Unknown location Kansas
Wednesday, 2:18am
The Cessna flew at just over fourteen thousand feet in a turbulent, moonless sky. The time and timing were no coincidence. I’d planned the night’s operation around the new moon, but the weather system was entirely unexpected. An unpredicted storm front was moving in quickly from the west, playing havoc with the small aircraft. Everything about the night’s operation was planned and coordinated using every bit of intelligence I could beg, borrow, or steal. In this case, mostly steal. Everything except for the storm… and while it came out of nowhere and baffled meteorologists, I knew with certainty what it foretold.
More on that later.
Double Vision Gary was at the controls of the small four-seater plane. The rest of the seats had been removed since Double Vision’s day job was hauling machine parts anywhere in the greater tri-state area. If you’re wondering what kind of business there is flying tractor parts all over the state, there isn’t. Double Vision was a smuggler. Think Han Solo minus the Wookie, and replace the Millennium Falcon with a worn-out and past-its-prime patched-up aircraft that should have been sold for scrap back when I was in diapers.
Not surprisingly, Double Vision’s flexible moral compass made him perfect for my late-night rollercoaster ride through the clouds. For a price, he didn’t ask questions, and he followed instructions no matter how unorthodox they might seem to any sane—or sober—pilot.
Did I mention Double Vision was a bit of a drinker? As I watched him fight the control stick, there was a devil-may-care grin on his face, and the rummy gleam in his eye suggested he was enjoying this ride a little too much.
Lightning flashed across the window to the left, and I had to blink the blindness away. There was less than a second of delay before the accompanying thunderclap impacted the aircraft with a force I felt like a slap to the head.
“Hoo-wee!” Double Vision cackled. “It’s getting thick out there, hoss. It might be time to rethink this plan of yours.”
The oncoming storm was troubling. The fact that Double Vision didn’t so much as blink when the lightning strobed across the cabin ratcheted up my concern. Either he had cast-iron nerves, or he was literally feeling no pain. “Too much prep to turn back now,” I said. “Tonight’s the night. How long to the target?”
Our flight path had us skirting the edge of a large patch of restricted airspace over Nowhere, Kansas. Looking at maps and searching databases, there was no explanation for the patch of six thousand acres of no-fly zone. That it wasn’t recorded didn’t surprise me either. A top-secret research facility was located somewhere in the area—or, more specifically, underneath it. A private research firm had retrofitted a decommissioned Cold War intercontinental missile silo and was now operating an underground facility conducting some very dangerous research.
Air traffic in the vicinity was tightly monitored so the night’s flight wouldn’t go unnoticed. To mitigate concerns, I’d hired Double Vision to make a series of late-night flights between a couple of the larger farms north and south of the facility. Anyone looking into his previous flights would find them to be legitimate runs moving small machine parts between facilities to troubleshoot an issue with a specialized fermenting pump that I may or may not have had a hand in sabotaging to cover tonight’s operation. The result was that the radar tracking station attached to the underground silo was already accustomed to Double Vision’s air traffic and unlikely to find it out of the ordinary.
“Um,” Double Vision groaned. He waved one hand in front of the digital display mounted to the instrument panel to the right of his seat. “I need you to check the reading on that for me, friend. That last flash sort of cost me my eyes.”
I was kneeling on the thick rubber matting that lined the rear of the cabin and looking out the window, so Double Vision Gary’s comment caused me to do a double-take. “You can’t see? You’re kidding, right?”
Double Vision shook his head. “Afraid not, hoss.” He pointed again at the display. “That will tell you how long until the waypoint. Do me a solid and confirm our altitude too? We should be steady somewhere between fourteen and fifteen thousand.”
I crawled to the front of the plane and checked the display. We were vectoring squarely toward the graphical pushpin marking our waypoint, flying level at fourteen thousand two hundred feet and change. I looked Double Vision in the eye. He was blinking rapidly now. “You really can’t see?” If he was blind, he couldn’t land the plane alone.
I would have to scrub my op.
Double Vision Gary shrugged. “It’s coming back slowly. I can see smears and distant flashes. It’s only a matter of time.” He raised his chin at the windscreen, and I saw we were flying directly at a curtain of clouds that danced with lightning flashes.
“I’ll have to go back with you,” I said after a long breath. “You can’t land like this.”
“How long to target?” Double Vision said with a disconcerting lack of concern.
“Three and a half minutes.”
“And we’re on course?”
I double-checked the display. For reasons I couldn’t explain, we continued to fly straight and true—as true as we could in a cabin that was bucking and kicking like an angry mule. With a seasoned and sighted pilot at the controls, I’d been in large aircraft that couldn’t maintain course and altitude in such conditions.
“Yeah, but I don’t know how you’re doing it,” I admitted.
“The blessing of being a blind-drunk alcoholic,” Double Vision said, his devil-may-care grin back and accompanied by a laugh. “Been flying nearly blind for years. This ain’t nothing new. This blindness is a little more complete, and the blurs are clearing way quicker. I’ll be good to go well before I reach Clarksville’s outer marker.”
I waved a hand in front of Double Vision Gary, but he didn’t react. I sat back on my haunches and contemplated my choices, just in time for Double Vision to raise one hand and extend me the bird. “I saw that, asshole,” he said.
