Deep Silence

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FIVE

“Cowboy,” said Bug via the command channel, “the pilot says you’re not going to Montana.”

“No,” I said, “I’m going hunting for Valen Oruraka.”

“But Valen’s in Montana,” insisted Bug.

“Maybe,” I said, “but that’s not where he’s going.”

Doc Holliday said, “Activating the ORB. I think we need to have us a little powwow.”

Suddenly she was there, with Junie, Church, and Bug, along with my whole team.

“Before I explain where I’m going, I want to go over some things. Let’s take this one piece at a time. Honest opinion, guys… is Valen our Big Bad?”

“No,” said Bug. “It’s Gadyuka.”

“I agree,” said Junie. “Valen is a scientist and an idealist. He’s fighting for a cause. Two causes, really. This New Soviet thing, and family. He thinks his uncle was unfairly blamed for Chernobyl. It’s been the focus of his whole life to learn enough to be able to prove what he believes.”

“He’s still a bad guy, though,” said Bunny. “Heartbreak or not, he’s just killed nearly two thousand people.”

“Two thousand one hundred and nine, as of this morning,” corrected Doc. That hurt. It really goddamn hurt. I saw Top wince; Cole turned away, unable to look at anyone for a moment.

“Let me change the question,” I said. “Is Gadyuka the Big Bad?”

“Yes,” said Bug.

“Yes,” said Doc and Junie.

“No,” said Church. “Gadyuka is a spymaster and, possibly, an assassin, but the setup at Pushkin Dynamics could not exist without substantial political juice. Someone had to authorize the money for it, make sure it was left alone, guarantee that the tax returns would not be looked at too closely, and grease the wheels for the exports. That takes an infrastructure of considerable size. Gadyuka seems more likely as the director of field operations, but I can’t buy her as being senior management. It would be too risky to run an op of that size from the field. That, for the record, is why I do not go into the field anymore. Any chain of command needs to be solidly anchored.”

Doc frowned for a moment. “When you say ‘infrastructure,’ you’re not talking about Russian Mafiya? Do you mean a ghost organization within the Russian government?”

Church shrugged. “That, or something bigger.”

“What’s bigger…?” began Bunny, then he stopped and goggled. “Wait… you’re talking about all the way big, aren’t you? Like the actual Russian government. Are we talking Uncle Vladimir as the Big Bad?”

“Anything is possible, Master Sergeant.”

I said, “No way something like this was happening without key people at the very top being involved. The risk is too big, for one thing. If a single shred of proof ever gets out connecting Russia to D.C., then it’s an act of war. Such an event would splinter all global alliances. Countries would have to decide if they wanted to move fast to help crush Russia completely to prevent the use of the earthquake weapon; or they might align themselves with the New Soviet for fear of devastating retaliation. We have proof that Pushkin was shipping, or planning to ship, those machines to China, England, and other countries.”

“Well, we have the shipping records from a building that no longer exists,” corrected Bug. “That’s not going to be enough for declarations of war. We’re going to have to be careful how we break this.”

“I agree,” said Junie. “This news is like a nuclear bomb. Last thing we want is politicians overreacting and demanding that we put missiles in the air.”

“For the record, guys,” said Bug, “I’m not a fan of that whole mutually assured destruction thing. I’ve seen those movies. First bombs, then giant radioactive cockroaches and gorillas on horseback with carbines. No thanks.”

“He’s right,” said Junie. “As much as I’m usually for full disclosure, there is no way to spin this that wouldn’t result in a panic or a war. Or both.”

“Can’t let it go unanswered,” said Top.

“No,” agreed Church.

“Who do we tell?” asked Doc. “Last I heard everyone in Washington was hanging up on you.”

“First things first,” I said. “Valen is still out there. Bug, have you been able to decrypt the shipping records? How many God Machines were sent to America?”

“Well,” Bug said, “some of it is still rough guesses, and not all of the shipments went to the United States. But if you include Canada, to places where there’s a lot of interstate trucking heading down to the States, then it’s a lot of them. Possibly as few as eighty and as many as two hundred.”

“Two hundred?” cried Cole.

“Maybe more,” said Bug. “It breaks down like this. Fifty of them were sent to Baltimore via container ships. The dockyard records show them coming in from three different points of origin, none of which are Russia. The shipments were moved around a lot. Any customs computer whiz would have missed it, because the guys at Pushkin were very smart about it. But… y’know… MindReader and all. So that accounts for all of the D.C. machines, and maybe some others as backups, or defective. There are no records at all after they were picked up by local trucking companies and delivered to a warehouse in Baltimore. They were probably picked up from there by Valen and his crew. The warehouse has been swept and is clean.”

“Big question,” said Doc, “but where’d the rest of the gol-dang machines go?”

“Five different ports in Western Canada. Coming from all sorts of fake destinations, but I can prove they started at Pushkin. The cargo was picked up by truckers and came into the U.S. via the standard routes through Canada Route 99, to Route 5 in Washington, and then west along 90, and probably south on 15.”

“That means we can track them,” said Duffy. “Good. Let’s roadblock these sons of bitches.”

“Bug, tell them the complications.”

Bug sighed. “First thing is that most of the parts shipments were sent to their destinations months ago. Not sure how long it takes to assemble one of these God Machines, but from our experience with Gateway and Prospero Bell, it’s tricky. There are all sorts of alignment issues, and you really don’t want to get the math wrong.”

“Assuming they know how to build them,” said Top, “what’s the timetable?”

“I think the clock’s ticking down to boom,” I said. “Bug spotted Valen in Montana. I think he’s out there to oversee the next phase. But before we get to that, let’s backtrack and add the other big piece of the puzzle. The why.”

“About that,” said Cole, “what’s his beef with us? Unless I skipped that day in history class, we didn’t sabotage Chernobyl.” She glanced at Church. “Did we?”

“No,” said Church. “We did not sabotage Chernobyl.”

“Then why did he wreck Washington? And why’s he out there maybe setting up some other attack?”

“Why did the Soviet Union collapse?” asked Church.

Cole thought about it. “It was economics, wasn’t it? Trying to keep up with us, building up their military and all that. We have more natural resources and a stronger economy.”

“Top marks,” said Church. I’m sure if he’d actually been in the same room with us he’d have given her a cookie. “There were other elements, but as is often the case, it comes down to money. We have more of it, and we used it more effectively. There was tremendous economic turmoil, poverty, corruption, and internal strife in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. We prospered and even offered financial aid, which seemed like compassion and forgiveness, but wasn’t. It never is in such circumstances. The ideal outcome for America would have been to turn Russia into another postwar Japan or Germany. That nearly happened, too, but there was too much resentment and it lasted much longer than the tensions between America and its enemies during World War Two. The Cold War never truly ended, at least for key players in Russia.”

“There’s a conspiracy theory,” said Junie, “that the influx of Russian Mafiya to America was a deliberate tactic. After all, so many of them were former Soviet military.”

“There may be a great deal of truth in that, Miss Flynn,” conceded Church. “Which supports the view that the Cold War hasn’t ended. When the Wall fell, the Cold War went dark, but it is still being fought as a long-game special operation. There are hawks on both sides, and in times when those hawks were not in open political power, they worked tirelessly behind the scenes. It’s only been more recently that the hawkish views in Russia have become less well hidden. Maybe because they knew that they were going to finally win that war.”

“So, wrecking D.C. was what? Their opening move?” asked Duffy. “Are they going to hit New York next? If so, why aren’t we going there? That’s where the money is. That’s the heart of the economy, unless I’m reading Forbes magazine wrong.”

“Money passes through there,” said Church. “It’s the brains of the national economy, just as Washington is the center of the infrastructure. But it’s not the heart of the economy.”

“Then what is?”

I bent and tapped some keys on my laptop, and some pictures I’d preloaded popped onto the virtual walls of the ORB. Oceans of wheat blowing in the wind; thousands of acres of corn and barley and soy; groves of fruit trees. “This is America,” I said. “This is what Valen is going to destroy.”

Duffy shook his head. “How? He’d need a million God Machines to cause that many earthquakes.”

“No,” said Doc Holliday, her face draining of all color, “he won’t. He could do it with the machines they’ve already sent to America.”

“But… how?”

“Tell them, Cowboy,” said Doc.

I could see the precise moment when Junie got where I was going. She went pale as death. Doc, too. They looked like they wanted to flee. As if that was even possible.

I pushed another key and one more image came up. It was of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. “Beneath the park is the Yellowstone Caldera,” I said. “Church, you even listed it as a possible target when we were at the hospital. One of our own analysts put together a paper on this a few years ago when we were tracking that Apocalypse Cult in Montana, the ones we thought might have brought in some old Soviet nukes bought on the Chechnyan black market. Because Montana’s just north of there, the analyst put the caldera at the top of our worry list, and for a good goddamn reason.”

“Maybe I wasn’t in school that day,” said Smith, “but what the hell is a caldera?”

