Empire (42 page)

It was a narrow, high-ceilinged cavern with steel bracing extending up to the roof. The walls were lined with mechs, squatting on the floor like they were all taking a dump. Cole had always thought that the mechs would hang like suits, with their legs dangling. But then how would anybody get inside?

Cole pushed himself forward a little farther and found a target—a guy running for one of the mechs. Being in a good position, his shot was clean and he took him down. Slid farther in and took out another.

They stopped trying to get to the mechs. Instead, they fled the room. “Idiots,” said Cat softly. “They should have been
in
the mechs before we made it up here.”

“Maybe some of them already are,” said Cole. “Playing possum.”

“They that smart?”

“I just don't want to walk down between those rows.”

Which was fine. There were corridors leading off to the left and right. Cole chose the one to the left for no better reason than that he was on that side already.

He tried to imagine the architecture of this place. It wouldn't be like a building, with rooms one after another, divided only by thin walls. They had a whole mountain on top of them. So each room would have plenty of rock between it and the next one, with only corridors connecting them. The really tall corridors would be for mechs to walk along. Stay with the low, man-sized corridors, and they'd be more likely to face opponents that weren't armored like tanks.

The cavern architecture also meant that corridors could be long and could lead anywhere. This one was sloping upward and turning. The turn made Cole uncomfortable. It meant he couldn't see all the way ahead.

Then it looked like the corridor ended.

No. As he rounded the last bit of curve he could see that it took a sharp turn to the right. No door this time. No reason to put a lot of doors in here, when you were above the water level and nobody could get in here anyway.

But now Cole had to wonder: What was their mission now? They had headed for the cabin only to reconnoiter. They hadn't meant to assault the place. Each step along this road, after the firing started, was oriented toward survival. Except . . . when there
had
been a choice about which way to run in the flooding tunnel, Cat had chosen to go toward the enemy, not away. And Cole had gone along without a second thought.

They had proof enough that this was where the bad guys were. One of the guys outside had to have taken pictures of the mechs and hoverbikes coming out of those huge doors in the mountainside. Video, too, of the rebels shooting at Cole and Cat on the ladder up to the cabin.

With no one actually shooting at them, Cole gave a hand signal for Cat to wait and keep watch. Then he switched on his transmitter.

“You think that's still working?” asked Cat.

“Light still comes on,” said Cole. “And it's supposed to use the ground as a conduit.” Cole coded for Drew first.

And got an answer. “Drew here. You guys okay?”

“Mingo and Benny get through to Gettysburg?” asked Cole.

“Don't know yet,” said Drew. “But everything and everybody's coming through those big front doors.”

“More guys looking for you?”

“We killed two mechs with rockets and then they all headed back for home. Trucks are coming out now, driving up and over the dam. Looks to me like they're evacuating the place.”

“Just cause two guys got inside?” said Cat. “Big babies.”

“They've got to believe we're just the preliminary team,” said Drew. “If they believe we're just an advance team, and you actually got inside, I think they took that as a bad sign.”

“Besides,” said Babe, “these are the guys who decided
against
a military career.”

Evacuating, moving to a different location. Why? Because they intended to make this one unusable themselves. “I think they're planning to flood this whole place,” said Cole. “Genesseret is higher than this whole complex. Run water through it all, ruin everything.”

“Doesn't eliminate the evidence that it exists,” said Drew.

“If they're planning to flood this, I want to get a little higher up,” said Cat.

“Tell us when Mingo reports that a strike force is coming,” said Cole. “Make sure you have a radio ready to tell them about the ordnance and personnel that are getting away. Capture it all on the road.” Then he signed off and turned off his transmitter.

Cat slid down the wall to a squatting position. “How long will it take a strike force to get here?”

“I don't know,” said Cole. “If they come from Nevada or Montana, at least an hour.”

“Carrier off the coast—the Marines might get here fastest.”

“I don't mind getting my ass saved by the Marines,” said Cole. “Long as they save my ass.”

“If the bad guys are evacuating—”

“In order to flood the whole place?”

“I've done enough swimming,” said Cat.

“So—before we move on, what's our goal here?”

“Stay breathing,” said Cat.

“We could have stayed at the cabin,” said Cole.

Cat thought about that for a few seconds. “Well, we want higher ground if they're going to flood the place. And my guess is, if we try to go out the front door, they'll be waiting for us there. Why hunt us down if they know we've got to come to
them?
”

“So we want to go up. If there's any place high enough in here to stay out of the water.”

“And I was thinking,” said Cat, “maybe Aloe Vera's here somewhere. Course, he'd be crazy to be here where he couldn't deny knowing about it.”

“Maybe he doesn't want to deny it,” said Cole. “Maybe he's proud of it.”

“Here's where the ordnance is coming from,” said Cat. “Maybe the orders come from here, too. Guy builds this army, don't you think he'd want to run it?”

“So we're looking for Verus?”

“Hell no,” said Cat. “We're looking for command and control. Wipe it out in advance of the main assault.”

It was elementary. Wipe out enemy command and control—it's what Special Forces were supposed to do in advance of an attack. But he'd never been in an invasion. He'd always worked on hearts and-minds, recon, small-group assaults. Cat, however, had been there for Iraq in 2003. Different experience, so different stuff comes to mind in a crisis.

Still, thought Cole: I should have thought of it.

“If we do happen to find him,” said Cole, “we need him alive. For the cameras.”

“I think his dead body does the same job,” said Cat.

“Better to pull him out of a hole.”

“Like Saddam.”

“Meanwhile,” said Cole, “I wonder what's waiting around this corner. You got any grenades left?”

“In my pack,” said Cat. “Floating in that tunnel.”

Cole dropped to the floor and rolled out into the corridor, keeping his weapon pointed down the hall.

