by Greig Beck
The operator’s eyes went wide. “Chim-ibja!”
A muffled thud of Zimmerman’s silenced rifle reverberated. The shot took the lift operator in the throat before he could fill his lungs again. John gave the signal, and the three advanced. The passage was quiet except for the soft hum of the industrial lights. A few doors lined either side. John knelt beside the first door. From a side pocket, he removed a two-foot piece of plastic tubing. He slid the small end underneath the door and put his eye up to the lens enclosed in the opposite side. The room on the other side came into view. Rotating the tubing, he scanned the adjacent room.
John retracted the tubing and glanced back at Rodriguez. “Storage.”
At the next set of doors, John began to uncoil the tubing again but stopped at the sound of voices from the other side. Zimmerman took a position on the opposite side of the door. Flattening against the wall, Zimmerman drew his knife. John stowed the lens and did the same. Seconds passed, and the voice grew louder. The door handle twisted and opened inward. A man wearing a lab coat and black headphones stepped through the doorway, singing. John’s left hand covered the man’s mouth while his blade slid into the back of the man’s neck, severing his spine. The man convulsed; a thin rasp barely escaped his lips. John pulled the body a short distance down the hallway. He wiped the knife on the man’s shirt before clicking it back into its sheath.
“You guys need to see this,” Rodriguez said.
John and Zimmerman joined Rodriguez at the doors. The interior was crammed with computer equipment, some carelessly tossed in piles around the room. At the far end, an observation window overlooked what appeared to be a larger room.
John pointed to a door across the room. “Zimmerman, get me eyes on the other side of that door.”
“Got it,” Zimmerman said. He moved across the room and knelt beside the door.
“These systems have to be at least ten years old. I mean look at this,” Rodriguez said as he walked up to a computer screen. “This is old basic. Why in the hell would they be running basic?”
“It’s the bloody Kores we’re talking about. When have they ever made sense?” Zimmerman asked as he fished the miniscope under the side door.
John moved over to the observation window. The window overlooked a large rectangular room. They had to be a few stories up. Below, people in plastic yellow hazmat suits worked on a half dozen white cylindrical canisters.
“What does this look like to you, Rodriguez?” John asked.
Rodriguez pulled himself away from the computer screen and moved over to the window. “Looks like missile components to me. See those guys nearest to us?” He pointed at two men adding an electrical board to an inside panel. “Those could be guidance systems.”
“But why six? They wouldn’t be assembling this many in one place if they were nukes or biologics, and either of those would have given us a component signature by now,” John said.
“What has me puzzled is the lack of substantial military presence,” Zimmerman said, withdrawing the miniscope. “We’ve only seen three armed personnel since we arrived, and the stairwell on the other side of this door is unguarded.”
John moved away from the windows. “If I wanted to make sure something was kept a secret, I would minimize the presence around it. Rodriguez, try and pull anything you can from the computers.”
Rodriguez laughed a little too loud. “These things,” he said, lifting one of the nearest keyboards, “predate USB drives. How do you suggest I get the information off?”
John turned. “I don’t care how you do it, just get it done!”
“I thought you Mexicans could do anything with a little tape and some wire,” Zimmerman said.
Rodriguez flipped Zimmerman the middle finger. “I’m Puerto Rican, pendejo! When shit hits the fan, I’ll make sure to borrow your head scarf to wipe my ass.”
Zimmerman grinned. “If I ate as many tacos as you, I might need it too.” He opened the stairwell access door and started down the stairs before Rodriguez could reply.
John followed Zimmerman down. Rodriguez was still swearing on the comm when they reached the next floor. Despite outward appearances, the squad was close. Shadow Company was a special branch of the Combat Application Group, or CAG. Each of the five-man team John had hand selected was a certifiable badass, and each one a bigger pain in the butt than the last. It was a perfect family of misfits. Zimmerman and Rodriguez had come from the same unit. He had first met them in a shithole bar outside Raeford, North Carolina. At the time, they were diligently trying to out drink each other for the enjoyment of a woman, which could just as well have been a man in drag.
“Keep the comm channel clear,” John said. There were a few more choice words from Rodriguez before the comm went silent.
“He was mad enough, he even slipped into Spanish,” Zimmerman replied, clearly pleased with the results.
