“That’s a mouthful,” Knight remarked.
“Ha. That’s what she said.”
“To be fair, I have a small mouth,” Queen said quietly.
“Well, that’s just rude,” Rook said, grinning behind the mask that covered his mouth and nose, protecting his face from the frigid air.
“That’s the place, right?” Queen said, turning her head a few degrees to look at Knight.
“That looks like the old weather station, but…” Knight shrugged without raising his head. “It looks completely deserted.”
Rook twisted around again and squinted in the direction the other two were facing. “Wait, there’s a building out there?”
Despite his earlier quips, he had actually read up on their objective, a decommissioned weather and radio monitoring station built by the Canadian government in the 1950s. Officially, the station—CFS Alert—was once staffed year-round by a roster of scientists and technicians. At just five hundred miles from the North Pole, it had been the northernmost permanently inhabited settlement in the world. But in 2013, the site had been leased to the US government and all the tech had been removed. It was an empty shell. A black site. Permanently occupied, yes, but by a small coterie of security contractors—mercenaries with a background in black ops and a Top Secret security clearance—and one very special prisoner.
Queen handed him the magnifying lens. “Several actually.”
Rook scanned the foreground with the high-powered optics. There was nothing recognizable in his display, and certainly nothing that appeared man-made. “Those lumps covered with snow?”
“Could be camouflage,” Knight suggested.
“What’s the point of that?” Rook said. “This is literally the last place on Earth.”
“As much as it pains me to say it,” Queen said, “he’s right. I think this is another dead end.”
Rook tried to think of an appropriately off-color reply, but the realization that they had come so far for nothing took the wind out of his sails. It had taken the better part of three days to get to the location, which was so far north that satellite communications and GPS location systems were unreliable at best. The last leg of the journey, a nine-hour snowmobile ride from Grise Fiord—an Inuit village 500 miles away, whose name meant ‘Place that Never Thaws’—had sounded a lot more fun than it actually was. Getting back would be no less tedious, but the return trip would take place in the shadow cast by a cloud of failure. “We should probably…you know, check it out.”
“Yeah.” Queen rose to her full, if modest, five feet, five inches—five-seven including the two-inch thick soles of her mountaineering boots. She clicked into the quick-release bindings on her snowshoes, and gripped the FN-SCAR-L assault rifle that had been slung across her back. “Let’s go take a look.”
Knight tilted his head back, revealing the eye-patch that covered the place where his left eye had once been—he’d lost it on a mission in the Congo—and he looked up at her with his one good eye. “Want me to do what I usually do?”
Queen stared back at him as if weighing the options, but Rook was not surprised at all when she nodded. “Yeah.”
As the team’s designated marksman, it was Knight’s job to provide overwatch. Given the circumstances, it seemed like an unnecessary precaution, but standard operating procedures were called that for a reason.
Rook rose as well. He glanced down at Knight, who had already lowered his eye to the scope. “Don’t eat the yellow snow.”
Knight shook his head. “Is that the best you can do? It’s like you’re not even trying anymore.”
“Ouch,” Rook said, with a dramatic wince. He turned to Queen. “Do you think he’s right? Am I losing my touch?”
Queen’s face, mostly hidden behind a thermal mask, was unreadable. “I’ll tell you if it gets to be a problem. Let’s go.”
Rook held his SCAR at the low ready and started forward, taking point. Normally, he would be packing the squad automatic weapon—an M240B or something with equivalent firepower—but this mission demanded a higher degree of mobility. A machine gun was useless without several hundred rounds of ammunition, and there was only so much the three of them could carry. With King and Bishop chasing after their dead sister, or whoever the mystery woman was, some adjustments had to be made.
There were other considerations, too. If Alert was the black site they sought and they had to fight their way to Duncan, their foes wouldn’t be terrorists or enemy combatants. Trained killers, yes, but Americans, working under the auspices—albeit with questionable legality—of the United States government. While Rook and the others would not hesitate to defend themselves, the best outcome for the mission was one where they would not have to fire a single shot. Carnage was off the table, and that was probably for the best. Inasmuch as Alert appeared to be another dry hole, leaving the big gun behind was definitely the right call.
