“He snookered us,” moaned Knox, who was holding the useless key. “I can’t believe I fell for it. Like he’d have a damn key to this place after all these years.”
“He’s going it alone,” said Finn.
“The hell he is,” snapped Chapman. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out a slender metal object with a magnetized edge.
“What is that?” asked Knox.
“Well, love, at MI6 we call this a doorbell.” She attached it to the metal door where it met the doorjamb. She motioned them to step back. She drew a remote from her pocket, slid open the protective hard plastic covering and pressed a button. “Don’t look at the laser,” she instructed.
They all looked away as a burst of red light erupted from the device she’d placed on the door. It cut neatly through the locking bar, and the door swung free on its hinges.
“Pretty cool technology,” said Knox.
“One-time power pack, good for most secure doors, metal or otherwise,” she explained.
“I see Mr. Q is still alive and well in British intelligence.”
“Actually, it was a woman who invented this little toy. But you can just call her Ms. Q.”
Guns out, they approached the door. With Chapman and Knox covering him, Finn slowly pulled the door all the way open. He aimed his gun into the darkness and then nodded at the others. They pulled on protective goggles, as did Finn. A second later Finn hit the opening with a pulse of blinding white light. There was a shout of pain from inside and then the light vanished.
Before the men could move, Chapman was through the opening. They hustled after her in time to see her nimbly disarm the man and then smash her foot into his face, sending him rocketing backward against an interior wall. The man, partially blinded by the light, ricocheted off the wall and came at Chapman, big arms swinging like pistons. Finn moved to step between the attacker and Chapman, but the MI6 agent had already launched off the ground. With her left foot she hit the man with a crushing blow to his right knee. They all heard the bone in his leg snap. He crumpled downward at the same time she delivered a kick to his chin, flipping him heels over ass. When he tried to rise, his gut pushing in and out with painful breaths, Chapman laid him down for good with an elbow strike to the base of his neck. She rose and placed the muzzle of her Walther against the unconscious man’s temple.
“Wait a minute,” snapped Knox.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re just going to shoot him in cold blood?” asked Knox.
“Do we want to leave witnesses?” she asked calmly.
“Witnesses to what?”
“To whatever’s going to happen here tonight. Like me killing Stone for him playing us for fools.”
“We’re not killing anyone unless they’re in a position to kill us,” Knox said firmly.
Chapman deftly cuffed the unconscious man. “Suit yourself.”
Finn said, “Where’d you learn moves like that?”
“Maybe you blokes think otherwise, but MI6 is not a bloody girls’ school. Now let’s get going.”
She turned on a flashlight and headed down the corridor.
Finn and Knox looked at each other and then quickly followed the woman.
CHAPTER 97
THOUGH THE ENTIRE FACILITY itself was quite large, with barracks, kitchens, an infirmary, a library, offices, classrooms and other specific free spaces, the most intensive training areas of Murder Mountain were set up in the form of a pair of large steel cylinders divided into parallel sections and separated by a main hall. Once you entered the first section, you had to continue on until the last section in that cylinder. The massive entry doors locked behind you and did not allow passage back. And one couldn’t simply block the door open, because if one did the next door would not open. It was a way to keep reluctant recruits focused and on mission and always moving forward. Stone’s plan was simple. He was going to take the section on the right and follow it through. If he didn’t find his quarry there, he would exit this cylinder, walk back down the main hall and enter the other cylinder.
Stone made his way slowly down the hall to the first door. One man was down and there were five more to go, plus Friedman, whom Stone considered probably the most skilled of the bunch.
He felt no guilt about tricking his friends. If anyone was going to die trying to rescue Caleb and Annabelle it was going to be him. This ultimately was his fight, not theirs. He’d lost enough friends. He was determined not to lose any more tonight.
He ran off the order of the training sections in his head. Shooting range first, where he had fired off hundreds of thousands of rounds in the year he had been here. They threw every imaginable distraction at you while you were aiming at the targets. It had been good training, because out in the real world a perfect field of fire with accompanying idyllic conditions was impossible to find.
After the shooting range was a room outfitted like the famed Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy. Here Stone and his teammates had practiced what they’d learned in the classroom. After that room was the lab. It was there where the psychological testing took place—really glorified torture to determine what your breaking point was. Stone had seen hard-as-steel men weep in that room, as the technicians played numbing games with their minds, which would never be as strong as their physical side, no matter how much they trained. There were proven exercises that would enlarge and strengthen muscle. The mind, on the other hand, was not so easily quantifiable. And the recruits all carried hidden mental elements with them here that would jump out at unexpected times and cause them to falter, to fail, to scream in rage. Stone had felt all those emotions. No place on earth had ever humbled him like the lab at Murder Mountain.
