Authors: Patrick Lee
E
very inch of the sprint felt like too much to ask for. Each vaulting step seemed like it should be the last.
He went back over the lip at the top of the stairs. Jumped with no thought for which tread his foot would land on—the time required for that kind of thinking was also too much to ask for.
It turned out to be the fourth step above the landing. His arch came down right on the drop-off, and only his forward momentum kept him from dumping all his weight onto it and breaking his ankle. He threw his other foot down with more control, rammed it hard and flat onto the steel landing, and brought his forearm up to catch the wall before he shattered his face on it.
The arm took a lot of the blow, but not all. The rest of his body was hurtled against the stone an instant later, the impact wringing the air from his lungs. He sucked it back in and used it to scream for the others to cover their ears, then pivoted toward the next flight and jumped again. He was arcing through the air, aiming for the next landing and clamping his hands over the sides of his head, when it finally happened.
I
t felt like having a boxcar dropped on him.
The airspace around him seemed to solidify and compress inward in a single, monstrous clap. He saw the stairs beneath him jump and vibrate. Saw the effect race down the shaft, a shockwave trailing a vacuum in its wake. The bass followed, making an eardrum of his whole body. He heard it with his knees and his spine and his fillings.
He kept his feet under him as he plunged ahead toward the landing, and threw both hands forward from his ears to catch the wall. He became aware of the transparency suit falling away below his arm, and had just enough time to notice it’d dropped toward the sidewall, not the open center of the shaft.
Then he hit, and his arms folded, and his forehead slammed against his wrist on the wall and everything went black.
H
ands, shaking him by the shoulder, frantic.
“
Travis
.”
Paige, whispering.
He opened his eyes. The shaft was swirling with gray-white concrete dust. Ten feet above him, a broad rectangular shape stuck out over the top of the shaft.
The green door. Bent and twisted at its edges. Hurled out of its frame into the room, lying with maybe a quarter of its mass over the shaft’s edge.
Travis looked at Paige. Her eyes were wet and her cheeks were smeared. Relief just outweighed fear in her expression.
Travis turned over and sat up. He looked at the flight he’d jumped down past. He got up on his knees and leaned forward and pawed at the landing and the lowest stair treads, and for a terrible few seconds believed the suit’s halves had missed them anyway. Maybe they’d caught the air and gone under the rail—or right between the treads—and slipped down into the depths of the shaft, where a painstaking week wouldn’t be enough to find the damn things.
Then he saw them: misshapen pockets of clear air amid the churning dust, clumped near each other halfway up the flight. He reached up and grabbed both, withdrew to the landing again and looked at Paige and the others.
“I’m going to engage them outside in the open,” Travis said. “That gives me the best advantage, especially with the dust down here.”
He turned and sat on the second step, felt for which half of the suit was the bottom, and began to pull it on. He heard Dyer take a quick breath at the sight of first one leg and then the other vanishing.
“The three of you should find shooting cover in the chamber up top,” Travis said. “Weapons trained on the doorway. It’s like the Thermopylae Pass. Anything comes through that you can see, kill it.”
He unslung his MP5 and handed it to Dyer.
Dyer looked puzzled. Then, assuming Travis was asking him to trade, he drew his own sidearm from his shoulder holster and held it out.
Travis shook his head. “I’m good.”
“What are you going to use?” Dyer said.
“Something quieter,” Travis said, and pulled on the suit’s top half.
H
e took the stairs quickly but carefully, no longer able to see his feet. He’d worn the suit before—its twin, anyway—but that had been more than three years ago, and the thing still held all its novelty for him. The material was comfortable and breathable, and there was no question it had some capacity to shape itself to its wearer. As Travis had been told, it generally kept the form of whoever had last worn it, then actively adjusted to anyone new. He felt it doing that now, as he ascended. Where it covered his face, it drew taut along his jawline and relaxed a bit over his nose. It sucked in around his shoes and ankles. It molded to the precise dimensions of his hands. He guessed it would’ve done the same for a hand with seven digits instead of five. Maybe even for a body with four arms, or some altogether different structure.