I wasn’t sure he did. Or if he did, he might have seen a quick blur among other blurs. Either way, it was a bad situation. A lot of time and planning had gone into this op, and it was about to go down the tubes. Truth be told, I was anxious to complete this project after what I’d seen on the news two weeks before. I was far more interested in the experiment taking place in Arlington. Well, maybe not the experiment, but the—
A chime sounded from the navigation display on the instrument panel.
“Thirty seconds to the waypoint,” Double Vision said.
I started to respond, but another thunderclap reverberated through the night. The plane tipped hard to starboard, and I narrowly missed being thrown against the pilot’s seat. I was dumped to my hands and knees in the empty cargo space. I crawled back to the space to the right of Double Vision Gary, where the copilot’s seat usually would have been.
“It’s all good,” Double Vision said. “Don’t worry about me. My vision is getting better by the minute. Honestly, it’s all good. You’re the damn fool who’s going to get struck by lightning.”
I looked out the window and nodded. It was becoming a distinct possibility. The rain hadn’t caught the plane yet, but it couldn’t be far off. I slipped protective glasses over my eyes and pulled the helmet over my head.
“You’re sure?” I asked one last time.
A new tone sounded from the digital display, telling me we were over the target waypoint.
“Would you get outta my plane already? You ain’t gotta go home, but you can’t stay here,” he said with an exaggerated drawl.
I clapped Double Vision on the shoulder and thanked him. Turning the release on the starboard door, I pushed it out and up. I was instantly assaulted by gale-force winds that were nearly deafening. Prior research suggested we were flying at approximately 120 miles per hour. The door was hinged across the top of the frame so that it would swing up to clip against the wing overhead. At our speed and in the turbulence, the clip didn’t engage. The door swung up to meet the wing, mostly out of the way, but it wouldn’t secure. It continued to slap the horizontal surface and threatened to drop on me at any moment. Only our airspeed seemed to keep it at bay. Before the door had a chance to hurt me, I ducked my head and dove into the night.
My graceful exit from the plane ended up being anything but. While turbulence was a bitch inside a plane, experiencing it from the outside, at terminal velocity, and at the edge of an extreme weather system was beyond compare. I was getting physically kicked from every direction. It was all I could do to pull my clumsy tumble into a controlled arch. The second I did, the nanofiber mesh beneath my arms and between my feet caught the air, and my plummet was altered into a glide. It was my first use of the wingsuit. Timing, conditions, and a general reluctance to have anyone capture my strange rig and splash it all over social media meant there wasn’t an opportunity for a single test jump with it.
While airspace over the research facility was tightly controlled, approaching from the ground was even more of a problem. Perimeter detection and alerting systems were state-of-the-art, and to be honest, entirely overkill. Everything was high-tech and automated, with human systems for redundancy. The place was hardened against even cyberattacks. With that in mind, it was simply easier to enter from the air. One just had to traverse the no-fly zone without triggering the automated air defense systems. Designed to watch for aircraft, one man playing the role of a flying squirrel could enter the airspace from beyond the perimeter, bypass ground defenses, and land within the facility’s inner perimeter, where security was less intensive.
This approach left me to contend with the facility’s inner defenses later.
My glasses pulsed to life with a full glow when my dive turned into a glide. The wraparound lenses kept the rushing wind from my eyes, and the cutting-edge tech was the secret weapon for the operation. The night came to life in crisp monochrome detail. I could see the outlines of the surrounding clouds, even in the moonless sky. Shooting a look over my shoulder, I tried to find Double Vision’s Cessna. That proved a mistake as it destroyed the carefully balanced characteristics of my flying squirrel imitation, and I went cannonballing again.
What must have been a creative combination of expletives, even by my own standards, was thankfully lost to the sound of the rushing wind. I threw myself into an arch and mentally crossed my fingers, hoping the wing suit’s webbing would withstand the choppy wind.
“If it’s alright with you, I’m going to engage the heads-up display,” Esker’s voice said through the microscopic bone conduction device in my inner ear. Skydiving represented the most extreme noise conditions under which the AI had conversed with me, and it surprised me that I could hear his voice with perfect clarity.
“Good idea,” I said. “That might keep me from doing anything stupid.”
A broad, swooping orange line appeared across the inside of my glasses, simultaneously with a similar blue line. The lines had distinctly different curves, though both curved down and to the left. While the orange was lazy and gentle as it passed off the edge of my lens, the blue sloped aggressively to the west and was relatively flat across the horizontal plane.
Esker’s voice clarified what the display already made clear. “You lost altitude with that tumble. Level out now to extend your glide. You’re in danger of not reaching the drop zone.”
I tipped carefully to my right and arched my back slightly. Working the squirrel suit was all about gentle adjustments. As I moved, the orange line inside my glasses slid smoothly to overlap with the blue.
“Nicely done,” Esker said in a calm tone.
Then I hit the wall of water. One second, it was a dry, if turbulent, sky…and the next, there was nothing but water.
Flying in a wingsuit is all about balance and careful, precise movements. Impacting a sudden torrential downpour doesn’t go unpunished. I went ass over teakettle again, this time spinning like a frisbee, with arms and legs flailing. There were helpful words of encouragement from Esker, but the most helpful thing he did was disable the heads-up display in my glasses for the duration. My brain was already scrambled from the sensory overload. I didn’t need more visual stimulation to add to the fun.
