The Milestone Protocol

by Ernest Dempsey

  “I am that good of a shot.”

  Sean’s finger twitched as it had done so many times before. The muzzle flashed, and a pop echoed around the chamber.

  He held the pistol still after the recoil, keeping it aimed upward, toward where Magnus stood. The Swede snorted derisively at first, then started outright laughing.

  “Was that supposed to be your dramatic moment, Sean? Your time to shine where Sean Wyatt rides in on his horse to save the world?”

  Kevin stirred at Tommy’s feet, but a swift kick to the temple knocked him senseless again.

  “Something like that,” Sean said.

  Magnus shook his head, still chuckling. “But you missed.” He dropped the red diamond into the hole and held his hands out wide, showing that the deed was done.

  “No,” Sean corrected. “I didn’t.”

  Magnus searched Sean’s face for a lie, but he found none. He hadn’t been struck by the bullet. Then he realized Sean’s angle was slightly twisted to the right, his left. Horror stretched across Sorenson’s face as his eyes fell on the pillar where the green gem had been placed. A bluish green light sprayed out from the shattered remains of the precious stone, spilling the rays out onto the hieroglyphs to the right.

  “No!” Magnus yelled. “No!”

  Sean took a deliberate step forward and squeezed the trigger again. Another gem exploded. Then a third. With every stride, Sean picked off one after another until they were all obliterated, save for the one behind Magnus—the red diamond.

  The Swede grappled at the shattered gems, desperately hoping they could somehow be repaired. With panic in his eyes, he turned back toward Sean, who held the pistol aimed squarely at his old benefactor’s chest.

  Magnus fumed. “You fool! You’ve killed us all! Don’t you see? The world is going to consume itself. And we are going to die here in this mountain!”

  The humming the men heard outside the pyramid pierced the walls of the megastructure and filled the chamber with an almost deafening sound, like the roar of an approaching freight train. The blue cube’s rhythmic pulsing quickened, and the light shooting up to the ceiling brightened.

  “Maybe,” Sean said. “Or maybe we gave humanity a chance.”

  Sean lowered his weapon and turned around. He strode back toward the door, passing Tommy.

  “Sean Wyatt! I made you! I made both of you! And I can end you!”

  Magnus drew a .45 pistol from the folds of his jacket and raised it.

  Sean saw Tommy’s movement and whirled around.

  The two friends were quicker, and they squeezed their triggers in rapid succession.

  Sean’s pistol clicked when the last of the magazine was empty. Tommy fired two more times just to make sure the deed was done.

  Then the two lowered their weapons as Magnus stared down at the bullet holes in his torso and legs only a second before he fell to his knees.

  “Goodbye, old friend,” Sean said.

  Then Sean and Tommy turned and ran out of the room.

  50

  Svalbard

  Adriana fired her pistol and ducked back behind the door next to Niki.

  “I think I have two left,” she said.

  Five of the gunmen lay dead at the head of the passage, but some still remained.

  “And I’m out,” Niki added. “What should we do?”

  “Make them come to us,” she said, looking into the room behind them. “We hide out in there, surprise them, take them down in close quarters."

  The room she indicated was full of ancient artifacts. Most of the relics were unlike anything she’d ever seen. Strange vases, pictures, weapons, and tools filled the shelves and tables all around the vast space.

  “That’s a good idea,” Niki agreed.

  They were about to enter the storage room when a deep thud roared from somewhere in the mountain. It shook the facility’s foundation. Lights flickered overhead. Then the building trembled again.

  “What was that?” Niki asked. He looked to her for answers, but she had none. Except one.

  “I think we’re too late.”

  Then a woman’s robotic voice echoed through the corridor.

  “Warning. Warning. Containment protocol breached. Evacuate immediately.”

  The message continued repeating as red lights flashed in the corner of the storage room.

  Niki and Adriana shared a concerned glance, then heard a shout as the door at the end of the corridor burst open.

  “Run!” Sean appeared through the opening and sprinted toward the elevator.

  He saw the two huddled by the door and then looked down the hallway where the five bodies were. Realizing there could still be trouble, he raised his pistol, ejected the magazine, and grabbed a full one, all while on the run. He slammed the magazine into the well and jerked back the slide to chamber the first round.

  “Come on!” he shouted to Adriana and Niki as he charged past. Tommy was close on his heels.

  Adriana and Niki rushed after them, full of questions that would clearly have to wait.

  One of the gunmen emerged from the corner and took aim at Sean, but he hadn’t expected himself to be the target, or to have Sean rushing headlong toward him.

  Sean’s pistol was already trained on the gunman, and he fired several times, missing wildly with four shots that plunked into the wall. Two struck true, though, and dropped the man to the floor.

  Two others popped out from the other side, ready to avenge their comrade, but they caught hot rounds from Sean’s and Tommy’s blazing pistols as the two unleashed an inescapable barrage.

  Sean got to the elevator first and punched the button, hoping he wouldn’t have to wait for the lift to come back down. Fortunately, the doors opened right away, and he waited for the other three to board before he got on.

  Tommy pressed the button for the control room and then mashed the button to make the doors close faster, which never worked.

