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RAMIREZ TRIED ONE CITY department after another and finally dug up a retired city engineer who claimed to know about the abandoned freight tunnels. Two agents retrieved the man from his home in Naperville and drove him to the Homeland complex in Buffalo Grove, running code three the whole way. At 1:09 p.m., the escorts delivered Alvie Brockbank to the warehouse staging area where the TAC teams and the Z-squads were assembling.
The old man shuffled, and his damp eyes kept wandering from the digital maps projected over a planning table to the rows of Revivants and paramilitary agents. Scrawny and chicken-necked, the former engineer was dressed in a puke-green work shirt and brown canvas pants. Instead of a side-to-side comb-over, Brockbank’s ran from back to front.
“The tunnels?” he repeated after Ramirez asked him a question. “Which tunnels?”
“The tunnels under the city.”
“There’s, ah, there’s bunches of tunnels down there. There’s more air under parts of downtown than there is dirt. Six, some places seven, levels. As deep as a hundred feet... ah, thirty meters.”
“Where are they?” Ramirez gritted his teeth. The clock was ticking, and every second meant his quarry would be scattering like an upended bucket of cockroaches. “I have an old map from the web overlaid on the street grid, but it is nearly useless.”
“I expect so. That map shows the old freight tunnels. Lots of old fiber and cable laid in them now, but I don’t know that anybody’s updated a map since Obama was in office.”
“The city people said you used to go down there and do maintenance from time to time. How did you get in? I know one entrance is here”—he tapped a spot near Oak Street and the Chicago river—“but it’s inside Cabrini territory, at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Not a tactically advantageous place to assault. I need options.”
“Options,” the old man said, but more to himself. He scratched his bristly chin and narrowed his eyes, leaning across the table to peer at the glowing map.
“Are there any grade-level entrances?” Ramirez asked.
“Grade-level?” Brockbank shook his head. “Not anymore. Never were, best I can remember. Everything at that level was by elevator or ladder only. The old cable car tunnels under the river, yeah, they had them some street level entrances. Had to, so the cable cars could go down ’em.”
“But not the freight tunnels?”
“No, not the freight tunnels.”
“So, how—”
“Hold on a sec, let me think.” Brockbank traced routes with a shaky finger, nose close enough to the map it nearly pushed through the projection. He mumbled so low, Ramirez only caught bits and pieces. “There’s LaSalle... Washington, okay... goes under the river there... How’d we... oh, yeah...”
The approach of Captain Reed, leader of Armed Response Team Eight, distracted Ramirez from considering how to hurry the old man along.
“All teams locked and loaded, Special Agent,” Reed reported. A taller-than-average man with hawkish features, the captain towered over Ramirez. The special agent eased back to give himself room.
“And the Z-Squad controllers?”
“Loaded in the Mobile Response Vehicle. Z-Squad lead reports all telemetry online and functional. You will have ten independent squads of six Z’s each.”
“And the special material?”
Reed shifted his feet and looked away, finding something outside the warehouse to focus on. “Loaded with the Z’s, sir.” Reed hesitated before blurting, “Sir, have you heard about this so-called video circling the Net? I haven’t seen it, but some of my guys are getting calls from their folks—”
“A bunch of trumped-up crap these people have put out to cause disruption. Focus on the mission, Reed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent.” Ramirez dismissed the team leader and turned to the engineer. “Brockbank? How about it?”
“Well, it’s been a while since I been down there, but seems to me there was a stairway put in back in ’18 or ’19 under the old CTA building on Lake, right next to the Clinton-Green Metro stop. You know the place?”
“Yes.”
“You take the elevator to the basement,” Brockbank said, “and there’s a vault door, take some getting through. You’ll need tools. Open that door and there’s a staircase that’ll take you allaway down to the old freight tunnels, then on down to the deep tunnels.”
“Get in the van with the TAC team,” Ramirez ordered.
“Me?” Brockbank’s chin quivered. “Why me?”
