While Duncan covered him, Riley reached up and used the butt of his weapon to clean out any lingering pieces of glass from the window frame. Then slinging his weapon over his shoulder, he boosted himself up and through the window into the train car.
The compartment was small, containing just enough room for a set of manual controls and a small bench seat for the engineer to sit on. Safety glass littered the floor. The good news was that the car was as empty as it had appeared to be from the tracks below.
Better yet, nothing came charging through the door after him.
He signaled to Duncan and covered the door while the other sergeant climbed into the car. Duncan slid up next to the door, taking care to keep his head below the level of the window so that he wouldn’t be framed in it as a target, and put his hand on the handle.
Riley centered his weapon on the door and nodded to Duncan.
The other man pulled the door open and Riley shone his light down the center of the other car.
It was a standard tram car, with bench seats lining the walls and several floor to ceiling poles placed throughout the space. There was a door at the far end of the car, leading to the next one in the chain. Duncan slipped through the door, quickly cycling from left to right, assuring that no one was hiding against the wall on either side of the door.
Satisfied that the car was empty they moved to the far end and repeated the procedure, this time switching positions.
Finding that car empty, they moved through it toward the next. Halfway across the car they encountered their first problem. Riley’s light faded and then winked out.
“This is no time for jokes,” Duncan whispered from behind him.
Riley shook his head. “I’m not joking,” he whispered back. He gently smacked the side of the light a few times with his palm, but it didn’t do any good. The light stayed dark. “Looks like I’ve got some kind of mechanical failure. You’d best take point.”
The two of them changed positions. Duncan’s light was working fine and so they continued moving forward until they reached the door to the next car. Riley stepped up and placed himself to one side, his hand on the door handle, being careful to avoid crossing directly in front of the window, just as Duncan had done three times before this. Duncan stood in front of but a few feet back from the door, the muzzle of his HK MP5 pointed at the center of the door.
“Ready?”
Duncan nodded.
The other man pulled the door open.
At that same moment, the light on the end of Duncan’s weapon winked out and the two men were plunged into total darkness. “Damn!” the big sergeant swore, his uncharacteristic expression letting his partner know how unnerved he was. The tightness of the car itself, the constant tension from not knowing what was around the next corner, the unusual nature of the enemy that they were hunting, all of it combined to make both men feel off their usual game.
And the darkness did nothing to help the situation.
But the darkness didn’t hold sway for long. Before either man could do anything more to react, they were faced with a new problem.
In the car ahead of them, a thick greenish glow began to pulse from somewhere in the back, illuminating the figures that were moving toward them down the center aisle.
“Contact!” Duncan shouted into the tactical mike, alerting not only his partner but the rest of Echo still waiting outside the train. Then he and Riley opened fire.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Captain Mason paced within the confines of the command center. It had been two hours since he’d received that last, garbled transmission from Echo and he was growing more concerned as the silence continued. Yet despite his unease, he knew everything was going according to plan. They had expected to lose contact once Echo entered the base proper and the self-imposed deadline set by Commander Williams was still several hours away.
Still, Mason worried.
This entire operation made him uncomfortable. From Father Vargas’ sudden appearance out of the desert like some kind of Old Testament prophet to the strange phantom-like creatures that had slaughtered his entire recon team, he’d constantly been playing catch up, struggling for understanding in the aftermath of each event rather than proactively facing the issues head-on. He always seemed to be one step behind and that was anathema for a professional soldier of his caliber.
He had to admit that he’d been surprised by Knight Commander Williams. The man’s reputation preceded him and he’d been expecting a maverick that played fast and loose with the rules. Williams had proved to be the exact opposite. He was careful in his planning, at least insofar as the situation allowed, and seemed genuinely concerned for the welfare of the men under his command. He’d expected a man with an axe to grind and what he’d gotten instead was the consummate soldier that approached a particularly dangerous mission with skill and planning.
But Mason’s confidence in Commander Williams still wasn’t enough to calm his rapidly fraying nerves. Standing around not doing anything had never been one of his strong suits.
The door mid-way down the length of the command center opened and one his men stuck his head inside the door.
“Sir? I think you’d better see this…”
Pvt. Chang quickly ducked back outside the command center and Mason had no choice but to follow.
He was just in time.
The storm over the base had been expanding ever since Echo Team had entered the grounds, pushing outward from the twister that had spawned it toward the edges of the facility. Now, as Mason watched, it reached the southern most portion of the perimeter, the side closest to the command center. It drifted across the fence line and then abruptly stopped as if it had hit a physical barrier.
“It’s done that several times now,” Chang informed him, without taking his eyes off the storm itself. “It’s as if there is something in the fence line keeping it from expanding beyond that point.”
There was a strange feeling in the air, the kind that Mason had known as a boy in Alabama, when the twisters would come out of the darkness like avenging angels, all brute force and power, as apt to take you and yours as it was to simply pass you by, leaving you unharmed. That feeling would get you just before the twisters would come, pricking at the nerves and dancing along the spine, the body’s way of saying IT’S COMING AND IT’S GONNA BE BAD.
