“Hard to tell, sir. It goes down a ways.” Kepler replied.
“You don’t have to tell me, Adrian. I was down there. Cut it and let’s move on.”
Kepler pulled out an SOG Seal Pup knife from the sheath attached to the front of his black BDU blouse and in one slick swipe, cleaved the rope. The tail of the rope quickly slithered off the floor and down the hole like a retreating snake.
The other twenty team members had moved further into the complex toward the freight elevator, past the gym. Each team member, in their solid black BDU uniforms, and armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, staggered themselves along the hallway, covering both ahead of them and behind, as they had been taught. Damien doubted whether the feeble five-man Chess Team security force on site would pose any threat. They’d probably have a hell of a time just getting into the base. By that time, Damien and his men would have what they had come for and would be long gone. Then Damien would take the utmost pleasure in finally destroying the base, as it should have been destroyed years ago.
5.
En route to Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Tom Duncan smiled broadly.
Although concerned about being trapped inside the base with a probably hostile invading force, he grinned at being back in action. He throttled the HDT motorcycle and sped down the underground train tunnel toward Labs. The invaders had secured all the doors and shut down local control of the electric trains that connected the three different sections of the base as well. As soon as he had discovered that, Duncan had told Lori to leave the glassed in office on the edge of the hangar and get into the main computer lab in Central. They hadn’t set up everything they would need there yet—and miles of cables were clustered sloppily on the floor until they set it all up correctly, but she would be safer there and she would have more computing power at her fingertips. Hopefully she would be able to crack the encryption keeping them out of half of the system.
After Lori was on her way, Duncan had headed to the weapons pallets on the hangar floor and unwrapped the plastic from a few. He selected an M4 carbine that got strapped over his back, an M9 pistol that went into a holster on his hip and an M11 bayonet knife. In their former lives as Delta Force operatives, Chess Team members had picked and chosen their tools from all the armed services. They all seemed to favor the KA-BAR knife the Marines and Navy used, but Duncan preferred the explosive ordinance disposal variant of the Army’s standard M9 bayonet. The KA-BAR always felt too slippery in his hand, and as a former Ranger, he was used to standard Army tools.
After arming up, Duncan had taken an already fueled up HDT dirt bike through the corridors and down to Central’s electric train terminal. He drove the bike right off the platform and down onto the concrete beside the two sets of rails—one for trains heading to Labs and one for trains returning from Labs—Ridley had thought of everything—and had roared off into the darkness of the tunnel. It was a ten-mile straight shot to Labs. Halfway there, with the breeze blowing in his face and the occasional LED security lights whizzing past him on the walls of the tunnel, the smile had crept onto his face. He was back in action again.
Even with the thrill of racing down the darkened tunnel on a dirt bike and the adrenaline coursing through his veins at the thought of confronting an incursion force, Duncan’s strategic mind was at work in the background. He was cataloguing the entry and exit points to the base, recalling exactly where everyone on his team was—even the field members of Chess Team that were away, thinking of choke points in the Labs section and mostly pondering what the goal could be. Was this Manifold after something they had left behind? Was it a revenge tactic on the part of some nation or organization Chess Team had done wrong? Could it possibly even be a non-military incursion? Burglars? He dismissed that thought with clinical precision. The facility was too complicated for an average burglar to have gained entrance. He quickly boiled things down to three possible sources. Manifold, Russians upset with the team over recent antics in their country or King’s clash with them over the hitman business or perhaps most upsetting, this incursion could be from US military or Homeland Security personnel that had no knowledge of Chess Team’s new black status. If it was the latter, Keasling would be able to sort things out, but it would be sticky for a while. If it was the Russians, unless they had sent in Spetsnaz troops, Duncan was confident he and Black Zero could handle things just fine until the security team found their way inside.
Duncan’s true concern was if this was a Manifold team. He couldn’t imagine why they would be back here at Alpha after the base had been dormant for so long. He’d had the place guarded all this time, of course, but the optimal time to strike the facility would have been when it was mostly empty. Or even when as president, Duncan had ordered Eli Jacobs and his cleanup team to scour the site for records and the warped remains of Richard Ridley’s genetic experiments—most of which ended up under lock and key at the CDC complex down in Georgia.
