Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

As usual with tasks that included climbing, this one fell to Callahan. Much of the debris slope he’d used earlier had been collapsed and scattered by the falling concrete slab, but together the three of them were able to build it up enough for him to clamber up to the opening.

The hole itself was smaller than Kyle had estimated earlier, too small for any of them to squeeze through. But Callahan managed to get his head through. Gripping an exposed piece of rebar with one hand and the metal door with the other, he eased up for a look.

He stayed there for a good ten seconds, and in the light seeping down from above Kyle could see his neck moving as he turned his head back and forth. Finally, he pulled his head back through the opening and made the precarious climb back down.

“No watchdog,” he whispered as they all huddled again. “But it looks like they’re almost ready to go with the next blast. They’ve got two of the satchel charges at the base of the tunnel face, and they’ve moved the others way back down the tunnel.”

“Like they’re going to do a second blast further back, too?” Zac asked, frowning.

“No, like they don’t want a second blast at all,” Kyle told him. “Sympathetic detonation—Orozco told me about that once. If you put a bunch of explosives—”

“If you put explosives within four or five feet of each other, triggering one of them triggers the rest along with it,” Callahan finished for him.

“So if everything’s ready, what’s Skynet waiting for?” Zac asked.

“Nightfall, probably,” Callahan said. “The light coming through the roof is pretty weak, so it’s probably getting close to sundown. Maybe Skynet’s planning another attack like last night to cover the noise.”

“Leaving more debris for the Terminators to haul away tomorrow,” Kyle said. “So if we don’t want to spend tonight and most of tomorrow down here, we need to make our move now.”

“The problem is that there aren’t any openings up there, at least none I could see,” Callahan said. “If we want a hole, we’ll have to make our own.”

“You mean with the explosives?” Zac asked.

“Exactly,” Callahan said. “We’ll take the charges, plant them down the tunnel a ways, and blow all of them at once.”

“Wait a minute,” Kyle cautioned. “You know anything about how to place charges for that sort of thing?”

“Zac and I have both had training,” Callahan told him. “And you worked pretty closely with Orozco on some of his demolition stuff. Between us, we should be able to bring down the roof to give us a way out. With a little luck, we might also knock down enough of the roof to seal the Terminators in the other part of the tunnel.”

Kyle winced. And if they had no luck at all, the blast might collapse their end of the tunnel and kill all three of them.

But Callahan was right. Skynet knew someone was down here, and they couldn’t stay hidden from the Terminators forever.

“Okay, but maybe we should wait a little longer,” he said. “If it’s still light outside, most of the fighters and all of the big guns will still be working out by the daytime perimeter. If the blast lets any of the T-700s get out, they could kill a lot of people.”

“It’s a risk, I know,” Callahan said heavily. “But if we push things too far, we may be trapped down here by Terminators making last-minute checks and adjustments.”

“And if we let Skynet blow the tunnel on its schedule, we know a lot of people will die,” Zac added.

“He’s right,” Callahan said. “This is the best window we’re going to get. I think we need to go for it.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m in,” Zac said.

Kyle took a deep breath. “Me too.”

Callahan nodded. “Let’s do it.”

The first job, getting up into the tunnel, was easier said than done. The metal door the Terminators had laid over the broken concrete was too heavy for Callahan to push it clear by himself.

In retrospect, Kyle realized as he and Zac made the precarious climb up the debris alongside their companion, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Not only did the door have to handle the weight of T-700s walking over it, but also the extra burden of whatever chunks of metal or concrete those T-700s were carrying.

Fortunately, with all three of them pushing, the door finally moved, and without any of the teeth-jarring screeching that metal on concrete often made.

A minute later, for the first time in hours, they were back in the tunnel.

“We’ll start with those,” Callahan whispered, pointing to the two charges sitting against the tunnel face. “You two get them—I’ll head down the tunnel and look for a place to set them up.”

“You want this?” Kyle asked, pulling his shotgun from his belt and offering it to Callahan.

The other shook his head. “Maybe later.” Checking his footing, he headed down the tunnel.

