The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  “No,” insisted Otto. “They are under strict orders to leave all systems in operation.”

  “Why?” Hecate asked, then answered her own question. “Oh . . . you need a working computer terminal for your device.”

  “Why don’t you say that a little louder?” said Otto icily. “Just in case the female agent didn’t hear you.”

  Hecate ignored him. Instead she said, “Listen . . . can you hear the blowers?”

  They were all silent in the absolute darkness. “I can’t hear anything except a few birds,” said Cyrus.

  “Damn it! The blowers are offline.” Her voice was shrill with tension. “They’re on a dedicated system with their own generator. The controls for that are in my office.” She paused. “That means the main power is out as well as the security systems and auxiliary systems. All at once?”

  Cyrus opened his cell phone. There was no light.

  “Otto, try your phone. See if the light comes on.”

  “It’s dead.”

  “Something took out all electronics in a single burst,” said Cyrus, his voice low. “Either the island has been nuked or someone hit us with a precise EMP.”

  “Our teams don’t have anything like that,” said Otto.

  “Then the Americans are on the island. If they used an E-bomb, then they know about the trigger device. Nothing else makes sense.”

  There was a distinct note of panic in his voice.

  “We have to get out of here,” said Otto in an urgent whisper. He fumbled in the dark until he found Hecate’s arm and gave it a fierce squeeze. “We need to get out of here before they can stop us or we will have lost everything we’ve worked for.”

  “I have a ruggedized laptop in my office,” she said. “It can withstand any kind of EMP and it’s in a lead-lined safe along with a portable hard drive with our backup files.”

  “But how can we get to your office?” demanded Cyrus. “We’re trapped in here.”

  Hecate laughed, a strangely feline sound in the darkness.

  “I designed this place, Father. Do you think I would be so careless as to let it be my tomb?”

  “Then get us out of here.”

  “I need to find the waterfall. The rear panel is false. There’s a door that leads to a service tunnel. Now be quiet and let me get my bearings.”

  CONRAD VEDER TOOK the darkness philosophically. He wasn’t frustrated, because he was not emotionally invested in the kill. All it meant was that the change in circumstances required a new plan.

  He remembered the process of climbing up to the ledge and climbing back down would be easy enough. But he didn’t move right away. There was no immediate threat to him up here and the lights might come back on.

  One of the greatest advantages of having a mind like an insect is that there is no tendency toward impatience.

  TONTON DID NOT like the total darkness. It was the only thing that made him feel vulnerable.

  He could still smell the woman and if he was careful he could track her. But what if she had night-vision goggles? How was she dressed? Fatigue pants and boots, a black tank top.

  Did she have an equipment belt?

  He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure.

  A few seconds passed.

  No, he decided. She hadn’t been wearing an equipment belt. On the other hand, she may have had a pack and left it among the foliage. He hadn’t seen her after she’d run into the brush. She might have had time to grab a pack and keep going.

  So what did he do?

  If he had one of the new recruits he’d have ordered him to stand up and then he’d see if the bitch put a bullet through his head. Tonton was not willing to risk his own head.

  Miss Jakoby might have a trick. Tonton reached into his pocket for his cell, but the unit was dead. Not even a glow from the screen. What the hell?

  Wracked with indecision, Tonton did nothing.

  GRACE COURTLAND DID not fear the darkness. She would have preferred night vision or some useful light, but she didn’t need it. There was too much of the predator in her to be stymied by darkness.

  If she couldn’t see, then neither of the men who were hunting her could see, either. And she understood the why of the darkness. Church had dropped the EMP, which meant that she had a little breathing room. But she also had a very specific purpose. There might be a hardened terminal or laptop on the island. She doubted there was one in this chamber, but that meant that she had to prevent Cyrus Jakoby from getting out of the chamber.

  Her Special Forces training ran deep. Grace had been one of the very first women accepted into the SAS, and she’d been the first field team operator for Barrier. Church hadn’t recruited her for the DMS because she was decorative. Church wanted her because she was the best of the best. Now was the time to live up to that, and in the absolute darkness Grace smiled.

  If anyone had seen that smile—even a killer like Tonton—it would have given him pause.

  She moved out of her niche, recounting the steps she’d taken. Her training taught her to remember directions, yards run, right and left turns, elevation. This wasn’t a time for gunplay. She couldn’t see a target, and the muzzle flash from a missed shot would give her position away. The gun went back into her waistband and she practiced drawing the fighting knife from her right-hand pocket several times until she knew that she could have it out and flick the blade into the locked position in under a second.

  That gave her the confidence to keep her hands free while she retraced her steps. She paused briefly to feel along the ground for small rocks, and she put several of them into her left pocket.

  Somewhere off to her three o’clock position she could hear the whispered voices of Cyrus, Hecate, and Otto. Their position sounded about right for where she thought she needed to go.

  Her greatest care was in placing her feet, making sure that each step was featherlight until she was sure of her footing, and then she shifted weight in a flow from one leg to the other. It was like using Tai Chi to stalk her prey in the darkness—long, slow, controlled steps.

