Deep Thaw (Denver Burning Book 3) Read online

  Ten minutes later, he saw the roadblock.

  It was a hurried job, just two large passenger vans pulled nose-to-tail across the highway in a place where a snarl of dead vehicles had already blocked half the road. Standing in front of the vans stood two armed men, and even from a distance Carson could see their aggression in the way they held themselves, and in the weapons they carried. Both cradled AR-15’s in gloved hands. The rest of their outfits were a practical advertisement of every paramilitary magazine and military surplus store. Combat fatigues in sand-and-spinach digital camo, black boots, sunglasses and watch caps. Their belts were heavy with ammo and gear. They looked like members of the militia movement or possibly ex-military mercs.

  Whoever they were, they must have had something to do with whatever was going down—how else would they have gone into action so quickly after the power went out?

  The men had stopped an old minivan, the only other vehicle in sight that was still running. One man stood to the side, weapon ready, while the other screamed at the driver to exit her vehicle.

  Carson slowed and pulled to the side, unsure if he should approach or turn around and find an alternate route. He couldn’t afford a time-consuming detour, and for all he knew the other roads were all blocked as well. He also didn’t want to get involved in an altercation that would compromise his ability to get to the cabin.

  But his orders were clear. Nothing, repeat nothing, was to impede his exit from the city and his arrival at the cabin. These men’s actions were clearly outside the law—they had no badges, no patches, no official vehicle.

  Carson watched as the man screaming the orders pulled the woman roughly from her minivan and gave her a shove that sent her stumbling into the bar pit. His partner held her at gunpoint while he climbed behind the wheel of her vehicle.

  Now Carson’s mind was made up for him.

  He gently slid the Sig out and clicked off the safety. Left hand on the wheel. Right hand holding the Sig, reassuringly solid, resting on his lap. Muzzle pointed forward and to the left. He nudged the Jeep back onto the pavement and toward the barricade.

  He was twenty yards away when the man guarding their victim looked up and saw the approaching Rubicon. He hustled forward, AR-15 coming up. “Get back! Get back!” he shouted.

  Carson steadied the Sig on his Jeep’s side mirror and fired three times. The first shot went wide, but the second hit a leg and the third snapped the man’s head back. He crumpled, instant rag-doll, and Carson put both hands on the wheel again and gunned his engine.

  The Jeep leaped forward and closed the ground between him and the minivan. The man inside had just put a foot out onto the ground to exit and confront Carson when the Rubicon slammed into the back of the van, sending it hurtling forward into the barricade. Carson’s seatbelt instantly locked and he was pressed against it. He put up an arm to shield his face. Both vehicles slid right through the barricade, pushing the two vans apart and leaving an opening.

  When Carson looked up, he saw that the man in the minivan had crumpled and fallen out of the vehicle to the pavement. Without getting out of his Jeep, he aimed his pistol at the man, who was still clutching a rifle and squirming. He fired once, the slug hitting near the man’s spine, and the squirming stopped.

  Only then did he put the Rubicon in park, look around and get out. He kicked the rifle away, hauled the man’s body out of the road, and beckoned to the woman. She was huddled in the bar pit, shaking.

  “Get back in your vehicle and keep going, ma’am. Don’t stop for anyone. Try to get to a safe place. This is not over, I’m afraid.”

  Confirming that the first man he’d shot was dead, he got back into the Jeep and rolled through the barricade, then accelerated away without looking back. It was a distasteful thing, and he felt like anything but a hero leaving the scene like that. But he had a job to focus on, and at least he’d been able to clear the roadblock. It might save a few lives before the day was out.

  As he drove on, Carson tried the radio; all static. He turned it off and focused on the road, looking for more barricades, but there were none. Apparently he was outside the net, if there was a net. Carson’s instincts were on high alert and he sensed more than understood that this was more than a simple grid-down event. If every exit from Denver was road-blocked and guarded by gunmen, then the situation was exponentially more serious – not a single-strike terrorist act, like a suicide bomber or gunman, but more large-scale. Organized. Planned. With a definite objective.

  But he could not deviate from his own objective to find out. The orders were very clear: in the event of this kind of alert from Deep Thaw, he had to get out of the city as soon as possible. There were other scenarios, where he remained in the city and worked from the inside out, but they had a different alert system. This one was a mandatory beeline for the hills. Which meant that there was a reason he was being sent out of a population center.

  Perhaps Denver was about to be hit in a way that required he be outside it, free and alive, with assets at his disposal. That way he could return on his own terms and timing, rather than be stuck inside the city and possible victim to whatever large-scale disaster was imminent. He pressed down on the gas pedal, hitting an open stretch of road without cars or people walking on the shoulder, and let the speedometer needle climb.

  The fact that he’d been activated at the same time his area sustained an EMP, if that was the source of the blackout, was troubling enough. But the gunmen took it in an unsettling direction. Ordinarily, local law enforcement would be able to handle a couple of shooters on the highway, even a whole militia uprising or terrorist action. For Deep Thaw to activate its agents meant that something worse was happening, something outside the police’s ability to respond, possibly even outside the military. Obviously this went way beyond what he’d encountered so far.

