Callsign: Deep Blue - Book 1 (A Tom Duncan - Chess Team Novella)

by Robinson, Jeremy

  Carrack didn’t know if he would be rappelling into a room full of hostiles, but it was too late for him to flip around and come out the vent head-first. So he did the next best thing. He released his grip on the rappel device, and slid rapidly down and out of the vent. He braked when his head had cleared the ceiling by a few feet, and his FN SCAR was up and leveled, as he scanned the hangar around him.

  Mercifully, it was empty.

  He quickly descended the rest of the way to the floor, laying the razor grill next to what he assumed were the remains of one of his men. He quickly detached from the line and crouched down behind a nearby pallet that had had its plastic stripped off. The light in the massive space was low—it wasn’t really necessary to have your parked helicopters and pallets full of stuff lit up like Christmas, so Deep Blue was saving the electricity.

  Carrack knelt down and examined the remains of his soldier.

  Son of a bitch.

  The murder grill had done its evil deed well. Most other people would have been ferociously sick at the nearly liquid remains of a human being, but Carrack had a strong stomach. He’d seen some bad things in Afghanistan, but he wasn’t sure if he had ever seen worse. He quickly scanned the distant ceiling of the hangar and located the second vent.

  Checking carefully for hostiles, he moved quickly from pallet to pallet, taking brief cover at each until he came to a pallet that was coated in the remains of his other soldier. Neither man had stood a chance against their respective murder grills and the velocity of a human body in freefall. Carrack wondered whether White Four and White Five had met similar fates at their respective points of attempted ingress.

  He moved cautiously through the remaining rooms in this section of the facility, one after the other. All of his senses were heightened. His pupils had dilated to take in the maximum vision in the dimly lit rooms and hallways. His ears were attuned to the slightest sounds from the air conditioning. He carefully smelled the sterile air, searching for a hint of cologne, the scent of nicotine exuded through the skin, sweat or anything else that might indicate a threat before he could see it.

  By the time he got to the room that would be the main computer center once the base was fully operational, he was certain he was alone in this section.

  When he stepped into the room, he saw motion though, and then his eyes opened up like saucers. He had never seen anything like this in Afghanistan.

  Someone was sitting in the computer chair with the unusual design. It looked to him like White Zero, the shy computer girl. Her head and part of her shoulders were covered, so he couldn’t be sure at a glance. Covering her head and sticking straight up into the air, was the biggest fucking spotted salamander he had ever seen. It appeared to have come out of the air conditioning vent above White Zero’s head and it had tried to eat her. Her head and shoulder were completely inside of the creature, and its upper body stood straight up off the top of her head like a grotesque hat. About half way up the thing’s body—and it had to be at least seven feet long without the tail—the sheer weight of the slimy black body had made the creature bend over, almost in half. The tip of its long tapering tail nearly reached the floor. The beast’s bright yellow spots over its back screamed a hideous contrast to the horror of what he was seeing.

  Strong or not, White One turned and vomited the contents of his stomach onto the floor.

  As he was wiping a strand of drool from his mouth, he saw movement in the chair. He turned back to see the salamander twitching and seemingly struggling to free its immense mouth from its attempted meal.

  That thing is still alive?

  It was bucking in a frenzy now, and Carrack understood that it had heard him and was now looking for another snack.

  “Not this time, fucker.”

  He opened fire on it with the FN SCAR, then blinked his eyes in wonder as it continued to move. He lowered the weapon at the creature’s hind quarter and fired a long burst, sweeping the gun in a horizontal arc. The tail fell off and landed on the floor with a smacking noise. Both the tail-less creature and its tail were moving now. And to his astonishment and horror, Carrack watched as a new tail began to grow on the body. He guessed it would be no longer than ten minutes before the thing was back to its original size. He checked the tail on the floor to see if it would grow a body. If it did, there was no way to beat the things. But it didn’t. It twitched a few more times and then it lay still. Carrack vaguely remembered hearing about salamanders and geckos that could drop their tails to attract predators, allowing them to escape unharmed. The tails would still wiggle for a while to provide a healthy enticement for the predator.

  Carrack was no scientist, but he was intelligent enough to figure that the regeneration capabilities had to be controlled by its consciousness—it didn’t just occur automatically at the cellular level, or the tail would be growing a body.

  “Okay. Let’s see if you can grow back a whole body from just a head.”

  He opened fired again in a horizontal arc, this time at the creature’s neck, well aware of the damage he was probably doing to White Zero’s corpse, but it was necessary for him to determine how to beat the thing—especially if there might be more of them. Carrack was a cautious and very pessimistic man. He assumed there were probably hundreds more of them somewhere. After all, once he got over his initial shock at the sight of this thing, he remembered where he was and what the job entailed. Chess Team dealt with the wacky.

