Cannibal

by Jeremy Robinson

  Boucher swallowed. “And everyone in it.”

  “Desperado was always intended to be a measure of last resort. A literal scorched earth policy. An explosion like that will…” He trailed off, unwilling to articulate the full measure of destruction that would result. He gestured at the screen where the SWAT team was already placing another round of breaching charges. “They might not make it past the barrier in ten minutes, but even if they don’t, the resulting explosion will take them out, not to mention setting the forest on fire and probably destroying a good chunk of Pinckney.”

  “We can’t do that, Tom.”

  Duncan needed no convincing. If the attacking force had been a mercenary army or foreign operatives trying to seize the secrets of Endgame so they could launch a campaign of global domination, he would not have hesitated, but the men on the other side of the barrier were Americans, doing their sworn duty. And that did not begin to account for collateral damage.

  “I’ve always known that I might someday have to make the ultimate sacrifice,” Duncan said. “I don’t have the right to make that decision for those men out there. But I have to keep my people safe.”

  “It always comes down to that doesn’t it? Sacrifice. Destroy a village to kill one terrorist. Bomb a city to win a war and save millions.”

  Duncan nodded, still staring at the screen. More vehicles were arriving. Agents in windbreakers were setting up a mobile command center. Another screen showed a second group, National Guardsmen by the look of their uniforms, deploying at the hangar entrance some ten miles away, which while secure, had not been sealed off completely. Those troops would be inside the Central portion of the facility in a matter of minutes. “I need a better answer.”

  “If you take Desperado off the table, you’re left with…two options, as I see it.” Boucher was thinking out loud, putting his half-formed ideas out in the open in hopes that inspiration would strike. Duncan welcomed the process, but Boucher’s next words were anything but inspirational. “Surrender or retreat.”

  “Surrender is not an option,” Duncan said, with unexpected vehemence. Allowing himself to be captured, arrested and put on trial would be a betrayal of the highest magnitude. Not only would he be taking down Chess Team and everyone who had worked and sacrificed to make it a reality, it would also lead to revelations that would throw the entire country into chaos.

  Boucher smiled cryptically. “Well then, I guess you’ve already made your decision. I’ll be honest, I didn’t much care for the notion of going down with the ship anyway.”

  Duncan stared at his old friend in dismay. “You think we should run?”

  “You do.” He stood up. “Making the decision is the easy part. Figuring out how to pull it off, and not second guessing yourself… That’s the rub.”

  “And living with the consequences,” Duncan murmured, but he knew Boucher was right. “We can exit through the Dock. Either they don’t know about it, or they figure it’s too inaccessible to be of any use to us.”

  He did not add that the latter was mostly true. There were only two ways out of the Dock: a concealed passage that came up in an old abandoned cabin, which could be reached only via a primitive forest road, and the submarine tunnel that let out under the surface of Lake Winnipesaukee, where another undersea passage—some sixty miles long—connected to the Atlantic Ocean. The latter choice would ensure their escape if not for one small detail. The only vehicle capable of bearing them through the long tunnel was a decommissioned Russian Typhoon submarine, and even if it was possible for two men to operate the 575-foot long vessel, which Duncan very much doubted, the submarine had sustained extensive damage during an incident a few years earlier, and repairing the monstrous undersea craft had been low on the list of priorities.

  Fleeing into the woods was only a marginally better choice, but as Boucher had so eloquently demonstrated, when the unacceptable options were subtracted, the only choice was the least undesirable one.

  The Manifold Alpha facility had been built to resemble a large letter ‘A’ with three main areas of operation occupying the points of a triangle. After taking over and rechristening the complex as Endgame headquarters, Duncan had centralized operations in the Labs section, at the lower left corner of the triangle, after moving it from Central. The Dock, situated at the lower right corner, ten miles away, could be reached in a matter of minutes using the dedicated high-speed light-rail train that connected the sections of the sprawling base. Unfortunately, the rail line also joined the Central portion at the top of the triangle, where the hangar was located. Once the intruders entered Central, their path to the Dock would be wide open.

  More hard decisions.

  He leaned over the console and brought up the systems control subroutine. “I’m cutting all power to the light rail. That will buy us a little time. Unfortunately, it means that we won’t be able to use the train to reach the Dock.”

  “Well, there’s a reason they call it ‘running,’” Boucher replied with a forced laugh.

  Duncan executed the command and then closed the system down and locked it out. Given the unique complexity of the quantum computer, it was doubtful that even the most skilled FBI technician would be able to override the lock-out, but Duncan had no intention leaving even that small window of possibility open. The quantum computer would have to be destroyed.

  He checked the screen showing the mission feed and saw the team making their way across open ground to the abandoned factory. They were still a long way from safety, but the immediate threat from the cartel appeared to have been neutralized. “King, be advised. The q-net will be going down permanently in a few minutes.”

  As he delivered the dire news, Duncan felt a pang of guilt for having become so dependent on the innovative technology. The team would be losing not just instantaneous communication with both Endgame and each other, but also the weapons targeting system and their chameleon camouflage. He did not doubt that they were equal to the challenge of finishing the mission without their high-tech gadgets, but that was little comfort. He had let them down.