He stepped off the top stair into the chamber. The green door lay at his feet among the curling dust. Straight ahead, its frame had been torqued and blown half free of the stone that’d encased it. The giant bolt latch lay off to one side, bent like a pried-out roofing nail.
Travis turned from the opening and sprinted toward the back right corner of the room. The kitchen.
He found what he wanted in the third drawer he opened: a ten-inch chef’s knife right out of a horror film. He took it and ran for the blasted-out doorway.
H
e climbed the access stairs in perfect silence. By the third flight he was above the dust. He waved his free hand in front of his face and saw that none had stuck to the suit. He rounded the next landing and started up the topmost flight. The horizontal tunnel above was full of indirect daylight; it led directly out onto the forested slope.
He heard men talking just outside. Then the faint thud of boot treads stepping onto concrete. Once, then again and again in rapid succession. More than one person walking. Travis put the number at three.
He lifted the hem of the suit’s top and carefully raised the knife into the space behind it. This was one of the suit’s most useful tricks: its capacity to hide handheld objects. A silenced pistol would’ve been a godsend just now. Travis had seen for himself the brutal effectiveness of that combination. He’d come within half a second of taking a bullet to the head as a result.
He crept up the stairs and saw the men in the tunnel as soon as his eyes cleared floor level.
Three, as expected.
They stood at the midpoint between entry and stairwell, heads cocked, listening for any sign of movement down in the mine.
Travis stepped onto the concrete, the knife still hidden. The three men nearly blocked the tunnel ahead of him, but there was enough room on the left to slip by. Travis advanced, twisted sideways, eased past the formation.
He looked out through the tunnel’s mouth and saw no one else close by. The Humvees were forty yards away down the hillside, and every man Travis could see was among them, standing or crouching.
He turned back to face the three listeners. For a moment longer they just stood there, waiting. They were arranged in a rough triangle, two forward and one lagging back, all three staring ahead into the darkness at the top of the shaft. Travis took a position directly behind the loner. He brought the knife out from under the suit and raised it slowly until it was eight inches behind and to the left of the man’s neck—nowhere near the edge of his peripheral vision.
He held the blade level, with the cutting edge facing back toward himself.
With his other hand he pulled the suit’s hem outward once more, ready to hide the knife again in a hurry.
“I don’t hear anything,” one of the men up front said.
Travis slipped the knife beneath the loner’s jaw and yanked it straight back with all his force. It sliced through skin and cartilage and tough rubbery cords of muscle about as easily as it would’ve passed through ground beef. The man’s body spasmed hard and his hands jerked to his throat, and a ragged choking noise came from his mouth.
The other two men spun, raising their weapons instinctively.
Travis brought the knife down to his waist—blocked from view by the still-standing victim—and raised it back into concealment within the suit.
“
Gordy
,” one of the other two said, his eyes taking in the wound but unable to comprehend how the hell it’d gotten there.
Gordy dropped. One shoulder landed first and his head went back and to the side, and the awful gash drew open and began founting blood in thick pulses.
The man who’d said the name sank fast to his knees and reached for him. The other guy stood back, hyperventilating, looking around instinctively for a threat he couldn’t perceive.
He settled on the tunnel’s mouth, ten feet away. The only logical place the attack could have come from. He stared at it, eyes darting, MP5 held tense.
Travis sidestepped around him in a wide arc, got behind him and brought the knife back out, then sliced him carotid to carotid.
He didn’t rehide the knife. He simply stepped forward and slashed the third man’s throat before number two had hit the ground. Just like that, there were three bodies convulsing and dying on the concrete, one of them maybe five seconds further into the process than the other two. Nothing about the encounter had been loud enough to carry to the men downslope.
Travis scooped up one of the dead men’s MP5s, flicked the selector to full-auto and walked to the tunnel’s open end.
“
Heads up!