Kyle turned back to the explosives, a hard lump forming in his throat. He’d dealt with the stuff several times back when the three of them were living in Los Angeles. But those had all been pipe bombs or something similar, with flammable fuses. Canvas-wrapped packages with a fist-sized box wired into both bombs were way outside his area of experience.

“You know anything about these things?” he asked Zac as the two of them crouched down beside them.

“A little,” Zac said, gingerly picking up the small box and turning it over in his hand. “This is the detonator. Not sure what type—I’ll have to pull off some of this outer wrapping to see what’s inside.”

“Is that safe?” Kyle asked, forcing himself not to edge away as Zac started carefully peeling away the plastic.

“Should be,” Zac said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

He angled the partially open package toward the light coming in through the ceiling.

“Looks like a solenoid plunger system,” he said. “We use this type, too. It’s pretty simple...”

He trailed off.

“What?” Kyle asked.

Zac visibly braced himself.

“It’s a plunger,” he said. “That means it has to get physically pushed in to trigger the bomb. The solenoid coil around it is just there to do the pushing. Radio controlled, probably—this thing here looks like a receiver.”

“You mean Skynet could set it off right now?” Kyle asked, his skin crawling a little.

“You’re missing the point,” Zac said, his voice suddenly gone brittle. “It’s a plunger, and we don’t have a radio to set it off. That means one of us will have to stay behind and push it.”

Kyle looked down at the short wires running from the detonator to the charges.

“Could we make the wires longer?” he asked.

“If we had more wire, sure,” Zac said, looking around. “But I don’t see any.” He stood up, holding the detonator gingerly in one hand as he picked up one of the wrapped explosives with the other. “Let’s get these back to Callahan. Maybe he’ll have an idea.”

“Okay,” Callahan said after Zac had explained the situation. “Let’s focus on getting these things placed. Then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

“Meaning what?” Kyle asked suspiciously.

“That we’ll figure out where to go from there,” Callahan repeated, an edge to his voice. The same edge, Kyle noted, that Yarrow had had when he’d pulled his gun and ordered the three of them to cover. “There are six more charges, right?”

“Meaning you’ll stay behind and trigger the detonator?” Kyle asked.

Callahan looked him straight in the eye.

“When Yarrow died, I became senior man here,” he said flatly. “If it comes to that... yes.”

Zac stirred. “We should probably draw straws or something,” he suggested hesitantly.

“Or maybe we should pretend we’re Resistance soldiers who follow military procedure and chain of command.” Callahan held up a hand as Kyle started to speak. “And if we stand around arguing until the Terminators get back, we lose by default. Now go get the rest of the charges like I told you while I get these positioned.”

Clenching his teeth, Kyle turned and headed back down the tunnel. Zac lingered another moment, then followed.

“What are we going to do?” the younger teen muttered as he caught up to Kyle.

“You heard him,” Kyle said grimly. “If it comes to that, he’s going to take the job.”

They got another three paces before Zac spoke again.

“So we just have to make sure it doesn’t come to that.”

“You got it,” Kyle said. “So get busy and think. Think hard.”

He glanced over his shoulder at Callahan’s shadowy figure as he knelt down by the explosives. “And think fast.”

There was no way to know how far the disposal group had gotten before Lajard’s activation code had turned Jik from a John Connor pretender into a killer Terminator. There was also no way to know how long it had taken the Theta to finish its bloody task. Probably, knowing Terminators, not very long.

Which meant Barnes and Preston should have run into the machine again somewhere between Baker’s Hollow and the river.

Only they hadn’t.

“What now?” Preston asked over the roar of the water as he and Barnes stood in the partial shelter of the trees near the river. “Go on, or go back?”

“You’re the expert,” Barnes said, frowning as he eyed the far bank. Was something moving behind the foliage over there? “Are there any paths he could have used to get past us?”

“Not unless he headed up to the bridge and crossed that way.”

“Yeah,” Barnes said, consciously letting his eyes move away from the area where he’d seen movement. Jik had already caught him and Williams that way once. “What’s with that bridge, anyway? He told us he helped you build it.”

