The Angel of the Abyss

by Hank Schwaeble

  “Don't start composing your apology just yet. All it means is she had something to gain.”

  She raised her face to him, her eyes growing animated. “Hatcher, this is a double homicide. This means we can call the police, or more likely the county Sheriff's department. They'll be here in five minutes if we tell them there are two corpses, recently murdered.”

  He looked over at the body again, still smoldering.

  “Don't you see?” she continued. “We can tell them whoever did it is down there and armed. We won't have to go in alone.”

  More like, we won't be going in at all. He shook his head. “It will be too late.”

  “But I'm telling you, they won't drag their feet on something like this.”

  “It doesn't matter. Let's assume they act faster than any other police force in history. It will still be too late. They'll secure the scene, call for back-up. Set up a perimeter, interrogate the crap out of us for what we know. What they won't do is charge down into an underground installation without getting a handle on what's going on. And under the best of circumstances, that will take hours. We don't have hours.”

  “You can't know that,” she said, but her voice sounded less than certain.

  “I do. It's no accident we – I – ended up here right now. I was told four days, and it's been four days. This is when it's going to go down, and my guess is, it's about to start, if it hasn't already.”

  “Then what do we do? Go down there and start shooting everyone?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Amy grew still for a moment, the heaviness of her stare pressing on him in the dark. “What are you not telling me?”

  He sighed, wiping his face with his palm.

  “Hatcher, you may have been some expert interrogation tactician, but I've slept every night with my bare leg over yours, listening to your heartbeat for almost two years now. I know when you're not telling me something.”

  “If this is what I think it is, they're here for a reason. Something they want, maybe Sahara Doyle, maybe something else, is down there. I have a hard time seeing whoever did this getting down into that facility by force. So, either we're talking about a heavily armed group capable of penetrating a fortress...”

  “Or Bartlett's men were in on it.”

  “Not all of them. But, yeah. Some. It's the only thing that makes sense. That place is designed to survive a nuclear blast.”

  “If Bartlett's men were in on it, that means he was, too.”

  “Maybe. Either way, it's happening now. And I'm pretty sure whatever it is, it's what I'm supposed to stop.”

  “Which is why we should call the police. We have to assume they're expecting you.”

  “You're right, but I have to go down there anyway. You should call them, show them, get them up to speed with what they need to know. They'll be my reinforcements.”

  “Oh, no.” She wagged her head stiffly. “No, no, no. You're not going down there alone.”

  “What happened to that stuff you said about letting me do my thing?”

  “'Your thing' doesn't include going up against who knows how many people with guns. Besides, I've been down there, Hatcher. I know the layout. At least, I know it a lot better than you. You'd just be wandering. I'm tired of having this conversation with you.”

  He looked away, thinking. That was true, about the wandering, but he doubted it was as important as she was making it out to be. He had a feeling they wouldn't be hiding from him.

  “I don't know,” he said. Which was also true.

  “Then how about this? If you go, I'm going. Even if that means I have to wait a few minutes and follow.”

  Hatcher shone the light at the body again. Ribbons of smoke still curled into the air. He didn't want her going, but there was no time to argue about it.

  “Fine. But Amy, I'm serious, if I tell you to get out of there, or to hide, or whatever, you have to promise me you'll do it.”

  She waved him off. “Whatever. I don't plan to be a liability. But I do have to ask one thing. What, exactly, do we do once we're down there? Do you have a plan?”

  He pointed the light at the ground in the direction of the silo and touched her arm, then started walking.

  “Plan? Yeah. The plan is to stop whatever they're doing and not get killed in the process.”

  “And what are they doing?” she said as they made their way through the maze of thorns, stepping around sage and cactus.

  “I have no idea.” He raised his eyes, watching the scant light of the structures in the distance. “But if I had to guess, I'd say they were holding a coronation.”

  * * *

  At Amy's direction, they approached the structures from what she described as the rear. They were almost at vehicle port when Hatcher stopped, motioning for Amy to halt and shutting off the flashlight.

  In front of them, about a hundred yards to the east, voices. A vehicle and silhouettes just visible in the moonlight. A few shouts. Then a pair of gunshots. Two of the figures dropped. Two more remained standing. One raised a container, seemed to toss it back and forth, then raised it over his head and tilted it. He handed it to the person next to him, who did the same, shaking it a few times. A moment later, a sudden bloom of light flowered and competing shouts erupted. Almost like cheers.

  Hatcher told Amy to wait, raised his pistol and started racing toward the flames. He covered the distance in less than twenty seconds, but the bodies were fully involved and beyond recovery. The first two were already dead, the second two were writhing in pain on the ground, chanting something through the waves of fire clawing toward the sky.

  “Oh my God!”

  Hatcher turned and grabbed Amy, pulling her away. “I told you to wait back there.”

  “We have to help them!”

  “It's too late. Besides, they did that to themselves. After they killed the other two.”

  “They did this to themselves?” she said, tearing her eyes away from the flames. “Who would do something like that?”

