He cleaned his weapons, cleaned the cabin, cooked, scouted, and then did it all over again. He missed reading terribly; the only books in the cabin were old field manuals and a Tom Clancy he’d read four times already. He bitterly regretted not bringing a few paperbacks in his gym bag. He resorted to closing his eyes and recalling whole passages from his favorite historical works, passages he’d read enough times to know by heart. He found himself dwelling mentally on the fall of Troy and on a few works from the Civil War. He wondered what parallels might actually be occurring in the world outside the cabin as he waited.

  Finally, at the end of six weeks, he arose early and unsealed Enveloped 2 to read his next instructions. It was a thick, security-lined envelope like the first, large enough to contain several full-size pages. But, as before, there was a single sheet inside.

  Envelope 2: Operational Protocol

  Assume operational status. Leave secure location clean of all traces.

  Proceed directly to 101 Bonner Drive, Longmont, CO and retrieve data storage unit designated 905T4 using attached key. Deliver 905T4 unit to any U.S. two-star or higher in Colorado Springs or Cheyenne Mountain.

  Secondary objectives:

  Help secure Federal building on 8000 East and 36th Avenue Denver, containing local FBI offices. Assist agents there for up to 48 hours with emergency tasks.

  Locate and eliminate local paramilitary leader R. Foley Masters. Intelligence indicates Masters and his group may use a state of emergency to challenge government authority in the region. Last known residence: 41 S. River Road, Pine CO.

  Assist state and/or federal authorities to secure all electric power plants in the greater Denver area if control has been lost.

  Once primary and secondary objectives are complete, attempt restoration of functional government in your area, and facilitate link-ups with other areas.

  Pursuit of secondary objectives cannot compromise fulfillment of primary objective. Avoid unnecessary contact with military/paramilitary forces and civilians. Limited civilian and military casualties are sanctioned as necessary for operational success, but all collateral damage is discouraged and may be disavowed under later scrutiny.

  That was it. There was a small electronic key fixed to the page, which he pulled off and examined. The number 905T4 was engraved in the black plastic of its handle, and there were grooves in its tip for making an electronic connection with some kind of device.

  Now he had his marching orders, such as they were. Carson collected all his equipment, cached what he could not carry, and cleared the cabin of anything else that would be of interest to anyone venturing this far into the mountains. Then he drove away in the SUV left him by the kill team, and he didn’t look back. His memories of the place weren’t fond ones.

  Six weeks had wrought significant changes to the mountains around Denver. Every deciduous tree had flamed suddenly into red, orange, yellow, or burnished brown. The air was crisp, clear, cold, the sky a dark blue dome peppered with cirrus clouds. It was a perfect day for a drive, windows down, enjoying some of the most beautiful country on the planet.

  For an hour or so, he was almost able to forget everything and just exist as a man cruising through the Rocky Mountains. He imagined Dana Ryan on the seat next to him, her brown curls framing a full face with pouty lips. She was his kind of woman in all but her infuriating attitude that no one, least of all Carson himself, should ever be alone for more than five minutes at a stretch. She was a social butterfly and had kept the cul-de-sac buzzing with game nights, dinner invitations, and block party barbecues ever since moving in.

  Carson hadn’t played ball, though, partly because it might have interfered with his professional duties and partly because it wasn’t in his nature. Dana had taken it as a challenge and gone after Carson with enthusiasm. He remained courteous and, he had to admit, a little mysterious, which probably made him even more irresistible to the girl. The weekly back and forth had become almost a game between them, Dana jonesing for a date and Carson staying just friendly enough to avoid hurting her feelings, but never taking the bait. He had rarely returned from one of his business trips without finding a friendly note or a plate of cookies on his doorstep.

  Again he wondered where Dana was now and how she was faring. He wondered if he would run into her at some point in the weeks to come, now that he was operational and might end up revealing a little more of what it was he did for a living. Would she be impressed?