  Carson decided to take time for a quick look. He was approaching a rise, and when he crested it, he pulled to the shoulder and looked back at the city.

  What he saw confirmed his worst fears.

  The whole greater Denver area was a mess. Fires were burning downtown. The airport was especially smoky, and he spotted two separate plane crashes in the nearest suburb, long swaths of blackened, burning destruction. The highways were filled with stalled cars, and some of the busy streets he could see were in total gridlock, making it look like a bad L.A. commute during rush hour.

  For some reason, at that moment, he thought of Dana Ryan. Her face was clear in his mind, smiling brightly as usual. He wondered what she was doing, wondered how she was reacting to the chaos.

  Dana was his neighbor, a cute brunette who had been pursuing him romantically ever since she’d moved in by chance across the street. So far he had kept her at arm’s length, but the fact that she popped into his head at a time like this probably told him something important about her—or about him.

  Carson surveyed the scene a moment longer, face impassive, then drove on. Any lingering doubts he had about going back to help were smothered by his training and by the certain knowledge that in the months ahead, he would best serve his fellow citizens by remaining free, uninjured, and completely off-grid. Dana was on her own.

  Funny how guilty he felt, though, even though he had no earthly obligation to her or anyone else. They didn’t train you for that, did they?

  Carson kept going hard, as fast as his vehicle could safely operate, and an hour later he was deep in the mountains. He had turned off I-70 onto 40, then off again, north, on a dirt road. The sun was already down behind the peaks, and the air was cool. The shadows were soft blues and purples, each new vista was worthy of a framed print. Hard to appreciate it at the moment, though.

  Carson was coming around a long bend when his Jeep suddenly died. He braked hard, skidded off the shoulder, and came to a jarring halt in a field of lupine.

  Utter silence. Cool air. Smell of hot engine. Somewhere a meadowlark trilled in a liquid warble.

  Carson turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. Not a crackle, not a whine. He got out and went through some of the steps that had revived the machine earlier, but nothing got a response. Every electronic piece in the vehicle was fried, and there was no point sticking around. It was another five miles, at least, to the cabin.

  Carson grabbed his gym bag, dropped the keys inside, and started up the road. He was in good shape, it was a fine evening, and he was almost on location. All things considered, he was doing well. In a few minutes, he disappeared from sight around a bend.

  The Jeep engine ticked for a while, then was silent. A cool breeze rustled in the lupine, and the meadowlark trilled again.

  Summer had all but passed, and Autumn was coming on.

  Envelope 1: Activation Protocol

  Secure area upon arrival.

  Maintain minimal presence on site for 45 days following arrival.

  If area is approached by intruders, vacate area but remain close by.

  If unable to vacate (or if intruders take up residence on site), eliminate intruders and dispose of remains.

  After 45 days, follow instructions in Envelope 2. Do not unseal Envelope 2 until after 45 days have passed.

  Failure to comply with these orders will compromise mission parameters and may result in unacceptable outcomes.

  Chapter 3: Night Attack

  Carson woke.

  He lay still for a long moment, eyes staring at the ceiling. It was the middle of the night, and he did not know what had awoken him.

  The cabin was silent. Carson lay on a cot against the rear, eastern wall, next to a window. The cabin was one large room, except for a walled-off storeroom built of the same heavy logs as the cabin itself. It was a dark night with the merest sliver of moon, so sight was denied him and Carson could only listen, and smell.

>   A long minute passed. Carson slept with all the cabin windows cracked open, partly because the cool night air helped him sleep better, and partly for security reasons. He strained his ears. Outside, the deep silence of the mountains was unbroken. Even the breeze had died away.

  Silence. That was wrong.

  It shouldn’t be silent. Carson had been in residence a week now, and every night he fell asleep to the sound of the crickets, or whatever they were. Thousands of tiny nocturnal insects who filled the air with a ceaseless sound. It was soothing, really, once you got used to it. They kept it up most of the night, only really stopping during the cold snap in the hour before dawn. Carson looked at his watch, tritium numerals softly glowing. It was only one AM. The crickets should still be singing their little legs off.

  There was something out there. It was probably an animal, an elk or a small herd of deer. Perhaps even a bear.

  Even as he thought it, though, Carson knew it wasn’t an animal. In this business, you just couldn’t put any stock in coincidences. One week after a massive EMP attack hit Denver, one week after being activated, the crickets stop chirping in the middle of the night? You couldn’t just assume it was an elk and go back to sleep.

  One hand reached out in the dark to the low table at the head of his cot. The Sig was there, reassuring in the darkness. Carson kept it locked and loaded within easy reach at all times. With it in his hand he gained a surge of confidence.

  Then, outside, a twig snapped.

  It was a faint sound, coming from the northeast, and the only reason he heard it was because the normal racket from the crickets had ceased, and because his senses were on high alert. The sound was not repeated.

  Carson smiled to himself. It was a rookie mistake, but one he had made virtually impossible to surmount. In the dark you couldn’t avoid every single little twig or dead stick on the ground, especially since he had personally spent the first day at the cabin scattering the entire area, all around the cabin, with dry twigs. Armfuls of them; it had taken all afternoon. There was literally no way to approach without stepping on something and making it break.