  “I don't know.” The glow of the fires played off their faces. “But I think the two already dead were Bartlett's men.”

  Hatcher studied the scene, the living flames quieting down now, lying flat, hands starting to scratch at their throats. Flames rolled over them like liquid. He looked at the Humvee next to them. Behind it was an enormous concrete slab. The silo closure door. It was open, its two halves spread apart, the launch duct in between covered by something flat – sheet metal, it looked like. It was hard to see in the shadows.

  “We need to get down there,” he said. He looked at the pistol on the ground, too close to the flames to reach. “And we need to get out of here before the rounds in their weapons start firing from the heat.”

  Amy nodded, eyes still on the bodies. She shook her head after a moment and turned away. Hatcher put a hand on her and urged her into a trot.

  “That's it,” she said, pointing. She looked back over her shoulder. “Hatcher, what's going on?”

  “I really don't know any more than I've told you. But whatever it is, we came to the right place to find out.”

  Hatcher could make out the shape of a large exhaust vent as they approached. Maybe ten feet high by eight feet wide. “You said you rigged it?”

  She nodded. “I still had some duct tape in my purse.”

  “While it may seem a smidge tacky, given what we just witnessed, have I told you how awesome you are lately?”

  “Talk is cheap. I'd rather you quit trying to leave me behind.”

  He glanced back at the fires. “Now maybe you're seeing why.”

  “What I'm seeing is a man who expects me to sit back and let him handle danger all by himself, which may be chivalrous in one sense, but is completely unfair and condescending and dismissive in another.”

  Hatcher said nothing.

  “We'
re probably going to trip the motion sensors,” Amy said, sighing, her voice low. “I hope they ignore them.”

  The moved forward, Hatcher slowing, running his light over the stall of the vehicle port. Empty. “How many Humvees did you say they had?”

  “Four. Plus two other vehicles.” Amy paused. She looked into the spaces where they'd been parked. “Gone. There were at least two still there when I left, plus another car. What do you think it means?”

  “I think it means someone sent them away.” He looked back over his shoulder, fires still glowing behind him. “Most of them, anyway. Beyond that, I don't know. We need to move.”

  Hatcher broke into a low sprint for the final twenty yards or so, Amy following him. He used a hand to stop himself against the side of the vent. It was incredibly solid. Thick cement. Steel framework. Huge metal dampers. Impenetrable.

  On the side wall was an oval hatch about four feet tall and two feet wide. It had no handle or latch. Hatcher handed the flashlight to Amy and groped along the seam of it until he could get his fingertips inserted deeply enough to pull.

  The hatch was dense and sluggish. He pulled it open, could see even in the low moonlight the mechanism, a heavy coil of spring loads designed to automatically throw the pistons back when the hatch closed. The wheel handle was tied back with a wrapping of duct tape, layers and layers of it, twisted in a length to form a line, secured to another section of the mechanism.

  Hatcher took the flashlight from her and turned it on. He pulled the latch shut behind them. “That was really good thinking,” he said, running the beam over the back of the hatch.

  “Wouldn't have done any good if I hadn't seen to this.” She gestured toward the floor. Another hatch, this one round, about three feet in diameter. It was angled slightly up. Hatcher could make out a gap of about an inch.

  He bent down and lifted it. Wedged tightly inside against the rim was a tube of lipstick. “That's a heavy lid,” he said. “How did you know it would hold?”

  “When something costs as much as that, it'd better do more than just make my lips look good.”

  After an inspection with the light, Hatcher went down first. Amy waited until he was a few feet below to follow.

  “You good?” he asked.

  “I did this carrying a big purse and in narrow wedges. Other than the gun digging into my hip, this is a breeze.”

  He dropped several rungs at a time down the shaft, letting his weight do the work, stopping to flash the light. Finally he saw it. Another access hatch, this one on the circular wall. Like the others, it had no latch or handle on this side. It was only meant as an exit, and an emergency one at that.

  “This one isn't propped open.”

  “Push on it,” she said.

  He gave it a push. It didn't budge.

  “Harder,” she said. “It closes on its own, and it's got a seal. I had to tug on it really hard to get it to open. But I don't think it locks unless you turn the wheel.”

  “Then I hope nobody turned the wheel.”

  He pushed it again, but couldn't get much leverage from the ladder, needing to lean out. He handed her the flashlight, passing it up, then grabbed the tubular metal siderails of the ladder and raised his leg. He pressed his foot against the hatch, pushing. After a few seconds, he gave it a quick stomp.

  It opened. He pushed it open more with his foot before quickly switching to reach out with his arm. The access was obviously not designed for someone to get back in. It was the kind of military thinking Hatcher was used to. There were self-locking passages at the other end, so there was no need for this one to lock on its own, and no need for someone to pass back through if it were ever used. No need meant the designers could ignore the contingency.

  He managed to pull himself through the passageway and help Amy through. He eased the hatch door shut to avoid noise. The noise probably didn't matter, but discipline did. It kept you focused.

  “Whisper voice from here on,” he said.

