“Only two men,” Ridley said. “Hardly an obstacle.” He typed in another sequence on the keypad, and a locked metal cabinet on the wall sprang open. Inside it, he retrieved a satellite phone and a Browning 9 mm pistol. He handed the phone to Seth and the gun to Jared.
Seth stepped away from the other two men and began dialing a number. Jared cocked the weapon and moved to the janitorial closet. He carefully moved a mop aside, allowing Ridley to follow him into the cluttered space. Jared looked back to Ridley for confirmation. The man nodded, the overhead bulb shining off his bald head.
Jared turned back to the door, opened it and fired two shots. Both of the soldiers were caught completely off guard, crumpling to the tunnel floor without even raising their weapons.
Jared stepped into the tunnel, reached down and pulled a Glock 19 from the dead mercenary’s holster. He kept it and handed the Browning back to Ridley. Seth, finished with his phone call, stopped at the control panel and punched in a third sequence, then he joined the other two. “We’re ready,” he said. “Communications are jammed.”
Jared stepped over the two corpses bleeding on the tunnel floor and led the way into the dark tunnel. Ridley paused at the security panel on the far side of the door. He typed in a code and the tunnel filled with light from several caged lights lining the walls.
Jared turned back to Ridley. “Sir, they’ll know we’re coming…”
Ridley simply nodded and they moved on down the length of the tight tunnel. The pitted stone walls were just wide enough for the broad men to pass, but would make an excellent place for an ambush.
As they came to the end of the tunnel, they could see the stairs that led up to the amphitheater, but no mercenaries guarding it. Jared stepped to the foot of the stairwell.
He immediately jumped backward, his Glock raised, as a body tumbled down the stairs, rolling to a stop at his feet. The dead man’s throat had been sliced. There was no sign of anyone on the stairs above them.
“Trigger?” Seth called out.
Jared looked around at his brother in surprise. Whatever this was, his brother had kept him in the dark.
“That you, Seth? Sorry about that. He was a struggler, that one.” Daryl Trajan, callsign: Trigger, descended the steps, his sniper rifle strung across his back, and a bloodied Gerber folding knife in his hand. The slim man wore black BDUs. He bent to wipe the blade of his knife on the dead man’s clothes, then stepped over the body.
Jared lowered his pistol and looked to Ridley and Seth. They were smiling.
“Are we good?” Seth asked.
“All clear at this end. Carpenter will have the stairwell to the garage in a minute,” Trigger replied, folding up his knife and slipping it into a sheath on his belt.
“You have no qualms about switching sides?” Ridley asked.
“No, sir. Some mercs follow a code of honor. I follow a code of greenbacks. With as much money as Seth offered me for this job, I’ll be retiring to a villa in Honduras.” Trigger smiled a huge grin, clearly pleased with having chosen the correct side of the struggle between the Ridley brothers. “Darius and his forces are all inside the loading dock by now. Any men loyal to him on the surface have been eliminated.”
Trigger glanced down to a wrist-mounted two-way pager, which was gently vibrating against his skin. He depressed a button three times, then looked back up at the others.
“Gentlemen, this is Carpenter,” Trigger introduced the stocky man coming down the dark side tunnel from the second stairwell that led to the garage. As the man stepped into the light, Jared could see he wore black BDUs like Trigger, but he had thick pink scars on his brawny exposed forearms.
“Garage is secured. Everyone up top is loyal to us,” Carpenter said in a surprisingly soft voice.
Jared looked at the man and wondered about loyalty. He was irritated that Ridley and Seth had not confided in him about this part of the plan, co-opting some of Darius’s forces to work for Ridley.
“So,” he said, a little of his irritation creeping into his voice, “what’s next?”
