They had discussed the strategies for regaining access to the cavern below Labs. Beck had explained that there were several smaller crevices and tunnels that led off from the train tunnel into the cavern, but she had rejected those as possible means of travel to the floor of the cavern, claiming they were too twisty and would take far too long. He was inclined to agree with her, but he wondered how much his admission to her that Deep Blue had given him free reign to wreak as much havoc as he felt necessary had played a part in her decision.
He unslung the M72 LAW anti-tank rocket launcher from his back and telescoped out the inner tube, by pulling the rear of the weapon backward. He quickly aimed at the distant bio door and launched the 66mm rocket warhead. The rocket deployed its six stabilizing fins as it soared down the tunnel at a rate of 145 meters a second. The rocket hit the door and the explosion echoed back down the tunnel toward Carrack and Beck. The wave of heat and smoke flashed past them and it was over. Beck was already running toward the door, so Carrack disposed of the launcher tube and raced after her.
Beck waited for him at the remains of the ruined plastic door. “Ready?” she asked.
He aimed the LED Flash Bang grenade in his left hand and the Wagan spotlight in his right hand. “Go.”
She pointed the muzzle of the flamethrower through the remnants of the bio door and let loose a burst that lit up the darkened interior of the train platform. In the brief moment that the flames illuminated beyond the beam of the spotlight, Carrack didn’t see anything move. “Clear.”
Beck led the way and Carrack was right behind her with his backpack and hers, while she wore the flamethrower. They moved into the station and up onto the platform, stepping between the bones and tattered remains of black BDU clothing. Carrack didn’t see much of anything that looked like flesh anywhere. Beck took off the fuel tank backpack for the flamethrower and laid it down carefully on the platform floor. They couldn’t take it any further for fear of possibly igniting the gas fumes from the cavern below this section of the base. Carrack tossed her the backpack he’d been carrying for her, and she donned it before pulling out her own LED Flash Bang grenades—one for each hand.
Now Carrack led the way down the corridor toward the stairs that would take them up toward the supply closet with the access tunnel to the cavern. He ruminated on the absurdity of needing first to go up four floors to the level with the barracks room before they would then need to descend the same distance within the cavern, but this approach worked best for their plan. After no sign of the Gen Y men or any more salamanders for a while, Carrack was becoming curious. When he and Beck arrived at the top level of the Labs section and made their way to the open door to the supply closet and the gaping hole in the floor that was the entrance to the cavern, he spotted something. On the floor, not too far from the hole, was a combat boot. Easily size 15, and unfortunately, its resident foot was still at home inside it.
Carrack tilted it until it was standing upright and aimed the beam of his Wagan spot directly inside the still tightly tied boot.
“Charming,” Beck whispered. She was buckling the straps on her harness. “Ready for this shit?”
Carrack turned the beam of the light upward so she’d be able to see his face and he could see hers. “Why not?”
Beck smiled back at Carrack and then turned to the opening in the floor of the closet. She donned her facemask so she’d have a proper air supply inside the cavern. Carrack put his on at the same time. Beck then held one of her LED Flash Bang grenades over the hole.
“Three seconds,” she said. “On my mark.” She depressed the triggering button and dropped the device into the hole. “Three…two…one.”
On ‘one,’ Carrack tightly squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away from the hole. The advanced electronic LED grenade was still bright enough for him to sense the burst of bright light, even through his closed eyelids. The sounds of squeals came up at them from below.
“That woke them up,” Beck said, then she cracked and dropped several bright orange chemical glowsticks. She turned to face him and smiled before she jumped in the hole. Pointing his Wagan spot down after Beck, Carrack followed her a few seconds later. Once he cleared the hole, he counted ‘one-Mississippi’ and deployed his chute. Beck had already deployed hers below him. The fall to the cavern floor was almost a mile below the supply closet floor—or 1600 meters—plenty of space in which to perform a successful BASE jump. Carrack blasted the Wagan spot around the cavern as he saw the walls shift in the gloom around him. Now it was his turn to let loose with an LED burst.
“Three seconds,” he called out to Beck, as she had done for him.
“Roger that.”
“Three…two…one,” he held the reusable, electronic-light bursting device behind his back and squeezed his eyes shut as it burst like a billion blinding suns. More shrieks and squeals of retreating salamanders echoed around the chamber. As the light faded, Carrack opened his eyes and swung the Wagan spotlight again, this time catching sight of several salamanders freefalling from the cavern ceiling above them.
Twenty seconds later, Beck was approaching the floor of the cavern and shouting out the repeated warning that she would be popping an LED flash. Carrack closed his eyes at the appropriate time and reopened them to discover that Beck was nearly on the ground, maybe twenty meters below him. Then he heard a thump and the lines up to his chute went slack as it collapsed, a salamander body careened off it into the darkness and Matt Carrack began to freefall.
20.
Section Dock, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
The fighting in the dock was thick. Salamanders were on the walls and the ceiling of the massive space that acted as a dock and unloading platform for the cargo hauling decommissioned Typhoon. At over 170 meters in length, the sub’s dark and flattened hull made it look like one of the world’s longest whales. But this whale had speckled six-to-eight foot long salamanders crawling all over it.
