The phalanx code, p.25
The Phalanx Code, page 25
“Your father’s legacy. We kill the general and his seed and you have nothing left except yourself, and of course, that healthy inheritance, right, Aurelius?”
I tried to put it all together. Blanc wanting the inheritance, perhaps enlisting Drewson to help? Those thoughts fluttered away like bats from a cave because my primary concern, my only concern, were my children and my team.
“And I know exactly where you are. So, while we’ve been killing time here, so to speak, I’ve been stalling of my own accord. Your best squads are here, some dead, some alive. If you look around you, I’d say you’re rather unprotected, wouldn’t you?”
My finger on the trigger tightened. I didn’t want to kill him before I better understood how to safely retrieve the pod.
Drewson looked at me and smiled. “Oscar worthy, don’t you think?”
Then he pressed the button. On the opposite screen from Blanc’s face, the weaponized pod located at the south apex station rocketed forward along the tube, smashing through the first steel door like an improvised explosive device, which was exactly what it was.
I began to squeeze the trigger on my rifle when the floor opened beneath Drewson, and he vanished.
26
DREWSON’S DISAPPEARANCE WAS THE least of my concerns as I watched the pod smash through the steel doors. The tube buckled and shook but so far held steady.
“Can you do anything to control the pod?” I asked Maximillian.
“We’re under fire,” he shouted into his microphone. As he spoke, I heard the tap tap tap of rifle fire.
Stepping around the cylindrical escape hatch that had consumed Drewson, I quickly studied the control panel. I flipped the communications switch and said, “Jake, Joe, Randy, can you guys hear me?”
Their heads jerked up. They studied the camera with hopeful eyes. I frantically searched the dashboard for anything that might move their pod toward us. There had to be a way.
“Yes!” they shouted. Mahegan, Van Dreeves, and Hobart all held their hands out, a symbol to be careful about consuming too much oxygen. By my count they were close to being out. Amanda shed her game of hiding the oxygen tank and was overtly passing the mouth cup to Misha, Reagan, and Brad.
“There’s a train barreling down on you in about a minute. I’m going to try and move you. Buckle everyone up.”
Blanc’s screen had gone blank but Evelyn appeared.
“Garrett, Aurelius is under attack. If you toggle the joystick there in front of you, it might move the pod toward you.”
In the center of the dashboard was a control bar with arrows pointing left and right. I moved the bar to the left and nothing happened. Blinking lights winked rhythmically. One for each pod. I pressed Pod One and tried the joystick again.
The pod shot forward, throwing Mahegan, Hobart, and Van Dreeves against the back wall. It slammed to a halt seconds later beneath us. I pressed the button that sent current to the demolition pod and pushed the joystick to the right, attempting to slow or reverse its course, but nothing was stopping it.
Loud banging thudded beneath our feet where Drewson had disappeared. I stepped to the side and pushed the same button he had pressed. Cylindrical metal covers retracted into the floor. I looked into the space and saw what Drewson had done.
There was a fireman’s pole that had a levitating platform just a few feet beneath the surface of the floor. He had ridden that down and then most likely picked his way through some unseen escape route that led into the mountain redoubt. To the right was the pod with the chamber sealed behind it. Presumably my friends and kids were safe from the pressurized vacuum, but not from the speeding improvised pod that would impact in a few seconds.
I left the command station and dragged one of the dead guards into the hole where Drewson had escaped. I dropped the dead guard and slid down the pole like a fireman might, descending into the north station terminal. It looked much like the south and west apex stations with its bright lights, white walls, and blinking cameras. Lifting the dead man, I opened his eyelids and stood him in front of the scanner. Mahegan was shouting something at me through the glass. The hydraulics finally hissed, and the door opened. My team was prepared.
“You have maybe ten seconds,” I said. “Get them away from here.”
Mahegan was carrying Misha and Reagan like they were firewood. Hobart had Brad draped over his shoulder monkey-back as he jogged from the doors. Jeremy West, Matt Garrett, Blair Campbell, and Amanda Garrett were dragging Patch Owens and Zion Black, who were unconscious. Calles had managed to rally and move under her own accord.