  TONTON THOUGHT HE heard something and he turned his head and sniffed at the darkness. The air was thick with the scent of fear from several of the transgenic animals that had panicked when the lights went out. It clouded his sense of smell, but he was sure that he’d just caught a fresh whiff of the woman. Humans don’t smell like animals, and though Tonton did not possess the genes necessary for processing the thousands of individual scents that jungle apes had, he had trained for many hours to hone his olfactory skills.

  He was sure that it was the woman. She’d moved.

  There was a sudden sound far off to his opposite side and he turned suddenly, swinging his pistol around to point at the blackness. What had made the noise? The woman? Veder? One of the animals?

  There was a second sound. Sharp and fast, like a stone dislodged by a running foot.

  Then a third. All off to his right side.

  It had to be her. Somehow she’d tricked him and was crossing the open field under cover of darkness instead of coming back along this path.

  “Got you, bitch,” he said with quiet malice as he rose from a prone position and got to his feet. He took a tentative step, then another.

  And then something brushed against his leg and he spun, but as he spun he felt his thigh ignite with a white-hot burn. He smelled a confusion of scents. The woman—close!—and then the sharp, coppery tang of blood.

  He swung a vicious a blow through the shadows, but all he hit was air.

  There was another flash of burning pain across the back of his knee and suddenly he found himself tilting to that side, his knee buckling.

  Tonton cried out as pain hit him in waves, a one-two burst of agony from thigh and knee. He scrabbled at his thigh and could feel wetness, and then he felt something hot splash against his palm. He was bleeding. Fast and hard. An artery.

  The bitch had cut him!

  She’d found him in the dark and cut him.

  “You fuck
ing cu—!” he started to shout, but he was struck across the face. His cheeks burned with unbearable pain, and when he touched his face he could feel something weird, something terribly wrong. His mouth seemed to stretch wide . . . absurdly wide. Where the corners of his mouth should be were two ragged double lines of torn flesh.

  He flailed at the darkness as fear burst through him like fireworks. Then he felt fingers curl into a knot in his hair and his head was jerked violently backward. Then there was the hard edge of a blade against his throat. It pressed deep but did not cut.

  Something brushed his ear and he realized it was a pair of soft lips.

  “This is for those poor bastards in Deep Iron,” the woman said in a murmur that was as soft as a whisper of passion.

  He didn’t understand. He hadn’t been at Deep Iron. That job had been done by two of his men. He hadn’t killed those people. He opened his mouth to tell her, to plead with her. Then there was a lava-hot line across his throat and he had no voice at all. Tonton heard a weak and distant gurgle that sounded like it came from underwater. He felt hot wetness in his mouth, and then he was falling forward into a darkness more complete and eternal than the temporary shadows of the Chamber of Myth.

  Chapter One Hundred Twenty-One

  The Dragon Factory

  Tuesday, August 31, 2:44 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 33 hours, 16 minutes E.S.T.

  If there were more of the scorpion-dogs down in the lower level we didn’t encounter them. We did find a half-dozen guys in greasy overalls lying dead inside a shattered office. It looked like they’d tried to make a stand against the monsters by pushing a desk against the door and arming themselves with wrenches. They’d killed one of the transgenic creatures by smashing in its skull, but from the looks of the place the other monsters had swarmed in. The workers looked to have been stung dozens of times each.

  “Poor bastards,” Bunny said.

  “Poor bastards who work for the bad guys,” I said. My sympathy level was bottoming out.

  We ran on, chasing our flashlight beams. The EMP had wiped out our night vision, but we each had a flashlight and extra batteries wrapped in lead foil for this purpose.

  “Stairs!” Bunny said, pointing, and we cut right and went through the doorway as fast as safety would allow. The stairwell was empty, so we climbed, taking turns covering each other on the corners, never stopping. If Alpha Team still held the far end of the hall, then I was hoping to catch the Russians by surprise. A few flash bangs and then some frags would make the odds more even. They would literally be in the dark, so we’d use that against them.

  We got to the main floor and opened the door cautiously. No sounds of gunfire from inside the building. No way to tell if that was good news or bad. I could hear sounds of a pretty heated exchange outside, though.

  This next part would be tricky because we couldn’t risk using our flashlight, but we had to get down that hallway.

  I leaned close to Bunny and told him what I wanted to do.

  “Roger that,” he whispered.

  I slung my rifle and drew my Beretta. Moving carefully, I found the far wall with my left hand; Bunny kept one hand on my shoulder. Like a couple of blind beggars negotiating an alley we walked forward. I let my fingers glide along the wall and never moved faster than my ability to recognize the terrain. Each time I found an opening—a hallway or a doorway—I stopped, tapped Bunny’s hand twice, and then moved in a shuffle until my fingers made contact once more with the long, curving wall. Being in total darkness makes you realize how much of every action relies on sight. Sudden darkness for a sighted person opens up a feeling of great vulnerability. Movement is clumsy and slow. To overcome this you have to create a system of movement and constant analysis. Speed is an enemy to sightless orientation.

  So, it took us a while to navigate that hallway, but the way we did it brought us all the way to the main doorway. The big glass doors were closed, so I followed them to the other side and found the wall again. Now I knew where we were and how far from the hatch.