  “Understood,” King replied in his characteristically neutral tone. “Good luck.”

  The words felt like a body blow. This is it, he thought. Everything we’ve done... Saving the world over and over again… All for nothing.

  No. Not for nothing. We did save the world, after all.

  “Well, at least there’s that,” he muttered to himself. He took a deep breath. “Endgame...out.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Boucher’s growl shocked Duncan out of the fog of despair. The source of the former CIA director’s ire seemed to be on the screen showing the ongoing attempts to break through the barrier at Post One, but at first glance, the situation appeared unchanged. Then he saw what had triggered the outburst.

  There were two new faces visible in the crowd of agents and SWAT shooters. The men were immediately conspicuous because they were not wearing the ubiquitous and easily identifiable blue windbreakers favored by FBI special agents. Instead, they wore tailored business suits. Duncan didn’t need a second look to identify them. The man closest to the camera, gesticulating wildly as if taking charge of the situation, was US Deputy Attorney General Joe Taits. A political creature with dubious law enforcement credentials, Taits had been a controversial choice for the number two law enforcement position in the nation, but the newly-sworn President Chambers had hoped—futilely as it turned out—that his nomination of Taits, who was popular with the majority opposition party, would be seen as a bipartisan gesture. Duncan had privately advised his successor against the appointment; Taits was, at best, an opportunist, and at worst, an outright fraud.

  Duncan however barely noticed the DAG. His attention was transfixed by the other man.

  “Marrs. Son of a bitch.”

  Suddenly, it all made sense. The ambush waiting for the team in Mexico. The raid on Endgame. The senior senator from Utah had two ambitions in life: to become the next president, and to destroy Tom Dun
can and everything he stood for.

  If Taits was a bad apple, then Marrs was the worm. His first crusade to bring down Duncan’s administration had verged on treason, though in a deft move, Duncan had turned the situation to his advantage. Marrs’s interference in the more recent Congo crisis, motivated as always by his personal ambition and fueled by generous bribes from special interests, had put the African continent on the brink of total war and nearly triggered an ecological catastrophe that would have killed millions—a calamity that had been averted only by Erik Somers’s supreme sacrifice.

  Now, with the destruction of Crescent II and the kidnapping and probable death of forty-six American tourists, Marrs was directly complicit in both treason and murder.

  Duncan shook his head, trying to push down the rising swell of rage. “We have to go, Dom.”

  Boucher followed him from the control room, his angry eyes watching the screen until they turned the corner. Duncan however did not need to look back. Marrs’s appearance had awakened something within him. He had been willing to give his life to preserve the secrets of Endgame and protect the Chess Team from the fallout of his own demise, and still he was not certain that trying to save his own life was the best way to accomplish those goals. Now however, there was a new and far more compelling reason for him to stay alive.

  Payback.

  35

  Mexico

  Death, Colin Parrish decided, really sucks.

  He had never believed in an afterlife, which conveniently absolved him of the need to worry about the consequences of questionable moral decisions or the inevitability of karmic payback. He was sure that death was the end, lights out, full stop, but if there was any truth to what untold millions believed, and he was destined for some infernal judgment—slow roasting in the Lake of Fire or sent back to live again as a mosquito—he was okay with that. What he had never anticipated was this: a dark crushing limbo, unable to move, to speak, to even breathe, but completely aware.

  His rational mind grasped that this was not the afterlife at all, but the threshold. He was still alive, though the distinction was so trivial as to be meaningless. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would spend the rest of eternity exactly like this, trapped in the infinite darkness of his own mind.

  The first indication that he might be wrong about that, too, was heralded by a faint rustling noise, like someone walking across a graveled path. Then, with startling suddenness, he was yanked out of the darkness and into the twilit aftermath of the apocalypse. He found himself face to face with the Devil himself.

  No, he corrected, as the initial sting gave way to a tsunami of pain. Not the Devil. Someone even worse.

  Hector Beltran was almost unrecognizable. His ritualistically tattooed body, which already gave him the appearance of a demonic creature, was now streaked with dust and blood, making him look utterly inhuman. There was a preternatural fierceness in the man’s eyes. His lips were pulled back in what was either a grimace of pain or a grin of bloodlust—probably both. He stood atop a mountain of rubble, the muscles of his arms and chest bulging like something from a comic book as he held Parrish aloft.

  Parrish tried to speak, but the only sound to pass his lips was a mewling grunt. Beltran let him fall, and the impact with the rocky ground sent another spike of pain through Parrish’s body. Through the haze, he saw Beltran stalking away, bellowing orders to his men in their shared language.

  For a few fleeting seconds, Parrish dared to hope that Beltran had forgotten him, but the crunch of footsteps on stone signaled his return. “Get up,” he roared in English. “Find them.”

  Find…who? Parrish longed for the oblivion of unconsciousness, but neither Beltran nor his own body would oblige that retreat. The cartel leader’s powerful hands gripped him once more, hauling him erect and drawing him so close that Parrish was nearly suffocated by the other man’s sickly sweet breath. “Where are they?”