One thing I can say about myself—and it’s something I still don’t understand—is that even while plummeting through the night, the rain, and bouncing through the turbulence, my heart rate never spiked. This was Esker’s observation the next day and something he has noted on numerous similar occasions. Even when my rational mind couldn’t understand what was happening or how to regain control, somehow my panic response failed to engage.
When in doubt, go for the arch. It was something drilled into anyone who has ever taken a skydiving class. Hands and feet out, head back, and belly arched to lead the way; if you can do that, gravity will take care of the rest. It’s like taking a badminton birdie and throwing it into the air. Once the fall begins, the tip will point to Earth, and the rest will take care of itself.
In my case, the wings engaged, and I was once more gliding, though now I was taking rain so solidly in the face that it felt like hail. For all the planning that had gone into the night’s operation, I never anticipated needing a full-face helmet.
My glasses pulsed back to life, but only the orange line was visible. A small arrow at the top right edge of the lens hinted at where I might find the blue line, and I tipped my head very carefully in that direction until it came into view. I was a long, long way off course and wanted to ask Esker if there was any possibility of reaching the target drop zone. Unfortunately, the unrelenting wind and rain made speaking impossible.
Thankfully, Esker had come to anticipate my thoughts in the relatively short time we’d been together. “It’s no longer possible to reach the drop zone given the current flight conditions,” he said. “I am rerouting to the nearest cover position. You will land well within the inner perimeter fence.”
I offered a slow blink in response, confident Esker would understand my meaning. The blue line shifted across the lens and I responded to the guidance.
Normally, a skydiver deploys the primary chute at fifty-five hundred feet. This gives the jumper sufficient time to see the sights, judge wind conditions, watch for hazards, scope out the landing zone, and generally enjoy the experience. That skydiver would also be jumping in the daytime under sunny skies and be trained by a qualified professional.
Did I mention this was my second solo dive? Second dive ever, in fact? My training consisted of what I had read online and gleaned from watching far too many YouTube videos. Certification requires a minimum of twelve jumps and six to eight hours in the classroom. But I had a secret weapon. I had a cutting-edge AI in my pocket and next-gen smart glasses that would make the Terminator envious. Combine that with unbridled determination and a lack of self-preservation, and you get me bellyflopping through a thunderstorm in the middle of the night.
Anyway, like I said, going by the book, you’re supposed to pop the chute at fifty-five hundred. The built-in AAD, or Automatic Activation Device, would activate at seventeen hundred feet. The idea is that if the jumper were too distracted by the pretty scenery, or perhaps more likely unconscious, the chute would auto-deploy. The auto-deployment canopy would be the reserve and would not offer the control of the main. With this in mind, and in an effort to open as close to the ground as possible to reduce any potential radar signature, I pulled the ripcord at twenty-one hundred feet.
Throughout the fall, the altitude was displayed with precision in red letters in the corner of my heads-up display. It was another advantage I had over those qualified skydivers. They had to look at wrist-mounted, often analog displays, to keep track of their descent. In the driving rain and wind, I couldn’t see my hands even though they were literally six inches in front of my face.
In freefall, the diver loses one thousand feet every five and a half seconds, so my margin for error was brushing up against the AAD’s comfort zone by the time my main chute deployed. Qualified divers also spend a lot of time finding a safe landing zone. Some place free from trees, fences, power lines, and just about anything that might ruin their day. Again, thanks to my night vision lenses, I could see with surprising clarity. What I couldn’t see was the direction of the wind. I was gliding through a roiling tempest under a fully inflated canopy, and the ground was still coming up fast.
One thing the literature and videos made clear was the need to land while gliding into the wind. Bones could easily be broken and lives potentially lost if this rule was ignored. Sadly, in my case, the wind was hammering me from every direction. No gentle breezes—gale force winds hammered me and were playing hell with my canopy. Esker did his best to compensate. A blue arrow instructed me to bank hard to the left, and I instantly obeyed.
The altimeter in the corner of my HUD counted down, and Esker’s voice filled my ears. “Prepare to flare on my mark.”
I lined up on the blue line on my display, and the moment the altimeter reached twenty feet, Esker announced, “flare now!”
I pulled both steering toggles fully down to my knees and envisioned the outer edges of the rectangular canopy overhead collapsing as the air was forced from the inflated cells. My descent stalled just as my boots touched the sodden soil. It would have been a graceful landing had I not been slapped in the back by a sudden gust of wind. My boots caught in the muck, and I went toppling forward. I ducked my head as my hands went to the emergency release mechanism for my rig. As I tumbled into a controlled somersault—yes, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it—the chute was torn away and lost to the wind and the night.
When the night stopped spinning, I was kneeling in a clearing of flattened corn stalks. As I’d seen on my descent, this was a recently cleared cornfield. It was flat and empty to the north and east. A run-down, abandoned farm sat a half mile to the southwest.
“Well?” I said to Esker.
“I give you seven point five. High marks for speed, but you sort of flubbed the landing.”
I laughed and rolled my eyes. He was being generous. “I meant radio transmissions and radar. Did my landing draw any attention?”
