Dead Zone (7 page)

Rich nodded and opened his mouth to speak, but Gillett cut him off.

“Rich relays the schematics of the machine to Josi, who won’t forget a word.”

Lytle spoke up again. “Can’t we just use a camera and a voice recorder?”

“Not if the power’s out,” Gillett said. “This team is designed to operate without electricity. We wouldn’t need Tabitha if we could rely on radios. We wouldn’t need Jack if we could rely on night vision. We wouldn’t need Krezi if we could rely on heavy firepower. As for Aubrey—well, she can turn invisible, and that’s useful whether the power’s on or not.”

Rich raised his hand. It made him look very young, like a kid in school. Which was exactly where they all should have been, Aubrey thought.

“Yes,” Gillett said, nodding to Rich.

“This may be a dumb question, but how am I going to touch a Russian truck? Isn’t there a war going on?”

Aubrey was glad that Rich asked it, because she’d been thinking the same thing. She could sneak up on a truck, but she couldn’t bring someone with her.

“It should actually be easy. Well, relatively easy. There’s no war front near Seattle—not anymore, not after the landing. There’re too many civilians, and they’re clogging the streets trying to get out of town. The Russians have pledged to drive all Americans out of Washington. In fact, rumor has it that they’ve asked us nicely to just leave.”

“How does that make it easy?” Rich asked again, clearly nervous.

“Because it’s not like you’re sneaking up on the front lines of World War Three. We’re going to be sneaking up—if you can call it that—on a roadblock in Snowqualmie Pass. Our forces are waiting until the civilians clear out and until we can isolate this electronic device to counterattack. There’s no shooting going on up there, except for the citizens who have taken up resistance fighting.”

It was Tabitha who spoke next. “So we’re just driving up to a roadblock—to the place where they’re looking specifically for soldiers?”

“It’ll be a panicked nightmare,” Gillett said. “A steady line of refugees on one side of the road and you guys on the other. You’ll run into the roadblock, they’ll probably turn you around, and you’ll mix into the sea of evacuees. Only Sergeant Sparks—
Nick
—is going with you. He looks young. The Russians will think you’re just another pack of teenagers in a minivan.”

“Do we have a cover story?” Jack asked.

“I don’t suppose you’ll need much of one,” Gillett said, “but we can hammer that out.” He unfolded a map across the table. Aubrey recognized the city names from when they’d fled Seattle, just over two months ago. It felt like she was going back into the lion’s den.

THIRTEEN

“JACK, I DON’T LIKE THIS.”

Jack had been listening for Aubrey all night but knew she wasn’t getting a lot of privacy. The girls’ tent was a hive of activity, with soldiers coming and going from several different units. It was only now, as Jack heard the crunch of gravel under Aubrey’s feet and smelled the splash of Flowerbomb perfume on her, that he could focus on her voice—and that he knew she could talk privately.

“I’m outside,” she said, and then laughed. “I probably don’t need to tell you that. I went for a walk. I can’t sleep. I hope you’re awake.”

He wished he could answer her, wished that he had Tabitha’s powers.

He wished he and Aubrey were getting in a car in the morning and driving to Mexico, not into a potential combat situation.

“I don’t like that Tabitha’s in charge,” Aubrey said. “I know that’s petty. But she and I are the same rank, and I don’t know why Captain Gillett chose her to be second-in-command.”

Jack thought he knew. It was because Tabitha was the one giving the orders to Aubrey via telepathy. Supposedly Tabitha would be watching over everything. Not that it mattered. They had Sergeant Sparks—Nick—with them. He was really in charge. He’d be calling all the shots.

“But that’s not the worst thing,” Aubrey said. “I’m supposed to clear a path for Rich to approach a Russian vehicle. What does that mean? Shoot people while I’m invisible? That doesn’t make me a soldier—it makes me an assassin. A cold-blooded killer. That’s not what I agreed to.”

