“Phase two,” Jo announced, urging him along with a ‘get moving’ gesture. She pointed out exposed duct work and construction scaffolding. Not readily visible, Dean might never have noticed without her help.
“Bureaucracy,” she muttered,” otherwise they’d have been further along by now. We’re lucky they got this far, or we’d have been fish food by now.”
Now that he was looking more closely, the whole place exhibited an unfinished quality. Their feet crunched on what seemed like construction gravel, and even the walls looked rough-hewn and incomplete. They walked on, away from the stairwell and deeper downhill. Then Jo put a heavy hand on Dean’s chest with a finger to her lips. He reacted appropriately, stopping short and holding his breath.
Jo crept forward a few steps, soundlessly, then flashed a glint of metal—the fact that it was a weapon didn’t immediately register—and spun to her right. “That’s far enough!” she commanded. “Show yourself!”
A moment passed. Dean could hear nothing except a rush of blood around his ears. With a crunch of boot-steps, a man stepped out from behind a support fixture. Relaxing his posture, he flipped a pistol around one finger to muzzle it down, then put his hands up.
Dean’s eyes widened as he recognized the man—it was the colonel who’d interviewed him yesterday. Even more surprising was the sight of Jo breaking into a smile, the first such happy expression he’d seen her offer anyone. The colonel, still in surrender pose, looked pleased to see her as well.
“Shane Douglas, son of a bitch,” she said, “figures you’d find your way down here.”
“I heard a rumor you’d barged in, Agent Osborne,” he replied, “but I just had to see for myself.”
Dean waited a minute, then coughing lightly to get their attention. Jo waved him over.
He listened as the two of them caught up. They seemed to know each other from way back, but he wasn’t comfortable enough to ask. Then Jo asked him how he ended up here, and the colonel mentioned something about conducting a recent test flight and…
“Shane Douglas the test pilot!” Dean said, genuinely impressed, “I thought you looked familiar! I saw you on a documentary. The Mojave desert incident.”
Shane nodded a recognition. “That was a long time ago,” he said casually, like it was no big deal. “How’d the two of you end up down here?”
Dean didn’t know were to begin. So he was glad when Jo launched into it, explaining their narrow escape, and how Dean was one of the scientists they brought in. “To work on the phase two problem,” was how she put it, which Dean found interesting. He’d only just heard the term moments ago, and now it seemed he was a part of it.
“And the others?” Douglas asked.
“After what just happened up there, he may be the last of them,” she said, staring at Dean, then down at the floor.
* * *
A small number of survivors began trickling in, mostly uniformed officers and staff lucky enough to be stationed on a lower level. What remained of the base leadership was unclear. According to the duty officer, there were several contingency plans which may or may not have been activated, depending on the severity of the attack—but none of them involved command staff entering an unfinished segment of the facility. At one point it appeared that Douglas might be the ranking military man, but eventually a handful of stragglers from the command center arrived. He accepted the demotion without comment. Nobody was ready to start ordering people around, anyway. Not until they figured out what their next move was.
“I’m guessing communications are shoddy all the way through?” Jo asked.
The answer came in the form of ‘Who is this person?’ glares from the ones in uniform. Douglas set them straight by nodding for Jo to continue, wordlessly vouching for her.
She gave him a thankful glance. “Right. Communications are obviously shot. Let’s get a rundown of what we do know. From the top down, so we can get a sense of what happened. Who was on the highest level when the attack began?”
It took a few minutes to figure out this new, creative pecking order. The answer came from a corporal who was at the top, literally, when the bombing began.
“I was in the nest. That’s the upward signal station,” he explained, “and it’s mostly empty up there except for the receiving equipment. We’d just retrieved the daily signal when the first explosion hit, but it was so far away it didn’t really register. I remember thinking a generator might’ve blown. Someone made a crack about whales at the hatch. But when the second blast hit, it shook the room, and we took it more serious then.”
Jo and Shane were watching the man intently, and the others had formed a circle around him. The guy looked nervous, making Dean feel like he was witnessing an interrogation.
“You didn’t inform anyone topside until the second explosion?” Shane asked.
The man thought for a minute. “Sir, I’m not sure topside was informed at all. We’d already signed off after the retrieval, and with all the commotion and all…”
“Oh, shit,” Shane mumbled, loud enough for all to hear.
Jo looked a slight shade paler. “You shut down after receipt, then?” she asked, “No further communications at all?”
The corporal swallowed and nodded.
