The Furies (33 page)

“The Riflemen … they're at the fence.”

The news wasn't unexpected. Sullivan's deadline had passed four hours ago. By now he surely knew that Ariel wouldn't give up the formula for the catalyst, no matter how much pressure he applied. He also knew that the federal agents would raid the farm by midnight, and once that happened he'd have no chance at all of getting the formula. So his only option was to attack Haven before the agents did. Ariel furrowed her brow, contemplating strategy. “How many men does he have?”

“At least a hundred along the southern fence. And dozens more to the west and north. I've deployed guardsmen behind the outbuildings, but I need more sharpshooters to cover the approaches.”

She nodded grimly. “Well, now you have one more.” Stepping toward one of the aging guardsmen, she relieved him of his duffel bag. “Are the long guns in here?”

“Aye, the MK-13. That's your favorite, is it not?”

Instead of answering, Ariel turned away from him and headed out of the train tunnel. At the same time, John approached the other exhausted guardsman and offered to take his duffel bag. The man gave him a grateful look, but Conroy scowled. “What are you doing, paramour? You're not coming with us.”

Ariel looked over her shoulder. “Let him come. John did ten weeks of basic training with the American army. And he fought well when we were on the ferryboat.”

“Ten weeks? That's not very—”

“Don't be a fool, cuz. Let's go.”

Conroy kept scowling, but he let John take the duffel bag. Then they followed Ariel out of the tunnel and back to the cavern.

The cavern's floor was even more crowded than it had been five minutes ago. So many Furies streamed toward the tunnel that John started to wonder if all of them could fit in the railcars. The train might have to make two trips to carry everyone to the trucks. And that meant Conroy's guardsmen would have to hold off Sullivan for at least an hour, maybe two.

They ran up a catwalk fixed to the wall of the cavern, then climbed a spiral stairway to the surface. It was longer than the stairway John had used earlier that day to ascend from the cavern to the barn. This one seemed to go on forever, rising past the point where John thought the ground should be. At the top of the steps they found themselves in a dark, circular room about thirty feet across, with a high dome for a ceiling. Spaced at regular intervals along the surrounding wall were several horizontal slits, through which John glimpsed strips of dark purple sky in the final stages of twilight. He stepped closer to one of the slits, and when he looked down he saw the shadowed cornfields and pastures of Haven's farm about a hundred feet below.

The room was at the top of the farm's silo. It had been converted into a sniper's nest. As soon as they entered it, Conroy and the two older guardsmen unzipped the duffel bags and removed several long, sleek rifles. The faces of the tired men turned keen and lively as they loaded the guns and attached night-vision scopes with practiced ease. These guardsmen, John realized, were highly trained and knew their weapons well. They knelt on the floor next to the silo's circular wall and pointed their sniper rifles through the horizontal slits. At the same time, Ariel knelt in front of another slit and loaded her own gun. Then she reached into one of the duffel bags, pulled out a handheld scope, and passed it to John. “You'll be our spotter,” she said. “That means you find targets for us.” She lay on her stomach and pointed the barrel of her rifle through the slit. “Come down here.”

John sprawled on the floor beside her and looked through the spotter scope, which had a night-vision display. He'd seen this kind of display before, during his brief time in the army. It intensified the available light and outlined everything in shades of lurid green. He saw the cornfields again, but now in vivid detail, the tall, ripe stalks crowded in close rows. He saw the cinder-block outbuildings near the edge of the farm and the guardsmen positioned behind them, clutching their carbines and waiting for the attack to begin. And about half a mile away he saw the farm's southern fence, topped with coils of concertina wire, and the pine woods beyond.

“You see that gate in the fence?” Ariel nudged him. “That's twelve o'clock. When you spot a target, call out his position—one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, and so on.”

John focused his scope at the edge of the woods. After a few seconds he saw movement, a green blur between the pine trees. Someone who'd been hiding behind one of the tree trunks had darted to another. An instant later he glimpsed someone else raise his head above a pile of stones. “I see Riflemen.” Panning the scope from left to right, he saw more of them fidgeting behind the trees. “They're all along the edge of the woods.”

