Trial By Fire ts-4 Read online

  Skynet’s Thetas, the ultimate infiltration units, could simply bleed to death.

  The barrage faltered, and as the noise faded away Blair could hear someone shouting for the remaining shooters to cease fire.

  Eventually, they did.

  “Williams?” Barnes called.

  Blair looked back to see him and Preston hurrying toward her. Beside Preston, to Blair’s surprise and relief, was Preston’s daughter.

  “I’m all right,” Blair called back as she got to her feet and went over to what was left of Oxley.

  No movement of limbs or head. Blood still trickling from the wounds. No pulsing or even quivering from the carotid artery, partially visible behind the metal mesh shielding around the Theta’s neck.

  “Well?” Barnes asked as the others came up beside her.

  “It’s dead,” Blair confirmed, looking at Hope. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” the girl said, her voice shaking a little.

  “Not from lack of trying on Valentine’s part,” Preston growled, looking apprehensively behind them. “Hope was able to get the drop on her and pin her to a tree with a couple of arrows.”

  “Nice,” Barnes commented. “Not going to hold her long, though. You need to get these people out of here before she makes it back.”

  “No argument there.” Preston beckoned to one of the women nearby. “Jessie, get everyone out of town, right now.”

  “Where do we go?” Jessie asked.

  “Head for the old Glaumann cabin,” Preston told her. “It’s as good a meeting place as any, and I don’t think Lajard or Valentine has ever been there.”

  Jessie nodded. “What about you?”

  Preston looked in the direction of the river. “Someone needs to go see what happened to the people who were with Jik,” he said. “That should probably be me.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Barnes said. “Let me stop by Halverson’s first and get the minigun.”

  “You still have ammo for it?” Preston asked.

  Barnes nodded, patting the strap of his backpack.

  “About thirty rounds. Should be enough to take down a Theta.”

  Blair grimaced. That was true enough.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t just one Theta on the loose out there. There were two of them.

  “You’ll need more than that,” she said. “I’ll get the Blackhawk. Where should I meet you?”

  “How about the ford?” Preston suggested. “Jik has to come that way if he’s going to link up with Valentine.”

  “Sounds good,” Barnes confirmed. “There should be room enough on the riverbank for you to put down to let me aboard.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless you want me to go back to the chopper with you.”

  Blair focused on Preston’s expression. He knew what he was going to find out there, all right. Not just a killer Terminator, but the bodies of his friends and neighbors.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “What about Susan?” Hope asked. “You’ll need a route to your helicopter that she doesn’t know about.”

  “No,” Preston said flatly. “You’re going with Jessie and the others.”

  “She’ll never find the snaky on her own,” Hope said, just as bluntly.

  “What’s the snaky?” Blair asked.

  “It’s a route through some of the thickest undergrowth in the area,” Hope told her. “We sometimes go there to hunt rabbits and quail. Susan and Lajard don’t know about it, and they probably couldn’t get through it even if they did.”

  “We don’t know that they don’t know about it,” Preston warned darkly. “And there’s nowhere for you to go once you’re inside. If they catch you in the middle, you’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “If we don’t destroy them, we’re all dead anyway,” Hope said, fear and anger and determination swirling together in her voice and face. “We need Blair and her helicopter, and she needs me to get to it.”

  Preston muttered something. “Williams?”

  “She’s right,” Blair said. “For whatever it’s worth, she’ll be as safe with me as she’d be with Jessie. Or with you.”

  “And we don’t have time to argue about it,” Barnes put in, digging around in his backpack.

  Preston sighed, then nodded. “Be careful,” he said, giving his daughter a quick hug. “Both of you,” he added, looking at Blair.

  “We will,” Blair promised.

  “Here,” Barnes said, holding out his hand.

  Blair blinked in surprise. Clutched in the man’s hand were two spare magazines for her Desert Eagle.

  “Where’s you get those?” she asked.

  “I always bring extra ammo for all the guns on a mission,” he said, an almost embarrassed gruffness in his voice.

  “Good idea.” Taking the magazines, Blair slipped them into her pockets. “Thanks.”

  “Watch yourselves, and good luck,” Preston said. “Come on, Barnes. Let’s go get your minigun.” The T-700 convoys had made four more round trips to the tunnel face before Callahan finally decided it was safe enough to risk a quick recon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As usual with tasks that included climbing, this one fell to Callahan. Much of the debris slope he’d used earlier had been collapsed and scattered by the falling concrete slab, but together the three of them were able to build it up enough for him to clamber up to the opening.

  The hole itself was smaller than Kyle had estimated earlier, too small for any of them to squeeze through. But Callahan managed to get his head through. Gripping an exposed piece of rebar with one hand and the metal door with the other, he eased up for a look.

  He stayed there for a good ten seconds, and in the light seeping down from above Kyle could see his neck moving as he turned his head back and forth. Finally, he pulled his head back through the opening and made the precarious climb back down.

  “No watchdog,” he whispered as they all huddled again. “But it looks like they’re almost ready to go with the next blast. They’ve got two of the satchel charges at the base of the tunnel face, and they’ve moved the others way back down the tunnel.”

