Daniel Suarez - Freedom (TM)

“There, sir!” Priestly pointed.

Hollings trained a FLIR scope into the darkness through the bars of the wrought-iron gate. He could see them coming—a long line of cars racing in at over a hundred miles per hour, only a half mile out. He didn’t see any end to them. “Vehicles one thousand yards! Coming in fast!”

Gear creaked in the dark as hands clenched around pistol grips and straps were pulled taut.

“Give ’em hell, gentlemen!”

The roar of approaching engines took center stage now, echoing off the outer face of the estate wall. Suddenly a booming wall of sound hit their eardrums—followed by a shower of sparks and flame. Quickly followed by several more sharp explosions and the screeching of metal.

There were hoots in the ranks. “Yeah!”

A flaming, twisted piece of wreckage slammed into the wrought-iron gates, knocking one gate off its hinges and filling the grillwork with fire. Another flaming wreck slammed into the first, toppling the gates completely. They crashed down onto the highway dividers, sounding like a xylophone tumbling down a staircase.

“So much for our gates.” Through the flames Hollings could see that the claymores had taken out another dozen AutoM8s, which were burning in the ditches alongside the road.

But there was now a veritable roar of racing car engines. The flames revealed dozens more cars coming in from the night.

Just then a staccato boom echoed and tracer fire flicked out of the guardhouse—tracer rounds bounced off the distant prairie and metal wreckage. The M60 near Hollings opened up, too, as another sedan plowed through, smashing into the burning wreckage filling the arch and sending the whole pile over the highway dividers. The deafening crash washed over them, flaring into a brilliant fireball as the wreckage cartwheeled into the corner of the guardhouse. Another car blasted through. And another—which tumbled into the ditch alongside the road—partially blocking their field of fire to the gate.

“Jesus H. R. Pufnstuf Christ!”

“Priestly, put some arty on that road!”

“All I’ve got is static, Captain. Comm just went down!”

“Goddamnit, get on the landline in the guardhouse. And bring some fire down!”

Priestly saluted and took off at a run toward the guardhouse. Flames and tracer fire silhouetted him against the surrounding blackness.

Soldiers around Hollings were flipping up their night vision goggles. It was getting bright in the kill zone with all the flames.

A rocket streaked out of the guardhouse window and disappeared through the gate opening. A flash and boom echoed out there. Another rocket raced in from the foxholes and detonated against the stone wall. Rock splinters blasted back, dinging against the Humvee fenders as Hollings ducked down. “Damnit!” He stood back up and had a much better view of the road now. Good thinking. They could build a new fucking wall. . . .

A whole row of SAWs on his right opened up through the new opening—tracers screaming toward the sound of a NASCAR race approaching them out of the darkness to the north. Ricocheting off of unseen targets. Another rocket raced out of the guardhouse. An explosion. The burning wreckage of a car knocked down a section of wall to the left of the gate.

Machine-gun fire rattled from the extreme right and left flanks—out by the ends of the wall.

“Keep on them! Keep firing!”

Several more cars raced into the meat grinder, crashing into the barriers and pitching up. But by now the barriers were partially pushed aside or smashed in two.

He could see Priestly racing through the guardhouse door. The guardhouse was starting to catch fire now. Soldiers raced up, pulling pieces of burning wreckage away from the wall. A Humvee with the .50 caliber on top roared past Hollings and slowed near the wreckage—nudging it from the building.

“Good job, Lopez!”

Lopez waved and opened up with the .50 into the maw of the gate. The deep, slow booming of the .50 was a kettledrum section to the crackling of small arms fire.

Another rocket streaked out of the guardhouse and nailed a car on the approach road.

Hollings looked around at the carnage. Good lord . . . Flaming wreckage littered the prairie. It looked like something from Revelation.

The gunfire was crackling less intently now. Soldiers were changing drum clips. Barrels were smoking hot. Their field of vision was now the radius of light around the flames. Their night vision and FLIR scopes were useless so close to this light and heat.

But the sound of approaching engines only got louder—and there was a deeper one among them. Hollings stood up and shouted. “Truck! Incoming truck!”

Just then another two sedans smashed through the opening, and tracer fire ripped through them. One caught fire and tumbled over the foxhole nearest the road. Shouts and screaming. Nearby soldiers ran to help their trapped comrades.

“Goddamnit!” Hollings could see Priestly rushing out of the guardhouse, waving his weapon over his head. He sprinted down the road toward Hollings’s position among the Humvees.

“Captain! Phone line’s been cut. We have no communications! They must be—”

Just then a steel-plated concrete truck plowed through the wreckage filling the mouth of the gate—sending burning wreckage, concrete dividers, and stone blocks flying. It continued on into Lopez’s Humvee, crashing into it and plowing it through the front wall of the guardhouse. The truck followed, crushing the front wall and collapsing the rest of the structure under the weight of the enormous peaked roof. The nose of the concrete truck was buried under debris. Lopez, his driver, and the guardhouse team were gone.

“Goddamnit!” Hollings cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted. “Fall back to the Humvees! Fall back! Bring the wounded!”

Bullets ricocheted off the cement mixer as it caught fire, but now the gate opening was clear. Two more AutoM8s—domestic sedans—raced through the opening and quickly took fire from retreating soldiers. But the fire wasn’t intense enough to stop them and one locked on to Priestly in the road. Before he could duck into the nearby ditch, it nailed him at sixty miles per hour with a sickening whump and sent his body twirling off into the darkness beyond the flames.

“Lieutenant!” Hollings jumped onto his Humvee’s hood, as the grenade launcher Humvee roared past. “Fuck!”

It fired a burst of grenades at both AutoM8s, ripping off their fenders and roofs—quickly shutting them down.

Hollings jumped off his hood and shouted again. “Fall back!!! Fall back!!!”

Then he heard a howling engine coming up from behind. He turned just in time to see the gleam of a blade in the moonlight. It was the last thing he saw.

General Connelly ignored the alarms sounding all around him and beheld the central screen again, with its orbital view of Earth. He breathed deeply, savoring this moment.

A nearby analyst interrupted his reverie. “General. I’ve got direct confirmation that we are under attack by darknet factions. Kiowa choppers have been engaged by what appear to be microjet aircraft. We have at least one chopper down. There are thousands of enemy troops moving in from every direction.”

Connelly nodded calmly. To be expected. “It will do them no good. Do we have confirmation that all strike teams are in place and ready?”

“Affirmative, sir. All strike teams in place and ready.”

Connelly kept his eyes on the screen. The world lay before him. “On my mark.”

“Standing by.”

“Commence Operation Exorcist.”

“Commencing Operation Exorcist.”

It was a facet of the modern world that the most important events now occurred unseen by human eyes. They were electronic bits being flipped from one value to another. Connelly knew that somewhere in this command center one of the network analysts was now, with a single keystroke, destroying the data of almost 80 percent of the world’s most powerful corporations. It was a command script that sequentially invoked the Daemon’s Destroy function using as a parameter the local tax ID of thousands of Daemon-infected corporations throughout the world. The net effect was that they were using the Daemon’s own followers to destroy that data along with the backups. Sobol had warned his Daemon would do this if they tried to retake control.