“Because if that door’s not there, old man, you’ll be the first one I shoot.”
***
THE TWO MARINES AND I made it back to Franklin Rogers’ headquarters by hailing a cab. The driver eyed the military equipment with something less than enthusiasm, but carried us to the edge of Cabrini territory without complaint... right after Patrick stuck a pistol in his ear. We jogged six blocks from the drop-off, as even threat of death was insufficient to get the cabbie to cross the Cabrini-Green border.
My body hurt down to the DNA level. Getting blown up, beaten, drugged, and, oh yeah, beaten again had left my face puffy and swollen. Aches radiated from my ribs, my hip, and my belly. Even my eyeballs hurt. Within two blocks, my lungs clawed for air, and I squeezed one palm against the stitch in my side. Patrick and Jackson jogged ahead of me, and I allowed the gap to widen.
Besides the physical pain, dread weighted chains of guilt around my soul. I had betrayed the Children’s hiding place. And I killed a man. A vicious, pig-nasty sonofabitch, but still a human being. For all my tough talk about murdering Ramirez, the reality of blood on my hands squatted on me with the mass of a small planet.
I squinted at the painful glare of the sun, broiling high overhead, well past the midday mark. Winded and sweat-drenched, I slowed to a walk as we approached Franklin’s three-story apartment building, across an open lot. Balconies overlooked a playground where kids shrieked and laughed. A toddler in grass-green corduroy training pants crabbed the wrong way up the slide, ignoring the protests of the girl at the top.
“You look like recycled shit, man.”
I glanced around and found three Cabrini sentinels had ghosted alongside without me noticing. Lean young wolves in ghetto clothes and a motley assortment of weapons, the sentries would have once scared me blue.
“Pass the word, DeShawn,” I told the guy next to me, “things are about to get real here. The feds are coming.”
“One if by land, two if by sea?”
“Exactly.” During my month in Cabrini, I’d borrowed some of Franklin’s books. The lines from Longfellow’s old poem came back to me now, something I’d read late one night that I didn’t remember until DeShawn jogged the brain cells into alignment. “‘The fate of a nation was riding that night; / And the spark struck out by that steed in his flight, / Kindled the land into flame with its heat.’”
“Right on, Joe.” DeShawn clapped me on the shoulder and ignored my grimace. He seemed quite happy at the prospect of a firefight. “It’s time for some revolution, bay-bee.”
DeShawn and his buddies escorted us to a cafeteria at a school a block away from Franklin’s headquarters. No kids were around, which confused me until I remembered it was Saturday and all the urchins would be out for the day. Rows of tables filled the middle of the room, with impossibly small chairs stacked on top, creating a forest of silver legs. At one end of the room was a stage with a curtain, while on the opposite end was the serving line, closed off by metal shutters.
I laid the SMG60 next to me and stretched out on the edge of the stage. I fell asleep in about one point three seconds. Like passing out, only faster, and without the stigma.
***
RAMIREZ, CAPTAIN REED, and the Z-Squad commander, Stephan DiNunzio, traveled in the back of a swaying command vehicle—a box truck outfitted on the inside with comm gear and map screens, computers and weapon racks. The ART captain wore his helmet but kept the HUD visor raised while Ramirez outlined the game plan. DiNunzio wore a business suit and a complex communication and control device. Apparently grafted to the side of his head, the boxy appliance sprouted antennae and flickered with LEDs in Christmas colors of red and green. Under a muted green overhead light, Ramirez pointed out the building Joseph Warren had identified during chemically-enhanced interrogation as the entry point to the Children of Liberty’s rabbit warren of a home base.
“They’ll expect us to hit here,” he explained, “at this building on Oak and LaRue. This is the headquarters of the Cabrini separatists, commanded by an ex-army major named Rogers. I suspect it would be ruinously expensive to take this building and ingress the target through the elevator; however, I want them to think that is our objective. You, Captain”—Ramirez indicated Reed—“will take seven of our ten Z-Squads and two of our four ART units, and our armored vehicle. That will give you twenty living soldiers and forty-two Revivants, along with seven controllers. You will fake an assault on this building, using whatever means and methods you think most effective to pin down the enemy and give them the impression this is our main thrust.”