Richard Ridley stepped forward, patting Jared on the shoulder as if to say Don’t worry about the small stuff, we didn’t tell you because there wasn’t time. He grinned at everyone. “Let’s go up top and get my Chest. Darius’s force should engage the Chess Team in the next five minutes. When they do, send in the second wave of soldiers to kill everyone.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Sub Level 3, Manifold Omega Facility, 2013
Rook burst out of the door bringing up the MetalStorm rifle he’d taken from the armory. He rolled to the floor and fired down the hallway. MetalStorm weapons fired rounds straight out of the barrel, triggering each with an electronic jolt. The first three rounds exited the three barrels before Rook felt the kick. He’d been trained to fire in three round bursts, because each shot moved the barrel up just a little higher. With a MetalStorm weapon, all three shots would be accurate and the need to adjust for the next three was minimal. But Rook didn’t adjust at all. He held the trigger down and unleashed all thirty rounds in just under two seconds.
The small cluster of men that had already come in through the loading dock were greeted by a wall of bullets. They dropped in a heap, their limbs tangling. Rook stood on unsteady feet, the effects of the gas still making him woozy, but he shook his head with a grin. “Deep Blue has got to get me one of these.” Then he tossed the weapon to the floor, not knowing how to reload the thing. He brought up his MP-5 from his shoulder.
Peter and Asya followed him out the door into the hall, each armed with a newfound Manifold MP-5, also opting for weapons they knew how to use and reload. Lynn ducked her head out of the armory and looked at the bodies on the floor. The four men, each dressed in black BDUs, had motley looking hair and tattoo-covered skin on their exposed forearms. A pool of blood formed around their tangled bodies.
Rook took a tentative step further toward the loading dock doors, which were on the other side of the fresh pile of corpses. There was no sign of Queen or the others. Rook guessed they had successfully ducked back into the security room, the view inside of which was now blocked by a closed and bullet-riddled door.
Rook was about to take another step toward the dock, when the doors burst open into the hallway, and another four armed men rushed into the cramped space. He let loose a burst of fire from his MP-5, stepping back, but the sudden movement sent a wave of nausea through him. He slipped and fell backward. He tried to turn it into a back roll, but awkwardly smashed into the wall of the narrow corridor instead.
Peter raised his weapon to finish the newly arrived men, but Asya had stepped forward and already sprayed them with a burst of fire from her own weapon. Rook got to his feet as the newly arrived men fell. They looked just as unkempt as the first bunch.
“Mercenaries,” he said, thinking about who they might be working for and how Chess Team was going to deal with this new threat. He keyed his microphone, trying to reach Queen, but all he got in his earpiece was static.
Rook frowned. “Something’s blocking coms. This is going to suck donkey—”
The door to the loading dock inched forward again, and before Rook could put some bullets through the door and into whoever was on the other side, something came flying into the corridor. He knew this projectile would not be just a stun grenade.
He turned to tell the others to run, but they were already turning.
He turned his attention toward the end of the hall. A shadow moved across the stairwell door window. There were more of them. Rook’s group was about to be pinned down in a crossfire, and getting holed up in the small armory on the right would just make the slaughter go faster.
“Go left!” he shouted.
Lynn, the closest to the stairwell, was already moving in that direction. Asya was right behind her as they both slipped into the unmarked door across from the armory.
Rook took a huge lunging step, shoved Peter through the door and toppled into the doorway, his legs still not inside the room when the air w
as knocked out of his lungs. The clap of noise was deafening. Something — metal fragments most likely — sliced into his foot. His toes went numb. The doorway filled with smoke from the detonated grenade. Rook felt someone tugging his wrist, pulling him into the room. He twisted and looked back into the corridor, now choked with dark billowing clouds near the ceiling. At the floor level, from Rook’s vantage point, he saw what he had hoped for — a limp arm extending from the partially ajar stairwell door, lying in its own blood.
Then his feet were past the door, and his view was cut off as the door closed to the carnage in the hallway. Rook rolled over in his bulky impact armor and staggered to his feet. He was grateful for the suit. It had clearly protected him from the bulk of the grenade’s blast, despite the stab of pain in his foot.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“The viewing gallery,” Peter replied. Then a light came on and Rook could see the older man standing by a light switch on the wall. The room was twenty feet across but appeared to run the full length of the facility, paralleling the corridor they had just escaped. The ceiling was twice as high as that of the corridor, and there was a balcony rail up above the space, in the center third of the room, so those on the second floor could look down into the vast space.
