The Trojan Horse (36 page)

“Lie down on the ground, spread your legs and arms,” the policeman snapped.  Davenant complied, reluctantly.  The policeman was on edge.  That was clear from his voice alone.  A single mistake could set him off.  “Don’t even
think
about moving without permission.”

He stepped closer, looking down at Davenant.  “Put your hands behind your back and cross your ankles,” he ordered.  A moment later, Davenant was securely handcuffed and the policeman was searching him roughly, removing a set of weapons and tools that would have alarmed anyone.  “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a federal agent and that woman was a wanted fugitive,” Davenant said.  “If you’ll check my ID...”

He felt a boot on the back of his neck.  “Damn collaborators,” the policeman said.  The pressure increased to the point where Davenant felt his neck beginning to break.  “You’re all scrum.”

There was a terrifying crunching sound, somehow shatteringly loud inside his skull, and then Davenant fell into darkness.  The last thing he felt was the policeman removing the cuffs and preparing to move his body.  No one would realise what had happened until it was far too late.

***

The Colonel hadn't told his son – or any of his other children – that he was moving to Washington.  None of them needed to know.  The information Toby had slipped down to the farm had been relayed through a team of human agents, all of whom knew no more than they actually needed to know.  If the aliens had the patience – and a lucky break – they might be able to track the messages to their destination, but the Colonel knew that fear and suspicion could not be allowed to paralyse him.  The aliens would win if he gave up the fight believing that they could track him whatever he did.  Besides, there was Gillian’s bug detector to ensure that they were not followed or detected. 

General Thomas had been moved up to a location near Washington two weeks ago, where he’d been making contact with military deserters and a number of former military personnel who had realised that it was in their best interests to go underground.  The aliens and their pod people – and their collaborators – had been expanding the round-ups, tracking down and arresting everyone who had any military experience at all.  It made perfect sense, the Colonel knew; people with military experience presumably knew how to be dangerous.  The aliens, given what they now knew about alien society, might not realise just how many guns were in civilian hands.  And, now that they’d
wrecked most of the federal government, they had no way of knowing how much
unregistered
weaponry was in the hands of the resistance. 

“We begin the operation in three days,” General Thomas said.  Once, he would have been forced to use PowerPoint slides, creating a dog and pony show for bored officers and civilians who wanted to feel that they were at the heart of military operations.  Now, nothing was written down and no records were kept.  The aliens had busted one underground cell because they’d made the mistake of keeping records.  No one else would make that mistake.  “We hit the collaborators – not the aliens – as hard as possible.”

There were nods from the grim-faced men gathered around the table.  They all knew what happened when aliens were killed; their bodies disintegrated in a massive explosion.  Worse, the aliens didn’t seem to care how many of their collaborators were killed, but they launched massive reprisals against any civilian settlements anywhere near where one of the aliens were killed.  The Colonel wasn't particularly surprised.  There were only a limited number of Snakes, after all, and they weren't expendable.  Humans were expendable.  They could always make more pod people.

It wasn't just in the United States, either.  The Snakes were trying to hold down the entire first world.  Communications channels to the rest of the world were flighty, but they’d managed to get general agreement to join the attack on the aliens.  The Snakes would start thinking that the entire world had turned on them.  And if they realised that no
Snakes
were being killed...

“Keep the pressure on, but don’t let them have a chance to smash you,” the General added.  “We cannot afford a stand-up fight; not now, perhaps not ever.  We hit, we hurt...and then we get out.  Any questions?”

There were none.  “Very well, gentlemen,” the General said.  “Let’s go.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Washington DC

USA, Day 69

Jeffery Spender was having a bad day.

It was bad enough that the FBI had been turned into a cheap knock-off of the Gestapo.  He’d never signed up to abuse American citizens, back when his wife had become pregnant and he’d been forced to choose between staying with her or staying in the Marines – without her.  He’d applied to join the elite FBI Hostage Rescue Team and discovered, much to his surprise, that he actually enjoyed the work.  He saw more combat action and saved more American citizens than his brothers in the Marine Corps.  And besides, many Marines had been discharged back when the government had started cutting the military in line with the Galactic Federation’s demands.  Spencer had known that his position was secure.

And then the government had been forced to order a lockdown and Spencer had found himself serving as their tool.  He’d had to raid houses, arrest citizens without any regard for little niceties like law and constitutional rights; the look on the faces of scared citizens would haunt him until the end of his days.  If he’d been a bachelor, he would have deserted and joined the resistance, but that hadn’t been a possibility.  His wife and his six-year-old daughter had been taken into protective custody, officially because the wives and children of federal agents were being targeted by the resistance.  Unofficially, they were hostages for his good behaviour.  If he failed to satisfy the government – and its alien masters – that he was doing the job they ordered, he had no doubt that his wife would be killed and his daughter fostered out – or killed herself.  He dared not do anything that might alarm their captors.

