It was rough going. But the guys were doing a good job of suppressing sniper fire.
And then suddenly they weren’t.
Because it wasn’t sniper fire. It was mechs. They were just stepping over the gaps that had been leaps for Cole. And the sniper fire from the Virginia side couldn’t do a thing against them. They knew it. And since the bad guys also knew it, they weren’t exposing themselves anymore. Let the mechs do it, they were no doubt thinking.
His cellphone rang.
He cowered in a depression in the rock, trying not to present a target to the oncoming mechs. Fortunately, the mechs weren’t really designed to walk on terrain as rough as this rock. One of them even tripped. It was keeping them busy. But eventually they’d get where his hiding place no longer hid him, and then he’d be dead. “Hello?” he said into the phone.
“Any way to take those suckers down?” asked Drew.
“Either an AT-4 or two guys pressing the legs apart while two cars run into it.”
“Nobody’s willing to sacrifice their cars,” said Drew. “But hold tight. We’ve got backup.”
“From who? The U.S. Army doesn’t know I’m on their side.”
“Think, Cole,” said Drew. “Our side doesn’t have those mechs. Wherever we see them, it’s okay to kill them.”
It was only a few more minutes, and the Apaches came up the river. No focused-EMP weapon now—where would they plug it in? The mechs didn’t even try to run away. As hard as it was for them to get as far as they had gotten, there was no going back. They aimed at the choppers but before they came in effective range, the missiles the choppers sent by way of greeting ended the conversation.
Cole got up and waved his thanks. He knew there was no way they could land on the island. It was safer for them to get out before the guys from the hovercycles—if there were any left—tried out their antitank rockets to see if they could bring down choppers.
So Cole was on his own getting to the narrowest place on the Virginia side.
Arty and Mingo had both climbed down to the nearest point. What, did they think they were going to catch him?
No. They had a rope.
He caught it. He tied it around himself, up under his arms. Mingo wrapped it behind his back and sat down and braced himself. If Cole fell in the water, they could haul him out, hopefully before he had been beaten to death on the rocks.
He jumped.
He landed.
Arty caught him by the wrist and Cole didn’t even get wet.
Arty and Mingo helped him get up to the observation point.
“Good work,” he said to them.
“You, too, sir,” said Arty.
Drew was waiting up top. He made a point of turning off his cellphone. Cole held up his cellphone and ended the call, too.
“Does Cecily know?” asked Load.
Cole nodded.
Then he staggered to the railing and stood there, leaning on it, and trembled from the spent adrenalin, and then found himself crying, and he decided that it wasn’t for the ordeal he’d just been through, and it wasn’t for the fear, and it wasn’t from killing a bunch of guys in Rock Creek Canyon and back on the Maryland side of the park.
“I only knew him for three days,” he said.
“He makes an impression,” said Load softly. One by one they each touched his shoulder. And the kind touches were enough to revive him. Calm him. He walked back with them along the path, around the ranger station, ignoring the civilians and rangers who were being watched over by a heavily-armed Benny.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said Benny. “I’m happy to tell you that the operation was successful. You can resume your normal activities.” Then he joined them on the walk to their cars.
SIXTEEN
FINDING THE ENEMY
They also serve, who only sit and type.
It was Reuben’s PDA that got Cecily through the first month of widowhood. Recording the shipments and financial transactions, following the trails, searching for patterns, tracking corporate entities, passing along names and leads to FBI and DIA agents: It was a vast spiderweb, with Reuben’s notes like dewdrops that reveal where the otherwise invisible strands must be.
It was an urgent task. And they were Reuben’s notes. Reuben’s words. It was his trail that she was following. All those days when he traveled on assignments he couldn’t tell her about, all those trips abroad and in America, all those nights when she could see that he was troubled and yet knew he couldn’t talk about it. Now he was telling her.
Meanwhile, Aunt Margaret brought the children down to Gettysburg and stayed with them. “I’m an old widow myself,” she said. “I know how hard it is. You need the children near, and you also need to lose yourself completely in something that isn’t your family. So here I am and here I’ll stay while you save the world.”
It wasn’t the world Cecily was saving. It might be America. It might be herself.
But one thing was certain. It was not going to save Reuben’s reputation. There was no way that he could have helped but see that something wrong was going on. Too much of what he did was within the borders of the United States. Most of the shipments seemed to go from port city to port city, so some illusion could be maintained that these weapons shipments were going overseas. But who would bring weapons from China or Russia to the United States in order to ship them to pro-U.S. partisan groups in Iran or Sudan or Turkmenistan? Reuben had to at least wonder if some or all of these weapons were meant to be used domestically.
Which was why he kept these notes on the PDA—and why he was so reluctant to give it into anyone else’s hands. Because he knew something dangerous was going on and he was helping with it—yet he believed he was doing it for a President that he admired and trusted, and so he acted the good soldier and did the jobs he was assigned to do.
