Going Dark (26 page)

The air is brown with dust. No wind blows. I think the cavern might have collapsed. Or the borehole caved in behind us. Something has blocked the tunnel back there, because I feel no more heat from the inferno.

I make sure I’m linked into gen-com, and then I rasp, “Roll call.”

“Holy fuck,”
Logan whispers. “I’m still alive.”

“Me too,” Tran concedes, stirring a little, lifting his head.

I should probably get up too. “Papa!” I croak.

He answers: “
Da
. Goddamn you, Shelley. This was
not
a plan.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking. Issam alive?”

“So far. I still might kill him.”

“We need to move.”

“
Da
. Get up, little boy. You don’t get to die yet.”

I hear Issam wheezing like an asthmatic. If I could do something to help him, I would, but all we can do is move on.

In the mission Colonel Abajian assigned to me, I was to play my role as an arms dealer to the end, leaving as I came in the company of my bodyguards, with Damir driving the flatbed truck. There was no contingency for a post-inferno evacuation, or for rescuing an asthmatic Stanford scientist who’d gotten himself in with the wrong crowd.

Issam makes it only a few more steps before he collapses. “Papa,” I call, “just get past him, go on ahead.”

I send Tran forward too. As he squeezes past Logan, he notices the extra M4. “LT, let me carry that.”

Logan hands it over with a warning. “Don’t lose it.”

Tran really doesn’t need the extra weight, but I guess he needs the comfort. Carrying the M4 in one hand, he
clambers over Issam and then follows the light that Leonid carries.

I move forward with Logan. As we crouch beside Issam, my broken foot slips, pitching me to my mechanical knees.
“Shit.”

“Steady,” Logan says.

I don’t think he’s noticed the condition of my foot yet.

We help Issam sit up. His farsights are askew on his face and every breath is a labored gasp. I take his farsights off and fold them up to put in my pocket—but then an idea occurs to me.

Logan?

Here.

Back me up.

What?

Gangster shit.

“Issam,” I say out loud. Then I have to turn my head to cough. “Look at me, Issam.”

He opens his half-closed eyes, focusing on me, his chest still heaving.

My throat hurts. My lungs ache. I have to talk in a low, hoarse voice. “I want you to unlock your farsights.”

At this request, Issam’s eyes widen even farther, so I know he understands me. Logan settles back on his heels, the harsh shadows cast by his little LED exaggerating his brief, cold smile. Issam’s farsights almost certainly contain extensive data gathered over two years among his “circus of murderers.” That is an invaluable intelligence asset. I don’t want it locked up and out of reach.

I speak gently, use a reasonable tone, and make sure he understands his vulnerable position. It’s a technique of persuasion I learned from a mercenary. “Unlock your farsights for me, Issam. No secrets anymore, okay?” I take a slow, shallow breath, struggling not to cough. “You need to give
it all up if you want us to get you out of here, get you home.”

He takes the farsights, holding them in two hands as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. “I have personal things . . .”

“No.” I shake my head. “Nothing stays personal or private in this world. You know that better than most.”

Still, he hesitates.

I cock my head to listen. “Logan, can you still hear Papa?”

“No. They’re too far ahead. We can’t wait any longer. We need to catch up.”

I start to get up.

“Don’t leave me,” Issam says.

“Unlock the farsights,” Logan growls, “so we can get the fuck out of here.”

Issam looks from Logan to me and back again. I think he suspects it’s an act. But why risk it? Why risk pissing us off? I watch the decision get made. He nods and slips the farsights on. His gaze shifts subtly. He mutters. “. . . select. Select. Yes. Yes, I’m sure!” He slides them off. Hands them to me. “No secrets,” he says. “All yours.”

I put them on and check the security settings. Wide open. All biometric identifiers deleted. No passcode required. I shut off the network access and then I stash them in an inside zip pocket of my coat. “You’re going to be okay, Issam.” Logan helps me get him on his feet; I get his arm over my shoulder. “You’re going home.”

In the narrow tunnel, we have to crab sideways. My pack keeps hitting the wall; the muzzle of my HITR scrapes the roof. Issam tries to help, but after a minute he’s dead weight, so I put him down again. Logan takes his shoulders, I take his knees, and we carry him.