There was nothing there. Just more ramp going up and another turn.

“Goes up,” said Cat behind him.

“Just the direction we wanted to go.” Cole got up and ran up the slope. Cat followed him.

The next jog wasn't into a corridor, it was into a large, heavily braced cavern. This was one of the factories. Not a fully automated assembly line—the volume wasn't great enough to justify that. It looked like they used teams to assemble the pieces into finished hovercycles, one bike per team, six teams working, plus carts loaded with parts.

But nobody was assembling anything right now. Which went along with what the guys were seeing outside. Everybody evacuated.

On the wall, there was a map of the place with two escape routes marked. One led to the huge front door, the other to the tunnel connecting to the cabin.

“I don't believe this map,” said Cole. “I don't think they'd build this place without an escape hatch that didn't require that the lake be drained.”

“They didn't expect the tunnel to be full of water,” said Cat.

“But they flooded it themselves. Their defense is flooding the front door, too. No way are they so stupid they get trapped if both entrances are flooded.”

“So there's an escape route didn't quite make it onto the map?” said Cat.

“One that trucks can't use,” said Cole.

“But Aloe Vera can.”

Studying the floorplan, though, there was nothing conveniently labeled “Command and Control.”

“I'll keep watch,” said Cole, “you look at this.”

Cat looked. “Not like a regular building. Nice rectangular tower, you can spot the gaps when they leave stuff off the floor plan.”

“So if you were in charge of this place, where would
you
put the command center?”

“Up high,” said Cat. “They got three levels higher than this one. Not a lot of routes leading there.”

“I bet Command and Control is four levels up,” said Cole, “since the floorplan only shows three.”

“Bet you're right,” said Cat.

“So which way up you want to use?”

Both he and Cat had memorized the map while studying it—part of their training, to be able to memorize maps so they didn't have to carry them around.

“Not the ones that lead toward the front door,” said Cat. “Let's avoid the crowds.”

They ran into only three people on the stairs they took—all civilians, from their clothing, and two of them women. One of the women cried and shrank away, but the other armed herself with her shoe, brandishing it at them as they passed her and moved on up the stairs. “You can holster that shoe now,” said Cole as he passed her. She didn't seem to think it was funny.

The stairs ended at the top level on the map. But this level was smaller than the others. There were plenty of offices on this level, mostly in the form of cubicles. Every computer's cpu had been blown up by a small enough explosive that it was contained entirely inside the case—but smoke was coming out of many of them and most were splayed out or otherwise deformed. Not much data was going to come out of those computers now, but you never knew
what a hard drive was going to live through. Might still be something retrievable. Unless they were heat bombs, and then all the plastic inside would be melted. That's what I'd use, thought Cole. So that's probably what Verus used.

His infra vibrated. Somebody calling him. “Cole here.”

It was Benny. “As soon as we gave the word, they took off from Montana,” he said. “By now they're probably only fifteen minutes away.”

If the Progressive Restoration had observers with the forces in Idaho, which was likely enough, then that would explain why they started evacuating this place when only a couple of soldiers had penetrated it. Cole thanked Benny and signed off.

“You see any controls for that big front door?” said Cat. “Or for flooding that tunnel we were in?”

“We didn't see controls for opening the trap door in the cabin, either,” said Cole.

“And there's got to be a control for sending water from one lake into the other.”

“What do you want to bet,” said Cole, “that wherever those controls are, Verus is sitting there waiting to raise the water level of Chinnereth just as our attack force is moving through the big front door.”

“That would be mean,” said Cat.

“And then he'd use the secret back door that isn't on any of the maps. The one that's camouflaged and opens up on the slope of the mountain somewhere on the Genesseret side.”

“That would be smart,” said Cat.

“Well, only semi-smart,” said Cole. “Smart would be to give himself up peacefully and denounce us for violating Washington's neutrality.”

“Nobody's gonna buy that now,” said Cat.

“Come on,” said Cole. “People buy any lie they want bad enough to believe. We're the U.S. Army. When we screw up, everybody thinks it's on purpose and some of us should go to jail. Even when we
win
, they think we screwed up. What Army were you in, anyway?”

“My bad,” said Cat.

“One level up from here,” said Cole. “Gotta be a stairway somewhere.”

“Maybe not,” said Cat. “Maybe just a closet door.”

“Leading into Narnia?”

“Leading to a stairway.”

There weren't all that many doors, but all of them were locked. In the movies, people always shot doors open. But shooting a deadbolt lock didn't withdraw the deadbolt from the socket. And these were heavy doors, with lots of metal. Bullets could ricochet. Shrapnel could fly. You could kill yourself shooting at doors like these. Not to mention they didn't want to scare Verus into jumping down his rabbit hole—if he had one.

“Desks,” said Cole. He headed back for one of the rooms full of cubicles and opened drawer after drawer, lifting up papers and feeling around inside.

Sure enough, he found a key that looked like it might do the job. Somebody forgot he had a spare in his desk. Happened all the time.

It wasn't a master key, but it did open two of the first three doors they tried. Naturally, Cole assumed that the one it
didn't
open was the one they wanted, but the third door opened to reveal a normal flight of stairs going upward.

And up and up. It wasn't just one story up, it was
way
up. Maybe not all that far from the observation tower on top of the mountain between the lakes.

They ran up at a measured pace—didn't want to be caught out of breath at the top, just in case somebody had a weapon waiting for them.

There it was. Command and Control. A single room full of screens and computers and control panels and gauges. These computers hadn't been blown up, because these didn't contain incriminating data, they just controlled the local machinery.

Cole moved into the room. Now he could see another door, labeled “Restroom.” Standing near it were two men. One of them was Verus, in slacks and an open-collared short-sleeved white shirt. The other man was wearing a business suit and holding an AK-47.