At least there was a silver lining to this dark cloud. He looked over his shoulder at Queen. “Now that we’re alone—”
“Don’t.”
He grinned again. “Just looking forward to warming up when this is all over.”
Despite her protestations, Rook knew Queen enjoyed his irrepressible wit. It was what had ultimately won her over. They had been an item for almost four years, and while their relationship was not exactly conventional—it was hard to imagine either of them settling into a house in the suburbs, with a couple of rugrats and a soccermobile—the bond between them had only grown stronger with the passage of time.
He let his eyes linger on her a moment longer. The custom-made combat-suit—an ingenious combination of high-tech liquid body armor and synthetic fur—left her virtually unrecognizable. Still, he had no difficulty visualizing the lithe, athletic body underneath. He was, after all, intimately familiar with it.
Maybe a couple rugrats wouldn’t be so bad after all, he thought. She would make beautiful babies.
He pushed the idle thought away and returned his attention to the blank snowfield ahead. Truth be told, he sometimes entertained the fantasy of a normal, ordinary life with her. He would never say it to her face, though. Long before she became Queen—the strongest woman he had ever known—Zelda Baker had borne the unimaginable pain of losing a child. He was not about to do or say anything that might tear open that old wound.
The snow-covered lumps he had glimpsed through the lens gradually became more defined as they approached, though it was still a stretch of the imagination to believe that they were man-made structures. Even when he was standing close enough to touch the outermost drift, Rook got no sense of what lay underneath. He reached out with one gloved hand and began scooping away the snow. The action triggered a small avalanche from above that bowled him over and subsequently piled up around him.
“Damn it,” he rasped, kicking his snowshoes in the air for a moment.
“You look like an albino turtle flipped onto its shell” Queen said with a chuckle. “You grew up in snow country. How did you not see that coming?”
“Stay in your lane,” he retorted. “I do the jokes.”
“I think the joke is on us. Take a look.”
Rook rolled over onto hands and knees and wiped the powdery snow away from his face. The collapsed drift now revealed a squat, weather-beaten, pre-fabricated modular building. Sheets of plywood had been nailed into place over the windows and what he could only assume was a door.
“Well, at least we won’t have any trouble getting a room.”
“Nice,” she replied, and turned away, heading for the corner of the structure.
Rook got to his feet again, which was no simple task in the deep snow. “Oh, come on. I’ll build a fire. It will be ro—”
“Rook!” Queen’s voice was unexpectedly sharp. “Get over here.”
He was on his feet in an instant and reached her side less than two seconds later, his SCAR raised and poised to fire. Queen was pointing at a dark spot fifty feet away, halfway between the first building and the next.
<
br /> “What is that, oil?”
“Switch off your NODs,” she said. “I’m going to use white light.”
He did as instructed, squeezing both eyes shut so that the brightness of Queen’s tactical LED flashlight reflecting off the snow would not blind him. Even with that precaution, he still winced a little as the light stung his pupils. It took him a few moments to adjust. When he finally opened his eyes, he saw that the spot in the snow was actually a deep shade of red.
“That’s blood.”
“Yeah,” Queen said.
“A lot of it.”
“Yeah.”
The blood had melted the snow a little before cooling and freezing, but it was still starkly visible. No snow had fallen to cover the stains, and the buildings had evidently blocked the wind that might have otherwise erased them from existence. The dark stain looked like a Rorschach ink blot from a distance. Up close, Rook could see that there were actually several splotches of red in the snow. “Someone got killed here.”
“Or something.” Queen pointed to something beyond the splotches. “We’re in polar bear country, don’t forget.”