  “Like they’re going to do a second blast further back, too?” Zac asked, frowning.

  “No, like they don’t want a second blast at all,” Kyle told him. “Sympathetic detonation—Orozco told me about that once. If you put a bunch of explosives—”

  “If you put explosives within four or five feet of each other, triggering one of them triggers the rest along with it,” Callahan finished for him.

  “So if everything’s ready, what’s Skynet waiting for?” Zac asked.

  “Nightfall, probably,” Callahan said. “The light coming through the roof is pretty weak, so it’s probably getting close to sundown. Maybe Skynet’s planning another attack like last night to cover the noise.”

  “Leaving more debris for the Terminators to haul away tomorrow,” Kyle said. “So if we don’t want to spend tonight and most of tomorrow down here, we need to make our move now.”

  “The problem is that there aren’t any openings up there, at least none I could see,” Callahan said. “If we want a hole, we’ll have to make our own.”

  “You mean with the explosives?” Zac asked.

  “Exactly,” Callahan said. “We’ll take the charges, plant them down the tunnel a ways, and blow all of them at once.”

  “Wait a minute,” Kyle cautioned. “You know anything about how to place charges for that sort of thing?”

  “Zac and I have both had training,” Callahan told him. “And you worked pretty closely with Orozco on some of his demolition stuff. Between us, we should be able to bring down the roof to give us a way out. With a little luck, we might also knock down enough of the roof to seal the Terminators in the other part of the tunnel.”

  Kyle winced. And if they had no luck at all, the blast might collapse their end of the tunnel and kill all three of them.

  But Callahan was right. Skynet knew someone was down here, and the
y couldn’t stay hidden from the Terminators forever.

  “Okay, but maybe we should wait a little longer,” he said. “If it’s still light outside, most of the fighters and all of the big guns will still be working out by the daytime perimeter. If the blast lets any of the T-700s get out, they could kill a lot of people.”

  “It’s a risk, I know,” Callahan said heavily. “But if we push things too far, we may be trapped down here by Terminators making last-minute checks and adjustments.”

  “And if we let Skynet blow the tunnel on its schedule, we know a lot of people will die,” Zac added.

  “He’s right,” Callahan said. “This is the best window we’re going to get. I think we need to go for it.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I’m in,” Zac said.

  Kyle took a deep breath. “Me too.”

  Callahan nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  The first job, getting up into the tunnel, was easier said than done. The metal door the Terminators had laid over the broken concrete was too heavy for Callahan to push it clear by himself.

  In retrospect, Kyle realized as he and Zac made the precarious climb up the debris alongside their companion, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Not only did the door have to handle the weight of T-700s walking over it, but also the extra burden of whatever chunks of metal or concrete those T-700s were carrying.

  Fortunately, with all three of them pushing, the door finally moved, and without any of the teeth-jarring screeching that metal on concrete often made.

  A minute later, for the first time in hours, they were back in the tunnel.

  “We’ll start with those,” Callahan whispered, pointing to the two charges sitting against the tunnel face. “You two get them—I’ll head down the tunnel and look for a place to set them up.”

  “You want this?” Kyle asked, pulling his shotgun from his belt and offering it to Callahan.

  The other shook his head. “Maybe later.” Checking his footing, he headed down the tunnel.

  Kyle turned back to the explosives, a hard lump forming in his throat. He’d dealt with the stuff several times back when the three of them were living in Los Angeles. But those had all been pipe bombs or something similar, with flammable fuses. Canvas-wrapped packages with a fist-sized box wired into both bombs were way outside his area of experience.

  “You know anything about these things?” he asked Zac as the two of them crouched down beside them.

  “A little,” Zac said, gingerly picking up the small box and turning it over in his hand. “This is the detonator. Not sure what type—I’ll have to pull off some of this outer wrapping to see what’s inside.”

  “Is that safe?” Kyle asked, forcing himself not to edge away as Zac started carefully peeling away the plastic.

  “Should be,” Zac said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  He angled the partially open package toward the light coming in through the ceiling.

  “Looks like a solenoid plunger system,” he said. “We use this type, too. It’s pretty simple...”

  He trailed off.

  “What?” Kyle asked.

  Zac visibly braced himself.

  “It’s a plunger,” he said. “That means it has to get physically pushed in to trigger the bomb. The solenoid coil around it is just there to do the pushing. Radio controlled, probably—this thing here looks like a receiver.”

  “You mean Skynet could set it off right now?” Kyle asked, his skin crawling a little.

  “You’re missing the point,” Zac said, his voice suddenly gone brittle. “It’s a plunger, and we don’t have a radio to set it off. That means one of us will have to stay behind and push it.”

  Kyle looked down at the short wires running from the detonator to the charges.

  “Could we make the wires longer?” he asked.

  “If we had more wire, sure,” Zac said, looking around. “But I don’t see any.” He stood up, holding the detonator gingerly in one hand as he picked up one of the wrapped explosives with the other. “Let’s get these back to Callahan. Maybe he’ll have an idea.”

