Harvey Bennett Mysteries: Books 1-3

by Nick Thacker

  His aide for this mission, the man who had been sitting across from him on the cargo plane, grabbed his elbow and helped Valére balance as they walked toward the door to the hidden maintenance elevator. He had decided just before completion to hide this elevator, restricting access to it once the larger machinery and computer systems had been put into place, and reserving its use to a few people.

  As they neared the elevator, its great door already sliding open, revealing a cage-like interior of steel and aluminum, he heard gunshots.

  The man at his side stiffened, but they continued walking. The other two soldiers walked in step behind them, properly providing Valére the protection he required.

  “Sounds like our team is engaging that Chinese force,” the man said.

  Valére nodded, closing his eyes. “Did you ever discover the reason for their arrival?” he asked.

  “They intercepted a signal from when SARA came online. Apparently she sucked a lot of bandwidth over here during her initial power-up cycle, and a couple of surveillance satellites programmed to McMurdo saw it.”

  We should never have been so close, Valére thought. He had argued against building the base so close to the American research station, but he had been outvoted, back when there was a protocol for decision-making via quorum. He wanted Draconis to establish a station on the other side of the Transantarctic Range, but the logistics of getting the equipment and supply chain set up in a much more volatile weather zone was too hard a sell.

  He hoped the Chinese were the only nation who had seen the signal, and he knew that was likely. The Chinese had been a constant thorn in his side, even since before he had taken the helm. They were incessant about their surveillance, and they seemed to have unlimited resources to deploy in the interest of securing defense secrets for themselves. It had cost Valére a fortune to defend against their snooping, but even he knew it was only a matter of time before they would find a chink in his armor.

  As it turned out, the chink in his armor was the armor itself. SARA, in charge of every automated system on the station from climate-control to shutdown and reboot procedures, was also tasked with its security and defense. When someone had attempted to shut down the heating system throughout the base, SARA had immediately overridden their access and cycled it back on. She was good at her job, but Valére wanted better. He wanted perfection.

  He was frustrated with her massive power requirements, but for now it was a necessary evil. Soon, after the Chinese threat and the much smaller threat from Joshua Jefferson and his crew were eliminated, Valére would be able to streamline SARAs functionality, eventually to be able to use less than half of the computing power that was available below his feet.

  “There’s a team coming up to Level One, sir,” the man told him as they stepped into the elevator car. “We need to get moving; they’re probably setting up a position here in the hangar to ambush the Chinese when they draw them out in the open.”

  Valére nodded, allowing his aide to help him into the elevator, and the doors slid shut just as the deafening sound of gunfire began spilling out into the hangar.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The first shots danced wide of their target, but Ben heard two of the tiny bullets fired from the quadcopter ricochet off the side of the metal vent. He pulled his legs in quickly, hoping to get far enough into the shaft to escape the volley of miniature bullets.

  He slid farther, hearing the quad hovering just outside the shaft. There was enough room to roll over, and lay on his back, where he might be able to get a better look at his attacker, but he didn’t want to risk catching a bullet to the face, no matter how small.

  Ben remembered the first of Hendricks’ men to get hit back in the transport vehicle. Not only had the shot cracked through the thick glass windows, but it had seriously injured the man as well.

  Ben slid a bit farther, finally feeling some distance between his feet and the helicopter. Just when he began to assume the drone had lost interest in him, it fired again.

  This time, the shots were on target. One of the bullets grazed his pant leg, searing a hole directly through the thick ski pants.

  One of the bullets hit the metal next to him, again ricocheting off into the shaft.

  And one of the bullets landed in the back of his calf muscle.

  He howled, unable to control the outburst. The scream carried far down the shaft, and no doubt into the level below. The ripping pain of the tiny bullet flared in intensity after the shock of the attack left his system, and his body reacted involuntarily. He had never been shot before, but he’d thought about it often, knowing that in the last year it had become a realistic possibility with his and Julie’s escapades at Yellowstone and in the Amazon Rainforest. He had wondered whether it would truly hurt, or if it would be more like the Die Hard scene where Bruce Willis shot through his own shoulder to kill the bad guy behind him — hurt, but a ‘Hollywood’ type of hurt. A pain that could be overcome, just long enough to deliver the punch line of an hours-long joke, to fully satisfy the audience.

  He racked his brain for a good punchline, trying to take his mind off of the pain.

  “Dammit. This hurts.” He winced, then tried to slowly move his leg.

  He shook his head in frustration, both at his failure to come up with something good to say as well as how poorly Bruce Willis had portrayed what it felt like to get shot. That guy needs to be shot, he thought. It’ll help his acting.

  His nerves were on fire, and adrenaline began coursing through his body. He felt better, but certainly nowhere in the realm of ‘good.’ The wound was bleeding slowly, and he could almost feel it coursing blood up and over his pants, momentarily warming the skin around the bullet hole and then freezing as it came in contact with the Antarctic air. It had grown much colder outside, some of the frigid air snaking its way down the shaft and onto Ben, consuming him, and the adrenaline helped a bit. He shivered, trying to wake up his numbing fingers and toes.

