Empire, Lawson, and Georgetown, but the highway was thick with old traf‚c and new rockslides. Fires had blackened the mountainsides even where there was nothing to burn except damp moss and weeds. Ash and dust lay across the earth in vast streamers. It whispered up beneath their tires and boots. Three of the Rangers now wore radiation badges clipped to their jackets and Captain Park also had a Geiger counter that chittered and clacked at times. They seemed to be edging through an area where the fallout had settled after the explosion. They were lucky the prevailing weather was out of the northwest, behind them. It had carried most of the poison east, but the radiation was another reason to go west from the Divide.
They spent two days in a long, green valley cut into the mountains by a good-sized creek that had brie†y become a colossal †ood. Nearer to ground zero, most of the snowpack had been vaporized, but at this distance the snow immediately slumped away as water and slush, increasing the landslides caused by the quake. Their jeeps rocked and crashed through banks of gravel, muck, and driftwood. They broke one of their four shovels digging a way through. They also encountered three groups of survivors. This valley faced north and had escaped the worst of the damage. Many of the aspen and spruce were still standing and the water ran clear — and there was nothing in this place to attract the air war, only wilderness.
Finally they made it up through the Ute Pass, where Highway 9 arrowed south toward Interstate 70. On this high point, the blast wave had lifted cars by the thousands, overturning the old metal shapes. The road was a mess of broken glass and odd drifts of rust and paint †akes, and Captain Park took them back north instead of following the highway toward Leadville. He refused to move deeper into the blast zone. Ruth’s few protests were soft-spoken and confused.
Ruth was haggard beneath her sunburn. She worked nights with her AFM and tried to nap in the day when they were on the move, but it must have been like sleeping on the back of an elephant. The jeeps bumped and seesawed on the rocky earth, stopping and starting as the Rangers jumped down to push wrecks or boulders out of the way. She was exhausted. She carried that goddamn stone everywhere.
She thought she’d failed. Two of the refugee groups they’d met in the valley had been clean. They’d infected those people themselves. Yes, she’d given them the vaccine, but at the cost of tainting them with the ghost, too.
They were running out of time. Open broadcasts out of Grand Lake constantly advised American forces of enemy action, and Chinese armored units had pushed into Colorado.
The Chinese had taken southern California and most of Arizona with relative ease. There was no one to oppose them except the tiny populations on the few peaks east of Los Angeles, who were quickly burned away. The Chinese armies numbered at least a hundred and ‚fty thousand soldiers, pilots, mechanics, and artillery men — and their naval †eets were rushing away for more.
Interstates 40 and 70 became the lifelines of the invasion. At low elevations, the freeways were mostly clear, except where American ‚ghters had destroyed bridges and causeways. Planes from both sides clashed above the desert while, far below, Chinese combat engineers struggled to move their trucks and APCs across every break in the road.
The Chinese armies were also disrupted by hot spots. There had been huge drifts of the plague out of the L.A. basin and it scattered the Chinese reserves, overwhelming the vaccine. At the Arizona border, the Colorado River was also seething with nanotech. U.S. surveillance put the enemy’s casualties in the thousands, and North American Command did their best to channel the invader into these death zones.
The Chinese couldn’t slow down. They also had the bugs and the desert heat to contend with. Their best strategy was that of momentum and speed. They plundered every city and military base within reach and they were brie†y rich for it, squandering fuel and ammunition.
Flagstaff only lasted ‚ve days. While Cam and Ruth were in their quiet valley just west of the Continental Divide, the Chinese effectively claimed Arizona and turned toward the Rockies in full strength.
The Grand Canyon served as a critical defensive line. This deep, ancient gash in the Earth stretched for hundreds of miles through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah, and not a single bridge or dam survived the American strikes. It split the Chinese in two. The enemy could provide air support for themselves across the entire Southwest, but their generals were faced with a decision as far back as Las Vegas, at the mouth of the Canyon, beyond which their armies were no longer able to reach each other.