The top of the massive sub’s sail tower abutted the bridge of the catwalk, nearly twenty-five meters above the frothing surface of the water below the dock. The walls of the dock and the floor surface as well were covered in clumps of slime and brownish white eggs by the hundreds or thousands. The water next to the giant parked sub was roiling with hundreds more swimming salamanders. But what Tom Duncan noticed first as he drove his HDT dirt bike out onto the metal catwalk was that several things around the room were on fire.
Flames had erupted from all surfaces except the catwalks. Even parts of the water were on fire. Duncan then saw why in the flickering light of the flames. The Gen Y team had poured flammable fuel over nearly everything and three of their team were firing the M203 grenade launchers mounted on the bottom of their MP5s around the space, targeting salamanders that got too close or sometimes those far away. Duncan hadn’t realized you could attach an M203 to a small submachine gun like that but he recognized the design. As each salamander got hit, it would explode and flaming chunks of its flesh would ignite pools of fuel into a new blaze. The noise from the explosions and the squealing of hundreds of mutated amphibians was deafening. Several salamanders were attempting to get at the Gen Y men, but the men had sprayed a semicircle of fuel around themselves and ignited it. The flames made a waist high fence around their position.
One of the black-clad Gen Y men was picking up a sticky egg the size of a basketball and placing it into a backpack, while kneeling on the floor, ignoring the chaos around him. The other three men were providing cover with their grenade launchers. The kneeling man shook his hand after sealing the backpack and a large line of clear viscous slime slid off it to the floor.
Duncan rode his bike to a point a few meters from the end of the catwalk that stopped at the top of the sub and quickly dismounted. So far, he hadn’t been noticed at all. He set a small fragmentation grenade with a tripwire across the end of the catwalk, by the sub’s sail, at ankle height. He then retreated to the mid-section of the catwalk on foot. He quickly set
an anchor with carabiners and tossed a climbing rope over the side of the railing. One of the Gen Y men noticed the falling black rope in the middle of the air and spotted him. Before Duncan was quite ready, the man had opened fire on his position with the MP5.
Bullets clanged off the metal catwalk’s floor and the railing by Duncan’s head, as he squatted and readied his own weapon. He threw the LED flash bang off the rail and squeezed his eyes shut tightly. The burst was brilliant—even through his shut eyelids. The squealing of the frantic salamanders increased as the men on the dock also screamed out in pain. Then Duncan stood and let loose with the M202 FLASH rocket launcher. His flamethrower would only reach out to about a maximum range of 40 meters. He had brought it to deal with salamanders. The FLASH fired four 66 mm incendiary rockets filled with over a pound each of TPA—a substance similar to napalm. These, he’d brought for Gen Y.
As the first rocket hit the ground between the men and the entrance to the sub, Duncan realized it wasn’t terribly accurate—he’d been aiming for the center of the group of men. Still, they had stopped firing at him, because now they were running. The detonation threw flame and smoke all around the concrete dock. The man with the egg in the backpack was deserting the others and racing up the metal stairs to the platform. Duncan would put an end to that. He aimed the FLASH again and launched another rocket at the stairs. It hit a few meters under the man, but the effect was spectacular. He was blown up the stairs from the explosion, flying further up to the platform, which had been his intended destination. The stairs were shattered in the middle and one of the other men that had only just begun to climb the stairs got crushed as flaming metal rails and step fragments rained down on him.
Duncan turned to face the spot where the men had originally been clustered, only to see that there was just one man still there. The fourth man had run for cover on the far side of the sub. The man who was still on the dock had fired a 40 mm grenade up at Duncan, which had missed. It exploded on the ceiling of the Dock area, and the man was about to fire another projectile. Duncan launched his third rocket down at the man, then dove to the side for cover, landing heavily on the metal grill of the catwalk.
The man with the grenade launcher down on the dock exploded in a bloom of liquid fire at the same time that the forward half of Duncan’s catwalk exploded, sending metal shards flying past his face, and a few of them embedded themselves in his left arm. The wounds were shallow but they stung. The salamanders were racing all around the flames on the floor and in the water, screeching and squealing as their eggs caught fire and exploded with loud belching noises, spraying their half-solid and half-liquid innards up into the air like fountains of snot.
Duncan scrambled to his feet and checked his six—back toward the destroyed half of his catwalk and the man that had been propelled toward the platform at the top of the steps. No sign of him. And Duncan hadn’t forgotten that the man left behind in Central could still be coming from that direction. He was about to check the other end of his catwalk down by the bike and the submarine, when something at that end exploded loudly and the concussion wave knocked him back down onto the metal grill. He rolled to look down that end of the catwalk and quickly darted his head and shoulders to the side to avoid the incoming impact of a long dark shape. It hit the metal floor next to his face with a meaty thwack. Duncan saw that it was a salamander tail—easily four feet in length. The stump end was slightly singed from the detonation of the tripwire grenade Duncan had set at the end of the catwalk by the sub. He checked there and saw the last section of the metal walkway bent down and falling from support struts on the ceiling to plunge into the burning water below.
