“This is where they keep them,” he went on. “They went out hours ago. We won’t be able to get past them all.”
She found the lock, fitted the pick into it and went to work. A few seconds later, the lock fell open. She removed it from the hasp and opened the gate. “Come on. I’ll keep you safe.”
“Doubtful,” he moaned. “But I guess I’d rather die out there than in here.”
She slowly extended her hand out to where she thought he was, groping until she encountered him. A moment later, he was gripping her hand, holding onto her like she was a life-line. “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Joe.”
“Okay, Joe. Just follow my lead.”
He squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”
A thin sliver of light at the top of the stairs marked the door through which she had been led. It was not enough to see by but enough to gauge the distance. Lynn found the doorknob—unlocked—and carefully cracked open the door. With the dagger poised in a backhand grip, she eased the door open a little more. The hallway was deserted, but she stayed in a ready fighting stance as she beckoned Joe to follow.
When she got her first look at him, she was unable to stifle a gasp of dismay. When he had been merely a voice in the darkness, the mental image she had formed had been of an emaciated prisoner, dressed in rags, with shaggy hair and beard. Joe however looked like something from a horror film.
Aside from a few lank tufts, his hair was gone. There were large weeping sores on his face, and judging by the crusted bloodstains on his T-shirt, all over the rest of his body as well. His mouth was caked with dried blood. As someone who had grown up during the nuclear arms race, Lynn immediately recognized the early signs of severe radiation poisoning.
Joe was a dead man walking.
As disconcerting as that realization was, she was even more alarmed at the possibility that Joe’s condition might not be the result of accidental exposure. Were Catherine and her sadistic friend Alexei conducting radiation experiments on prisoners? Was that what they were doing to Jack even now? Was it already too late for her son?
She pushed the terrible thought away, refusing to let herself be defeated before striking even a single blow. She focused on the immediate situation. The corridor was empty and as still as a tomb. “Where is everyone? Are there soldiers here?”
“A few,” Joe said. “I think. Most of the people I’ve seen are scientists, and there aren’t very many of them.”
Lynn wanted to press him for more information about the facility and its purpose, but she sensed that the subject might push Joe deeper into despair. She did not take his assessment of the security force at face value, but if he was correct, then the main threat she would have to contend with would be the men Catherine had brought with her. And of course, the ‘beasts’ Joe had mentioned. But that seemed like a topic best avoided.
She stole down the hallway, trying to remember the route her captors had taken. As she neared a corner, she heard a door behind them open. The sound of male voices in boisterous conversation filled the space.
“—send the Army in to take over security.”
“I can see why he would not want that, but he cannot keep it a secret forever.”
She grabbed Joe’s arm and hastened him around the bend, but then she edged out far enough to see two men—both wearing lab coats and headed in her direction.
“It will take a minimum of two years to replace the almases,” the second man continued.
“None came back?” the first asked.
Lynn drew back and rushed to the nearest door, which she cautiously opened. The room beyond was dark and apparently unoccupied, so she pulled Joe in and then went inside. She left the door open just a crack, to observe the hallway. The scientists rounded the corner, still chattering, oblivious to the presence of the two escaped captives.
“None.”
“What about the subhumans?”
“They don’t tolerate the weather, very well.”
“We have plenty to spare.”
“I suppose we could put coats on them.”
Lynn couldn’t make out the rest of the conversation as the men moved out of earshot, but she had heard and seen enough to know that neither of them was the sadist Alexei. That was probably a good thing. If he had been there, she might have risked venturing out and slitting both men’s throats from behind, consequences be damned. Instead, she closed the door and flipped the light switch.
The room contained several medium-sized metal tanks, which Lynn recognized as fermentation vats. They were useful for producing small batches of ale or wine, as well as cultivating anthrax and other biological weapons. The fermenters were empty, however, and they did not appear to have been used in a long time. Whatever else they were doing at the facility, creating bio-weapons did not seem to be a priority.
She turned to Joe. “You’ll be safe here for a while—”
“No,” he said quickly, straightening a little. “I can fight. And I’ve got some unfinished business.”
Lynn didn’t know or care what he meant by that. Having him along might increase her chances of escape, or just the opposite. “Suit yourself. You’ll have to keep up.”
Joe chuckled. “Never thought I’d hear that from someone old enough to be my grandmother.”
She shot him a withering glance. “Funny. You don’t look like a twelve-year-old.”
His eyes went wide. “Sorry, ma’am. I just meant that I’m… ah…”
Lynn did not miss the abrupt shift in his demeanor and his deferential language. The man was a soldier, probably an American special ops commando caught spying on the facility.
He might be useful after all, she thought.
She raised a finger to her lips, and then returned to the door. She opened it a crack then waved him ahead. “I’ll take point. You watch our six o’clock.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
With her carbon-fiber blade at the ready, she moved out into the open, walking with a quick determined pace. The two scientists were long gone, the hallway utterly deserted, as far as she could see. If her mental map was correct, her destination was just beyond the next turn.