  “Okay,” Callahan said after Zac had explained the situation. “Let’s focus on getting these things placed. Then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  “Meaning what?” Kyle asked suspiciously.

  “That we’ll figure out where to go from there,” Callahan repeated, an edge to his voice. The same edge, Kyle noted, that Yarrow had had when he’d pulled his gun and ordered the three of them to cover. “There are six more charges, right?”

  “Meaning you’ll stay behind and trigger the detonator?” Kyle asked.

  Callahan looked him straight in the eye.

  “When Yarrow died, I became senior man here,” he said flatly. “If it comes to that... yes.”

  Zac stirred. “We should probably draw straws or something,” he suggested hesitantly.

  “Or maybe we should pretend we’re Resistance soldiers who follow military procedure and chain of command.” Callahan held up a hand as Kyle started to speak. “And if we stand around arguing until the Terminators get back, we lose by default. Now go get the rest of the charges like I told you while I get these positioned.”

  Clenching his teeth, Kyle turned and headed back down the tunnel. Zac lingered another moment, then followed.

  “What are we going to do?” the younger teen muttered as he caught up to Kyle.

  “You heard him,” Kyle said grimly. “If it comes to that, he’s going to take the job.”

  They got another three paces before Zac spoke again.

  “So we just have to make sure it doesn’t come to that.”

  “You got it,” Kyle said. “So get busy and think. Think hard.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Callahan’s shadowy figure as he knelt down by the explosives. “And think fast.”

  There was no way to know how far the disposal group had gotten before Lajard’s activation code had turned Jik from a John Connor pretender into a killer Terminator. There was also no way to know how long it had taken the Theta to finish its bloody task. Probably, knowing Terminators, not very long.

  Which meant Barnes and Preston should have run into the machine again somewhere between Baker’s Hollow and the river.

  Only they hadn’t.

  “What now?” Preston asked over the roar of the water as he and Barnes stood in the partial shelter of the trees near the river. “Go on, or go back?”

  “You’re the expert,” Barnes said, frowning as he eyed the far bank. Was something moving behind the foliage over there? “Are there any paths he could have used to get past us?”

  “Not unless he headed up to the bridge and crossed that way.”

  “Yeah,” Barnes said, consciously letting his eyes move away from the area where he’d seen movement. Jik had already caught him and Williams that way once. “What’s with that bridge, anyway? He told us he helped you build it.”

  “Someone helped me build it,” Preston said. “But that was forty years ago, and I don’t remember the kid’s face well enough to know whether that was Jik or not.” He grimaced. “But even if Jik isn’t him, Skynet must have had access to the real guy somewhere along the line. Otherwise how could Jik have known about the bridge?”

  “All of his Connor memories were false,” Barnes pointed out. “Maybe the childhood ones are, too.”

  Preston hissed between his teeth.

  “More likely they found him somewhere, dredged out his memories, and then killed him. They might even have deliberately searched him out because he’d been in Baker’s Hollow and they were using us as their damned—”

  “Hold it,” Barnes cut him off, dropping the minigun’s muzzle from chest-rest into firing position. There was definitely movement over there, too much for Jik’s rope-and-stick gimmick. “Jik?” he shouted. “Hey, you! Terminator!”

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a pair of bushes parted—

  And Halverson stepped into vie
w.

  But it wasn’t the swaggering, arrogant, overconfident Halverson who’d left Barnes and Williams prisoners in Preston’s living room while he went off hunting T-700s. He was limping as he made for the river, his face contorted with pain. Instead of a rifle, a bow and quiver dangled loosely from his right hand. His left hand was pressed against his right side.

  He was barely in sight when Preston broke from cover and sprinted to the river, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he ran. He splashed through the rushing water to Halverson, taking the man’s left arm and laying it over his own shoulder. He wrapped his other arm carefully around Halverson’s back and side, then half led, half carried the injured man across the river and back to the trees where Barnes was waiting.

  “Give me a hand,” he grunted as he put Halverson’s back to one of the thicker trees and started to ease him to the ground.

  “No—don’t,” Barnes said, catching hold of Halverson’s arm and pulling him upright again. “If you sit him down, you’ll just have to stand him up again in a minute.”

  “He needs to rest,” Preston insisted.

  “Not here he doesn’t,” Barnes countered.

  “But—”

  “No, he’s right,” Halverson said, shrugging off Preston’s hand. “Besides, I think a couple of my ribs are cracked,” he added, making a face as he again pressed his left hand to his side. “I sit down now, I probably end up with a punctured lung.”

  “Fine,” Preston gritted out. “What happened back there? No—dumb question. I mean—”

  “You mean did anyone else make it out alive,” Halverson said bitterly. “The answer is no. He killed them. All of them.”

  “How’d he miss you?” Barnes asked.

  “Does it look like he missed me?” Halverson retorted. “He took my gun, clubbed me with it, then started shooting everyone else.”

  “Probably planned to come back to you later.”

  “You think?” Halverson said acidly. “Only I saw how it was going. I saw there was nothing I could do. Badger was already down, so I grabbed his bow, just to have something if he came after me. Then I took off to try to warn the rest of you.”