“Someone helped me build it,” Preston said. “But that was forty years ago, and I don’t remember the kid’s face well enough to know whether that was Jik or not.” He grimaced. “But even if Jik isn’t him, Skynet must have had access to the real guy somewhere along the line. Otherwise how could Jik have known about the bridge?”

“All of his Connor memories were false,” Barnes pointed out. “Maybe the childhood ones are, too.”

Preston hissed between his teeth.

“More likely they found him somewhere, dredged out his memories, and then killed him. They might even have deliberately searched him out because he’d been in Baker’s Hollow and they were using us as their damned—”

“Hold it,” Barnes cut him off, dropping the minigun’s muzzle from chest-rest into firing position. There was definitely movement over there, too much for Jik’s rope-and-stick gimmick. “Jik?” he shouted. “Hey, you! Terminator!”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a pair of bushes parted—

And Halverson stepped into view.

But it wasn’t the swaggering, arrogant, overconfident Halverson who’d left Barnes and Williams prisoners in Preston’s living room while he went off hunting T-700s. He was limping as he made for the river, his face contorted with pain. Instead of a rifle, a bow and quiver dangled loosely from his right hand. His left hand was pressed against his right side.

He was barely in sight when Preston broke from cover and sprinted to the river, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he ran. He splashed through the rushing water to Halverson, taking the man’s left arm and laying it over his own shoulder. He wrapped his other arm carefully around Halverson’s back and side, then half led, half carried the injured man across the river and back to the trees where Barnes was waiting.

“Give me a hand,” he grunted as he put Halverson’s back to one of the thicker trees and started to ease him to the ground.

“No—don’t,” Barnes said, catching hold of Halverson’s arm and pulling him upright again. “If you sit him down, you’ll just have to stand him up again in a minute.”

“He needs to rest,” Preston insisted.

“Not here he doesn’t,” Barnes countered.

“But—”

“No, he’s right,” Halverson said, shrugging off Preston’s hand. “Besides, I think a couple of my ribs are cracked,” he added, making a face as he again pressed his left hand to his side. “I sit down now, I probably end up with a punctured lung.”

“Fine,” Preston gritted out. “What happened back there? No—dumb question. I mean—”

“You mean did anyone else make it out alive,” Halverson said bitterly. “The answer is no. He killed them. All of them.”

“How’d he miss you?” Barnes asked.

“Does it look like he missed me?” Halverson retorted. “He took my gun, clubbed me with it, then started shooting everyone else.”

“Probably planned to come back to you later.”

“You think?” Halverson said acidly. “Only I saw how it was going. I saw there was nothing I could do. Badger was already down, so I grabbed his bow, just to have something if he came after me. Then I took off to try to warn the rest of you.”

Barnes grunted. “Nice thought. A little late, though.”

“What are you talking about?” Halverson asked, frowning. “He couldn’t have gotten past me.”

“He didn’t have to,” Preston told him. “Oxley was already there.”

“Oxley?”

“And Valentine,” Preston said. “Remember those Terminator hybrids we were talking about earlier?”

Halverson’s face went rigid.

“Oh, God. Did he—is Ginny—?”

“Ginny’s okay,” Preston hastened to assure him. “It looks like he only got a couple of people before we were able to take him down.” His throat tightened. “The full count will have to wait until later.”

“Where is she?” Halverson asked. “Ginny. Is she still in town?”

“No, they’re all heading to the Glaumann place,” Preston said. “You think you can make it that far?”

“I can make it,” Halverson said. He looked at Barnes. “What about your partner? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine,” Barnes said, a small part of his mind wondering how he felt about Williams being called his partner. “She’s headed back to the chopper to get us some extra firepower.”

“Hope’s taking her via the snaky,” Preston added. “With luck that’ll get them past Lajard and Valentine.”

“Yeah, what’s with Lajard?” Halverson asked. “You didn’t mention him before.”

“We think he’s pure human,” Preston said. “Possibly the Thetas’ controller and observer. But that still leaves Valentine on the loose.”

“And Jik,” Barnes said, frowning at the river. “Where the hell is he, anyway?”

Halverson shook his head. “Last I saw, he was collecting all the T-700 pieces we were supposed to dump in the ravine.”