“It’s a large volcanic crater,” Doc explained. “There’s a huge one beneath Yellowstone National Park. Between thirty-five to forty-five miles across. Absolutely massive. There is a nasty geological hot spot. Very similar to the Hawaiian Islands, actually, but this one’s on continental crust rather than oceanic crust. Geologic hot spots are when molten rock or magma continuously upwells from the mantle, burning a hole in the lithospheric plate above. That’s what causes eruptions on the surface of the Earth. What makes this one so bad is its size and location. Unlike in Hawaii, this one is not surrounded by ocean. It’s surrounded by America’s agricultural states. Shorthand answer is that we’re talking about a supervolcano.”

“Well… shit,” breathed Smith. “Sorry I asked.”

“Buckle up, because here’s more bad news. Each of the past three Yellowstone eruptions occurred between six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand years ago. The last one was six hundred and thirty thousand years ago, so we’re technically due. By best geological guesses, though, there is only a small chance it will erupt in our lifetimes.”

“Unless Valen uses his freaking machines,” said Tate.

“Yes.”

Duffy looked around. “Okay, but we had Mount St. Helens, right? I mean, bad, sure, but—”

Doc looked sick. “Kids, if the Yellowstone Caldera blew, we’d be looking at a force twenty-five hundred times that of Mount St. Helens. That’s a blast equal to twenty-seven thousand Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.”

No one spoke. No one could.

Doc nodded and turned the knife. “The last one laid down a layer of ash over most of the western central United States that is estimated to have been six hundred and sixty feet thick. That means the ash bed would have been thick enough to bury modern skyscrapers. And that doesn’t even count the ash released into the atmosphere. A supervolcano would change the climate, cooling the Earth. Maybe not into another ice age, but enough to affect crops.”

“ How bad?” asked Bunny.

Doc Holliday turned to him, and for once she was not wearing that perpetual smile. Maybe things had to get this bad for her to lose the jackal grin.

“How bad?” she echoed. “Let’s see. There would be about anywhere from three hundred to a thousand inches of ash over everything from Missoula to Denver and Boise to Rapid City. Gone. As much as thirty inches of it on the next ring outward, from Seattle to Chicago. Beyond that? Maybe as little as a couple of inches in New York. But all across the country’s fields and farms, there would be destructive hot ash; which would also choke the streams and rivers. We would lose years’ worth of crops, probably see a die-off of over ninety percent of animals like pigs, cows, and chickens. Timber and mining would stop. And you wouldn’t have enough people left to bury the millions of dead.”

“And,” I said into the absolute silence, “we may be out of time to stop it.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SIX

Gadyuka sat cross-legged on the bed with three laptops around her. Her flight to Paris was scheduled to depart in six hours, which gave her plenty of time to watch it all start. Plenty of time before planes departing New York would be affected. She would be eating in a sidewalk caf é near the Louvre before it all fell apart. After that? She would take her time making her way back home. Three or four weeks, with plenty of time to sightsee and watch history change via the media.

The news from Washington was stunning, and all of the coded messages from back home were filled with congratulations and praise. The ones from the highest offices hinted at promotion, medals, and some more substantial rewards.

The prudent part of her mind would have had her halfway back to Moscow by now, but where would the fun be in that?

Fun.

She thought about that. The word, the concept. Was this fun?

Gadyuka reached over to the bedside table for the glass of vodka and took a thoughtful sip. The effect would be fun. The New Soviet. A new party. Bigger and stronger than the one that had fallen when she was a little girl. Something that would outlive her, and would both dominate and stabilize the world. Yes, that would be fun.

But getting there…

Well, that was something else. Valen was falling apart, and her people on the ground out West told her that he was looking stressed and a little manic. Gadyuka was more than a little certain that her pet mad scientist did not necessarily want to live in the new world he was creating. That was something she could understand. It would be a problem for the New Soviet to have so many sleeper agents and others who had spent so much time in the West return to live in a true Communist society. Could they ever really adapt? And how could some, like Valen, reconcile what they had done with the peacefulness needed to be good citizens?

Could she do it? When she’d read the e-mails and those hints at substantial rewards, was that a clue of some kind? A warning? Were they testing her to see if she was motivated by financial gain rather than the good of the Party? In the old days many millions had died to try and erase that hunger from the hearts and minds of the people.

She sipped the vodka. It was Van Gogh. Not even a Russian brand. The stuff was made in Holland, for God’s sake. It was her favorite, and her next three favorite brands were Belvedere from Poland, 1.0.1 Vodka from California, and 42 Below, which came up from Australia. Gadyuka could not actually remember the last time she drank Russian vodka.

She would have to give all of that up. Her fine clothes, the freedom to buy anything she wanted anywhere she wanted. The food. Good lord, she would miss American food. And all these lovely vodkas. Gadyuka drained her glass and shimmied off the bed to get the bottle out of the ice bucket. She was halfway there when the door to her hotel room blew inward off its hinges. It slammed into her, lifted her, smashed her against the bureau. The TV leaned forward and fell, exploding in sparks as it landed, partly on the door and partly on her.

At first Gadyuka was too stunned to even understand what just happened. There was the smell of burned wood and plastic explosives in her nostrils and blood in her mouth. A fire alarm began screeching and the overhead sprinklers kicked on with a venomous hiss.

She looked up and there, moving slowly through the smoke, was a figure. A woman she did not recognize. Tall, slender, in her late fifties or early sixties, with a face like a fierce and unforgiving queen in an old painting. She was dressed all in black — pants, a formfitting top, gloves. The woman tossed a small detonator onto the floor and drew a slender, double-edged blade from a sheath behind her back.

“Get up,” said the woman in a heavily accented voice. It was not a Russian accent, not a Russian face.

“Wh-what…?” stammered Gadyuka as she reached into her thigh holster for her gun. The door completely hid the action.

“I said get up,” said the older woman.

Gadyuka fired four shots through the door.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN

“The real question,” said Junie Flynn, “is what would cause the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt?”

She and Doc Holliday were in the ORB alone now, with Bug on the screen. Echo Team had signed to try and cobble together a mission directive. Nevertheless, the holographic conference room was crammed with hundreds of images and lists of data and other information. Some of it swirling as MindReader made connections; others stable and as fixed in place as a bullet hole.

“The last eruption at Yellowstone was about six hundred and thirty thousand years ago,” said Doc. “To get things rolling now, if it was all left up to Mother Nature, and if she was in a bitchy mood, then you’d need the underground magma chambers to fill up and build pressure before it blows.”

“What can Valen do with his damn machines?”

“Well, since I haven’t had a chance to actually study the machines, I guess he’d have to use it to open conduits — cracks, in other words — from depth to allow magma to flow upward beneath Yellowstone. That happened around the Long Valley Caldera in California in the 1980s. Lots of earthquakes and dome-like swell ing were thought to indicate an imminent eruption. They evacuated people, but luckily it never blew.”

“I saw the green reptile guy do something that folded the stone walls in the hallway at Pushkin like they were shower curtains. If that’s how the technology works, then Valen can use them to open channels to the magma chambers.”

Bug asked, “If they could do this, then why hit Washington?”

Doc Holliday walked around the hologram of the God Machine, then turned to look at a series of photos of Valparaiso, the military base in Ukraine, and newer pictures of Washington.

Junie fielded that. “Joe once tried to explain boxing to me. He said some boxers like to batter their opponents’ arms to make them too sore and achy to lift, which makes them too slow to block a solid punch to the face. Other boxers go a different route and try to hit their opponent on the nose early on. Especially if it looks like the other boxer’s nose hasn’t been broken before. It’s a psychological and physiological thing. I mean, what happens when someone gets a broken nose?”

Doc shrugged. “Intense pain. Bleeding. Externally, of course, from torn tissue, and internally. Blood in the throat and Eustachian tubes. The eyes water. If the punch is heavy enough there’s even a chance of whiplash. And there’s possible disorientation and loss of balance if the synovial fluids in the inner ear are disturbed.”

“Right. All of that is disorienting and distracting. Joe says that he’s won more fights by punching the nose than by any fancy martial arts moves. Plus, he says that we tend to ascribe emotional meaning to physiological effects. Break a nose and the boxer’s eyes tear. For an experienced boxer that’s nothing; but to someone far less experienced, the tears are equated with crying, with weakness or fear.”

“Which then becomes an internal and therefore greater distraction,” said Bug. “Okay, I get it. It’s what boxers call ‘taking the enemy’s heart.’ They lose the fight because they are too distracted, too emotional, too confused, and no longer confident in their own strength.”

Doc gave him a dazzling smile. “Well, well, you’re more than a sexy mind and clever fingers, aren’t you. I’ll text you my private number.”

“Behave,” said Junie.

“Where are you going with this?” asked Cole, steering the conversation back to the point.

Junie spread her hands over the satellite image of Washington, D.C. “This is America’s broken nose. We have a new administration, a president who isn’t a politician and hasn’t handled a major crisis, fractured infrastructure, political infighting, and party polarization. Then the earthquake hits. Now we have pain, distraction, indecision, the practical — or perhaps impractical effects of party politics, disorientation, and too much raw emotion.”