“Go! Go! Go!” I shouted.
I inspected the pod, and other than random weapons and bags, there was nothing we needed. I followed my team into a large elevator that JD had found deep in the bowels of the hyperloop station.
We were all inside. The doors shut. JD, wounded though he was, used his bloody hand to press the button to go up. The gears engaged. The elevator lifted. The cable squealed under the weight. The ground shook with the pod snapping through steel plates at Mach one. When we were halfway up the elevator shaft, an enormous explosion thudded into the north apex station. There was heat below us. Heat above us. Flames cooked the metal elevator car.
The elevator stopped.
We were trapped inside a mountain as the explosion boiled through the compound. The flames receded as quickly as they had appeared.
Once we shook to a halt, I climbed the ladder on the elevator cabin wall and unscrewed the circular hatch. It squeaked on its hinges and rocks and dirt fell into the car. But it still opened. Dim light seeped in from above. The elevator shaft was still smoking from the explosion, gray wisps lifting upward like ascendant ghosts.
Van Dreeves and Mahegan climbed up after me, and I shined my flashlight on the granite walls of the shaft. The cable led another fifty meters up to a metal plate the shape and size of a sheet of plywood.
“I’ll shimmy up this and figure a way out,” Van Dreeves said.
“We’ve got rope,” Mahegan said.
“Randy, you go up. Jake and I will feed everyone up. Let’s get moving,” I said.
“Roger,” Van Dreeves said. He took the hundred-and-twenty-foot nylon rope and slung it across his torso. He proceeded to climb the steel cable pulling up with his hands and cinching with his feet. Pull. Cinch. Pull. Cinch. He did this until he got near the top and shouted.
“Cable frayed. We need to move fast!”
On cue, the elevator car shifted slightly. If we were fifty meters from the top and the shaft went two hundred meters deep into the mountain, the car would fall a hundred and fifty meters.
It rocked again.
“Cable’s going out,” Van Dreeves said. “There are climbing pegs on the side of the shaft.”
Jake was lifting the team onto the top of the elevator car. The rock walls that had protected us from the blast might very well become our tomb if we didn’t hurry. Van Dreeves adroitly maneuvered at the top of the shaft, swinging as if he was traversing monkey bars.
The car shifted again, this time tilting at a thirty-degree angle. We held on to one another with Misha, Brad, and Reagan clinging to me. Misha was hyperventilating still, but less so than in the pod. Amanda Garrett was kneeling next to her giving her what oxygen remained in her aid bag. Matt Garrett was tending to JD, Patch Owens, and Zion Black, all of whom were not faring well from injuries and lack of oxygen. Jeremy West was the last to climb on top.
“This is a soup sandwich, General,” he said.
Van Dreeves shouted, “Rope coming down!”
He fed it down until Mahegan grabbed it. He quickly tied slipknots in it and ran rappel seats around those who were not wearing them. From his rucksack he retrieved snap hooks and began clicking those onto the rappel seats.
“Brad, Reagan, you two first. Get up there and see how you can help Randy,” Mahegan said, snapping them into the rope. “Amanda, you take Misha with you next.”
Like we were doing a SPIES extraction beneath a helicopter, they were snapped into the knots Mahegan had tied in the rope and somehow were ascending rapidly to the top.
After a long minute, the rope fed back down. The elevator car tilted another ten degrees. The cable was unwinding and going to snap momentarily. We had readied JD, Patch Owens, and Blair Campbell. Up they went. Then Sergeant Calles lashed in with Zion Black for the next lift. We snapped them in, and the rope moved faster this time, with more people to pull on the rope using the pulley Van Dreeves had found at the top of the elevator shaft. Then went Matt and Jeremy West.
Remaining on the top of the creaking elevator car were me, Mahegan, and Hobart. We had been warriors together for many years.
Just before the elevator car snapped away from the cable, I said, “Men, we did some good.”
27
THE SHOUTS OF MY children and team echoed down the cavernous elevator shaft as we tumbled.
