Assault on Cheyenne Mountain (Denver Burning Book 4) Read online

  “You ever played with one of these before?” Brunson asked the pilot.

  “Not hands on,” Khalil admitted, “but I’ve seen it a million times.” He checked the ammunition link belt and fumbled with the handles for a moment.

  Suddenly the gun emitted an ominous whine as the barrels spun up and a stream of fire spurted from the barrels. A trail of tiny craters appeared across the parking lot, sending bits of asphalt flying into the air. Then the barrels spun down.

  “Whoa!” Khalil yelled, and then burst into laughter. “Wasn’t quite ready. Okay, let’s try that again.”

  “Focus, Khalil!” Carson said. He worried about the man’s grip on reality after so long in prison.

  Khalil aimed the gunsight on the building’s door and then got the barrels rotating again. When they fired this time, the door was battered with a stream of rounds so rapid-fire that they couldn’t distinguish individual impacts. The door dented, buckled, and then crumpled inward, torn from its hinges and sheared into pieces.

  Khalil kept firing. He was laughing raucously and standing up off the seat.

  “Cease fire!” Carson yelled at the top of his lungs. Khalil finally cut the gun and stepped down from the helicopter to inspect his handiwork.

  “Whoo!” he crowed. “That did it, huh? How about that! I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “I’m glad we could help you check something off your bucket list,” Carson growled. “Now stay focused. Let’s get what we came for and get out of here. This shouldn’t take long.”

  “If he didn’t destroy everything inside,” Dana added.

  They stood before the entrance and Carson flicked on a flashlight he’d brought from the stockpile at his house. The beam illuminated a large room. They all stepped inside and saw that it was almost completely filled with desks and office chairs, wrapped in sheet plastic. A printed paper sheet read “Office Furniture Repository 3A”. Several of them lay in pieces on the ground, torn apart by the minigun.

  Dana was incredulous. “Chairs and desks? What is this?”

  “Cover,” Carson said. He examined the floor with the flashlight, finally calling Brunson and Khalil over to help. Together they pushed a couple of desks aside, revealing a narrow staircase leading down. “This place is not just another federal data routing facility. There must be some very deep secrets hidden here.”

  It was a long staircase, Carson realized, which would take them far underground.

  “Brunson, will you stay up here and watch out? If anyone approaches the chopper, throw a chair down the stairs. That will alert us and we’ll come to back you up.”

  Brunson nodded and took up a position by the door with his rifle. Carson led the way down the staircase with Dana and Khalil in tow. A metal railing aided their descent. The flashlight’s beam played off the concrete walls, making eerie shadows.

  At the bottom was another door, heavy duty with a keypad and keyhole that looked perfectly smooth, made for the electronic key Coulter had taken from Carson at the Air Force base. Fortunately the door was already cracked open.

  “That’s one stroke of luck, since I’ve got no key,” Carson said. He stepped forward and had just put a hand on the door to push it open when Dana grabbed his arm in an iron grip. “Stop!”

  She was staring down at a thin wire stretched across the door way at foot level, revealed in the flashlight’s dancing beam. It ran between two small bundles attached to the wall at each side of the doorway, covered in duct tape. They were nearly impossible to see in the gloom at the bottom of the stairwell, and were only noticeable with the flashlight aimed right at them.

  Carson felt cold sweat trickle down his back, and he slowly stepped back from the door. He looked at Dana, realizing just how deeply she had changed over the last several months. Now she was far more alert and cautious than he was. “Dana, I am really, really glad you came with us.”

  She smiled nervously at him.

  They studied the trap carefully and found, after gently peeling back some of the tape, two fragmentation grenades. The wire was looped between them in such a way that, when pulled, the grenades’ fuses would go. Anyone standing at the bottom of the stairwell would be enveloped in a cloud of shrapnel and concussive force that would completely obliterate them. The door had been left open to encourage intruders to proceed directly through the trap without stopping to mess with the lock.

  “Khalil,” Carson said, “please go up and tell Brunson not to throw anything down the stairs. That was a very foolish idea.”