That same green and silver lightning they’d been watching for days was still there, flashing among the black clouds like a frenzied animal looking for a way out of the cage that held it; the colors alone strange enough to send a chill down Captain Mason’s back. As he watched, a particularly vicious array struck the main gate in several places, the force of the bolt blasting it from its hinges and sending it cart-wheeling across the desert floor until it disappeared in the distance into the darkness of the storm itself.
Chang was looking at his watch and counting beneath his breath, “Should be…just about…now!”
Thunder boomed, a rumbling cacophony that pounded the landscape like the crash of a hammer on an anvil. Mason was forced to put his hands over his ears, but he didn’t take his eyes off the storm and afterwards he was glad he had not, for he never would have believed what happened unless he’d witnessed it himself. The storm rapidly sucked back in on itself, the clouds rolling backward like a video of an explosion run in reverse, while the thunder continued to pound at his ears with a fury of its own.
Then, just as quickly as it had started, the fury died down and silence returned. The storm was back where it had been before Echo’s incursion into the base, compacted into a smaller set of storm clouds that hovered over the center of the installation around the base of that odd column of darkness. Even the lightning seemed to have taken a break, for Mason could only catch a flicker of its presence within the depths of the clouds themselves.
Mason stared, astonished.
“What now?” he asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“If it follows its previous pattern, it will take a few minutes
for it to build up enough momentum to make another attempt,” Chang replied.
The captain knew instinctively that Chang was right. The storm, if that’s what it truly was, would keep trying, would keep pounding against whatever strange barrier kept it locked in place until it managed to find a way to free itself.
Then things would rapidly go from bad to worse.
“Keep your eyes on the situation, Private, and let me know the second anything changes.”
“Yes, sir!”
Turning away, Mason thought he heard the storm growl back at him in response.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Cease fire! Cease fire!”
Cade’s voice could be heard clearly even over the din of the gunfire and the two sergeants reacted to his command, pulling their fingers from the triggers and lowering the muzzles of their weapons. In front of them, the “enemy” was lost in the darkness, the mysterious strobe light suddenly winking out with the arrival of the rest of the team.
Cade pushed between Duncan and Riley, staring ahead at the strange tableau, lit now by only the thin beam at the end of his weapon. “Lights!” he called, “we need some light up here.”
Flashlights were handed forward. In their high powered beams, the identity of their assailants became immediately obvious.
It was D Squad, 3rd Platoon.
Jackson’s missing teammates.
Cade stepped forward, moving amongst the bodies. Closer examination showed that they had been tied upright to the posts that served as handholds throughout the train car, their arms extended and secured to the horizontal crossbar. They’d been tied so tightly that not even the onslaught of Echo’s bullets had torn them loose. With the strobe light flashing behind them, their positioning had given the illusion that the bodies were lurching forward.
It was an eerie spectacle, shocking in its blatant use of the dead. Just what had their opponent hoped to achieve with such a display? What was the value of dragging the bodies down here into the dark and arranging them like life-size puppets that no one would ever see?
Unless, of course, it had known that they were coming.
“Freakin’ weird sense of humor,” Ortega said quietly from the back of the car and the comment struck Cade between the eyes. Could that be it? Could this have all been some kind of a sick joke? An attempt to get under their skin and play with their emotions?
There were nine bodies in all, which meant that the entire platoon was now accounted for, if you included Jackson. Cade shone his light on the various corpses, searching for one in particular. When he found him, he pulled his knife and carefully cut the ropes holding him in place. By the time he had the man free, Duncan and Riley were there beside him, helping him lower the body gently to the floor of the tram car.
The nametag on the front of the man’s uniform read Stoddard. From his review of 3rd Platoon’s personnel files, Cade knew this was the lieutenant that had been in charge of the patrol. He’d been young, 28 or 29, if memory served, but you wouldn’t know it looking at him now. His face was shrunken, collapsed in on itself, the once smooth skin now grey and wrinkled. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his mouth remained frozen in an “O” of surprise or fear, Cade wasn’t sure which. Even stranger was the fact that the man’s hair, once jet black, had now gone completely white.
A quick glance at the rest of the bodies showed that they, too, were in a similar condition.
“What do you think, boss?” asked Riley, while keeping watch on the shadows around them. “Could it be a wight? Or maybe a nest of Chiang Shih?”
Sitting back on his heels, Cade shook his head. “There hasn’t been a wight sighting in the continental U.S. for more than fifty years. Besides, this isn’t the right environment for them. I’d be inclined to think it might be the Chiang Shi,” he said, referring to the vampire-like creatures of Chinese origin, “except for the fact that the eyes are intact and they’re always one of the first things to go.”
“Which leaves us back at square one,” said Olsen.
