From the fighting, they were sure the main entrance and the south gate had been overrun. If the north tunnel was blocked, too, this would be the shortest escape attempt of all time. Deborah tried not to think about it. She had enough problems jogging in her suit with her arms wrapped around an extra air tank. It weighed twenty pounds. She was embarrassed she couldn’t carry more, but the suit alone was like swimming in glue with forty pounds on her back. She just didn’t have the upper body strength.
They entered the next room, which had been personnel quarters. It was neat and square with tall bunk beds, low foot-lockers, and two bodies in a heap. They had been bludgeoned by Bornmann and Lang. Both men carried rifles, but gunshots would be another kind of risk.
“Oh, God,” Emma mumbled. She looked away. Deborah did not. She thought the two soldiers — their own soldiers — were deserving of her horror. She stopped without intending to. Walls bumped against her and she fell onto one knee, grasping at the aluminum cylinder in her arms.
Walls caught Deborah’s sleeve clumsily. He wore a backpack sideways over his air tanks, humping two laptops and a sat phone in addition to two spare tanks in another sling.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“We’re almost there.”
He said it like they were going to stop and rest, and Deborah nodded at the lie. “Yes, sir.”
Behind him came Rezac. All of them rustled and clanked.
Rezac carried their Harris radio, one spare tank, and an M16. Medrano held two more tanks and their lamp, a white star near his hip, where the light puddled on the floor among the fat, sagging tubes of their legs. Sweeney brought up the rear with an M4, bent nearly in half beneath the MRFM.
As they trotted through the empty rows of beds, Deborah thought again how lucky she was just to be alive. It also occurred to her that General Caruso must have known the risk he’d taken in holding onto his missiles. Maybe he’d been right after all? The composition of this small unit was proof of his intent to fight in any way possible without resorting to a planetwide nuclear holocaust. Caruso hadn’t only put them in suits to access the nanotech gear. With the few people he’d chosen, Caruso had created a backup command group. That was the only explanation for assigning General Walls to a squad of eight people.
Walls was meant to assume Caruso’s role as the supreme U.S. commander if Complex 1 was breached. Rezac was his signals intelligence specialist. Medrano, an engineer, served as the team’s mechanic, and Bornmann and the other commandos were their might. Staff Sergeant Lang doubled as their linguist. Like the other translators she’d seen, Lang was Chinese American and all the more valuable for his heritage and verbal skills. Deborah wouldn’t be surprised if others in the group knew some Mandarin, Cantonese, or Russian themselves. This was a top-level unit, which left only Deborah and Emma as their pathetic science assets… And yet what could Caruso honestly hope for them to accomplish? If they escaped and regrouped with other survivors, what use were a few hit-and-run attacks against the Chinese? Even that seemed unlikely. Their air wouldn’t last two hours.
“We’re there! We’re there!” Pritchard shouted, grabbing Emma’s shoulder to help her. They’d reached a blast door. Beyond it was a narrow vertical shaft with a spiral metal staircase. Their boot steps thrummed on the steel.
Stupidly, Deborah looked up. There was no end in sight. The height of it nearly defeated her. She lowered her head, but the climb was endless. Her muscles ached. Then her thighs turned rubbery. Then there was a heavy clung above her and suddenly the shaft was in twilight.
Deborah looked up again. Bornmann had thrown open a hatch at the top. Deborah saw a square of light, but it looked like it was another full story above her.
Finally, she threw herself through the hatch into the unexpected silence of an Airstream camper. All of their doors to the underground were covered by RVs, huts, and trailers. Other top priority areas were strung with camouflage netting to prevent surveillance by spy planes and satellites. This shaft was no exception. The gutted shell of the Airstream sat above the stairwell. The netting outside was ripped and burned, hanging in brown mats across the shattered windows on one side. The sky was black. It reverberated with the long lines of sound from two jets and somewhere Deborah heard other, deeper engines, but she was shocked by the quiet that otherwise surrounded her.
Bornmann and Lang stood against the wall with their M4s. Bornmann gestured for everyone to get down as they emerged from the stairwell, but Walls joined the two commandos and Deborah continued to peek outside.
She saw fires and dust and the eerie shapes, everywhere, of people staggering through the haze. No one ran for cover. They walked upright. There should have been screaming. One man limped badly. Another’s face was blackened by fire and blood except for the jutting white gleam of his cheekbone. He didn’t seemed to notice, casting about in the smoke with his only remaining eye.
They were infected. These men and women would never grasp the danger of the Chinese assault — and they provided her group with some cover as Bornmann led them out of the calm space of the Airstream. The mob enveloped them. Lang brought up his M4 when several people turned, but didn’t shoot. There was no telling how close Chinese soldiers might be.
Bornmann and Lang clubbed five Americans to the ground as they ran into a maze of destruction. Some of the buildings and trucks that coated these mountains hid the antennae and dishes sprouting above the command complex. Their eyes and ears had been distributed as widely as possible to mask their signals, but the enemy must have strived to triangulate each source of electronic noise ever since the war. It was these points that had been targeted by the Chinese fighters, not the people themselves or even the gun emplacements.
Bornmann led their squad past burning campers and an overturned jeep. Debris lay everywhere, a mix of dark earth exploded from the hillside and lighter material blasted out of walls and furniture and people. Camouflage netting sagged from the structures or twisted on the ground in curls and lumps. Deborah saw a dismembered arm and a shoe and a field of broken glass.
She realized her uncertainty was pointless. She was one of the lucky ones. She reminded herself of it with every step. Even if she and Emma ran away, where would they go? Agonizing over it was a waste of energy.
Deborah resolved her self-doubt as easily as that, and she was grateful. She felt like the eye of a hurricane, composed and intact despite the carnage all around her, even because of it. The chaos was exactly why she needed to remain pure. That was how she wanted to be remembered — competent and reliable — and no one would ever know otherwise if she kept her secret and followed orders to the end.
Suddenly they could see past the sprawl. The mountainside fell away to the northeast, where a familiar trio of peaks were lost in the filthy sky. Dark clouds crashed against the land in a billowing conflict of wind and heat.
“You’re going for Complex 2,” Walls said on the suit radio, breathing hard, and Bornmann answered, “Sir, we have to get out of the open. Then we’ll run for Complex 3 and resupply.”
“Rezac,” Walls said. “Any contact with 1?”
Rezac had been chanting to herself as they worked through the ruins, calling for Complex 1 or any allied assets. “No, sir,” she said. “Even if there are hardened units who survived the blasts, the sky is for shit. I’m getting nothing but static.”
“Your call sign is Viper Six,” Walls said, undeterred. “Authentication Hotel Golf India Sierra India X-ray. I want—”
“Missiles,” Pritchard said.
“Get down!” Bornmann shouted. “Where?”
“They’re at two o‘clock. Outgoing. I see three. Four. I think they’re ours.”
Within the turmoil to the northeast, yellow-white sparks raced into the sky. Deborah saw three flecks streaking intermittently through the haze. The rocket trails hurt her eyes, rising, rising… “Yeeaaah!” Pritchard cheered. His voice was savage and Deborah felt herself respond the same way, meeting his pride with a keen new predatory feeling of her own.
