Resurrection Express (47 page)

01:19:00

Outside, the war is on. Our gunships are taking no shit. The air is on fire against the sun of high noon and the endless blue sky. Even though we’re in the middle of nowhere, somebody has to be hearing all this. Somebody has to be a witness. It’s just too goddamn amazing. The enemy’s defenses are weak and we’re punching through them fast. They never expected every badass in the world to come at them, pissed off like this. The pilots all report in as they destroy the cannons set into the mountain with Sidewinders. The explosions are like low, dull godfarts down below, away from us but getting closer. The sky is clear for a few seconds before a heatseeker stings past our window and blows just behind us. One of the choppers takes a hit and goes down, the pilot yelling
mayday, mayday, mayday
. Another chopper near us explodes and Heather shakes her head. That could have been us, she screams into her headset. She wants that ordnance
sterilized
and do it now, you dumb motherfuckers. They cut loose with the whole goddamn salad bar, dropping everything on the ground below. I can feel it all in the air, as the missiles tear loose and scream for glory, their marks carefully chosen by the most sophisticated targeting systems in the world. The whole earth shakes. Hail Mary blastwaves. Flaming flotsam and jetsam everywhere, on all sides of us. We sail through it, grinding and shaking, holding steady.

01:12:00

Nothing coming at us now. We’ve lost three gunships—one in the rear, two more at the front ranks. Acceptable losses, they’ll call it. We come in low behind the six choppers that remain, toward the mountain opening. A cavern directly ahead of us, hacked out deep in the rock. Men on the ground, about sixty soldiers, all in fortified positions, firing at us with antiquated M16s and mounted 50-caliber machine guns. Old school, but heavy-duty enough to seal the deal. The front flank of our squadron
takes heavy damage and they go down in flames before the second flank rips the enemy to shreds. Big bombs, real smart. I hear them suck the air out of the world, just outside, and Lucifer’s hammer slams into the earth, kicking up hell and a half. As the explosions rock us hard and flaming demons make their epic grab for all they can eat, we circle up from the mountain behind the rear guard and come back for another strafing approach. The cave is on fire now, and nobody’s shooting at us anymore. They make sure. The big hammer comes down again for the kill. Outside, the day goes supernova.

01:06:00

Two of the gunships left hover over the burning mountain as we follow the rear guard and land, just inside the cavern. Three choppers ahead of us. Heather nods to Burke, and he tells his men it’s time to saddle up. They all yell the word “sir” and unsnap the harnesses holding them to their chairs. Sharp metal sounds. XM8s, locked and loaded. Heather looks at me and says to stay low again. My pistol is in my hand. The other two wireheads are carrying big guns, like their buddies. I’m reminded of Alex Bennett when I look at them. Men trained for war, and trained to bust computer systems, too. I wonder what my old freckle-faced hacker pal would say if she’d lived to see this moment? Somewhere inside my head, I’m saluting her, in my own way—not like a soldier, but like the civilians she was sworn to obey and protect. Maybe this is for her, this thing I am doing now. Maybe it isn’t. Gunfire clatters from outside, as if in response.

00:59:00

I follow Burke and his men as they stream out into the cavern, and the other men do the same. Heather is a streak of black among them, moving fast and ruthless like a jungle animal. There are dead bodies all over the place, men blasted apart and screaming
because they’re on fire. Some of them aim their weapons and shoot at us. The massive caliber discharges resound in the huge cave like fireworks with muscle. Two of our guys go down. Another one of us explodes on his feet, hit with the mounted 50-cal. Burke’s boys open up and it turns into a firefight. I throw myself on the ground, keeping low, just like she said, as the bullets chew up the air. The flames illuminate the half darkness in crazy, dreamlike bursts, and inside them I see shapes running and diving for cover, explosions of meat and blood. A mad dance with death. I see the kid on the mounted 50-cal whipping the giant weapon around on its swivel, trying to re-aim from his position in the dark alcove, but they turn him into dog food fast. His whole body detonates, pieces of him raining down on the thick business end of his gun, fried instantly by the superheat. Now our boys are ripping the hell out of the cavern, firing at anything that looks like an enemy, cleaning house. They’re using state-of-the-art cobalt-jacketed tracer ammunition, deep protocol stuff that cuts through solid rock, so there’s no bullet ricochets. It all bores deep into the mountain and never comes back.