Cole’s eyes went very round as the full impact of this hit her. “God almighty. If Yellowstone blows, we’re not going to be able to react or respond in any way except badly. Jesus H. Christ, Esquire. If we can’t stop this, we’re going to lose the whole damn country. Not just the crops… we’ll lose everything, including any chance we have of protecting the survivors.”

Duffy gave a weird little smile. “But, hey, no pressure.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT

The hotel door was heavy and it took effort to shove it off of herself, but as soon as it thumped away, Gadyuka scrambled to her knees, raising the gun, aiming it through the falling sprinkler water.

At nothing.

The older woman was not there.

Water splatted down on the carpet, making bloody droplets dance. Then there was movement coming from her right, from the wrong side of the room. Gadyuka snarled and spun and fired at the same time a foot lashed out and caught her in the hip. Gadyuka whirled and tried to use the impact to spin her all the way around so she could slam her attacker with the butt of the pistol. She put all her fear and anger into it, but the gun whistled through empty air as the woman ducked and punched her hard in the ribs. Gadyuka coughed and staggered, and then the woman chopped down with an elbow, nearly breaking her hand and sending the gun spinning away.

Gadyuka struck with her left hand, landing a brutal blow over the attacker’s heart that sent her staggering back. They paused for a moment, taking each other’s measure. The woman was bleeding from a gunshot wound to the lower left side, though based on the speed with which she moved she was either not badly hurt or insane. Maybe both.

“Who the fuck are you?” demanded Gadyuka.

The woman smiled a killer’s smile and there was blood on her teeth. “Call me Lilith.”

Gadyuka could actually feel her blood turn to icy slush. Lilith. Dear God.

The savage smile brightened. “Good. You’ve heard of me. I’ve heard of you. Your pet toad, Ohan, told us so many interesting things about you before we skinned him alive and cut his throat. He was only a lackey, but you actually gave the order. Imagine what I am going to do to you.”

Gadyuka dove for the bed, bounced onto and over it, and snatched up her purse. She dug something out, flung the purse at Lilith, and rose into a fighting crouch, snapping her wrist to release a telescoping spring-metal fighting stick.

“Come and take me, you old hag.”

Lilith reached into an inner pocket and drew out a knife with a blade so long and slender it looked like a needle. A boning knife.

“If you insist,” she murmured.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE

Bug called me just as we were dipping toward the runway.

“I think I have something,” he cried, sounding agitated to the point of near hysteria.

“Hit me.”

“It was you mentioning the Chechnya thing during the ORB conference. About the Apocalypse Cult? Well, a bunch of the members of that cult came from prepper groups. Not the normal survivalists, but the lunatic fringe. The ones who want the world to end so they can be proven right. The ones who seem to think it’ll solve their problems, cancel their debt, and get the government off their back.”

“Yup. So what?”

“We ran backgrounds on them and have kept tabs on the scarier ones. Some are dead now, some are in jail, and a few dropped off the grid to the point of no Wi-Fi or cell phones and no utility bills in their names. But there’s a bunch of them — just over forty — who are very much on the grid because they work for one of two big trucking companies based in Washington state.”

“Ah,” I said. “And now you’re going to make me happy by telling me that these are the same companies Pushkin Dynamics sent their boxes of God Machine parts to, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am,” he said, and almost giggled. “It gets better, though. When I hacked the records for the companies, I found shipping records for a last batch coming from one of Pushkin’s dummy companies. The trucks carrying those shipments arrived this morning.”

“Arrived where?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Their cargo is listed as parts and equipment to install a thermal venting system intended to regulate pressure buildup at the Yellowstone Caldera. Cowboy… they’re right there, right now.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY

People were running and yelling; alarms howled and the sprinklers hissed. A hotel assistant manager, responding to the crisis, reached room number 2301 and skidded to a sloshy stop in the doorway. The entire frame was ruined and the door lay inside, the dense wood splintered and pocked with holes. The whole room was in ruins. TV shattered, mattress torn and bloody, sheets scattered around, coffee maker crushed as if stepped on, and the big reinforced glass window completely smashed. The only consolation — and it was a small one — was that there was no fire.

He yelled at someone to shut the sprinklers down, but they twitched and sputtered and died anyway, the heat sensors failing to find cause. Water dripped heavily onto the soaked carpet. His boss, a stern-faced Asian woman of fifty, came hurrying into the room and stopped beside him.

“What happened?” she demanded. “Where’s the guest?”

All he could do was shake his head. They stared at the window and walked numbly toward it in complete silence, terrified of what they might see splashed far below. They leaned carefully out over the jagged teeth remaining in the frame.

A few people stood on the pavement, glancing down at the glittering shards of glass and then up to see where it had come from.

“Where’s the body?” asked the manager.

Six floors lower, in a junior suite with the blackout drapes closed and opera playing very loud, two women had a conversation in the bathroom.

One was dressed only in blood. The other wore white, disposable coveralls of the kind used by crime scene forensics technicians. It was a corner suite, chosen because there was no one on the other side of the bathroom wall. The soprano arias sounded enough like screams to convince passersby in the hallway, should other screams get too loud.

Lilith sat on the closed lid of the toilet, forearms resting on her thighs. She held the boning knife loosely between the thumb and index finger of her left hand.

“You disappoint me,” she said in a voice that almost sounded gentle. “From your reputation I expected more. But… I suppose it does not require much to stab from a shadow or fire a gun through a window. A pity.”

Gadyuka cringed in the tub. She was able to breathe, and weep, and talk. So many other things were beyond her now.

“You still have a chance, my pet,” said Lilith. “You have to make a very important decision now. What means more to you — your cause or your skin? And I am not speaking in the abstract.”

“Please…,” begged Gadyuka. “I… I… can’t…”

The head of Arklight cocked her head to one side. “Is that really true? I wonder.”

The aria playing was Maria Callas singing “Suicidio!” from La Gioconda. Very appropriate.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE

Church stepped away from Doc Holliday and Junie to take the call.

“Lilith,” he said. “How is Violin?”

“Alive. But that’s not why I’m calling. Do you know the name ‘Gadyuka’?”

Church stiffened. “Yes. Why?”

“We had a long conversation,” said Lilith as casually as if she were discussing yesterday’s news. “About earthquakes and green crystals and God Machines and destroying America. In any other circumstance I would think she was lying, but trust me when I say she was very earnest in convincing me of the truth of everything she said.”

“I believe you,” said Church. “We already know quite a bit and have made some guesses about more. Did she say anything about Wyoming?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell me you have a team there already.”

“They are on the way.”

“Then they may already be too late.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO

“How we going to get there?” asked Bunny as he bent over a map. “Map says that you have to go all the way around the damn thing to get there by road. Four and a half damn hours.”

Top and I leaned down next to him. I grunted. “There’s got to be another way if they’re bringing in parts. A service road somewhere.”

“There,” said Cole. She tapped the glass on one of the windows. There, a few thousand feet below us, we could see a semi creeping along a dirt road through the rocky terrain.

“Not on the map,” said Bunny. “They must have put it in for the venting job.”

Since Nikki had found out about the truckers, she backtracked into state and federal records to find the details on the venting project. It was there, but it was hidden. Not under top-secret labels, but behind veils of what had to be deliberate obfuscation. Someone did not want it found, and by the time we were wheels down, Nikki came back to us with the name of the official go-to person in Washington.

“Who’s Jennifer VanOwen?” asked Smith.

“You’ve seen her,” said Tate. “Blond chick who stands behind POTUS and nods a lot.”

Smith shrugged. “She one of our bad guys?”

“I’m not liking her much right now,” said Top.

“She had the road built,” said Bunny.

“Jesus, Farm Boy, you took a nap on the plane and woke up stupid. Yeah, that road’ll get us there, but it’s how these motherfuckers have been getting their God Machine parts out there in the first place.”

“Just trying to make lemonade, old man.”

“Fuck you and your lemonade.”

The jet thumped down, jostling us all since none of us had bothered to buckle up for safety. By the time it was done rolling, we were locked and loaded. Tate disarmed and opened the door and deployed the collapsible stairs.

“Wheels?” asked Duffy, but the answer was rolling right toward us. A huge Toyota Sequoia painted in the colors of the National Park Service. “Well, there is a God.”

Shorthand is, we commandeered the truck, crammed enough weapons and ammo to storm the gates of hell, and squeezed all of Echo Team into the SUV. Top drove like the world was on fire.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE

It took too long for a call of this kind to make it through channels. In previous years, and even in the early days of this administration, the call would have gone straight through. Ultimately, he had to fudge the math and have Bug force it through the cell towers and security barriers and make it damn well ring in the president’s hand. While he waited for POTUS to answer, Church calculated the number of laws that call broke. Seven, he concluded.

“How in the hell did you call me?” demanded the president. “I blocked your number.”

“Mr. President,” said Church, “I need to inform you of a grave threat to national security.”

There was a beat and for a moment Church expected the line to go dead.

“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.

“We’re made,” I yelled, but at that moment a man walked out from between two mounds of dirt with an AK-47 in his hands, stood wide-legged in the center of the road, and opened fire. We all ducked down, the windshield blew apart, and hot rounds tore into the car.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE

Top turned the wheel hard and skidded off of the road. The SUV bounced horribly over ancient lava rock. He stamped down on the gas, crashed through some withered brush, and crunched against a jagged ridge.