Duncan’s plan was coming apart rapidly. He hadn’t expected the fight with Gen Y to last so long and he’d hoped to be safely swinging from the rope off the catwalk, where he’d be perfectly safe from any salamander attackers and he’d be free to deal out flamethrower justice to the crawling things. Instead, both ends of the catwalk were now destroyed, he was trapped on the metal walkway above the flaming water with the dirt bike and a backpack on the floor full of explosive propellant. The room was awash in flame and his original target, the man with the egg, might have gotten away.
The salamanders were still writhing in a frenzy around nearly every surface of the enormous space, but they seemed to be converging on the sub—both in and out of the water. Duncan stood up on the now wobbly and flaming catwalk and looked again toward the train platform end, noticing the upward slant of the floor where it had buckled and twisted from the 40 mm grenade explosion. He glanced back to the HDT at the other end of the catwalk, a few meters from where the walkway disappeared and left a huge gap before the top of the sub sail.
He ducked down and scooped up the backpack for the flamethrower and slung it around his shoulders. He tossed the M202 FLASH down off the catwalk to the concrete floor of the dock far below. He wasn’t sure whether he’d get to it again or whether it would survive the impact of being thrown so far, but right now it was just in his way. He needed the catwalk floor as clear as possible. He likewise picked up the detached salamander tail and flipped it over the rail of the walkway and into the flaming water twenty-five meters below.
He ran to the end of the metal grill floor to retrieve his HDT, worried about the structural integrity of the last piece of the walkway as he ran. He got the bike started, laid the wand of his flamethrower along the improvised holster for it on the handlebars as he had done back in the train tunnel and looked at the hundred or so meters of standing catwalk he had left before the floor angled upward and twisted like ramp starting into a corkscrew. He had to clear probably a twenty-meter gap after that to reach the safety of the platform. He had considered jumping the bike the other direction toward the flat top of the sub’s sail, but discarded the idea. There was no ramp at that end and the sail was teeming with angry salamanders. Most of the beasts on the ceiling had come down the far wall and congregated on the sub as well.
Tom Duncan held in the clutch, gunned the throttle on the bike once again and once more thought of his election slogan: A Brisk Pace.
Oh yes, we’re moving along briskly now.
He popped the clutch and the bike lunged forward, Duncan holding on tightly and accelerating the whole time as he aimed for the left side of the ramp-like metal floor at the end of the catwalk. The right side had twisted into a double helix of angry metal debris that would shred his front wheel and send him cascading down to the concrete floor of the dock where he would be devoured by pissed off, flaming, mutated death engines with four foot long tongues.
As his front wheel neared the clear side of the ramp, he asked himself aloud “How the hell did I get myself into this?” and launched into the air.
21.
Cavern under Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Anna Beck wasn’t sure what to do. She’d just touched down on the floor after clearing the immediate area with another LED burst and then twisted to look back and up at White One. She was just in time to see a plummeting salamander land on top of his chute and collapse roughly half of the cloth with its weight before bouncing off and down toward the floor.
White One’s body swung out to the left of his collapsing chute and his body began to plummet horizontally toward the top of her own still inflated chute. Beck ran under her chute and dove toward the floor on the other side of it, just clearing the body of the falling salamander, which hit the ground to the side of her with a loud thump. With Beck’s body pulling her chute as she dove, it stayed inflated somewhat. White One slammed into the top of it. The chute partially softened his fall, but he continued his plunge toward the floor, crashing hard into Beck’s back and knocking them both onto the salamander as it struggled to right itself.
Beck groaned from the impact and tried to disentangle herself from the cords and folds of two parachutes. When she crawled out from under the fabric, she saw the beam of the Wagan spotlight across the floor in the distance. The orange glowsticks
illuminated the nearby area. And three large squat black heads were approaching her at eye level across the floor.
“One, eyes shut now!” she shouted.
Then she turned her head and held out the LED grenade just as the salamanders were reaching her. The burst of light caused the three to shriek in pain, and when she looked back, they were a few meters away and retreating fast.
Beck switched her experimental LED grenade to a mild strobing pattern and clipped it back to her chest. Then she tugged and pulled at the fabric of the tangled chutes to get to White One.
“You alive?” she asked him, as he was beginning to stir.
“That sucked.” he said groggily. “What happened?”
“A sal deflated half your chute and you broke your fall on me.”
“Crap. Sorry.”
She quickly ran her hands over his shins feeling for broken bones, then moved her hands up to his thighs and squeezed the meat of his muscles. White One jerked back away and shouted. “Aaahh.”
“Broken?” she asked him.
“No, just ticklish. I’m fine.”
Beck laughed and then stood and whirled, the strobing pattern of her light making the advancing salamanders retreat once again. She raced over to where the Wagan had fallen and marveled that it still worked. White One was extricating himself from the fabric, when he started shouting “What the fu—”
Callsign: Deep Blue - Book 1 (A Tom Duncan - Chess Team Novella) Page 9