It had troubled Jack, too, but Aubrey was leaping to the worst possible scenario. Ideally, she could just cause commotion on one side of the roadblock—spill a little gas, start a fire. Or puncture the tires on a truck and get the soldiers working on repairing them while Rich snuck in from the other side. It would be dark, and hopefully the guys manning the roadblock would have too much to deal with to notice Rich and Josi.

Aubrey had stopped now, no more rocks crunching under her feet. She let out a long, slow breath that sounded like it had a little shiver to it. It was almost Thanksgiving, and there was snow in the mountains between the camp and their target.

“Did we agree to this?” Aubrey asked, her voice quieter. “I mean, I know we said yes, but did we really know what we were agreeing to? Did we do this because we wanted to join the army, or did we do it because we didn’t want to be locked up in quarantine? I remember standing up and saying we’d join—we did it together—but why did we do it? Do you remember?”

He honestly didn’t. Maybe it was a surge of patriotism. Maybe he was thinking that they needed to protect their homes and families. They’d been shown pictures of everything the terrorists had destroyed—the collapsed bridges and the burned malls and the fallen skyscrapers. But was that why they had joined? In his heart, Jack wondered if he had done it to stay close to Aubrey. And he wondered if she had joined because she had nowhere else to go. Her father had sold her out when the army had begun searching for scattered teens during the initial roundup. Jack doubted if she’d ever go back to him.

“Ugh,” Aubrey said, and then laughed. “Sorry I’m so depressing. Maybe you’re sleeping and not hearing any of this and I’m just talking to myself. As if I didn’t already feel like a dork.”

She started walking again and Jack imagined he was walking beside her, holding her hand.

“Josi is doing better. A medic came and checked her out. Did you know they have medics who are assigned especially to the lambdas? They act like they have it figured out, although I don’t believe it. Do you know what advice he gave her? To keep her eyes closed whenever she could, to sleep a lot, and to avoid stressful situations. Seriously. We’re going to the front lines in an hour and she’s supposed to avoid stressful situations.

“Anyway, you probably need to sleep and not listen to me. I should be sleeping, but I figure I can do that in the van on the way.”

She paused for a long time, not walking or talking. Just standing still. “I can’t believe it’s starting again,” Aubrey finally said. “We’re going to see people die again, Jack. We might die. You might die.”

Jack closed his eyes and wished he could say something to her. Something comforting and soothing. Something to make everything better. But there was nothing. She was right.

She might die.

“I’m going to get in out of the cold. Sleep good, Jack.”

Jack drove the van, with Nick sitting in the passenger seat. They were on the interstate headed through the mountains. The clock on the dash read 3:15 a.m., and they hoped to hit a roadblock sometime around five.

There were thousands of cars on the other side of the median, all fleeing from the invasion, but the westbound lanes were empty. Occasionally they’d hit a roadblock of American forces, and Nick would give them the proper passwords and authorization to get them through.

None of them were carrying any official papers, and they’d all removed their dog tags and left them with Captain Gillett back at the base. They were spies. If they were found out, they could all be shot according to the rules of war. Jack didn’t know whether that thought gave him any more or less fear than their mission.

Nick turned the heat up. He was wearing a sweater and jeans. Everyone else had coats—all commandeered from a department store in Yakima.

“I bet you didn’t know this,” he said, staring out the front window, “but it gets cold as hell in Afghanistan. You always think about it as a desert, but those are some high frigging mountains, and the wind can blow like a son of a bitch.”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Jack said. He glanced in the mirror. Aubrey’s head was against a window and her eyes were closed. Only Rich and Tabitha looked like they were awake.

“Neither did I till I was in the middle of it. Fortunately you’re always walking—I spent five months going up and down mountains. Your hands get chapped, but your body stays warm.”

“And Green Berets don’t get cold,” Jack joked.

“Damn straight.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

Nick laughed. “You’re asking because I look like I just got out of junior high, right? I’m twenty-four. Started out as a grunt in Iraq and did that for four years before I went in for the Green Berets. Coldest decision of my life.”

“You seen a lot of action?” Jack asked.

“Depends on what you call
action
and how you define
a lot
. Are you asking if I’ve fired my gun much?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m just talking.”