A half mile from the train platform in the Labs section, Duncan released the throttle and coasted to a stop. He turned the bike off and climbed off of it, keeping to the shadows. He leaned the bike in a concrete alcove—both to hide it and to prevent it from causing a wreck should either of the trains be activated again. He unslung the M4 and took a light jog toward the end of the tunnel, remaining close to the wall and the cover of darkness it provided.
‘A brisk pace’ indeed, he thought, his former campaign slogan running through his head, as he raced into what was likely to be danger.
As he approached the end of the tunnel, Duncan passed the bio security doors—installed at each section of the base to completely seal that section off from the rest in case of a biological or chemical accident. Duncan had seen in Manifold’s records that the doors were identical to those used at the CDC. He eased past the thick white steel, plastic and Plexiglas door with its immense rubber seal, and stepped closer to the edge of the tunnel and the open cavern beyond. Duncan paused, crouching down under the concrete lip of the train platform. One of Ridley’s shiny white electric trains sat parked at this end of the line, waiting to take passengers from Labs to Central or Dock. After the intermittently lit tunnel, the bright lights in the station made Duncan squint his eyes. He heard hushed voices at the far end of the platform, but stayed in his crouch until he adjusted to the florescent glare. The barrel of his M4 leading, he slowly peeked over the rim of the concrete.
Duncan immediately recognized the black Gen Y uniforms with the stylized logo of the security firm on the chest. Men were streaming across the platform toward the train, and he quietly swore under his breath. He counted at least fifteen of them. He watched as two of them boarded the train, while one squatted down and opened a portable laptop. Duncan overheard the man speaking to his nearby superior.
“Just give me a moment to activate the train, sir.”
The man standing near the laptop user just nodded curtly. The other remaining men had taken up defensive positions around the train and Duncan had to slowly duck back down under the concrete lip to avoid being spotted. He moved slowly because the human eye tended to notice rapidly moving objects in the periphery. But slow moving objects often went unnoticed. Crouching along the rails, he retreated to the shadow of the mouth of the tunnel. He could still see the platform from here, but not as well. He aimed the M4 along the edge of the wall, ensuring the tip of the barrel did not protrude into the light of the station, where it might be seen. He adjusted his footing on the concrete floor for a better stance and felt his right foot slide slightly. He glanced down and lifted his foot, seeing some kind of sticky and viscous slime attached to the bottom of his shoe. What the hell? But the situation on the platform demanded his attention more then the slime. A problem for another time, he thought.
He aimed for the laptop the Gen Y man was using, thinking that must be how they were controlling the computer systems and the doors. Lori still might not be able to open the doors if Duncan destroyed the man’s lap
top, but he and Gen Y would be on equal ground with regard to controlling the facility around them.
Just as he was about to fire, the rapid-fire staccato sound of MP5s came from the far hallway, across the cavernous space around the train platform. Another Gen Y man came rushing out onto the platform and whirled around, firing his weapon back the way he had come. The others on the platform all turned their backs to Duncan’s location and focused on the current threat. More fire was still coming from the hallway as well. Someone was engaged in a battle.
Duncan had flinched down at the sound of the automatic weapons fire, but now resumed his stance, thinking it must have been Beck on the other end of the hallway beyond the platform. Excellent. We have them in a crossfire.
Then the screams began and Duncan realized it wasn’t Beck at all.
6.
Mount Tecumseh, above Section Central
White Two was not a bulky man. Neither was his partner, White Three. They had been dispatched to the top of Mount Tecumseh, to seek access to Central through the vents for that very reason. They were both wiry, thin rock climbers with hardly any percentage of body fat. Both men were blonde haired and blue eyed, although their facial structures were different enough that they were never mistaken for one another. Both men loved to climb and both men loved adventure. The chance to come work for Chess Team had been a dream for both of them, friends and climbing partners since their days together at Fort Drum in 10th Mountain.
