed the mess hall, supply center and the living quarters for the ninety-five soldiers under his command. The living quarters was a warren of cubed sleeping berths. The plan was for them to be down there no longer than a month, so there was not much in the way of creature comforts. These were men used to living in the rubble of burned-out cities for weeks at a time, so the facilities were like staying at a resort. If their stay underground had to be extended, there was a plan to give each man a larger space, but until then they just had a bunk and a locker for clothes and minimal personal effects.
“Scan complex,” he said.
Immediately, the screens flipped images in rapid succession. So fast that it was hard for him to pick anything out in detail. It didn’t matter because the technician with the brain machine interface was seeing everything perfectly. Analyzing it, storing images for archival retrieval.
Brain machine technology was ubiquitous enough that it was easy to forget how amazing the feat truly was. The same way climbing into a tube made up of several tons of metal and then soaring into the sky to fly great distances had gone from being fantasy to just mundane travel over the course of the twentieth century. But in both cases, a few moments of reflection was all it took to feel a sense of awe at what humans had developed when cooperation, incentive and scientific ingenuity were allowed to flourish.
And then in the next few moments, after one admired mankind’s progress, the dark reality of his baser instincts came into focus. What did man do with the power of flight? Yes, he’d gone to the moon and to Mars, but he’d first made machines of war, delivery systems of destruction and death. And what had man done with the brain-machine interface? First adopters were in the pornography industry, promising unparalleled sexual experiences with AI robots plugged into their partner’s every whim. Think it, have it, as the commercials promised. Then the military got into the mix. Better killing machines. More drone warfare. Internal mics. Retinal head-up displays. All of it designed to fight the next great war.
Only the Jihadis hadn’t gotten the message that war was more sophisticated now. They used time-honored techniques to achieve their goals. Brigades of zealots willing to execute entire villages. Dirty bombs of low-grade radioactive material set off in population centers. Dispersions of anthrax, weaponized Ebola and designer viruses that had names like the Plague of Allah or Fallujah’s Revenge. So many sleeper cells that there seemed to be a lone gunman for every special occasion. America’s malls were turned into bloodbaths. Graduations, weddings, even the funerals of returning soldiers, were all targeted. Sporting events were a security nightmare. So much so that baseball and football games were being played in empty stadiums, with fans safely watching the game at home. No one wanted to admit the terrorists had won, but they also weren’t willing to be the next victim in a mass shooting or bio attack.
The Jihadis knew they were winning because they saw America fleeing back to her shores and withdrawing from the world. The Chinese and the Indians, two and a half billion people, saw the same thing and landed body blow after body blow on America in her retreat. Before long, the international financial system was in ruins, the dollar discredited as an international currency. Protectionism ground trade to a halt. Territorial challenges were ignored and the bigger countries swallowed the weak, with China spreading throughout Southeast Asia.
America was an eagle that had willingly crawled back into its cage and forgotten how to fly. Keefer planned to fix all of that. When he was done, the American eagle would fly higher than it ever had before. More than that, he planned to guarantee she had the skies completely to herself for decades to come. Perhaps centuries.
He watched the monitors as dozens of bodies at a time were wheeled into the main cavern for processing and to be put into their places. He glanced at the mission clock, impatient for the new age he was about to usher in to become a reality. They were so close, he could almost touch it. Nothing would stop him now.
“Sir, there’s a power surge in the secondary exit shaft,” the soldier at the command center said.
Keefer felt his chest tighten. Could it be a special forces infiltration? Had word leaked somehow and they were here to stop him?
“Bring it up on video,” he said.
“Video feed non-functional,” the tech said. Keefer thought he heard a strain of nervousness pierce the man’s monotone speech. “The power surge must have taken some of the systems off-line.”
Keefer didn’t like the sound of that. A trained infil team would take out the cameras and, given time, they would disarm the explosives in the tunnel. But the exit was their way out. He was reluctant to order it sealed without more information.
“Analysis?” he asked.
“Impossible to determine the cause of the surge,” the tech said. Keefer found the man’s flat voice suddenly grating on his nerves. “Possibilities include a rock slide damaging the fence outside the door. A large animal running into the fence. An enemy force penetrating our defenses. An installation defect. A missing––”
“Enough,” Keefer said. He knew the list of possible causes could theoretically continue for hours if he let it as the computer generated all possible scenarios and fed them to the technician. It wasn’t enough information to blow the tunnel.
“Should I retask a work detail to go investigate?” the tech asked.
Keefer glanced at the monitors. Every screen showed the finely orchestrated ballet designed to get the mission operational as soon as possible. Pulling a team ou
t of the workflow would lead to inefficiencies and eventually jam up the process. That was a high price to pay if the surge was caused by a deer running into his fence.
“Send surveillance drones to check it out,” he said. He suddenly had a mental image of a team of Navy SEALs cutting through the explosives planted into the ceiling of the tunnel. “Send the armed drones,” he added. “Just in case.”
“Monitors 5, 6 and 7,” the man said.
Keefer’s eyes darted up to the correct screens. It was video feed from the point of view of three drones on the ground, relaying images of the staging area where hundreds of bodies were piled, waiting to be put into place. The image shifted as the drones rose from the ground, wobbling a little as the rotors spun up to full speed. The soldiers paid them little mind; drones hovering everywhere were a fact of life.
The three drones moved forward, flying through the staging area, each of their cameras sending the same image from a slightly different angle.
“How long to get to the area?” Keefer asked.
“Four minutes,” the technician said.
Keefer crossed his arms and watched the sides of the tunnels whip past on the video feeds as the drones flew through the air. He wasn’t going anywhere until he saw for himself what was going on at the exit tunnel. He was impatient, but he’d waited years to make this mission come together. He could last four minutes to see whether there was someone coming to try to stop him.
Because if there was, he intended to press the kill button himself.
42
Rick shined the flashlight over the back of the door, half expecting to see it rigged with explosives. It appeared to be clean. He turned his attention to the ground around him, happy to discover it was solid rock as far as the light extended into the tunnel. Rock was easy. Hard was walking around an entire country covered in sand and was filled with people who liked to bury bombs.
