Orson Card - Empire

Unless he’s a true believer in the cause. DeeNee certainly never gave a clue of her deep hatred of all things military and/or conservative. Then again, DeeNee kept it a secret by never talking about herself or her views on anything. Torrent talks all the time. Has it all been a lie? Starting when?

Not possible.

Okay, possible, but hard to believe.

And it’s not as though she could go and ask him. By the way, are you a treacher? Are you going to treach my husband’s loyal friends, these fine soldiers?

If he was part of the conspiracy, then he had performed brilliantly. He had fooled everybody. If he was part of the rebel movement, then part of his act had been to send out missions that led to the deaths of many of the rebel soldiers and the thwarting of many of their plans.

She might as well imagine that Cole and the others were part of the conspiracy too, and didn’t really kill anybody, but rather faked the battles and planted the evidence and…

That way lies madness. She knew better. She knew these guys, and how Reuben had met them, and there was no double-dealing there.

And Torrent was no doubt exactly what he seemed to be—a brilliant professor of history who had been entrusted with the chance to help shape history during a time of national crisis that he had nothing to do with causing.

But as she drove northward toward Gettysburg, she began to lay out her own plan. She wouldn’t wait—she’d get a Farsi speaker in Gettysburg to identify the notes from Torrent’s classes and translate them for her right away. Maybe she’d learn something from Reuben’s notes that would either set her mind at ease or give her leads to follow up, the way his PDA records had.

And she would research Torrent’s own life. Find out whom he knew. Who had taken his classes. Who had sponsored and attended his lectures. The press would be involved in exactly this research, but she knew something about the laziness of reporters, about their tendency to find only what they were already looking for. She couldn’t count on them turning up anything, whether it was there or not. She would find it herself.

Before they got close enough to Chinnereth and Genesseret to need to cut off cellphone use, Load briefed them all on what he saw during his first driveby. Both National Forest Roads 20 and 21 had been gated off because of the dam, with electronic keycards required for entry. But not road 48. “Which is odd,” said Load, “because it switchbacks up the mountain and 4820 cuts off and skirts around it, way above Chinnereth. Overlooking it. Nothing you do at Chinnereth wouldn’t be completely visible to somebody on 4820.”

“Doesn’t sound odd, if there’s nothing going on there except a couple of dams,” said Cole.

“Except that they had to build awfully high and expensive dams to contain the amount of water those lakes can hold,” said Load.

“Either they aren’t there,” said Cole, “or they think their concealment is so good they’ve got nothing to fear from being observed.”

“Or,” said Load, “they’ve got patrols up there to make sure nobody sees anything and lives to tell the tale.”

“So what do you think?” said Cole. “Go in at night, dark? Or still play tourist like we planned?”

“Your call,” said Load.

“Why me?” said Cole. “It’s our mission, not my mission.”

Load didn’t answer.

“We’ve all led missions.”

“You’re active duty,” said Load. “And you’re the one Rube picked.”

“He didn’t even know me,” said Cole. “Three days.”

“But we know you now,” said Load. “We voted you our abun.”

It meant “father” in Arabic, but it had come to mean “boss-man” among the Special Ops troops that went in-country in the Middle East.

Cole didn’t waste time arguing when he was only talking to one guy anyway. “I think we go in dusk,” he said. “Some daylight, but gone before we unload the truck. The seven of you come in with only two cars. We rendezvous low on 48. To unload the ordnance. We don’t want it to look like a parking lot, and we don’t want to try to take this U-Haul up a winding mountain road. You go in first, Load, and pick the spot, out of sight from the valleys with the lakes.”

“And you come in right before dusk?”

“With no lights, once I’m on the road.”

“Anybody asks you,” said Load, “you’re going up to Hager Lake and Jennings Falls.”

“With a truck full of furniture and dishes?” asked Cole.

“Tell them your friends have the fishing tackle and cameras.”

“My plan is not to get challenged,” said Cole.

“Go with that one,” said Load. “Better plan.”

Cole’s timing went well enough. The sun sank below the ridgeline fairly early, but there was still light in the sky when he found the entrance to road 48 and pulled off. Other cars were using headlights, but it wasn’t particularly odd that he wasn’t yet.

He was a little bothered by the sign warning about a dangerous, narrow, unpaved switchback road. But with any luck, he wouldn’t have to negotiate any of the tight turns.

He was half right. The truck ground along in low gear to the first switchback, and there was Load, greeting him like an old fishing buddy. But there was the tricky maneuver of going straight when the road curved, backing up the higher part of the switchback, and then making a scary little hairpin turn to get the truck pointing down the hill and the back of it pointing into the trees. Several times it felt like the truck was going to tip over, which would have been inconvenient. But finally it was done.

They used the last shreds of daylight to load the furniture and boxes off the truck, take out the weaponry, and conceal it in the trees. Then, with only one lantern inside the truck, and with a bit of cursing, they loaded all the furniture and boxes back onto the truck so it wouldn’t be so obvious to a curious forest ranger or rebel scout that the important stuff had been taken out of the truck and nobody cared what happened to the furniture.

Then, in the dark, they changed into their camo and put their civilian clothes in big Ziploc bags. They put on their vests and packs, loaded and hefted their weapons, and then started up the road, picking different spots to conceal their civvies and then memorizing the spots.

“Just in case we return alive,” said Arty cheerfully.

“Sometimes your sense of humor is actually funny,” said Benny. “I hope I’m there next time it happens.”

After that they were quiet, except for the occasional low click of the tongue to draw their attention to something—a turn, an impediment in the route. They stayed close to the trees. There was light enough from a sliver of moon to see where they were going, but that meant enough light for them to be seen. But they stayed with the road, since in the dark all they could do among the trees was crash around. Flashlights were out of the question. If there were sentries anywhere, flashlights would alert them like the blinking lights on airplane wings.

At the third switchback, a track led off to the southwest—road 4820. They followed it around the mountain for a little over a mile. In the stillness of the evening, they could hear a waterfall below them, though the trees were too thick for them to see down to the surface of the lake they knew must lie below them. Then there were a couple of switchbacks. When they came to a third one, they finally left the road and proceeded only a few dozen yards into the trees between the legs of the hairpin turn.

The ground sloped; they found the most level spot. Cole, whose alarm watch was already on vibrate, assigned Mingo and Benny to the first watch, Mingo upslope, Benny down.