“Out!” I bellowed, but Bunny was already shoving people toward the doors. Cole jerked up the handle and fell onto the hard-packed dirt and rock, with Smith nearly crashing down on her. They slithered like snakes to the crest of the ridge as more bullets punched chips of stone out of the irregular shelter. The others got out, too, but the two big men, Tate and Bunny, risked death to drag out the equipment bags and boxes. The metal boxes were lined with plate steel sheathed in Kevlar, so the others took them and built a stronger shelter. Duffy immediately opened his rifle case and took out his weapon. Top slid out of the seat and stumbled, pawing at his face, which was smeared with blood.

“Are you hit?” cried Bunny, beginning to crawl toward him, but Top waved him off.

“Glass cuts. Shit. Get your big white ass under cover, Farm Boy, before they shoot your dick off.”

“Watch your own ass, Old Man,” grumbled Bunny.

“How many shooters?” asked Smith.

Tate was studying the video feeds from the drones. “Count three. Guy in the road, one on either side. And, shit, there’s two guys going around the truck, heading into the hill south of us. One of them has a scoped rifle.”

“They brought a sniper,” complained Smith. “That’s just—”

There was a crack and his head whipped around to see Duffy raise his head from the scope of his rifle. “ Had a sniper.”

“Nice damn shot,” said Top.

“What was that?” asked Cole. “A thousand yards.”

“Give or take,” said Duffy as he worked the bolt on his CheyTac M200. “Hold on.”

Another crack.

Tate snorted. “Other guy’s down. Tried to pick up the hunting rifle.”

“Of course he did,” said Duffy. “That’s why he was with their sniper. Two hunters.”

“Should have sent four,” said Smith.

Duffy shrugged. “I brought more than two bullets.”

“We get out of this,” said Bunny with a grin, “I’m going to get you drunk and laid in the town of your choice.”

“Sexist asshole,” murmured Cole, but she was grinning, too. Then we all stopped grinning as the other shooters opened up with a new fusillade. From the drone video feed, it was clear there were five shooters now, and they had all taken cover.

“I don’t have a good line on any of them,” said Duffy. “They’re shooting over stuff and around corners. Putting a lot of ordnance downrange to keep us pinned. Figure they got some other play.”

Top met my eye and gave me a hard look. We both knew what that play was. Bunny caught on, too.

“We need those damn helos,” he said.

I tapped my earbud to get an ETA and got the news. The National Guard had been recalled. Instead, state police were coming to arrest us, with the job to hold us until the FBI could take custody. My team all heard it. It was insane news. It was the kind of thing that could steal the fire from a dragon’s heart. We were seven people up against an army of survivalists, pinned down behind a nonarmored vehicle with sketchy ground cover. We were a handful of soldiers trying to save our entire country. We had every right to expect to see the cavalry come galloping over the hill, flags flying and guns a-blazing.

There was a special bing-bing in my ear that I knew was the private line between Church and me. I held my hand up for silence. They nodded, understanding. They turned away and screwed their game faces on and looked for opportunities to return fire.

“Captain Ledger,” said Mr. Church, “I’m sorry that it’s come to this. I spoke with the president and outlined the entire case. He believes that we are taking actions outside of our jurisdiction.”

“Is he insane? Doesn’t he understand what’s going to happen?”

“I would like to think that it is the devastation in Washington that has shaken him so badly that he can’t think clearly. That and the fact that he doesn’t have enough experienced professionals around him to keep things going if he loses a step. That isn’t what we have here. He either does not believe me or can’t afford to, because accepting the truth means having to address other issues within his administration, his career, and his life. I don’t think he can afford to spend that coin.”

There was a lot of gunfire and I didn’t know if the others could hear me. Our mics are tiny dots beside our mouths and they have incredibly sensitive pickup. A whisper, a murmur, and that’s enough.

I said, “We’re fucked.”

“Are we, Captain?” he asked calmly. “This is the war. This is the job. We are in place because we are the select few who can think outside the box enough, act quickly enough, hesitate less often, and act more determinedly than anyone. I formed the DMS to be exactly that. Without ego or distortion of our own capabilities. We are our own backup. And if the situation is so dire that we lose faith, then there is no plan B. So, tell me, Captain, where does that leave us? Tell me if we are out of options. Tell me if we have already lost.”

I looked at my team. They were already fighting. They were doing their jobs even though they’d heard the same news, that we were out here alone. It was a humbling thing to see. As if he could feel my eyes on him, Top looked over his shoulder at me. He gave me a single nod.

I gave it back.

To Church I said, “The sun’s going down. That will help us more than them. But I think that also means the clock is ticking down. It would do more harm to have the volcano erupt at night. Rush hour in some places, diminished workforce at hospitals and with first responders. I think that’s Valen’s timetable.”

“I agree. It coincides with the last shipments arriving now. What is your plan?”

I smiled. “My plan is to kill every last one of these evil sons of bitches.”

I heard a sound. A rare laugh from Church. We were both standing on the edge of the abyss and I’d just told him I was going to jump. “Then good hunting, Captain,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SIX

We huddled together and I told them my plan.

They grinned like a bunch of ghouls. And, if there was fear in their eyes, too, and a little panic, then they kept it locked down and tightly secured.

We had to dismantle some of our wall in order to get to the right equipment, and as each box was emptied it was put back into place but angled to give us loopholes for counterfire.

Included in our gear were six pigeon drones, a hundred horseflies, grenades, night-vision goggles, more body armor, and more of Doc Holliday’s Toybox. Most of the latter, though, required application. They were booby traps to prevent pursuit rather than tools for a frontal assault. Didn’t matter. Smart soldiers improvise, and Tate was proving himself to be a devious bastard. Cole, Smith, and Bunny maintained a steady return fire. Not wasting bullets, but making sure we didn’t get rushed. Duffy still couldn’t get a good kill shot, but he punched holes in whatever the shooters were hiding behind, delivering eloquent warnings about what would happen if they got sloppy. One of them did, in fact, lean too far out, and Duffy blew his arm off in a very loud and messy way. The screams resulted in a shocked pause and then a new barrage of outraged automatic weapons fire. That was fine. Let them waste bullets.

The sun was a tiny yellow ball that was rolling fast off the edge of the world. There were no clouds, nothing to reflect the sun and maintain the illusion of light. When the sun went down, it dragged the rest of the day with it.

In combat, the largest force owned the daytime, because that’s when their numbers allowed them to dominate the landscape. Small and more mobile forces owned the night.

“Do it,” I said, and Tate launched all six drones at once, steering them low so they flew no more than five feet above the ground. Four of us opened up with heavy fire and then two of the drones made their flash-bang faux gunfire as they moved out at right angles from our position. The incoming gunfire immediately split, firing into the dark to catch runners. That was the fiction we were selling, and anyone who’d had military or paramilitary training would buy it for what it seemed to be: shooters giving cover fire while runners broke cover and ran to flank the enemy.

We reinforced it by sending two more drones and reducing our central fire to a pair of guns. The flash-bang effects now seemed to be coming from all over the landscape. It scattered the enemy fire, thinning what was aimed at us.

Tate sent a swarm of horseflies out and I watched their infrared video feeds. The shooters were breaking up and spreading out to intercept us, not knowing that they were hunting ghosts.

While Duffy was hunting them. He had his sound and flash suppressors in place, and as the truckers ran to cut off flanking attacks they were pinned against the darkness through his night vision. Duffy fired and fired and fired. Single shots, and any chance of them tracing it back to him was confused by Top firing straight up the pipe with a noisy Heckler & Koch 416. He’d even risked a magazine with tracer rounds as a dangerous way to reinforce our fake-out. When that mag was dry he swapped in one without tracers and shifted to the far end of our shooting blind, letting return fire pound a spot where no one was standing.

Tate shifted the drones to our left as if we were running in a widely staggered line to try and claim the high ground. The incoming fire shifted that way, with a greatly diminished attack on where we actually were.

“Time to go, Cap’n,” called Top.

I slipped on my Google Scout glasses, switched them to night vision with a geodetic survey overlay, thermal scan, and distance meter. The others did the same, checked that they were carrying as much ammo as possible, and buddy-checked each other’s armor. The horseflies gave us a clear picture of the best route. It was tight and we had to move fast, but we’d scattered their focus. One by one Echo Team broke right and vanished into the darkness until only Top remained. He emptied a full magazine into the dark, paused to make sure it was clear he was reloading, then fired another, and during this pause he ran to catch up.

We scattered as we ran, with Duffy and Smith heading uphill to establish an elevated shooting position at a distance that would, for most people, be too far away to do any good. Duffy wasn’t most people; and sharp-eyed Smith would be his spotter and bodyguard.

Top and Cole split to circle the shed from the far side, while Bunny and Tate cut sharply left to come in tight on the blind side of where the knot of shooters were by the trucks. I sent Ghost ahead of me to scout the best path, and I followed his RFID chip signal on the glasses lens.