Ariel squinted through the scope on her rifle. “I see them, too.” She looked over her shoulder at Conroy, who was removing more equipment from the duffel bags. “It's a little strange, cuz, that they haven't attacked yet. It looks like they're waiting for a signal.”

Conroy nodded. “The Chief Elder is talking with Sullivan again. Through the wireless video connection.” He pulled a long tube out of the bag and began assembling the weapon. “She's pretending to negotiate with him, but in truth she's stalling for time. The evacuation of Haven is taking longer than expected.”

Ariel pointed at Conroy's weapon, which was much bulkier than a rifle. It looked more like a rocket launcher. “Is that a Stinger?”

“Aye, to shoot down helicopters. The federal agents may try to fly over our fence.” He pointed toward the east. “They've set up a staging area three miles away, but they're not prepared to strike yet. Sullivan is our more immediate concern.”

Curious, John turned his spotter scope to the east. Although he didn't see any helicopters, he observed at least a dozen state trooper cars parked in a distant field. He turned back to the south, intending to look for more Riflemen in the woods, but while panning the scope along the southern fence he caught a glimpse of a figure in the grass, about a hundred yards left of the gate. The figure was crawling toward the fence and holding an oversized pair of bolt cutters. “Someone's approaching the fence, eleven o'clock,” he told Ariel. “Looks like he wants to cut a hole in it.”

She instantly pointed her rifle at the man. “Damnation,” she muttered. “It's Harcourt.”

“Who? What do you—”

“He was in the Rangers for twenty years before the rebellion. We worked together on dozens of assignments.”

The man was fast. Within seconds he reached the drainage ditch just outside the fence and disappeared from view. Then he crawled up the other side of the ditch and started cutting the chain link at the base of the fence. “He's quick with those bolt cutters,” John noted. “He'll get through in no time.”

Conroy stopped unloading the duffel bags and came up behind them. “Take the shot, milady,” he urged. “We can't let him breach the perimeter.”

Ariel curled her finger around the rifle's trigger. But she didn't pull it. In the spotter scope John saw the Rifleman snap six more links, making a crescent-shaped tear in the fence.

“Milady!” Conroy raised his voice. “Do your duty!”

She took a deep breath and let it out. Then she fired the rifle.

John saw the impact of the bullet in Harcourt's chest. He fell backward into the ditch, the bolt cutters still in his hands. The gunshot echoed across the farm for a few seconds, then faded away. Then John heard a chorus of enraged shouting, a war cry composed of hundreds of voices. Sullivan's men emerged from the pine woods and rushed forward.

From a distance it looked like pandemonium, but gazing through the spotter scope John could see that the attack was well coordinated. The first line of Riflemen fired a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades, which exploded up and down the length of the fence. The blasts were so bright, they flooded the night-vision display in John's scope, and he had to close his eyes. When he opened them again the fence was wreathed in smoke, and he couldn't see a thing behind it, but he could hear the shouts of the Riflemen and the crackling of automatic weapons fire. After several seconds the smoke began to clear and John aimed his scope at the base of the fence. Sullivan's men were already wriggling through the jagged holes where their grenades had shredded the chain link.

“They're coming through!” he shouted. “Eleven o'clock, twelve, Jesus, the whole fence!”

Ariel and the other snipers started shooting. Tactically, it was an ideal situation for them. Because the fence was half a mile away, it was within range of the sniper rifles but too distant for the Riflemen to return fire with their carbines. And Sullivan's men were easy targets as they scrabbled on their bellies through the holes in the fence. Ariel took her second shot as John peered through his scope, and he saw a man tumble backward into the drainage ditch. Another Rifleman crawled halfway through one of the holes, then shuddered and went limp. Ariel fired again and again, fast and efficient, hitting a new target every few seconds. When John looked up from his scope, though, he noticed she was crying. She didn't make a sound, but her wet cheeks reflected the muzzle flashes from her gun.