  “I…” At long last, Parrish’s inner bulldog began to stir. “Put me down.”

  Beltran blinked at him in disbelief, and for a moment, Parrish thought the man was going to break him in half. Instead, he set Parrish down on his feet, helping him stand erect, rather than forcing him to do so. “You know how they think,” Beltran continued. His tone remained every bit as demanding, but was marginally more civil. “Where will they run to?”

  Parrish turned his head to survey the aftermath of the pyramid’s collapse. The ruins were barely recognizable. Where the bloodstained temple had once stood, there was only a low misshapen mound of loose stone. A few men with assault rifles were picking through the rubble, searching for other survivors, evidently without success. Beyond that, lay the open field, gently undulating and vanishing into the horizon in every direction. There were mountains to the east, where the sun was just starting to rise, and a blocky shape to the south. Parrish had no idea what the shape was, but it was definitely a man-made structure.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “What’s that place?”

  Beltran followed the invisible line of Parrish’s finger. “La matadera,” he muttered. “Of course.”

  He stepped away and immediately began shouting to his men. The cartel fighters promptly abandoned their search-and-recovery efforts, and with near-military precision, they began marching out of the ruins, with Beltran at the forefront, towering above them like the Lord of Hell incarnate.

  Without being consciously aware of doing so, Parrish fell into step behind them. The commands Beltran employed to marshal his troops were incomprehensible to Parrish, but he had no difficulty divining their meaning.

  There was one word however, uttered in Spanish rather than Nahuatl, that he did understand: Matadera.

  Slaughterhouse.

  36

  Knight noticed the change, even before he consciously registered the fact that the virtual display had gone dark. It was as if someone had flicked off the switch on his migraine, leaving only a faint afterimage of pain. His immediate relief was tempered by the gravity of what this development meant.

  “I think we just lost Endgame.”

  There was no answer from the others.

  Of course not, he realized. Comms are down, too.

  He looked up, turning his head to locate the others. Despite the persistent agony of the strobe-light show that had been flashing into his retina for the last few hours, he had come to rely on the constantly updating virtual environment and even on the artificially produced stereoscopic vision of his implant. Yet, even without the chess piece icons to mark them, he had no difficulty finding his teammates, because their adaptive camouflage was also off-line.

  In its natural state, the thin over-garment was a pale satin, giving them the appearance of a bulky human-shaped marshmallow. Bishop was about fifty feet away. She had stopped moving and was likewise looking around in apparent confusion at what was happening. Further along, he saw the others. King was ahead of Bishop, and Rook with his machine gun had taken point. Queen, bringing up the rear, was behind him.

  King’s hand went out in a rapid patting gesture, and then he dropped to the ground. Knight immediately grasped the meaning of the hand signal and repeated it, just as he had learned to do all those years ago in Army basic training. The message was simple enough: Get down.

  From the prone position, below the low grass cover, his visibility was virtually nonexistent. He could no longer see the rest of the team, nor could he make out their immediate destination, the abandoned factory structure that was still some two hundred yards distant. The ruins were at least a mile behind them, and in the time it had taken them to traverse that distance, there had been no sign of enemy activity. That did not mean, however, that the cartel fighters had been completely defeated.

  After a minute of lying motionless, Knight heard a strange clicking sound off to his left. He turned his head toward the noise and mimicked it with his tongue against his teeth. There was a rustling in the grass, and a moment later, King crawled into view.

  “Ditch the cam
o,” he said without preamble. King had already done so, stripping off the over-garment to reveal what Rook had dubbed ‘work clothes’—in this instance, the latest version of the Army Combat Uniform, which employed the Scorpion W2 multicam pattern. “Where’s Queen?”

  “My six. About twenty yards,” Knight replied.

  “Rook is waiting about fifty yards from the factory. That’s our rally point. He’ll provide fire support if needed. Connect with Bishop and circle around the building to make sure there are no surprises. We’ll meet on the far side.”

  There was no discussion about the deeper, earthshaking implications of what was happening thousands of miles away at Endgame. All that mattered was the immediate problem. King did not wait for a reply, but resumed his high crawl through the grass. Knight quickly stripped off his chameleon suit, along with the now useless glasses. He stuffed them into his assault pack and began the long slog across the field. It was an arduous task, but he had done this hundreds of times, crawling stealthily from one firing position to the next. He knew that the only way to avoid going crazy was to dissociate the physical ordeal from the more critical mental game of hide and seek. Periodically, he would stop and rise up, just high enough to stay oriented on the objective, looking and listening for any sign of the enemy. After what seemed like an eternity of shuffling along, he caught up to Bishop.

  “I am not liking the old ways so much,” she said through clenched teeth.

  Knight offered a commiserating grin but could not entirely share her outlook, if only because the discomfort he was now experiencing paled in comparison to the relentless headache caused by the implant. Yet, as he continued forward, side-by-side with her, the significance of what was happening finally hit home.

  Chess Team was finished.

  He had been ready to walk away, to step aside and let someone else take his place, just as Asya had done following Erik’s death. Now, the question of his future with the team was moot. Even if they survived this day, managed to regroup and make their way back to American soil, what would happen next?