  It was an idle but enjoyable daydream. Easy to daydream of her. Too easy; it was a little late now to be thinking of socializing with a female, however charming. Where might he be now if he had encouraged her instead of pulling back every time they were together? The thoughts nagged at the part of him that wasn’t a steely-eyed warrior fighting the American apocalypse.

  Interstate 70 presented a rude wake-up call the moment it came into view around a bend. Littered with dead and abandoned cars, the stretch approaching Denver had to be navigated carefully. Just a little way on Carson passed a tractor-trailer rig, a livestock hauler, with several dozen pig carcasses rotting in the back. Why the driver hadn’t let them out, Carson couldn’t guess, and they had obviously died and begun to decompose soon after the EMP hit or scavengers would have looted the truck for meat. As it was, even five or six weeks after their probable death, the rotting pigs stank badly enough that he nearly vomited out the window as he drove past, and couldn’t get the smell out of his mouth and nose for several minutes afterward.

  The closer he got to Denver, the more signs of trouble he saw. There were people on the road, here and there. Some dodged off the road into the brush when they saw him; others ran towards him, screaming for help and waving their arms. He drove past everyone, ignoring the pleas for food, medicine, anything. It took some doing, and he found himself cursing and gritting his teeth in frustration.

  He left I-70 and approached the city on Highway 74, following the twisty smaller road as it looped its way towards Denver. He hoped to avoid the attention a grand entrance that a running vehicle on the freeway would attract. He also recalled the roadblock and sensed that the interstate would be a riskier vector with fewer places to hide the SUV if it came to that.

  Just before Morrison, he turned off into the hills on a dirt road, stopping in a grove of junipers and turning off the engine. The country between this location and Denver was all open sagebrush, dotted with low ridges, hills, and scattered juniper. No real cover. Lots of parks, country clubs, golf courses, rolling foothills. This was his last real cover before approaching the city itself. He didn’t think anyone had seen him stop, and didn’t plan to be long.

  He looked carefully around, selected a hill, and climbed it, keeping just down from the skyline. It was a warm day for early autumn, and he was sweating freely by the time he reached the top. He found a small copse of scrub maple and burrowed into it. When he was settled, Carson took out his binoculars, a very large, expensive pair, and began to examine the South Platte River Valley for the first time since he had left it.

  He took a long swig from his CamelBak water bag, wishing the shade of the little scrub maple grove he was laying in could reduce the ambient temperature as well as ward off the sun. Sweat trickled down his unshaven cheeks.

  Much had changed in the vista below during the intervening weeks. It was bad, worse than he’d expected.

  Smoke hung like a pall over the city, shimmering and blurring in the heat waves. Several fires still burned in different districts, both downtown and in some of the suburbs. The air was brownish and hazy. As the wind shifted, a bland reek seemed to filter up from the valley and smother him.

  The roads were junkyards. Tens of thousands of vehicles sat as they’d been abandoned when the second EMP hit, the same one that had crippled Carson’s Jeep. Most drivers hadn’t bothered to push their vehicles to the side of the road, so every street he could see from his vantage point appeared to be a hazardous, chaotic obstacle course of assorted wreckage. He sighed. Getting through there in the SUV wouldn’t be easy. He wondered if going in on foot would be safer.

  From where he was, Carson couldn’t see any human activity in the city itself, even with binoculars, but there was plenty on the roads. A long river of humanity, ragged and pathetic, straggled west out of the city. It was amazing; he’d never expected to see it in his own country. On CNN maybe, camera footage from some third-world hellhole, but not here in the land of the free.

  Refugees.

  Six weeks. That’s all it took. Six weeks of chaos, of hunger, of thirst. Most of all, fear. Americans weren’t accustomed to fear. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe it was a bad thing, but when it finally hit, it hit hard and stayed around. This wasn’t the sharp, sudden fear of a car accident or losing a job. It was the pervasive, unrelenting realization that it was all gone and no one cared about you. All the soccer moms, the teens hunched over cell phones, the stock brokers and lawyers: nothing in their world prepared them for the reality that struck when the system they’d taken for granted simply disappeared. As he watched the masses straggling away from the city they’d called home two months earlier, Carson’s mind drifted over similar panoramas he’d witnessed on the other side of the world during his younger days.