  After two seconds that felt like years, the doors closed, and the elevator began its ascent.

  “What happened?” Adriana asked.

  Sean breathed hard. “Killed Magnus.” He gasped again. “Shot the gems. Reversed the power. Just like Alex said.”

  “So, what happens now?” Niki asked, his voice distant, probably far away in the past.

  “We’re not sure,” Tommy huffed. “But it doesn’t sound good.”

  “I think it’s safe to assume this place is going to blow,” Adriana said. She swallowed hard. “We may not make it out in time.”

  The doors opened, and the four leaped out.

  “We have to try,” Sean said, leading the way back down the passage toward the control room.

  They arrived to find Dak and the others holding down their positions, and a gruesome display of bodies piled up around the entrance.

  “There they are!” Tara shouted, pointing from behind an overturned table.

  “Did you do it?” Alex asked.

  Sean and the others lingered by the corner of the room. “Uh, yeah. I think so. But what does that do if we reverse the energy flow?”

  Alex shrugged. “No idea.”

  “You told me to do something like that without knowing what would happen?”

  “Hey, you asked for an idea. I gave you one.”

  “Fair enough. What’s the situation?”

  Dak took over. “Holding down the exit. Thought they might try to tear-gas us or maybe use some kind of explosives, but they just kept sending guys in. Haven’t fired a shot in ten minutes.”

  “They’ll all be evacuating now,” Sean said. “We need to do the same.”

  “I’ll take point,” Emily said, motioning to June to join her.

  The two women carefully swept the corridor around the corner and then jolted into the intersection between hallways. There were no other troops waiting for them.

  “Clear!” June shouted.

  “Clear!” Emily echoed.

  Everyone in the control room left their cover and scurried to t
he exit. Emily and June pushed up, running at half speed with weapons drawn and held low as they approached the elevator.

  The woman’s voice overhead grew louder as they neared one of the speakers, the same evacuation warning blaring through the corridor.

  June arrived at the elevator first and pressed the button.

  The doors opened. She and Emily jammed their weapon inside but found it empty.

  They stood by the outside as the others ran in. The rumbling grew more frequent, and the floor shook. The woman’s voice in the speaker twisted and glitched. More voices came from the other end of the hallway, and a second later, reinforcements appeared with guns drawn.

  “Get in,” Emily ordered.

  June slid sideways into the elevator, popping off rounds at the attackers to give the Axis director cover.

  One man fell with a bullet to the thigh. Another with one to the abdomen. Sean and Tommy joined in as Emily retreated into the elevator mere seconds before the doors shut.

  The sound of bullets peppering the exterior riddled the lift as it climbed to safety and away from the bottom floor.

  The elevator bumped and creaked. Sean instinctively reached for a handrail as his infamous fear of heights and falling kicked in. He gripped the rail with a steel fist, his knuckles turning white as the nightmare he’d had so many times before started playing out in reality.

  Adriana reached over and put her arm around him. “We’re going to make it,” she said.

  “I know,” he lied.

  Few things terrified Sean like the fear of falling. It was his kryptonite.

  Tommy patted his friend on the shoulder. Emily, too, consoled him by covering his hand on the rail with her own.

  A heavy sideways bump nearly caused the occupants to lose their balance.

  Then the doors opened. The group shoved off the elevator and into the next corridor. Sean was glad to be out of one deathtrap, but up ahead lay another.

  The maintenance elevator was a shorter ride, but equally as terrifying.

  Once everyone was on board, Dak hit the buttons on the control panel to send the thing upward.

  Inside the open rocky shaft, Sean could see the cables twitch with every shift from the mountain. The corners of the lift were stabilized on every side with wheels in metal tracks, but it still rocked back and forth every second of the ascent.

  Sean kept expecting the cable to snap and drop them back down to their doom, but the steel threading remained intact, and the last of their elevator rides reached the top without incident.

  The scene that played out before them, however, was sheer chaos.

  Cult SUVs sped away down the road toward the mountain exit. Troops rushed down the catwalks on foot, desperate to escape whatever was causing the evacuation warning to sound.

  “Everyone in the first truck!” Sean shouted. “I’ll drive.”

  “Shotgun,” Adriana said as they dashed from the elevator to the cargo truck.

  The rest of the group climbed into the back while Sean and his wife hopped up the steps into the cab. Sean revved the engine to life as a huge fluorescent light fixture fell to the ground and crashed on the asphalt just a few yards ahead of them. Pieces of rock and debris smashed all around the truck.

  Sean heard someone in the back pound on the wall. He took the signal, shifted into gear, and put the pedal to the floor.

  The lumbering truck turned hard, probably sending everyone in the back tumbling to one side. The right-hand fender grazed part of the rock wall under the catwalk, but only did cosmetic damage. Sean spun the big wheel back around and straightened course as he accelerated toward the exit.

  Adriana held on to the handlebar over the window while bracing herself with her left hand. “Easy, Junior,” she said, making a reference to former NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr.

  He didn’t laugh at the joke. Something else was on his mind, and he kept his eyes locked on the road ahead.

  “I just hope they opened that steel door,” he said.

