As Matt Carrack raced along a dirt path around the base of the mountain to another door into Central, designated Post 4, he reflected on his own meeting with Tom Duncan and the revelations the man had provided.
“Your job as head of security, Matt, will be to overreact to the slightest hint of danger. Don’t ever fear making a mistake erring on the side of caution or worry about accidental property damage. If you even have a slight hunch that something has gone hinky, you leap into action. The five prime members of Chess Team will always look after themselves. Your job is to protect every man and woman in our support team, including me. Our enemies cover the range of terrorists, foreign governments and even mythological creatures. If you think something smells funny, you boys go into action mode long before everything turns FUBAR.” Tom Duncan’s face had turned serious when he had said it, and even though Matt Carrack hadn’t seen the mythological threats, he had read the files and he knew they weren’t bullshit.
“Yes, Sir. If you ever need me in that capacity, I’ll bring the hellfire.”
As Carrack approached the door to Post 4, a much smaller door disguised to look like the entryway to an abandoned mine tunnel into the side of the mountain, he turned his mind back to the job at hand. He quickly unlocked the chain-link fence gate across the entryway to the mine tunnel, pulled it back and ran down the 40-foot long damp tunnel, with the flashlight mounted on the barrel of his FN SCAR leading the way. At the end of the tunnel was a miniature version of the steel hangar door, this one designed only to admit a vehicle the size of a small truck. It too was locked tight and the control pad mounted on the wall to the side of the gleaming door was dark and unresponsive just like its twin outside the main hangar door.
Carrack returned to the bright daylight outside the tunnel and carefully scanned the pine trees that studded the hillside below the entryway. No movement. He pulled back the sleeve of his MO5 digicam woodland camouflage BDU blouse and checked his Suunto Vector wristwatch. Both the camo and the watch were not standard US military items—Deep Blue acquired the best equipment he could for the team. In this case, the uniforms were from the Finnish military, because their woodland patterns better matched the foliage in New Hampshire than standard US woodland gear. The watch was also from Finland—but only because Suunto was renowned for the quality of their marine compasses long before they started manufacturing wristwatches, and the company had been smart enough to put compasses into their watches, when companies like Casio were still patting themselves on the backs for stopwatch functions.
It would be twenty minutes or more before Carrack heard from White Three at Labs or White Four at Dock. He stepped back into the shadow of the tunnel opening, keeping his weapon trained on the forest around him, and contacted White Two with a small tactical throat microphone.
“Two, position? Over.”
“Approaching target now,” White Two’s voice came in clearly.
“Let me know when you’re inside.”
“Acknowledged, One, we’re at the vents now. When we get in, we’ll open the door for you.” Two’s voice had picked up some static, and Carrack figured the man had entered the vent already.
“Good enough, White One out.”
Carrack made his way back down the trail toward the hangar door, his eyes still scanning as he went and his nose breathing in the deep robust scent of the dense trees. When he reached the sealed hangar door, he again did a visual check of the area and then tried the control pad mounted on the wall to the left of the door again. It was still dark. He tried the satellite phone again, and as before, he could not reach Deep Blue. His next call was to General Keasling. The General was at the Pentagon and was one of only two people in active service to the US Government that knew about Chess Team—the other was the director of the CIA, Domenick Boucher. Both were friends of Deep Blue’s and both had been involved with Chess Team since its inception.
Keasling answered on the second ring. The secured line was reserved for Deep Blue, and Carrack had received the number and instructions to call Keasling if necessary, when he had taken the job. Carrack had yet to meet the General, but he understood that the man would know who he was.
“Talk to me,” the General’s no-nonsense voice was gruff, but he seemed in a good mood. That was about to change.
“General, this is White One. Please confirm your identity for me.” Carrack spoke clearly and quickly.
“Shit,” the General said, and he stretched it out so it sounded like sheee-it. “Authorization Code Delta Romeo Bravo Alpha Kilo Papa India Tango, General Michael Keasling, come back.”
“Tango Lima Hotel, Captain Matthew Carrack,” Carrack provided the return code to authenticate his own identity for the General.
“Talk to me son, what the fuck is going on?” All signs of the General’s mirth were gone.
“General, how soon can you get me an Abrams tank up from Fort Devens? I might need to blow some shit up.”
3.
Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Anna Beck swung precariously in the dark. The cavern around her was a natural system that ran almost a mile underground. Far above her, almost half a mile up the rope, was the entrance to the Labs section of the facility, but the halogen bulb of her headlamp only illuminated a short distance up the rope. She took another breath from the facemask of her closed circuit rebreather and squeezed the Petzl descender on the line. She resumed her descent into the depths of the cavern.
The cavern was filled with natural gas. Richard Ridley had planned to utilize the natural feature as a slash and burn technique for the compound. At the slightest hint of danger, he and his Manifold flunkies would have evacuated and an explosive device would have been remote control detonated from Ridley’s smartphone. But Chess Team and Anna Beck had put a dent in that plan. The smartphone had been remotely prevented from detonating the explosion. Ridley had escaped, but an Army cleanup team had later deactivated the explosive device. That was a few years ago, and now here she was back in the same facility she had escaped from along with Ridley; although when she had escaped, she had done so on the side of the angels.