Yet if it turned out to be wrong, he would have the paper trail—well, the digital trail—that someone could use to track it all down. Reuben never needed records like this. He had trained his memory like a Jesuit. So he was deliberately creating evidence.
He knew he was only guessing about the integrity of the people he served. If he guessed wrong, then he was serving traitors, and he could not claim that it had never occurred to him. All he could do was make sure that the full confession was here. The evidence to unravel what he had helped them do.
If only he had talked to me, she thought again and again.
And most of the time she answered herself: What did I know? What would I have counseled? Of course, caution, yes—I’m the woman who set aside the political career to raise a family. I choose safety. That’s what I do. But I also loved Reuben. Still love him. And I knew how unhappy he would be, to walk away from something that might have been in service of a cause, a President, he believed in.
So few seemed to believe in that President, and yet Reuben was sure that he was pursuing the right course. So would she have counseled him to give it up? To denounce it?
And . . . could he have given it up? It was clear now that he had been working for and with murderers and traitors. Would they have let him walk away, even if she had advised him? No. There was too much danger that he would then denounce them—they would have killed him. And she would have spent the last year or so consoling her children about their father’s apparent suicide. Or traffic accident. Whatever method they used.
Things happened as they happened. Reuben accepted the hand dealt to him, and bet on it. Bet his life on it.
Whatever others may think of the choices he made, I know his heart. I know that he would and did sacrifice anything for the cause of freedom, in support of those he believed also fought for it. He took the long view of history. He cared about the world their grandchildren would inherit. He despised those who thought only of themselves, their immediate advantage. Whatever I might have advised him, he would have done what he did. I could not have changed him.
I wouldn’t have tried.
So she shed tears over her work, but
she kept working.
Reuben’s jeesh came in and out of the Gettysburg White House, as the media were calling it now. She knew them all by their noms de guerre now: Cole, not Coleman; Load, not Lloyd. Mingo, Benny, Cat, Babe, Arty, Drew. Very young men when they first trained to be soldiers, but now men, seasoned veterans.
LaMonte knew an asset when he saw one. Eight extraordinarily good soldiers whose loyalty had already been tested. He turned them over to his National Security Adviser, and Averell Torrent used them for missions that required deftness, quickness. Seize this. Destroy that. In twos and threes they went out, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes, sometimes heavily armed in attack choppers, sometimes on domestic flights with no weapons at all.
They would find the agents of the Progressive Restoration and follow them to where their weapons or funds were stashed. The weapons were to be used to eliminate opponents of the Progressive Restoration in key states, as they had been used in the attempt to kill Cole, or to serve to defend states or cities that came over to the rebel side. The funds were to be used to bribe legislators, governors, mayors, and city councilors who needed a little help making up their mind.
Some of their small victories were kept secret; others, though, Averell Torrent went before the cameras to announce. Cessy soon realized that publicity depended on whether any rebels were killed who were not under arms. Take down a mech or blow up a hovercycle, and Torrent would go on the news, calmly and reassuringly telling the American people that an attempt had been made to assassinate a loyal American official, but the violent Progressive Revolution and its terrifying weapons had been stopped in their tracks.
But if the dead bodies were not men in body armor or ensconced in the new machines, then the event had no national significance. It was a matter for local law enforcement. If anyone noticed that the victims had been sympathetic toward the rebels’ cause, the killing was assumed to be the work of local right-wing vigilantes.
The result was that LaMonte’s administration retained its image of being infinitely patient, taking action only to protect American lives from the depredations of the rebels. And people got used to seeing Averell Torrent as the calm, reassuring voice of moderation, reluctantly taking action when forced to by the enemies of peace and freedom, but otherwise merely asking Americans to trust in the democratic process and not throw in their lot with the violence of the Progressive Restoration.
Meanwhile, the members of Reuben’s jeesh would stop in and see her whenever they passed through Gettysburg. They all regarded it as part of their work, to help her decode the Farsi that Reuben had used for his notes. Words and phrases that were repeated, she would learn, but many phrases weren’t in the dictionary, or at least not with the meaning he was using. Much of his Farsi was really the private language he and his comrades had developed—there was English slang in the Farsi, sometimes translated and sometimes transliterated, as there was also Arabic and Spanish and whatever other languages they happened to know.
It was all translated within a week, more or less. Then they helped her study the maps. She had threads that traced all the shipments, and as she learned whatever the FBI and DIA could find out for her about those shipments, she began to build up a clearer picture.
Meanwhile, she met with others in Gettysburg who were trying to figure out the Progressive Restoration movement—the rebels, as they called them now in the office. How much money would this all take? Who has that kind of money and can spend it without detection? Is the source of this foreign or domestic? They had to keep in mind the possibility that the Chinese were at the root of this. Or Al Qaeda. Even Russia. The joke inside Gettysburg was that it was really the French behind everything. They’d been secretly running the world since Napoleon, following an extraordinarily deceptive master plan that would eventually lead to conquering the world.
