‘What is this place, exactly?’ Lopez asked.
‘This is the world’s premier Doomsday Vault,’ Schofield explained. ‘It was built in 2006 into this sandstone mountain and is designed to withstand a direct nuclear attack and even a meteorite impact on our planet, an Extinction Level Event. Spitsbergen was considered the perfect location for this vault because it has no tectonic activity, has permafrost which aids preservation of materials and is over four hundred feet above sea level, meaning it will remain dry even if all the world’s ice caps melted.’
‘The Norwegians built this place in case of a mass extinction?’ Ethan asked.
‘No,’ Schofield replied. ‘They built it because of a mass extinction, which has already begun. This facility is designed to protect the diversity of life on earth after mankind has gone.’
‘You sound like you think that’s a certainty,’ Lopez pointed out.
‘That’s because it is,’ Schofield replied. ‘That’s why it’s here. There are no permanent staff based here, and even if all the power was lost the contents of the vaults would remain safe for many weeks afterward, time for us to rectify the problem. It’s been estimated that many of the seeds and grains held here could survive for thousands of years without human intervention.’
Schofield slowed as he reached a set of vaults arrayed before them, all behind air–locked doors.
‘We can go no further,’ he told them. ‘In the vaults are contained around one and a half million agricultural seeds and other flora considered either endangered or crucial to human survival in an apocalyptic event.’
Ethan folded his arms for a moment as he looked at the vault.
‘But if there’s nobody left to eat them, what’s the point?’
Schofield smiled, as though pitying Ethan.
‘Not exactly the pioneering spirit of optimism are you, Mister Warner?’
‘You’re the one working in a Doomsday Vault,’ Lopez said.
‘Truth be told,’ Schofield replied, ‘even a major apocalyptic event such as a meteorite impact with our planet would be unlikely to eradicate every last human being from existence. Our species, despite becoming rapidly unable to survive in the wild as our ancestors once did, possesses the means to make a rapid technological comeback in the aftermath of such a crisis. Petrochemicals, solar plants, bacterial energy generation, the growing use of insects for food in many countries, nuclear bunkers and so on all lend weight to the theory that even something as cataclysmic as a ten mile wide bolide impactor such as the one that forced the dinosaurs into extinction would not necessarily render humanity likewise extinct. The survivors would be aware of these vaults and use would no doubt be made of their contents.’
‘What made you come all the way out here from Montana?’ Lopez asked.
‘I’ve worked here and for other conservation projects for almost twenty years. How did you know that I worked in Montana?’
Ethan took a pace closer.
‘You worked for the Montana state University, and we’re chasing a lead on a man named Aubrey Channing.’
Ethan noted that Schofield’s eyes widened slightly and his skin paled at the mention of the name.
‘I don’t recall that name,’ he said, and made to move past them. ‘I have work to do.’
‘You wrote a letter to a reporter named Weisler describing a find you made in Montana’s Badlands,’ Ethan said, and moved to his right to cut Schofield off. The smaller man came up short before Ethan and squinted up at him. ‘Aubrey Channing was never seen again, Eric.’
Schofield raised his chin.
‘I was cleared of any involvement in whatever happened to Channing,’ he snapped back. ‘That’s all far in my past now, if you’ll excuse me?’
Ethan didn’t move. ‘Channing found something, didn’t he, out there in the wilderness? He was directed by your letter. We would very much like to know what you found.’
‘I don’t know,’ Eric insisted. ‘Even Channing did not know or couldn’t figure it out.’
‘He disappeared before he had the chance,’ Lopez said, ‘and you wouldn’t have gone to those lengths if you hadn’t known what it was buried in those rocks.’
‘A young scientist,’ Ethan said, ‘somebody who could not risk their career by unveiling a truly world–changing discovery, wrote that letter. You were young at the time.’
‘Yes,’ Schofield agreed. ‘That much is true.’
‘And then he disappeared,’ Ethan went on. ‘When did you last see him?’