  He winced in agony as he forced himself onto one side, raising his pistol with another hand. He had stashed the gun in the backpack, opting to take the smaller weapon instead of an AK-47. The gun was loaded already, and he raised it and aimed just as the drone’s turret began spinning up.

  He pulled two shots from the trigger and the drone sparked and flew away. He couldn’t tell if he had hit it in a crucial spot, but the fact wasn’t lost on him that, at the moment, the tiny square of cold Antarctic air at the other end of the shaft was currently devoid of any flying attackers.

  Do I move down the shaft or come back out and fight?

  The decision was the only thing in Ben’s mind at the moment, and it was plaguing him. Moving farther down the shaft meant he would reach the lower levels sooner, and accomplish his mission, but it also meant he would be in plain sight of another drone attack, should it choose to fly back down, for the entirety of his time in the shaft. Furthermore, he could clearly see that the rectangular shaft was plenty wide enough to offer a flight path for the drone. He didn’t like his chances of going one-on-one with a flying killing machine while cramped inside an air duct. But if he moved out to try to attack the drone once again, he was putting himself in harm’s way from not only the drone, but the elements as well. The temperature was still dropping, and he could tell from the slowly throbbing pain in his calf that it was helping to numb the wound but simultaneously freezing the rest of his body. He wasn’t dressed for an outdoor excursion, and he certainly wasn’t feeling up to the task.

  And his last realization was the determining factor. I don’t feel like I can do it, he thought. And immediately after, and that’s why I need to do it. I need to fight.

  He wasn’t a fighter — he had barely been in a fistfight his entire life — but he knew he could put up a fight if the need arose. And right now something nagged at him. A feeling he had never really understood, but one he had seen played out again and again in a single scene from his memory that he could never erase. His father was there, and his nine-year-old ki
d brother, and a very upset mother bear. The bear had mauled his father, both species of parents trying to protect their children, and he had almost been killed on the spot. Ben had intervened, shooting the bear with his father’s rifle and forcing it away long enough to save his brother and dad, but Ben’s father had succumbed to his injuries later and left Ben and his brother, Zachary, fatherless. His mother had never fully recovered from losing her husband, and Ben had the feeling she had even partially blamed him for his father’s death.

  Ever since he had passed away, Ben had been fraught with regret, partly assuming his mother was correct, and that he was to blame for his father’s death. But when his mother had succumbed to the virus infecting her about a year ago and passed, he experienced a sort of shift. His mindset changed, almost immediately, from someone living in regret — living in the past — to someone focused on the next thing. He charged forward with Juliette Richardson at his side, and together they had done more in the last months than any other time in his life.

  And in the moment it took for Ben to remember this, he realized that was his reason for fighting. He knew he might have a small chance of surviving if he escaped the drone’s attack and continued inside, but he had made this his fight, and in doing so made it Julie’s as well. She had accepted the challenge and come here, to discover the answer to a question Ben had been stubbornly chasing for far too long.

  For that reason, this was Ben’s fight as well.

  He sighed, knowing he had never been the type to feel compelled to do something just for a girl.

  Yet here I am…

  He pushed back toward the opening of the shaft, bringing his pistol around to his side and shoving it between his pants and his hip. He needed all his strength to push against the weight of his injured leg, but he wanted the weapon to be ready if the drone came back.

  As he neared the final stretch before he exited once again out into the frigid air, the drone came back.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-one

  The drone was tilting slightly off-axis, as if it was being pulled to the side by an invisible length of string. For that reason, the drone had to recalculate the trajectory of its weapon, adjusting on the fly. It fired a few bursts of the metal pellets toward the shaft, but Ben didn’t even flinch. He could see the turret mounted beneath the flying object clearly enough to know the bullets weren’t even properly aimed down the shaft.

  He winced with a final exertion of effort as the pain in his leg rose up and fought him at the final stretch, then he was out of the shaft. He immediately noticed that the situation outside the air shaft had changed. First, the weather had turned, and he was wearing nothing but a thin layer of clothing over his upper body in temperatures that had to be approaching minus twenty degrees. The wind had nearly knocked him sideways when he first landed on the soft snow outside the air duct, and it took a moment of maneuvering his one good leg around in the snow to hold the extra weight of his leaning body.

  I’m not going to make it out here for too long, he realized. He felt stupid for choosing to make his way back out of the shaft. His body was still cold from his first trek outside, and it had renewed the numbing sensation on his extremities almost as soon as he had reached the air outside. Now, with the winds toppling down into the canyon from far above his head, and the temperature clearly dropping by the minute, he wondered what the life expectancy was for someone clothed improperly.

  He looked up and saw something he had feared since Hendricks had briefed them on the trip. A storm had been swelling around the base, dark clouds twirling together and ominously hinting at their imminent release of ice and snow. He wondered if the weather would hold out long enough for whatever was about to happen involving the drone, or if he would have two enemies — one man-made, one nature — to deal with.

  The drone was hovering a few feet away, still struggling against the raging wind. Its turret was flailing around in a circle, trying to acquire the target that had just popped out of the hole in the side of the cliff. Ben saw through the thickening haze of snow that the helicopter was having a much more difficult time in the nasty weather than he, and he planned to use that to his advantage.