“Your chute appeared on the radar for just under two seconds,” Esker confirmed. I knew he was monitoring communications from inside the facility, encrypted though it was. “But when you cut it loose, and it was washed away by the wind, its movement at such high speed caused the radar operator to disregard it as an anomaly. He assumed it was debris stirred up by the storm.
Anticipating my next question, Esker projected a two-dimensional map in three-dimensional space before me. It showed me as an orange dot, the target destination as a blue dot, and the location I intended to land as an orange dot with an X through it. A dotted line between me and the X indicated that I was 1.1 miles off target. The storm had cost me in that regard but provided me cover with the radar operator and thereby saved me from a response by the onsite security team.
“I’ll take the trade,” I mumbled to myself, though in the back of my mind, I was apprehensive about what the storm foretold. It was directly linked to me and gave away my relative position geographically. That was a disadvantage. It also meant Breslin was back on his Brane, Wild-Side. “Hey, E. What’s the focal point of the corresponding weather system?” Esker had real-time access to the internet and weather data from all over the world.
“As you would expect,” he said. “The reciprocal front formed over the Seattle, Washington area.”
Esker didn’t need to say what I was already thinking. Once Breslin realized the epicenter of my weather system, he would put the underground facility on high alert. I’d been attacking his projects worldwide for the last six months, and when this storm formed over Nowhere, Kansas, he would have everything his people needed to understand where I was and which facility was next on my hit list.
In a perfect world, I would have landed much closer to the entrance to the underground facility. The weather and my own clumsiness had planted me far afield…literally. I was standing in the middle of a cleared cornfield in the middle of nowhere. Though I was inside the outer perimeter, there were still far too many sensors between me and the entry to have any chance of reaching it without alerting the on-site security team.
That meant I went with Plan B. Rather than go to the abandoned farmhouse in the distance, I headed for the nearest tree line. It was the perimeter between the corn field I was standing in and the next one planted with…whatever they grow in Kansas. I know it wasn’t corn, but I’m no farmer. And it was raining—a lot.
At the tree line, I could take cover, and it was trivial for Esker to scan for the sensors that were part of the supposedly random traps and triggers placed throughout the thousands of square acres inside the inner perimeter. Esker triggered three contiguous sensors along the tree line a hundred yards north of my hide. According to the facility’s strict security playbook, procured for me by none other than Esker more than a week before, two four-wheel-drive jeeps were dispatched to investigate a sensor anomaly.
Four guards arrived on-site within minutes, outfitted in foul weather gear, M4 rifles, and the latest generation night vision goggles. I’ll give them credit for adhering to protocol regarding their deployment. One Jeep pulled up short of the suspect sensors while the other moved in close so the headlights could be used to inspect the area in question more closely. A guard stayed with the perimeter vehicle while the other three, two from the foremost and one from the rear Jeep, conducted a thorough, if aggressive, inspection of the area.
Both teams quickly concluded that the string of sensors was a false alarm, likely due to the weather. Their conclusion was surely aided by the fact that the suspect area wasn’t the least bit disturbed, other than by the weather. Since Esker triggered the sensors, I didn’t need to go anywhere near them. Eager to return to the warmth of their bunker to dry off and log the false alarm, the teams were quick to return to base. The important part of the exercise was when they did; I was hanging from the spare tire and rear bumper of the trailing Jeep.
Why spend time and effort subverting multiple layers of base security when the security team is willing to help?
I dropped to the road and rolled into the ditch thirty yards before the perimeter guard shack. The Jeeps were signaled through the retractable gate with only a wave from the guard in the booth. I watched them disappear through the heavy overhead door and down the ramp to the underground motor pool. This base, just like the rest of Kansas, couldn’t have been flatter if it had been paved for parking. Closing the distance to the guard station was one of my few areas of concern. As it was, thanks to the sheeting rain, the guard in the booth didn’t see me until I banged the flat of my hand on the chain-link fence.
“Hey, buddy. Can I get some help out here?” I called through the fence.
The guard stepped from the booth, confusion clear in his expression. He missed his brief chance to sound the alarm because I promptly shot him. I’d slipped the muzzle of my pistol through the links in the fence and pulled the trigger once. The round caught him in the meat of his left thigh. He went down like a felled tree. I heard his helmet thud hollowly against the concrete pad at the base of the guard shack and even felt a little guilty.
Now might be a good time to describe my non-lethal ordinance. It was something special cooked up—ok, engineered—by Dr. Cormac. The rounds were fired from a conventional 9mm pistol; in this case, a 4.5-inch Springfield XD-M with a suppressor. The jacketed slug was replaced by a high-density plastic shell containing a dissolving nano-composite barb laced with a neuro…a neuro…
Ok, it might also be a good time to admit that the science of this stuff isn’t my strong suit, and I leave that to people much smarter than I. Let’s just say I was shooting a silenced round that broke on contact with the skin and injected the equivalent of a dissolving chemical sliver that induced instant paralysis and unconsciousness. Like the AI in my phone, the intelligence in my contact lenses, and the nanotech swimming in my bloodstream, it was science literally developed on another plane of reality, so you’ll have to cut me some slack when it comes to not understanding how it works.
What matters is that I’m very good at operating the tech.
“Esker, can you—” I was going to ask him to open the fence, but he beat me to it. The gate was already sliding laterally.