Rook checked his ankle and saw a small trickle of blood. Then he saw several other pitted marks in his armor’s leg and chest plates.
Well, mostly protected me, he thought.
Rook looked to his left. The far wall appeared to be a darkened Plexiglas of some type. He jogged over to it, the small wound in his foot shooting pain up his leg with each step. He put his eyes up against the dark wall, but couldn’t see through it. He quickly realized how close the base was to the sea, and guessed that this was a giant Ridley-designed aquarium.
“Is there a door at the other end?” Rook asked, as he started down the long empty room.
“Only way out of here is up,” Peter said. The older man pointed up at the second floor balcony with the barrel of the MP-5.
“Stairs?” Lynn asked.
“No. We’ll have to climb up somehow.” Peter looked doubtful.
“Alright,” Rook said. “Pawn, take the door.”
Asya took up a position guarding the door they had just come through. She still looked a little pale from the gas, but she threw herself into the task without complaint.
Rook ran over to the wall and turned his battle armored back against it. “Up,” he said to Peter. Rook held his hands out. Peter quickly scrambled up onto Rook’s shoulder’s and reached the lip of the second story balcony, pulling himself up.
“We got one thing in our favor,” Rook said, as Peter left his shoulders and Lynn began to climb up his body to her husband’s waiting hands. “Their coms don’t work either — or they wouldn’t have blown the crap out of their own people in the stairwell.”
Lynn scampered up Rook’s body and was up on the balcony before he knew it.
“Pawn, you’re next.”
Asya turned to him. “But the door…”
“I’ll handle it.”
Asya wasted no time. She was looking better — less shaky. Whatever the effects of the gas were, she appeared to be dealing with them better than everyone else.
Asya lowered her weapon and sprinted to Rook’s position, placing one foot on his outstretched hands and springing lithely up to the second story. Rook immediately had his weapon up and trained on the door at the start of the long gallery. He spotted a small black wire at the bottom of the door — a fiber optic spotting scope. He opened fire on the door, blasting the scope and hopefully scaring whichever mercenary was so timid as to check the room out before throwing grenades in. Rook crossed the space to the Plexiglas wall. He opened a hidden compartment on the bulky thigh of his impact armor and extracted a large brick of C4 explosive, which he smacked against the wall. Then he affixed a detonating blast cap. The radio switch to detonate the explosive was on his wrist. He didn’t know if whatever was blocking his communication with the rest of Chess Team would block the signal to the explosive, but it was worth a try.
He was just about to race back to the wall under the balcony and make the climb himself, with some assistance from Asya, when the door to the room exploded off its hinges and into the room, knocking him to the ground.
THIRTY-FIVE
Sub Level 3, Manifold Omega Facility, 2013
Queen paused by the door. She was getting no connection to Deep Blue back home and she couldn’t raise Rook either. Something was scrambling communications.
Two things, she thought in something like a prayer. That’s all I want. Active coms and Richard Ridley’s head back in a bird cage.
They were fools to have freed the man. Now with Alexander dead and no longer a threat, Ridley would go after the most powerful weapon he could find. She didn’t know what his long game was, but as soon as she saw Seth’s smile when he activated the gas, she knew it had been his plan all along. Not the duplicates’, Ridley’s. He had somehow planned the whole thing out himself.
A burst of gunfire in the corridor had her crouched by the door, ready to add her own bullets to the fray.
“Ready, Knight?”
The small man was deadly in a fight and as hardy as the rest of the team, but the loss of King seemed to have demoralized him worse than the rest. He didn’t respond to her.
“You want me to—” Bishop began.
