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44
While the dust was thinning out, and before the commandos overhead could start shooting, David and Mike Lewis jumped off the platform, landing on another tunnel mouth a floor below.
“We’ve got to go up and check on Goldman!” Mike insisted.
“Agreed,” David said. “Let’s go.” They found a perpendicular cross-shaft and climbed up a set of metal rungs. They found Goldman dead of a single shot to the heart, and pulled his limp body back into the shadows. “We’ll send someone for him when it’s all over,” Mike said.
David picked up Goldman’s assault rifle and ammo pouches. Hearing voices, he sprayed the door above with bullets. Another body dropped down into the shaft, and he felt an insane craving to kill all these shaven-heads.
Mike spoke into his com button, but there was no answer. “That explosion must have knocked out my com. They can’t send anyone up here for us. Their priority is to bring Mattoon to the White House. Is there another way out of here?”
David shrugged. “You got me. This place is a nightmare of hidden service tunnels.” He pointed behind him to the shaft. Mike gave Goldman’s body a pat on the shoulder, a farewell ruffle, and slid past David. “Hurry, man. Let’s get out of here.”
As David and Mike started down into the utility tunnel, the sounds of battle erupted from the elevator shaft behind them. They heard what sounded like cannon fire and rockets exploding, and exchanged puzzled looks. The sound was as if an ammo dump was in the process of blowing up. Whatever it was, the thought mirrored in their eyes as they exchanged worried glances, it could not be good.
No time for worry now. Their first order of business was to escape before commando search teams found them. Their second order would be to hide out until it was safe, or, if possible, to escape from the hotel and get to friendly lines.
Cautiously, sometimes a step at a time, the two men advanced. Often, they heard the voices of their enemies just feet away through a thin wall or around a corner.
A new sound began to be heard: the muffled slams of exploding artillery shells. The hotel was being shelled from outside. Each explosion echoed in the tunnel walls and echoed back and forth like an evil whisper.
Smoke drifted lightly and ominously in some parts of the airconditioning system. The one thing David dreaded most now was being caught in a massive conflagration. If the hotel went up in flames, most likely he and Mike would die quietly and insidiously of smoke inhalation. The flames might never even reach them.
“That smoke is getting worse,” Mike said, coughing, as they walked through a brick tunnel whose floor was so thick with dust that it was like walking on sand.
David raised his hand and listened. “It’s quiet out there,” he whispered.
Mike’s eyes were upturned and wide in his dirt-streaked face. “Yeah. We must be in a quiet part of the hotel.” The artillery barrage continued outside, but the babble of voices between explosions seemed to have evaporated.
David pointed to a laundry shute stenciled 10th Floor. Red water pipes for fire emergencies flanked the laundry shute. Creeping carefully along the wall, they came to a service entrance. The door also read, in larger letters, 10th Floor.
Just as David was about to reach for the door handle, the door slammed open.
A group of commandos burst in from the outer corridors, fleeing in panic, but they still had their weapons. They spotted David and Mike and raised their weapons to fire.
David pulled back against the wall, just in time to avoid a hail of bullets that flew past and knocked chips off the bricks. David felt the sting of brick debris on his face and brought the assault rifle up. He sprayed the exposed commandos with about thirty seconds of unremitting fire, barrels blazing, and watched them drop.
Mike had been hit. Covering, David dashed out to the fallen man and sat down. He cradled Mike’s head on his lap. Mike had difficulty speaking, but he mouthed a word and twitched a finger, pointing to a fatigue pocket. He looked up with huge, imploring eyes and his mouth was open in one unrelenting gasp for air.
David probed in Mike’s pocket until he touched something—he knew instantly what Mike wanted. David pulled out a photograph of an attractive redheaded woman with frizzy hair and a playfully crooked smile. Two tow-headed boys of eight or nine were in the picture, one on either side of her. David felt Mike’s hand on his wrist in a grateful grasp. David held the picture in front of Mike’s face. “She looks like she has a nice sense of humor,” David said. Mike seemed to want to talk with the woman. Mike moved his eyes, as if he were staring at the picture through a false light, a smoky room, and unable to make out clearly, but struggling—as David held the picture up, Mike made a brief croaking noise and grew still. He did not become heavier, nor more limp, just—he was gone. David, placing his emotions in a temporary holding basket like a letter to be answered later, tucked the picture in Mike’s pocket and rose.
