With slightly more caution they approached the main building. Harvish ran through his checks before the point man swept into the room. Talli came next, taking the left as Brandt swept in, clearing the right side of the room. Still running silent, they didn’t report their findings. Besides running silent there wasn’t much to report. Just a dingy, empty reception area with a cluttered desk and five really uncomfortable-looking steel chairs. Guess the GID wasn’t exactly known for its hospitality.
Behind the desk lay another door. Perhaps that direction would be a bit more promising.
Without hesitation, the point man strode to the exit as Talli shut the outer door. Since they were enclosed, Brandt turned on his gun’s light. Harvish followed suit, carefully checking this new doorframe for any signs of tampering.
Still none. Harvish turned the knob, also unlocked.
They were so screwed.
Unfortunately, they only had one direction to go. Forward.
They burst into the next room to find it equally boring. It appeared to be some kind of intake room. A table stood in the center with a chair on either side. If the reception room had been shabby, this room hadn’t been painted in thirty years. Under the layer of peeling dirt, brown paint showed shades of blue and green. Beyond a picture of King Abdullah I, the room was devoid of any other adornment or comfort.
The GID must really have taken their training by the KBG to heart.
They went through the sole exit door with similar results. Only this time they found a poorly stocked kitchen and break room with a fifties-style television. Swiftly they moved through several other rooms. Each the same. Standard-issue military bare essentials. This latest room had bunk beds practically stacked upon themselves. Berths for at least ten men. Which if they rotated through three shifts could mean that the facility could sustain thirty men.
But where were they?
“Um, Sarge?” Harvish said, breaking their silent entry.
Why the hell not? There didn’t appear to be anyone to hear them. “Yes?”
“There’s no door out of here.”
Brandt double-checked his point man, running his hands along the walls to check for hidden exits, but Harvish was correct. They’d hit a dead end.
“Then where’s the entrance to the underground levels?” Talli asked.
Hell if Brandt knew.
Rebecca stared at the facility’s door so hard that she truly feared she would blind herself. She was even afraid to blink in case she missed Brandt’s return.
“One hundred seconds,” Davidson reported.
Only two hundred more to go before the corporal’s orders were to get them as far away from here as possible.
“Lopez,” Rebecca asked, “can’t we take a cruise around the place?”
While Lopez looked tempted, he shook his head. “Sarge said to stay put.”
“No,” Rebecca corrected him. “He said to stay in the car.”
“She’s right,” Davidson piped up.
Lopez’s frown deepened. “I don’t think that was the spirit of the order.”
“And since when are you this enslaved to the rules?” Rebecca challenged Lopez.
“Like, never,” the corporal answered, turning on the car. The car rolled forward slowly, making an arc around the squat facility.
Bunny leaned forward next to Rebecca. “What are we looking for though?”
Rebecca was about to answer that she had no idea when Davidson piped up. “A grate of some sort. If the main building has a lower level, they had to provide ventilation, and given the fact that the place looks like it was built in the fifties, they had to vent to the outside.”
“All right then,” Lopez said. “Davidson, you and Bunny check the right side. Rebecca, you and I are on the left.”
Opening her eyes as wide as they would go, Rebecca tried to use every ounce of illumination to study the desert as the SUV slowly rolled forward. But all Rebecca could make out were a bunch of rocks and clumps of salt. Nothing man-made. Nothing to indicate another possible way into the structure.
Then the front tire clanged against something, which was followed shortly by an answering clang from the rear tire. Lopez smiled as he stopped the SUV and backed it up. Rebecca tucked her leg under her to lift herself high enough to see over the hood to the dark metal grate in the desert floor.
“Now what?” Bunny asked.
Rebecca didn’t have to wait for Davidson to pull his pack out and start molding a C-4 charge. Whether to breach into the facility or to create an escape hatch, they were going to blow that grate.
“But we only have like another hundred seconds,” Bunny protested.
Lopez though, he just grinned. “Darlin’, a lot can happen in a hundred seconds.”
And Rebecca knew he wasn’t kidding.
Brandt cursed under his breath as they backtracked through the whole damned building. But no matter his foul language, the structure refused to give up the entrance to the underground portion of the outpost.
He glanced to his watch. Ninety seconds. Did he give up the search, admit defeat, and bug out with the rest of the team? Or did he let the time expire and tear this place apart, one crumbling wooden beam at a time?
“Maybe we’re looking at this wrong?” Talli suggested.
“I don’t doubt it,” Brandt grumbled. They were missing something. And it was far bigger than just where a door was hidden.
“If you were the architect of a subterranean base, where would you put the entrance?”
“Depends,” Harvish asked. “Do I want the men stationed here to know where it’s at, or is it for higher up the food chain?”
“But was this place really used? I mean, sure it looks good, almost too good,” Talli suggested.
Brandt swept his light across the kitchen. It was pretty damned clean. No trash. No dirty dishes. You put thirty men in a space this small and it was going to get messy.
“And where’s the head?” Talli asked. “The showers?”
His man was right. All the other “necessities” were covered, with one important exception. An outpost has got to have a toilet.
