The Trojan Horse

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Washington DC

USA, Day 70

No one would have mistaken Mary Archer for a SF soldier, but that was something of the point. As a young woman, she had served in the army as a cultural expert, working with SF teams in the jungles of Latin America on a number of missions that had never been mentioned to the US public. She was fiercely proud of her service and of the number of tough violent men who’d respected her and treated her as one of their own. And there was no way she was going to allow an alien invasion to take her country without at least trying to strike back at the enemy.

Her first inclination had been to pose as a prostitute, but it hadn’t taken more than one look in the mirror to remind her that her youthful days were over. Besides, she had never been a beauty, even as a teenager. Instead, she donned a suit and sat in a wheelchair pushed by a limping man with a cane slung over his back. No one would have realised, just by watching, that the limp was feigned and the cane was heavy enough to serve as an offensive weapon. All they’d see would be a young grandson taking his grandma out for a walk. And they would see what they expected to see and walk onwards.

The collaborators had taken over a bar two blocks away from her house. Many of them had been young and foolish; they’d joined the Witnesses before anyone realised that the Galactic Federation wasn’t going to bring them a new world of peace, prosperity and total fairness. Some of the useful idiots — Mary had no truck with Marxism, if only because she’d seen its effects at first hand — had deserted when they’d realised what was truly being asked of them. Others had stayed, either because they still believed, they didn’t care or they were too scared to desert. Mary had no truck with them either. Being young wasn’t a sin, but stupidity — as her former CO had once pointed out — was inevitably punished by the universe. The collaborators had known what they were doing, once the Snakes had obliterated Tehran. Any that remained and worked for the aliens were fair game.

Her wheelchair squeaked as she was pushed up the steps and into the bar. The sound of loud music came from within, one of the deafening rackets that passed for music these days, rather than something that was actually catchy. Mary pursed her lips in disapproval before remembering that she was supposed to be a sweet old granny and managed to smile at one of the ladies sitting on the doorstep having a smoke. One of them — young Kathy Patron — almost made her heart break. Kathy had had excellent prospects before the economy had collapsed and her father had been taken away by the aliens for the dread crime of serving his country in the Gulf. Now, she was nothing more than a common prostitute. Mary almost whispered something to her before thinking better of it. It would only draw attention to her.

The interior of the bar was dim, with dozens of men and women dancing together, moving as best as they could to the irregular beat. None of them looked at Mary; none of them even considered why someone would bring his grandma to a bar intended for the young. Mary reached under the blanket and grasped the assault rifle she’d brought back from her military service. It had been totally unregistered, an ace in the hole in the event of any burglar deciding to burgle her house. As far as she was concerned, gun control laws — human or alien — didn’t apply to her.

She glanced up. Saul, the young would-be Marine who was playing her grandson, nodded back at her. Mary produced the weapon from under the blanket in one smooth motion and stood up. She didn’t need the wheelchair at all, even at seventy-five years old. But no one looked past a wheelchair. They thought a crippled person was helpless. Few considered just how much could be hidden under a wheelchair.

A handful of the dancers noticed her and opened their mouths, but Mary opened fire before they could say anything — or run for their lives. The assault rifle kicked more than she had expected, but the bullets tore into the crowd and sent them screaming to the floor, their bodies hitting the ground with chilling thuds. Blood flooded the slippery wooden pine they’d been using as a dance platform as they started to bleed to death. None of the bartenders appeared to be armed; Mary almost gunned them down before changing her mind. They’d only done what they had to do to survive — and besides, rumour had it that some of the serving staff had been poisoning the collaborators.

Behind her, Saul had produced a heavy pistol and had picked off the girls smoking outside the building. Mary felt bad about that, but she wasn’t going to bother complaining too loudly. Saul was a good lad and besides, the dead whores would convince others not to sleep with the collaborators. It was much better than tarring and feathering the sluts. Smiling grimly to herself, she turned, reloaded the assault rifle, and allowed Saul to precede her back out into the open. There was no sign of any police response, but Mary knew that the aliens would react. She had to be away before they arrived, or she’d be killed. And she had so many more collaborators to kill.

“This way,” Saul said. Mary was nowhere near as spray as she’d been while on active duty, but she could still move at a fairly respectable clip. They were well on their way, hiding the weapons in the bags Saul had carried in his coat, when two police cars roared past them in the other direction. “I think they’ve noticed us.”

Behind them, the C4 they’d left in the wheelchair exploded. Mary felt bad about the cops — unless it was one of the collaborators who had survived the hail of bullets — but they were serving the aliens, if only by trying to save the collaborators. Maybe they’d track her down, maybe not; unlike Saul, she was too old to go underground. Her heath wouldn’t survive roughing it any longer.