Queen whirled on Knight, who was slumped against a wall. His face was paler than usual, and she knew it was the gas they had breathed. She moved over to the man and saw his eyes were glazed and unfocussed. “Knight?”
No response.
She shook him by the collar of his battle suit.
Knight didn’t respond to the shaking.
“Shin!” Queen shouted and slapped the man across his face.
His eyes startled and fluttered. Then he focused in on Queen and she saw an angry glare creep across his face.
“You awake? You with us? We need you, man.”
“I’m good,” Knight said. “Fucking gas. I’m a little guy, you know.”
Queen grinned. He was, in fact, a few pounds lighter than she was, though that was their little secret. “Good, I’ll open the door and cover you. You try to find the jamming device and disable it. I want Deep Blue’s support, and I want to put Ridley back in his grave. Can you handle that?”
Knight nodded.
She turned to look at Bishop. No longer looking like his normal serene and placid self, Bishop appeared to be dealing with King’s demise and their betrayal by the duplicates in his typical fashion. Rage. The kind she hadn’t seen on Bishop’s face since the days when he’d been infected with Ridley’s regenerative serum.
“You okay, big guy?”
His eyes darted to her, sharp, focused and burning. He didn’t need to say a word. He was ready to tear someone apart.
She moved back to the door, and cracked it open. She heard shouting in the hall and peered around the door frame, her MP-5 up and ready. At the end of the hall, she saw Rook’s armored form leaping into a doorway. Men were at the stairwell door at the end. Down on the floor, a grenade skittered to a stop.
Knight crouched next to her, about to leap out into the hall and run like hell toward the far end of the corridor, in search of the jamming device.
“No!” she shouted.
She threw her weight backward, blocking Knight from leaving the room, when the grenade detonated, spraying the hallway with steel fragments. Her left arm, although covered from shoulder to wrist in the impact absorbing battle armor suit, was perforated with projectiles. She pulled the numb limb back and saw blood trickling from several spots on the appendage.
“Motherfu—” she cut herself off, as she took in a deep breath when the pain kicked in.
Knight leaned in with an auto injector syringe and showed it to her. “You want this?”
Queen recognized the cocktail they each carried. It contained a mix of caffeine and 1000mg of Ibuprofen.
The drug wouldn’t make her tired, but it would dull some of the pain.
Queen just nodded.
Knight placed the device against the side of her exposed neck and activated it. Queen inhaled sharply again, as the injector rammed the drug into her body.
“What now?” Knight asked.
Queen didn’t have an answer.
“I say we blow through the wall to the next room. If need be, to the one after that. We can’t fight them all in close quarters, and we need to not be where they think we are.” Bishop held up a small wad of C4 in his hand.
Queen nodded, then struggled to her feet. “Everyone back in the cell when it goes off.”
Bishop affixed the explosive to the wall just above a computer monitor on a desk, and the others fell back toward the cell. He placed a timed detonator for ten seconds, then rushed to the door to the cell, swung around it and hid behind it, while keeping a steel toed boot in the jamb.
Queen nodded at the move. The last thing they needed was to get locked in the hellish cell again.
The blast went off. Several chunks of rubble pelted the wall, filling the room with the scent of hot plaster dust.
Bishop moved into the room and coughed from the dust and smoke. Queen followed him and saw a nightmare of architecture. The wall behind the computer stations had been shattered, but the next room must have been a bathroom, because they had broken through into a crawlspace with water pipes that were now a tangled mess of jagged metal and spraying water. The far side of the space was another wall, still mostly intact. Water erupted across the exposed electrical wiring and damaged security stations, spraying arcs of spitting sparks across the whole side of the security suite. The hole they had blasted was probably large enough for them to get through — even with the bulky impact armor suits — but the tangle of jagged metal, spraying water and electricity made it a deathtrap.
“Gonna have to use more C4,” Bishop said.
Then Queen saw the door to the security room open just a crack at the end of the blasted room, a large piece of rubble stopping the door after just an inch.
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller cta-5 Page 16