” he screamed, his voice high enough that it could’ve belonged to any man, and opened fire with the weapon. He raked the stream of bullets randomly across the Humvees far below, heard shouts of alarm and confusion and saw bodies dive out of sight. He didn’t bother aiming for them. He dinged up the sides of the vehicles until the machine gun ran dry, then dropped it in the dirt and sprinted away laterally across the slope. He knew his feet were kicking up sand and needles, but between the ground vegetation and the fact that no one was looking, he didn’t worry. He exerted only enough effort to keep his footfalls close to quiet, and the knife hidden up inside the suit.
Fifty yards from the access he stopped. He turned straight downhill and moved at a careful walk, entirely soundless now and kicking up nothing. He descended until he was level with the Humvees, and saw the men crouched behind them on the downhill side. Anxiety in every set of eyes. Universal confusion over the screamed warning, the gunfire, and now the silence.
Travis counted fourteen men. He also counted two fewer Humvees than had chased them up here earlier; the others must have gone to the north access.
Getting at these fourteen from behind would be a joke—they were all looking uphill, over the vehicles’ hoods or through their passenger compartments. The men were clustered in twos and threes, the Humvees spaced dozens of feet apart among the redwood trunks. One little group at a time, these people could be handled with no more difficulty than the first three.
Travis stared at them and wondered why he didn’t feel worse about this. Why he’d felt nothing for the guys he killed on Main Street earlier, or those in the tunnel. Maybe necessity just pushed remorse aside. Maybe that was an animal thing from way back. Maybe he had more of it than he should. He considered that idea for another second and then pushed it aside too, and started across the slope in a long arc that would put him below the Humvees.
I
t took ninety seconds. When he’d finished, he dropped the knife and sprinted uphill to the access. He shouted the all-clear to the others, ran back to the Humvees and got one started.
T
hey rolled down out of the trees and saw the town full of police vehicles far below. Crown Vics and SUVs and pickups, state and local, every flasher strobing blue and red in the overcast gloom. The big guy in the Humvee had ordered them in here earlier, to help search the town for the three of them.
Travis braked on the narrow road near Raines’s house and put the vehicle in park. He switched on the two-way radio mounted to the dash and heard a man’s voice in mid-sentence.
“—any assistance needed, please advise us on that, over.”
There was a long hiss of static and then the same man began speaking once more: “Say again, any civilian unit, this is CHP, please acknowledge. I see one of you just out of the woods now.”
“They heard the shooting,” Paige said.
Travis nodded. “And their signals must not be getting to anyone on the other side of the ridge.”
He grabbed the radio’s handset and depressed the talk switch. “CHP and local departments, stand by for now. No assistance required. Echo unit, meet us on the highway; we’re bringing out a subject for extraction, over.”
He let up on the switch and shut off the radio.
“Nice,” Dyer said.
Travis, sitting in the driver’s seat and still wearing the transparency suit, glanced around at Dyer and then Paige and Bethany.
“Take the wheel,” he said to Dyer. “You look exactly like someone who’d be driving this fucking thing.”
He clambered out of the seat and into the back, where Paige and Bethany had already taken the hint and ducked out of sight below the windows.
“P
ull into the first good-sized parking lot we see,” Travis said.
It was five minutes later. They were back in bright sunlight, heading south on the Coast Highway. The Pacific lay to the right, low grassy hills to the left. Here and there the land dropped into flat stretches that might have been flood plains, or even extensions of the seafloor in ancient times. Farm buildings and other isolated structures dotted most of them, but Travis recalled seeing others developed into mid-sized towns on the drive up.
They needed to swap the Humvee for something else. There was no question it had a LoJack or some equivalent on board, and that someone would start tracking it at any time. The ruse back in town had bought only minutes, and probably not many.
Travis was in the passenger seat now. He’d pulled off the suit’s top and had it bunched in his lap. He looked at his phone. A quarter past one. Five and a half hours until Richard Garner killed himself.
Travis turned to Dyer. “Skeleton crew aboard
Air Force One
, you said.”
Dyer nodded. “If they’re torturing captives, I doubt they brought the press corps along. Doubt they brought
anyone
they don’t need.”
“If we can get within a mile of any airport where it lands,” Travis said, “getting aboard in this suit would be fishing with depth charges.”