“So this is all for show, like a model home,” Brandt concluded. “While all the real work happened downstairs.”
“Where does that get us though?” Harvish asked.
Brandt looked to Talli. The man shrugged. “I think the entrance would be the entrance then, right?”
Without another word they moved to the reception area, however it was equally unhelpful as before. They tossed chairs, the desk, even a map of Jordan, but nothing.
“Fuck!” Brandt shouted with less than sixty seconds to go, slamming the heel of his hand against the wall. Wait. Did that sound hollow? He knocked along the wall. Sure enough a large portion of it sounded hollow.
Harvish did the same along the intake room’s wall. They mapped out a large hollow area hidden behind the walls.
“These rooms aren’t the right size,” Talli said. Sure enough there was a good four-by-four-foot space taken up by these false walls.
Brandt hauled back and kicked at the area. Drywall splintered. He kicked again, getting his foot caught in the debris. Yanking his leg back, he pulled out a whole section of the wall, only there was no staircase. There was an elevator.
“The gate is on this side,” said Talli, exhibiting some actual enthusiasm as he hit the reception wall with the butt of his rifle.
Within seconds they had the false wall out of the way, which it turned out looked like it just needed to be pushed in to open. Oh well, it felt good to knock something around. Harvish lifted the elevator’s latch and rattled the metal lattice open.
Brandt looked to the front door and then to his watch. Forty-five seconds. They could never go down, survey the underground structure, and make it back in time.
“Sarge?” Talli asked as the two men stood in the elevator, waiting on his go order.
His gut ached at the thought of the others driving away, but perhaps it was best.
Now the die was truly cast.
Davidson shoved the blasting cap into the wedge of C-4, then stuck the mini-bomb against the metal grating. This was the third such explosive they’d placed and the farthest away from the building. The underground portion of the complex sprawled out under the desert. And possibly even extended under the Dead Sea. One of those ventilation shafts had been pretty damned close to the shore.
“Twenty,” Bunny announced. As in seconds.
He ignored her as he secured the bomb in place. Even if they had to evac, that didn’t mean they couldn’t help Brandt. He’d set the charges with a remote trigger that he could blow up to five miles away.
“Ten,” Bunny counted down. “Nine. Eight.”
“We aren’t really going to leave are we?” Rebecca asked as Bunny’s tone became more and more ominous.
“Five. Four. Three. Two,” she said, frowning. “One.”
Everyone looked to Lopez. The question clear on their faces. Was he going to obey Brandt or go against a direct order?
“What?” the corporal asked.
“Well?” Rebecca pressed. “Are we going?”
“Going where?” Lopez asked.
“Brandt ordered us to leave if he didn’t come out of there in three hundred seconds,” Davidson reminded the corporal.
“Oh that,” Lopez said. “I haven’t even started counting yet.”
Rebecca flew from the backseat and wrapped her arms around Lopez’s neck and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Sometimes you’re all right, Ricky.”
“Just all right?” Lopez said, starting the car again. “I’m like all awesomeness, all the time.”
Davidson couldn’t help but grin despite the fact it sent a sharp pain up the side of his face only to settle as a throb in his temple. He looked to Bunny, who didn’t seem quite as pleased. Reaching out, Davidson took her hand.
“This’ll be over soon,” he tried to reassure her.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Bunny answered.
There was no arguing with that.
You know how people said they were digging a tunnel to China? Yeah, the Jordanians took them literally. They’d long passed the drop-dead time to get back to the car. Lopez should be speeding away by now. Which was just as well. The damned elevator rattled and whined, coming to a near stop and then sputtering again.
Perhaps the GID thought they could make any enemy frustrated enough before they got to the actual underground base they could get the jump on them. Finally the elevator bounced to a stop, a final stop. Harvish opened the lattice door and headed out into a short hallway that ended at a staircase.
Who the fuck builds a staircase at the base of an elevator? Apparently King Abdullah the First. They trotted down the steps and then passed into a long hallway.
They were about halfway down it when Harvish brought his hand up into a fist. Brandt and Talli stopped in their tracks. Was that a pool of light up ahead? Had they reached the actual outpost? The point man brought his two fingers to his eyes and then swept them past Brandt’s line of sight. Harvish then counted off on his fingers. Four. So there were four men up ahead.
Four wasn’t too bad a number. Better than the thirty that could have been there. He’d take four. With a nod Brandt gave the order to enter. They charged ahead, right on each other’s sixes. Four chairs circled a small table.
In Arabic, Talli shouted for the men to get their hands up yet none complied. It didn’t take a brainiac to realize why as Brandt turned one of the chairs around. The men were dead. Way dead. Maybe not as dead as St. Basil, but still pretty damned dead. Not even bodies in the desert would be this mummified in two weeks, so they weren’t victims of Amed.
They were victims of someone though since each had taken several shots to the chest.
“Whoa,” Harvish announced as he looked to the decrepit equipment in the corner. “World War II is calling. It wants its tech back.”
Brandt would have glared at the point man, but he wasn’t wrong. The stuff was Cold War issue at best.
