He couldn’t fault Danny’s initial assumption. They’d seen only one other car cross the bridge since they’d crawled through the brush lining the river on their mile-long trek from the state campground, where Denise was taking a nap in the back of the truck. He hoped this was just a routine assignment for the Guardsmen, and not a security measure actively looking for something or someone in particular.
One of the Guardsmen had a laptop opened up on the tailgate of an ancient Dodge power wagon, done up in olive drab. He caught himself smiling as he tried to focus in on the sergeant, who paid a lot more attention to the laptop than he did the bored soldiers around him. They could do this, but it was going to be a job for Denise.
“You guys see a wireless tower around here?”
Josh and Danny were out of their element back at the campground. They stood within a few feet of the back of their truck with fishing poles in hand, looking back behind them as Denise’s fingers flew across the keyboard of her own laptop.
“Got ’em!” Denise had just shouted.
“Huh?” Derek knew Josh was still disappointed that he hadn’t gotten to run anybody over.
“She’s inside the signal of whatever that laptop on the bridge is talking to,” Derek explained from where he sat on the tailgate. Denise was under the truck’s shell roof in a lawn chair, using the campground’s Wi-Fi network.
“They’re monitoring a drone signal,” Denise said after a moment. “It’s well west of here, over the freeway.”
“She can do that from her laptop?”
Derek could tell Danny didn’t mean to give offense; his surprise was genuine.
“She used to program those rovers on Mars,” he explained. “For NASA.”
Denise looked up at him a moment later and smiled. “I’ve got control of it. Should I crater it?”
“You think it will get them repositioned? Pulled off the bridge?”
“Maybe,” Denise answered. “There’s at least three other teams on this subnetwork, but I don’t have their locations without access to a map of the cell tower IDs. I could get that, but it could take some time.”
“Yeah, let’s take the drone out.”
Denise’s fingers clicked on the keyboard for a few seconds. “Oval patrol pattern becomes a shallow dive into a potato field.”
“Just like that?” Danny asked. “It doesn’t explode or anything?”
“It’ll look like a control issue; it’ll just crash,” Denise answered for herself with a glance at her screen.
“We sure could have used you last winter, Ms. Denise,” Josh said. “The Army had drones up everywhere. We couldn’t move without being spotted.”
“We did manage to take a few of them out on the ground, though,” Danny added with a laugh and punched his brother in the arm.
“This way would have been a hell of a lot easier. Can anybody learn to do what you just did?”
Denise held a finger up to silence Josh. Her eyes were focused on her laptop. They all waited expectantly, until she clapped once with a big smile. “It’s down!”
“What do we do now?” Josh asked.
“We wait,” Derek added, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. The road to the bridge went right past the campground. “Keep an eye out on the highway, and see if the team on the bridge gets ordered elsewhere. I’ll go back along the river in a few minutes to see if they pulled out west across the bridge.”
“I figured we’d see some action on this trip. You didn’t even need us.” Josh looked as disappointed as he sounded.
“Guys, we’d be lost in Wyoming right now without you,” Denise said.
“There is that,” Derek added. “Besides, this trip isn’t over yet. We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Yeah.” Josh nodded to himself. “If they don’t get ordered out, I can still steal a grain truck and ram them right off the bridge. If we can get a motorcycle, I can get them chasing me into the hills while you all drive right through, easy-peasy.”
“Let’s just give it some time,” Derek offered. He didn’t trust himself to look at Denise. “We’re still roughly a day ahead of what we gave ourselves to get there.”
Time was all it took. Less than ten minutes later, Denise reported a flurry of communications between the National Guard unit on the bridge and one of the other nodes on their network. She couldn’t break out the encrypted comms being used, but within another ten minutes, the National Guard convoy of two trucks and the old pickup went past their campground in plain sight, headed south.
Denise slid off the tailgate slowly and faced Josh, giving him a light punch on the arm. “Maybe next time, Josh.”
*
Chapter 8
New Seattle, Eden
“Be careful, OK.” He knew Elisabeth was done being angry at him. She was reduced to a low simmer, understanding why he needed to go and not liking that answer. At this point, there wasn’t anyone more important to their long-term survivability than Dr. David Jensen. Kyle knew Elisabeth understood that, and besides, it wasn’t like he was planning on going to Chandra with Jake and Audy. According to Doc Jensen, this trip was to the back of beyond Idaho; how bad could it be?
“I will,” he replied, giving her a big hug. “You and the package be careful as well.”
“It’s your child,” she said, pulling back. “You can at least stop calling it ‘the package.’”
“Nothing’s more important than the package,” he countered with a smile.
She just rolled her eyes and gave him a kiss. “Go, before you tick me off again.”
He let go of her hand and dropped down to pick up his pack off the floor of the New Seattle portal room, wondering if there was ever going to be a time when grabbing a bag and gun wouldn’t be a regular occurrence in his life. Saying goodbye to someone was a new experience for him, and he didn’t like it. How many times, at the edge of a deployment or mission, had he worried that the head of one of his guys was still back at home with a wife or girlfriend? Now he was having to force himself to get his own head right. He didn’t like the feeling.
“You guys ready?”
He had walked up to Jeff Krouse, who assured him with a simple nod that he was. Dom Majeski stood a few feet away, saying goodbye to a young woman he hadn’t met. Hans Van Slyke was standing next to Doc Jensen near the portal doors, looking like a statue towering over Jensen’s handpicked team of a half dozen technicians. All of them were dressed for hiking and camping; he himself had ordered that. But looking at the technical team, he almost laughed. They looked like a group shot of an outdoor magazine’s idea of a camping trip.