  Amy nodded, drew her weapon.

  Hatcher took in the room, fanning his flashlight. It smacked of a military physical plant, with cabinet consoles of cold-war era communication racks, a cable vault, what looked like a sewage lift station, and lots of power equipment, including high-voltage transformers.

  “They cleared some of the stuff out,” Amy said, her voice low.

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Boxes, drums. Wood.” She waved a hand. “Stuff.”

  Hatcher said nothing. He found the metal stairwell and climbed, Amy just behind him. The stairs had a switchback halfway up, and after he passed it he slowed, cautious as he made the next landing, emerging into another room.

  The space seemed familiar. It was his first time in a missile silo, but the military look combined with the footage he'd seen of them made him feel like he'd been there before. Blue instead of green, gray instead of beige, but otherwise it was straight out of the Defense Department school of interior design. A bit more on the tech side, he allowed. He could only imagine the number of communication and electronic arrays this place had at its peak. Expensive, state-of-the-art equipment – for the time, at least – designed as if the fate of the world relied on it. Which, in many ways, it had.

  “The lights are on,” he said.

  “They must have come looking for me. Or maybe they turned them on when they removed the stuff from downstairs.”

  Hatcher thought about that. Something didn't seem right. “And if they did come looking, wouldn't they have checked the escape hatch? Checked up top and saw you left it propped?”

  “Who knows?” she said, shrugging. “Maybe they realized I'd taken off, but didn't think I'd be coming back.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What? You have that look.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. We don't have the luxury of pondering every unknown.” Hatcher looked at the metal stairs, rising up to the next level. “What's up there?”

  “Some quarters, a kitchen.”

  Hatcher moved back to the stairway, looked up. He kept still for almost a minute, listening. Nothing.

  “Your call,” he said.

  “Bartlett wouldn't be up there,” she said. “Not unless he was sleeping.”

  Hatcher nodded. “Those are the only monitors?”

  “Only ones I've seen. That guy Lonnie said it isn't manned very much. They only check it if the motion detectors go off. You look skeptical.”

  “It just seems like minimal surveillance for someone as paranoid as Bartlett. And they told you there were motion detectors? If that's true, I'm sure we set them off.”

  “I know,” Amy said, nodding. “But did they get to the monitors in time to see us?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  With Amy nodding to confirm the exit, Hatcher turned the latch of a hardened security door. It opened into a tight corridor with a slightly elevated metal-grate floor. The corridor led to another door. Hatcher paused at it, looked back at Amy, then opened it.

  The door fed into another hallway. It reminded him of the bowels of a submarine. Tight confines, exposed piping and conduit, an absence of windows.

  “Up ahead,” Amy said, voice low. “Around that corner is where Bartlett seemed to set up shop.”

  Hatcher nodded. He looked to his right, back to his left, waited. No sounds, no movement. Just some light spilling from around the bend.

  He headed cautiously, listening for his own footsteps.

  They waited at the turn. Hatcher listened again, angled his head so he could pan a larger and larger portion of the hall as he leaned, careful to expose as little of himself as possible.

  Nothing. Just a piped and vented stretch of subterranean corridor. Light fixtures every few feet, doors every few yards.

  He stepped out into the hall. Amy followed.

  “Down there,”
she said, pulling close to be near his ear. “Toward the end. That's where they took me at first, I think.”

  Hatcher nodded but said nothing. They made their way to where she'd indicated, pace a bit more deliberate now. He paused at each door, listening first, then glancing through any glass. A few had lights on, but were empty. Others, completely dark.

  Before they reached the end, Amy tapped his shoulder and pointed to a door to the right. It seemed to be the last one before the corridor terminated at a large set of metal double doors.

  A large room, probably multi-functional. Hatcher imagined it used as a dining hall and a recreational area. Maybe even for mock promotion ceremonies, if Bartlett were trying to instill a sense of military authenticity. The lights were on. It was empty.

  Hatcher glanced back out into the hall, then shut the door.

  Amy stepped over to another interior door and opened it. She stepped through and flicked on a light switch. Two florescent bulbs buzzed to life. “This is where Bartlett explained it all to me,” she said, indicating a small conference table.

  The room wasn't exactly an office. But it didn't quite qualify as a war room, either. There were maps and a few flatscreen TVs. Some bookshelves, a metal cabinet A laptop.

  Amy stopped to inspect a large, rectangular case leaning against the wall.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. This just wasn’t here before. Remember that excursion he took me on I told you about? The one where he'd seized all the computer equipment? I think this was in that guy’s bedroom. It was right next to some ridiculously expensive shotgun Bartlett was gushing over.”

  “And this is where his men took you to meet him?”

  “Yes. I mean, this is where we went after that whole thing I told you about.” She let out a humorless laugh. “Where he said I almost killed everyone.”

  She gestured through the windows that looked out into the rec area, and Hatcher's gaze settled on the far corner. A section of wall was missing. Scorch marks radiated out along the floor and adjacent sections like a dark starburst.