There was a long, mostly straight furrow, heading north through the snowed-over compound, toward the water. Drag marks. As if to confirm Queen’s suggestion, there were several larger depressions in the snow, too big to be footprints but too small to be snowshoe tracks. A closer inspection showed the distinctive shape of a paw, with bloody needle-points at the end pointing away from the larger bloodstain.
Claws.
“Papa Bear walked out of here, dragging a kill.” Rook shook his head. “Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to look.”
“You don’t think that’s what happened?”
“This is a splatter pattern, caused by a high-velocity impact. Like from a bullet. I don’t think Papa Bear would be able to pull a trigger.”
Queen registered her agreement with a nod.
“This couldn’t have happened more than a day or two ago,” Rook went on. “Someone or something got shot, right here. Executed, maybe.” He winced as soon as he said it. “I’m sure it wasn’t…” He didn’t finish. Meaningless platitudes and wishful thinking wouldn’t change reality. Somebody had died on this spot, and it might very well have been Tom Duncan.
“Somebody fired that shot,” Rook went on. “A person not a bear. Maybe the bear showed up later and dragged the body away.”
“The shooter might still be here,” Queen said. “I think this place just lived up to its name.” She keyed her radio mic. “Knight, we need you down here. ASAP. Head on a swivel. Something’s not right here.”
Rook heard the sniper’s reply in his earpiece. “Oscar Mike.” Radio-speak for ‘on the move.’
“We’re gonna clear this place.” Queen said, speaking over the radio net. “Every corner and crevice. We need to figure out what happened here.”
Rook just nodded. They pulled back to the outer perimeter and waited for Knight to join them. Not surprisingly, the Korean-American made a stealthy approach, getting within ten yards of them unnoticed before clearing his throat to announce his presence.
“Show off,” Rook muttered, but his heart wasn’t in it.
Queen brought Knight up to speed and then outlined her plan of action. They would walk the perimeter, making sure that no one was lurking on the far side of the settlement, and then begin systematically clearing the buildings, even if they had to use breaching charges to get inside. They started out, moving tactically in short bursts, from one place of cover or concealment to the next.
Three minutes later, they found more blood.
As before, the snow told a tale of high velocity impact, a body dragged toward the water and bears. As before, the circumstances were suspicious. Knight noticed a detail that had escaped Rook’s notice.
“These tracks weren’t made by a bear.”
Rook gave the bloody paw prints a second look. The foot pad and five evenly spaced toes certainly looked like every bear track he had ever seen.
“Hate to break it to you,” Rook said, “but I grew up in black bear country. I know bear tracks when I see them. These are bigger, but they’re definitely bearish.”
“They are bear tracks,” Knight countered. “But look at the spacing. Whatever did this was walking on two legs.”
“Bears do that.”
Queen put one booted foot, then the other, into the paw prints, and then started forward, stepping in the tracks without difficulty. “Knight’s right. These tracks were made by a human.”
“Wearing fake bear-paw boots.” Rook shook his head. “That’s some ninja shit right there.”
“Ninjas wouldn’t have been so careless. This was rushed,” Knight said.
“Careless or not,” Queen said, “somebody hit this place and then vanished. Where did they come from, and where did they go? There’s no sign of snowmobile tracks, no helicopter LZ.” She gestured in the direction of the pack ice. “They couldn’t have left by boat.”
“Submarine.” Rook and Knight said it at almost the same moment, in harmony, then Rook continued. “Ninjas with polar bear feet and a submarine. Well that just clears it right up.”
“I think this was the place,” Queen said. “This is where they were keeping Duncan. But somebody got here before we did.”
When neither man responded, she went on. “He’s alive. That’s why they tried to make it look like bears dragged the bodies away. To cover the fact that Duncan is still alive.”
“So this was a rescue?” Rook was skeptical.
Queen shook her head. “It was an abduction.”
“A sub that can break through pack ice,” Knight said, as if thinking aloud. “Who has access to that?”