“Camera feeds are looping as planned,” Esker confirmed. “I have blocked two attempts to send a priority lockdown notice to the facility from headquarters: one via the closed-loop link and the other via the VPN connection from the Beijing facility.”
I stepped through the gate, walked quickly across the gravel parking lot, and headed for the twenty-by-twenty-foot cinder block building fifty feet from the similarly sized building through which the Jeeps had disappeared. “It was the storm,” I explained. “Breslins crossed over, and the reciprocal storm front over this location gave me away. Monitor air traffic. It’s only a matter of time before he dispatches additional resources to try to intercept.”
“Understood.”
I reached the service door in time to hear the buzzer indicating the door lock had been released. “Thank you,” I muttered to Esker, pulling the door open.
A guard vaulted from the chair behind his desk in the spartan room beyond. This was convenient. Since guards were required to wear body armor and my ammunition didn’t work against it, it was most productive to shoot them in the leg. An arm would do just as well, but research indicated that some guards wore tactical gear that included pads on the arms. Padding on the legs was not part of any approved kit variations.
I raised my pistol and fired from the hip. When I did, a green reticle tracked across the lenses of my contacts, independent of what I saw in my glasses. It was calibrated with my Springfield to within a thirty-second of an inch at twenty yards, so I could fire from the hip without looking across the iron sights. I didn’t even need to bring the gun to eye level.
The guard toppled over the top of his desk before he could fully pull his pistol from the holster on his hip. A countdown in the corner of my eye told me I had seventeen rounds left in the magazine.
“Two Sikorsky have been scrambled from Alpha and Bravo reinforcement locations and are inbound. The closest has an ETA of 48 minutes,” Esker announced in my ear.
The clock was running.
I slipped a multitool from a pocket on my vest and wedged it in the gap between the stainless steel elevator doors. Aside from the guard’s desk, the doors were the only things in the cramped, cold space. I forced the doors apart, and the black abyss of the elevator shaft blipped into monotone focus thanks to the night vision optics.
“Exfil still looks good?” I confirmed. Until now, Esker had only had access to the facilities manifest. My exfiltration plan was based on what was believed to be in inventory here at the facility. Now that I was on site, he had access to the video surveillance feeds and could confirm everything I planned on being here was, well, here.
“Confirmed,” Esker said simply.
My partner in crime wasn’t one to waste words. It was one of the things I liked best about him.
“The elevator?” I asked as I stepped over the yawning abyss and onto the ladder built into the right side of the wide shaft. The shaft itself was a retrofitted underground launch tower for the Cold War-era missile silo. In recent years, the testament to a bygone age had been reworked to include a modern, high-capacity service elevator that had been the primary means of moving technical hardware into the underground facility. The shaft walls had been replaced by nylon fiber-reinforced concrete coated in a lacquer-like layer of polyurethane. The elevator rode a pair of massive steel rails, one on either side of the shaft. The lift was powered entirely by a triple-redundant pneumatic air system located in the bowels of the facility.
“Locked on sub-level three with nine increasingly agitated guards aboard,” Esker confirmed.
This was per the plan. A very narrow, almost claustrophobic emergency staircase could also be used, but it created a bottleneck. So, when the alarm was sounded, the procedure was to use the elevator to reach the surface as quickly as possible. Once I had taken out the guard at the top of the elevator shaft, Esker transmitted a message to the lower guard station asking for additional support to deal with a downed tree at the fence line. This resulted in nine reserve guards being dispatched to the surface. Esker allowed the elevator to rise two levels, then disabled its communication and power, thereby taking nine of the enemy forces off the field without even needing to fire a shot.
I descended the ladder until I reached the elevator stalled on sub-level three. I couldn’t hear the pounding and the shouts of those locked inside until I stepped on top of the car. Someone was just starting to push through the hatch at the top. I stepped on the panel and quickly slipped a padlock through the linkage in the mechanism. It would keep anyone from escaping. Five seconds later, I crawled through the gap between the elevator and the shaft wall. Whatever they had constructed the car from, it was even better insulated than research suggested. Initially, I was concerned about how far up the shaft the car needed to be before locking it down. The sounds were the least of my concerns. Ensuring I disabled the elevator escape hatch was the key to keeping those inside from becoming a problem.
I reached the bottom of the shaft and listened for signs of trouble. What we knew of the facility indicated another checkpoint just beyond the elevator. After that, only blueprint-level security information was available. No insight into the internal security posture had been available beyond this point. Now that we were on-site, Esker could gain more firsthand knowledge of the facility from the local computer network. But even that would take time. He needed to locate a vulnerable wireless device or network component before he could work his magic. To be honest, I tuned out the specifics of his plan since I was confident he would let me know when there was something worth knowing.
“Still no alarm?” I asked in a whisper. It was a wasted question since I knew Esker would have alerted me if any hint of a silent alarm had registered on his proverbial or literal radar.
“Negative.”
I had access to its mechanical release switch from this side of the elevator shaft, so I toggled it and pulled the switch. Then, with the tips of my fingers, I pulled the doors apart.
The guard at the desk in the lobby beyond was reclining in a chair with his feet up. A digital tablet was raised and occupied his attention. Since the desk was in the way, I didn’t have a clear shot at him, so I pulled myself up from the recess of the elevator well. And while the silent opening of the elevator doors had failed to catch the guard’s attention, the five-foot-ten-inch man slipping from the empty doorway somehow did not.
