The airwaves were full of shouts and screams, and Sam could not tell what was going on or who was winning.

In front of them, the rumble of gunfire sounded above the engine and the radio, and flashes lit the horizon.

There was a long sustained period of heavy firing and a series of booming explosions; then the radio suddenly went quiet.

"That didn't sound good," Sam said.

"How far away are we?" Dodge asked.

"Less than an hour," Sam said. "That's just a guess, really."

"This thing go any faster?" Dodge asked, turning back to his work.

"Only if it had wings," Sam said.

The choppers came out of the south, just as Tyler pa.s.sed the turnoff to Patterson Crossing. He saw them when they were still dark dots on the fading sky, and he knew what they were before they evolved into their menacing, wasplike shapes.

Helicopters-Apaches.

He stamped on the brakes and swung the car around the intersection, away from the constant stream of traffic on the highway.

Maybe at Patterson Crossing he could find somewhere to hide the Shelby: in a barn, behind a tree, anything.

Here, there was nothing but gra.s.sy scrub for miles on either side. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

He urged the car forward, roaring toward the tiny town. They had found him. That was enough, wasn't it?

That had created the diversion. Now if he could hide the car or just distance himself from it, he might survive after all.

He pa.s.sed a couple of grain silos and briefly contemplated trying to hide behind them but dismissed the idea.

The Apache helicopters had him in their sights by now. The silos offered no protection.

A large building of some kind loomed to his right.

Perhaps if he could make that...

A flash in his rearview mirror. A smoke trail heading toward him from the first of the two choppers.

Tyler slammed on his brakes.

The rocket must have triangulated on the speed of the car, because it pa.s.sed well over his head and impacted on the road in front of him, throwing up a storm of tarmac and dirt.

He slued the car to the side, narrowly avoiding the erupting crater, and swung back on the highway behind it.

Time to get out of the car now!

He saw another flash in the mirror and tried the same trick, but the car was moving slower than before. The road erupted just in front of the vehicle, lifting the two front wheels off the road and throwing the car sideways into a drainage ditch.

Tyler saw the ditch approaching in a strange slow motion, and observed, rather than felt, the impact as it hit.

Then came the body slam of the side door, and the world turned to black.

By the time they reached Wigwam, the sound of the explosions ahead of them were no longer distant but were loud crumps that vibrated the Humvee. Sam kept the speed as high as he dared through the township, not wanting to risk an accident.

Dodge closed the laptop and sat back in his seat, his eyes closed for a moment.

"Cheyenne Mountain is supposed to be impregnable, right?" Sam asked.

Dodge nodded.

"Even from a nuclear attack?"

Dodge nodded again but said, "I don't think it's us she's after with the nuclear bombers."

"No?"

"She's pouring all her troops into the area to try and stop us. If she bombed Colorado Springs, then she'd be killing them."

Sam took his eyes off the road for a second and frowned at Dodge. "If not us, then what is the target?"

Dodge shrugged. "My guess is where she'd find the highest concentration of non-neuros. If she can't get them to join her, then she wants to destroy them. Probably around Wichita, where all the refugee camps are."

Sam thought of Brenda and Olivia and the two children, and his breath caught in his throat.

"Oh my G.o.d," he said at last.

Tyler was lying in the wreckage of the car. His arm felt broken, and there was blood running down his face.

The pain meant he was alive.

He had survived!

His pistol was jammed under his body, and he struggled to get his weight off it.

Boots were approaching, two pairs.

The pistol was still jammed.

Voices now.

"It's Agent Tyler. He's alive."

"Where are the others?"

"Must have taken a different car, headed somewhere else."

"Where?"

"Tyler'll know. Get a neuro-headset, quickly."

Tyler'll know.

Tyler did know. That knowledge was in his brain, and if they got it out, then they'd know where to find Sam and Dodge.

The pistol came free from under his body, and he raised it, slowly, past his hip, which was surely also broken. Past his shoulder and his neck.

He raised the pistol to his head and flicked off the safety.

But suddenly there was a boot on his wrist, and the pistol was wrenched out of his hand.

"Not so fast, Agent Tyler."

54

FREEDOM ROAD

Wheeler came on the radio. "News ain't getting any better, boys. Heavy concentrations of neuro-troops have hit Fort Carson from the north and east. Neuros must know where you're going. Jackson has put some of his armor to the south to hold the road open for you. Hope you're nearly there."

