by Nick Thacker
When he finished, he looked back at the others. “Here goes nothing.” He yanked his arm out from its position between the ceiling and the blade, and with a heavy thud it pulled loose. The propeller began to move once again, rotating faster and faster with each revolution until it was moving full speed.
This time, however, the team was on the correct side of it.
Or, rather, they were on the side they wanted to be on. Ben wasn’t quite sure if being on this side of the fan put them in a better or worse predicament than they had been in before, but they were — so far — intact, in one piece, and together.
Let’s hope it stays that way, he thought.
He turned to focus on the next leg of their mission. The ledges continued toward the interior of the mountain, and he now saw that the tunnel was on a slight tilt upward. There were two stairs on each side of the shaft, and then a long stretch of flat ledge, and then another two stairs. His dive light wasn’t strong enough to see beyond that.
“Let’s move,” he said.
“You got it, boss,” Reggie said. “What do we do if we see —”
“Treat everyone like the enemy, but if you see a Green Beret, at least give them the chance to explain themselves. Jeffers, for one, helped us. We’d be unarmed without his intervention. And Lang didn’t seem to be so bad himself.”
“Doesn’t mean they didn’t leave us behind too,” Reggie muttered under his breath.
“No, it sure doesn’t. But they’re against Garza and Ravenshadow, too. For now, it’s ‘the enemy of our enemy’ and all that. But if they start firing at us, they’re toast.”
Reggie and Julie nodded, and Mrs. E silently stared ahead. Reggie set off on his ledge, while Julie, unarmed, set off along the other one.
Mrs. E was about to start walking as well when Ben pulled at her elbow. “Hey,” he said, quietly. “You okay?”
She sniffed, then looked back at him. “I am fine. I just — Ben, I am sorry. I led you into this trap, and I had my suspicions.”
“Whoa, hey, this isn’t your fault,” Ben said. “No one could have predicted —”
“I could have,” she shot back. “I should have. This never should have happened. Those men — the Green Berets. We should have sensed something was wrong.”
Ben nodded, but was about to argue with her further, when he came to the realization that she was right. “Yeah, he said. “You are right. But we all should have seen it. It’s just… there’s something else. Something about the way…”
He stopped, then looked ahead at his teammate and wife, moving forward cautiously. I need to work it out first, he thought. Turning back to Mrs. E, he said softly: “Don’t worry about it. I’m thinking about something, but I need to chew it around a bit. Let’s just get out of this hell shaft, okay?”
She nodded, her face showing a complete lack of emotion, and then they started up the right-side ledge.
Ben wanted to keep talking to her, to keep his mind off what he thought might be a major shift in their understanding of this mission. But he knew she wouldn’t budge; when Mrs. E was determined — in this case, to not talk — there was no way to change her mind. She was as stubborn as Ben, when she wanted to be.
But then again, this wasn’t about her. Ben knew it — he hadn’t been upset with her before she’d admitted to him that she took these events as her fault. He couldn’t have been. The CSO was in his charge, and he had followed his own wife here to avenge the death of their friend.
None of this had made much sense from the beginning, and even up to the point where Beale and his group betrayed and abandoned them, it didn’t stack up.
And that was just it. It hadn’t stacked up. Until now.
Ben jogged behind the other three members of his group, then saw that Reggie had reached a closed door. Julie was right behind him, and when he caught up with them Reggie was facing him, awaiting his order to open the door.
“Wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“I — I want to mention something.”
Mrs. E flashed him a glance, but he continued anyway. “We all… sensed that something was off about the soldiers. Beale obviously didn’t want us tagging along, but he let us anyway.”
“Because we set this whole thing up.”
Ben cocked his head sideways. “Right. But… did he?”
Julie frowned, stepping closer to her husband and placing her hand on his forearm. “What are you talking about? We called them, right? Reggie knew how to get in touch with them?”
Reggie’s eyes widened and he lifted his arms, palms-up. “Whoa, hey. I didn’t know them, I just knew some of the guys they used to work with. I had no idea —”
“Hey brother,” Ben said. “No one’s accusing you of anything. But the truth is they betrayed us, after they let us help them get here. Why?”
“Why’d they let us help them?”
“Yeah, why not just refuse to let us come along at all?” Ben said.
Reggie cleared his throat. “They needed our help, they told us that. But…”
His voice drifted off.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “That’s my point. If they didn’t want us along, they could have just not taken our call. But they did, and they came. That tells me, at least, that they also wanted to be here, but they didn’t want us to be here.”
Julie picked up his thread. “But they couldn’t let us know that,” she said. “They couldn’t let us get here as well, and find out…”
“That they have other business here.”
Ben finished the thought as if putting the cap on a conversation that had taken place only in his mind, with only his own thoughts. He was about to agree, to ask what it was exactly that ‘other business’ might be, when his headset wavered to life with a crackling noise, then a voice — Beale’s — buzzed into his ear.
