Sunfail Read Free Page B

miles and miles of tunnels.
    He walked down the platform. His orange jacket and hard hat worked like commuter-repellent, clearing a path through the crowd.
    Something was wrong.
    People along the platform looked agitated.
    There was a buzz moving through them like a swarm of angry bees. Jake checked out a couple of the guys closest to him as he passed them. There was an edge to them; they were tense. Up and down the platform he saw plenty of pale faces.
    Shock? That was his first thought.
    Why? That was his second.
    He’d lived in the city long enough to know bad things happened. Who could forget that? This grim recollection led to a third thought, the bleakest of the three: What’s going on up there?
    He hadn’t heard any announcements over the public address system, but that didn’t mean something wasn’t happening. He’d been a long way down the tunnel. He could have missed the announcement, but surely the control center would have given him a situation report?
    Anxiety is contagious. He knew that. He’d been in combat situations often enough to know that fear spread like wildfire, and once it was under your skin there was no shaking it.
    He hurried toward the exit. A young guy in a hoodie with his hands stuffed into the pouch pocket passed through the turnstiles ahead of him. Jake caught his eye. “Hey, man, what’s going on?”
    The man glanced up at him, startled, then saw the MTA logo on his orange vest and relaxed, trusting that down here he was one of the guys in charge. He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say. “Just came over the news—Fort Hamilton. It’s been hit.”
    “What?” Jake stared at the stranger. That couldn’t be right. Hit? No way would anyone assault Fort Hamilton. That was insane. But he started to register fragments of the conversations going on around him and realized he was hearing the name Fort Hamilton over and over again.
    “CNN had footage from their weather chopper, showed the smoke. Not much else. But the place is burning. Fucking terrorists.”
    “Jesus . . .” Jake crossed himself, muscle memory rather than devotion. He now heard the beginning whisper-rumble of an oncoming train, then spotted the headlights approaching around the bend. He was still trying to process what he’d just heard. Fort Hamilton, gone? He couldn’t get his head around that. In some ways it was more shocking than the Twin Towers. The old base had been there almost two hundred years in one form or another. It was a core part of the nation’s defense, not some stockbroker’s castle of commerce. Despite occasional calls to close the last active base in New York City, it was still home to a whole slew of reserve and National Guard units, and the North Atlantic Division headquarters for the US Army Corps of Engineers.
    Jesus indeed.
    A terror strike made a grim kind of sense, but to a man like him, trained in the turmoil of combat, a strike like that was never the endgame, it was just a move toward it. They—whoever they were—were cutting off an Army response to something else.
    And then there was Sophie’s message out of the blue: Something is about to happen.
    Were the two related? They had to be, didn’t they? And if they were, what the hell was she caught up in?
    Don’t look for me.
    I’m not who you think I am.
    He pushed his way against the flow of people rising up toward the street, and emerged into daylight, on some subconscious level expecting to see plumes of smoke. There were a lot of edgy people. He couldn’t see any of the fuck-with-one-of-us-you-fuck-with-all-of-us bravado the post–9/11 movies had propagated. Most of these people were frightened they were about to go through hell all over again. Life had changed a lot in the last decade or so, and often not for the better. The years brought distance with them and a feeling of It couldn’t happen again that was almost complacent. They’d willingly given up so many liberties to ensure it