  “Did they close it?” Concern spread across her face.

  “Probably. I doubt Magnus would have initiated the sequence without doing that.”

  Adriana took a deep breath. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

  The truck rumbled past hundreds of fleeing soldiers. Most were running down the catwalks toward the exit. Some sped ahead in SUVs. Many ran on the asphalt.

  The engine groaned as it reached seventy, then eighty kilometers per hour. Sean looked down at the speedometer and rolled his eyes. “Wish I knew how fast we are going. Stupid metric.”

  Adriana glanced at him uneasily. “Is that a joke? You know—”

  “I know. America and like two small countries are the only ones that use imperial. And metric is superior blah blah blah. I just want miles per hour.”

  She laughed uneasily. The truck leaned hard to the left as Sean steered it around the long curve to the right. One of the SUVs in front of him had slowed down due to a line waiting to get out. Sean cut the wheel to the right and felt the truck’s weight tipping, but he corrected and scraped by three of the slower vehicles, knocking off side mirrors in the process.

  The massive steel door came into view as they exited the apex of the turn and entered the straightaway.

  A giant piece of rock broke free from the ceiling and fell onto an SUV in the right-hand lane, crushing everyone inside a second before the cargo truck sped by.

  “Whoa,” Sean said, leaning forward and looking up through the windshield. “That was unlucky—for them.”

  Up ahead, the steel door was gradually opening, and people were running over each other to get out. The line of SUVS was at a standstill.

  Another chunk of rock collapsed from the ceiling, this time landing on the catwalk to the left and crushing several of the order’s soldiers. The catwalk shook loose from its supports and tumbled down the side of the rock wall, killing more of those on that section as it collapsed.

  “How are we going to get through?” Adriana asked. “It’s opening too slowly.”

  Sean didn’t answer as he pushed harder on the gas pedal.

  She gripped the handle tighter.

  The cargo truck barreled forward. The gap between the steel frame and the door grew wider with every second, but it was going to be close.

  With a hundred yards to go, it was still only wide enough for a single SUV to get through at a time.

  The truck closed the distance in seconds.

  SUVs sped through the opening that continued to widen, but still not wide enough for two at a time to get through.

  Sean took a deep breath when they were thirty yards from the opening. “Hold on,” he ordered.

  “Way ahead of you, my love.”

  “This is going to be close.”

  At the last second, Sean cut the wheel hard to the right just before the truck rammed into the rock wall and dozens of people. The right side of the van smashed into the first SUV in line, driving the smaller truck into the steel wall with jarring force. Sean deftly guided the cargo truck through the narrow opening, shattering both side mirrors against the door and its frame.

  The loud bang of the windows startled him and his wife, but the truck burst through and into the open, dark Arctic night.

  The earth shook beneath them as he eased on the throttle and continued down the road.

  “Look,” Adriana said, pointing up into the sky.

  “I see it.”

  In the sky above, bright red beams shot through the aurora borealis, piercing the rippling green waves and spreading throughout the darkness.

  “Did we stop it or not?” Sean wondered out loud.

  “I don’t know.”

  Then the earth shuddered, and a massive explosion ripped through the mountain, sending debris trails hundreds of feet into the air as though an ancient Arctic volcano had suddenly erupted to life.

  Kevin struggled to his feet. The ground shifted beneath him, and a terrible, loud humming sound filled his ears. Disoriented, h
e braced himself on a nearby ramp.

  Then he remembered where he was. With terror in his eyes, he looked up the ramp at Magnus. The Swede was propped up on the altar containing the cube, with one arm slung over it. Blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth. Much more oozed through his clothes.

  A bright red beam shone through the shaft overhead where the golden metal plate had broken away.

  “What happened?” Kevin shouted. “What’s going on?”

  Magnus wheezed and coughed, but he managed a chuckle.

  “Answer me, Magnus!” Kevin yelled in a panic. He turned and saw the exit was blocked with debris and rubble. “How do we get out of here?”

  “We don’t,” Magnus replied. “Humanity is lost.”

  “What? No. There has to be another way out of here. Something! Anything!”

  “No,” Magnus said. “The human race is finished. We have failed.”

  No sooner had the words escaped his lips than a bright white light flashed through the chamber, a second before the Quantium cube exploded and obliterated everything.

  51

  Oslo

  A television hanging in the corner of the pub displayed the headline: “Mysterious Red Lights Shock World as Earth’s Core Shifts.”

  A female news anchor with shoulder-length brunette hair and a gray suit with a silver necklace detailed the alarming story and the conclusion that scientists from around the world had reached regarding the bizarre occurrence.

  Sean snorted in derision, sitting across from the television. He’d requested a table for ten, so the hostess had arranged two smaller tables to accommodate the large group.

  Dak sipped a beer as he watched the anchor continue to talk about the incident before the subject switched to the case of the missing billionaire. The headline also changed, featuring the line: “Billionaire Philanthropist Magnus Sorenson Still Missing.”

  It had been over a week since the group arrived in Oslo. Tommy had arranged a meeting with a nuclear physicist at the university to get checked for radiation poisoning, but all tests had come back negative.