  It never changed, it never ended. It didn’t matter what caused it; war, earthquake, flood, pestilence, famine. The people started moving, first in a trickle, then in a flood. Human, but not human. Robbed of that sense of place essential to all civilizations and peoples, to not know where you were going, to not know if north meant safety, or if south meant death. Just take whatever you could carry and go, follow the one in front of you. Pray that your legs don’t give out, that there’s food and shelter ahead.

  He thought of the long lines of the White Russians, Kappel’s broken army and their families, crossing the Baikal ice in the bitter Siberian wind and bone-cracking cold, carrying the jewels and heirlooms of an exiled aristocracy, a way of life never again to be seen in this world. The children freezing in the arms of their mothers, then the mothers freezing, and then the fathers, turning blue, then white, to lie in rigid poses until the spring thaw sent them down, down into the deep blue of Baikal with all their gold and all their laughter, and all their dreams.

  He thought of the rains that would not stop falling, swelling the Yangtze like a glutted beast, sealing Nanjing on its crowded island as the quiet, deadly river rose, turned hunter, turned serial murderer, sucking in the swimmers, drinking them down into the mud. The thousands and thousands and then millions, desperate and so very afraid, afraid of the element of life itself, as it rose gray and relentless and without remorse, splashing and stumbling as they fled, uncounted, away from the river and its soft lapping, away across the immense land, in quest of somewhere that would not try to end them.

  He pondered the trucks and wagons rolling away from Leningrad as the Panzers closed in and sealed off Peter’s city, the Huguenots scattering with the wind, the Jews running from the endless pogroms, the Anasazi fleeing from who-knew-what, the Turks and Armenians, Greeks, Spaniards, Indians, Afghans. And on and on, through all ages and across all countries, regardless of skin color and belief system. The eternal refugees, eyes always on the horizon, afraid to look back, afraid of what lies ahead, trying to forget the land from whence they came, the land that could no longer bear them. Outcasts, exiles, homeless, wanderers, pilgrims, émigrés, the wretched refuse of all teeming shores, everywhere.

  Monotonous. Heart-breaking. Terrifyingly predictable.

  You know, Carson told himself, you think too much.

  He took his mind from the refugees and began to consider the immediate problem. Before he made his way north to get at his primary objective, he would have to get into the city. There were supplies he needed there, and he wanted to make contact with his secondary objective at the FBI facility to see what they could tell him about the route north. Every part of this journey required information, intel he didn’t have yet. He needed to know which parts of the city to avoid, but he could not afford to waste time questioning hundreds of refugees. He needed to be able to move fast and decisively, detouring around problem areas before running into them. Intel was crucial, and from what he saw of the refugees, hard data was unlikely from them. They would be from all sorts of different neighborhoods, half of them in shock and desperate for help. He couldn’t afford to get bogged down.

  It occurred to him that the roadblock he’d encountered on his initial escape from the city six weeks prior could no longer be a problem. Thousands of refugees seemed to be streaming out of Denver unimpeded, and there was no way this amount of people could leave the city along a major highway unless the roadblock and any others like it had been abandoned. This could mean that the city had been liberated, or at least stabilized, by legitimate power.

  On the other hand… six weeks would certainly have used up all the food in the private residences of citizens. Unless FEMA or Red Cross or some sort of jury-rigged airlift had been set up, hunger was probably the major issue. And if terrorists or enemy troops still held the city, letting the starving hordes leave would alleviate pressure and clog the highways with desperate people who would wreak havoc and chaos wherever they went, further impeding any U.S. efforts in the area.