‘I told this all to the police at the time,’ Schofield protested. ‘I worked the site and found remains that contradicted the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid impact. I couldn’t write a paper on it, or even attempt to describe what I’d found, because the university would never have dared to employ me again, such would have been the fallout from such an announcement. So, instead I wrote an anonymous letter to a reporter and directed him to Channing. That was the last I ever heard of him.’
‘And what you and he found, in the rocks?’ Lopez asked. ‘What happened to that?’
‘It was gone,’ Schofield replied, ‘just like I said at the time. When I went back, there was a cavity in the rocks where the remains had been.’
‘Remains,’ Ethan echoed. ‘Remains of what?’
Schofield faltered and then tried again to push past Ethan. ‘I don’t recall.’
Ethan’s hand stopped Eric in his tracks. ‘Try harder.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he hissed angrily.
‘Then help us out,’ Lopez suggested.
Schofield gritted his teeth and almost spat his response. ‘They’ll kill me.’
‘Who will kill you?’
‘Them,’ Schofield insisted. ‘They came to see me the day after Channing disappeared, after I’d spoken to the police.’
‘Who?’ Ethan demanded.
‘I don’t know! Guys in suits, serious men, angry men. They questioned me for over two hours like I was under arrest in my own home, wanted to know everything that Channing had told me. When they were done they said that if I breathed a word of what I’d witnessed to anybody they’d make sure I paid for it with my life. I believed them!’
Ethan and Lopez exchanged a silent glance and then Ethan reached into a pocket and retrieved his cell phone. He quickly thumbed through a series of images and showed one of them to Schofield.
‘Guys like this?’
Schofield’s eyes almost popped out of his head as he nodded frantically. ‘Yes, that’s one of them! How did you…?’
‘Long story,’ Ethan replied as he closed the image of Aaron Mitchell on his phone and looked at Lopez. ‘Mitchell’s likely to be following the same threads that we are.’
‘Which means that he might come here,’ she agreed.
Schofield’s eyes widened further and filled with fear. ‘Here?’
‘You didn’t tell us why you’re here,’ Lopez said to him.
‘You’re a scientist,’ Ethan pressed also, not willing to let Schofield go just yet. ‘You wouldn’t have just walked away from a discovery like that to come out here and babysit barley.’
Schofield seemed sobered by the image of Aaron Mitchell, and spoke freely.
‘I looked into Channing’s disappearance again after I heard that his son Robert had committed suicide, started to make links to people, powerful people,’ he said. ‘That’s when the heavy mob showed up. They made it real clear I should back off or else, so I did. But I didn’t stop looking into what I’d already found.’
‘Which was what?’ Lopez asked.
‘Channing wasn’t just a specialist in Tyrannosaurs. He also worked extensively on alternative theories for why the dinosaurs died out. His work on Tyrannosaurs coincided with the asteroid impact period, because creatures like T–Rex were some of the last of the dinosaurs to walk the earth before they went extinct, so the two subjects kind of went hand–in–hand. When I did a little digging into other people working in the same
field, I started to see a pattern. They were coming to the conclusion that the dinosaurs were already dying out before the asteroid impact that sent them extinct.’
‘Before it?’
‘Yes, quite some time before it,’ Schofield confirmed. ‘There were lots of things going on geologically at the time that could have contributed to their demise, but Channing and a few others seemed to have realized that there was more to it than our own Earth.’
Ethan frowned, uncertain of where Schofield was going.
‘What, you think they were really onto some other reason for why the dinosaurs died out?’
‘Oh they absolutely were,’ Schofield nodded. ‘They were working on something so unbelievable that I couldn’t really begin to accept it myself at the time, but when I finally did and I realized what it meant for us as a species, I decided to work instead in conservation.’
Ethan felt a chill down his spine as Lopez questioned Schofield further.
‘What did you learn?’
Schofield sighed and shrugged.