White Two, whose name was Austin Mealey, was reconsidering his decision to enter the ventilation shaft headfirst and without a line. It was a narrow shaft of reinforced aluminum with the occasional seam where sections of it had been fitted together. The vent had seemed so tight, that despite his slight size, Mealey had figured he could arrest his descent as he progressed deeper into the vent by simply widening his arms and legs. The friction alone against the wall would do it. Plus there were the occasional ridges at the end of each section of the rectangular tube that while only a quarter of an inch in width, were like a huge shelf to a rock climber. He guessed correctly that he was about a third of the way down the shaft now and he felt the need to rest at each tiny ledge.
He and White Three, whose name was Bryan West, had used a small hand-held blowtorch to cut through the grills at the tops of the ventilation shafts. Then they had each taken a shaft and started their respective descents. Bryan was the only other team member whose name was known to Mealey. Well, of course he had recognized Deep Blue as the former president as well. Tom Duncan was well regarded in Mealey’s family as the best president since Kennedy. Mealey hadn’t gone in for politics much himself, even though he came from a political Massachusetts family. But as far as Mealey could tell, Tom Duncan had done right by the military as a president and he was still doing right as Deep Blue. Mealey had been thrilled to meet the man and had been excited with the offer to join Chess Team.
Now Duncan was trapped inside the new base, possibly with hostiles inside, and White Two was determined to get inside and offer help if needed. He took a breath and brought his arms in again to move past the ledge and lower into the shaft. It was a repetitive task of expanding his shoulders and upper arms against the walls of the shaft while bringing his legs in and his knees up slightly. Then he would open his legs like a pair of scissors, pressing the sides of his legs and his combat boots against the aluminum walls, and move his arms forward again. Tiring and boring, but the repeated action of his stilted shuffle was doing the job. He moved deeper down the shaft toward the thin grate he knew was far below him. There he’d clip into an anchor on a small shelf just above the gate that he knew from Deep Blue’s computer schematics. He would pull the rope out of the small rope bag he had removed from his larger backpack on the summit and strapped to his midsection before the descent. His plan was to rappel down to the hangar floor from the edge of the vent shaft, after first checking that no hostiles were present.
At about the halfway point, he knew there was a bend in the vent that wasn’t quite an S-bend, and the low light from his red LED headlamp showed a dim reflection up ahead. He knew he was getting close. Shortly before the bend, he knew there would be another small ledge based on the frequency with which he had encountered them so far. He was breathing hard and looking forward to the little rest stop. Then he would take a longer break on the bend, which was about a 45-degree angle, and would feel like lying in a bed compared the vertical feet of metal above him.
At least the air was fresh. He always expected cramped dark spaces to smell bad too, like a cave or the smell of rotting vegetation in a damp forest, but the metal of the shaft only conducted blessedly cool, fresh mountain air.
His arms were getting tired faster than his legs—rock climbing is mostly a delicate balancing act with the legs. Only fools tried to power their way up climbs with their arms. As a result, the bulk of Mealey’s strength was in his quads and not his biceps and triceps. He was an excellent climber and good with balance and position, but not so good for sheer strength and long endurance. He preferred the shorter and more technically challenging climbs to long drawn out big walls.
Where the hell is that damn ledge?
Mealey continued his shuffle, sure that he must have passed the point where the last seam should have been. At least the bend was coming up. He lowered his arms and drew in a breath to expand his shoulders and elbows, wedging himself in yet again, when his elbow slipped.
He started to slide down, even though his boots were scissored out tightly against the walls. No seams came up to stop him. He gulped out his breath involuntarily, unintentionally bringing the pressure off his upper body and his slide sped up. He was heading fast toward the bend and struggling to get purchase again, when his body slammed into the bend hard and picked up speed. The walls were no longer offering friction of any kind. He thumped through the bend, literally bouncing off the walls, and Austin Mealey realized in a moment of utter horror why he couldn’t find purchase. The walls had been coated in grease. All of four of them.