After the lab was a series of rooms that served as holding cells. Stone never knew what persons might have been “held” here, and he didn’t want to know. If Caleb and Annabelle were not down this way he would start through the other cylinder where there were only two sections. The first was a tank full of foul liquid. One would fall into this muck if one did not know where to step on a catwalk that constituted the top of the tank. Once inside the tank it became a fight to the death. After the tank came a maze that Stone thankfully had the answer for. Or at least he thought he did. He now wondered if Friedman had built some surprise for him.
Of course she has. She’s enjoying this. I ruined her plans. She has a half billion dollars she can’t spend. She’s going to take it all out on me. At least she’s going to try to.
But again something tugged at the back of Stone’s mind, telling him there had to be more to it than that. He listened as the flap of wings evidenced that birds had gotten into Murder Mountain. That had happened when the place was operational. Stone had even made a pet of one bird that had built a nest near where he slept. It was the only tie to the outside world he’d had.
The place had been built in the 1960s, and the design reflected the era. There were even ashtrays built into metal consoles. Everywhere he looked he saw something hopelessly out of date. But when it was new, Murder Mountain was a state-of-the-art facility. The government funds to build it, Stone had been told once, had been buried in a huge spending bill that included subsidies for hog farmers and the textile industries.
What was a little governmental assassination with your ham and polyester?
He cautiously entered the firing range. It was here that he had killed the first man he’d shot in thirty years. He had done it to save himself and Reuben Rhodes. His gaze traveled to the very spot where the man had fallen and died. The fluorescent overhead lights were too weak to allow Stone to see if the man’s blood was still there. At least his body wasn’t. The place had been cleaned up after his last visit here. He wondered why they hadn’t just imploded Murder Mountain, burying it under tons of steel and rock. Maybe they were holding on to it, in case they needed to use it again. That was a chilling thought.
The lights were on, though, however feebly. Which meant Friedman had figured out how to use the old generat
or system to create a bit of power. He crept forward, past the tattered targets, ducking under the sagging wires on pulleys that allowed the paper targets to be moved back and forth. He stopped thinking about anything other than what would be waiting for him.
The bare scrape of a shoe on the dusty floor caused him to drop low behind a wooden counter where he had once stood daily to fire his allotted rounds. The sound had come from his left, ten yards at most. He wondered if they were all using darts until the moment of truth came. It didn’t really matter. If he allowed himself to be knocked unconscious by a tranquilizer round he was as good as dead anyway.
Crouching down, he circled backward, his gun covering both front and rear flanks in alternating swivels. This tactic must’ve confused his opponent, who probably thought Stone was moving forward and not backward with every creak of boards. When the man emerged from his hiding place to fire at a target that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Stone placed one round in the man’s arm, disabling him. As he clutched for his wounded limb, Stone fired the kill shot into his neck, neatly bypassing his body armor. The man dropped on the spot, his carotid severed.
Stone studied the door, did the math in his head. It was probable that the man he’d just killed was a ruse to flush him. Sacrifice one to accomplish the mission. The landing at Normandy in 1944 had followed this same strategy, only the number of lives sacrificed had been in the thousands. On the other side of that door were probably at least two shooters waiting to take him.
So he waited. He counted off the seconds in his head. Patience. He had spent years learning that trait. There were few men who could outwait him. Ten minutes passed and the only part of Stone that moved was his chest, with each shallow breath.
The only problem was that Friedman, and thus her men, knew that one could not go back in these sections. One had to go forward. How long were they willing to wait? How long was Stone willing to wait?
We’re all going to find out.
CHAPTER 98
“WAIT A MINUTE, HOW’D YOU KNOW to bring that laser thing?” Knox asked Chapman as they crouched in the darkness.
“Like your Boy Scouts, it’s the mission of MI6 to always be prepared.”
“Meaning you didn’t believe Stone?”
“The key?” Chapman scoffed. “Of course I didn’t believe him. Reading his psychological profile was fairly easy. He wasn’t going to endanger us too.”
“He let us go to New York with him,” Finn pointed out.
“I guess he believed the South Bronx was safer than this place,” pointed out Knox.
“Murder Mountain,” said Chapman. “Made for interesting reading.”
Both men looked at her.
“I researched it, of course,” she said. “Didn’t you?”
Knox cleared his throat. “How did you know what to research? Stone didn’t mention the place until we were on the way here.”
“The place where it all began? Remember, that’s what Ming said back in New York. So I did some digging, got my folks back in the UK doing the same. I knew that Stone started out his career in Triple Six. What I didn’t know was that it began with a year’s worth of training right here. Got a file emailed to me two hours before we left. Like I said, interesting reading.”
Finn looked down at the laminated plan of the place Stone had given him. “Looks like multiple spots to be ambushed.”
“That cuts both ways,” said Knox, and Chapman nodded in agreement.
She pointed at the plan and said, “We have two choices. Go through each side together or split up.”
Finn said, “I vote for getting out of the open. If we need to go through these section things, let’s split up. I’ll go to the left and you two to the right.”
Chapman shook her head. “No, you two go right, I’ll go left.”