“Collecting the pieces?” Preston asked, frowning. “What for?”

“How the hell should I know?” Halverson snarled. “All I know is that he was picking them up and laying them out like a jigsaw puzzle. I only got the one glimpse.”

“Maybe he’s trying to scavenge enough parts to put together a working machine,” Barnes said. “How badly damaged were they?”

“They looked pretty bad,” Preston said. “But now that we know it was all for show, maybe they weren’t as bad off as we thought.”

“What do you mean, it was all for show?” Halverson asked. “We nailed those damn machines.”

“Are you blind, or just stupid?” Preston said sourly. “The only reason Skynet let us take them down was to prove Jik’s credentials as the great John Connor. How better to do that than let him help the brave little locals wreck a couple of fearsome Terminators?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Halverson protested. “Why even bother if the damn Thetas were just going to shoot up the town anyway?”

An unpleasant sensation ran up Barnes’s back. Suddenly, the pieces were starting to fall into place.

“Because that wasn’t the plan,” he said. “What did Oxley say back there, Preston? That they would have been perfectly happy to keep things going the way they were?”

“Something like that,” Preston said, frowning at him. “You saying the plan was for them to stay in Baker’s Hollow?”

“I think so,” Barnes said, his mind racing furiously. “Only they’d be here with Jik joining them as John Connor. Did he ever say whether he had a radio or not? Or access to one?”

“He said that he had a small one,” Preston said. “I never saw it, but from the size of his backpack it couldn’t have been very big.”

“Perhaps he left a bigger one out in the woods,” Halverson suggested.

“Or maybe it’s both,” Barnes said. “He’s got a small transmitter with him, but it’s only sending as far as a bigger version out there in some hidden Skynet base.”

“Somewhere out in the mountains?” Preston asked, frowning.

“Somewhere right here in this area,” Barnes growled. “Probably where Jik came from, in fact, Jik and those four T-700s. Maybe even the H-K that attacked us outside the wrecked Skynet base last night.”

“We heard an H-K last night, too,” Preston said. “It could have been the same one.”

“Where did it come from?” Barnes asked.

Preston pointed across the river.

“Somewhere to the west of here, heading southeast.”

“If this base had an H-K, it would have to be in a clearing,” Halverson offered. “You can’t land those things just anywhere.”

Barnes fingered the minigun thoughtfully. Only Williams had said there weren’t any clearings near town on that side of the river. Which meant—

“It’s been camouflaged,” he told the others. “Probably with camo netting strung between treetops. You two know the area. Where could it be?”

Preston and Halverson eyed each other.

“Has to be somewhere with mostly flat ground,” Preston said. “That leaves out the two on Beelee Ridge.”

“Also has to be some place where we haven’t been hunting lately,” Halverson added.

“Maybe someplace you have a good reason to avoid?” Barnes suggested.

Halverson cursed viciously.

“Klein.”

“Damn it,” Preston said, just as viciously. “Bear Commons.”

“Bear Commons?” Barnes asked.

“A big clearing where one of our hunters, Billy Klein, got mauled to death by a bear about six months ago,” Preston told him. “Or rather, mauled to death by something we assumed was a bear.”

“We haven’t let any hunting parties go near that area since,” Halverson added.

Barnes nodded. Six months ago would put it three months before Lajard and the others arrived in Baker’s Hollow. Plenty of time for Skynet to throw something small together out here and run a data cable to it.

“Sounds like the place,” he said. “How do I get there?”

“By following me,” Preston said. “You’ll never find it on your own.” He peered back toward town. “Do we go now or wait for Williams to get here with the chopper?”

“We go now,” Barnes said. “A Terminator support base is usually stocked with extra guns and ammo. We need to get there before Jik finishes putting that T-700 back together and heads back to rearm.”

“You’ll never get past him,” Halverson warned. “There’s not enough room between the river and the ravine for you to sneak by without him hearing you. You’ll have to go around the southern end of the ravine.”

“Or we go up the east side of the river and take the rope bridge,” Preston said.

“The forty-year-old bridge?” Barnes said, doubtfully. “The one put together by a couple of kids?”