Because the fraying cable had tilted the car and the width of the shaft was marginally broader than the width of the elevator, the car was, for the moment, wedged precariously beneath the north and south walls of the shaft. A square peg and in a square hole, but tilted. The top lip of the elevator was squealing as it strained against the granite wall. It wouldn’t hold out much longer.
Hobart and Mahegan had snapped their rappel seats into U-bolts on top of the elevator car, which had prevented them from sliding into the shaft below. They needed to unsnap and get to the ladder on the walls of the shaft before the car rocketed to the bottom. I had fallen against the wall and found one of the metal rungs that Van Dreeves had mentioned. Because the car had fallen some distance before stopping, the rope dangled teasingly out of reach.
“Everybody okay?” I asked
“Roger,” Mahegan and Hobart said in unison.
“Okay, follow me,” I said.
I began climbing the metal rungs, which were spaced far enough apart to make the climb far more challenging than I believed it would be. I loosened my rappel seat and fed enough rope to be able to reach up, snap into the next rung, stand on my toes, and leap up to grab the rung. There must have been no scientific design when the engineer had developed the plan for this elevator shaft. The rungs were about eight feet apart. Maybe they had run out or most likely thought that no one would ever need them. Maybe it was a government regulation that they place the rungs in the shaft and Drewson’s team had done the bare minimum.
I was wondering where Drewson might have gone when a banshee wail of metal against rock filled my ears. The elevator car had finally given way. Mahegan had been the last and he was dangling by one arm from a metal rung as the elevator careened to the bottom of the shaft some quarter mile below.
The mangling of metal and rock was deafening. Cables whipsawed though the shaft like angry snakes, barely missing us. Dust and debris billowed up in a cloud resembling a small nuclear burst.
“All okay?” I shouted below.
“Hobart up.”
“Mahegan up.”
Mahegan had steadied himself and had gotten into the rhythm of snapping, climbing, unsnapping, and snapping again. He was six and a half feet tall, so the going was a tad easier on him than on Hobart and me.
As we got close to the top, Van Dreeves had managed to move the rope to our side of the shaft as a precaution.
“Looking good, boss,” he said as I slid onto the top of the foyer where the elevator would have opened. I turned around and helped Hobart up and then Mahegan.
We were back inside of Drewson’s house at the eastern end. Perhaps this was the path Drewson had taken out. There were two tunnels, one to the east and one to the west. There was no way of telling. Smoke hung in the air from the explosion below. One of the walls was charred. Debris littered the floor.
All that mattered for the moment was that my children and team were still alive. Misha was huddled over her MacBook with Brad and Reagan by the fireplace, while Amanda Garrett continued to talk to each of them, making sure they were okay. Calles was sitting against the wall, arms around her legs, forehead against her knees. Patch Owens and Zion Black were lying next to them, semiconscious, and Amanda had given them each an IV bag of fluids. My team never rested. They took care of one another and knew what to do without being told.
It made me proud.
I checked on them and knelt in front of my kids, who nodded that they were okay. Then I shifted toward Misha, who was trembling and focused, perhaps doing what made her feel best, getting lost in her computer propped on her lap. I handed her the flash drive from my boot and said, “Tell me what’s on this, please.”
Misha looked up, startled. Perhaps still in shock, she said nothing. Ever retreating inward during trauma, her savant mind cycling through thousands of outcome permutations as a method to shield her from the external chaos. After a moment of staring at my hand, she grabbed the flash drive and plugged it into the USB port and then retreated back into her world.
Jeremy West was standing near the door that exited to the garage, weapon in hand prepared to engage if necessary. I walked over to Van Dreeves, Mahegan, and Hobart, who were standing guard.
“Good job, Randy,” I said.
His face was drawn, realizing how close we had come to perishing in the shaft.
“This pulley was a lifesaver,” he said. He had threaded the rope through a basic block and winch pulley built into the interior of the shaft, perhaps as a safety feature, perhaps as a leftover from the mine shaft days. Regardless, it was a blessing and had saved our lives.
“Where’s Drewson?” I asked.
“No clue, boss,” Van Dreeves said. “But knowing this guy like we do now, we should probably un-ass the AO.”