He scowled.  A motley group of federal agents had been placed under his command, with orders to intercept anyone attempting to leave the city.  The darkness and the drizzling rain had deterred anyone from driving out, not when they might be shot by the federal agents or arrested and taken to one of the detention centres.  Spencer didn’t know quite what happened there, but some of the arrestees became pod people and others simply vanished.  Or were vanished, as they’d joked down in Latin America.  The fools who had welcomed the Galactic Federation with open arms hadn’t seen how they’d been manipulated until it was far too late.  They’d been nothing more than useful fools, just like the American-born Communists and Islamists who had served an agenda that had treated them as nothing better than tools.  And really, what had they deserved?  They had betrayed their country – and Spencer, by following orders, was no better than them.  How could he ever look himself in the face again?

Washington was encircled by a ring of federal agents, backed up by a handful of military units and equipment.  No one was allowed to enter or leave without good reason – and there were very few reasons that they were allowed to accept.  A number of federal agents had gone completely to the bad, abusing their powers in ways that would have shocked any pre-Contact American – and been completely familiar and accepted in a Third World country.  Most of the good ones had deserted, been turned into pod people or – like Spencer – found that their families were being held hostage.  At least Spencer’s team wasn't abusing the refugees.  He had that much honour and dignity left. 

But there were the stories…federal agents, like everyone else, loved to share stories about what was going on and what was going to happen.  Some of the stories were shocking, suggesting mass rape and kidnapping; others were merely worrying.  It wouldn’t be long, he’d been assured, before every federal agent was a pod person.  And then there would be no hope of resistance.  If the Galactic Federation turned everyone on Earth into a pod person…but they couldn’t do that, could they?  The logistics would be formidable, even for super-powerful aliens.  He checked his M16 automatically as he glanced down the long deserted road.  Everything had been much simpler in Iraq.  The enemy might have been cowardly enough to hide behind the civilian population, but at least they hadn’t had pod people on their side.  And they hadn’t had access to America families.

He heard the truck before he saw it, a lumbering gas tanker heading along the road towards Washington.  Gas deliveries had been reduced sharply ever since Tehran, when chaos had spread over the Middle East.  Rumour had it that the Saudi Royal Family had been strung up by their own population, while the Iranians were taking their revenge upon the Mullahs who had driven their country into the dirt and Iraqis were slaughtering each other in vast numbers.  Not that it really mattered any longer; oil deliveries out of the Middle East were all that mattered, and they’d been reduced.  Rumour had it that the aliens were talking about producing synthetic oil, but Spencer no longer believed them.  They’d lied to get the human race to let down its guard – and they’d succeeded brilliantly.  They’d stolen an entire world. 

The tanker started to slow as it approached the roadblock.  Traffic in and out of Washington had slowed dramatically since Tehran, leaving the capital perched on the verge of starvation.  What little food there was had to be brought in by soldiers and men pressed into service, ever since many of the truckers had gone on strike after Tehran.  Seeing a tanker gave him hope, even though he knew that there would only be a small amount of gas – and none of it would be put into civilian hands.  They’d be more likely to take it directly to the collaborators.

Shaking his head, Spencer walked forward as the tanker lumbered to a halt.  He couldn’t see the driver’s face behind the windscreen, but that was hardly surprising.  The rain was pelting down now, as if even the weather disapproved of the aliens.  Or maybe the aliens were manipulating the weather from orbit.  God knew they’d shown enough remarkable tricks before they’d shown their true faces.  Maybe they’d promised their collaborators sunshine and rainbows while drenching the rest of the world with cold rainfall. 

The driver’s door didn’t open.  Puzzled, and a little alarmed, Spencer stepped up and pulled at the handle.  The door opened, revealing a makeshift doll – life-sized, wearing male clothes – grinning at him.  There was no one else in the cab.  He stared at it, his tired brain refusing to quite process what he was seeing, and then he threw himself backwards.  It was far too late.

***

Mathew Bracken, who was officially dead, loved C4.  It was a common feeling among the SF community, who firmly believed that there was no such thing as enough C4.  Rigging up the gas tanker with enough explosive to destroy the roadblock utterly had been easy; it had been more complicated to rig the tanker so it could be driven by remote control.  In the end, they’d had to cannibalise a set of remote-control cars to construct the control system – and even then it had been flighty.  But it had sure paid off on the night.  The explosion smashed the roadblock as if it had been made of paper, throwing a pair of police cars dozens of meters away from the blast.  They caught fire and burned merrily, adding an eerie light to the scene. 

He exchanged a grin with two of his men and settled down to wait.  It wasn't long before they saw the vehicles driving towards the burning roadblock.  The collaborators had been smart enough to keep a quick-reaction force on permanent standby, knowing that they would have to seal any hole in their ring of steel before insurgents started getting in or out of Washington.  Mathew waited until they’d stopped near the burning cars, and then carefully targeted their positions.  The pod people had made one elementary mistake.  Their leader was obvious to the sniper waiting with Mathew’s team.

“Fire,” Mathew ordered, quietly.