Four commandos sprawled lifelessly in the thick dust. Only one of them still moved, moaning and feebly trying to raise one hand.
Quickly, David went through the dead men’s packs, until he found a spare blue and yellow uniform. He donned a camouflage cap, and donned one of their shirts, only buttoning three or four buttons. Under that, he still wore the Class A uniform trousers and black shoes in which he’d reported to work. He wanted to be ready to toss the commando uniform off if he had to, in case friendlies started shooting at him.
David checked the wounded man, but he was dying, and there was nothing David could do for him. The man had two bullet wounds to the mid-torso and already had lost a lot of blood. His eyes were glazed, and his body was limp. Still, he moaned faintly.
David grabbed the man’s wrist and lifted. With great effort, he got the limp figure over his shoulders. He felt warm blood running down his legs as he carried him out into the hotel corridors.
As David staggered with his load, the scene outside was pandemonium. They were in a wide main corridor in the middle of Tower 2, from the looks of it. The carpeted floors were littered with debris. Here and there were upturned maid service carts, broken ammo cases, a sock or a cap or a boot. The corridor had the acrid smokehouse stench of cordite, and a thick pall of smoke hung motionlessly, thicker in some spots than in others. From broken doors and windows, fresh air blew through as if he were outside. The corridor ran out in each direction toward a T-intersection with the floor’s outer perimeter corridor.
Seeing several of commandos repairing a machine gun in a hall niche, David put the dying man down and told them: “Call a medic.”
He did not stop to ascertain if they obeyed. They made no sign that they recognized him from the alarm, but concentrated on their deteriorating situation. What had happened? David wondered. Why had their leaders gone out on a limb like this, when the situation must have been hopeless from the beginning?
Rather than try the elevators are out, David decided, better to try for an exit stairwell.
He stopped to let several commandos pass carrying a large mud-colored container of mortar rounds, each man holding one handle of the heavy box. They headed toward the outer walls, which, David saw as he drew near, were pocked with holes. The thick concrete had been hit by so many shells that, in places, one hole overlapped another. Each hole was about a foot in diameter. That is some strong concrete, David thought, luckily, or the whole building would have started to collapse by now.
The rounds still came in, sporadically, and each time, the walls shook and emitted a gout of shattered concrete and drifting dust. A shell exploded not far away. A group of commandos operating a machine gun at a window hardly seemed to notice as they kept firing into the city. The window had long been blown out, its frame gone to the very floor. A fresh wind blew in.
The rest of the outer corridor of the hotel was equally a disaster. The carpets were covered with blood, dust, and debris. Bodies lay everywhere, sometimes several in clumps, in that bilious blue and yellow camouflage cloth. Sometimes the dead men had the courtesy to lie face down as if asleep. At other times they lay sprawled and grimacing. One corpse’s face had been peeled off leaving only one eyeball and grimacing teeth.
David was dead tired, but he thought of Tory and was anxious to get out of the hotel. Again and again, the floors shook as tank and artillery fire hit the hotel. Windows rattled.
Through a particularly huge hole, David glimpsed an astonishing sight. The city of Washington was a battleground. Thick dirty smoke roiled in the streets, punctuated here and there by the flash of a rocket of the wink of a tank muzzle. Lots of objects burned. As he watched, a tank tormented in a narrow street by snipers shoved an accordion bus out of its way, turning the bus into a shattered v-shape. The tank climbed over the bus and rolled away, raking the houses on either side with machine-gun fire. Finally its turret swung around. Rocking on its chassis, the tank delivered a shell whose explosion sent a Civil War-era brick building down in a shower of dust. This, in downtown Washington.
The commandos David encountered did not look dispirited, but there was something seriously bleak about them, and he heard them speak of a betrayal—he wasn’t sure what, and he did not stop to ask for details.. The halls were strangely empty, littered with clothing, bandages, empty shell casings.
David found a stairwell and bounded down ten flights of stairs, at one point climbing over a slippery pile of dead commandos. In the lowest stairwell, he found the door lying down and a path open out of the hotel. It led across a lawn, where bodies lay, wet from the rain. It led to a shattered wall, part of which had collapsed inward, revealing the city beyond: acres of rubble, a no-man’s land.