“Okay,” Shane said, “thanks for the heads up. Now, who was under the nest?”—he looked around the group, making a mental note of the order and motioning for the appropriate soldier to step forward—“I need whatever details you can remember. Anything unusual that happened on your level or on your way down.”
The next few reports were similar; they were far from the first blasts, disoriented and unsure, but once they realized what was going on they headed down to emergency stations in the lower-levels. Judging from the head-count, there were about half missing from the ones who belonged down here. Then there was another handful or so who’d thought like Jo and Shane, making for the bottom when they realized it was probably safer.
As the stories followed the facility down level-by-level, the tales became more harrowing, the proximity to the blasts painting a picture of the attack. The patterns indicated an external assault, either bombs placed on the exterior, or a vessel of some sort. Dean thought about how they’d approached, how the base forces had intercepted them so quickly. He had to assume such reinforcements would have protected the place from any such obvious threats. He guessed that left depth charges, or perhaps divers. Is it possible they’re still around, ready to strike again?
As if sensing Dean’s worry, Shane suddenly told everyone to group up with people they knew. He was looking for loners, and he found one sailor in the back who’d been quiet since they’d gathered. As the pairs and groups split off and moved together, it became obvious he was the odd man out, and all eyes fell on him.
“You assigned with any of these others?” Jo asked him point-blank.
He looked around, then attempted a ‘Who, me?’ gesture before stepping forward. “No, ma’am.”
“Where were you when they hit us?” Shane demanded, stepping closer to the loner. This caused a mild buzz as the others moved behind him, but Shane put up a hand to calm them. “Well, son?”
There was an uncomfortable silence before the odd man out spoke, but this time his voice was strong. “Actually, I was outside. Off structure, on a dive.”
“Alone?” Shane challenged.
The man squinted back at the airman, unafraid of the standoff. “My dive partner was killed. I was tracking the killer when I found my way down here…”
At that instant several things happened at once. The diver dove at Shane, knocking him down as the deafening report of a pistol went off. The echo reverberated off the chamber walls, disorienting the group and causing it to feel like they were in a shooting gallery. Shane’s weapon clattered to the floor, and the diver grabbed at it as someone shouted, ‘He’s got a gun!’.
All of this was still processing in Dean’s mind when he experienced a sudden, shocking bout of tunnel vision. Suddenly he w
as staring down the barrel of a gun. A different gun. He stood paralyzed, his intensified vision taking in every detail of the danger he was in. He saw the trigger finger beginning to squeeze, the slight quiver of the gunman’s arm, and the gun itself turning sideways and falling away as two more booming cracks sounded one after the other. The gunman aiming at Dean fell to the ground, dead on impact.
Looking around in shock, he saw the shooter. It was the diver, and he’d turned his sights to yet another man, one who was standing next to the first victim—“Let’s see ‘em.”
Reacting to the first man’s death, the other one looked about to make a run for it. The rest of the crowd, disoriented still, twitched and flinched as they considered reaching for their own guns. But Shane, having recovered from the tackle, repositioned himself between the gunfight and the crowd. From there he held back the surge, using body language alone. When the dead man’s friend realized he was out of options, he raised his hands up with a disgusted expression.
“Colonel Douglas, what’d you say?” The heroic gunman called out calmly, his sights coolly on the surrendering man, only glancing at Douglas for a split second before returning his attention to the mark.
Douglas responded by stepping past the gunman, directly into the line of fire, and grabbing the raised hands of the dead man’s friend, jerking them behind the man’s back, plucking a set of handcuffs from the belt of an M.P., and cuffing him cold.
“Stand down, everyone,” Shane Douglas announced. “Situation’s under control.”
With that statement, the gunman lowered his weapon. Nobody moved to grab him, Douglas included, as everyone struggled to understand what had just gone down. Clearly Douglas and the gunner had been on the same page, at least, and their confidence served as proof enough for the time being.
“So you were taking a swim, then?” Douglas asked.
“Special Ops. Yeah. And I’d have got these bastards on the outside, except for one slight miscommunication. Something about a submersible car.” He shot a glare at Jo.
“Sorry,” Jo replied, ignoring the vitriol with practiced ease, “I was never one for good timing. Sure as hell didn’t mean to distract your detail like that.”
There was a moment of silence as her comment sank in. Then finally the special ops gunman—seeming to accept her sincerity—said, “It’s okay, he’s got a lot more to say for it than you do.”
He cocked his weapon at the handcuffed man, who Shane had forced to his knees while they were talking. “We know them two are the only ones who got this far,”—he indicated the dead man and the prisoner—“Do we take him along, or dispose of him right here with his partner?”