Rook knew that Aleman—Deep Blue, now—would be able to provide the answer, but this far north, satellite communications were practically non-existent and certainly not reliable enough for an encrypted transmission. The answer to the question of who might have orchestrated the raid on the Alert black site would have to wait.
“Let’s finish our sweep,” Queen said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a clue.”
Knight abruptly made a hushing sound. Both Rook and Queen knew better than to respond with anything but total silence. Rook pulled his hood back a little and cupped a hand over his ear, trying to hear what it was that had caught Knight’s attention. At first, all he could make out was the constant low hiss of the wind moving across the snow. Then he could make out the harsh roar of jet engines in the distance and the faint rhythm of helicopter rotors beating the air, growing louder by the second.
3
Ashburn, Virginia
“What do you mean it’s not a door?”
Bishop searched her English vocabulary for the appropriate words to describe what she was looking at. “Is fake. Just there for looks.”
King jogged forward to join her. As he reached her side, Deep Blue’s voice sounded in her ear. “I’ve checked the blueprints on file. There’s definitely supposed to be a fire exit there.”
King took out a red LED flashlight and shone it at the edge of the steel door. There was no gap between the door and the doorposts. The builders had affixed a sheet of metal to the concrete wall, held in place with a frame of molding. From a distance it looked like a one-way exit, but it was merely a façade.
“Well, we’ve got them on a code violation,” King said, “but that doesn’t get us inside. I suppose all the other fire doors are bogus as well.”
“Can’t help you with that,” Deep Blue said. “All I’ve got are the blueprints, and those are clearly wrong.”
“We don’t have time to play Monty Hall,” King said. “Let’s go to Plan B.” He surveyed the breadth of the building, looking for the place that afforded the most concealment, but the wall was uniformly flat and exposed. “I guess here’s as good a place as any.”
Bishop unslung her backpack and knelt over it, rooting in its depths to retrieve a coil of black rope. Attached to one end was a collapsi
ble grappling hook. She took a step away from the building, mentally gauging its height, and then she measured out several arm lengths of rope. While she did that, King doffed his pack and took out a black plastic object that looked a little like an over-sized workman’s lunch box, with a strange pulley mechanism sprouting from the handle.
Bishop played out the rope and then began whipping the grappling hook around in an overhand motion. The hook made a faint whooshing sound as it orbited, gathering momentum until, after only a few revolutions, she extended her arm up and heaved both rope and hook skyward. The hook shot up more than forty feet on a slight parabolic trajectory, before peaking and arcing back down. A moment later, it disappeared beyond the edge of the roof. A faint clanking sound signaled contact. The rope slapped against the side of the building and remained there, while the excess slack clattered to the ground in front of Bishop.
“First try,” King said, handing over the lunchbox-like contraption. “Not bad, little sis.”
“I always get it on the first try,” Bishop said, without a trace of humility. She had mastered the art of setting a grapnel long before joining her older brother’s paramilitary team. She clipped the rope into the pulley handle and then used a carabiner to secure the device—an Atlas APA-5 battery-powered mechanical ascender—to the black nylon rigger’s belt she wore around her waist. “Tell me. What is Monty Hall?”
Before King could answer, Deep Blue chimed in. “Monty is a ‘who’ not a ‘what’. He was the host of ‘Let’s Make A Deal.’”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a game show. You see, there are these doors—”
“She can Google it,” King said, sounding a little annoyed. “We’re on the clock.”
Bishop shrugged then thumbed a button on the handle of the Atlas device. There was a whirring noise as the small but powerful electric motor engaged, and then a moment later, it lifted her into the air. She leaned back and planted her feet against the wall so that she was for all practical purposes, walking up the vertical surface. It took just a few seconds for her to make the ascent, after which she hauled herself over the roof’s edge. She drew up several yards of rope and clipped the now quiet ascender to the end. Then she manually lowered it down to King. After one last check to make sure nobody was around to see, he clipped in and started up the wall to join her.
Empire (A Jack Sigler Thriller Book 8) Page 4