00:56:00

It’s over in less than two minutes. Four of us are dead. Twelve men left. No wounded. I crouch low with the other two wireheads and one of them says he’s seen worse. I can tell he’s not kidding. Burke orders his A-Team deeper into the cavern and orders us after them. Heather leads the second charge, and I’m right behind her with the air force hackers. Everyone’s on nightvision once we get past the flames. I slip my own goggles on, at the rear of everything, looking back at the carnage we just waded through. Somehow, it doesn’t seem all that amazing now. I’ve been in heavier places, just like they have. This is just a slaughter, outlined in dull green light. It’s not even Tech Noir nightvision—old school. I think of Alex Bennett again and I laugh.

00:52:00

The cavern opens into an area paneled by thick steel on all sides. Red emergency lights bathe the room. Six young men with Heckler and Koch machine guns surrender to us, standing in the center of a slab twenty feet wide. The entrance to Resurrection. Its protectors give it up without a fight. Burke tells them all to let go of their weapons and drop to their knees. Hecklers hit the steel slab, clanging like metal deadweight. Two of Burke’s men move forward and cover them. Heather strides forward with her gun up and yells at the first prisoner to activate the platform, which will lower us down, and the kid says he can’t do it—has to be done from inside. She nods to Burke, and he pulls out a shiny silver handgun. Shoots the kid in the head without hesitation. Then Heather asks the next guy in line the same question. Same answer. Boom. She’s not fucking around. Burke follows her silent order like an iron man. This is a war, and in a war people get killed. People sacrifice. It’s the same on both sides. I turn myself off to it. Concentrate on what we have to do here. It’s the only way my soul will survive, if my bones make it out.

00:40:00

Everything is on fast-forward, without detail, without even voices. It’s always this way on a job. I get my head in the game as the two wireheads pull their rigs and start working on something. They’ve plotted ahead and they’re sneaky about it. I figure they’re using a remote-sensor recognizer to talk to the computer on the other side of the steel platform. But I’ve seen lifts like this before, and you can always trick them from the outside. They’re stupid machines. I scan the area and see the panel just off to the right of the platform and I tell the two wireheads to help me get it open. They both ignore me, but one of the grunts gives me a hand. The panel is held down with thick steel rivets. Heather tells the next man in the line of prisoners to activate the lift. He spits in Heather’s
face, calls her a cunt. Boom. Burke has three flavors of brains all over his nice uniform now. The grunt tells me to back away from the panel and cover my face. Uses his big gun to perforate the edges of the plate. We work together and pry it the rest of the way open with our hands.

00:45:00

The last guard standing begs for his life like a child. He screams that he can’t activate the lift and why won’t we believe him. Heather tells him it doesn’t matter. No more prisoners tonight. Burke pulls the trigger. Tells the kid he’s sorry after he falls down dead. Tells his men to haul the stiffs off the platform. Heather asks the wireheads how they’re doing. One of them says he’s almost got it. I get it first. A single circuit, just inside the power box, wired up in a super-primitive tangle. I tweak it and the platform begins to lower into the mountain, slowly. It’ll keep going until it can’t go anymore, right to the ground floor. The wireheads look at me funny from their consoles and I shrug at them. We jump down six feet onto the platform, joining the others as it rumbles on its way, and as I land there, Burke pats my shoulder and says the word
outstanding
. Heather just gives me a dim smile. One of the wireheads asks me how the hell I knew about the circuit. I say the name Axl Gange. Nobody else on this lift knows what that name means. Only him and his buddy. He nods at me and I nod back. The ghost of Alex Bennett is smiling again, and I salute her again.

00:35:00

Ten minutes before we’re almost to the ground floor. We’ve lost a lot of precious time. The levels of exposed steel and carved stone inch by us. Burke and his men reload their weapons. He tells them to form a circle on the platform, and tells us wireheads to get in the center of the circle, with Lieutenant Stone. We’ll be dropping into an open steel room annexed to a security corridor.
Through the corridor is Ops Central. We have no idea what’s waiting for us in that room. The platform is covered in blood already. I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot more in a minute.