  No sense hanging out here any longer than necessary.

  He lunged forward, forgetting that his leg was still raw with the injury, and fell on his face in the snow. The cold hit him hard, and he pushed up, trying to roll to a sitting position, but fell again when his arm pushed through a bank of softer powder.

  He grunted in frustration, feeling vulnerable to attack, but the drone still hadn’t righted itself. He finally was able to roll onto his back, then sat up and carefully brought himself to his feet. The drone had flown down the canyon about ten feet, but was still focused generally on Ben’s location. He assumed his fall had confused the drone’s sensors and caused it to overreact, veering out of control and down into the wind, only recovering farther away from Ben’s location.

  Okay then, he thought, that’s a strategy.

  He jumped on his good foot, trying to land as far away from his previous position as possible. The drone once again tried to react to the motion and anticipate its attacker’s next move, and in so doing was again pulled into the stream of air that had simultaneously burst into the canyon. It spun completely around, dipping toward the ground a few feet before regaining its balance.

  Ben almost smiled, now realizing he had the upper hand. These guys are an awesome defense mechanism in good weather. Not so much in this crap.

  He jumped forward twice, barely keeping his balance on one foot, like a crazed hopscotch player. He paused for less than a second then hopped to his right, coming only a few feet away from the drone.

  This time the drone couldn’t react in time. It fired a volley of bullets — spraying the area near the air shaft with a barrage of poorly aimed shots — and flipped completely upside-down.

  The tiny engine whined against the billowing air as it tried to correct, but it lurched forward and down, where Ben’s pistol was waiting in his outstretched arm. He swung downward as hard as he could, catching the drone just as it applied a bit of lift to try to counteract its fall. The pistol smacked hard against the outer ring protecting one of the rotors, and the pistol’s barrel caught the rotor itself. The smaller rotor stood little chance against the heavy metal barrel, and the drone spun wildly up and away, then into the cliff, where it destroyed itself in a heap of metal and electronic components.

  “There you go, you little bastard,” Ben said aloud to himself. He was freezing now, and the vibration from the pistol hitting the drone had caused his arm to explode in pain. For a brief moment it took his mind off the pain of his injured leg, but after a second he was simply in pain all over his body.

  I need to keep moving, he thought. He knew hypothermia was quick to set in, and combined with the exertion and injury, he knew he was a prime candidate for losing a few toes or fingers. He focused his attention on the welcoming hole in the cliff: the rectangular opening that meant respite from the cold, and started back that direction.

  He was only ten feet away from the hole, but the trek seemed impossible in the conditions. The storm was now fully upon him, and he breathed heavier as his body pushed harder and harder to stave off the wind. He was in a wind tunnel now, and the air had been turned up all the way.

  Three more hobbled steps and he would be at the open vent, ready to push through to the final leg of his mission.

  Two more.

  An image of Julie came up in his mind, and he savored the thought of seeing her again, knowing he just had to make it to this vent shaft.

  One more step.

  He leaned down, ready to stick his head into the shaft, and already he could feel slightly warmer air emanating from the vent.

  He reached out for the sides of the shaft, his hands trembling as they froze.

  Ben heard a voice behind him, muffled in the storm and softened by the man’s balaclava, and he was about to turn around when he felt the sharp crack of a pistol against the back
of his skull. His eyelids fluttered for a split-second as his mind raced to provide him a solution, then he blacked out.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-two

  “We’re going down there,” Julie said.

  Reggie looked up from his post, crouching behind an upturned table, and frowned. “What did you say? We’re going where?”

  “We’re going down a level,” she said.

  “Jules, I don’t think Ben’s —“

  “Ben’s not down there,” Julie said. Her voice was shaking slightly, but she paused and tried to force back the emotions. “With the storm, and — and whatever else, I know he’s not going to be down there. That’s the point. That’s exactly why we’re going.”

  By now, the rest of the group — Ryan Kyle, Mrs. E, Joshua, and Jonathan Colson — was looking at her, waiting.

  “We need to finish this. If not for ourselves, for Ben.”

  Reggie smiled, a gentle, even-keeled line on his face that said more about the situation and his undying optimism than any words he could have spoken.

  “I know it’s crazy. We’ve got two enemies converging on us down here, and whenever they’re done fighting they’ll turn to us. Or they’ll toss a few grenades down this way and just finish the job before that. So we’re sitting ducks.”

  She looked around. “You all know it, or you would have argued with me already.”

  “We’re not disagreeing, Jules,” Reggie said. “We just don’t have a plan that doesn’t end with us all getting skewered.”

  “I do.”

  The intensity of their stares increased, and for a moment the room was silent, as if all three groups of fighters were listening in.

  “We’ll rush the elevator.”

  “Julie, that’s never going to —“

  “We’re not going to take the elevator, but it’s still an open elevator shaft, right? We won’t have time to wait for the car, and then wait for the doors to close and all that, so we’ll just break through the outer cage and jump down the shaft.”