Dyer said nothing. He simply drew his BlackBerry from his pocket and opened an application, his eyes darting between its display and the road. A few seconds later he said, “Two flight plans. One’s already expired: the plane landed at an undesignated site in eastern Wyoming, just over an hour ago.”
“Border Town,” Paige said.
“Holt’s touring his new property,” Travis said.
Dyer scrolled down through the text on his screen. “Second flight’s coming almost straight to us. Plane takes off from Border Town in half an hour, arrives at Oakland International in two and a half.”
“He’s visiting the points of conflict,” Bethany said. “Probably has people aboard the plane that he trusts to check out the aftermath and make assessments.”
Travis managed his first smile in some time. “They’re going to be busy today.”
H
alf a minute later they saw a supermarket with a sprawling lot a quarter mile off the highway. Beyond it lay suburbs and a few blocks of low-rise commercial buildings—the western sweep of some unseen city further inland.
Dyer swung off the highway, then into the market, and parked out at the edge of the lot. Something like half the spaces were occupied. There were probably two hundred cars to choose from.
Travis pulled the suit’s top back on. Then he opened the huge glove box in front of him and saw three different wrenches and half a dozen screwdrivers, both slotted and Phillips types. He grabbed the biggest slotted one.
“We’ll wait here until you get something hot-wired,” Paige said.
He nodded and got out into the sharp wind coming off the ocean, and shut the door behind him. It would occur to him only later that she couldn’t have seen the nod—that from her point of view he’d simply left without acknowledging her words.
He stood surveying the nearest row of vehicles, and settled on the oldest thing in view: a mid-’90s Ford Taurus forty yards to the right, probably antique enough to lack any special security measures in its ignition. He sprinted for it.
Just inland from the lot, a train horn blared. Seconds later the rumble and clatter faded in, and he looked over his shoulder and saw it: a little six-car freight coming up from the south.
He reached the Taurus, gripped the screwdriver by the end of its shaft and swung it like a hammer. Its handle connected with the driver’s side window and burst it inward in a spill of crumbs. He unlocked the door, brushed most of the glass away and got in. Five seconds later he had the ignition smashed open and the starter wires isolated. He was about to touch their stripped ends together when something made him stop. Some sound right at the edge of his awareness. Something to do with the train, he thought. The racket of its wheels suddenly sounded wrong, though he couldn’t say how—or why it had struck him as important. Why it made the skin on his arms prickle. He listened for another second and then disregarded it. Whatever the hell was spooking him, sitting idle here wouldn’t help matters.
He sparked the wires and heard the starter motor kick over, and then the engine roared.
He opened the door and got back out. The train had already passed, churning away to the north, its clatter going with it. It’d faded for another second when Travis’s skin began to crawl again.
Now he knew why.
He could hear the sound even over the grumble of the Taurus’s engine. A sound that’d been perfectly masked by the passing freight.
Rotors.
He spun and looked around wildly, but for a few seconds he couldn’t pin the direction. The staccato hammering of the chopper’s blades seemed to come from everywhere, bouncing off the broad storefront and from the panels of every nearby vehicle.
Then he saw it. A quarter mile south. Coming in right out of the sun glare.
For a moment he thought it was a police chopper. It was black and there were bulky shapes hanging off the sides that might’ve been cameras or loudspeakers.
An instant later he saw he was wrong—he recognized the flattened, broad profile of a Black Hawk. But not the standard transport model; it was some special variant with stub wings jutting off the fuselage.
And missiles clustered beneath them.
Travis turned and sprinted for the Humvee, screaming Paige’s name. Screaming
Get out
, over and over. He could see her through the heavy glass, seated in back on the side facing him.
She couldn’t hear him.
He screamed louder, the soft tissue lining his throat going ragged.
In the direction of the chopper, high in his peripheral vision, white light erupted and something shrieked.
He was thirty yards from the vehicle now, moving as fast as he could move, screaming as loud as he could scream.
Paige turned toward the sound of his voice at last, centering her focus on it so perfectly that, for an instant, Travis forgot she couldn’t see him. She was looking right into his eyes when the missile hit the Humvee.