  Khalil left, and Dana and Carson cautiously pushed the door open and stepped over the wire to enter the room. It was filled with large columns, and each column held several boxy structures. Carson peered around at them with the flashlight.

  “What in the world is all this?”

  Dana stepped forward. “Those are hard drives, Carson,” she whispered. The dark room echoed with every little sound. “Massive computer hard drives. We had a data storage center like this at work.”

  Some of the data towers had been blasted, riddled with what looked like small arms fire. The floor was littered with empty brass. Carson picked one up.

  “Nine millimeter. From a submachine gun, or several of them. Someone had a party in here, hosing down those drives so they’d be destroyed beyond repair.”

  “Wow, that must have been loud.” Dana was still whispering.

  “But why did they hit some, but not all of the drives?” Carson examined two of the towers that were blown apart, labeled 1051A and 1051C. The untouched drive between them, 1051B, sat silent and cold.

  Brunson and Khalil came down the stairs, and Brunson set about disarming the trap.

  “Didn’t you ever take apart one of these during your time in the Marines?” he asked Carson. “They’re real simple. The original IED.”

  “So what is this place?” Khalil asked. “Some kind of supercomputer?”

  “No, a data repository,” Carson replied. “A dumping ground for massive amounts of information.”

  “Oh, so this is where the NSA stores all our emails and phone calls. Let’s smash it up.”

  “Somebody already did, at least some of the drives,” Carson pointed out. “But I have a hunch it’s more than a record of the public’s communications, though. Someone went to great pains to hide this place. Let’s poke around some more.”

  They spent the next fifteen minutes searching the place, looking for labels or paperwork or any clue to the contents of the destroyed drives.

  Dana beckoned to Carson. “Look at this!”

  On the back side of one of the data towers there was a secure lockbox set into the base near the floor. It had a keyhole like the one at the door, but it was already slid open an inch. A metal plate label affixed to the lockbox said “Data Backup 905T4 – Do Not Remove”. The box was empty, aside from two cables protruding through the back that had apparently fed power and a data connection to the missing device.

  Despair washed over Carson, and he stood up. “Well, that’s where 905T4 was kept. Now Coulter’s got it.”

  Brunson came over. “Took care of that booby trap,” he said, holding up the grenades to show them. “No problem. We’ll just add these babies to our little arsenal.”

  “Good job. Unfortunately we’re too late to get anything useful from this place,” Carson said. “The data’s gone, the drives are wrecked. Now we have to figure out where Coulter went from here.”

  “But why did they set the grenade trap at the door?” Khalil asked, stroking his ragged beard. “If they wanted to blow this place up, they could have just tossed the grenades in here and made a lot more of a mess.”

  Brunson looked at him. “You’re right, Khalil. They must have wanted to leave the place intact, but stop anyone that tried to get in. That’s why the trap was out in the stairwell and not on the inside of the room, where they might have damaged the remaining drives.”

  Carson stroked his stubbly chin. “So maybe there’s still something to be gotten out of t
he good drives. Maybe even enough to reconstruct what was on 905T4.”

  “Sure,” Khalil said, getting excited again. “All we need is a data expert, one of those guys that can extract bits and bytes from a broken drive. A whiz kid from some local community college.”

  The others looked at him, standing in the darkened, half-destroyed basement, several months since the last computer screen lit up anywhere in the country. The suggestion struck the other three as so ludicrous that they burst out laughing.

  “My old roommate could do it,” Khalil said defensively. “He was a computer genius, resurrected my laptop when it failed.”

  Dana chortled. “To do that, he would need electricity, and time, and tools, and a safe place to work. We have none of that, Khalil.”

  Brunson agreed. “The reign of computer nerds is over, man. Your roommate is probably slaughtering hogs now, or digging irrigation ditches.” He started walking back to the doorway. “I’d better get upstairs and check on the chopper.”

  The others looked around one last time for any clues to what Coulter might have had in mind after taking the backup drive, and then left, eager to be clear of the subterranean data vault.

