by A D Davies
“Still,” Tane said, “they’re having a big night, launching the shield. You’d have thought they’d step up.”
“The main building has more guards,” Harpal reported. “And there’s something weird on the dam itself. Those things that looked like they were carrying out repairs? I want to get a closer look.”
“Not yet.” Dan packed everything away except his Glock with the silencer attachment. He also had a submachine gun strapped to him, along with a K-bar knife on his belt. “Harpal, we clear for a run?”
“Patrol’s coming,” Harpal said. “Give them two minutes. Stay out of sight.”
An icy wind howled down the valley, drawing out the wait. With Harpal narrating the troops’ progress, no one needed to peek up from the natural barrier and risk an eagle-eyed soldier spotting them.
Eventually, Harpal said, “Clear. The tower guard is looking the other way. You have a straight run at the gate.”
The three action dudes didn’t wait on a countdown, instead sprinting through the dark to the wood-framed chicken wire perimeter. The lock was a simple but massive padlock, which Tane got through in seconds using a key scrubber.
Dan eased the gate open, and they all slipped through, replacing the padlock without engaging the mechanism. They progressed to the nearest hut and pinned themselves to the blindside.
Harpal said, “Good, you’re clear. You need to cover the ground carefully. But there’s no telling what the prisoners will do if they see you.”
Jules risked an eyeball down the next lane, viewing a couple of filthy, emaciated bald men shuffling with cups of water drawn from a rainwater butt. Their eyes remained on their drinks, plodding along, concentrating on getting through the loose dirt of the floor.
He came back to the guys. “I think we’re good. These people are empty. Traumatized. Can’t hurt to keep a low profile, though.”
“What are you thinking?” Tane asked. “Grabbing a hoodie?”
“Exactly. Wait here.”
Before anyone could object, Jules slipped around the corner and into the dorm. It was pitch black and stank of body odor and mold, with an after-whiff of disinfectant. His eyes took a moment to adjust, then he made out triple bunks full of human forms. His ears picked out the deep breaths of sleeping people.
He advanced inside, placing his feet deliberately, unsure what he was looking for, but came across it with a quick scan: shelves containing the ubiquitous clothing the other prisoners had been wearing. In the dark, he identified the largest two boiler suits he could find, plus one in his own size, and three hoodies.
Sorry for stealing your stuff. But if we win this, you’ll be free tomorrow.
A floorboard creaked. Two people stirred. A young woman on a bottom bunk rolled over to face Jules. She blinked her eyes open, raised her hands to rub them, but Jules fled before she completed the movement. Although not before snatching a pair of crusty work gloves from the sill by the door.
He silently closed the door and scrammed back to where he’d left Dan and Tane.
The boiler suits were too small for them, but Jules managed to change fully into his. Dan and Tane squeezed into the bottoms and tied the arms around their waists, the gray fleece hoodies covering the knots and their weapons. Jules also stuffed his hands into the gloves, the dirt on the outside baked on. While Tane’s skin tone might pass for Asian in this light, his facial tattoo was a dead giveaway. Dan might circumvent only passing interest, but Jules’s was a bigger risk than either. They’d seen no black people here, meaning he needed to conceal himself as much as possible. The work gloves would arouse less suspicion than the high-tech tactical gloves he’d flown in with.
Once they all closely resembled the other inmates—shrouded in hoods—they wandered out into the site.
“That’s so cool, guys,” Harpal said. “Slow down, though. No one moves that quickly. And you all need to slump a bit. No one is as tall or healthy looking as you.”
As they progressed deeper into the camp, knees bent and shoulders pulled in, it became clear that it wasn’t only the terrain outside the camp that kept order. The squalid conditions left many prisoners sobbing, some virtually comatose. Guards were not needed to the extent they would be in a US penitentiary, but they existed. With Harpal’s help, they circumvented a couple of random soldiers cutting through the camp, and they remained on the blindside of the tower guard wherever possible. The weak lights also helped, mobile generator-powered, the chugging machines positioned on every fourth corner alongside cans of fuel to top up as needed. No nice, clean hydroelectricity for these lowly humans.
Jules said, “If they need generators for power out here, they’re usin’ even more power from the dam than we realized.”
At the exercise yard, which resembled more a basketball court than something from a WWII camp, they took stock, lounging in a way they’d seen the inmates doing. Jules even slumped on his backside against the wall, head in his hands.
It wasn’t entirely put on. The sights were crippling to him. A lifetime of suppressing his emotions in terms of friendship, romance, and consumerist desires hadn’t prepared him for the agony he was witnessing here. Thwarting evil, fighting off terrorists, preventing a plague—it all seemed so distant compared to roaming amidst the dehumanizing treatment of these people.
Concentrate.
Despite his position, Jules had a clear line of sight across the ground, the courtyard sloping up toward the base of the dam where not one, but two facilities protruded. On the right, it stretched three-quarters of the dam’s width, the left less than a quarter.
He said, “That’s weird.”
“What is?” Dan asked.
“The two structures. Look at the bigger one.”
The two military vets appraised the span of the buildings.
Dan said, “I don’t see it.”
“One’s newer?” Tane suggested.