“A good day’s work,” she said. Two other collaborators lived nearby. They wouldn’t expect an old woman to be a threat, at least not until it was too late. “Let’s go see Mr Patel, shall we?”

The line of military trucks would have fascinated Timmy, once upon a time. At seven, he had told his daddy that he wanted to be a soldier, just like his father, uncle and several of his father’s friends. His father had laughed and promised him that he would allow Timmy to join as soon as he was old enough, but until then he’d better keep up with his studies, just in case. Timmy had learned more from books and instruction manuals than he’d learned from school, including how to take apart and rebuild remote-control cars, planes and other gadgets.

And then the aliens had arrived. Half-formed dreams of joining a real space force had died when the aliens had shown their true faces. The fifteen-year-old teenager had watched in horror as his father was dragged off by a team of collaborators and sworn revenge. Timmy hadn’t been supposed to know what was in his father’s lockable truck, nor was he supposed to know how to get in — and he did know that his father would have given him a sound thrashing if he’d been caught trying to get inside it. He wouldn’t have minded, now, if it would bring his father back to him. Instead, all there was left for him was revenge. There was no hope of honourable service as long as the aliens ruled the Earth.

Making an IED wasn’t actually difficult. Badly-educated insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan had been doing it for years, although a large number had been killed or maimed by their own devices. Timmy had been on every military-related course and adventure holiday he could find since he’d been ten years old. He knew enough to set up a primitive IED, one that packed enough punch to seriously upset his target. The tricky part had been fitting it into one of his remote-controlled trucks.

No one was on the streets now, apart from the aliens and their collaborators. Timmy braced himself and turned on the truck, sending it forward and onto the road. His hiding place wasn’t perfect, but they probably wouldn’t see him unless they got very lucky. The truck, about the size of a small dog, would certainly be noticed, yet the only way they could stop it was by shooting it. Timmy intended to flick the switch and detonate the IED if they started firing, if only to buy some time to escape.

He heard someone shout from the lead truck just before his improvised IED rolled under the wheels. In Russia, he’d read, they’d trained dogs to carry explosives under tanks. The principle was the same here. He flicked the switch and the IED exploded under the lead truck. The blast was far larger than he’d been expecting, knocking him backwards and shattering every window in the street. He pulled himself back to his feet and gaped at the results. The lead truck was simply gone, while two more were wrecked and burning. Flames licked around them as their surviving crew jumped out, weapons in hand. The soldiers in the remaining trucks were leaping out as well, firing at imaginary enemies. Timmy had no idea what they thought they were shooting at, but none of the bullets came anywhere near his hiding place. Their shots went through broken windows and shattered doors, probably injuring or killing anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Timmy felt a pang of guilt as he started to creep away. It sounded as if the enemy soldiers were getting organised and once they started searching thoroughly, they might find him.

Luckily, he’d taken the advice in his father’s tactical manuals and prepared his escape route first. The rear of the house he’d chosen as a staging post — it belonged to one of his teachers, who had fled the city when the aliens arrived and never returned — possessed a neat garden, one that opened into a drainage ditch. It was simple enough to crawl through the pipe and out into the other side, under the houses on the other side of his teacher’s house. He’d done it often enough as a kid when he and his friends had dared each other to risk the pipe.

The shouts behind him were growing louder. Timmy took off his rucksack as he dived into the pipe and started to half-crawl along it. It stank worse than he remembered, but then he’d been a kid back then. Now, he almost got stuck twice in the pipe. Sheer fear kept him going, somehow; he slipped and slid his way to the far end of the pipe. No one had tried to block the far end. He was suddenly very aware that he was filthy and stank of shit and worse. It smelt as if the entire city used the pipe for their personnel waste disposal.

And if they saw him looking like that, they’d know exactly what he’d done.

Behind him, the shouts seemed to be growing fainter. The enemy troops had either decided it wasn’t worth the effort of hunting him down, or they believed that they’d killed him already. Or perhaps they’d decided not to let a single insurgent slow them down any more. More out of curiosity than wisdom, he shimmied up a drainpipe he remembered as a child, climbing onto the house’s roof. His father had thrown a colossal fit when he’d caught Timmy and his friends playing on the roofs, but no one had ever been hurt. Now… he was heavier, yet his body remembered how to climb. Compared to some of the climbing frames at action camp, the drainpipe was easy.