  Eventually, the sawing buzz of bullets severed the creature’s head from its torso. The huge body thumped to the floor next to the tail. Carrack was relieved to see that it did not move. The head was also not re-growing a body. He stepped closer to see if the head looked like it was even still alive. It didn’t seem to be.

  That was when he had noticed the computer monitor that White Zero had been reading. He probably would have passed it by as unimportant as he went on to search for Black Zero and Deep Blue, but the irony of his peripheral vision noticing the word salamanders, caught his eye and dragged it back to the screen.

  Carrack read what White Zero had been reading. He didn’t understand everything he read, but he got the gist of it. One of Manifold’s flunkies had experimented on harmless, small salamanders and these monstrosities were the result. He got the high points: aggressive, enlarged, rapid, could secrete a poison from the skin, radiation, regeneration, and they needed dampness in their environment—they were averse to light and fire could damage their ability to regenerate.

  He knew where they were coming from and he knew how to deal with them. Rifle fire was clearly going to be ineffective.

  He headed back to the hangar and made for the pallets containing weapons. He was about to unwrap the one he wanted when he heard voices coming.

  13.

  Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH

  Damien was not pleased. The mission was supposed to be a simple infiltration. Get in, get the sample, leave the bomb and get the hell out. He knew the damned creatures were active. They had told him that. They just conveniently neglected to tell him that the damned things were psychotic and hungry to boot. They hadn’t told him the blasted things could leap. He’d lost a lot of men back on the train platform. They were fodder, of course. Poorly trained and likely to come apart at the seams at the first hint of danger—well, most of them. A few were solid soldiers. Still, Damien didn’t like to have to sacrifice them needlessly.

  Damien also wasn’t expecting much resistance from Chess Team personnel. He knew that most of the team—active members and support—were away still. Chess Team didn’t plan to occupy the facility for a while yet. Gen Y had only been alerted to Chess Team’s plan recently when they had inadvertently allowed Gen Y computer access, as a number of systems had been partially reactivated. Manifold had been content to leave the abandoned base in the hands of the US military after it had been captured. “Not worth it,” was the official call. But then the systems had been reactivated, and it became clear that Chess Team p
lanned to use the facility for something. A few Gen Y men had been tasked with keeping an eye on the computer systems. It was only much later, when the motion sensors had suggested that Maddox’s experiments were still inhabiting the base, that the powers that be had ordered Gen Y to go back in.

  Maddox. That damned fool. Vicious man-eating salamanders. For fuck’s sake.

  Damien had lobbied for setting a far longer timer on the device he was to leave behind, in the hopes of catching most of the Chess Team bastards inside the facility when it was destroyed, but that wasn’t how he had been ordered to handle things. They just wanted their sample, and then the base was to be destroyed. Immediately.

  But things had gone pear-shaped almost immediately. More than half his force decimated on the train platform, loss of control over the computer systems, giant bastard amphibians on the loose and someone armed and fighting back. Damien hadn’t gotten a clear look at the man with the bald head that had opened fire on his men during the salamander skirmish, but he looked familiar. He wasn’t one of the normal Chess Team operatives and he wasn’t one of the new security team. Damien’s spotter had confirmed by radio that all five of the security men had been outside when they had activated the steel security doors. So the man with the rifle had to be one of their few tech people that were supposed to be inside.

  Damien looked out the window of the moving train, as it sped down the underground tunnel to the section of the base with the aircraft hangar. All he had wanted to do was blow the shite out of this place, but now he had to try to get computer control back from one of the computer rooms, or he and his last few remaining men wouldn’t be able to get out after they had what they had come for.

  The train pulled into the platform and the men debarked, looking far more skittish than when they had arrogantly infiltrated the laboratories. Damien stepped out in front of the men and strode down a hall toward the hangar space and the computer rooms. His men followed behind him, and his new number 2, a man named Jameson, approached him.

  “What do we do now, sir?”

  “We leave someone to get into the computers and then we head to the sub as planned.” Damien stepped into the hangar and scanned all the equipment that had been stored there. Chess Team were planning to use the base for themselves. Cocky bastards.

  Jameson looked nervous, the square cut of his jaw almost pouting. “And the explosive device sir?”

  “O’Brian will have taken care of that, don’t you worry. He stayed behind to get it into the cavern when the time is right.” Damien looked the man in the face and noted that he had trouble looking at Damien’s scar. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you go back through all those salamanders just to leave the bomb.”

  Jameson sighed audibly; his relief was palpable.

  “Oh, no, my little shite-eel. I’ll need you to come with me to the submarine dock to fight off hundreds of the buggers and get our sample.”

  All the blood drained from Jameson’s face.

  14.

  En Route to Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH

  Tom Duncan saw a piercing light. He had, of course, heard all the stereotypical hackneyed clichés about death and seeing a light before you die. But he didn’t think they were usually talking about the sparkling orange brilliance of a road flare. And this sizzling light was coming right at him.

