Empire

Trap door

The two dead bodies had been disguised as park rangers. The guys they were facing now wore body armor.

Whatever training the rebel troops might have had, it wasn’t at Army Ranger level. They relied too much on their armor. It made them feel invulnerable. So they constantly revealed themselves. And they shot carelessly—too quickly, without stability. They also didn’t learn from their own bad shots. They’d overshoot the first time, and on the next shot they’d do it again.

Even undertrained soldiers can kill you with a lucky shot, though. Cole had no intention of dying because he had contempt for his enemy.

Their pistols were mostly for noise and show. The rebels dodged the bullets—they didn’t trust their armor enough to overcome their reflex to flinch.

Cole reached up and detached the M-24 sniper rifle from his pack. It fired a heavier round than the pistol—that’s why he brought it. Testing had shown that at fairly close range, it penetrated the rebels’ body armor at certain key points. Like the faceplate.

Two shots. Two rebels down.

“Good work,” said Cat. “Now it’s time for Minimi.”

Cole fired into the cabin window, shattering glass, as Cat scrambled up the slope and got into position against the cabin wall, just beside the window. It was an obvious time to toss a grenade into the cabin, but they both knew they couldn’t risk damaging whatever mechanism concealed or locked the passage down into the tunnels. So Cat reached down and pulled up a lump of turf and tossed it through the window as if it were a grenade. It would take the guys inside a split second to realize it wasn’t an explosive device. During the split second, Cat raked the inside with automatic fire from his Minimi.

They both reached the door of the cabin at the same time. It was open. They came in low, Cole first, and found three rebel soldiers, two dead, one trivially wounded in the left arm.

“I surrender!” the wounded guy said.

“How are we supposed to take you captive?” said Cole.

Cat walked over to the guy.

Terrified, the rebel said, “I’m an American, you can’t kill me.”

“Tell it to the cops you guys killed in New York,” said Cole. “And the apartment building doorman.”

“You guys are all murderers!” shouted the rebel. “You love to kill!”

Cat reached down and broke the guy’s right arm.

The guy screamed, staring at his arm. When he could speak, he groaned, “I’m an American!”

“American with a broken arm,” said Cat.

“He might be left-handed,” said Cole.

Cat broke the other arm. The guy screamed again. “Threat neutralized,” said Cat.

“Torturers,” the rebel gasped.

“Look, you said not to kill you,” said Cole. “Which do you want, pain or dead?”

Cole gave the guy a dose of morphine. “I think he wants us to surrender to him,” said Cat.

The cabin didn’t have any obvious elevator doors. Hardly a surprise. Nor was there any visible trap door in the wooden floor, or inything that looked like a passageway inside the fireplace.

“You’ll never find the entrance,” said the rebel.

“Kick his arm,” said Cat. “He’ll tell us.”

“Torturers!” shouted the rebel.

Cat picked up the clod of dirt and grass that Cat had tossed inside as a fake grenade. He pushed it into the rebel’s mouth. The rebel sputtered, spat. But he wasn’t talking.

Then, using his sniper rifle, Cole shot downward into the floor. Methodically he crossed the room, shooting straight down. Obviously there was concrete under the wood. Right across the room, no change. He moved over closer to the fireplace, put a new magazine in his M-24, and started firing downward again. Concrete. Concrete. Steel.

The steel section lined up with the fireplace. Cole could now see that the wooden floor extended under the stone of the hearth.

“It slides under the fireplace,” said Cole. Stepping out a couple of paces, Cole could see how the floor planks, while they didn’t all end in a straight line, had a slightly wider separation from the abutting boards.

“No doubt they’ve turned off whatever switch runs this from up here,” said Cole.

“Think there’s a way to open it by hand?” said Cat.

“Probably. From below.”

Cole thought about how the trap door worked. It slid under the fireplace. The hearth wasn’t deep enough to hold the entire trap door. So there had to be a projection on the outside of the house to hold the rest of the trap door.

“Going out back,” said Cole.

“I’ll stay here and make sure nobody comes upstairs.”

Cole went outside. On the way around the cabin, he couldn’t resist going near enough to the edge to look over.

There were mechs and hoverbikes coming out of the big doors now and swarming up into the woods. Cole knew that if Arty and Load could get back around the eastern arm of the lake to the cache, they’d be fine—they had weapons designed to counter both vehicles. Machines weren’t so good in the deep woods anyway. And seeing how the footsoldiers—only about twenty of them—fanned out, they were clearly not trained at all for rough-country combat.

Urban warfare, that’s what these guys were ready for. The other guys would be fine. And the more rebels they kept busy out here, the better it would be for Cole and Cat.

If they could even get down inside.

This was too much like a frontal assault. Two guys, and even if they got through the trap door, what would they do, ride the elevator and get blasted when they hit bottom? Or go down the stairs, where a flamethrower or a grenade could kill them before they had a chance to get off a shot?

At the same time, the longer they waited here, the better chance the rebels had of killing them. And what if Mingo and Benny couldn’t get to a phone? What if President Nielson decided not to send a strike force?