Nick laughed. “I understand you’ve seen plenty of action for your short time in the army.”

“Plenty,” Jack said.

“Well, you’re going to see even more.”

“I know.”

Nick brought his foot up and put it against the dash, leaning back in his seat.

“He doesn’t seem worried,” a voice said. It startled Jack. He was so used to his hypersensitivity that he knew how sounds rang around in his ears, and this was different. It was a voice in his head—Tabitha.

“I can’t believe they’re sending in six kids and one soldier,” she said. “It’s suicide.”

It wasn’t suicide, Jack thought. He looked in the rearview mirror and met her eyes. Then he gave a small shake of his head.

“You’re saying it’s not suicide? Are you kidding? We’re unarmed, driving straight toward a roadblock that is specifically looking for people like us. There might even be Russian spy planes watching us right now.”

Going into a situation unarmed was their job. They were spies.

“You know,” she said, “not all lambdas are doing this. Not all of them are just going along with everything that the military is telling them to do, and getting in the middle of a fight when they’re totally unprepared.”

Jack wanted to respond. To argue. For starters, Tabitha wasn’t “totally unprepared.” She was a full private. She’d gone through basic training—or, the rushed lambda version of it. And more than that, she had volunteered to join the army. Just like the rest of them.

He looked at her in the mirror again and Tabitha’s blue eyes stared back at him. Even though it was dark in the van, he could see every bit of her face—every strand of hair and eyelash. She was smiling. Maybe so little that she didn’t think anyone could see it, but Jack knew faces. He knew how the muscles pulled around the lips and along the cheek, how tiny creases formed about the eyes and mouth, how the eyes dilated ever so slightly, how the teeth were revealed. He observed it all.

If they were really going into a suicide mission, why would she be smiling?

Jack’s first thought was that she was a traitor, like the lambdas he’d known before—the lambdas who had been terrorists.

But Tabitha wasn’t like that, he told himself. It had taken nearly all of their time at basic training for Jack to learn to trust people again, but he’d convinced himself he could. The terrorists had been hunted down. Even the army had stopped forcing the lambdas to wear the horrible bombs around their ankles—that was as close to a stamp of approval as Jack could get. The military believed the terrorists were rooted out. He had to agree.

“If we survive this,” Tabitha said, “then we should talk about it. I shouldn’t have brought it up when we’re getting ready for a mission.”

Brought what up? That lambdas shouldn’t be in the army? There was no point in talking about that. They were already there. Already assigned to a Green Beret ODA on the front lines of a war on American soil. There wasn’t anything else to talk about.

Jack glanced back at Aubrey. She was still sleeping, her lips slightly parted.

“She’s going to be all right,” Tabitha said, and Jack’s eyes darted to Tabitha’s face. “We’re the Trio, remember? She’s in good hands.”

Jack gave a slight nod in the mirror, and then focused on the road.

“She’s talked about you, Jack. She’s told me a million good things. How you used to hunt together back home. How you were always there for her. She cares about you a lot.”

He didn’t look back. He didn’t like that Tabitha could just get into his head, and he didn’t like that she was talking about Aubrey. It felt too personal. Too intrusive.

He focused on the street, staring at the road ahead of them. He could see the curves and contours of the mountain highway, far beyond the reach of the headlights. And he saw the seemingly never-ending line of cars headed in their direction, driving away from danger. Danger that he was driving into.

Jack thought back to Aubrey’s question. What had made them decide to join the army?

FOURTEEN

AUBREY WAS NUDGED IN THE
ribs, and she sat up with a start. She glanced first at Krezi, who had woken her, and then looked forward at the shapes appearing in the headlights.

She adjusted her glasses and saw three vehicles blocking the road: two large six-wheeled trucks and one single tracked vehicle that looked like a small tank with a fixed fifty-cal machine gun mounted on the low-sloping turret.

She recognized it from training, but the name escaped her.

Jack was continuing to drive toward the roadblock, but a Russian soldier was lowering his hand, signaling for them to slow.