Turning his attention back to Stoddard, Cade searched the man for injuries. There were a variety of bullet wounds, but from the lack of blood it was clear that all of them were post-mortem. Duncan and Riley’s handiwork, no doubt. But aside from these, that was it. There were no other obvious injuries that could have caused the man’s death aside from the strange condition of his face. It was as if the very life force had been sucked out of him.
What could do that to a man? They’d already eliminated the known candidates. Could it be a new species, something they’d never encountered before? He was tempted to take off his gloves to try and use his Sight, that psychometric power given to him during his encounter with the Adversary several years ago, but knew it would be pointless. The bodies had been down here for over forty-eight hours; anything residual information the corpse might have held was now long since out of reach.
Movement to his left caught Cade’s attention. Duncan had drawn his combat knife and was moving toward the rest of the bodies, seemingly intent on cutting them down as well. Cade stood quickly and grabbed his arm, stopping him. “We don’t have time,” he said. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“But we can’t just leave them here like this!” the young sergeant protested quietly.
Cade gently turned the other man around so that he was facing away from the corpses, forcing him to pay attention to what was being said. “We have to. I don’t have the manpower to watch over the bodies and we can’t spare the time to take them back through the tunnel to the surface.” Duncan opened his mouth to protest but Cade shook his head, silencing him. “It’s only temporary, Duncan. I promise you. We’ve got to focus on the mission, to complete what we came here to do, but we’ll be back to give these guys the proper respect and care that they deserve. You have my word.”
Reluctantly, Duncan nodded. He knew the commander was right; they didn’t have any other choice. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.
Conscious that the dead men had been fellow knights, Cade ordered Olsen to collect their signet rings. He would turn them over to Captain Mason as evidence of their fate, just in case something happened to the bodies before they could return.
Once that had been accomplished, the team continued their advance, moving through four more cars without incident before coming to the end of the train and exiting out through the service door in the rear.
The tunnel stretched on before them in the darkness and they continued on their way, this time with Olsen and Cade on point.
*** ***
Behind them, in the darkness of the tram car, one of the slumped “bodies” sat up and got to its feet. It walked to the end of the train and stared out into the darkness of the tunnel in the direction Echo Team had gone moments before. As it did the flesh of its face began to twist and turn, features forming and then fading away again only to be replaced by a new incarnation seconds later, the skin melting and reforming like toffee in the hot summer sun, until at last it made up its mind and a new face emerged in place of the old. Two eyes, one steel grey, the other milky white, stared out of a face made of harsh planes and sharp angles. A wide band of angry scar tissue wrapped around the right side from the ear to the chin and was only partially covered by the long hair that covered the top of its head.
Satisfied with his new appearance, the lord of Eden stepped down off the train and began to follow the men of Echo Team back into the darkness of its temporary lair.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Echo emerged from the tunnel and found themselves in another underground station. The platform here was identical to the one they’d left behind at the other end, except that the shaft back up to the surface had been replaced by a steel security door. Climbing up out of the tunnel, the team advanced to take a closer look and as they did so, they could see that there was an inscription in Hebrew written above the entrance.
“Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden, and there he put the man that he had formed,” Cad
e read, translating for some of the others. While everyone in the Order was familiar with Latin, ancient Hebrew was another story. “Genesis 2:8.” The words had been cut deep into the steel with a blowtorch and were clearly a recent addition, but whether they’d been placed there by Vargas and his team when they’d taken over the facility or after the trouble had started Cade didn’t know.
He considered the inscription. He was familiar with the verse and those immediately around it, a key section of the Creation story, but he didn’t understand their relevance here. Had Vargas considered this his Eden, his garden of earthly delights? Or did it have more literal connotations, maybe suggesting that he considered what he was doing here his calling from God? Had it even been Vargas who had put it there? There was no way of knowing at this point, but still, Cade was troubled by it. The verse made him uncomfortable, though he couldn’t grasp why.
Putting it out of his mind for the time being, he turned to more practical matters. A numeric keypad was placed to the right of the door at chest height. A common sight at high security installations, both civilian and military, the unit was designed to provide limited access to the facility by requiring the entry of a nine digit password. The number of possible combinations was astronomical. If the person seeking entrance knew the proper code, the door would open easily for them. If not, they could grow old and die before they chanced on the right combination. Without the proper code, it was a dead end.
He experimentally tried a few buttons but the adjacent screen did not light up or acknowledge his efforts in any way. There didn’t seem to be any power running to the unit. Stepping back, Cade gestured to Olsen. “See if you can run a bypass.”
The sergeant pulled a multi-purpose tool off his belt and quickly gained access to the guts of the unit through its maintenance panel. With the wiring exposed, it took only a few minutes for him to splice a handheld computer into the lines. When he flipped the switch, the computer began running through all the possible numeric combinations. The viewscreen next to the keypad glowed red as the numbers churned past, one after another, until a nine digit combination had been selected. The screen turned green and something inside the door gave a sharp click.
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