“From the northwest,” Reed said. “Between Cosby and LaRue. Minimizes their sight lines and allows us cover for the approach.”
“Remember this is all Cabrini territory,” Ramirez cautioned. “Expect all these buildings to either be fortified or booby-trapped.”
“Understood.”
“While you and your teams feint here,” the agent continued, “DiNunzio and I will take the remaining forces and penetrate the tunnel complex here, through the Lake Street CTA building’s basement. We will advance along the west-to-east axis under Lake Street. The mass of tunnels will be to our south, but with any luck we’ll catch the defenders in the flank. We will bring all the... special weapons with us, strapped to a single Z-squad. The Z’s will, ah, deploy the gas throughout the tunnel complex once we’ve spotted the enemy.”
“Problem,” DiNunzio said. Middle-aged, middle-sized, and middle-ranked, the Z-Squad commander would disappear in a crowd of four.
“What?”
“The comm system for the zombies will be fucked. With our van at street level, we can do two-three kilometers without a repeater. More if we can bounce off a cell tower. Underground? In concrete tunnels? Be lucky we can make eighty-ninety meters. No signal and the Z’s revert to hardcode program.”
Ramirez frowned. “What about your mobile controllers? I remember doing a CBT on a handheld Z-controller.”
DiNunzio pulled a face like he’d bitten a shit sandwich. “You want my guys to walk behind a cloud of Vx? Yeah, let me see if I can get some dumb fuck to sign up for that. Jesus, Ramirez, they’d be dead in ten seconds.”
“We have hazmat suits,” Ramirez noted. “And bulletproof riot shields.”
“Oh, yeah, right,” DiNunzio snorted. “Makes all the difference.”
“The assault team members will be suited up. I don’t see the problem.”
“The problem, Special Agent, is my guys are techno-geeks, not field ops. We hired kids who’re good at video games to run the Z’s, not a bunch of Jack Reacher types.”
Ramirez compressed his lips, and an eyelid twitched. “Fine. Give me the handheld unit, and I’ll run the Z’s myself.”
“Ten minutes,” the driver’s voice carried over the internal PA system.
“Everybody understand their job?” Ramirez checked with Reed, who showed him a thumbs up. DiNunzio scowled as though he didn’t know where to spit out the taste in his mouth. After a long pause, he nodded.
“Excellent,” Ramirez said. “Good luck and Godspeed, gentlemen.”
***
BUBBLES OF CONVERSATION danced along the edge of my semiconscious mind, bouncing off the cocoon of blackness wrapped around me. Waking up would require a commitment to endure not only the physical pain of my battered body, but the emotional trauma of explaining how I’d compromised everyone’s safety. Nope. Better to snooze for a while longer than have to face...
A warm hand touched my shoulder, followed by a woman’s voice. Millie’s light scent, akin to wildflowers and summer breezes, caressed me. “Joe?”
“Mmm, murgle sterff?” I stretched and regretted it when a dozen pain signals fired across my network of neurons and overloaded the system. “Oh,” I hissed. “That smarts.”
“Oh, Joe.” Millie knelt on the stage and helped me sit up. “They really worked you over, didn’t they?”
I avoided responding and instead focused on the group clustered at a nearby table. Franklin Rogers I recognized right away, along with Sergeant Patrick and Momma Rose. John Marsh was there, overloading a plastic chair next to a woman I didn’t know in battle fatigues. A half-dozen other people I vaguely recognized were gathered there as well. The murmur of conversation stilled, and every face turned in my direction.
“I gave it up,” I blurted. “They hit me with drugs and... I, uh...”
“We know,” Millie said. Her hand stayed on my shoulder. “My fault, not yours. I rushed you into an operation without thinking it through.”