The SEAL team opened fire as one.  Carl, his sniper, took out the enemy leader, while the others contented themselves with random bursts that forced the enemy team to dive for cover.  An RPG, fired at one of the enemy vehicles, caused it to explode into a fireball, illuminating the eerie scene.  The enemy team hadn’t trained together very well; instead of firing back, or retreating in good order, they either hid and cowered or ran for their lives.  Mathew had once had reservations about shooting men in the back.  Now, with his country under enemy occupation and governed by puppets and traitors, he had no objection to killing them all by whatever method seemed quickest.  Besides, the runners would probably scream for help when they reached somewhere out of the line of fire.  Better that the enemy believed that their response force had run into a phantom army than to have any idea just how few resistance fighters there were on the front lines.

A brilliant flash of light lit up the horizon, followed rapidly by a pearl of thunder.  For one moment, Mathew thought that someone had popped off a nuke or that the aliens had decided to intervene directly, before realising that it was neither.  One of the other squads of insurgents had been planning a nasty surprise for the enemy; if the resistance was lucky, they’d spend long enough wondering just what the fuck had happened to allow the resistance to withdraw safely.  But once they figured out that there was no radiation – or forced their men forward anyway – the cat would be out of the bag.

“Cover me,” he muttered.  Tom and Markus provided cover, shooting at any enemy heads that showed themselves, while Mathew slipped down towards the ambush scene.  The human eye was naturally lazy, attracted to light.  He should be invisible in the shadows, at least until he started shooting.  An enemy body appeared in front of him and he almost squeezed off a round before he realised that the enemy’s head had been blown off.  He must have caught a series of rounds from the light machine gun the SEAL team had placed close to the ambush site. 

A trio of enemy fighters were hiding behind the remains of a car, trying to fire uncoordinated bursts back towards their ambushers.  It wouldn’t have been a bad tactic if they’d known what they were doing, but as it was they were doing little more than forcing the SEAL team to duck from time to time.  Spray and pray hadn’t worked in the Middle East and it wouldn’t work in America.  They had no idea Mathew was behind them until he shot them all neatly in the back of the head.  A badly-wounded enemy fighter, lying on the ground, waved desperately to Mathew; one look and Mathew knew that no medical centre would be able to save his life.  He hesitated, remembering that he was looking down at a collaborator, and then remembered simple humanity.  A single shot ran out and the wounded soldier went onwards into the next world.

Four more SEALs materialised out of the darkness and advanced forward, their weapons and combat goggles sweeping for enemy fighters.  One fighter, a young man barely out of his teens, was found trembling behind one of the smashed containers they’d used to build their roadblock.  The SEALs dragged him out, tied his hands, and placed him up against one of the
wrecked cars.  He wasn't a hardcore enemy fighter, Mathew noted, nor did it appear that he had any real training at all.  He’d already shat himself and the stench was noticeable, even against the stench of burning gasoline. 

Mathew pointed his gun right into the young man’s face and he started to whimper.  Mathew felt nothing, but disgust.  It was possible to feel sorry for the men and women who had been forced into serving the Snakes – either through having their family as hostages or by being brainwashed into becoming pod people – yet it was impossible to feel anything for a young man who had abandoned his country to serve the aliens of his own free will.  He clearly wasn't a pod person, or he would have gone for Mathew’s throat by now.  Pod people had no sense of self-preservation.  They could have given the Iraqi insurgents lessons in suicide tactics.  The aliens had wiped them of everything, but a desire to serve, whatever the cost.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” Mathew said, pressing the gun against the young man’s mouth.  “You answer my questions and I’ll leave you here to be found by your friends.  If you lie to me, or I think you lie to me, I’ll cut you up badly and leave you here to bleed out and die.  Do you understand me?”

The young man nodded frantically.  Mathew wasn't too surprised.  The real hard cases, the men who wouldn’t talk even if they were put through the water treatment or beaten to within an inch of their lives, were normally recognisable to a trained interrogator, who would put them aside for careful interrogation.  It would hardly be the first time Mathew had extracted information from an enemy fighter who had gotten in way over his head, but it had always left him feeling dirty.  Torture, however disguised, was not honourable.  It was unworthy of anyone who wanted to call himself a trained soldier.

“Good,” Mathew said.  “Now…let’s see, shall we?”

He bounced questions off the young man’s head for seven minutes, while the remainder of the SEALs searched the dead bodies and removed any number of ID and useful tools.  They’d have to be dropped off at one of the safe houses for careful inspection before they were taken anywhere near one of their hiding places; Mathew wouldn’t have put it past the aliens to slip a tracking implant on the ID or one of their tools, just so they could track it back to the resistance headquarters.  The young man knew very little, unsurprisingly.  He’d been seduced into joining the aliens because his family was starving and his father had been thrown in one of the detention camps.  A not unfamiliar story to Mathew, but one that had been largely unknown in the United States, at least before the aliens had arrived.  They were building a real police state, with death camps and a constant heavy surveillance of everyone who lived within their boundaries.  How long would it be before they broke the human race down to nothing more than slaves?