We stop every minute or so to breathe and to make sure
Issam is still breathing. In the tight, low-oxygen environment of the tunnel, carrying him is an exhausting, dizzying chore, and I know I’m not thinking clearly. I’m not thinking of anything but the next step, so it’s a few minutes before I realize that we’re breathing cleaner, cooler air.

Leonid and Tran have moved far ahead, but the borehole is straight, so Tran’s voice reaches us easily on gen-com. “Shelley, Logan,” he warns. “Stop where you are and hunker down. We’re going to blow the gate.”

We lay Issam down, and then we lie down beside him. Soon after, I hear our forward contingent stampeding madly back toward us. Leonid barks,
“Drop!”

I duck my head, throwing a protective arm over Issam’s unconscious face.

The explosives go off.

•  •  •  •

“
Roll call
,” I growl when the dust settles.

“Logan.”

“Tran.”

“Papa, you still with us?”

“Da.”
He doesn’t sound happy about it. “This was
not
our mission. This was beyond our mission. Far, far beyond it.”

“I know.”

“I think the angels must be watching over us, that we are even alive.”

“So far anyway,” Logan growls.

I spend several seconds coughing. When the fit passes, I hold my hand above Issam’s nose and mouth, and am rewarded by a warm flush of exhaled breath—which makes me aware of how cold it’s gotten. I have to guess that the door out of Hell has been successfully blown open. I look up to confirm it. Through a fog of dust, I see a faint purple glow. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”

Under the influence of the cool air, Issam starts to waken. I leave him to recover, advancing with the others the last few meters. The twisted shards of a steel gate hang from broken hinges with a lavender twilight beyond and glinting stars. I’m still limping to the gate when a network icon flares in my overlay. A tag slides out, identifying the network.

“EXALT!” I murmur in astonishment.

“I’ve got it too,” Logan confirms, a step behind me. “An EXALT network
here
.”

I thought we’d be isolated, with no way to get word out, since we had to turn over our satellite relays to Luftar. They’re burnt to ash by now.

It’s a thought that brings a flush of primal fear to my skin despite the cold.

I liked Luftar. He seemed like a decent guy. But it’s not smart to think of the enemy that way.

Gen-com responds automatically to the presence of the network, opening a link to the Cloud, seeking links to the rest of our squad and to our handler. While I wait for Kanoa to check in, I push past Tran and join Leonid at the entrance.

It’s 0546 and the sky has just begun to lighten. A thin frosting of snow lies on the ground.

“Is that a path, Papa?” With the half-light and the snow it’s hard to be sure, but I think there’s a path leading into a forest of evergreen trees that might be cedar.

“Looks like it,” he says. “Not well used.”

Steep, heavily forested slopes rise on two sides, ending in snow-frosted gray peaks that frame a narrow valley. I see a shimmer and then a tiny white flash just above the eastern ridge. I think it’s the EXALT node. Easier to see is a plume of dust and white smoke from the explosives Leonid used to blow open the gate. The plume is drifting
south, a marker indicating to anyone watching this region that something of interest is going on here.

Drones have surely been watching. Did they see evidence at the main gate of the conflagration we ignited?

Colonel Abajian warned he would respond to the slightest sign of hostile intent.

I check my overlay. Gen-com still shows only me, Logan, and Tran linked in. Where the hell is the rest of my squad? Where is Kanoa?

“Echo tango mike 7-1. Someone out there?”

No one responds.

Abajian might still have my squad on lockdown—but that doesn’t explain Kanoa’s absence.

“Wait here, Papa.” I slip outside.

Despite the steep valley walls, my overlay immediately latches on to signals from a constellation of GPS satellites. In seconds, my position is pinpointed. I’m in a valley with a name I’ve never heard of and can’t pronounce. Eleven kilometers south is a narrow road that might offer us a way out of here. There’s a much bigger, modern highway well to the north, past the ridge that separates us from the front gate of the UGF. I don’t know why the underground facility is here. I can’t imagine what it was intended for. Maybe it was a make-work contract designed by some Cold War defense contractor who bribed an official to gain the approval.

“Echo tango mike 7-1,” I repeat. “ETM 7-1. Kanoa. Abajian. Whoever’s there. Mission accomplished, but we need a ride out of here.”

Still no answer.