The disappointment about Ridley and Manifold Genetics still stung. She had left the Army and Iraq disappointed enough, and she had gone to work for Gen Y, a security firm, whose sole client was Manifold Genetics. Manifold had seemed like the real deal—a biotech company that actually cared about people and about saving the world. Only a short time after going to work for them though, Beck had learned the truth. Manifold had been run by a megalomaniac that was obsessed with learning the secrets of human regeneration and immortality, at any cost. When it came down to it, she switched sides and helped Chess Team take him down. But at the end of the battle, she had taken the opportunity to slip away, unsure of her next move. She had traveled around a while, until running into a member of Chess Team once again, and this time, the team had had a job offer for her.
As Black Zero, she was Deep Blue’s right hand assistant in all things non-technical; White Zero handled the tech stuff along with Lewis Aleman and Deep Blue himself. Beck was computer proficient, but she was far better in the field. The Black side of the support organization was all pilots, mechanics, spooks and her. Deep Blue had told her she was to be his assistant in things logistical as well as an assistant to the team in field support matters, but she was also tasked with acting as Deep Blue’s personal bodyguard, and it was a task she took to heart. It didn’t take long to learn to like the guy. He was a natural and charismatic leader, calm and good natured, but startlingly brilliant in his ability to see the bigger picture. Beck hadn’t paid that much attention to the man when he was president, but when she was brought into the team, she quickly gained a huge respect for him as Deep Blue. She rapidly gleaned that this time, there was no mistake—Chess Team were the good guys, and Deep Blue was one of the best. The man had given up everything so he could keep his fingers in the game and make the most amount of difference. Within weeks, Beck went from
enjoying the new job, to considering her role to be more of a calling, like a position in the priesthood. Tom Duncan was her guy, and she was dedicated to the core.
She continued her descent on the line, her climbing harness digging into her crotch. The rebreather equipment was a bit awkward—she’d never rappelled wearing it before—but she was still enjoying herself. She had always been up for adventure. That was why the Army had called to her, why she had gone to work for Manifold, why she had eventually bailed on them and ultimately why she had accepted the position with Chess Team’s support organization. She wanted to be on the side of the angels, but more than that, she wanted action. She knew helping a group that had recently dealt with creatures from Greek mythology, worldwide contagion and murderously animated rock monsters would put her in the thick of it. She slowed her descent as the floor of the cavern came into view below her in the small pool of LED light from her headlamp. The dark outside the circumference of the headlamp was complete, and she could hear nothing but the sound of her own breathing.
When she reached the floor, she unclipped her harness from the line, pulled out a strong Wagan 2057 12-volt halogen spotlight and swung the beam in a wide arc around her. The cavern was cold and damp, yet the heat from the contained air of the rebreather’s mask against her face had caused her to perspire slightly. The cavern was immense, with small tunnels and areas that weren’t quite tunnels, but rather smaller caverns, leading off in all directions. The beam of her spotlight could reach almost a mile, but there were sections of the chamber the beam could not reach, the distant darkness impenetrable. She turned the beam down to her feet. She could see the scuffle marks in the sand on the floor from where the Army team had come in and removed the explosive device.
Today, Deep Blue had tasked her with taking a look around, in case Manifold had left any other surprises in the cavern. The clean up team the Army had brought in years ago had only had retrieval of the device on their minds. Now that Deep Blue was going to make the Alpha facility into Chess Team’s permanent base of operations, exploration was warranted—or at least as much exploration as she could perform given the hour or so of fresh air her breathing apparatus contained. She checked the air gauge and again checked her wristwatch. The thing was bulky as hell, but she loved it because it was like a badge of honor—the first piece of team equipment she had been issued. Everyone got a Suunto. It wasn’t a watch she would have picked for herself, but she had come to love the day-glow yellow plastic around the bezel and the little level-bubble set into the plastic face of the device. The company that manufactured the watch called it a wrist-top computer, and she agreed with that assessment after Deep Blue had given it to her and handed her an inch thick instruction manual to go with it. Right now though, she was only concerned with the compass feature on the watch.
She took a bearing and started roughly northeast. She knew that over a mile above her, the Labs section eventually connected with an underground electric train that ran a ruler straight rail 10 miles deeper into the mountains and directly into the Central section. Her first goal was to determine whether there was access to the rail tunnel from this cavern. She started hiking across the sand, soil and rock of the cavern floor, scrambling where necessary over boulders and, she was surprised to see, the vegetation that resembled roots on a large tree. The roots came in and out of the rock all over the floor, reminding her of the mangroves she had seen in Florida.