The Russians helped them in Utah, pounding at the largest American outposts in the mountains east of Salt Lake, but the enemy bogged down there. Interstate 70 ran north from Vegas and stayed tight along another high range for nearly a hundred miles before it squeezed into a series of passes and bent east toward Colorado. The Chinese advance was hit every step of the way.
If they’d tried to charge through, they probably would have succeeded, with heavy losses, but the northern Chinese group didn’t want Utah at their backs as they assaulted Colorado. They appeared to settle in for a long ‚ght.
Their southern force had always been the larger one, however. It was also where they directed all reinforcements. The thrust by their northern army was only to hold Utah in check. Meanwhile, their southern force angled up into Colorado on as many smaller highways as they could access, swarming north and east as the roads curled away from the vast, sprawling bulk of the front side of the Rockies.
Bombers out of Canada, Montana, and Wyoming struck the Russians and the Chinese from behind. Attack choppers out of New Mexico harassed the Chinese in Arizona, but New Mexico was preoccupied as smaller Chinese landings on the coasts of Florida and Texas began to launch their own assaults, picking at the U.S. forces from behind.
Colorado armies still held Grand Junction, which straddled I-70 near the Utah border. The all-important air ‚elds in Durango, Telluride, and Montrose had fallen. The Chinese were rapidly securing their grasp on the southern part of the state, and Cam was glad again for the insigni‚cant size of his squad. Every day there were jets close overhead. More frequently, they heard distant planes or saw contrails or bright metal dots.
If they were noticed by an enemy ‚ghter, they would be dead in seconds. There had been reports of the Chinese stra‚ng refugee camps simply to create more chaos, expending ammunition on nonmilitary targets because the survivors †ed for the protection of Army bases, where they made trouble for the soldiers and pilots. Unfortunately, most of the people in this part of Colorado still did not have the vaccine. Grand Lake had †own it to military personnel across the United States and Canada, thoroughly screening those vials of blood plasma for the ghost nanotech. Soldiers everywhere had spread the vaccine to nearby refugees if they could, but Cam’s squad saw no one whatsoever for the next day and a half as they circled west and then south again below the barrier.
Interstate 70 rolled nearly dead-center across the middle of the state. Reaching it was their ‚rst goal. Captain Park planned to join the freeway in the town of Wolcott, jog west, then continue south again on dirt roads and trails as they worked their way back toward elevation. They knew there was a large conglomeration of American infantry and armored units in the area, coordinating with Grand Lake command. West of Leadville, the mountains surrounding the once-famous ski town of Aspen were poised to become a stronghold against the Chinese.
Ruth hoped to ‚nd her answers there. If not, the expedition was wasted. Everything boiled down to whether or not she’d guessed right — but if, for example, Leadville had only tested its nanotech on its troops along its northern border, they’d come all this way for nothing. There would be no perfect vaccine. They would have no explanation for the ghost nanotech and Ruth would be more alone than ever, as the last top scientist in the United States.
She snapped at them and then apologized. She obsessed with her maps even when they hadn’t taken any new samples since the Ute Pass. Cam tried to kiss her that night and Ruth grabbed a handful of his jacket and used her arm like a piston, shoving him back. But ‚rst she pulled him closer and opened her mouth. He was sure of that.
Ruth was a mess, strung out and unsure even of herself. Cam had never felt so clear. He knew he’d been right to come. The Rangers were committed but Ruth needed friends, not only protectors. He regretted adding to the demands on her. There was no time or privacy for them to pursue whatever was happening between them, and she wouldn’t relax until they’d found the remnants of Leadville’s military.
Unfortunately, Wolcott was a swamp. The town sat in a steep channel along the Eagle River. The quakes and †oods had turned this gorge into a muddy lake. It was June 27th. Their only choice was to turn back and ‚ght around the water to the east, where they stumbled into a hot spot as they winched their jeeps up an embankment. Ballard was distracted, infected in his ear and hands. He caught his sleeve in the winding cable and