A floodlight in the back of one of the trucks burst on and filled the van with light so bright she had to shield her eyes. The van slowed and came to a stop.

As they’d planned, Nick opened his door and stepped outside, causing immediate shouts from the Russians. Aubrey disappeared and slipped between the driver and passenger seats—pausing to kiss Jack on the cheek—then climbed out into the light.

They were well within one hundred and forty yards of the Russian vehicles, and she knew she was safe. Half a dozen Russians were pointing assault rifles at Nick, who had his arms up in the air and looked as nervous as a teenager facing down the Russian army was supposed to look.

“Get in your car!” a man called with a thick accent.

“We have to get to Seattle!” Nick called back, his voice shaking. “Our families are there. We have to get them out.”

“Get in your car!” the man shouted again.

Aubrey began walking toward the armored vehicle, watching as its turret pivoted and aimed at the van. This was it. This was the first real contact with the enemy. She felt a wave of nausea and fought to stay calm.

“We need to get into the city,” Nick continued, his voice pleading.

Aubrey walked past the soldiers to the back of the roadblock and looked behind it. She didn’t see any reinforcements. She raised a set of binoculars to her eyes and searched the darkness farther down the road, but there was nothing there either. That wasn’t saying much—it was dark and she’d just been blinded by the floodlight. She’d have to wait until the white spots disappeared from the center of her eyes.

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the bottle of Flowerbomb perfume. She sprayed it on her wrists, and then misted her neck.

The Russians were continuing to shout and Aubrey glanced back at them, getting a full count. There were eight men on the street, all pointing their rifles at Nick and the van. Another man stood up in the turret of the tracked vehicle—a BMP! That was what it was called!—and another man sat in the driver’s seat, his head sticking up through a hatch in the front. From what she remembered, there would be one more crew member inside, with passenger room for a squad of infantrymen. They were probably the guys out on the street.

There was a man standing in the back of one of the trucks, pointing the floodlight, but there were no soldiers in the cabs of either truck. So that was a grand total of twelve men.

She felt for the gun at her hip, and the grenades she wore on a harness inside her long coat. Just the thought of using them made her feel sick again.

The commander of the BMP was talking on a radio, saying something in Russian. In the street Nick was starting to get back into the van.

“Turn around!” the lead soldier ordered.

“Where are we supposed to go?” Nick said.

“
Mnyeh vsyo ravn.
I don’t care. Turn around and go.”

“Our families are there,” Nick said.

“Your family is on road,” the soldier argued. “You go back. Find them there.”

“We don’t know where to go.”

“You go back,” the soldier said again. “Or we shoot.”

Nick held his hands up higher and nodded. It really was a convincing performance, Aubrey thought. He looked young and innocent and totally intimidated.

He got back into the van, but didn’t close the door.

“You go,” the soldier said, taking a step forward.

“We’re trying to figure out where we’re going!” Nick said, his voice pleading.

“You go.
Idi ot suda!
You go.”

Nick pulled the door shut, and Jack started the engine.

Aubrey suddenly felt very alone. Jack turned the van around on the empty street and pulled away. He drove slowly, hugging the shoulder, and after a hundred yards or so he turned off the median and into the trees that separated the eastbound lanes from the westbound.

“Aubrey, you okay?” Tabitha’s voice appeared in her head.

“I’m good, Jack,” Aubrey said, relieved to be communicating with them.

There was a pause. “Jack says you’re okay. Can you give Nick a sitrep?”

“Twelve soldiers,” Aubrey said, watching the Russians. “I think the main cannon is still aimed at you guys, but I don’t think they can see you. No one is wearing night-vision goggles, and I can’t make out much of the van through the trees. But, you know, my eyes aren’t the best. Still, I think you’re okay to send Josi and Rich.”

The plan was for Josi and Rich to trek through the thick pines until they got close to the roadblock. Then Aubrey would create a diversion. What the diversion was going to be was something Nick was supposed to decide, and Aubrey didn’t like that she couldn’t make her own choice.

“Roger that, Aubrey,” Tabitha said. “Josi and Rich are changing clothes.”