After thirty seconds of slaughter Sullivan's men retreated, ducking into the drainage ditch on the other side of the fence. A moment later they lobbed a dozen smoke grenades over the coils of concertina wire. Billows of thick white smoke erupted from the canisters, and soon the fence was hidden again. The snipers kept firing, using memory alone to aim for the holes in the fence, but John saw several Riflemen emerge from the wall of smoke and dive for cover in the cornfields. Within a couple of minutes most of Sullivan's surviving men were inside the fence and advancing on the outbuildings.

Dozens of guardsmen stood at the corners of the outbuildings, alternately firing their assault rifles into the fields and ducking behind the cinder-block walls. They had night-vision scopes too, but they couldn't see the enemy through the rows of cornstalks. After a while it became clear that the Riflemen were outflanking them. When Sullivan's men got close enough to the outbuildings, they threw fragmentation grenades at the defenders. The blasts flashed like supernovas on John's spotter scope, and when the glow faded he saw the corpses of the fallen guardsmen twisted into grotesque shapes.

Ariel tried to aim at the attackers, but there was too much cover and they moved too fast. She pulled back from her rifle's scope and turned to John. “You see anything?” Her voice was frantic. “Any targets at all?”

He shook his head. “All I know is they're getting closer.”

“Bloody fucking hell! It doesn't make sense!” She stared into her scope again, grimacing. “We can't see them, but they can see us! How do they know where all our guardsmen are?”

“I don't—”

“It's like they have a fucking map of our defenses!” She looked over her shoulder at Conroy. “Are you monitoring the radio bands, cuz? Could one of the guardsmen be talking to Sullivan, telling him our positions?”

Conroy shook his head. “Only my most trusted men have radios.”

“I suspect you've misplaced your trust.” She turned back to John. “Use your scope to look at the guardsmen. See if any of them are handling their radios.”

With some anxiety John pointed the spotter scope at the defensive positions. He looked at the guardsmen behind the outbuildings, but he didn't know what he'd do if he saw one of them speaking into a radio. He was worried that Ariel would immediately aim her rifle at the guy and execute him. His hands trembled so badly he fumbled the scope, pointing the thing at the sky instead of the ground. And in that instant he saw something, a small flash of green against the vast darkness. A green cross.

John focused on the object. It was the drone, beyond any doubt, but it seemed much larger than it had before. “Look at the sky, ten o'clock.” He pointed at the unmanned aircraft. “It looks like it's flying lower now.”

Ariel raised her rifle and scanned the sky until she saw it. “It's the Reaper! And you're right, it's only two or three miles up.”

“Why did the federal agents lower it? So they can observe their raid on the farm?”

She nodded. “The drone has infrared cameras. They detect heat, so they can see everything in the dark.”

“Do you think Sullivan is intercepting the video from the drone's cameras?” John thought of something Sullivan had mentioned during his conversation with the Elders. “He said he could disable the government's drone if he wanted to. So maybe he also has access to its video feed.”

She lowered her rifle to the floor and gripped his arm. “That's it! That's how the bastard can see our positions!” She jumped to her feet and turned around to face Conroy. “I'm sorry for doubting your judgment, cuz. Is the Stinger ready?”

“Aye, milady.” He bowed his head and then dashed to the other side of the circular room. “I'll open the hatch.”

While Ariel picked up the bulky tube of the Stinger and hoisted it to her shoulder, Conroy grasped a handle on the curving wall and began turning it rapidly. John heard the sound of metallic scraping inside the dome on top of the silo. He looked up and saw a steel panel move to the side like a sliding door. The gap widened until it was a huge square, ten feet across, like the opening in the dome of an observatory. But instead of a telescope, Ariel pointed a missile launcher at the sky. She looked through the Stinger's night-vision gun sight, then waved John to her side. “Come here. Help me target the drone.”

He stood up and gazed at the sky through his scope, trying to find the drone again. After a few seconds he spotted it. “Okay, it's there, in the lower-right corner of the opening. It's moving to the left.”

“Got it.” As Ariel pointed the Stinger at the drone and tracked its progress, the launcher emitted a high-pitched tone that grew steadily louder. “The infrared seeker is locked on.”