“T-T-T-T—.” He couldn’t even get the word out. The stubby antennae around his mouth twitched with wild agitation.
“Yes, sir, Jimmy. Terrorists. How’s that for a thank-you from Uncle Sam? They rang the alarm and we were sent in to drop the hammer on the bad guys. But…here’s my problem, Jimmy, and maybe you can help me out with it.”
His black eyes glittered like jewels.
“I’m not sure who the bad guys are. I mean…you’re killing folks, and you know that I can’t let that happen. I can’t let it continue. But at the same time, I don’t think you’re doing these kills because you’re a terrorist.”
He said nothing. They all waited.
“I think you’re doing it because you’re scared. More scared than I am now and that’s saying something. But you know I can’t let you go on killing these people. Even if I agree with why you’re doing it, I got a job to do and I know you understand that.”
His antennae twitched.
“Now…‘terror’ is a funny word,” I said. “We use it all the time, but we don’t think about what it really means. Right now…I think my man on the floor there is feeling some genuine terror.”
Collins looked down at Bunny and then up at me.
“And you’ve got to be feeling it. All of you.”
The others clicked and hissed.
“And everyone else down here is feeling it because of you. There may not be any terrorists down here, Jimmy, but I have to stop the terror. That’s my job. That’s what I’m really here to do.”
Jimmy Collins’s eyes were wide, and dark, and wet.
“Can you help me with that, marine? Can you give me an out here?”
Collins looked at me, and raised his eyes slowly toward my helmet. Not at the night vision unit, but at the small cylinder mounted on the left side of my tin pot. He nodded at me. At it.
“That’s right, Jimmy,” I said with a smile. “That’s a video camera. We’re on mission time here, everything’s being recorded. Everything we’ve seen and everything we’ve heard since we came down here is saved to memory in our helmet cams. Now how about that?”
Collins bent low until his deformed face was inches from Bunny’s. He whispered something that I couldn’t hear over the alarms.
And then he straightened and pulled his hand away from Bunny. The five little pinpricks still leaked blood, but there was no real damage. Collins took a step back, and another. Bunny scrabbled sideways and scuttled back toward me. He made a grab for his fallen M4.
“No,” I said.
Bunny looked at me in surprise, then at Top, who nodded, and then at Collins.
The hulking figure stepped farther back. His companions clustered around him. They made chittering noises and God only knows if it was some kind of speech or the screams of the damned. Behind them was the door to the secondary generator. Collins turned, looked at the door and then back at me. His eyes were intense, pleading.
I swallowed a lump the size of a fist.
“Boss,” said Bunny, “if we get them out…maybe something can be done. Maybe there’s some way of reversing this…”
His voice trailed off as the huddled monsters chittering and clicked. It wasn’t words, but it was eloquent enough.
I shook my head.
“But…you know what they want to do,” he pleaded.
Top put his hand on Bunny’s shoulder. “If it was you, Farm Boy, what would you do?”
I raised my pistol. “Stand aside,” I said to Collins.
After a moment he and the others moved away
It took six rounds to blow the lock open.
Smoke hung thick in the air. The klaxons continued to bleat.
“Give us ten minutes,” I said.
Collins stared at me, his eyes unreadable in the green gloom of my night vision. Did he nod? Or was it simply the way his body trembled as he turned and slipped into the generator room? The others followed.
I holstered my gun and looked at Bunny and Top.
We ran likes sons of bitches.
(5)
The Vault
Now
The voice said: “Failsafe is active. Hard lockdown commencing.”
It was a female voice, very calm. She began counting down from one hundred.
“Top, Bunny…get everyone into the elevators.”
“The generator—” Top said.
“…Eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-seven…”
Halverson said, “The elevator has a separate power source. It’s topside. As long as we get above the three-thousand-foot line we’ll be fine. Below that charges in the wall will collapse the elevator into the shaft.”
“…seventy, seventy-nine…”
“Get moving!” I ordered, and my men began herding the remaining scientists, support staff and security personnel into the elevator.
“…sixty-three, sixty-two…”
I lingered in the staff room, watching as Doctor Goldman finished downloading his research files onto a one-terabyte portable drive.
“Is that everything?” I said as he pulled it out of the socket.
“…forty-four, forty-three…”
“Yes, thank God. Everything was in packets for quick hard-dump. We have everything we need to start over.” He moved to the door, but I shifted to block his way.
“Give me the drive,” I said.
“…thirty-six, thirty-five…”
“What the hell are you doing? This is no time for—?”
I kicked him in the nuts and snatched the drive out of his hand. Yeah, it was a sneak shot, but who cares? He uttered a thin whistling shriek and grabbed his groin, sinking to his knees in shock and agony.
I set the drive on a countertop.
“…twenty-eight, twenty-seven…”
I drew my sidearm and used the butt to smash the drive to silicon junk. Goldman screamed louder than when I’d kicked him. He made a grab for it, but I batted his hand away.
“What are you doing?” he croaked.
I moved to the doorway. The elevator was a hundred yards down the hall. I could make it at a dead run.
I said, “I’m doing what I believe is in the best interests of the American people.”
He stared at me and opened his mouth to say something, but a sound cut him off. Not the relentless female voice counting down. This was a thin, chittering noise that echoed out of the darkness at the far end of the corridor.
I holstered my gun, turned and ran like hell.
“…thirteen, twelve, eleven…”
“Where’s the doc?” Halverson demanded as I skidded into the elevator car.
“They ambushed us,” I lied. “Came out of nowhere. Now come on, get this damn thing moving!”
Halverson met my eyes for the briefest of moments, and I could see the realization in his eyes. He flicked a look out into the darkness. Maybe he could hear the skittering sounds. Probably not. The alarms were so loud that they even drowned out the sound of the screams.
He slammed the door shut and the car began to rise.
Three seconds later we heard the bang-bang-bang as the steel doors dropped down and the thermite charges blew, fusing them shut. A moment later the explosives in the elevator shaft blasted half a million tons of rock into the well of darkness below us. Dust clouds chased us all the way up into the light.
As the car slowed to a stop I removed my helmet. The helmet cam was gone. I’d taken it off after we’d left Collins and the others outside of the generator room. The video file ended there.
Top, Bunny and I stepped out into the gloom of the building. State troopers were everywhere, and soon there would be FBI, Marine Corps and DMS choppers in the air. We didn’t care. The three of us stood there in the darkness and said nothing. I reached into my pocket to touch the helmet cam, and closed my fist around it.
In silence, we left the shadows and walked out into the light.