David thought of making a run for it, but decided against it. Too risky. And he still had something important left to accomplish. For a moment, he still contemplated fleeing. It looked inviting, but no thanks. In the distant drizzle, he glimpsed the broken body of a downed helicopter with Red Cross markings. The chopper burned with black oily smoke rising from its trashed interior. David heard gunfire from above and saw bullets bouncing off the water-soaked walls. He turned away and went back into the bowels of the hotel.
David made his way toward Tower One through corridors littered with bodies and wreckage. His passage was brightly lit by morning sunlight that streamed through shattered skylights. The sweet, damp wind blew in freely.
He found that the lobby was obliterated. The glass ceilings were gone, and it was raining on the flattened tropical garden. The marble floors were heaved up and broken like brittle candy. A huge Canary Island date palm hung upside down into a hole in the ground, and David could see daylight on twisted vehicles in the garage below. Thick diesel smoke, tainted with a medley of acrid smells, rose from the garage in a column to heaven, dissipating in drizzly sky like an offering.
Outside, artillery still fired steadily. Fighters ducked from rubble pile to rubble pile. The floor shook every few seconds as a new shell landed.
David headed upstairs, using an unscathed inner stairwell. He found his way to Tory’s former work place. Emergency lights still burned along the way. He came to the restricted rooms that contained CloudMaster. Kicking the door in, weapon ready, he was surprised to see a smallish figure busy in a room marked Data Processing. “Hello?” he said pushing a disangled door in and stepping over a pile of crumbling drywall. The figure turned, and he instantly recognized her. “Glad you’re alive!” he said.
“Captain Gordon!” said Jet Steffey removing her head walker’s gear.
They shook hands, then hugged. She grinned pixie-like. Her butterscotch face was smudged, but her eyes twinkled undaunted. “Didn’t know you were still around, Sir. Where’ve you been?”
“It’s a long story. Still working?”
She sighed. “Yes, I couldn’t get out. I called home and my husband took our baby to my mother’s, so they’re safe. I figured I might as well keep busy, though everyone else left. I promised Lieutenant Breen I’d look for Ib’s file. With Tabitha gone, she wanted something to show Mattoon. It’s probably all too late now, huh? How is she?”
“She’s with General Devereaux,” David said. “Find anything yet?’
“Yes. Take a look at this.” She turned the screen slightly so David could see better. David leaned forward and looked at a handwritten document. He stared at it, using a small hand-shaped cursor to “tug” the image around on the screen. There were several pages of neat handwriting, with many words crossed out and replaced by other words above them. “What is this, Jet?”
“It’s the document Ib found. The one he wanted to give you the night he was kidnapped.”
“Huh? Who wrote this?”
“Robert Lee Hamilton, Sir. Ib says he did a handwriting analysis. This is the document Vice President Cardoza was about to deliver to President Bradley. Now you see why he was murdered that night in Washington State, and these generals made it look like a militia plot.”
“I still don’t get it,” David mumbled, but it wasn’t true—the awful realization was already dawning on him. As he came to the beginning of the document, it stared him right in the face. There, printed in bold letters across the top of the page, were the words: “Constitution of the United States of America.”
The words that followed didn’t seem quite right.
Then he remembered: he’d heard these words spoken in the hotel before the insurrection.
Jet spoke the words out loud. “This is the constitution that the generals wanted to institute to replace the old Constitution.”
“I’ll be—,” David muttered. “Those sons of bitches, excuse me.”
“Hamilton wrote this over a year ago, Sir. He was not only in it with them, he betrayed everyone—he was the leader.”
“And he’s dead,” David said, “murdered. What does that mean? Someone bumped him off as payment for failure? Because this whole thing is clearly a failure? Or does someone want him out of the way because there is another plot?”
She handed him a set of head walking goggles and explained: “There is more, Sir. The CloudMaster in the hotel is down. I’ve found one cable connection still up, and I managed to network into the machine at the White House. I’ll show you what I’ve found.”
David put on the goggles. Instantly, he found himself in a fantastic landscape of cyberspace, a city of the imagination, peopled by blurs and shadows as in an architect’s rendering of a building as yet unbuilt. “You don’t have to do anything, Sir. I’ve installed us in tandem, so anywhere I go, you go.” David found himself riding with her in a surreal taxicab of sorts. It was black, white, and gray, but he almost could have reached out and touched the dash. Only there would be no dash. It was all a metaphor.
“I wish Ib could be here to see this,” she said. David found himself being transported along a street. Traffic whizzed all around them, and at one point he almost physically cringed because a huge truck bore down on them and lunged away at the last moment.