  In fact, Carson realized, if the goal was to completely destabilize and destroy an entire region, one of the most effective ways would be to seal off a city of over half a million people, let them eat themselves into desperation, then allow those people to bleed into the surrounding countryside all at once, thus ensuring that every town, house, ranch, and farm within a hundred mile radius be overrun. Colorado Springs lay within a couple of days walk to the south, but it could not hope to accommodate such an influx of hungry people, let alone any community of a smaller size, even if it was in better shape. Mass famine, disease, horrific violence between citizens, rape, armed robbery, and all the rest. It was exactly the sort of chaotic pandemonium that terrorists would love to unleash. The state of Colorado would take years to recover, and if this was characteristic of what was going on in other areas, the nation might well be on its knees for the foreseeable future

  After considering the problem again for several minutes, Carson decided to drive a mile or two further south and then ditch the vehicle. Driving into the city under these conditions would be a great way to attract a crowd of hungry followers eager to kill him for his equipment. Wherever he stopped, they would catch up with him. Better to enter the city on foot under cover of night, get what he needed, and proceed north.

  Carson returned the binocs to his pack, left the scrub, and retreated back down the hill. He was scrambling down a slope of loose gravel, peppering his socks with cheat grass seeds in the process, when he heard voices. Then glass, breaking.

  Chapter 5: Unpleasant Encounter

  Carson froze. The voices were coming from the junipers where he’d left the SUV.

  He immediately unslung the AR-15 from his shoulder, readied it to fire, and began a rapid circling movement, keeping his distance from the junipers. Within a minute he had circled around far enough that he obtained an angle into the grove, a mere thirty meters from the vehicle. He crouched behind a juniper and set up; from this position, he could bring fire onto the whole area immediately surrounding the SUV.

  Two men were ransacking the vehicle. They had broken a couple of side windows out and one man was inside, handing out bundles of Carson’s gear to his partner. A woman watched from the sidelines, glancing greedily at the spoils from the car but constantly swiveling to keep an eye out for the car’s owner. Carson studied them for a moment as they robbed him of his food and water, his gear and the surplus weapons. Neither of the men appeared to be armed, other than a baseball bat leaning against the SUV’s tire. He couldn’t tell what they might have concealed on their bodies.

  He lined his sights up on both of the men, waiting until one was in front of the other. His 5.56 mm rounds, at this range, ought to pass right through the one standing outside and pin the guy inside. Say, two seconds to make sure. Then pivot right and kill the woman if she rushed him or called more hostiles into the area. Or watch her flee if she was smart. Then advance quick, finish off the men without ruining the vehicle entirely, and throw his gear back inside. He could be on his way out of there in ten or fifteen seconds, long gone by the time anyone else converged on the sound of the gunshots.

  Didn’t matter how they’d arrived, how they’d seen him. Carson cursed himself. He should have been more cautious, waited by the vehicle for a while before leaving it to scout the city. For all he knew, these people could have been camping just out of sight, and heard him arrive.

  Carson’s finger tightened on the trigger as he aimed at the men, trying for a shot that wouldn’t hit the dash up front if it penetrated. The words of his Operational Protocol echoed in his mind.

  Movement, off to the right, in the junipers.

  Carson stared. It was a kid.

  No, scratch that. Two kids.

  They were a pitiful pair. A little girl, maybe six years old, and a boy, just a toddler. They sat on the grass behind a sage bush, clearly tired out, watching the adults plunder the vehicle. Carson studied them. Privation was written clearly on the smudged little faces. They were silent, intent on the possibility of food from the vehicle. Carson’s eyes were drawn to the bright pink sweatpants the little girl wore, with holes in both knees and bloody scabs on the skin beneath. The toddler boy looked pale and listless; the baby fat that should have been swelling his cheeks had apparently melted away during the last several weeks.

  Carson drew a deep breath.

  Orders were orders. The SUV and its contents were mission-critical resources. If he was deprived of them, he might fail in his missions, resulting in the loss of much more life in the coming months. He wasn’t trained to be kind; in fact, he was under strict protocol to ensure that civilian concerns did not interfere with his mission.