I stared a hole in the floor and spoke through the broken glass in my throat. “They killed Alex. I watched him die.”
Millie hugged me with arms stronger than I expected, her compact body pressed against me. I wiped my cheeks against my sleeve and tried not to sniffle. Sniffling would mean I...
Goddammit.
I hated crying in public.
“We started evacuating our people as soon as we realized your team was lost,” Millie said in my ear. “We couldn’t know for sure, so we took the precaution.”
Franklin spoke up. “Listen up, Joe, and we’ll download our plan. Lots of things are happening in the world today, and you need to be up to speed quickly.”
“Embrace the suck,” Patrick told me, not unkindly.
“Aye aye, Sergeant. Embracing now.” I touched my eyebrow in a wry salute and gestured for Franklin to continue.
“Millie, if I may?” the major said. At her gesture, he continued. “Objective One is owned by the Children of Liberty. They will continue to evacuate the tunnels through the southern routes. Lieutenant Gonzales”—Rogers indicated the woman in fatigues I hadn’t met before—“will take her marines and screen the evacuation. Inevitably, a bottleneck will form at the State and Roosevelt, and the Polk and Canal exits, so people will back up into the tunnel system as far north as Van Buren or Washington. Millie’s team will sweep forward, collect the stragglers and keep her people moving.” Rogers paused and exchanged a look with my warrior elf. “Your people, your plan, Millie. Any changes or updates?”
“Negative.”
“Objective Two,” Rogers said, “is the defense of C-G against a probable incursion by Homeland, targeting our Oak Street headquarters. After MacCauley’s people leave, we will blow the connecting tunnel from the elevator to their Orleans Street entrance. This will effectively block their rear from attack, should Homeland breach our defenses. Which ain’t fucking likely.” Rogers twisted his lips into a wolfish grin.
“Franklin, you don’t have to—”
“Millie, honey,” Momma Rose spoke for the first time, “you know we been over this already. We tired of these people stompin’ into our homes whenever they feel like it. They come around this time, we gonna slap the daylights outta them.”
Millie chewed her thumbnail and compressed her lips in a thin line, keeping her eyes fixed on the tabletop. I knew that look. It spelled trouble with a capital Oh Shit.
Rogers held up three fingers. “Objective Three is to secure our borders and provide shelter for Millie’s displaced population against the uncertainty of the near-term future.”
I must have projected my puzzlement via telepathy, because John said, “In the last several hours, Joe, the cabinet meeting video has blown up around the world. Millions of downloads. People are in the streets, mad as hell.”
“We think the president means to declare the government insolvent or declare martial law,” Millie stated.
“Holy...”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Pursuant to Objective Two,” Rogers said, “we have fortified our HQ based on Plan Turtleshell. Our civilian population has retreated to deep basement shelters and hardened buildings throughout our territory. One of our two companies of light infantry has taken up defensive positions along Hobbs and LaRue, while the remainder waits in reserve. If, or I should say when, the Homeland boys show up, we will treat them to a breakfast of firepower like they’ve never seen.” Rogers paused to examine the faces around the table. Every person shared faces set in grim determination. “With God’s grace, we will not only knock the feds on their ass, we’ll send them back to the special pit of hell that spawned them. Questions? No? Then let’s execute the plan.”
Chairs scraped, and I eased off the stage and helped Millie down. She popped off a string of orders. “John, Joe, you’re with me. Lieutenant, gather your people and deploy scouts along Kinzie and Canal. I want to know if Homeland has found another way in before they jab a gun up my ass.”
“Aye aye, ma’am,” the marine officer said. She flicked a gesture at Patrick and they departed at a trot, breaking through the knot of Franklin’s people at the exit.
I hesitated. “Millie, I...”
“Joe.” She fixed me with her welding-torch eyes. “The past is the past. There’s a long way to go before our people are safe, and it’s our job to make sure they come to no harm. This is your chance to be the kind of man I think you can be. Are you with me, or not?”
My answer surprised me more than anyone.
“Let’s go.”