Sure, the bad guys had numbers and position, they had some training, and they knew the terrain. But no matter how many times they’d chased each other around in the woods playing soldier, they were not soldiers. And even if they’d worn uniforms once upon a time, we were way the hell out on the cutting edge of military tech. It was going to suck to be them.

No, let me go a step further with that. These were militiamen who hid behind Second Amendment protections and then tried to use those same laws to hurt their countrymen. They were traitors to everything they claimed to stand for. It didn’t matter if they knew they were working with the Russians or thought they were somehow defending their own skewed view of America. The truth was that they were the enemy and Echo Team was going to war with them under a black flag.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-SEVEN

The drones kept popping their fake rounds and there was scattered return fire as the truckers chased phantoms through the night-black landscape. Ghost led the way and I followed through a weird green world. Night vision always turns the world into something from a science fiction or horror movie. Intense blacks and whites, and a thousand shades of green. Of all the colors that I did not want to see, it was that one. My imagination kept populating the darkness with green-scaled giants, writhing tentacles, and creatures too bizarre to even comprehend, let alone describe.

When I saw an actual shape detach itself from the dense shadows I felt a brief but intense flash of irrational fear. But it wasn’t a lizard man or even a Closer. It was a burly trucker with an AR-15, and he was swinging the barrel to track movement. Ghost, probably, but my dog knows the game. I saw Ghost circle fast and come up behind the shooter and then stop because I had not given a command to kill. It was dark and quiet and I needed to get to the shed without raising an alarm. I knelt and went still and let the trucker chase movement that wasn’t there. He came within six feet of me, and if he’d turned toward me I’d have shot him. I carried a Sig Sauer with a Trinity sound suppressor and he was in my kill zone the whole time.

“What you see?” called another trucker.

“Nothing. Deer maybe,” called the guy near me. “Coming down to you. I think those pricks are up on the east ridge.”

He moved away and for now that meant he got to stay alive. For now.

I rose and moved, and Ghost moved with me.

The shed was close, and I came in from a corner angle, keeping my eyes on two sides of it. There were four guards out front and two more standing at a distance. I could see light streaming out from under the shed’s door, but there were no windows. It looked like the kind of simple structure they placed at the top of mines, betraying a much more complex facility below.

I knelt again and tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Spartan, what’s your twenty?”

“About seventy yards upslope and to your right,” said Duffy. “I can see you and the pooch. Got a good view of the shed. Count six targets.”

“I’ll take the four out front as soon as you drop the others.”

I never heard the shots, but the two men standing farthest from the shed spun away and fell. Then I was moving, yelling, “Ghost, hit, hit, hit!”

Even as Ghost surged forward I began firing as I ran. The truckers were looking at their fallen comrades and turning to look for the shooter. They expected him to be coming from where they thought we were. I came at them from the side and slightly behind, firing, firing. Two of them went down right away and Ghost did as ordered and hit a third, snapping his metal teeth down on the wrist of his gun hand. The fourth swung his gun at me and I jagged right and shot him in the chest, but all it did was stagger him. Must be body armor under his coat. Fine. I put the next round through the bridge of his nose and his head snapped back on a broken neck as blood splashed on the shed door.

I pivoted to see if Ghost needed help. He didn’t. There was a severed hand on the ground and a savaged throat gaping beneath a face filled with profound surprise. As I watched there was a final, feeble spurt of blood from his carotids and then the man slumped over.

The whole thing had taken about three seconds.

There are a lot of myths about the bite strength of dogs. Sure, wolves can chomp down at 400 pounds per square inch on average and up to 1,200 PSI when defending themselves, but dogs can’t. For dogs, the common American breeds with the strongest bites are Rottweilers, who have the strongest bites at 328 PSI, and bull terriers at 235; but shepherds are in the number-two slot with average bites at 238. Now, add a lot of combat training designed to teach Ghost how to destroy bone and tendon with six titanium teeth, and the math gets ugly.

“Good doggy,” murmured Duffy in my ear. “Coast is clear, Cowboy, but you better haul ass. Pigeon drones are picking up a shitload of thermals coming your way.”

I ran to the shed door and amped up the thermal imaging, but it bloomed way too hot, from the lava down deep. Thermals were going to be useless in there; so was night vision. I took off the glasses, swapped in a full magazine, cautioned Ghost to be as silent as his name, and eased the door open.

The space inside was built to allow access to an elevator and a set of spiraling stairs. It was hot as hell in there and my clothes were instantly soaked, despite the whole “but it’s a dry heat” thing. It felt like every drop of moisture in my flesh was being leached out. Every other spare inch of floor was crammed with stacks of equipment, and along the walls were racks of black coveralls of a kind I’d never seen before. They looked like rubber but when I touched them the material felt more like a flexible plastic. Thick, though, and a quick examination revealed that each was double-lined to allow for tubes and wiring. Small harnesses and rows of tanks gave me the answer. These were some kind of advanced coolant suits to allow Valen and his team to work down near the thermal vents.

I wasted no time and put one on. As I did, it occurred to me that Ghost could not go with me, and he couldn’t stay in the shed because there would be nowhere for him to run if the truckers came in. So I told him to go find Top. As usual, Ghost didn’t like it, but he gave the soft whuff that’s his version of “hooah.” He ran out into the night. It bothered me to see him vanish into so deadly a darkness, and I had a horrible feeling that I might never see him again.

“Sergeant Rock,” I said quietly, “Ghost is coming to you. Can’t take him down with me.”

“Roger that, Cowboy,” he said, then added, as if reading my mind, “We’ll keep him safe.”

I finished sealing the suit and as the last zipper pull locked into place, the internal works activated. Cool air flooded through the outfit, but it did not blow up like a hot-room hazmat and instead kept a normal shape. That made sense, since Valen and his team needed to be able to assemble the God Machines. One precaution I’d taken was to remove my combat harness, and I buckled it on over the suit, allowing me access to extra magazines, grenades, and fighting knives.

The suit’s cowl came complete with goggles with orange-tinted lenses that reduced glare but were nonetheless sharp. It was nice tech and I hoped I lived long enough to steal it for the DMS. Junie could probably find a use for it, too, maybe for firefighters battling California forest blazes.

I removed the sound suppressor from my gun, ignored the elevator as a damn death trap, and started down the stairs. I had an unnerving flashback to my college days, when a comparative lit teacher had us read Dante’s Inferno. As the narrator passes through the gates of hell he sees an inscription:

It amused me at the time, but absolutely chilled me now to reflect on the translation: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-EIGHT

Top Sims moved through the night like a murderous specter from some old folktale. That’s how Tracy Cole saw it.

There were a lot of truckers out now, using flashlights mounted on rifles or shooting flares into the sky. Echo Team cycled its Scout glasses to compensate for the flashes of light and instead of being blinded, used them to pick their targets. Tate and Bunny were down among the trucks now, wiring everything with nasty items from the Toybox. Duffy was the finger of God, flicking people off the planet one bullet at a time. Cole had taken two of the militiamen out so far, both with double-taps from her Glock. She preferred handguns for night fighting.

Top went another direction, using stealth and speed to bring him close and personal, and then he used vicious kicks and a bayonet to drop and kill. He never used a wide variety of techniques; instead, like most expert fighters, relied on a few simple moves over which he had great mastery. No one saw him coming, and he killed them. It was unadorned and frank, devoid of emotion or complication. It was strange to see it, because she knew that emotional fires had to be burning in Top’s head and heart. He was a passionate man beneath all that control. Maybe that was why he never hesitated and showed no mercy at all. There was too much at stake.

They moved through the nightmare landscape of volcanic rock, twisted shrubs, and brutal death.

Bunny and Tate reached the truck that they’d followed here. Only three of the truckers were still using it to fire on the wrecked SUV. Those men were intent on their work and did not see the two hulking figures that came up behind them. They did not even hear the silenced shots that killed them.

“Open the truck,” ordered Bunny, and when they’d swung back the doors they found crates of parts identical to what had been found at Pushkin. The truck was only a quarter full, though.

“There’s not enough stuff here,” said Tate. “Shit. I think they have most of the parts already.”

“Yeah, damn it,” growled Bunny, and he called it in. There was no answer from Captain Ledger. “He must have gone down to find Valen,” he said to Tate.

“Want me to blow this stuff up?”

“No. Rig it so it blows up whoever comes looking for it. Then we’ll go set up a playground between here and the shed.”

Tate nodded and set to work. He heard footsteps and a man call out in inquiry, but didn’t turn to see what was happening because there was a sudden muffled cry of pain that ended in a wet gurgle.

“Work fast,” murmured Bunny as he lowered a dead man to the ground.

“Jesus, man, I’m working as fast as I can.”

Tate cut a look behind him in time to see Bunny fire three shots with a silenced pistol. A running man suddenly lost all coordination and fell badly. Bunny put a foot on his throat and shot him once more in the head.

“Work faster.”

“Christ,” murmured Smith, “they’re coming out of everywhere. How many of them are there? I thought there was supposed to be like… forty, tops.”

Duffy looked up from his scope at the shadowy figures swarming across the landscape. He stopped counting at sixty.

“No National Guard,” said Smith. “No backup coming at all.”