“Might was well try to fire it up,” Brandt said to Talli. The man complied, and shockingly the computer booted up...to display a black screen and a bright green cursor. “Is that DOS?”
Talli tilted his head. “I think it might be its precursor, QDOS,” he said as he typed in a few basic commands. Error upon error message sprang up. Well, if they couldn’t count on the tech, perhaps this antiquated workstation held an actual paper trail.
Brandt tossed the drawers, flipping through file after file as Talli struggled with the computer. Harvish checked the two doors that led from the small office.
“Each leads to a hallway. Each looks like they branch.”
Which was what Brandt was afraid of. Seldom did one build a small underground complex. In his experience, they were usually sprawling. How many acres did this thing stretch? Each and every nook and cranny could hide the Rinderpest.
“I’m pretty sure it’s down that hallway,” Talli stated, pointing to the nearest door.
Brandt glanced to the screen, but it was still filled with blinking green error messages. “And you got that from...?”
Talli indicated to low on the wall where a chunk had been taken out. A line was gouged out of the hall too. And unlike the dead men, that damage had been done recently.
“Looks like someone was in a hurry,” Harvish stated as he touched his finger to a small pool of oil. He rubbed the liquid between his fingers. “I’d say they hit the wall with a hydraulic lift of some sort.”
Could they really be that close to the Rinderpest?
If the pit in his stomach was any indicator, it had better be because his gut was telling him they didn’t have much time left.
And damned if his gut was never wrong.
“Over there!” Bunny yelled, pointing across the SUV to a small glow of light.
Rebecca grabbed hold of the armrest as Lopez gunned them across the desert to the grate in question. She leaned out of the window to peer down at the metal grate. Sure enough, light was coming from deep underground.
“Can I?” Davidson asked as he squeezed in next to her.
They’d already rigged each of the grates with C-4, so what was Davidson up to? Carefully he wrapped string around a lipstick camera. “This is so Mickey Moused, but we might be able to pick something up.”
“We should have brought the endoscope,” Lopez grumbled.
To have a high-tech, flexible, cablelike camera would have been great, however who knew back in London they would be trying to spy beneath the Jordanian desert? Instead, they were just going to have to be content to lower the equivalent of a nanny cam on a string.
Lopez turned on a small palmtop tablet. The image was blurry and showed metal wall after metal wall. The picture jarred only to stabilize. The camera seemed pointed down a horizontal vent.
“Can’t we get some kind of visual?” Bunny asked.
Davidson indicated to the strings in his hand. “I can’t force it to go forward to another opening. The best we can do is track their light signature.” Then Davidson frowned. That was the look of a man about to come up with a great idea. “Let me try to turn it,” Davidson said as he looped the string over his finger and worked the lipstick camera like a puppet and he the master.
Wobbly at first and then with more precision, Davidson gave them a full spin of the vent. It looked like they were at the intersection of four ducts. “I think,” Davidson said, readjusting the camera, “that the light is coming from that direction.”
Which turned out to be straight ahead.
“Then what are you waiting for?” Lopez asked. Davidson promptly reeled the camera back up.
They moved north to the next grate that did not show any light. At least not yet. Davidson lowered the camera, repeating the maneuver.
“Nothing,” Lopez sighed. “Maybe they turned off—”
Then the screen bloomed with light. They still couldn’t actually see anything, but someone was moving dow
n there. And given the swiftness and surety, it was Brandt.
And if he was moving, he was alive.
That thought had to get her through the next three hundred seconds.
Brandt trotted to keep up with Harvish. They’d lost the trail on the marred wall, but the farther they went the more obvious the wheel marks of the hydraulic lift were in the dust. They’d only stopped to check side rooms. Except for the occasional dead body, they were clear.
Whatever the Jordanians were doing here, their job had been done decades ago. Had they given up looking for the tablets? Or had that never been their purpose here? This close to the Israeli border, maybe this really was just a GID outpost.
And strangely the hallways seemed to angle back up toward the surface. Who spent all the time and money to build a deep underground structure and then have it rise back to the surface? But not a lot about this complex made a whole bunch of sense.
As long as they found the damned Rinderpest intact, Brandt wouldn’t care.
Harvish made a left, sweeping his light over the floor, following the relatively fresh wheel marks. Guess Amed didn’t expect anyone to track him this far. And with good reason. They’d had to traipse all over London, Russia, Slovenia, and Jordan to find it.
Suddenly Harvish shut off his light and pulled to a full stop. Brandt and Talli followed suit. As soon as their lights were doused it became obvious why Harvish had halted them.
A dim light streamed out of the room ahead. Brandt cocked his head trying to hear anything beyond his breath but came up empty. He put his hand on Talli’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. Talli then put his hand on Harvish’s shoulder.
They were in attack formation.
Now to attack.
“Where did they go?” Rebecca asked in Davidson’s ear. “Why did they turn off their lights?”
He didn’t know the exact answer to either question, but Davidson could bet it wasn’t good. Brandt would only have turned on their lights if he felt they were alone and safe. Which meant Brandt no longer felt they were alone or safe down there.
Betrayed 02 - Havoc Page 28