  At the top, Brunson stopped them, motioning for silence.

  “General Tamare is here,” he whispered. “Just pulled up with twenty or thirty troops in Hummers. They followed us!”

  Chapter 7: Change of Plans

  The general’s troops had surrounded the helicopter and were taking up positions so they could concentrate fire on the doorway. Peeking out from the shadows inside, Carson saw three Humvees with fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on swivel turrets and manned by gunners standing in back. There was also a covered troop transport truck and two civilian pickup trucks. Each had soldiers by it that looked lean and a bit tattered, but still grim and professional. There was no way out of this.

  “Come out with your hands up,” came General Tamare’s voice. He managed fine without a bullhorn, cupping his mouth with both hands. “Do not resist or we will open fire.”

  “I didn’t know they had Humvees,” Khalil said.

  “Yeah, they got those a while back from the soldiers that rolled in from Pueblo,” Brunson said. “What I want to know is how they found us so fast. Could there be a tracking device on the chopper?”

  “There’s no GPS tracking anymore,” Khalil said, angry and confused at their predicament. “Maybe they were already up north here and they saw us fly by. Doesn’t matter, we’re royally screwed either way.”

  There was no other way to get out of the building, and with the Humvees the soldiers could run down anyone on foot in seconds. It was over.

  “Okay, we’re coming out,” Carson shouted. “Hold your fire, we’re leaving our guns inside.”

  He shrugged an apology to the others and led the way out the door.

  No sooner had he gotten one foot outside when the Humvee nearest the chopper suddenly erupted in flame. There was a massive concussion from the explosion, driving the nearest soldiers into the dirt, and several were felled from flying debris and shrapnel. Instantly, the entire area erupted in gunfire, lots of it. Carson stumbled back inside and crouched on the floor.

  “What the—”

  Brunson peered outside and then ducked back in. “Somebody’s attacking the soldiers! They’re in the trees up the hills to the west.” He held up the two grenades he’d removed from the trap. “Maybe we should give them a hand.”

  Outside, soldiers were running, screaming, attempting to return fire, but the assault was so sudden and so well-coordinated that effective resistance was impossible. The soldiers had assumed they were the ambushers, with their quarry pinned in the building. They had no cover from the fire coming down out of the trees.

  Several of Tamare’s people turned in one direction, trying to get behind the building, but they were hammered by gunmen already at the corner. Brunson pulled the pin from one of his grenades and rolled it along the ground toward the cluster of troops caught in the open.

  “Not the chopper! Don’t hit my chopper!” Khalil shrieked.

  The grenade exploded, taking out three soldiers and showering the area with asphalt. Then Carson saw a rocket-propelled grenade streak out from some junipers to the east. The missile hissed in hungry and fast, lighting up another Humvee, which heaved into a clumsy roll through the sagebrush at the side of the parking lot, littering the ground with fire. It seemed that the soldiers who had surrounded the building were now surrounded themselves.

  The third Humvee, with Tamare inside, bounced onto the road and tore off to the east as fast as it could go, engine screaming. Carson jumped to his feet, grabbing wildly for his rifle to bring fire on the escaping Tamare, but the wall of the building mere inches away from his face suddenly chipped and whirred in a blur of supersonic grit as it was peppered by a hail of automatic fire. He hit the deck again, and when he finally was able to scramble to his knees, Tamare was out of range.

  Tamare’s men, however, were not so lucky. Abandoned by their commander, they fought bravely, desperately, but futilely. Too many had been killed or injured in the initial barrage, and the survivors were overwhelmed with concentrated, accurate fire from several directions at once, all from behind good cover. They were shadows among the trees, but it was hard to even pick out a target.

  Carson and his team grabbed their weapons from where they’d been dropped in surrender and added their own dose of medicine, pouring bullets out from the doorway into the parking lot. Carson lined his sights up on one big sergeant who was valiantly attempting to direct a SAW team toward a likely target. He squeezed the trigger, felt the rifle buck hard against his shoulder, and saw the sergeant go down. He felt a stab of shame; the man was an American soldier, but he had chosen the wrong side and this sudden battle was Carson’s last chance at survival and freedom.