Jules didn’t have the energy to get annoyed at their lack of observational prowess, and time was wasting. “The left one is a modern build. The bigger one on the right is carved out of the land.”
Tane squinted that way. “You sure?”
“Don’t ask,” Dan said. “If he’s not sure, he doesn’t say.”
So he listens sometimes.
Jules said, “The right side could be what the mining operation discovered. Buried under hundreds of millennia of geological shift.”
It had been cleaned up, restored to something that—from above—would look like a concrete bunker or bland two-story office building. But Jules recognized the flowing, natural lines, the way it melded into the ground and the far side of the valley.
“Like the tomb in India,” Dan said.
“Right. And here’s where I start guessin’, but it’s an educated guess. The big, ancient structure is where they’ll have the orb and all the dangerous stuff.”
“It’s also the most heavily guarded,” Tane said.
Jules had already concluded that. “Then we’ll have to be sneaky. Harpal, you good?”
“When you’re inside, we might lose comms,” Harpal replied. “But I’ll keep myself amused. There’s something I need to check out. Might be important.”
“Okay, then.” Dan checked his pistol was in place, tucked under the hoodie. “Time to be sneaky.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Project Ahua, New Zealand
“I don’t know how much help this will be,” Phil said over the speakers Charlie had set up while working the lab’s computers.
“Whatever you’ve got,” Charlie said. “I have to do something while the language twins are holding their private party.”
Charlie noticed Bridget glance at her with a faintly amused eye roll, but she and Prihya concentrated on the screen and the blown-up writing that Bridget had jotted down in the Witnesses’ language. They knew certain phrases and some letters and symbols—which Bridget had explained didn’t translate directly to English—but they hadn’t cracked it yet.
Phil said, �
��Sally Garcia has been a busy girl. She’s stayed off most people’s radar, flying low as what looks like an eccentric kook.”
“I think she is an eccentric kook,” Charlie said, watching the screen that Phil was sharing with her. “She’s not pretending. But she knows more than it seems. Maybe more than even she realized.”
“Yes, probably. Based on how many people have been courting her, I’d say she’s very valuable. Russia, China, North Korea, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But New Zealand is in there, plus the UK—”
“Which explains Colin’s expert knowledge of all this.”
“The Indian government sent someone to meet her, the Striovians, the Canadians. Pretty much everyone except the Americans.”
Charlie considered that.
Toby, who’d been listening to both conversations, said, “The USA is a young nation. Obsessed with mythologizing their own brief history and maintaining the status quo. If well-respected academics, who bend the ear of politicians up the chain, are saying Sally is cuckoo, it stands to reason they’d ignore other options.”
Charlie nodded. “Like her being right about giants living in the recent past.”
Phil said, “America wasn’t the only country to dismiss her. She met with all those who were looking into her work, and it seems only Striovia and North Korea kept tabs on her. From the emails I can intercept on the servers she’s used, they chatted a lot more on some unrelated issues. Striovia’s interest dried up sometime last year, when the seals went hot, and you guys disrupted their country’s international relations. But certain private individuals from North Korea remained in touch.”
Toby ran a hand over his face. “But why side with them?”
Charlie could see the names popping up on the dense text-filled dataset Phil was working from. “Those are companies owned by Ryom Jung-Hwan, I assume?”
“On paper, they’re scientific research firms,” Phil answered. “Drugs companies looking at mental health treatments. But the premises they list…” Phil brought up a montage of a mapping software’s street view. “Either hardly occupied or abandoned. They’re shells.”
“Good lord,” Toby said. “So Professor Garcia thought she was being courted by serious scientific establishments, which she had to keep secret from her university until they granted her tenure. Her other work, her deep academic research that didn’t go near the existence of giants and the like, must have been immense.”
“Then we came along,” Charlie said, zoning in on something Phil had unearthed and switching to a different computer. “Validated her early work. Ah Dae-Sung tried to snatch her and tempt her here, but she wanted to hold out a bit longer, get that tenure, and do it the right way.”
“Exposing her to the catacombs in Alabama made her realize the end was nigh.” Toby watched Bridget’s screen for a moment, but—as Charlie expected—there was little progress. He stood at Charlie’s shoulder. “Ah Dae-Sung revealing her real theories to the world pushed her into a corner. She believed she had no choice but to cooperate. The only people who could achieve what she needed were employed by this Executive character. What are you doing?”
“What is she doing?” Phil asked.
“Executive Ryom is a careful man,” Charlie said, uploading her own specially written malware to the server that had hosted Sally’s research and most incendiary videos. “But there’s a back-link to Ryom’s servers. Where they invited her to share her findings last year.”
She clicked the go button, and her digital worms spread out, searching for crevasses and ingresses, anything that might aid the boys or Bridget and Prihya.
Charlie sat back. “This might take a while.”
Toby sighed. “Okay, then. Cup of tea, anyone?”
Everyone raised their hands.
Dragon’s Pit Gulag, North Korea
The looming cave of an entrance was like accessing a concert or convention center, two lanes of foot traffic accommodating a trickle of men and women. More were coming out than going in, suggesting to Jules a shift was ending, the tasks inside requiring fewer workers.