His chair was toppling; he was just reaching his feet when I put a round in his upper leg. On the way down, his head bounced off the edge of the heavy steel desk. He would wake up tomorrow with a far worse headache than everyone else.
“Gray,” Esker said with a hint of excitement. “I have finished mapping the facility and located the device.”
A three-dimensional schematic materialized at arm’s length in front of my face. It quickly began to render with additional detail. First, the tall cylindrical tower took shape, and then the elevator shaft in the tower’s center formed. The ground at the top of the cylinder entered the wireframe, along with the crude cinderblock shack covering the top of the underground silo. Not far away, another shack formed, though its lines were fuzzy, likely due to the distance from the main drawing and a lack of relevance.
Back on the main diagram, a long rectangle extruded from the tower’s base, and I started to see the hall where I now stood. Small blocky rooms were added to the side of my current corridore. Nearby, another vertical shaft formed. This one was about half as wide as the primary missile silo that had brought me to this level. This shaft looked to be perhaps three times deeper than the main. At the bottom, a series of rectangles and squares branched out to represent a sprawling and complex underground facility.
“Holy crap,” I whispered.
“Indeed,” Esker responded. His voice was similarly hushed and awed. “It appears this facility is much more complex than the information previously noted.”
I absentmindedly ran a hand over the spare magazines in my combat harness. “How about the staff onsite? Was that information accurate?”
“I don’t have access to camera coverage of the entire facility yet, but nothing indicates otherwise.” Esker’s tone was back to being dry and analytical. “Forty-three minutes until the first response team arrives,” he reminded. “I can’t currently estimate the response you will face.”
I studied the three-dimensional image of the massive underground facility and wondered how long Breslin’s people had been working on it. Then I considered how many similar facilities were out there, just waiting to be found. He had plans for this world, and no one here knew what was happening. Worse, they wouldn’t believe it if I tried to explain it.
At least I had tools to help me in the fight. Here and now, I had technology. Esker had already mapped the facility and knew where my target was. “Show me the fastest possible route?” I asked. A blurred line appeared on the model. It wove and zig-zagged through the halls and rooms of the facility. “And you can open every lock and door I come across?”
“Confirmed.”
“Then let’s go.”
I made my way through the facility quickly. There was no resistance between the base of the second elevator shaft and the primary laboratory. It was due to the time of night and our false instructions, which left every available security guard trapped in the main elevator just below ground level. While I knew I was racing against the clock, luck had been mostly on my side when facing the on-site security force—I didn’t realize my luckiness was about to run out.
As I approached the double doors to the central lab, the latch clicked, and I knew Esker had already wirelessly subverted the PIN code and card swipe authorization on the lock. I pushed through the rightmost door and into the thirty by forty lab. What should have been a lights-out and locked-down room was instead a bustle of activity. Close to a dozen people moved about the room in seemingly random directions, each moving at what could only be described as a motivated pace. The overhead lights burned bright and a large digital timer mounted high on the rear wall was counting down. Three hours, twenty-one minutes, and nine seconds remained until whatever deadline was reached.
Esker’s voice sounded in my ear, verbalizing pretty much the same thoughts going through my mind at that instant. “It seems the first full-scale test of the apparatus has been moved up even more aggressively than we were led to believe.”
“You think?” I whispered.
I knew there would be no second chance at this attack when I breached the facility’s perimeter. My inside source had messaged to let me know the previous timeline of five days was no longer valid. It would have been more helpful to know that the experiment would be completed before sunrise. That would have impacted my plan of attack. This new insight was already being factored into the mental profile I’d built for my helpful, if secretive, insider. The contact was well-placed enough to know the timetable for today’s test had been advanced but not sufficiently well-placed to understand that the test had been scheduled for before sunrise today.
A half dozen heads turned to me as I skidded to a stop only a couple of paces through the doorway. Dressed head to toe in black, wearing a tactical vest festooned with extra magazines, three flash-bang grenades, and a spare pistol—not to mention the 9mm in hand, I didn’t look like one of the base’s security guards. Oh, did I mention the black ski mask pulled over my face?
Nothing out of place about that, right?
The room’s occupants spread out in an arc away from me as if repulsed by a magnetic force. As they did, a hand slapped down on my left shoulder. I failed to notice the pair of guards bracketing the door when I stepped through.
“Crap,” I whispered. Stupid mistake. I was rushed for time, not expecting the room full of people, and didn’t anticipate armed resistance inside the research lab.
What the hell is everyone doing here in the middle of the night?
I sensed more than saw the guard closing in on me from the right. The one moving from the left was more aggressive, but he had chosen a non-lethal response—at least for the moment—so he would be first. I grabbed his extended right hand and bent it backward, palm up, to an extreme angle. It slowed his ability to bring his pistol to bear with his left hand. His knees involuntarily buckled to release the strain on his hyperextended wrist. At the same time, his gun hand went high and swung wildly as he struggled for balance.
The guard at my right had closed quickly. I think he was attempting to press his pistol to my neck or head, trying to take the fight out of me. He should have maintained a safe distance. I simply pushed his automatic away with the side of my own, and stomped my right foot down on his forward knee. His oncoming momentum failed to find balance on a knee that no longer had integrity, and he slid on one shoulder about three feet in front of me. I fired a shot into his thigh before his slide ended, and he was out of the fight.