Van Dreeves’ euphemism for leaving the area of operations, or AO, quickly was aptly put as sniper fire hit the window in the main foyer.
“What about Maximillian and the south apex team?”
Hobart was staring at the control panel that showed the south apex foyer.
“I don’t see anyone alive there,” he said. “Don’t know if they’re good guys or bad guys, but a lot of dead bodies.”
“In the garage are two armored SUVs,” West said. He had moved from the foyer to the garage. “Keys in them.”
“Load up,” I said. “We will establish comms on the way. We leave no one behind.”
The rifle fire became more sustained as we hustled to move everyone to the SUVs. Jake and Hobart had Patch Owens, O’Malley, Blair Campbell, Matt Garrett, and Amanda, who tended to the wounded JD. I rode shotgun while Van Dreeves drove with Brad, Reagan, Misha, Zion Black, Calles, and West in the back. We had lost many of the weapons we had started with but still maintained a few pistols and long rifles.
Mahegan and Van Dreeves looked at each other as the garage’s retracting steel plates opened. The night sky poured in. Orange tracers rained down on the compound. Mahegan went first and bolted the SUV from the garage. Van Dreeves followed. Soon the orange tracers arced from the house toward the vehicles.
We were without any support. No unmanned aerial vehicles for counterattack or intelligence. No air support to suppress the enemy fire. No artillery to call in to mask our movement. Our two SUVs, easily identifiable by whoever was trying to kill us, snaked along icy roads built for ambushes. Rock walls reached to the sky like jagged spires on the left. Sheer cliffs fell away into infinity on the right. Pounding enfilade fire raked and sparked along the egress route. Rocket-propelled grenades smoked and exploded all around us.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
We teach that refrain to soldiers stacking with backs against the wall about to enter a building and clear the first of many rooms. We were in that zone.
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
We were all silent and focused. Scanning. Bracing for impact.
The more we drove, though, the less accurate the fire became. The roads were slippery with black ice, and twice we careened into the rock wall. Mahegan and Van Dreeves had both taken tactical driving courses, and their skills were being put through the PhD level exam tonight.
After thirty minutes of silent driving and maneuvering, we approached a tunnel and reached a sign that read: LEAVING DREWSON ENTERPRISES PROPERTY. ENTERING FREMONT COUNTY, WYOMING.
Mahegan pulled the lead vehicle into the tunnel that bore through a mountain pass just beyond Drewson’s property. Van Dreeves stopped a safe distance behind. I met Mahegan in the middle. Hobart and Van Dreeves joined us. Then West and Matt Garrett appeared. Then O’Malley and Owens.
“Established comms with Maximillian,” Mahegan said. “He’s wounded. They are meeting us here in the next hour.”
“Okay. How are our casualties?” I asked. People first, always.
“Amanda’s done some good work on Patch and Zion,” Matt said. “Misha’s still a little freaked out.”
“Is she scared or is she mad at herself for believing in Drewson?” I asked.
“Probably the latter, knowing her,” Mahegan said.
“Fuel status?” I asked.
“Half tank in each. About twenty miles from Jackson Hole Airport.”
“Let’s get somewhere safe, regroup, and figure out a plan,” I said.
“Get us to Jackson and I can have a plane meet us there,” West said.
“Okay, and then we go to where we do best,” I said. “My farm in North Carolina. Plenty of weapons and ammo. Chow. You name it.”
In the car’s headlights, Misha’s long shadow approached us like an apparition in the dark, cold tunnel. Her blond hair was matted and disheveled. Her desensitizing glasses were cracked and askew on her face. Her mouth contorted downward, as if angry, which she very well might have been.
“Misha?” I asked.
Everyone turned and watched as she approached us.
She pulled from her rucksack the MacBook with the flash drive stuck in it and showed it to us, the blue light brighter in the black tunnel and, importantly, destroying our natural night vision.
She spoke clearly and fluently. There was no stutter in her words, as if the trauma of the last several hours had shocked her vagus nerve and shook her for a moment off the autism spectrum.
