Alan Roark stopped the Humvee right in the middle of the I-75 overpass. Horns immediately started honking from behind. He ignored them and finished cramming the rest of his Big Mac into his mouth. The things were so fucking good. He tried to drink from his Coke, but all he got was the bottom-of-the-cup straw sound.
Peter passed over his Coke, which looked half full. Alan smiled a thanks, then drank. It soaked the giant bite of Big Mac sitting in his mouth.
The horns kept honking.
Alan swallowed and let out a big ahhh.
“Dude,” Peter said, “you need to take smaller bites. Seriously.”
“True,” Alan said. “Just got carried away. You ready?”
Peter nodded. “That guy’s horn is bugging me. Maybe we should show him what it means to love instead of hate?”
“Chelsea would like that,” Alan said. “But we don’t have time. I’ll talk to him.”
He opened the door carefully and stepped out into the hazy gray light of a frigid winter afternoon. Cars whizzed by on the second lane, missing him by inches, kicking up fine sprays of dirty slush.
The guy kept honking.
Alan reached back in and grabbed his M4. He saw a French fry on the seat and popped it into his mouth. It was still warm—five-second rule and all. As he chewed, he walked to the Hummer’s back bumper.
The car behind him was an SUV. Who still drove those things? Pretty fucking tough on the environment.
The driver saw Alan, saw Alan’s gun.
He stopped honking.
Alan pointed the M4 and squeezed off a burst. The SUV’s windshield spiderwebbed, splattering with red from the inside.
Tires screeched. People saw him and swerved, not thinking about the fact that they were on an overpass and there was nowhere to swerve. Cars smashed. Metal ground. Plastic cracked. Glass scattered.
Alan turned and saw Peter leaning over the overpass rail, an AT4 rocket on his shoulder. A cone of flame belched out the back as a rocket streaked down, trailing smoke for two seconds before it hit a gray Chrysler. The car turned into a fireball rolling along at sixty-five miles an hour, spewing parts and burning tires as it went. Peter dropped the empty rocket tube, aimed his M4 and started firing on the panicked traffic below.
Alan would join him in a second, but first he had to take care of all the people suddenly stuck in their cars. In only ten seconds, the Eight Mile Road overpass was already shut down.
Alan pointed, squeezed off a burst, turned to the next target and repeated.
Murray Longworth hated the goddamn Situation Room. He’d had it, just had it. Maybe Vanessa Colburn was right. Maybe it was time for a new generation. Let the kids have the country—it was time for Murray Longworth to go golfing.
They’d killed the satellite, goddamit. They’d won. It should have been over, and now a wave of bad news so high he could drown in it. A sense of hopelessness, a feeling that no matter what you did, the enemy was going to keep coming, keep trying to kill you—it didn’t just depress him, it exhausted him.
Thirty-three soldiers dead at the Gaylord airport. Thirty-three so far, because some of the wounded weren’t going to make it. Ogden gone AWOL. The Exterminators unaccounted for. And now Detroit.
They had all gathered in the Situation Room; the Joint Chiefs, the secretary of defense, Tom Maskill, Vanessa. Gutierrez himself would be there soon.
The main flat-panel screen changed to a news helicopter’s shot of a highway. The bottom left corner of the screen showed a logo for Detroit’s WXYZ-TV. The bottom center of the screen read EIGHT MILE OVERPASS AT I-75. Hundreds of cars sat motionless on the three lanes heading north as well as the three lanes heading south. On I-75, cars had driven up the inclined shoulder, some stopping there, others rolling back down to land on their sides or roofs.
The traffic on the overpass itself looked much the same—motionless cars, smoke, flames and bodies sprawled everywhere. The only movement was near one green vehicle.
A Humvee.
Even from the high angle, Murray could see two men in fatigues. Wherever they moved, little puffs of smoke from automatic weapons soon followed.
The speakers suddenly played the sound that accompianied the image.
“…we don’t know who these men are or how many people are hurt. We can see bodies from here. The vehicle is army green, but there is no unit insignia.”
An air response was already on the way. A-10 tank killers from Selfridge would be the first to engage, then Apache attack helicopters. Murray had even scrambled Ogden’s squadron of four dedicated Strike Eagles—he just prayed he wouldn’t have to use any bombs on Detroit.
“Murray,” Tom said.
Murray tore his eyes away from the screen. Tom had a phone in his hand again.
“Dew Phillips on line two, said it’s mission-critical.”
Murray nodded, grabbed the nearest phone and hit line two as he looked back to the surreal carnage on the screen.
“Dew,” Murray said. “You okay?”
“Yeah, so is Perry, but a squad of Ogden’s men tried to kill us. They took out Baum and Milner. Perry identified the gate location—it’s in Detroit, and apparently it opens up at one-fifteen sharp.”
“We’ve got a lot of gunfire in Detroit,” Murray said. “Rockets, too. Looks like more of Ogden’s men. He’s AWOL, so he’s either dead or hiding somewhere and calling the shots.”
“We know,” Dew said. “It’s all over the news.”
“Where are you?”
“With Whiskey Company,” Dew said. “Two platoons in three Ospreys, headed for Detroit. We’ll be there in thirty minutes. We’ll set down, then Perry will find the gate.”
Murray popped four more Tums into his mouth and chewed. This couldn’t be happening. They’d had it won.
“Another one,” Tom called out.
“Dew, hold on,” Murray said. He looked at the screen. The bottom left corner of this one showed Fox-2 News. The center bottom of the screen read 8-MILE OVERPASS AT M-10 JOHN C. LODGE FREEWAY. The scene looked like a mirror image of the other, hundreds of cars piled up on the road, a Humvee on the overpass with soldiers firing away.
Nothing could get through that tangled mess of cars. Ogden was shutting down the highways into and out of Detroit.
Murray turned his attention back to the call. “Dew, if this is Ogden’s doing, what the hell is he up to?”
“Causing chaos,” Dew said. “Looks like he’s trying to block all traffic in and out. He wants a big perimeter with lots of civilians inside it so you won’t drop bombs if we find the gate.”
“Motherfucker,” Murray said.
“Are the other two DOMREC companies still at Fort Bragg?”
“They’re already on their way to Detroit,” Murray said. “They should land at DTW in about thirty minutes. I’ll also activate the Eighty-second Airborne. It will take them eight hours, but…”
His voice trailed off. He didn’t need to finish. If the gate opened and something came through, the Eighty-second would be the first organized unit to tackle it.
“I hear you,” Dew said. “One more thing. Sergeant Major Nealson said he saw at least two platoons of X-Ray Company at the airport this morning. They aren’t there now, and there’s only two squads accounted for—that means a platoon and a half has to be on the way to Detroit. Roughly forty-five men. Get some birds in the air to take them out.”
“Take them out?” Murray said. “We don’t know those men are infected. We can set up a roadblock, test them. If they’re negative, we use them to go after whatever Ogden has in Detroit.”