“That’s it,” Preston said. “Unless you’d rather go toe-to-toe with another Theta.”

For a moment, Barnes was tempted. Thirty minigun rounds ought to be enough to make quick work of the damn Theta.

But only if he got a clear, clean shot. Given the mass of tangled undergrowth he’d already seen clogging that side of the river, it was a dangerously big if.

“No, we’ll try the bridge.” He turned to Halverson. “You wait here. When Williams gets here with the chopper, tell her where we’ve gone.”

“Like hell I’m staying here,” Halverson growled. “With Terminators on the loose and my wife out there with a bunch of useless shirt-makers? Forget it. She needs me.”

“She needs our Blackhawk and its M240 machineguns a hell of a lot more,” Barnes retorted. “And she needs them in the air, not sitting here with Williams wondering where the hell we went.”

“Can’t you call and tell her?” Halverson asked. “Even Jik’s got a radio. Don’t you?”

“Usually, yes,” Barnes said. “But in the last week—” He broke off. “Hell.”

“What?” Preston asked sharply.

“Nothing,” Barnes said, cursing his thick-headedness. So that was why Skynet had been jamming all the radios in San Francisco. “No, we don’t have radios. That means you’re staying here. Even if I have to nail you to a tree.”

Halverson’s face darkened.

“Look—”

“What if we told her we aren’t here anymore?” Preston cut in. “Would she be smart enough to come find us?”

Barnes hesitated. Williams was smart, all right. And she knew the cable ran up that side of the river.

“How do we do that?”

“With this,” Preston said, reaching into his shirt and pulling out a whistle. “You might want to cover your ears—it’s pretty piercing.”

It was piercing, all right. But with the proliferation of whistles in the San Francisco camp these days, it was hardly something Barnes hadn’t heard before. Preston blew a quick succession of short and long bursts, paused, repeated the sequence, then slipped the whistle back into his shirt.

“That’s the best I can do. Ready?”

Barnes resettled the minigun on his arm.

“Ready.”

“Good luck,” Halverson said.

“You too,” Preston said. He hesitated, then reached down and took Halverson’s bow and quiver. “Here,” he said, pressing his rifle into the other’s hand. “You can’t use a bow, not with broken ribs. You might be able to use a rifle, though.”

“Thanks,” Halverson said softly. “I see Lajard or Valentine, you’re damn right I’ll be able to use it.”

A minute later, with the roar of the river on their left, Preston and Barnes left the open area at the ford and once again plunged into deep undergrowth.

“What was that about the radios?” Preston asked over his shoulder. “Something you didn’t want Halverson to hear?”

“No, just something that wasn’t worth wasting time talking about,” Barnes told him. “I just figured out why Skynet’s been jamming our radios in San Francisco. It wasn’t just to annoy us, but to keep us from hearing the fake John Connor broadcasts Jik’s been making.”

“Because if you heard them, you’d send someone to investigate,” Preston said, nodding. “Lucky for us— well, lucky in the long run—you came anyway.”

Barnes winced. Except that they wouldn’t have if Williams hadn’t gotten her back up on tracking that cable.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why do you put up with him?”

“Who?”

“Halverson,” Barnes said. “You’re supposed to be in charge. Why do you let him tell your people what to do?”

Preston’s shoulders hunched in a shrug.

“That’s just Halverson,” he said. “He was a master hunter out here long before Judgment Day, and he likes to think he knows how to do everything better than any of the rest of us.”

“And you just stand there and let him think that? Why?”

“Because he is a master hunter, and we need him,” Preston said. “More than that, we need the rest of the expert hunters who look up to him.”

“So you just let him walk all over you,” Barnes bit out. “You let him make you look like a fool.”

“I suppose you could say that,” Preston said calmly. “But letting him play his games is what keeps this town functioning and its citizens alive. I think that’s worth a little wounded pride, don’t you?”

He gestured. “We’d better be quiet from here on. We don’t want to reach the bridge to find Jik waiting at the other end.”

The distant whistle call was faint, just barely on the edge of hearing. But the dots and dashes were distinct.