The best chance of success here would come from moving forward. Pushing. But… carefully.

There was a concrete road running from the huge doorway out toward the dam. It was under water the whole way till it got near the dam. There it looked like a paved marina ramp as it rose up to the usual waterline. Clever disguise. They could bring trucks in and out of here without anything looking like a highway.

Cole jogged around to the back of the cabin. Sure enough, under the grass behind the chimney brick, there was a concrete projection. Totally enclosed. No easy way in.

Cole pulled the pin on a grenade and laid it down in the corner where the brick joined the concrete. Then he threw himself to the other side of the concrete projection and rolled down the slope.

Boom.

Cole got up and ran back. Some damage to the concrete. Not a lot.

He unpinned another grenade, set it right where the most damage was, and leapt and rolled. Another explosion. More damage.

After the fourth grenade, he had a hole.

He ran back to his pack, carried it up to the hole. He pulled out the crowbar and the flashlight. He could have used a sledgehammer, but that wasn’t something that he had wanted with his gear when he was hiking.

With the flashlight, he could see the mechanism that pulled the trap door into the concrete sleeve. Not really a complicated machine. He didn’t want to damage the tracks where the trap door would slide. Just the lever that pushed the trap door closed.

It was sweaty, frustrating work, because he didn’t have great leverage. He also had to make sure he didn’t drop the crowbar, because there’d be no getting it back, and he was the only one who had brought one.

Eventually, though, he popped the lever out of its socket. Now it was dangling free.

Taking the crowbar, the flashlight, and his pack, he ran back around the cabin and went inside. Cat had poured himself some coffee from the percolator. “Good stuff,” he said. “Lots of caffeine.”

“No thanks,” said Cole. “You can go out and get your pack now.”

Cat jogged out. The broken-armed rebel glared at Cole. He was sweating with pain and looked so miserable Cole almost felt sorry for him. “I notice nobody came out to see if you’re all right,” he said.

The guy didn’t say anything.

“I guess they knew we were going to beat the shit out of you,” said Cole. “You know, before people start wars, they ought to make sure they know how to win.”

“We don’t have to win the war,” said the rebel. “We just have to keep you guys killing people till public opinion turns completely against you.”

“Same strategy as Al Qaeda,” said Cole.

“We’re not terrorists, you are.”

“Since you’re terrified and I’m not, I suppose you’re right,” said Cole. He worked his knife into one of the spaces between floor planks, slicing away bits of wood to make a gap wide enough for the crowbar. “You’re guilty of treason, but maybe they’ll let you off because we broke your arms. Military brutality and all that.”

“I’m not the traitor, you are.”

“I’m a sworn soldier of the United States of America, performing my duties according to orders,” said Cole. “You’re a hired goon of Aldo Verus, functioning as his private army in order to subvert the United States. Besides, you guys are the ones who killed the President.”

“Not my President,” said the rebel.

“That’s my point,” said Cole. “He was President of the United States, but he wasn’t your President. What does that make you?”

“We didn’t have anything to do with killing him. Terrorists did that.”

“It was your guys who stole the plans the terrorists used.”

“No way,” said the rebel. “It was your guys who wrote those plans.”

Cole couldn’t deny that. “Only so we could plan to counter them.”

“And yet,” said the rebel, “you hadn’t gotten around to countering them, had you?”

“And when the President died, you guys were right ready to move.”

“We’ve been ready for months,” said the rebel.

“Waiting for Friday the Thirteenth.”

“Waiting for a right-wing coup to give us an excuse,” said the rebel. “We never thought that asshole in the White House would be dead.”

Cole set his anger aside and thought about what he’d said. Was this just the line they fed their own troops? Or was it possible that Aldo Verus hadn’t arranged the assassinations? Could it be that he was waiting for General Alton to get his phony coup under way, and they only seized on Friday the Thirteenth as an opportunity after the fact?

The evidence in Rube’s PDA only dealt with his clandestine work for Phillips in the White House, helping move Verus’s ordnance around the country. It had nothing to do with the plans that were leaked to the terrorists.

DeeNee, though. Wasn’t she the link proving that they were all working together?

“Got to you, didn’t I?” said the rebel.

Cole ignored him. DeeNee was dead. She assassinated Rube and then she died. So nobody could ever ask her who she worked for. The guys who chased him were after Rube’s PDA. But was it possible that they weren’t in league with DeeNee? That they had simply staked out the Pentagon parking lot, waiting for Rube to show up?

Cole remembered back to that Monday morning, June sixteenth. There was shooting inside the building, but nobody shot at him out in the parking lot. The security forces inside the Pentagon had killed three bad guys inside. Was it possible that that was all of the guys who were with DeeNee? That the guys who followed him out in the parking lot were a different team, and that’s why they didn’t shoot as soon as they saw him? It took the guys outside a while to realize that Cole, not Rube, had the PDA now. That’s why they didn’t shoot him down, or even follow him immediately.