‘That we’re doomed,’ he said finally. ‘Few terrestrial species last more than a couple of million years before they go extinct, which is about how long modern man, Homo sapiens, has existed. Humanity will not survive for more than a few decades at the most. Our extinction event is already here.’
***
XIII
‘We know,’ Ethan said. ‘We were briefed before we left on the Sixth Extinction.’
‘We really need to know what you found in Montana,’ Lopez insisted. ‘What convinced you to leave and go into conservation?’
Schofield seemed to hesitate for a moment longer, and then he sighed and looked around him at the rocky walls and the vaults beyond.
‘I guess if I’m not safe speaking a hundred forty meters inside a secure mountain facility, I’m safe nowhere,’ he said finally. ‘Aubrey Channing had discovered a…’
Ethan did not hear Schofield’s last as a clatter of machine gun fire echoed down the corridor from outside. He whirled, one hand instinctively reaching for the pistol at his side and finding it not there. Ethan cursed as he hurried across to one side of the tunnel, Lopez following and dragging Schofield with her.
‘What’s happening?’ Schofield gasped in terror. ‘Could they have heard me speaking even down here?’
Ethan shook his head as he heard the guards returning fire. From somewhere ahead in the facility he could see the distant flashes of muzzle fire as rifles were aimed out into the bitter wastelands outside.
‘I’m afraid we’re not the only ones interested in what happened to Aubrey Channing,’ he shouted above the noise as he looked at Lopez. ‘Our weapons are inside the office.’
‘Sounds like multiple targets outside,’ she replied. ‘We’re gonna be sitting ducks.’
‘Any other way out of here?’ Ethan asked Schofield.
The scientist shook his head. ‘Kind of the point of the place.’
Ethan cursed under his breath as he heard another rattle of gunfire and saw in the distance one of the facility guards stagger backwards and collapse onto his back, his weapon falling uselessly alongside him.
‘There’s too many!’ cried the remaining guard, his features stricken with fear as he looked over his shoulder at them for assistance.
‘Get him out of sight,’ Ethan snapped at Lopez as he dashed forward toward the entrance.
The remaining guard fired another few rounds into the snow outside, falling back as a hail of gunfire raked the wall alongside him and sent clouds of debris spraying across the hall. Ethan slid down alongside the fallen guard and grabbed his rifle, checked the chamber before he tucked in alongside the wall opposite the remaining guard’s position.
‘How many are there?’ he asked.
‘Ten, maybe twelve,’ the guard replied, adrenaline coursing through his veins and causing him to breathe heavily. ‘We got three of them but I’m almost out of ammunition.’
‘Any way to call for back–up?’
The guard shook his head. ‘There’s supposed to be a secure underground communications link to the town but it’s out of action. They must have either cut it or jammed it somehow, and we’re too far away from the town for anybody to hear the gunfire!’
Ethan ducked down as more gunfire raked the wall nearby, scattering clouds of stone chips across his jacket as he retreated down the corridor.
‘Where the hell did they come from?!’ Lopez shouted.
‘They must be following us!’ Ethan yelled back above the clatter of gunfire now being amplified by the confines of the tunnel. ‘Maybe Majestic Twelve have taken the gloves off and decided it’s time to get rid of us for once and for all!’
‘Good place to do it!’ Lopez shot back. ‘We’re unarmed and there’s no way out of there but through that entrance!’
Ethan looked back at the entrance, where the guard was still trying to hold off the attackers outside. ‘There’s no way out of here!’
Lopez looked back at him but she said nothing, clearly knowing just like Ethan that the only way out of the facility was right through the hail of fire coming from the entrance.
‘You got any smart ideas, now would be a good time to use one of them!’ she finally yelled back.
Ethan looked at the beleaguered guard and the entrance, and made his decision.
*
‘Forward!’
Jake Viggen waved his arms forward and urged his men on, half a dozen of them breaking cover from behind their vehicles and rushing the entrance of the massive vault. Viggen saw the security guard loose off a few more rounds, and then his courage failed him before the charge and he disappeared inside the facility.