"Not far to go now," Sam said, looking up at the skies around them. "What about jet fighters and helicopters?"

"You're clear so far. Jackson's boys took out two fast movers with Stingers a few moments ago, and the rest are keeping clear. I think they're trying to break through the lines and cut you off from the mountain on the ground."

"Tell them we're doing our best; be there as soon as we can."

"Good luck. You're going to need it. We're all going to need it. Those bombers at Whiteman just got airborne."

They screamed around the off-ramp to Colorado Springs behind a quartet of tanks that had clearly been stationed there to protect the interchange and were already engaged in a furious firefight with troops advancing down the freeway from the north.

A helicopter gunship streaked down toward them low over the rooftops as Sam put his foot down along Academy Boulevard.

A series of rockets flashed from a pod beneath a stubby wing, blasting tarmac and dirt into the sky just behind them. It swung around on their tail, but before it could fire again, a pinpoint of light streaked skyward, clipping the machine's tail rotor and exploding.

The helicopter began to spin uncontrollably, like a toy unwinding, and belly flopped onto the road with a horrible grinding sound.

Soldiers in full combat gear were laying down a fierce fire toward the troops arriving from the north, but the sky was turning black with troops and gunships. There seemed to be no end to them, and already Sam could see resistance forces starting to fall back under the a.s.sault.

They raced down the boulevard, right between two groups of soldiers firing at each other from either side of the road. Bullets cracked the bulletproof gla.s.s of the Humvee but did not penetrate.

In front of them, a man appeared with a shoulder-fired rocket of some kind. He dropped to one knee and aimed it right at them. Sam swerved from side to side, trying to shake off his aim, but the man was too close. Suddenly, a series of shots rang out around them, and the man with the rocket staggered. A puff of smoke came from the rocket, but it went wild, spiraling off into the sky as the man fell.

"Not much farther." Sam gritted his teeth and hurled the big car around the winding mountainside roads.

They barely made it.

Neuro-troops were charging down the hillside at them when Sam rounded the final corner and shot forward into the circular opening that was the mouth of the underground facility at Cheyenne Mountain.

Explosions and light-weapons fire rocked the vehicle on its springs as they hurtled inside, and Sam fumbled for a moment with the lights, trying to adjust to the sudden dark, despite the strip lighting that ran down the ceiling of the tunnel.

There were soldiers everywhere, running up behind them to try to defend the mouth of the tunnel, and the gunfire and explosions behind them were continuous.

"There!" Dodge shouted, and Sam hit the brake pedal, the heavy vehicle sliding to a halt beside a ma.s.sive metal blast door.

A wiry, gray-haired man in full combat gear ran over as they jumped out of the car.

"I'm Jackson," he shouted over the sounds of the battle at the entrance. "You got here just in time. They've overrun our perimeter. We're falling back here to the tunnel, going to put up a last-ditch defense until we can get as many of our boys as possible in here and shut the blast doors. You get in there and do what you need to do."

There was a sudden burst of firing from the tunnel entrance, and they ducked behind the Humvee as bullets whined off the rock walls around them.

"Get in there!" Jackson shouted, and ran toward the entrance, drawing his pistol.

Sam didn't need any encouragement and ran after Dodge, who seemed to know where he was going.

"Where's the laptop?" Sam shouted as they ran in through the huge blast door.

"Don't need it. The virus is finished," Dodge yelled back, holding up his skull-shaped USB drive.

They were in a corridor with rock walls and a metal roof. In front of them was another blast door, a twin of the one behind them.

That led them into a wide concourse, with a low mezzanine running around the outside. Various doors led off on both levels.

Dodge was still running, up a flight of metal stairs, heading for a doorway on the mezzanine level with the familiar Homeland Security CDD logo above it. Sam bounded up the stairs behind him.

The door led into a control room with workstations and computers, each with a keyboard, a mouse, and a neuro-headset.

Dodge slid into a chair, sweeping the headset to one side, and slotted his drive into a USB3 port.

"All right, you witch," he said. "Get a taste of this."

55

INFECTION

There was a series of beeps, and a row of lights on a central console turned from red to green as the computers in the control room went online. No longer isolated from the rest of the world. Dodge removed his hands from the computer and just watched as the virus ate its way into the network.