Beck didn’t think that giant tree roots grew in caves, but she didn’t know for sure. She pulled out a digital camera and snapped a few pictures of the roots just in case. Ridley had been experimenting with all kinds of genetic muck in the labs above her head and the gun battle that had led to the capture of the base had resulted in a chemical soup of ungainly hazmat proportions spilled all over the place. While it wasn’t part of her mission today to look for environmental problems, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility in Beck’s mind that some of that chemical goo could have seeped down into the cavern and mutated harmless lichen into arm-thick roots. She might get back to Central only to have Deep Blue inform her that there were hundreds of subterranean plants that might fit the bill and there was nothing to worry about. If that happened, she’d be fine with it. But she’d rather be overly cautious where anything concerned Richard Ridley. The camera’s flash made a feeble attempt to light the darkened space, but the bright glare from the flashlight would be more than sufficient to capture the pictures. That task completed, she slipped the camera back into a nylon zippered case and deposited it in her black BDU cargo pocket on the side of her leg.
She took a sip of water from the CamelBak pouch’s straw that was embedded inside the facemask, and wiped a stray wisp of her long brown hair away from the Plexiglas shield over her face. She should have worn a hood, but the thought of neoprene headgear, when she was already sweating, made her glad she hadn’t.
She was about to continue deeper into the cavern when something brushed past her ankles and calves, hard enough to cause her to lose her balance and fall over backwards. She rolled backwards with the fall, coming up in a crouch, her Beretta M9 already out of her tactical leg holster and aimed in the direction of whatever had hit her. In the other hand, she played the spotlight in a slow arc, but to her consternation, she didn’t see anything.
A small scritching noise came from behind her and she rolled again, blasting the beam of light into the shadows behind her. She thought she had seen something move at the edge of the beam’s radius of ambient light, but every time she moved the beam further, whatever it was, seemed just out of reach.
More shuffling to the side of her, and again, behind her.
She started breathing heavily and swung the beam of light in a full circle, fast.
Movement on three sides of her—the things were black and shiny, and huge and fast.
She checked her Suunto’s compass, and started hauling ass back toward the rope. She didn’t know what it was that was down here with her, but she knew there was more than one of them, and she knew they were hunting her in the dark. Whatever the things were, they seemed to be confined to the ground, so the rope was her salvation. She spun a 360 turn a few times while running, playing the arc of the spotlight all around the cavern, but she still caught no more of a glimpse of her attackers than just shuffling movement in the shadows, just beyond the edge of the light.
Whatever they were, they were damn fast.
As the rope came into focus in the beam of the spotlight ahead of her, Black Zero knew she had made it, and she would get out of the cavern to return with more light and bigger weapons.
Until she saw the rope move, that was.
She thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, because the rope was moving and moving quickly. And it was moving in the wrong direction—down. She leapt aside as nearly a mile of 11 mm black climbing rope came pooling out of the air and slamming to the ground at her feet.
Someone had cut her rope.
Then the scritching noise came from behind again.
4.
Post 2, Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
The infiltration team made short work of the door at the helipad. After all, even though it was a few years after Manifold had abandoned the place, they still had the original security codes for the entrances. It was an easy task for Martin Damien’s Gen Y security team to slip past the guards stationed at the front of the former Bible campground, unlock the helipad door and then send all entrances and exits into all branches of the facility into lockdown. Of course, the new residents had changed the basic entry codes for the security doors, but they had yet to mine through the former data architecture of the base deeply enough to discover the override codes that Gen Y had installed back in the day. Now it was too late.
Damien was the eldest member of the security team at twenty-four and the only member of the infiltration squad that had been employed by Manifold at the time of the Hydra incident. He absently rubbed a hand over the cruel scar that m
arred his otherwise boyish good looks, and then continued to run his fingers up and through his thick shock of black hair. He’d been waiting for a chance to get back at the bastards that had scarred him. Although intel suggested that the field team was not on site yet, meaning that jackrabbity Korean wouldn’t be here, Damien would still be more than happy to inflict a little pain on Chess Team’s support members.
“Secure the barracks,” Damien murmured the command into a tactical throat microphone, and his men branched out down the short hallway off the helipad and into the section that had formerly been used to house Damien and his fellow Gen Y security members, when the facility had been Manifold’s. Gen Y, a security firm comprised mostly of former military members, was a company with just the one client—Manifold Genetics. Manifold had been Richard Ridley’s baby, with locations all over the globe and cutting-edge research into biotechnology. Damien had been happy to work for them, first in a post in Iran, then later at Tristan da Cunha and here at the former Manifold Alpha base in New Hampshire. Anything to get away from his native Ireland. But things had gone to hell, first in the Atlantic, and then here too. That bitch, Anna Beck, had gone over to the other side, and the hopping Asian wonder, the Chess Team member named Knight, had ruined the Hydra lab, setting off all kinds of crazy. The base was lost to the military and Ridley was gone—Gen Y took their orders from another leader now.
“Sir,” Adrian Kepler, Damien’s second in command was calling him over, startling him out of his remembrances.
“What is it?” Damien walked over to the doorway leading off the barracks, to an unfinished surface of rock walls that led down to the caverns below Alpha. Most of the rest of this level had floors under it as well, but this closet went right into the rock of the mountain under which this section of the base was built. Kepler was pointing to a thick climbing rope that had been secured to the anchor at the top of the vertical tunnel going down into the depths. “Is someone on the line?”
Callsign: Deep Blue - Book 1 (A Tom Duncan - Chess Team Novella) Page 2
