“You have one minute,” said the president.
Church told him of the conspiracy involving Russia, Gadyuka, Valen Oruraka, and Pushkin Dynamics. He named all the right names and offered to provide substantial evidence to back it all up. It took more than a minute, and the president was still listening at the end of ten minutes. The ensuing silence was a great deal longer.
Then, “And you can prove this?”
“I can, Mr. President.”
“Do you understand that you’re asking me to declare this an act of war?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that I’ll have to respond by declaring war.”
“There may be other strategies to deal with that,” said Church.
“This is a hell of a lot to ask me to believe. Wyoming? Since when is there a volcano in Wyoming?”
“For quite a long time now.”
“Well, I’ve never heard about it.”
Church found it difficult not to smash the phone against the wall. Brick, standing a few feet away, his big arms folded across his chest, raised one eyebrow. Church shook his head.
“And,” continued the president, “you want me to believe that Jennifer VanOwen is involved?”
“It would appear so. At least as far as facilitating deliveries to our chief suspect, Mr. Oruraka.”
“Jennifer’s been here in Washington. She’s all over the news. She’s a damn American hero. Hurricane VanOwen.”
“I’ve seen the coverage, Mr. President,” Church said with forced patience. “It does not change the facts. And it does not alter the timetable. In the short term we need to evacuate Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho for a start. I have a team on the ground, but we need to be proactive to protect as many American lives as possible.”
“What do you mean by a ‘team’? What team? Who’s running the ground operation? It had better not be that criminal Ledger.”
“He is my finest field team operative, and he is the one who I trust most to run point on this. His team is on the ground in Wyoming and we have National Guard converging to provide support and containment.”
“No.”
“Sir?”
“No damn way. I didn’t authorize that.”
“Not to be indelicate, sir, but the DMS charter allows for necessary shortcuts like this in order to get ahead of any threat of this kind.”
“Did you hear me? I said I didn’t authorize the National Guard.”
“I heard you, Mr. President.”
“When I get off this call I am going to call the governors of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho and tell them that you do not have my approval for this operation.”
“Mr. President, we need to act together and with a great deal of urgency in case my team is unable to—”
The line went dead.
Church looked at the phone, wondering if it would feel good to smash his phone to bits. He did not, but it was close.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FOUR
The semi had a forty-minute lead on us and the driver had the pedal down. It was a rough grade, though, and the sheer mass of the truck kept its top speed down around fifty.
Top Sims went a hell of a lot faster than that.
This time we all buckled up, or there wouldn’t have been enough of us left to pour onto the ground. My aching back felt every goddamn rock and divot along every goddamn inch of that goddamn road. It hurt, but more than that, it made me mad. The truth is that if you eat enough pain you want to vomit fury.
Even so, even with Top racing at full speed, every second seemed to take an hour.
“Hey,” yelled Smith over the roar of the engine, “I think we’re good. I mean, think about it, these guys aren’t going to set off the volcano while they’re here, right? They’re not stupid; they don’t want to die. Right?”
Tracy Cole turned her head and gave him a long, withering stare.
“What?” he demanded.
“During that whole conversation about those doomsday prepper truckers being part of an Apocalypse Cult, were there any words in particular that stood out?”
He started to say something. Didn’t. Turned tomato red, avoided her eyes, and checked that the magazine in his gun was properly loaded. I thought I could hear Top chuckling.
There was no actual way to get there straight as the crow flies. Hills, slopes, craters, thermal vents, and downright dreadful terrain made even the access truck route a snakelike fifty miles. Ghost yelped a few times. I could sympathize.
The truck was in sight now, though mostly veiled by a drifting wall of brown dust. I turned to look at the team. They were all tense. None of us had gotten enough sleep on the plane. They — well, we—were all wired and scared. Angry, too, but that was as much resentment as it was animosity toward this country’s enemies. When someone is trying to kill most of the population of the nation in which you live, it actually stops being purely patriotic and gets very personal.
Let’s face it, true patriotism is personal. It’s connected to more than the physical substance or a land, and a hell of a lot more than a piece of cloth, no matter how symbolic it was. We did not pledge allegiance to the flag. Not really. Anyone who did was missing the point. It was always a love of who we were, and what our country represented. Not when it stumbled or erred, and there are a lot of times it did that, from slavery through its attacks on civil and human rights; but for what we all aspired to. We all wanted the country to live up to the best ideals implied by our Declaration and Constitution. All the rah-rah “America first” and “my country right or wrong” histrionics is so much bullshit unless it’s built on a foundation of deep love for what truly made America great in the first place. A desire for freedom, diversity, democracy, and as a machinery for making positive change.
Tate took some pigeon drones out of a case, synced them with his tactical computer, and hurled them out of the window. They rose high and flew away. They were faster than either vehicle, but they had to circle around the dust cloud or risk having grit clog their engine intakes.
“Wish I was driving a Betty damn Boop,” groused Top. “Could use me some rocket pods right up in here.”
“Chain guns’d be nice,” agreed Bunny almost wistfully.
“I’d be okay with a couple gunships in the air,” said Duffy. “Some recreational hellfire missiles. You know, just to start a conversation. A minigun on rock ’n’ roll.”
“We have air support on the way,” I said. “Wyoming and Montana National Guard are both sending air and ground forces. We got here first, so we get to be the opening act.”
“We know how many of these truckers are here?” asked Smith.
“Depends on how many were in each truck,” I said. “And how many of them stayed. If Valen needs them to help him finish assembling the machines, and if there are as many machines as we think, it could be upwards of forty and as many as ninety.”
“Not enough,” said Tate.
“Captain said we have backup on the way,” said Cole.
“No,” replied Tate, “there won’t be enough of them.”
She studied him a moment, and at first I thought she was going to blast him for trash talk. She didn’t. Instead, Cole held her fist out for a bump. “Hooah,” she said.
“Hooah,” he replied. And we all echoed it.
“Getting a live feed, boss,” said Tate, and I opened the same screen on my wrist computer. There were eight big rigs parked haphazardly around a small prefab structure. Great mounds of dirt and rock were heaped near a couple of heavy-duty front-end loaders and a massive bulldozer. There were a dozen men there, some looking through binoculars at the approaching truck. One of them, though, stood on the roof of the structure and was looking past the truck.