Absurd. Too complicated. They simply lied to their soldiers. They couldn’t very well announce, “We’re going to kill that evil right-wing madman in the White House and then take over America.” You get a whole different kind of recruit when you announce that as your purpose.

“What were you blowing up out there?” asked the rebel.

“You know, for a guy who was afraid to die, you sure do test our patience.”

“If you were going to kill me, I’d be dead,” said the rebel.

“That’s right,” said Cole. “We chose not to kill you. We put up with your shit. And yet you still believe we’re murderers and torturers.”

“You broke my arms.”

“So you couldn’t shoot us in the back, idiot. Use your brain. Or have you turned that over to Aldo Verus, too?”

“I think for myself.”

That was twice that Cole had mentioned Aldo Verus’s name, and neither time had the rebel denied knowing anything about him. But he had denied having anything to do with the assassination. So Verus was his boss of this army and the soldiers knew it.

“Guys like you are so angry that they can lie to you about guys like me and you believe it,” said Cole. “You can’t even conceive of the idea that maybe a guy becomes a soldier because he loves his country and is willing to die to keep it safe. No, you have to believe that guys like me are murderers looking for an excuse to kill. And yet you put on a uniform and you took up arms.”

“I’m nothing like you,” said the rebel.

“Right,” said Cole. “Because I trained to do my job right. And because I recognize that even my enemies are still human beings. Assholes, but human ones.”

Cat came back into the cabin. “Nothing else on this island. Nobody even bothered to shoot at me. I think they think we can’t get through their door.”

“Maybe we can’t,” said Cole.

“You can’t,” said the rebel.

Cole pushed on the crowbar. The wood splintered a little, but it also moved. The trap door had slid about a half inch.

Which meant it would probably slide farther. Far enough for the door to open.

“The question,” said Cole, “is this. Do we open it enough to toss a grenade down and kill anybody waiting for us? Or do we hope they trusted their mechanism here so much that they aren’t even bothering to defend it?”

“We throw a grenade and they aren’t there,” said Cat, “the grenade tells them we made it through and they come running.”

“On the other hand, we open this and they are there, they just toss a grenade up here and we’re dead.”

Cat pointed his thumb at the rebel. “One consolation is, he’s dead, too.”

“Collateral damage,” said Cole. To the rebel he said, “But your team doesn’t believe armies should ever cause collateral damage, don’t you?”

The rebel just glared at him.

“Safety first,” said Cole. “I’ll shove, you toss.”

Cat got out a grenade.

“Of course, I’ll be right here where the blast will still hit me,” said Cole.

“Well, don’t be there,” said Cat.

“I can’t open the trap door if I’m standing on it,” said Cole.

“You could try,” said Cat.

Cole went over to one of the dead rebels and dragged his body over to the set of slight gaps marking the end of the trap door. Cole shoved the crowbar under the body and lodged the angled end of the crowbar into the gap. Then he stepped over the body and started pushing on the other end of the crowbar. “Is it moving?” he asked.

“Are you pushing?” asked Cat.

Cole pushed hard enough that his feet slid on the floor.

So he tipped over a table and ran it up against the far wall. By bracing his feet against the end of the table, he kept himself from sliding. And now the trap door started to move.

“Anytime you feel like it,” said Cole.

He pushed farther. The trap door began to move smoothly.

A burst of machine-gun fire from inside the trap door shuddered the dead body in front of him and shoved it back into Cole’s face.

Cat flipped a grenade down the gap.

It exploded. There was no more firing.

Now the two of them opened the door the rest of the way. It went rather easily.

Steep stairs led down into a small concrete room with an elevator door on one side and the top of a spiral staircase on the other. There were pieces of body armor scattered on the floor, some still containing fragments of flesh and bone. The pieces didn’t come out even, so some of them must have blown off the edge and down the spiral stairway.

They went back up into the cabin and put on their packs. Cat quickly finished his coffee. “Shouldn’t drink this,” he said. “I’ll just have to pee later.”

“You didn’t put on your catheter?” said Cole with mock surprise.

“Can’t find any that fit me,” said Cat.

Cole turned to the miserable-looking rebel. “We probably won’t come out this way, so… I’ll see you at your treason trial.”

No smart remarks. The guy just looked away.

Down on the elevator landing, Cat pushed the button for the elevator.

“Oh, come on,” said Cole.

“Ain’t gonna ride it, man,” said Cat. “Just want to see if it comes when I call.”

They waited, weapons trained on the door. It opened. The elevator was empty.

“We could put that guy inside and send it down,” said Cat. “Then it’s friendly fire that’ll kill him.”

“Being an ignorant jerk who believed a lot of lies shouldn’t get you the death penalty,” said Cole.

“Not even sometimes?” Cat was holding the elevator door open.

Cole leaned close to him and whispered. “Push the button for the bottom floor and let’s go down the stairs.”

Cat pushed the button and scrambled back out of the elevator before the doors closed.

Then, as quietly as they could, they started down the stairs.