The two men looked at each other, and some truth passed between them. An understanding of the reality of this mission.

“Then we take as many of them with us as we can,” said Duffy. “We buy the captain enough time.”

Smith licked his lips and he could feel something within him change. It was something he’d read about and heard about from other soldiers. When you think you are going to make it out of a fight, you cling to the hope of survival, and sometimes that keeps you alive, and sometimes it shines a light by which the bad guys can take aim. But if hope dies in you because you know — without a shred of doubt — that you aren’t going to walk off the playing field, then you become a different person. It is no longer about winning in order to go home. The fight becomes a hunt, where all that matters is clearing as many of the enemies off the board as you can so you can be laid to rest on a mountain of their corpses. It was old thinking, maybe going back to the Vikings or the Romans or the Celts or whomever. It was the battle madness they used to write about in old epics.

So be it, thought Smith. If they want me, then they’ll have to earn it.

He set aside the night-vision binoculars he was using to spot for Duffy and picked up his own rifle.

“Hooah,” he said.

Duffy grinned. “Hoo-fucking-ah.”

They opened fire at the swarming figures.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE

The stairs went down and down and down. Through long patches of darkness and into a light that seemed to come from the burning heart of the Earth herself.

Great coils of steam rose from below, and when I looked over the edge of the railing I could see the work platform far below. A dozen men milling like ants around something that gleamed like silver. A God Machine, I had no doubt. A big one. Bigger than the one in D.C. And around it were smaller ones that the workers were lifting and carrying away with them. From what I could make out, they had finished the construction of the devices, or at least all the ones down there. But they were still placing them.

My heart lifted and perched on a fragile branch of hopefulness. There was still time.

The stairs were metal, so I had to move slowly enough to stay silent, and it was a long way down. The elevator looked like it opened right behind the big machine, so taking that would definitely have been suicide.

I moved down and down, and I could feel the rising heat even through the suit’s cooling system. Sweat stung my eyes but I blinked them clear.

Down and down.

When I was two flights up from the bottom I paused again and gave my earbud the tap-pattern to let them know I could hear but not speak. I wanted confirmation that they were seeing this, too.

There was absolutely nothing. Not from the TOC, the ORB, or my team. I glanced around. Down here, deep inside the caldera, this close to a trillion tons of lava and gas, yeah… no signal of any kind was getting out without a cable running up to the surface.

Fair enough. It meant the assholes down there weren’t speaking to anyone, either. I crouched and watched, letting what I saw teach me.

The big God Machine was maybe six times larger than the smaller ones, though less than a fifth the size of the massive one at Pushkin. It had a line of green crystals in slots on its side, but they were covered with a thicker slab of glass that was veined with wires. Some kind of signal blocker, I guessed, to keep the effects of the activated crystals from affecting the workers. Okay, that made me unclench a little. And I thought about the wires in the coverall I was wearing. Maybe a backup to that? I hoped so.

The God Machine was already on. I could see it vibrate and the air around it shimmer. The effect made the stone wall against which it was set look insubstantial. Hard to say whether that was an accurate assessment or merely a distortion effect, like a heat haze. No green men stepped through, though; nor did I catch any glimpses of alien worlds.

The smaller machines were not active, it seemed. The workers picked them up and placed them on carts before pushing them down side tunnels. When I leaned to look into the tunnels it appeared as if they curled around, and my guess was they formed a ring around what I assumed was a rock-lined thermal vent. I’m no scientist, but I’ve blown enough things up to be able to make an assessment. If the vent was as big as it looked, based on the arc of the tunnels, then it seemed likely Valen was going to use his machines to drastically destabilize it once all of the devices were on. The big machine already running had probably set the groundwork — literally — by tampering with the fault lines running through the whole caldera. I would have bet a shiny nickel that there were more of the big ones somewhere. Running. Getting the whole thing ready to blow.

I saw something odd — well, something in keeping with the general and pervasive oddness of the scene. The tunnels themselves seemed to shimmer, very much like the walls had in the hallway at Pushkin. What did that mean? Were they real tunnels, or some kind of matter disturbance effect of the God Machine?

The big question remained… what next? I had a whole bunch of grenades as well as some blaster plasters. I could blow the big God Machine halfway into orbit. What, though, would be the effect? Did those machines just turn to rubble when they blew? The ones in D.C. exploded with real force. What would happen to the big vent if I destroyed this one?

Would destroying it be enough? What if the machine needed to be adjusted and dialed down, like cooling a nuclear reactor? The more complex the machine, the greater the forces within it, the more complex it gets to turn it off.

I mean, sure, I could try and force Valen to do it, but how would I know if he was doing that or turning it so high it overloaded? I already half suspected he was out of his mind and maybe suicidal, because he was here instead of fleeing the country before it blew.

Which meant… what? Was our race against the clock not as down to the wire as it seemed? If so, damn, that would make a really nice change and I would promise to devote my life to good works and Jesus. Hell, I’d get a sex change and become a nun if this was all next week’s doomsday clock.

But I didn’t think so. Too many loose ends. Too many of these militiaman flunkies who could get drunk and talk big and ruin the whole thing. No, I thought the clock was ticking and boom time was close.

Real damn close.

But how to stop it? I was pretty sure the tallest of the three men nearest to the big machine was Valen Oruraka, because he was giving orders to two others.

Well, as my old math teacher tried to explain to me once, when faced with a complex problem, begin by solving those parts you understand.

Okay.

I crept down to the ground level, picked up a clipboard that was resting on the edge of a cart, walked over to the men loading a God Machine onto another cart, and shot them in the head. Another man cried out and tried to unsling a rifle. He died, too.

First part of the problem solved.

The tall man whirled and stared at me through the orange lenses of his goggles. Yeah, the same eyes I’d seen in D.C. looking down the barrel of a Taser, except now I had the only gun.

“Hello, Valen,” I said.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY

He stared at me with eyes filled with strange lights. Not madness, exactly, but definitely a profound surprise, horror, and something else. Relief? No, that was wishful thinking on my part.

“Ledger,” he said hoarsely.

I touched the barrel of the gun to his face, right between his goggle lenses.

“Turn it off,” I said.

Valen reached up a gentle hand and moved my gun barrel. Not to the side, but down, placing it over his heart. Making a statement about his acceptance of what I could do, but also creating an easier line of communication between us. It was a strangely intimate act.

“I can’t,” he said.

“You can,” I said.

“Go ahead and kill me, Captain Ledger. I’ve already accepted that I’m dying today.”

“Yeah, well, hoorah for you. This isn’t about you making a grand sacrifice to usher in the Novyy Sovetskiy.”

He looked surprised for maybe half a second, then nodded. “She told me you were smart.”

“You mean Gadyuka?”

I couldn’t see his mouth, but his eyes crinkled. He was smiling. “Very smart.”

“She’s dead,” I told him.

“Oh.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“A little. She seemed like the kind of person who would be hard to kill,” said Valen.

“Do you want to know how she died?”

He shook his head. “You’re trying to rattle me. But it’s a little late for that.” He gestured to the machine. “You see, I really can’t turn it off. That was a design requirement from Gadyuka. She was the only one who had the code. Did the person who killed her bother to ask? No. I can see it in your eyes. They didn’t, which means the code died with her.” He paused. “Do you know why Gadyuka had them build that into the machine? Because of me.”

He looked down at the gun, shook his head, and stepped away from me, walking over to the rows of green crystals.

“She said it was because of them. The Lemurian quartz. We were all afraid of the effect… which you’ve seen. If you spoke with Gadyuka then you know that the activated crystals drive people crazy. Murder. Suicide. Mass hysteria. You saw it in Washington. I’ve seen it many times. Gadyuka was afraid that the men working with me here — and I — would go crazy and damage it. So they built in safeguards, a locking mechanism that freezes the controls once they’re set. I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.”

“Mr. Valen,” called a voice, “I… holy shit!”

Another pair of truckers had come back with an empty cart, and had seen the dead bodies on the floor. They went for their guns. I already had mine out. I shot them both and all Valen did was stand there and watch. I swapped out my magazines and pointed the barrel at him again.

“How far did you idiots think this through?” I asked. “You’re going to kill a hundred million or more people in America. Maybe half the population of Canada and a big chunk of Mexico. If this thing blows really big, then you have nuclear winter and then there’s famine everywhere. Including your New Soviet.”

“I know,” he said, and his eyes glistened. “God help me, I know.”

“So why do it? Is wrecking half the world really going to bring about the future you want?”

“Yes,” he said. “Prevailing winds will sweep the ash to parts of Europe, some of Africa, and across Asia. We’ve run the computer models a thousand times. Of all the superpowers, Russia will be the least damaged. When the skies clear and the snows melt, we will be the last powerful nation left standing. We will be able to control the smaller agricultural nations. Easily. We have a nuclear arsenal and they do not. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, and China will be crippled. They will need our help, and we will give it.”

“You mean you’ll sell them wheat and corn as long as they pay for it by becoming good little Communists.”

