Jack Chalker - A War of Shadows

There was a phone installed, with a funny sort of gadget attached which they guessed was a scrambler circuit. All they knew was that there had been a note under it in computer typewriter characters telling them to call in to The Man at midnight each night. If there was no call, then it would be assumed that they had been taken. There was also a caution that any attempt to tamper with or remove the funny box from the phone circuit would trigger a nasty explosive charge.

Nobody wanted to touch it.

The next couple of days were spent just exploring the area. They had no orders or assignments, so they spent the time walking in the woods, doing light housekeeping, and discovering the shuttle bus, a standard yellow one, that made hourly shuttle runs between the state line and the county seat of Westminster perhaps twenty-five kilometers southwest. From there you could get regular busses to the other towns in the county and Greyhound to Baltimore, from whence you could get just about anywhere you wanted—if you had the proper papers to even board the big bus.

They had clothing and money and good fake IDs, so they weren’t too worried, but Suzy was the leader and she ran a tight ship. It was four days later, and all but one of their team had arrived, when they ran out of groceries. Sam volunteered to go, but two others were sent, and he went back to just relaxing, enjoying Suzy and the nice countryside, his conscience fulfilled. He’d tried and failed. Suicide was not in his makeup, not when life was like this.

The next day the phone in the house rang. It startled them; Suzy answered it, half expecting to hear a pitch for storm windows or something.

“This is 1-500-555-2323,” a clear announcer’s type voice told her. “Now, listen carefully, for this will only be said once. Your team is complete, I repeat, complete. The missing member was killed by security forces but did not have the opportunity to betray you. The things you will need and all instructions are buried in a chest in a grove approximately eight hundred meters due north of the house in the woods. It is marked by three white-painted stones, is about two meters down, and has been there since before the emergency. Understandably, the things are still the standard blue, so be careful when transporting them to the house. A single stray individual seeing people carrying blue anything will get you lynched. Anticipating this, materials in a subbasement of your house have been left to change the material into more unobtrusive form, along with instructions. When the transfer is completed, call this number again and report it so. The subbasement is reached by trapdoor under the coal pile. That is all.” There was a click and the line went dead. She stood there a moment, thinking, while the others clustered curiously around. It had obviously been a tape recording.

Sam and two of the others who were muscular made their way into the woods with shovels found in the basement. It didn’t take them long to find the spot; they’d been walking the woods anyway, and most had casually noticed the stones.

“Something’s really fishy here,” Sam told them.

One of the others, a younger man who said his name was Carl, looked up. “What do you mean?” he asked.

Sam pointed to the ground. “Anything buried here was buried a hell of a long time before the emergency. A year at least. Look at the trees and shrubbery. I just find it hard to believe that this could be so well advanced.”

The others shrugged. “So? It was ’cause here it is. Come on! Let’s get digging! If we don’t find it before dark we’ll be chopping each other’s heads in.”

It was at least two meters down, a huge coffin-shaped box four meters long and over a meter deep. It even had handles on it, but it took them until well after dark, with some of the others holding flashlights, before they cleared all obstructions away and brought it up. It took ropes and their combined muscle power to do so; the box weighed over 450 kilograms.

They opened it anxiously but carefully. The clamps had almost all rusted shut and took some nervous taps with a hammer to undo. Finally the top came off.

Inside, packed in cotton, were six baby-blue cylinders with complex valves and nozzles at one end sealed with a waxy compound. To some they looked like single tanks, but they also resembled fire extinguishers with rounded bottoms.

And they were heavy. They weighed almost fifty kilos each.

Also in the box there was an ordinary looking attaché case with a ten-digit touch lock. It was also heavy, but not extremely so, and Suzy took it while the three stongest men each gingerly lugged a blue cylinder back to the house guided by a companion with flashlight, then went back for a second. There was an anxious moment when one was dropped, but there seemed to be no damage and no hissing sounds. They kept going.

Finally they had the worst job. “We have to rebury the box,” Sam told them. “Even if somebody came by and saw a freshly dug area, which is unlikely, they’d hardly be willing to dig all that way. If we tamp it down and there’s one decent thunderstorm, there’ll be no more signs.”

The others protested, but Suzy agreed completely, and she was the boss.

It was past two in the morning when they finished, dead tired.

Suzy made the call. To her surprise there seemed to be a live voice on the other end, not a tape. She could hear the breathing. It wasn’t the same voice, but they were all being distorted anyway, she knew. “The combination is the complete phone number,” the voice told her, then hung up.

She went to the briefcase. Suspecting some kind of explosion if she tried and goofed, she’d just left it there. The cylinders were all in the kitchen, stacked like wood and covered with a blanket, and the others had all gone exhaustedly to bed after eating.

She punched the number on the keys. One-500-555-2323. There was a click and the lid opened as if on a pneumatic riser.

Inside was a foam rubber insert covering the whole inside. Spaces had been cut out, and small bottles, three of them, holding some clear liquid, were strapped in. A cutout below them held a wooden box which, when opened, revealed two dozen wrapped and sealed disposable syringes, some cotton, and a sealed plastic bottle of alcohol. When she took the box out she saw that under the rubber was a thick Manila envelope, and she reached under, having to pry it up where the foam rubber had stuck, and got it out.

The next morning, when they came downstairs for breakfast, a Suzy too excited to sleep greeted them.

“Guess what!” she said excitedly. “We’re the ones who get to hit Washington, D.C.!”

Sam Cornish’s heart sank. “When?” he asked her. “On the sixteenth,” she said.

He looked with the others at the wall calendar. It was September ninth. A week from today, he thought. Seven more days.

Now what do you do, Sam Cornish?

The phone in Braden’s den rang. Alton got it, talked for a few minutes, then called the self-exiled security man.

“Yes, sir?” he said crisply.

“The Edelman team is on to you,” The Man told him. “They raided Martha’s Lake and have everybody out. They know the whole story. It will only be a matter of time before they’re there now. I had hoped for six more days, but we can live with this. Give O’Connell the treatment, get her out, then you get out, fast.”

Braden nodded absently, fear creating a knot in his stomach. “Yes, sir. At once.” Suddenly he heard a whirring of rotor blades and panic rose. “I hear a chopper now. Do you suppose…?”

“That’s for O’Connell, from me,” The Man assured him. “You get out by boat. Time is short. Move!”