Jokes aside, it became clear to Cecily and those who agreed with her that a conspiracy like this had to be very tightly held or it would have been detected long before. Even true believers in a cause can be careless, but nobody had been. Nothing leaked. How?
The organization that Cecily imagined bringing this off consisted of only a handful of people, who then hired or encouraged others to do what they needed, but without telling them anything about what it was for.
But there were some points where they had to let larger numbers in on what they were doing. Somehow they had to recruit the soldiers who would run these machines, and the pattern was emerging: They must have recruited among groups of veterans who had turned against the war, the military, or the President. She had to assume it was the left-wing version of the way right-wing militias recruited. Find who’s pissed off. Then find the ones who are angry enough to train to kill for the cause.
The bodies of those killed at Great Falls and at the Holland Tunnel established the profile, and now the investigators were tracking down others who had dropped out of sight in the past year or so.
Another place where they had to let outsiders in on the secret was weapons development. This wasn’t something you did as a hobby. They had to recruit from among the experts—American experts, since nothing about the designs suggested European or Japanese concepts.
So the FBI worked on assembling a list of disgusted or disaffected researchers who had dropped out of sight over the years and could now be assumed to be working for the rebels. There were also some former automobile and aviation designers, computer engineers and hotshot programmers whose political views were far to the left and whose rage had seemed, to many of their coworkers, disproportionate. Some of them were found, having made perfectly innocent career changes. Others were not found at all. They went on the list.
The weapons themselves were still intimidating, but no longer baffling. With several mechs to study from the battle at the Holland Tunnel, the DOD experts had found nothing that couldn’t be built using existing design theory. Excellent, creative engineers built these weapons, but not necessarily geniuses. Their work could be duplicated and countered.
Except for the EMP gun. The DOD people still had not duplicated the technology that kept the directed pulse coherent over such a long range. It was a serious problem that the rebels had an air defense system that kept military aircraft from overflying New York City any lower than satellite level. The DOD was working on systems that would momentarily shut down all electronics while the EMP blew through. But planes that depended on electronics to stay aloft were almost as damaged by the shutdown as by the EMP itself.
The U.S. was used to having air supremacy. Over loyal territory they still did. But that territory was shrinking, bit by bit.
Because in the absence of a firm military response, Americans who viewed the Progressive Restoration as heroes began to believe that they might just bring this thing off. Some worried that the leaders of the Progressive Restoration had not come forward—but the New York City Council insisted that they were now leading the movement to “restore Constitutional government” and the Progressive Restoration was obeying their orders. It put democratically elected officials at the apparent head of the movement, and for many people who sympathized with their views, that was enough.
In the first month, the legislatures of Washington State and Vermont passed resolutions joining themselves to the Progressive Restoration. In Washington the governor vetoed that action and mobilized the National Guard to make sure that no mechs or hovercycles showed up in Washington. The trouble was, he also asked President Nielson to keep U.S. forces from taking any “provocative military action.” In effect, the state had declared itself neutral territory.
Meanwhile quite a few cities had passed or nearly passed resolutions declaring their recognition of the Progressive Revolution. And there were well-orchestrated movements in other states pressing for their legislatures to jump on the bandwagon.
There was no shortage of liberals, from moderate to radical, who also condemned the rebellion. This was the wrong way to go about it, they said. Nobody should have died, they sai
d. If the Progressive Revolution has any links to the assassinations of Friday the Thirteenth, they should be tried and punished for the crimes.
At the same time, many voices that condemned the rebellion also argued strongly against taking military action. Cecily was not surprised to hear them call for negotiations. Having lived for years with a soldier-historian, she knew that negotiations only worked when you had something to offer or when the other side thought they had something to fear from you. It was hard to see what negotiations with rebels would accomplish except to give them time to build more and more support in the rest of the country.
Cecily could hear Reuben’s voice in her mind, scoffing at all these people. If the states tolerate a takeover of the federal government by force, we’ll never have peace again, he’d say.
The trouble was he wasn’t here for her to argue with him, to tell him that if this rebellion was suppressed by military action against an American city, there would be no forgiveness for it. He would listen. He would realize that she was right, or at least that her views had to be taken into account.
Meanwhile, she worked at her investigation. The key was figuring out where all these shipments were controlled from, where the money flowed. When her information was complete, it could be combined with information from the other investigations and maybe they could figure something out.
She was glad she had her job and not LaMonte’s. Because the country’s split over how to respond to the war showed up in Congress. Party discipline was breaking down on both sides of the aisle. There were Democrats calling for military action against the rebels, and Republicans calling for a wait-and-talk policy. Each side of the debate saw only the worst possible consequences for the other side’s view.
Which was a recipe for indecision and obstruction in Congress. No one there had declared for the rebels; no one had resigned, not even the Congressmen from New York City. All were calling for the Progressive Restoration to leave New York.