Before we left, Kanoa said I was not to worry about the future of 7-1, but I’m worried now. Abajian said he was our ally. But what if he changed his mind? Now that the mission is done, he might see 7-1 as a political liability, too dangerous to keep around.

I duck back into the tunnel where Leonid and Logan are waiting, Logan with his HITR, Leonid with the M4 he took from the armory.

“Where’s Kanoa?” Logan wants to know.

I tell him my theory. He does not take it well. Leonid growls like an irritated dog, and then he mutters, “I will see what I can arrange.” Pulling his tablet from a pocket, he moves to the door.

After another coughing fit, I turn to Tran, who’s sitting down, leaning against his backpack, his arms around his M4, eyes closed, his dark skin frosted in dust. More dust has mixed with the blood soaking his pant leg, and his chest is rising and falling with fast, shallow breaths. He needs to be evacuated, transported to a hospital and treated. But for now, all we can do is clean him up and close his wounds.

Logan helps me. The blood on Tran’s pants is cold, sticky, coagulated. We ease his pants off and manage not to restart any major bleeding. I use water from my pack to clean his leg. That lets us get a look at his wounds: seven lacerations, six of them on his thigh, one on his hip. “You look like a yeti got hold of you.”

“Shrapnel,” he growls through gritted teeth.

Logan and I work as fast as we can, pulling out bits of rock and metal before gluing each wound shut. The glue has an anesthetic that gets Tran feeling good enough that he puts his shredded, blood-soaked pants back on himself. I help him with his boot.

“We have to move out,” I tell them. “Drones will have marked the activity here. Depending who they belong to, we could be a target.”

“I’m good,” Tran says. “I can do it.”

I think he’s trying to convince himself.

Leonid comes back inside the tunnel.

“Got us a ride?” I ask him.

This earns me a dark scowl and an untranslatable Russian curse. “The details are being worked on. Also, fighter jets are coming this way.”

Even as he says it, I hear their low roar. I squeeze past him to the entrance. The remains of the shattered gate are vibrating in sympathy. Logan and Leonid crowd behind me. Together we search the sky.

“There,” Logan says, pointing to where three jets are racing in from the southwest. At first they’re just distant gray points beneath a deck of high clouds, but they draw closer with startling speed. My overlay tags them as Pakistani.

Leonid makes the same assessment. “They are out of Islamabad.” He adds, in an ominous voice, “It has been only thirty minutes since you blew up the truck. Less since the missiles ignited. It is possible these jets were already in the air, but is it likely? Or are they here to intercept an outside threat?”

“Ah, fuck,”
Logan says. “You think Abajian already launched his cruise missile?”

Colonel Abajian might have launched it an hour or more ago when the news came that the other missile sites had been captured—a preemptive strike to stop Abaza taking any desperate action.

The fighters scream past our position, barely a half-klick to the west. The Pakistanis don’t have a lot of tolerance for American cruise missiles in their sovereign territory. I watch them pass over the shoulder of the mountain. I wait a few seconds for their roar to fade and then I say, “Let’s get the fuck out of here, get into the trees. I don’t want to be underground when that missile hits.”

I go back for Tran, but he’s already made it to his feet. He’s bracing himself against the wall, a grimace on his face. “Help him, Logan.”

“I don’t need help,” he protests. “I’m good.”

“Then go outside.”

I squeeze past, and hobble after Issam. He’s dragged himself to a sitting position, but he doesn’t look like he’s good for much more than that. I kneel beside him. He gives me a desperate, frightened look. He’s sticky with sweat and dust, and stinks of fumes just like the rest of us, and he’s breathing with a faint wheeze—but at least he’s breathing. “How badly do you want to go home?”

“You said you’d get me out,” he whispers.

“I will. But you’re going to have to help.”

I get him on his feet. I’m trying to get his arm around my shoulder when the ground shudders, a vibration that rises up through my titanium legs. I drag him stumbling to the tunnel mouth. Everyone else is already out. We emerge as a rumble of thunder rolls in from the north, a deeper register than the jets’ engines.

Logan, Tran, and Leonid are all looking back at the mountain. The rising light picks out the dirt and dried sweat on their upturned faces, the mud and smoke stains on their clothes, and it hits me again how close we came to dying—and we’re not safe yet. Boiling up behind the mountain is a column of gray smoke.