“— stay alert —” than a gunshot, then another. “Go, go. Move out! Jeffers, get — body behind something. We can’t — see us.”
There was a half-minute pause, and Ben and the others waited, trying to decide if the attack was over. Whatever was happening inside the door was happening very close to them — otherwise the tiny communicators wouldn’t have worked.
Snippets of an argument in broken, whispered voices. Whoever was talking wasn’t as close to them as Beale was. Then Beale’s voice came back on, more clearly. “Sturdivant wants an update. Nothing more. From here on out, we’re black ops, radio silent.”
Another crackle, then the line went dead.
Ben looked up at the rest of his team. This wasn’t just a betrayal.
This was much worse.
36
Ben
“Look,” Berndt said. “Your mom’s upstairs right now, sitting with your dad. You’ve had two days to process all this, up close. She’s had about ten minutes. She’s gonna need some time to just get past the emotions of it and let the reality sink in, so give her a little bit. But not too much, all right? Don’t make her wait too long. She’s gonna need you, a lot. I don’t know your mom, but my guess? If you run and hide from this, hide from that survivor’s guilt you’re feeling? That’s gonna hurt her more than if all three of you were killed out in those mountains.”
Ben hadn’t realized that he’d memorized those words. He hadn’t thought of Dr. Berndt or that moment in the hospital, looking out that window, since it had all happened.
That had sort of been the point. He hadn’t wanted to recall anything about the memory, so his mind had obliged and blocked it out.
But, as he had come to realize in about thirty-five years of life, the human mind’s ability to retain and recall information with only the slightest nudge was nothing short of incredible.
So here he was, standing in a drainage tunnel outside of a mountain filled with people who either wanted to kill him or just didn’t care one way or another, and all he could think about was why.
Why had he just thought of that? What about his father’s death — his feeling that it had been
his fault — was important in this moment?
Julie must have seen it in his eyes. “What’s up, Ben?” she asked.
They were waiting outside the door, hoping the Green Berets who had already moved inside were pushing into the base, moving farther away from them, so Ben’s team could eventually enter without being immediately apprehended.
“I, uh… was just thinking.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that look before,” Julie said. “You’re thinking about your dad.”
He shot a sharp glance at her, then tried to recover. How did she just know that intuitively? Was it that obvious?
“Yeah, brother,” Reggie said. “You wear it on your face. Always have.”
“What are you talking about?”
Even Mrs. E smiled and joined in. “You know, Ben, when I first met you, you had a look about you sometimes. I saw it and thought to myself, ‘hmm, why is he so often thinking about his father?’”
“What?” Ben asked, stepping back. “No — no, that’s not —”
Julie laughed. “Ben, it’s fine. We’re giving you a hard time. But we all know who you are, where you’re coming from. There’s a reason we’re here, and that reason is you. And because you’re you, there’s a reason you’re thinking about him right now.”
He couldn’t argue with that, so he stopped trying. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. I was. I was thinking about him. When he died. How I… felt.”
“How’d you feel?”
“Like it was my fault,” he said quickly, as if mentioning it in passing would diminish its value. “But that’s not really what I’m feeling now. It’s more… it’s about control.”
“Control?”
“Yeah, like, I always used to think I ran away from my life because I wanted to be in control. And watching my dad get mauled by a grizzly was a decidedly out of control feeling.”
“Yeah, I’d agree with that,” Reggie said. He fiddled with his headset. Ben listened in on his own, trying to hear whether they were out of range yet or not. They had all figured out how to disable the microphone transmitter before they talked, to ensure their own conversations wouldn’t be picked up.
“But then I started to realize that maybe it wasn’t about control, really. Or, rather, that it’s actually about not wanting to feel out of control.”
“Can you explain that?” Mrs. E asked.
“Well, yeah, maybe. I think I don’t really care about being in control — like, I don’t have to be the guy in charge. But I absolutely hate feeling out of control.”
“What’s the difference?” Reggie asked.
“The difference is that coming here, trying to track down Garza, trying to accomplish that goal and getting out alive, and helping you guys stay alive — I don’t have to be in control of all of it. I can control what I do, and what I think, and that’s enough.
“But when I’m betrayed, left for dead, and trapped between two enemies, I feel out of control. I don’t need to be in control, but I don’t want that.”
“That makes sense,” Julie said. “But… what do we do with it? What does it mean?”
“Yeah, man,” Reggie said. “It’s real deep and stuff, but… what the hell are you talking about?”
Ben shook his head. “I know, I know. It sounds crazy. Insane that it matters, but it does. All my life I thought I was the guy who needed to be in control, at least of my immediate surroundings. But I think I’m realizing that I don’t care about that. I just cannot feel out of control, or that my situation is beyond something I can affect.”
Reggie and the others looked at him blankly, as if he hadn’t even tried to answer the question. I’m not explaining this very well, he said. He pinched the area above his nose, then took a breath.