  At the last second, Duncan dodged to the side and the light sailed past him and smacked hard into the plastic and Plexiglas of the bio door that had been at his back. There was a loud thwacking noise then the projectile fell to the tunnel floor and Duncan saw that it was indeed a road flare.

  He quickly turned his attention upward again, but all the shifting salamander shapes he had seen in the darkness of the tunnel were gone now. There was a hard blue-white light ahead of him, facing away down the tunnel, and then it turned to him briefly before turning away.

  “You okay, Boss?”

  Anna Beck stepped into the glare of the flare and was illuminated for Duncan to see. Her black uniform was a bit disheveled, but otherwise she seemed fine.

  “Anna, am I glad to see you. I thought I was done for,” Duncan let out a sigh.

  “They don’t like light and they really don’t like heat and fire. The cavern was filled with them. Also, as we suspected, several crevices and passages lead from the cavern up to these rail tunnels,” all business, Beck had stepped up to Duncan and was attaching a glowing LED lamp to his shirt, and handing him a spotlight and some flares.

  As they started walking toward the HDT dirt bike, Duncan thought of something.

  “What the hell were you doing with flares down in the cavern? You knew it was filled with gas.”

  “I like to be prepared for anything, Boss.”

  Duncan smiled. He’d told her she didn’t need to call him ‘Boss’ several times now, but she insisted on doing it. He quickly briefed her on what he knew of the situation, and they got onto the HDT. He let her drive. As he was swinging his leg over the bike, he saw some shifting in the shadows ahead, despite the glow from the headlamp on the bike, and the spotlight he now held in his hand.

  “They’re still up ahead in the shadows,” he told Beck.

  “Yeah, the light won’t make them go away, but it will keep them at bay a little,” she replied.

  “Hold on a second,” Duncan made her get off the bike and he opened the storage compartment under the seat. He removed a small cutting torch. “This might not be much, but if they don’t like heat and fire, it might be better than the spotlight.”

  “Great idea.”

  They got back on the bike and Black Zero turned her head back to him. “Are you ready? This is likely to be one hell of a ride.”

  “Let’s get it done.”

  Beck gunned the throttle and the dirt bike took off down the tunnel. Almost immediately, Duncan could tell things weren’t going to go well. The walls shifted and slid with the concentration of Salamanders he knew were there, despite the fact that he couldn’t see them. The headlamp from the dirt bike kept the path in front of them clear, but he could tell they were on the walls around the bike, and soon the first one leapt at the riders.

  Duncan swung the cutting torch, its blinding white-hot flame spitting through the air. He scored a hit and the attacking creature darted away. He felt things brush by him as the bike raced into the darkness. He kept his knees locked tightly to the frame of the bike for balance and swung the spotlight with his left hand as rapidly and as unexpectedly as he could. He still never saw more than a tail rapidly retreating into the gloom. His right hand waved the torch—most often toward the right side of the vehicle. He didn’t want to bring his arm over and risk burning Beck.

  Beck was hunched forward over the handlebars and laying on the speed, when Duncan felt something wrap around and grab his right arm. He blasted the beam of the spotlight on his arm and saw a long pink strip of meat wrapped around his arm in a spiral, and below it was one of the salamanders. This one wasn’t as large as the others he’d seen on the train platform. He guessed it was an adolescent. It was riding on the side of the bike frame, its head facing forward and the rear of its body wrapped over the back fender. The meat on Duncan’s arm was a tongue that must have been at least four feet long.

  Duncan rotated his wrist and neatly sliced through the tongue with the cutting torch and the great beast leapt away from the side of the bike and into darkness. He glanced up just in time to see another of the pink tongues stretching out into the light from the wall. He ducked his head under it and then saw a few more of the tongues ahead. He raised his arm and held the torch high. Beck seemed to understand and steered the bike a bit closer to the right wall and away from the tongues on the left wall. Still, the move brought them closer to the tongues coming off the right wall. And now he saw some coming from the ceiling too.

  Duncan focused on the creatures, noting their size, distance and movements, visualizing each strike. Then he began to slice off tongues with the cutting torch a
s the bike raced past the bodies in the dark.

  15.

  Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH

  White Five slashed out with his M9 bayonet. His Gen Y opponent merely took a step backward. The man that had been playing possum was huge—at least six inches taller than White Five’s five-foot-eleven. On the plus side, the Gen Y giant really did seem to have a broken arm. On the negative side, the man was wielding a ridiculously large Rambo knife in his other hand. Pete Johnson hated those things, as did many active duty U.S. military members. They were so large as to be useless in survival situations, despite being labeled as survival knives. They also sucked for utility purposes; although the blades were frightening and beefy looking, they didn’t have the tensile strength for true field craft. Pete Johnson preferred his M9 for such purposes. Unfortunately, in a straight knife fight against a longer-armed opponent, the serrated weekend-warrior knife worked just fine. A little too well, for Johnson’s taste.