“What was that?” he asked.
“A file packet,” she said. “We’re in the data stream, sorta. Actually, the data is a river under our feet, so to speak. Everything here is a metaphor.”
“I remember that from the previous tour,” he said. The cars and so on were analogs of the data in the stream below. That way you could track the message packets.
“Watch where we are going,” Jet said. Her taxi turned a corner into a huge warehouse with ornate neo-Roman pillars on either side of the entrance. David found himself leaning into a turn that never actually happened. “We were never allowed up here before, Sir. We ran the system from the CloudMaster hardware downstairs, but we never got near the application programs. This is the program, Sir, that I believe Ib and Tabitha and who knows how many other people were killed for. And there is something else.”
“Tabitha mentioned this Federov program,” David said. “I’m confused. I thought we were looking for a list of names.”
“That too,” Jet said nodding. “I’m sure Ib had this all figured out. It’s too bad they got to him—he might have prevented this entire tragedy.” The taxi glided under a sign, FED-OIB-A, and into a large, semi-dark bay a hundred feet on a side. Embedded in the walls were moving pictures of large masses of people waving little books. “It’s Algeria 1990. The scenarios aren’t lit because the program isn’t working on that module. In Algeria, during their first free elections ever, the people voted to get rid of their new secular Constitution and replace it with the Koran. They voted for fundamentalism over democracy. I know this now because I’ve cruised up and down here all morning checking these modules out. Each module has a view-me option that tells the user about itself. There’s one for Hitler coming to power after being elected in the Weimar Republic, one for Lenin, one for Athenian democracy being destroyed by demagogues in the 400’s B.C. There’s one thing that puzzles me.” David watched as they coasted to a halt just before a brightly lit bay introduced by the words: FED-OIB-N. “I don’t get it, Sir. What’s N?
Gunfire rattled far away. It went on for some time, while David and Jet explored the Federov application program. David was astonished by huge conceptual relays linking the entire nation in a web of fiber-optics. He and Jet sat parked on a virtual hill overlooking a city, no, a nation of lights, almost like a couple parking. Only he and Jet sat silently, each preoccupied with personal thoughts, when shouting broke David’s reverie.
His shoulder was roughly shaken, and he jerked the headset off. There stood Colonel Bellamy, grinning broadly. He was accompanied by a squad of New Mexico reserve infantry. Bellamy said: “It’s over. We’ve stormed the assembly and the skinheads surrendered. There’s a few more on the roof of Tower 3. And there’s still fighting near the Mall, but we’re cleaning it up.” They all cheered and shook hands.
It is beginning to end, then, he thought, and his knees felt weak. He thought of Mike and hoped his comrade was still alive. And he thought of Tory, suddenly, very clearly, and realized after all they had been through there was nothing that could stop them from being together—he would marry her. He would! It was firm in his mind now—not a shadow of a doubt.
Only Jet stayed in the world of metaphor. Suddenly she said: “Captain Gordon! Come here quick! I’ve got it! I know what’s going to happen! This isn’t over! It hasn’t even started yet!”
ALLISON MIRANDA: We have several stunning developments. Chairman Mattoon was rescued from the Atlantic Hotel in a daring raid by reserve generals acting against the so-called Hotel Generals. A battalion of the 399th Infantry Division broke out of the hotel complex and headed for the White House after freeing CON2’s chairman. Hostage negotiators report dramatic news in the standoff with the Hotel Generals. Generals Robert Montclair, Felix Mason, Louis VanOort, and several others reportedly have committed suicide. Informed sources say the generals realized all hope was lost when General Norcross sided with the President and ordinary soldiers did not join their commando units. They claimed Norcross had been in the plot with them, but changed his mind at the last moment, a charge the Pentagon vehemently denies. Information is extremely sketchy at the moment, but we are told the Hotel Generals ordered their commandos to shoot them rather than face trial in this coup that seems to be unraveling. The commandos were allegedly told to douse the bodies in gasoline and burn the bodies on a hotel rooftop. Heavy smoke is pouring from the top of Tower Three. A spokesman for the commandos of Unit 3045 says they will release all the delegate hostages unharmed, along with a number of uninvolved military personnel. Among the released were a number of lightly injured personnel. About eighty commandos are said to be still holed up in Tower Three, demanding free passage to the fundamentalist dictator General Alberto Shopenhauer of Colombia.
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