Valen shrugged. “The projections say that after a time of turmoil there will be one world. Fewer people, less of a strain on resources, and a strong central government. A world government.” He paused and again I saw his eyes crinkle. “You think I’m insane, of course.” He shrugged. “You’re probably right.”

I lowered my pistol and stepped closer. “How is it worth it? How is any of this worth it?”

Valen shook his head. “I love my country, Captain Ledger. I would do anything to save it.”

“Even this?”

Tears fell from his eyes. “If I could stop the machine, Captain, I would. I think. I… I don’t know. I drove all the way here from Washington, listening to the news as they counted the dead.” He stopped and shook his head like a dog trying to shake off fleas. “I went to church, you know.”

“You what?”

“I went to church. To ten of them, all through Washington. Every night before we turned on the machines, I went to church. I talked to the priests. I’m an atheist, Captain. I don’t believe in God. Not a Catholic God or any god. I only believe in my country, and yet… I went to church. I talked about sin and redemption. I asked the priests how the church reconciles the sin of killing with the Ten Commandments, with scripture. With Jesus. I couldn’t understand it, you see, and I wanted to. I wanted to know that I wasn’t going to hell.”

“You’re an atheist and you believe in hell?”

He laughed. “Maybe it proves I’m insane. I had to ask the questions, Captain, because I felt that I was confronting a crisis of faith. Not in God, but in my purpose. You see, my group, my party, does not accept that the Cold War ever ended. The war goes on. It is complex and hard to explain, but it persists.”

“The war is the war,” I said, and he looked surprised.

“Then you understand.”

“I understand devotion to country. I understand raising a gun to defend those you love.”

“And do you love your country?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Right or wrong? No matter which direction it takes?”

“I’m not on the policy level.”

He shook his head. “You have an opinion.”

“I’m sworn to protect my country, even when some of the people running it make the wrong call or do the wrong thing. When I want to affect policy, I go and vote. I don’t blow up half the world. And you want to talk about sin? Sure, the history books your new Communist Party will allow people to write about this will probably paint you as a hero. But you’re a monster. If this machine goes off then you will be the biggest monster in the history of the world. Nothing is worth that. No cause, no religion, no politics can ever justify this. Never. And I think you know it.”

He turned and looked at the machine. “When I came down here, Captain, I thought about what would happen if I could somehow switch it off. But I can’t. To do that would be to betray more than my party. It would mean betraying my people. It would mean aban doning them to greater hardship than they have ever known. Within a hundred years, Russia, as we know it now, will be gone. Bankrupt, torn apart, broken beyond repair. I can prevent that and help usher in an era of genuine abundance. America will fall, yes, and other nations will be hurt, but Russia will enter a golden age of prosperity.” He looked at me, tears streaming down his face. “How can I turn aside from that? What choice do I have left?”

“None, I guess,” I said as I raised my pistol.

And that’s when someone shot me in the back.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-ONE

Top Sims saw Tracy Cole fall.

He was reloading when the shot rang out and her cry rose like a tortured gull into the night. He pivoted and fired, catching the shooter in the upper chest, just above the line of his body armor. The man went down, but by then Top was running to where Cole had dropped. He went down on his knees, trying to see how bad it was.

Her face and throat were painted with black, which is the color blood looks through night vision. He felt for a pulse and found it, but it was too light and too fast. Then he saw the hole. It was in her upper right side, and it had to have been made by an armor-piercing round. It was big and red and had tunneled through her upper chest and out through her shoulder bone, doing dreadful damage.

“I got you,” he said as he tore open his pouch for sterile packing to stanch the blood flow. “I got you.”

“I know,” she said, but her voice was very far away.

Ghost came running toward them. Top tried to ward the dog away. There was a sharp scream and suddenly Ghost was falling, his white fur turning the same slick, oily black.

Everything went perfect. Until it didn’t.

The truckers and militiamen came thundering along the road, racing toward the shed with the ferocity of men answering a call. Bunny knew that it had to mean Captain Ledger was in the middle of it. They were coming from the hills, though. Only a few were going to pass between the trucks, which was where the majority of the traps were set.

“Shit,” cried Tate.

“I know,” growled Bunny as he snatched up his drum-fed combat shotgun. “Guess we do this old school.”

They opened fire. Seven militiamen went down in the first barrage, but the rest turned and the sounds of gunfire — booms and bangs and cracks and pops — filled the night. Bunny and Tate ran for cover, but there were simply too many hostiles and they covered too wide an area. There was no safe place left.

Behind them the first of the smaller band of truckers kicked their way through the Toybox trip wires and the world turned from dark night to fiery day.

From his shooting spot, Duffy did not have the challenge of finding a target, but of having too many targets. He fired and fired, killing or at least dropping someone with every shot. More kept coming.

A dozen yards to his left, Smith was lobbing grenades with great force, sending them arcing down into the mass of shooters. The blasts blew apart the truckers, but more ran forward over the dying and the dead.

Smith screamed and fell back, and when Duffy looked he saw his friend sprawled like a starfish, mouth gasping like a fish, eyes white and staring upward at the night.

Duffy reloaded and fired. And fired.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-TWO

The bullet hit me between the shoulder blades and knocked me against Valen. The punch was so hard my gun went flying and the barrel cracked one of the Russian’s goggle lenses before falling out of sight.

I dropped, trying to breathe. The spider-silk-laced body armor stopped the round and sloughed off some of the impact, but I still felt torn in half. I flung myself down and rolled toward the God Machine. The next rounds missed me and struck the device. Metal wires burst apart and the reinforced glass over the green crystals shattered.

“Stop! Stop!” cried Valen, waving his arms and throwing himself between the shooter and me. He backed up and stood with his shoulders against the panel, arms wide, screaming. “For God’s sake— stop!”

Three militiamen came running out of a side tunnel, guns up, ready to kill. I had no gun and no damn chance at all.

And then there was a sound. A huge, deep, bass hooooom sound that shook the whole cavern. Massive chunks of rock cracked and fell from the walls, smashing themselves to pieces all around me. I rolled all the way against the machine and curled up, trying to use its structure to protect myself.

Another earsplitting hooooooooom!

The floor split and jets of steam and gas shot upward. One of the shooters was caught by one and instantly burst into flame. The other two skidded to a stop, then turned and ran for the stairs, but a piece of rock the size of a Greyhound bus leaned out from the wall and smashed down on the stairs, crushing them like soda straws and obliterating the two men as if they’d never existed.

There was one more hooooom sound and the whole world seemed to shiver. I saw sparks burst from the damaged circuitry on the God Machine. Valen, who still stood with his back to it, began to turn. I was on my belly, leaning against the base of the thing. There was a burst of green light so intense that its brightness stabbed me through the head. I screamed and reeled back.

And then I was falling as the world vanished beneath me.

I fell and fell.

And Valen Oruraka fell with me; and the Italian words kept running through my head. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-THREE

I woke up nowhere.

A nameless place. Empty and colorless and unreal.

I’m in hell, I thought. But that wasn’t right. There was no heat. No fire. Nothing. I’m dead .

But that was wrong, too. I hurt too much to be dead. So I sat up. My protective suit was ruined, torn, hanging in shreds. How it had been so thoroughly slashed and my skin beneath untouched is something I’ll never know.

I stood and stripped it off. My clothes were soaked with sweat and felt cold in the wind.

Wind? I realized that it wasn’t that there was nothing to see, but that my eyes could not penetrate the thick and cloying mist that surrounded me. Almost at once I realized that the mist was not empty. Something moved in it. There was a clumsy, heavy thump as if the bare foot of something vast stepped down a few yards away. I crouched and tore the fighting knife from the combat harness I’d shucked. It was a double-edged British Commando-style weapon, but it felt absurdly small in my hand.

Stupidly I called, “Valen…?”

Another soft thump. A little closer, and with it was a rasping breath, but if it came from the mouth of some animal, then that mouth was forty feet above my own.

I turned then and ran away. Something buzzed past me and I caught a mere glimpse of it. It was like a moth or dragonfly, but the size of it was impossible. The wings were easily five feet across, and the head of the creature was a deformed nightmare mask.

I fled into the mist.…

Hoooooooooom!

I tripped on something in the sand. There hadn’t been sand beneath my feet a moment before. Or light. I fell and rolled and came up onto fingers and toes, the knife still held in the loop of thumb and index finger. In front of me was a beach. Vast, stretching to either side of me until it vanished in the distance. There was something wrong about it, though.

Two things. One, the sand on which I crouched was not tan or white, or even Hawaiian black. It was green. That green. Miles of it. The other problem was the horizon. I’ve been on beaches all over the world. I’ve seen bare ones and mountainous one, dunes and flats and rippled sand. This one was green with traces of mud, but it was wrong. There didn’t seem to be enough curve to it. Same with the ocean when I looked at it. I could see an impossible distance, even from sea level. The curvature of the Earth was wrong. Not flattened out, but warped, as if I had shrunk down or the world was so much larger that the anticipated and familiar curves were changed.

“No,” I said.

A voice said, “You see it, too?”