He kept his head down as he reached the roof, knowing that armed men were nearby. One of them might see him and open fire — and if he was blown off the roof, he was dead. Behind him, where he’d triggered his IED, the fire seemed to be mostly out, with a couple of enemy traitors using fire extinguishers to put out the remaining flames. It wasn’t the fire that caught his attention. It was the small crowd of people who had been yanked out of their houses by the traitors. They sat in the middle of the street, hands on their heads, watched by armed soldiers. A number of bodies lay on the ground, torn apart by bullets; they’d been gunned down in cold blood. Timmy fought down the urge to vomit; instead, he stared, heedless of his own safety. One of the enemy soldiers was shouting at the prisoners, demanding attention. Timmy could barely hear him, but he got the gist of it. They wanted the prisoners to point them in Timmy’s direction, or else. But the prisoners couldn’t help them…

There was a long machine gun rattle from where they were kneeling. They died as the machine gun was played over their position, leaving a pile of bleeding bodies in the street. Timmy couldn’t take his eyes off the scene, even though he wanted to run, or to fight back. They’d killed everyone just because they’d lost a few trucks and a couple of soldiers? He’d killed the prisoners just as surely as if he’d killed them himself. None of the war movies he’d seen, or the tales his father told, had suggested anything like a cold-blooded massacre. It was a nightmare.

A shot pinged off the roof. Timmy realised he’d been spotted and threw himself to the ground instinctively, crawling back towards the drainpipe as if his life depended on it. It was a harder task to get down than he remembered, and he scraped his arms quite badly on the brickwork, but he was eventually down on the ground. Turning, he ran as hard as he could, cursing his own curiosity. If they gave chase, they’d catch him — and if they caught him, he knew it would be bad. There were shouts after him, but nothing…

…And then he felt something strike him between the shoulder blades. The ground came up to slam into him with staggering speed, just as a red-hot needle seemed to dig into his back. He hit the ground, feeling his nose break as he slammed down face-first, trying not to scream out in pain. He’d been shot; they’d seen him and shot him and killed him…

He was dimly aware of running feet, and then silence.

“Please remain calm,” the loudspeaker said. “Terrorists are attacking this building. Please remain…”

A thud echoed through the building and the loudspeaker fell silent. The Welcome Foundation had been targeted by the insurgents, Jason knew; it was hard to blame their thinking as the Welcome Foundation had been the spearhead for alien seduction and then conquest of Earth. The attack had started only twenty minutes ago and he’d spent them cowering in his office, knowing that any of the insurgents who saw him would gun him down without realising that Jason was working for the good guys.

He winced as something struck the building. An alarm started to sound, only to cut off several seconds later, leaving him completely isolated. A glance at his cell phone revealed that the phone networks had gone down, something that puzzled him until he realised that the insurgents were probably using cell phones to coordinate their actions. They’d have to be careful. The networks had loved the alien devices they’d been given, but they did have the disadvantage that every cell phone call was routed through one of the alien servers. They could listen in to everyone. Jason had his doubts about how well such a system could work in practice — there were literally billions of cell phone calls every day, requiring the aliens to scan them all — but given the right software the aliens could probably listen in to anything important.

There was another sound — the high-pitched whine made by some of the alien craft — and then a series of smaller explosions that seemed not to affect the building itself. Moments later, the gunfire died away as the insurgents retreated. Jason suspected that the Snakes themselves had taken a hand and the insurgents had fallen back, rather than risk facing the Snakes directly. Washington DC would suffer if any of the Snakes were killed. He thought, briefly, about the defector he’d helped, and then pushed the thought aside. It was a secret that could not be spoken aloud.

Forty minutes later, the all-clear was sounded and Jason had a chance to get out of his office and check up on the damage. The insurgents had inflicted considerable damage, he realised, although they hadn’t managed to bring the building down. They’d wasted a number of optimistic paintings and killed a number of guards before the Snakes had arrived, but unless he was much mistaken — and he was no military expert — the attack had been designed to annoy them rather than kill. The insurgents had pinned the guards down, yet they’d failed to move in for the kill.

“Jason,” a voice called. Jason looked up in surprise to see the formidable Mrs Kraus. She was an iron-headed harridan, a secretary who ruled her department with a rod of iron. Jason wasn’t surprised that she’d survived. Someone like her could never be killed by anyone, or at least it seemed that way. “The other Directors are dead. You’re in charge.”

Jason stared at her, finally understanding. “Me?”

“You,” Mrs Kraus said. “I suggest you stay in your office. You don’t want to die just yet. They’ll come back when they realised that they missed you.”

Jason didn’t disagree, not openly. But he strongly suspected that she was wrong. Sanderson had given him an opening. Now all he had to do was make use of it.