The first guard was starting to remember he had a gun in hand. I saw recognition flash in his eyes. He looked up at me from his position on the floor on one knee, his twisted wrist still tight in my left hand. “This won’t hurt a bit,” I said as I slipped the muzzle of my gun into his armpit to access the gap in his body armor. The already muffled spit from the suppressor was quieted further by the close contact with the man’s fatigues. I decided there would be some residual pain when he woke. I hadn’t considered what sort of collateral damage he might suffer from the close contact powder burns. My rounds were non-lethal but still projectiles reliant on conventional gunpowder. That meant there would be the traditional heat and gas discharge issues.
As I released the guard’s wrist and he slumped to the concrete unconscious, I felt a little guilty. This was still better than the alternative, which was to strike him unconscious…but, ouch. My goal was to get in and out without hurting anyone.
Muffled screams from the back of the room returned my attention to the group again. A large older man in a lab coat was skirting the right side of the crowd, maneuvering in a way that suggested preparation for a counterattack.
Good for you.
I was glad to see someone proactive and attempting to act in a chaotic time. It was better than letting an aggressive force seize the room and gain the upper hand. Regardless, I fired one round that caught the big man in the lower calf. Like the guards, he was unconscious by the time he hit the floor.
This shot, of course, brought more screaming. Everyone present compressed to the room’s rear while they tried to get as far from me as possible. A woman in a lab coat seemed to move independently from the populace. While the group moved away from the assembled equipment, she was reluctant to separate from a collection of hardware. She made an effort to keep herself between me and the central apparatus.
“I need you in the back of the room with everyone else,” I said as I ambled closer.
She shook her head and continued to block me physically. If I had to guess, she was in her early thirties. She had strawberry blonde hair, pale skin, and a dash of freckles under each eye. There were bags under cornflower blue eyes. In addition to looking terrified, she appeared exhausted.
Raising a hand in what she clearly knew was a futile attempt to ward me off, she said, “You can’t take this. Please—you don’t know what we’re doing here.”
I slipped the gun into a holster low on my hip and looked her in the eye. “I won’t hurt you, but I have to take it. I know exactly what you’re doing, so I have to take the hardware.”
She looked at me squarely, and I could tell she was trying to picture the face behind the mask. She could sense the sincerity of my words. I didn’t want to be here, and I didn’t want to do this…like this.
“You don’t know who you’re working for,” I said. “You don’t understand what he’s really trying to accomplish.”
I looked at the stitching on the breast of her lab coat and realized her name was Doctor Norton. I was familiar with the profiles of the lead project researchers but had believed someone with the name Norton to be a man. In my head, I had pictured a balding, overweight, shortsighted man who was stooped and enjoying an ongoing affair with argyle and wool.
I’m not sexist. I’d just associated the name with old man Norton, a codger who lived a few houses down the street from where I grew up. He was your classic stay off my lawn sort of old fart who hated kids, and the kids hated him right back. If I was guilty of anything, it was failing to spend more time examining the CVs of the science team. Since I was hitting the place in the middle of the night, I didn’t expect lab geeks to be a factor. I was only worried about the security forces.
Doctor Norton’s fear and trepidation morphed into determination right before my eyes. She glared at me with a look equal parts terror and steely resolve. When she spoke, her words were little more than a pleading whisper. They were only audible because the room had dropped to utter silence. It was like those present were holding their collective breath. “We’re about to change mankind’s understanding of the universe.”
I slid the protecting lens from my eyes and pulled up the front of my ski mask to reveal my face. It was painted with blackout dye that made it almost impossible for cameras to work facial recognition magic on me, though that ship had sailed. With choppers inbound and the storm front having already given me away, I was the only person to whom this effort would be attributed.
Not that Breslin would ever let any of this be reported.
I looked past the doctor at the small silver sphere cradled on the three vertical acrylic pins that comprised its tripod. It stood at the end of a six-foot-long polycarbonate table. Along the rest of the bench, taking up most of the surface, was a complex and admittedly high-tech-looking apparatus that I knew to be one of the world’s smallest high-energy laser projectors. The laser lens was pointed directly at a sphere.
Norton saw my stare and stepped to block me once more. The now determined set of her jaw spoke volumes. The hands at her sides were balled into fists. “You don’t know what we’re doing here.”
Norton’s determination made me smile. Few people had so much passion.
“You’re trying to open a doorway between worlds,” I said simply. I glanced at the projection-like screen standing upright beyond the table and the sphere. It was a vertical sheet of transparent film about four feet wide and eight feet high. “You want to know what’s on the other side.”
Norton’s mouth fell open, and I understood why. Even most of the people in the lab didn’t know the project’s true intention. Only the three principle contributors knew the ultimate goal. Norton specialized in applied physics, string theory, and was the only contributor with hands-on access. The other two had only intellectual contributions to the effort. What she didn’t know was that one of them had already died under mysterious circumstances.
“How could you know?” Norton said. She seemed to deflate with the understanding that the secret wasn’t under wraps.
There was a lot I could say and even more that she needed to hear. Glancing at the display on my wrist, I confirmed I had no time to spare. “If this works, you would open a door,” I said instead.