  Within seconds, it was all over. Of the thirty soldiers who had arrived with Tamare, nearly all were dead. The few who had not escaped in Tamare’s Humvee were down with wounds, most serious enough that they died within minutes. One was left that hadn’t been wounded seriously enough to bleed out in the near future, and he threw down his weapon and raised his hands.

  Carson and his team watched as the ambushers appeared, moving quickly. Several of them moved among the fallen soldiers, stripping them of gear and ensuring they were dead, and taking the surrenderer into custody. Six others jogged towards Carson and his team. They were led by a stocky, older man in overalls and a mossy-oak hunting coat. He sported a trucker’s cap on backwards, and his three-inch beard was twisted into two bunches with rubber bands.

  Carson motioned to the others to keep their weapons down. “We’re friendly!” he shouted. “Four friendlies in the building!”

  The bearded man nodded and stopped in front of the doorway. “I see you. Anybody shot?” he asked, chest heaving.

  “No. Thanks for the help.” Carson emerged with the others behind him.

  The man grinned. “My pleasure, believe me. Been tracking that general and his Humvees for a week now. Thought I had him this time.”

  “Was that you on the RPG?”

  “Yeah, we only had the two of ‘em. I picked the wrong pair of Hummers. Got disoriented in the smoke and dust, I guess. But we’ll get him next time.”

  Brunson shook his hand. “Jim Brunson, United States Marine Corps. Well, formerly. How did you know the general had us bottled up in here?”

  “Well, we were already setting up an ambush for the general when we saw your helicopter fly over. My scouts said Tamare’s column left the route that would take them into our trap and sped after you.”

  Brunson laughed. “It was his chopper. We stole it yesterday. I bet when he saw us go by it made the blood boil right out of his veins.”

  “That’s what we figured when we saw him recapture the thing and order you out of this building. We were watching him set up outside, and we decided the conditions were ideal to take him while he and his men were distracted with you and
the chopper, with their backs to us. Half his men are still back on the highway; if he’d brought any more soldiers than he did to this place, we wouldn’t have chanced it. But I’d say this all worked out great!”

  “Well, the general got away,” Khalil said, regretfully.

  “Sure, but we have his helicopter and three new trucks now,” the man grinned. “We can put that chopper to very good use indeed.”

  “What a coincidence.” said Khalil, giving the man the stinkeye. “So can we. And we had it first.”

  “We’ll sort that out later,” the man said. “For now, let’s get out of the open. That was an awful lot of gunfire, and we don’t want to be here if Tamare brings the rest of his men back this way.”

  “Where to?” asked Carson, dubious. He was grateful for their rescue, but he didn’t even know the man’s name yet.

  “That’s our little secret. I’m sorry, but for security reasons we’ll have to blindfold you. I know it sounds cheesy and old-school, but hey, these days everything’s old school.”

  “No!” Dana was furious. “We’re not going anywhere, blindfolded or not! Who does this guy think he is?”

  Carson shook his head, gauging the man with a firm gaze. “Let’s go with it, Dana. If these guys wanted to shoot us or take us prisoner, they needn’t have rescued us.”

  “That’s right,” the man said, beard splitting in a grin. “I don’t know who you folks are or what you were doing here, but if you stole the general’s chopper, I can already tell we’re on the same side.”

  “Well, what about the chopper?” Khalil asked. “I’m not letting it out of my sight for one minute. That machine is all I’ve got in this world.”

  “That’s a good question,” the man said, scratching under his overalls. “We can’t leave it here. And honestly, me and my boys wouldn’t mind a ride—it’ll cut a couple of hours off our trek back. Tell you what, I’ll waive the blindfold requirement if you’ll all swear to secrecy, and then you can fly us to my lair.” He gazed at the helicopter as if he’d just won a prize in a toy store.