  We went another forty yards and then stopped. I found Bunny’s hand, tapped it three times—a cue that I was about to give instructions—and then followed his hand up his arm to his chest and then to the grenades hung on his battle rig. Then I found his big hand and drew a series of letters in his palm. He tapped my wrist every time he needed me to repeat one.

  When I was done he gave my wrist two sets of two taps. Message received and understood.

  We reoriented ourselves and moved farther along the hall until we could hear voices. Whispers from several men. Low, quiet, and in Russian. I could make out what they were saying, but there wasn’t time to translate for Bunny. Besides, none of it was tactically important. One man asked another when the lights were coming back on, and a gruff voice—probably a sergeant or team leader—told him to shut the hell up.

  I holstered my pistol and took two grenades from my harness. A flash bang in my left and a fragmentation grenade in my right. From the faint rustle I knew Bunny was doing the same.

  “Light ’em up!” I hissed, and we pulled the pins on the flash bangs.

  If the Russians heard me, it didn’t matter. We sailed the grenades into the emptiness in front of us, squeezed our eyes shut, and covered our ears the best we could. Even so, the blast and starburst was like a hot knife through the brain.

  It was far worse for the Russians.

  The grenades burst in the air right above them and I opened my eyes a second after the detonation. I saw them—maybe twenty in all—reeling back from the intense light, screaming at the pain in their ears, too shocked and confused to do anything. The last sparks of the flash gave Bunny and me perfect distance and angle.

  “Frag out!”

  We threw.

  They died.

  Not all of them. We had to shoot three of them.

  But the rest took the shrapnel full in the face. The fools had been spooked by the dark and had grouped together for safety. It had been a stupid mistake, but they probably thought they owned this hallway.

  Now it was their tomb.

  The echo of the blast rolled up and down the hallway, and my head rang from the thunder. Even pressing your hands to your ears can only block out a portion of that noise.

  I turned on my flashlight and swept the beam over the charnel house.

  “God Almighty,” said Bunny.

  I cupped a hand around my mouth.

  “Hopscotch!” I yelled.

  A moment later the reply echoed back to us.

  “Jump rope!”

  It was Redman. Alpha Team had survived.

  We converged on the hatch. We pulled chemical light sticks and threw them down so that we all met in a mingled blue and green glow. One of the Alphas came last, supporting Top, who looked ashy and ill.

  “How you holding up?” asked Bunny, hurrying over to help.

  “Just fucking peachy, Farmboy. Took you long enough.”

  “Yeah, we stopped at a titty bar for a few beers.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Redman closed on me while I was examining the hatch. “First Sergeant Sims won’t accept any painkillers. He threatened to kneecap the first son of a bitch who tried to give him morphine.”

  “He seems to be in that kind of mood. Leave him alone. We have other fish to fry. We need to get through this hatch.”

  Before he’d been promoted to Grace’s number two, Redman had been the demolitions expert for Alpha. He ran his hand over the hatch and then crabbed sideways and knocked on the wall.

  “Okay, Cap,” he said, “we couldn’t blow that hatch with an RPG, but the wall is just block. If we can knock a big hole in it, I can rig a compressed charge and maybe make us a doorway. We have just about enough C4 for that; it’s the hole that’s going to be the problem.”

  “I need solutions, not problems.”

  Redman looked at the dead Russians, then turned to one of the Alphas. “Beth—check the bodies. I n
eed grenades and explosives. If they have any, it’ll be Semtex. Detonators, too. Whoever has the most Semtex will have the detonators. Do it now.”

  Alpha Team moved with a purpose, and in under two minutes Redman had twenty grenades and four tubes of plastic explosive. Three of the four Russian detonators had been broken, but he said he only needed one.

  He set to work rigging the grenades together over a wad made from half of the Semtex. He draped it with three layers of Hu’s polymer blast dampening cloth, placed the detonator with great care, and started backing up, unspooling wire as he went. I chased everyone back to the sharp bend in the corridor and we all flattened out on the floor by the wall.

  “Fire in the hole!” Redman called, and clicked the detonator.

  The blast was massive. Smoke and dust blew over us, funneling around the curved corridor.

  As soon as it was clear, I was up and running, a cloth pressed to my face, squinting through the smoke. There was a smoking crater in the wall that was at least eight inches deep, and fissures ran outward from side to side and floor to ceiling.

  “Damn,” Redman said, “I’m good.”

  He set to work on the second part of the job, gouging the cracked inner stone to make a tight crevice for his C4. He packed it tight. A compressed blast does far more damage, and we needed damage. We needed a doorway big enough for me to climb through.

  Once he was done we repeated our retreat and he clicked the detonator.

  This blast was bigger but not louder. A lot of the force went into the stone wall with such intensity that we felt the vibration run along the floor.

  Again I was up and running, and as I approached the wall I knew that Redman had broken through. I could feel a breeze of moist heat coming at me through the smoke. I waved furiously at the cloud of dust and shined my light at the hole.

  It went all the way through.

  But it wasn’t big enough.

  Not for me. Not for any of us.

  And we’d used all of our explosives.

  Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Two

  The Chamber of Myth