After a few more seconds, he summed up his thoughts. “Look, here’s what you guys need to know: I’m dealing with some stuff, and it’s made me a bad leader. Getting married, then Julie running off to fight a battle knowing that we’d all follow. Then… all of this. It’s been a lot. But here’s what I promise: no matter how out of control we feel, how off that equilibrium we are, I’ve built my life around making sure I get back to that equilibrium.
“So… what does that mean?” Julie asked.
Ben sighed. “It means I want to get out of this base, alive, more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.”
“Yeah, but that means —”
“It means I want to kill Garza more than ever.”
III
Act 3
37
Ben
The inside of the base appeared to be, at first glance, nothing but a mine. Ben had to duck as soon as he’d entered, as the ceiling of the hallway they found themselves in upon opening the tunnel door fell to a low height. The air tasted like sulphur, old dust, and the stale salty breath of a cave.
He took a few steps forward, trusting his dive light to illuminate enough of the hallway to reveal anything noteworthy. The others followed behind him, and Reggie, last in line, closed the door behind him. There were shallow puddles on the floor, the imperfections in the mine shaft collecting the slow drips of water from humidity into small pools. He sidestepped these as he traveled along, moving with one arm in front of him, the other on the wall next to him.
It was cold inside the shaft, cooler than even the drainage tunnel they had been in previously, and it felt to Ben as though he were spelunking in an ancient cavern system. The walls had obviously been cut by human hands — the rough streaks that had taken out chunks of the black rock were still visible, and he even saw boring holes in certain spots, areas where the rock had been tested for whatever precious metals the miners had been searching.
He wasn’t sure how long the mine had been here, but Beale’s team’s dossier had indicated that the mine had been active up until the late 70s. Ben was no expert in engineering or mining, but by his estimate that put the mine into the ‘modern’ category. This was no ancient, hand-cut mine. He wondered why it had been abandoned in the first place: perhaps the mine had been too expensive to operate, or it had been depleted?
When they were all in the hallway, Ben walked to the opposite side of it, finding another door. This one was similar to the one they’d entered through, but it was smaller, due to the lower height of the ceiling. He opened it slowly, careful to avoid any unnecessary noise. When it was open fully, he stepped through.
Into a hallway that was, unlike the cramped space he’d just emerged from, wide and tall. LED lights had been mounted every ten feet, near the ceiling, and that ceiling was studded with lines of cabling and electronic wiring.
When the rest of the team entered the more modern hallway, their communicators clicked back to life with a quick crackle. Ben didn’t hear any chatter over the airwaves, which meant that they were likely in range of Beale’s broadcaster, but the Green Berets were not currently speaking. Still, Ben held up a hand and told the others to wait for a moment, to ensure they were safe to move forward.
Forward, in this case, meant one of two directions — left, which seemed to offer miles of empty, long hallway, or right — which offered a t-intersection a few hundred feet down.
“Anyone have any idea which way they went?”
He saw Julie shake her head, and Reggie responded. “Negative. But they engaged with some Ravenshadow guards here. They may have headed that way.”
He chose to head to the left. First, it seemed like heading away from the center of the mountain would keep them on the perimeter of the interior base. It could provide them with an emergency exit point, or at least a place to hide if things went south. Second, he thought he could see a door about fifty feet down.
No one argued. He pointed that direction and then began to move. In his mind, he ran through the plan: find somewhere to hide, then make a plan.
It wasn’t much, but he knew he didn’t want to be caught in the middle of this hallway between the Green Berets and Garza’s men.
He jogged toward the door and considered their options. The ca
bling on the ceiling, power and lighting and what he assumed was CAT-6e — ethernet — cables meant that the Ravenshadow crew had run communications all the way here, from wherever their “headquarters” inside the mountain was to whatever these outposts on the extremities were. In other words, it meant that they were connected, and there was not likely a place they’d be able to hide that the Ravenshadow soldiers wouldn’t be able to find them.
One thing at a time, he thought. One problem at a time.
The major problem he had to deal with was that he had no idea where he was, where Garza was, or where Beale and his men were. He needed to find Garza, but there were too many other unknowns waiting for him inside this base.
The problem preventing him from tackling that goal was that he was here with his wife and friends, and keeping them alive was far more important than finding and rooting out Garza.
It was the predicament he’d found himself in more than once before, and he had yet to figure out a way to solve it: by going it alone, he would just about guarantee his failure, but by allowing them to help, he put them in danger.
Relax, he tried to tell himself, they’re adults. They’ve chosen to come along, and they knew the risks.
The door was unlocked, and Ben looked through its rectangular window as he opened it.
The others were right behind him as he entered.
“Stairs,” he said.
“Well, up or down?” Reggie asked, closing the door silently behind him. They were standing on the landing of the stairwell, and Ben saw at least two floors above and below them — both paths were dark, lit only by a single bulb mounted above each of the landings, casting an ominous golden glow that spilled out onto each set of stairs.
“Up,” Ben said, without hesitation.
“You sure?” Julie asked.