I turned, and there was Valen. He had also shucked out of his protective garment and wore a plain T-shirt and jeans. His face was different, though, and it jolted me every bit as badly as the horizon line. Instead of the face I’d seen back in Washington, a man of roughly my own age, this Valen was older. Years older. Decades. He wore a heavy, unkempt beard and his hair hung down to his shoulders. His clothes were filthy and threadbare.

Then my brain played back what he’d said. I’d heard it wrong. What he said was, “You see me, too?”

I licked a salty dryness from my lips. “I see you.”

The man smiled, shook his head, and touched his ear. “I can’t hear. Speak slowly so I can read your lips.”

I did.

“You’re Joe Ledger, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice that was cracked from disuse, and badly pronounced the way deaf people sometimes speak.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m Ledger. Which means you know why I’m here.”

“I had to do it,” he said, and tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. “You understand that, right? I had to. I had to.”

“No,” I said, “you didn’t. You made a choice to do it.”

“It was for my country.…”

I hit him. Not a punch, not a killing blow. I hit him across the face with my open palm. I didn’t want him to die. I wanted somehow, impossibly, to literally knock sense into him. He staggered, his cheek turning a livid red. Then he began to cry.

“Did you stop it?” he begged. “Did you find a way to stop the machine?” His weeping suddenly changed to a high-pitched laughter that was so fractured it scared me. He laughed and wept, and tears and snot ran down his face.

“God damn you to hell,” I said.

“I prayed to him every night that you stopped it,” he replied, eyes wild.

That’s what I heard. That’s what I understood. But the actual words that came out of his mouth were: “Y’ vulgtlagln h’ nilgh’ri n’ghftyar cahf ymg’ h’ mgepmgah.”

It was a language that I’d heard before. In dreams. In nightmares. A language not spoken by human tongues. A language never meant for us to speak. I’d heard it in the mad wastelands of Antarctica and when I was dying of that impossible version of the flu. And in my dreams at the Warehouse. I’d heard it when Rafael Santoro and I got lost in the God Machine in the laboratory of Prospero Bell.

It was the language of another world. Of this world in which we both stood.

A cloud shadow passed over the beach and I turned, knowing that it was not a cloud at all. Valen fell to his knees and buried his face in the sand, weeping and praying and beating his head with his knotted fists. I looked up at the thing that rose from the vast sea. A shape out of nightmares or the prayers of the damned. A body that was only vaguely humanoid, topped by an octopus head and whose face was a mass of writhing tentacles. Monstrous wings and claws that could tear apart mountains. Behind it I saw ships slashing their way through the sky. T-craft. Sleeker and faster than anything man could ever build.

“Ymg’ mgepah h’ mgah?” cried Valen.

Did you stop it? He screamed it into the sand as the god of this world threw back its head and howled.

Hoooooooom.

Valen Oruraka and I stood on the slope of a long valley. He was my age again. We were stripped to the waist and we both held knives in our hands made from gleaming crystal.

Both of us were crisscrossed by dozens of shallow cuts, and on some of them the blood had already crusted over. We were both running with sweat, our chests heaving. It was as if we had been fighting here for hours. Days.

Forever.

Valen was weeping but he raised the knife and slashed at me. I parried him easily. He cut again and I parried again. I don’t know how he’d managed to injure me so easily, but he was no bladesman, and I was. I could have killed him outright, but I didn’t.

I stepped back.

“Stop this,” I said.

A voice spoke and I turned to see two figures standing higher up the slope. Both of them dressed in the same lizard-skin armor. Except that I knew it wasn’t armor.

“Fahf ah ahf’ ymg’ ah,” said the taller of the two. My mind could still understand the language. I heard it as, “This is who you are.”

Those words hurt me more than I could explain. Worse than any of the cuts that had been sliced into my skin.

“No,” I said.

“Ymg’ ah h’ mgathg?”

Do you deny it?

I looked at the knife and the blood smeared along its length. I looked at Valen, who was panting and wild and terrified. Then I turned back to the Reptilians.

“I know who you are,” I said.

They studied me.

“In Maryland, on the road, you tried to tell me something. You told me that I was making a mistake.”

They said nothing.

“You told me that you were not my enemy. I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand.”

They said nothing.

“I was the one who got the Majestic Black Book for you. I stopped Howard Shelton from using it to build those.” I pointed to T-craft that scraped the ceiling of the world. The two creatures did not look up. “I thought we’d given all of it to you. I believed that. That’s why you tried to talk with me in Maryland. You knew that there was more of it and that someone was using it. You wanted me to stop them again.”

They said nothing.

“I can’t stop it. The machine is running. It’s going to blow up the volcano under Yellowstone and everyone I love and care about is going to die. I can’t win this for you and I can’t win it for me.”

I held out the knife, opened my hand, and let it fall, then pointed at Valen.

“He already won. I’m done.”

The taller of the two took three steps down the slope, stopping inches from me. When he spoke, though, he and the shorter one both opened their mouths. They both spoke at the same time, with the same voice, even though their lips did not move. They spoke in my language. In English.

“You are a hunter. You hunted. We followed. You found the machine that was hidden from us.”

“Yeah, well goody for me. I got there too late. Now you can take your toys and go home and let me die.”

The two creatures glanced at one another, then at Valen, then at me.

“We are not your enemy,” they said. “We are not your friends. Your world is your world. Ours is ours.”

The shorter one reached into a pouch on his belt and removed a slender piece of that damn green crystal. He showed it to me and nodded. I nodded back, though I don’t know why.

Then the son of a bitch stabbed me with it.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FOUR

Top Sims knelt on the ground with Tracy Cole’s head in his lap and a pistol in his hand, the slide locked back. He had no more bullets. Cole was alive, but fading. Going away from him, just as hope was leaving him. Ghost lay where he’d fallen and Top couldn’t tell if the dog was dead or not. Probably dead.

They’d all be dead soon. He looked at his empty pistol and let it fall. No soldier wins every battle. Top eased Cole’s head down onto the ground and rose, drawing his knife. The old joke about never bringing a knife to a gunfight occurred to him and he actually laughed. Militiamen closed in from all sides. Grinning, raising rifles to their shoulders, fingers slipping into trigger guards.

Bunny crawled along the ground, fat drops of blood hanging from his slack lips and falling to mark his slow passage.

Tate was behind him somewhere with a sucking chest wound that was going to kill him as surely as Bunny’s injuries would end his own run. Duffy’s rifle fire had stopped and all the brush up on the slope where he’d been was burning. Smith was down, too.

It was over. The militia had won from sheer force of numbers, even though more than half of them were dead. The rest would punish what was left of Echo Team. Maybe they would make it quick. Maybe the fucking volcano would blow and burn them all.

Bunny stopped crawling when he reached the AK-47 he’d seen lying by a burning truck. He leaned back on his knees, hissing with pain, checking the gun. Half a magazine. Shapes moved toward him.

“Come and get it, you cocksuckers.” He put the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.

Gunfire ripped along the ground and the man he was aiming at danced and twitched and screamed as the rounds tore the life from him. Then the men with him spun and raised their weapons. Not toward Bunny, but up. But a hail of bullets tore them down and they fell like dolls. It was only then that Bunny heard the sound of the heavy rotors as a wave of National Guard helicopters came sweeping over the camp.

Top knelt there and watched the militiamen scatter and run and try to hide and try to fight. And die. M134 Miniguns roared, their six rotating barrels spitting thousands of rounds, tearing apart any hope of cover, ripping through body armor. Missiles streaked like falling stars through the night and lifted escaping vehicles high on plumes of fire.

Suddenly the whole landscape was swarming with soldiers, their guns chewing up the fleeing truckers. Armored Humvees leapt over the crests and slammed down, jouncing and then accelerating as their gunners opened up with heavy machine guns. Top smiled despite his pain and weariness. The militiamen had trained for war, had dared to wage it against their own country, and were now learning what it meant to fight that kind of war, against that kind of foe. How Mr. Church had managed it was beyond him. It didn’t even matter. The cavalry had arrived.

He closed his eyes and bent over Tracy Cole, begging her, willing her to keep breathing. Then he threw back his head and in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice roared for a medic.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FIVE

When I woke up the first thing I realized was that I wasn’t dead.

“God,” I breathed.

Then I realized that I was in the chamber by the vent. The heat was incredible. I rolled over onto my hands and knees and then pushed off, raising the ten trillion tons of me onto my feet. The room swayed, or I swayed, or the world swayed. All the same to me. I put a hand out to steady myself on the God Machine.

And fell over because there was no God Machine. It was gone. Totally and completely gone. I scrambled back to my feet and looked right and left, trying to reorient myself, but I was in the right place. It was the machine that had gone.

So, too, had the tunnels. The walls had dropped like curtains and solidified into place. Which sounds as impossible as it looked.

The men I’d killed lay where they’d fallen. My gun was there, too, and I bent to pick it up.

I saw a figure in the shadows a few feet away and walked over to it. Valen Oruraka lay there. Ancient, wizened, dried out as if he had lived a long, hard, bad life and withered into a mummy. I knew it was him because of the knife cuts all over him.

Beneath my feet the Yellowstone supervolcano grumbled. Once. Like a giant turning over in his sleep. That one rumble, and then nothing.

Nothing at all.