A peek around the corner revealed two soldiers standing guard at the door to the examination room where she had last seen King. Unless they were asleep on their feet, sneaking up on them wasn’t an option. Rushing them would be suicidal, even with Joe’s help.
Joe’s help, she thought, and a plan began to take shape. She grabbed his arm and pulled him forward. She did it so quickly that he was halfway around the corner before he realized what was happening, by which time she was already pulling him back. Off balance, he stumbled back, crashing noisily against the wall.
Lynn could hear the voices of the two soldiers, registering confusion, and then their footsteps as they moved to investigate the strange occurrence. Exactly as she hoped they would. As soon as the first man reached the corner, she struck like lighting, driving her dagger hilt deep into the soldier’s temple. Even as he was slumping to the ground, she used his body to launch herself at the second man. She moved so quickly that the man barely had time to register a shocked expression before her arms enfolded his head. Her momentum toppled him backward, and as they both fell, she twisted her body—and his head—halfway around. As they hit the floor together, there was sickening crunch of bones snapping.
Not his.
Hers.
A spike of pain transfixed Lynn’s ankle. Her leg buckled beneath the combined weight of herself and the soldier, and she slammed into the floor hard enough to knock the wind out of her. Stunned, she could only watch helplessly as the soldier shook off the effects of her attack and then turned toward her, his eyes red with rage. Before he could do anything more however, Joe leapt into the fray and slammed the butt of a captured Kalashnikov rifle into the side of the soldier’s head.
Lynn’s breath returned in a gasp. She reflexively backpedaled away from the unconscious man, but another explosion of pain in her ankle al
most made her pass out.
Joe didn’t look much better than she felt. It was as if the exertion required to club the soldier had taken ten years off his life. Nevertheless, he knelt beside her and began gently probing her ankle. “It’s broken,” he said, but then he managed a wan smile. “That was a pretty gutsy thing to do, ma’am. Sorry about the whole ‘grandmother’ thing.”
“You were right. Maybe I am too old for this.” She glanced over at the door to the examination room, just a few steps away. “Help me up. We have to keep going.”
“You won’t get far on that ankle. At least let me—”
She pointed at the door. “I only have to get that far. Give me a gun.”
He passed over the carbine he had used to club the soldier, then extended a hand to help her up. She stood on her good leg, steadying herself by leaning against the wall. Even without putting any weight on the injured ankle, the pain brought tears to her eyes. But she was too close to stop now. Joe retrieved the unconscious soldier’s weapon and then leaned down so that she could use him as a crutch.
She hobbled the last few steps and then leaned against the door frame so she could put both hands on the weapon. “Open it,” she whispered. “Slowly.”
Joe did as instructed, easing the door open slowly. Catherine’s voice was immediately audible. “—descendants of Rasputin, Children of Adoon. You are. And so was your sister.”
Lynn could see inside the room now. Catherine stood with her back to the door, facing the examination table where King was still restrained in a prone position. Aside from the two of them, the room was empty. Lynn raised the carbine, aiming it at the back of the woman’s head, but before she could voice a threat or demand surrender, Catherine spoke again.
“I think I might be her. I think I’m Julie.”
Lynn drew a sudden involuntarily breath.
Can it be true?
The gasp was enough to elicit Catherine’s attention. As she started to turn, Joe swept into the room, his weapon trained on her. “Don’t!” he shouted, the single word covering a multitude of possible violations.
King twisted his head around, staring back at Lynn with a mixture of incredulity and admiration, which quickly gave way to curiosity and then urgency. “Cut me loose, quick.”
Joe took a step forward. “Lynn, cover her.”
Lynn kept the weapon trained on the woman who had just admitted to being her daughter. Part of her desperately wanted to hear what Catherine…or Julie…had to say about that, but the moment for revelations had already slipped away. It was only a matter of time before someone discovered the dead bodies in the hall and sounded a general alarm. The only thing that mattered now was escape. “I have her.”
Catherine raised her hands slowly, almost languidly, as if this were nothing more than a game they were all playing. “This is foolish,” she said. “You’ll never make it out of here, and even if you did, we’re in the middle of the Urals. There’s more than two hundred miles of frozen wilderness between here and the nearest town.”
“That’s our problem, lady,” Joe said, lowering his carbine but nonetheless giving Catherine a wide berth as he moved to the table and started loosening King’s bonds.
King looked up at his rescuer. “White team?”
Joe paused a beat to stare at him, then resumed his activity. “That’s right. I’m King. How did you know that?”
“What’s the status of your team?”
Joe’s hands stopped moving again. “Three of us survived what happened out there, but now I’m all that’s left.”
King allowed a moment of silence to pass. “We’ll catch up on that in debrief. Right now, I just need you to drive on.”
A look of disbelief came across Joe’s tortured face, but he resumed unbuckling King’s restraints. “Debrief? Who the hell are you?”
“I guess you could call me King, Version 1.0.”
“Seriously? You’re Blue Team?” He glanced back at Lynn. “And you brought your mom?”
“Long story. But with a happy ending. We’re gonna get you home.” The last restraint was loosened, and King swung off the table. He winced as his feet hit the floor, but then he hastened across the room to Lynn. “You’re hurt.”