He was in the straightaway below the bend, with nothing but two hundred feet of vertical drop below him until the grate in the ceiling of the hangar—and then another fifty feet of open hangar below that! His body was picking up speed like a runaway train and his limbs slid down walls of the vent like a kid on a Slip N’ Slide. He knew his only chance was to get his knees up to his chest and then lunge out laterally, hopefully forcing his way past the grease and denting the thick aluminum outward with the force of his body’s thrust. There was no way he’d be able to snatch the small anchor before bursting out of the hangar’s ceiling. But it was hard to raise his legs at his speed of descent and with the disorientation of being upside down and falling fast.
He had almost done it and he thought it was going to be close when the glare from his headlamp reflected off something just up ahead and above the grate at the bottom of the shaft. He recognized it for what it was a half a second before he hit it.
Manifold had intentionally greased the ventilation shafts as a security procedure. When the security override was initiated, a second grate extended from the vertical walls and latched into place. It was like a manhole sewer cover grate that you could see though—the kind with bars. Designed not to impede the flow of air into and out of the facility. But this grate’s bars weren’t flat like those on a manhole cover. They tapered upward into razor sharp blades.
White Two’s body slammed into the death trap at close to forty miles an hour. His clothing, skin and the skeleton beneath it were all no match for the steel razor-grill. One hundred and sixty pounds of human being and military equipment were diced into small chunks and soupy muck by the razor-grill, then crashed into the actual grate that was set into the ceiling of the hangar of Central. If anyone had been in the hangar at that moment, they would have seen the grate on the ceiling explode open and a red and brown burst of human debris splatter through the air and onto the concrete floor fifty feet below. If White Two had made it successfully into Central, he would have
seen the similar remains of White Three on top of a pallet of cardboard boxes, thirty feet across the hangar.
7.
Lake Winnipesaukee, White Mountains, NH
Well, I’m in the shit now.
White Four, a short broad-shouldered New York Italian, looked down into the massive cistern and frowned. It was probably twenty feet tall and about five feet in diameter, and the bottom third of it was filled with liquid sewage, a few chunky fecal bits floating on top. The smell was strong enough to make his eyes water.
White Four, known as Gino Ravenelli until his transfer from 10th Mountain to Chess Team’s Security Force, was peering down at the heady brew of human waste from an access tunnel near the top of the cistern, where a rusted ladder led down the wall and submerged into the slime. He now realized that the access tunnel wasn’t strictly for the purpose of access, but rather was primarily intended as an overflow tunnel. If the cistern filled to its top with sewage, the tunnel would direct the overflowing waste out of the cistern and directly in the lake. Gino was outraged.
“That bastard,” he said aloud, the sound echoing around the mostly empty chamber.
Richard Ridley had been nothing if not extravagant with regard to his own comforts while cutting corners in every other area that he deemed nonessential. The man had apparently saved money on costly sewage treatment or removal by simply choosing to contaminate the local environment.
Gino had arrived at the edge of Lake Winnipesaukee on his HDT dirt bike just about twenty minutes after White One had dispatched him here from the outside of the hangar door. The road at the north of the lake led to a small, seemingly abandoned cabin, which Deep Blue had discovered was owned by Manifold through several dummy companies. The cabin was strictly camouflage though. Gino had entered it and attempted to gain access to the underground section of the Alpha base known now as Dock, but the door at the top of the stairs down to the huge dock with the massive submarine was covered by a thick steel security door, which was usually retracted and hidden inside the wall like a pocket door. Gino knew how thick the door was, and he reasoned that he didn’t have enough explosives on him to get through it. He had expected the door though. If all the security doors at the base had slammed shut like the hangar door had, he knew he’d have a challenge ahead of him in getting into the Dock. But the stair inside the abandoned cabin made the most sense to check first. It was the easiest possible way in.
Callsign: Deep Blue - Book 1 (A Tom Duncan - Chess Team Novella) Page 3