She nodded slowly.
“Doors work in two directions. Did you ever consider what might come through from the other side?”
Her brows furrowed. She slowly rocked back on her heels. Once, she started to speak but stopped. I watched her slowly turn to look at the apparatus. She turned fully and just stared at the machine as if seeing it for the first time.
No one in the room moved. It was like they were frozen in time. All eyes were on me, Norton, or buried in the arms of the person beside them. I’ll admit I felt terrible for holding these people hostage, but I wasn’t going to hurt any of them. Well, maybe not too badly. If someone tried to stop me, they would get tranqued. There was no way around it. I had to clear the area before the first chopper arrived. In the long run, getting captured would be far worse than letting Breslin complete this experiment.
Norton looked at me. By that point, I was standing beside her and facing the apparatus the same way she was. I was even doing my best to appear non-threatening—the best I possibly could, given that I was decked out in tactical gear and painted as if I had just walked off some Hollywood action movie set.
“You know what we were going to do,” Norton said slowly as if tasting the words as they rolled from her tongue. She watched me carefully as the next sentence formed. “Does that mean you know what would happen if we performed the test?”
My eyes rested on the baseball-sized silver sphere as she spoke. “I’ve seen what’s on the other side,” I said in a hushed tone. “So has your benefactor. The difference is I want to keep what’s on the other side there so it can’t hurt the people here. Breslin wants to feed our people to it.” I met her eye to convey every ounce of sincerity possible. “Opening that door would be the last great scientific breakthrough for mankind.”
I stepped past the doctor and walked to the end of the table. The huddled mass at the end of the room shuddered and shifted, the group moving as one to keep me at bay. They needn’t have bothered. I stopped at the acrylic tripod and picked up the sphere. I glanced briefly at it before dropping it into the pack slung over my shoulder. The doctor didn’t make a move to prevent it.
“Breslin has already killed Professor Saranac,” I said to Norton. “Once this is gone, you and Kane will soon follow. You need to run. Take a new identity—find a quiet place to lay low until the dust settles.” I picked up a pen and scratched a phone number on a scrap of paper before handing it to her. It was accepted with a shaking hand. “Go tonight. Get somewhere safe, then make the call. My friend will help with the arrangements and help you contact Kane securely.”
Norton looked like she was going to be sick. “Saranac is dead?”
I nodded. “He questioned Breslin’s motives in moving up the timetable. I would have been here sooner but didn’t realize you would be performing the experiment tonight.”
Norton was swaying on unsteady legs.
“You don’t have time for that,” I warned, glancing at my watch. “An off-site security team will be here in twenty-three minutes. You and your crew need to be gone before they arrive. The rest of your folks should be safe, but you will have more cover if everyone scatters. This isn’t the only experiment Breslin is conducting and isn’t the first I’ve derailed. Once you go into hiding, he won’t have the resources to search for you indefinitely. Plus, I’ll take him off the board sooner or later.”
Bracing herself against the counter, Norton looked at me intently. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
I gave her a wink and headed for the door.
Esker’s voice entered my ear as I reached the first hallway. “Cutting this kind of close, aren’t you?”
“You tell me,” I said with a chuckle and started jogging. The path out of the installation was already indicated on my heads-up display—literally, a blue line on the hall floor directed me. All I had to do was follow it to the motor pool.
Exfiltration went more or less according to plan. While I was “wasting time,” as Esker put it, in the labratory, he identified the Jeep best suited for my escape. Apparently, the two vehicles used to scout my induced exterior sensor malfunction hadn’t been refueled, even though it was standard procedure. Likely, the two responding teams were more interested in stowing their foul-weather gear and finding a place to warm up. Esker must have accessed some onboard computer system because he identified the four-wheel drive with a full tank and even started the engine as I entered the motor pool. The sound of the throaty V8 rumbling to life distracted the two guards on duty and drew the attention of the three mechanics. All five men converged on the Jeep. I was already loaded with a fresh magazine, so I took down the entire group before a conventional shot was fired.
Esker noted that Miranda Norton and two of her senior research assistants were slowly making their way through the facility and approaching the garage as well. Based on what he’d overheard using the base security cameras, she was briefing them on what I had conveyed and convincing them it was best to exit before the incoming security arrived.
When I drove out in the Jeep, I left the retractable door to the surface ramp open and the overhead entrance on the ground level as well. I also left a Jeep warming up so Norton and her team could quickly retreat. I thought about taking them with me, but that would raise further questions and lead me to take on more responsibility for the group than I could afford. I already had a lead on another of the experiments Breslin was funding. If I was honest with myself, my focus had been on the next mission since waking up with that talon in my side and seeing the news broadcast two weeks prior.
Breslin had conducted nearly a dozen experiments similar to the one I disrupted that night. Each used a different approach in some way. Various technologies were used; sometimes, different scientific or even occult principles were employed. The orb from tonight’s attempt was something new. Even Esker couldn’t track the provenance of that artifact.
Breslin had a singular goal, and he would stop at nothing until it was accomplished.
He wanted to break through the barrier separating my world from his. Like me, he could travel between the two—but we were the only ones. If he could bring more of his people across, it would end this world as we knew it and mark the start of a new dark age—a time when man was no longer the most dangerous creature on the planet.