Systematically, they cleared each of the floors but found nothing except for more discarded computer equipment and storage.
“What do we have here?” Zimmerman said as they descended the last set of stairs. Unlike the other areas, this one featured a set of glass doors. There didn’t appear to be any handle, just smooth panes of glass. John approached watching for movement on the other side. The panes opened, retracting into the walls. Lights in the ceiling illuminated a small room connecting the stairs to a larger area. Zimmerman followed John inside. The doors slid back into place. Behind them, the doors clicked.
John looked back at Zimmerman. “I don’t like—”
The interior lighting changed to red, and pressurized gas expelled from the floor, filling the room.
“Hold your breath,” John yelled, trying to shout over the sound of the valves. He took aim on the exterior glass door. The gas stopped, and the ceiling lights turned green. The doors to the larger room opened. John relaxed his finger on the trigger and released the breath he had been holding.
A nervous smile spread across Zimmerman’s face. “Damn decontamination room.”
They moved forward into the new area. A small wall separated the entry from the main assembly area they had seen from above. John moved along the edge of the wall and peered around. The workers in the yellow hazmat suits continued their work on the white cylindrical devices still unaware of the intrusion.
“Sergeant.” Zimmerman had stepped in close to John. “Those men aren’t speaking Korean.”
Zimmerman was right. The men were practically yelling to one another to be heard through the enclosed suits.
“Sounds like Mandarin, but what would the Chinese be doing here? Thought they’d be too busy protecting Beijing from Allied Forces.” Zimmerman said.
The communicator in John’s ear crackled.
“I was able to access the mainframe, but all the data is in Chinese,” Rodriguez said. “I’m a little rusty, but... holy shit!”
“Repeat,” John responded.
“The thermal-electromagnetic pulse systems. They’re right here!” Rodriguez replied.
“The TEMPs? Five years of fighting the Axis and the Chinese put the bloody devices in Korea. You have to be kidding me,” Zimmerman whispered behind John.
John pulled away from the wall. “Rodriguez, we need to let HQ know what we’ve found, and do it fast.”
Ever since the Chinese detonated the first TEMPs, every country on earth was scrambling to make their own, but none so far could recreate the results. Scientists working for the State Department believed the Chinese were using a newly engineered element. Without a sample, it would be impossible to recreate the effects. For John, the day the first TEMPs detonated in Cuba would always be burned into his mind. The electromagnetic fallout darkened a quarter of the southern United States. Without electricity, chaos erupted. The government was quick to react, enacting martial law, but it was only the beginning. The TEMPs not only damaged electrical systems, but the thermal wave sterilized millions of acres of farmland. It wasn’t until two more devices were detonated in the United K
ingdom and Turkey that World War III truly started. If these really were TEMPs, the mission had just substantially changed.
A few minutes later, Rodriguez came back on the comm. “We are to terminate and secure. Transport is on the way. ETA forty-five minutes.”
John thumbed the firing mode switch on his rifle from burst to single. “We’ll work from the back to front. We can’t chance one of those things going off down here, so we need to keep it tight.” He rolled his head popping his neck. “I counted seventeen. I’ll take the left. You take the right. The faster trigger gets the last man. We’ll go on three.”
Zimmerman nodded.
John moved back along the edge of the wall. Zimmerman took position next to him. “One. Two. Three.” He pivoted, stepping into view. He brought his sight down on his first target. Aim. Squeeze. The suppressed mechanical thud of the rifles sounded too loud in the oversized room. Six, seven, eight. The last man dropped to the floor.
“And that’s nine,” Zimmerman said, lowering his rifle. “You buy the drinks tonight.”
Smug bastard, John thought. Movement on the floor caught his attention. An injured worker strained to reach a handheld device on a workbench. In one smooth motion, John raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. The worker arched backward and collapsed. “No. That’s nine.”
Zimmerman swore and strolled over to the worker’s body. With his foot, he rolled the corpse over. The air filter attached to the front of the man’s chest had a finger size hole in it. “Hit the damn filter.”
John walked up and patted Zimmerman on the shoulder. “Let’s go. I believe you have drinks to buy, and none of that cheap stuff this time.”
A Man Out of Time is available from Amazon here!