Meaning Executive Ryom and his people were close to their goal.
Jules and Tane approached the “in” lane using the same shambling gait at the workers-come-prisoners, but there would be no hiding their faces once they arrived at the checkpoint.
“This had better work,” Tane muttered.
Jules’s tolerance for inane chitchat had never been high, and Tane’s clichéd declaration set the hairs on the back of his neck on end. He’d come to expect better from the big Kiwi, so said nothing. Must have been nerves. They were less than ten yards from the two soldiers.
This close, though, Jules could see these were not proper Korean uniforms, just designed to look like them. Enough to inject a healthy portion of fear into the inmates.
Jules said, “Harpal, you still with us?”
“I’m here,” came the reply. “Still need to check out that scaffolding, but I’m watching the guard tower.”
“Anything else we need to know about?”
“I can’t see much else. I assume there’ll be cameras.”
That was one part of the plan they could do little about. They’d spied two cameras pointing out of the building and two pointing in and could only gamble with their range. Were they fish-eyes or conventional lenses?
Impossible to tell.
They followed one figure with a limp, the pair of guards alert enough to exit their hut beside the yawning entrance.
“They’re armed,” Jules said.
“AKMs,” Tane replied, meaning the submachine guns strapped to them. “An updated AK-47, but the Russians aren’t keen on them. You can get them cheap as surplus.”
One checked a clipboard while the other left his AKM in place and put a hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. With so many departing and few going in, it might have looked suspicious.
Jules and Tane kept a half-dozen yards back, watching the routine play out as it had the previous arrival. There was no check for those filthy, tired souls leaving.
The limping figure then clenched its stomach in pain, grunted, and keeled to the side, staggering, before falling flat on their face. The guard with the clipboard watched it with disinterested annoyance, as if it was an everyday occurrence. It probably was.
The other guard, younger and clearly junior, went over and crouched beside the fallen prisoner. His face moved closer, then he called to the superior.
The senior guard sighed and tramped to the pair.
By the time he noticed that the fallen man was a former US Army Ranger who was holding the junior soldier by the scruff of his neck and pointing a K-bar knife at his exposed flesh, Tane had already reached the scene and pressed a gun into the senior guard’s back. He muttered in Korean, and they carried on out of sight to the side of their shed.
Once concealed, Dan stabbed his guy, deftly diverting the blood away from his clothing, while Tane pulled his into a choke hold before snapping his neck. The pair stashed the fresh bodies behind the hut before limping back down the path and rejoining it for an approach that—hopefully—raised little suspicion.
Jules usually felt sick at a loss of life. Any life. Even bad guys who’d been happy to kill him. His philosophy that everyone could redeem themselves if given the chance typically sat at the forefront in his mind. Not today, though. Today, he was complicit. He’d given approval to this plan, when normally he’d object and seek a non-lethal solution.
Had he been hollowed out by what he’d seen and judged those men unworthy of life? Or was it that he needed to feel less in order to do his job back home? When Sergeant Massey’s life was threatened, Jules could have shot and killed the assailants, but he didn’t. He chose another way.
This time, it barely registered. They hadn’t died at his hands, so it wasn’t on him.
The trio continued inside with no further resistance, the mouth gobbling them up with one bite. Darkness surrounded them, only
a faint light up ahead showing them the way and occasional footsteps heading in the opposite direction.
Around the first bend, dim bulbs on the floor illuminated the way. Like emergency strips on a plane, they gave off only essential light. Dust filled the air, this roughhewn passage through the stone wall having been dug rather than discovered. Jules picked out the telltale marks of machine-tooled carving around the walls. They had found the place, but not the entrance… or they’d built this one to make access easier.
They came to a corner, manned by a prisoner who looked so tired he might have been drugged. He was giving out masks like those found on a building site and accepting dirty ones back from those departing to soak in a barrel of grimy water. Tane asked for three. The man stared, his eyes lifeless, but he lacked the energy to enquire as to Tane’s presence. He just handed over the garments.
Wearing the masks, Dan and Tane were better disguised than Jules, so he had to remain careful, although it was a little easier with the bottom half of his face covered.
Moving on, they found themselves in a smoother, better lit corridor. It expanded, double the width, enough for two family cars side-by-side. The stone walls, floor, and ceiling were gray and solid, with the occasional masked inmate passing them by in the opposite direction.
Dan said, “Where do you think they’re going?”
“Home,” Jules said. “They’re being dismissed.”
To their right, another passage branched off, this one more modern—polished smooth and paved, with poured concrete walls. The end was open, with more intense lighting.
“That’s our target,” Dan said.
“Okay.” Jules turned that way.
Someone shouted, “Oh!”
They all turned to the sound to find a female guard waving at them from down the original corridor. She shouted something else.
Tane translated. “We don’t go this way.”
The three of them kept their heads low, their masks and the shadows of their hoods giving only limited camouflage as they obeyed the woman’s gesture to move along. Jules lingered a second longer, letting the guys lead and keeping his face averted, conscious of triggering the alert if the woman examined them too closely. He self-consciously tugged at the cuff of his gloves.