‘Go, now!’
Viggen leaped out from behind the jeep in which he had arrived and sprinted up the icy track to the entrance. His men plunged into the facility ahead of him as a salvo of gunshots burst out and thumped into the walls around them. Viggen hurled himself against a wall as he saw one of the rounds smack into the forehead of one of his men and exit the back of his skull with a puff of scarlet blood that splattered the pristine ice around his boots. The gunman, a former Army trooper named Granger, dropped almost vertically, the life gone from his eyes as his rifle toppled from his grasp and landed beside his corpse.
More gunshots rattled out and Viggen crouched out of sight as he watched his men advance by sections into the building. Of the twelve he started with, three were already dead, but he knew that he outnumbered those inside by better than two to one, and that only the guard was armed. He risked a peek down the corridor that led to a gigantic tunnel and saw the guard retreating, firing as he went. Closer, his men jumped over the dead body of the second guard sprawling face down in the entrance.
‘Let’s finish this!’ he bellowed as he stood up and opened fire down the corridor, spraying the walls with gunfire and forcing the security guard to cower out of sight behind a metal stanchion that supported the rocky ceiling of the tunnel entrance. ‘Advance!’
The men plunged into the facility, rushing through the shattered glass of the airlocks as Viggen sprinted along behind them and jumped over the dead guard’s body, firing as he went. Bullets hammered the walls of the tunnel and one of the arcing blue lights shattered and spilled glass down onto the rocks beneath their boots as they rushed into cover against the walls of the tunnel.
The gunfire ceased, and Viggen peered ahead. He could see in an office at the far end of the tunnel a man and a woman crouched behind a desk for cover, and to his left near them he could see puffs of breath from the security guard glowing in the blue lights.
‘There’s nowhere to go!’ Viggen yelled. ‘Come out now with your hands up and we’ll talk!’
The guard’s voice shouted back at them, heavily accented with Norwegian. ‘If you’d wanted to talk, you wouldn’t have opened fire on us!’
Viggen shrugged. ‘We’re not here for you! We’re here only for the Americans! Stand down, and you’ll live!’
The guard�
��s reply echoed down the tunnel. ‘Go to hell!’
Viggen grinned and shouted back. ‘You first! Take them all down!’
His men burst from their hiding places, and Viggen heard a crescendo of shots blaze down the tunnel. He was about to follow his men when he realized that they had not yet opened fire. Bullets smashed past Viggen and he saw them hammer into the backs of his soldiers, cutting them down like an invisible scythe as he whirled, brought his rifle around and caught sight of the “dead” security guard standing in the entrance, his rifle blazing.
Viggen tried to take aim, but the first round hit him in the chest before he could pull the trigger, and then the second slammed into his shoulder and he spun as he collapsed onto the ice, his rifle tumbling from his grasp.
*
Ethan, standing in the dead guard’s ill–fitting uniform, fired his final rounds just as one of the black–clad soldiers realized what had happened and turned to try to return fire. Two rounds cut him down and he tumbled aside as the last of the soldiers was cut down with a bullet landing square between his shoulder blades. A cloud of bright blood burst from his chest and his cry of agony was cut short as he collapsed onto the rocks.
‘Clear!’ Ethan yelled as the gunfire ceased and echoed away through the tunnel and out toward the entrance.
Lopez and Schofield broke cover along with the remaining security guard and hurried to Ethan’s side as he crouched down to where one of the soldiers was lying on his back on the icy rocks, blood spilling from a wound in his chest that had caused massive trauma to his back as the bullet had exited his body. More blood spilled from a second wound in his shoulder as Ethan grabbed his rifle and used the ammunition to reload his own weapon.
‘Nice move,’ said the guard as he joined Ethan, who began shrugging off the dead guard’s uniform. ‘Who are these people?’
The Extinction Code Page 9