  Someone was out there, approaching the cabin stealthily in the wee hours and now mentally cursing in rage and embarrassment at the blunder. The question was, would he hear more twigs breaking as well? One intruder was an issue, but multiple attackers would be seriously problematic.

  Carson realized he was jumping to the conclusion that whoever was out there was, in fact, an attacker. But he didn’t waste time feeling bad about being acutely judgmental and ever-so-slightly paranoid. Not in this line of work.

  He slipped on a pair of moccasins which he kept next to the bed. They had been waiting for him inside the cabin when he arrived, along with a variety of other all-weather clothing, everything in his sizes. He grabbed the Sig and, keeping to the shadows in the room, he quickly and quietly slipped across the cabin floor to the front, or western side.

  There was one window in this wall, next to the door, and it too was cracked open. He listened carefully, not for sound, but for its absence. And, yes, the crickets had stopped on the west side as well; they would not maintain their ceaseless nocturnal symphony in the presence of large, foot-clumping mammals who shook the ground.

  Carson quickly calculated his chances. At least two, probably more, assailants were approaching from at least two sides. Not terribly good. He would need all the surprise and violence of action he could manage. Since their intentions were almost certainly not benign, and since no one was supposed to know he was here anyway, it was easy for Carson to decide to engage with full lethal force.

  He had no time to prepare anything fancy, and he had no idea of the level of training or equipment his visitors possessed. If this was a professional kill team, they would have night vision goggles and would see him the instant he showed himself. Two could play at that game, though. Less experienced shooters might rely on flashlights, but either way the obvious choice was to approach as silently as possible, then attack with overwhelming force. If you had enough firepower, you could hose the whole structure down with high-velocity rounds, turning the cabin and its occupant into Swiss cheese.

  If the level of weaponry wouldn’t allow for that kind of approach, kicking in the door and blasting anything that moved was a pretty good option too. If your approach was quiet and the target was asleep, you could catch them in the utter panic and confusion of the first few seconds and blow them away. Carson didn’t mean to give his opponents such an easy time, but he knew how these kinds of raids were done and could predict their possible approaches.

  Either way, he needed to get away from his cot and be in a place where the first attack would not hit him. Carson decided to lie flat against the storeroom wall in the shadows, at an angle from which he could still cover the front door and window. After repelling the first attack, if he was still alive, then he would retreat into the storeroom. The cabin was built of thick logs, so the weak points were the door and windows. And the last place he wanted to go was the fatal funnel at the cabin’s only exit. All firepower would be concentrated on the door and the windows big enough to escape from.

  Carson slipped silently to his chosen place, stretched out on his belly, and aimed for the door. Several minutes went by. Then the porch creaked. A second later Carson heard the sound of the doorknob being softly turned. It was locked, of course, and the intruder on the porch quickly realized this. Carson tightened his arm muscles and began to squeeze the trigger slowly.

  There was a moment of silence, then the door crashed open from a violent kick. In the dim light, Carson could see a figure, aggressively hunched, filling the doorway and already moving forward. Carson fired twice at center mass and the figure staggered backward through the door and then disappeared as it fell off the porch steps.

  Carson was already moving, slithering across the floor like a giant sidewinder. He heard a shout outside, and then the night was shattered by rifle fire, an AR-15 by the sound. His front window shattered, spraying the room with glass. Another AR-15 opened up from the same direction, and Carson heard bullets whine and rip into the floorboards, filling the air with a micro-storm of dust, wood fibers, and shredded carpet.

  But by then he was in the storeroom, with reinforced, 12-inch thick log walls that would stop anything short of a .50 caliber, and he was pretty sure the boys outside didn’t have one of those. There were no windows in this room, so Carson rose to his feet. The thunder of the assault rifles outside continued unabated, and from the sound, he could tell they were using extended magazines; their rate of fire was extended long after it should have run dry.

  Carson shut the door, flipped on the battery lantern that rested on a shelf close to hand, and gazed with satisfaction at the M4 Super 90 semiautomatic shotgun propped in the corner. It was a lethal piece of ordnance, black and hideously practical, the Big Answer to bad things encroaching on your perimeter in the night. You had to hand it to the Italians; they could sure cook, and once in a while they threw out a nice gun like the Benelli M4. After strenuous testing, it had been adopted by the U.S. military and Carson had used it more than once in Afghanistan. Although technically a semiauto, in the hands of an experienced user it could fire so fast that it seemed fully automatic.

  He picked it up, checked its load, and switched off the lantern. He didn’t want a crack of light signaling his location when the men outside advanced again to the front of the cabin.

  In the darkness, he felt his way to the corner of the little storeroom and quietly lifted the heavy trapdoor that was set into the floor. Cool night air filled the little room, along with the smell of damp earth flowing from the open crawlspace under the raised cabin floor. He listened intently for a moment, and heard one shooter run dry, finally. Number two took up the slack, continuing a searching, suppressive fire which was demolishing the interior of the little cabin.