00:34:00

We lower slowly into the room. Nothing waits for us. Nothing at all. It’s a small landing, walled on all sides by metal. A big steel door with an entry panel controlled by a keypad and a retina-identification system. Those are easy. You just eyeball your way in. I’m on it before the other guys are. I pull my rig and a few tools and I start working. First the interface—then the guts. We use power screwdrivers to crack open the panel. Takes ten seconds—just like wahooing an ATM back in the day. Burke tells half his men to cover the lift opening, the other half to cover the door. Heather pulls out her hand screen and yells into her headset for a picture, but all I hear crackling back is static. We’re down too deep for all that. We have to rely on ourselves and the technology we brought in here. The two wireheads get on both sides of me, and we work together. They say words I’ve heard a million times. They know who trained me. They know I can break this console faster than they can. We solder the wires and splice their screen to ours and my legs feel strange under me as I stand here and use the laptop to breeze right through a wall of numbers. If I’d never walked again, I still would have been able to do this. I fool the machine fast. I make it look right in my eye and it sees something else. I do that in less than a minute. The door clunks inside and rolls open quickly.

00:31:00

The tunnel beyond the door is filled with armed men. I see them just as they open fire on us, and something slashes me in three places, one of the wireheads blasting apart like a meat-filled puppet. The clatter of heavy ordnance fills the room. My eardrums
almost go. I pull the other wirehead with me as I hit the ground. Burke’s men charge the line, blowing everything in the tunnel straight to hell. Somewhere in there, I see Heather running with them, raw and sleek and brave, doomed to die like all soldiers are. Our side takes heavy hits, two more men going down, shredded by machine-gun fire. But we have the superior position, hammering the Resurrection fighters back into a tight space. Alarms go off everywhere. Bullets zing all over the place. I don’t get shot again, but I can tell I’m bleeding. The wound in my side stitches me with agony, reopening in a sickening hot ooze down my waist as I crawl after Burke’s team. I don’t see Heather now. I don’t see Burke. I feel wet things popping inside me as I get to my feet and stumble, then run, my legs reminding me I was paralyzed less than twenty-four hours ago. The wirehead stumbles after me. The corridor fills with shrieking strobeflashes and heavy explosions. Grenades blow hard. Men become boys in the last seconds of their lives. Part of the ceiling collapses, just missing us. Steel and concrete and mountain rubble. I run into the storm.

00:29:00

Minutes left. Are we too late already? The tunnel ahead of us opens into a room filled with smoke and dim light and the sounds of men fighting. Screaming. Shooting. Exploding. I can’t tell who’s firing at whom now. I can’t even see the room. Just the smoke. We walk over dozens of dead bodies, staying low, dragging our rigs with us. The shooting dies down. I hear Burke scream as loud as he can—long and shrill and wordlessly—and then I hear the sound of his handgun. It’s the last shot fired. I move into the room, through the haze.

00:28:00

We walk in with our guns up. Not low anymore—it doesn’t matter. Burke stands in the center of a huge chamber carved in
rock and steel, flashing with screens. He’s been shot in the neck, gushing. Dead soldiers everywhere, good guys and bad guys floating in lakes of blood. Sparks flying from a few of the walls. A couple of men who look like wireheads slumped over in their chairs. Someone puts a hand on my shoulder and it’s Heather. There’s blood all over her face. It’s the end of the line, she says, and everybody’s dead. Everybody but us. They’ve all killed each other. Burke motions to a center screen, tells us that’s the main console. They’ve smashed the interface. Smoke rises from the destroyed computer panels. Hopeless. His voice is a croak. The wirehead next to me says we can still get in through there, pulling his gear off his back. When he does that, he winces, and I see blood gushing from his stomach. He says he needs my help. Can’t do it alone. Gonna bleed to death soon.

00:27:00

Heather gets in front of me and says to use the recall code. Call the submarines back. Stop those maniacs. I can’t hear her voice when she says that—the pounding of my own heartbeat mutes her. But I can see her lips moving, and I can tell what she’s saying: that we’re all doomed. I ask Burke where the rest of our men are—our backup squad from the surface—and he chokes out that he doesn’t know. He gags on Heather’s name. He falls to one knee, then all the way over, going stiff at my feet. I close my eyes for just one second, call out my wife’s name twice. Nothing comes back but an echo off steel and rock. Did she buy it in here? Is she splattered among all these bodies, facedown in her own guts?