Lynn managed to smile. “I’m better now,” she lied, then she turned to Catherine. “Is it true? Are you my Julie?”
The younger woman said nothing, but met Lynn’s stare with a gaze that was as cool and impassive as a glacier.
“There’ll be plenty of time to sort this out later,” King said. “Right now, we need to focus on getting out of here.”
“You heard what she said.” Joe nodded at Catherine. “We’re a long ways from anywhere. And there are things here. Monsters. A whole army of them. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but it’s gonna take more than you and your mom to get us out of here.”
“How about a helicopter?”
Joe stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, that might work.”
29
There were advantages in being the only foreign-born member of the Chess Team. One was not having to come up with a convincing backstory to explain to a Russian black-market arms dealer why Bishop needed several thousand dollars’ worth of guns, ammunition and sundry items for causing death and destruction. She also hadn’t needed a similar fiction to explain her urgent need to fly to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Yevgeny, the cousin of a friend of a friend, with whom she had served in the Russian Army, was currently a low-level soldier in the Uralmash syndicate—Yekaterinburg’s mafia. He had not even asked why she needed the guns. Sasha, the creaky old pilot of an equally creaky and old Antonov An-2 biplane, had complained more about her timing than her choice of destination. “Come back tomorrow,” he had said from behind a closed door, his voice thick with sleep—or vodka. He had relented when she started slipping hundred dollar bills under the door.
She doubted the Russians, even those who felt no particular loyalty to the rule of law, would have been as accommodating to her American teammates.
Sasha’s accommodations did not extend to helping her unload the plane when they reached their destination. But the physical labor helped banish the chill that had set into her bones during the three-hundred-mile flight to a remote mountain pass in the Urals. To his credit, the old bush pilot was a little concerned about leaving her in the frozen wilderness.
“I will come back for you,” he promised. “Right here. Twenty-four hours. You will pay, of course.”
“Really,” she told him. “You don’t need to. I’ve already made arrangements.”
She hoped that was true. The plan Queen and Deep Blue had devised had them commandeering the helicopter that was still at the secret research facility. They would use it to escape after they accomplished their objective—rescuing the members of White Team. If any were still alive and being held there. If Chess Team did not or could not accomplish their objective, the exit-plan would probably be irrelevant.
Sasha insisted she keep the half-empty thermos of coffee he had brought along. The beverage was bitter and full of grounds, but hot enough to ward off the chill while she waited for the rest of the team to show up.
She did not have to wait long.
Almost as soon as the Antonov took off, Queen contacted her on the quantum communicator they had left for her in Yekaterinburg, to let her know that they were nearby. There was no time for a proper reunion, but they briefly recounted the story of their battle with the humanzees.
“I have never heard of such things in this area,” Bishop said, incredulous.
“That’s just what we’re calling them,” Rook explained. “But whatever they are, they’re real enough and there might be more of them.”
“Good thing I didn’t come empty handed.” She gestured to the Gator boxes that held the weapons she had acquired—five AKM rifles, each with an accompanying Type-2 bayonet, five GSh-18 semi-automatic 9-millimeter pistols, an RPG-7 reusable anti-tank weapon and four rocket propelled g
renades to go with it. There were also over a thousand rounds of 7.62-millimeter ammunition for the AKMs. The rounds were already loaded into magazines, and there were several more magazines for the pistols, fifteen pounds of Semtex and a few dozen blasting caps with some radio detonators. “Don’t say I never brought you anything.”
The weapons were distributed amongst the team. Rook carried the extra rifle, which had been intended for King. It still might prove useful if things went pear-shaped. Bishop held onto the spare pistol. Per Deep Blue’s instructions, she had also brought along a pair of cross-country skis, and as soon as they were all outfitted, Queen led the trek back up the pass to where the avalanche had nearly claimed their lives.
Bishop could sense the change in mood as they skied across the fresh slide zone. Even Rook seemed to have lost interest in providing glib commentary. For her part, Bishop had never felt more at home. While she had enjoyed the familiarity of Moscow—immersing herself in the language and culture she had grown up with—this was what she loved about the Motherland. There was a strange beauty in the harsh austerity of the natural environment, which could be appreciated only in solitude.
Except we aren’t really alone, are we?
“Head on a swivel people,” Queen said over the comm. “Those things could be anywhere. Blue, any sign of them?”
“Negative. Aside from that helicopter, there hasn’t been any activity down there since the avalanche.”
“Okay, we’ll approach the woods using standard buddy teams. Rook and I will lead out. He’ll get all butt hurt if I don’t keep him with me.”
Queen and Rook stayed on their skis, moving as quickly and quietly as possible to the woodline. Bishop peered down the iron sights of her AKM, straining to keep her teammates in view as they approached and ultimately vanished against the dark background of the trees.
“We’re set,” Queen whispered a few seconds later. “Move out.”
Bishop slung the rifle across her back and started out across the flats, staying in the groove cut by Queen’s skis. She quickly crossed the distance and ducked down behind the first tree she came to.
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