The handcuffed man flinched, but remained silent.
“He’s not going to talk,” Shane said, stepping cautiously around the sprawled-out dead man, “but we know they acted alone, and that’s all we need for now.”
“You sure about that?” Jo asked. The man with the gun gave Shane a quizzical glance. Even the prisoner looked confused.
“Absolutely. How many blasts were there in total?” Shane asked the room.
The question raised a cacophony of replies. Some reported as many as nine, though the consensus was between three to five.
“Round it off and account for misperception, and let’s say four. You over by the wall!”—he pointed to a wide-eyed, fresh looking kid standing by a computer station—“Pull up the station logs and verify the seismic indicator. It’ll be on a small counter on the bottom left.”
The kid nodded and did as he was told, turning back to the group after a minute and repeating the number four.
“So two saboteurs, four blasts. That’s all any frogman could’ve worked with, and we’ve already confirmed they weren’t equipped with a vehicle or they’d have been seen. Jo’s arrival confirmed that.”
* * *
“There’s no way any escape craft will be left up there by now?” Shane Douglas asked around.
Nobody had an answer.
“Isn’t there another access way?” Dean blurted. When all eyes turned on him, he blushed. Until now he’d managed to remain invisible, only to come off as a coward with his first words.
“Whole place is gone now,” one officer said, “too late.”
“Then we’ll just have to walk,” Jo said.
This is no time for joking, Dean thought, and from the look of the people around him he wasn’t the only one to think she was being inappropriate. She ignored the sentiment, leading the group across the cavern and into a secondary tunnel, this one extending out of sight and off into the distance.
She pointed and said, “That way to shore, forward a ways and straight up for Point Loma. The base’s a bit further along, but we’ll get there soon enough. Unless any of you were planning to swim it.”
Without a backwards glance, she started walking. Dean immediately fell into step behind her, ignoring the others. It wasn’t a question of whether he believed her or not, he just wasn’t about to lose sight of the woman who’d gotten him this far. As he glanced in their direction, Dean saw Shane Douglas look back, then down the dark tunnel, then back again—finally shrugging and following Jo. That was enough for the rest of them. They were fast joined by about half the survivors, roughly two dozen men and women, trudging through a tunnel under the seabed in the general direction of Coronado Island. A long walk, but seemingly their only real option.
“How’d you know about this?” Dean asked.
“I didn’t,” she claimed, though she gave Douglas a grin as she said it. Dean couldn’t tell if this was some secret of theirs or what, but decided it didn’t matter, so long as they kept getting him out of danger.
Jo pointed ahead. “Won’t be too long.”
Dean, incredulous, peered down the darkened tunnel. It’d taken a good fifteen or twenty minutes to reach this place by bond-car, how did she expect to walk it back so quickly. But it turned out she was right, because about twenty minutes later they came upon a set of rails. A bit further on, there was a light-rail vehicle which reminded him of an amusement park ride, sitting there in the darkened space, looking ready to lumber off into the unknown. Beats walking, anyway, Dean thought to himself, bravado dismissing the fear. They took a few minutes to gather up the group and make sure all were accounted for, then Shane climbed into the vehicle, assumedly to figure out how it worked.
10.
Dean admired the initiative, the vastness, and the attention to detail all at once. He’s never imagined such an elaborate, invisible undersea complex could’ve been installed right here off the coast—literally under everyone’s nose—without at least some rumors of it’s existence leaking out. The fact that it was carved out of the military budget made it no less impressive, though perhaps less far-fetched. Of course no private enterprise could attempt such a feat. Even for the government, though, it was beyond belief. Like something out of a science fiction novel.
The extra effort of including a lift was appreciated, given their circumstances. The ride inland was surprisingly quick, the passengers quiet as church mice. Now that they’d had a few minutes to collect themselves, the gravity of what they’d been through was settling in. Expressions ranged from severe to outright shocked.
The train rolled up to a guard station and stopped. There was a moment’s hesitation among the passengers, nobody knowing whether to stay put or brace for trouble. But the Marine who emerged wore a neutral expression that set the passengers at ease. He entered a code on the outside of the train and stepped in when the door slid aside.
“Gonna have to go back out, I’m afraid,” the guard said, “we’re locked down.”
Colonel Douglas stepped forward, allowing the Marine to notice the full-bird on his collar. The man looked uneasy for the first time as Douglas spoke. “Lance Corporal, I wish we could. The base has been compromised.”
Dark Alignment Page 7