The men looked at her again. “What?” she said. “A woman can’t go it alone? She needs a precious man to hold her poor, fragile hand?”
“It’s not that,” said Knox uncomfortably.
“Good to hear it,” she said. “I’ll take the one on the left. Now here’s some little tidbits you need to know about the section on the right to traverse it safely.” She filled them in on particulars she’d gained from her research.
“Got it?” she said, looking at them.
“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” said Knox.
“Why wouldn’t I?” shot back Chapman. “It’s my job.”
“Good luck,” said Finn.
“Cheers.”
She left the two men standing there staring after her until she disappeared into the darkness.
Stone was still waiting in the firing range room. He considered his options. It didn’t take long since there weren’t many. He could stay here until he starved to death. Or he could go through the door.
Or…
He got up, grabbed the wire that the targets rode on and pulled it free. He wound one end of it around the door handle and over the existing pulleys. Then he crouched down behind the counter and wound the remainder of the wire around his hand. He counted to five and aimed his pistol at the door opening. He slowly pulled on the wire. The door handle lifted. He tugged harder. The door started to open. As soon as it was open halfway, a barrage of bullets poured through, clanging off metal surfaces in the firing range room.
Okay, probably against orders, the Russians are done playing around with stun darts.
He tugged on the door some more until it opened all the way, then tied off the wire onto a hook to keep the door open. He sidled along the counter and slid down the pair of NVGs he had brought. They were older and had a major drawback if the other side had night-vision equipment too.
He edged closer to the opening, but keeping something solid between him and the doorway at the same time. Then he did something unusual, at least to the untrained eye. He took off his goggles, but still kept them powered. He placed them on top of the counter, facing the doorway. Then he scuttled away, aimed his gun and waited for what he was pretty certain was coming.
The shots came. He counted four of them. Stone couldn’t see the rounds, but he was sure they had passed an inch above the red dot revealed by his goggles to someone looking at them with NV eyewear too. That was the drawback to the old-generation goggles. While on infrared power they painted a red dot basically on your forehead, allowing a sniper to draw a fatal bead.
But by firing the Russians had revealed their position to Stone by their muzzle flashes through the open doorway. He fired rapidly, once, twice and then a third and fourth time, aiming at spots two inches above the twin flashes. Stone could tell by the weapons’ discharge that they were pistols. If they were firing from classic shooting positions, Stone’s target selection would coincide with their heads, bypassing their body armor.
He heard two distinct thumps as the bodies hit the floor.
He got up, snared his NVGs and kept moving.
Three Russians down, three to go. Plus Friedman.
CHAPTER 99
FINN AND KNOX MADE THEIR WAY carefully across the catwalk that was suspended over a tank of foul-smelling liquid. They knew this for two reasons. One, because they could smell it, even if they couldn’t see it. And two, it was on the plan Stone had given them. But it was Chapman who’d told them the secret of passing safely over it. Stone hadn’t done so, because he had never intended for them to get inside this place.
They had to keep their weight in the center of the metal walkway. If they made a misstep and touched the sides, only bad things would happen. They had nearly reached the end of the catwalk when they heard it.
A groan.
Both men looked around, guns pointed at obvious threat points.
Another groan.
Finn whispered to Knox, “Sounds like it’s underneath us.”
“Thinking the same thing,” replied Knox.
“I recognized it.”
“The groan?”
Finn nodded. “Keep a lookout.” He dropped to his knees and put his fac
e against the floor of the catwalk that was only inches from the top of the tank. “Caleb?” he said softly.
Another groan.
“Caleb?” he said in a louder voice as Knox gazed anxiously around.
Another groan and then, “Harry?” The voice was weak, the mind obviously muddled.
Drugged, was Finn’s first thought.
He looked up at Knox. “Remember what Chapman told us?”
Knox nodded and glanced around. “Got an idea.”
Keeping to the center of the walk, he headed back the way he had come. He couldn’t go back out the door they had come in. It had locked behind them and it was thick and made of stainless steel. But there was an old packing crate set against the wall. He slipped his gun in its holster, hefted the box, which weighed about fifty pounds, and carried it back over to where Finn was, again keeping to the center of the catwalk.
Each man climbed up on the railing of the catwalk. This was difficult for Knox with the weight of the crate, but he managed it. He looked at Finn and told him his plan.
“You ready?”
Finn nodded.
Knox counted to three and then dropped the box on the side of the catwalk. The floor immediately tilted down on that side while the other side tilted up, revealing a blackened strip of empty space on each side. The crate fell through the opening on the right side and they heard a splash. The foul smell got even fouler.
Finn, still holding on to the railing, dropped down until his foot was squarely in the empty space. As the floor tilted back up and into place, he jammed his foot against it, holding it open. Knox reached into the rucksack he carried on his back and slid out a length of rope. He tied one end to the railing and let the other drop through the opening.
Knox switched places with Finn and held the floor open with his foot. Finn grabbed the rope and lowered himself through. He landed in knee-deep muck.
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