“I bet half of them have never even slept outside.” Jeff must have been thinking the same thing he had been.
“Ready,” Dom said as he walked up.
“Who’s the girl?” Jeff asked.
“Girlfriend,” Dom said simply, and looked at him again. “I’m ready.”
He clapped Dom on his shoulder. Dom understood; the kid’s father had probably read him the riot act many times before; “You go on mission, you leave your life, your concerns at home. You don’t, you may never see either again.”
They all turned as a heister rolled up with its beacon light and beeping warning going full tilt. It was carrying a pallet’s worth of equipment and gear.
“Who’s going to carry all that shit?” Jeff asked.
“I’ll give you one guess.” Kyle shook his head.
Doc Jensen had warned him that there would be a “significant” amount of gear. “Better to have it when we need it; not like I’ll be able to fabricate a spare part,” he’d said.
“I think the scientists may need to break in some of their new boots.” Dom smiled. “We’ll need to remain hands free, to provide security, yes?”
Kyle smiled; he’d been thinking the same thing. “That works.”
Doc Jensen waved him over to the group of technicians. “With me, guys.”
They all walked up, and he stopped as Jensen started the introductions.
He didn’t worry about Jensen at all. The guy had put himself through school on a GI Bill, and was a veteran of the first Gulf War. The rest of his team was a different matter. Jensen himself had warned him. He put on his fake team leader smile. The one that left no doubt he was smiling for their sake, to be polite.
“Once we are set up and secure at the site, we’ll work for you. We’ll fetch water, we’ll keep you fed, we’ll hand you the Phillips head screwdriver when you ask for it. Until that time, during our insertion, until you are tucked into sleeping bags tonight, we will be in tactical control. That is a polite way of saying in complete control. There is nothing democratic about it by design. Anything, I or one of these gentlemen behind me suggests—you do. Are we all clear on that?”
He got the necessary nods in reply. One of the technicians, an older guy, jerked his head up and down rapidly. “I am understanding completely.”
The man looked familiar to him.
“Have we met?”
“Yes, Mr. Lassiter. I am Dr. Tomas Kovarik. My daughter is betrothed to your friend Jason Morales.” Now he remembered. The barbeque out in Chief Joseph a couple of months ago. Jason had introduced him.
“Last time I did this,” Doc Jensen spoke up, “I was utilizing a theorem that Dr. Kovarik had come up with years earlier.”
“Great.” He added a polite nod to both of them. All he could think of was a hope that whatever Jensen had to do with the phone booth would go quicker with Kovarik along.
“We ready?”
“Now that our gear has arrived”—Doc Jensen pointed at the pallet of gear—“yes.”
“About the gear . . .”
Idaho, Earth
The experience of translation was no different than what he had remembered, though he could not remember ever being so scared that he was risking a one-way trip. If they couldn’t get the phone booth working, it would be months before the new one under construction at New Seattle would be able to come and retrieve them.
Kyle opened his eyes to the late October midday sun, shining down on the forested hillside within the Caribou-Targhee National Forest on Earth. Their translation had killed any natural sound the forest may have been making in the instant before they’d intruded on the peace of the place with their instantaneous displacement of atmosphere. The echo of the thunderclap was still bouncing between the walls of the narrow canyon.
He felt some relief as his eyes flashed to a large bird of prey soaring on a thermal over the middle of the shallow canyon below them. The distant sound of a mountain stream reached his ears. The governments of Earth hadn’t destroyed the place, yet. Though they’d probably changed the name of the forest to something along the lines of the “People’s Green Space” by now.
The sound of retching startled him. He turned around in time to see one of the PhDs doubled over, having just sprayed Jeff’s boots with the contents of his stomach. He looked up into the former SEAL’s eyes and was rewarded with a look of resigned disgust. All he could do was smile and shrug. He was both surprised and proud of Jeff for taking it in stride, but he knew he’d hear about it later.
“OK, Doc,” he said loudly. “You’re with me and Jeff. Show us where we’re going.”
He did a double take as all six of the technicians shifted and gathered up around him. He realized his mistake.
“I’ll figure out your names, I promise. For now, Dr. Jensen is ‘the doc.’
“The rest of you, unpack that pallet. Prioritize the gear. We’ll start daisy-chaining the stuff once we figure out where we’re headed.”
Jensen’s recollection of the site was spot on. The translation had keyed to the lat/long the doctor had provided, but their insertion point had still been in a forest, in an area that was characterized by thickets of thick brush. Without Jensen’s help, they would have spent hours wandering around looking for the entrance to the mine. As it was, the doc was able to point down the hill.
“It’s just below us, about two hundred yards.”
“You sure, Doc?” Jeff looked around them. “It all looks the same to me.”
“City kid!” Jensen shook his head.
“Aren’t you from New Jersey, Doc?”
Jensen smiled at them both, and started leading them downhill.
He stopped them after they’d separated from the other technicians. “Allow an old man his white lies. The rest of my team thinks I spent a lot longer in the Army than I did. You can’t imagine the gravitas that imparts. In their world, I’m a unicorn.”
Kyle mentally shook his head. The doc understood the theory and math behind the quantum tunnel better than anyone. He was a purple unicorn. The mine’s entrance was thirty yards uphill from the overgrown track at the creek’s edge. Looking at the small entrance, braced with archaic railroad ties, above the rusted-out remains of a small-gauge rail system, Kyle did a double take.
“How in the hell did you guys do this?”
“Private land.” Jensen shrugged. “Owned by our friend Phillip Westin. We ported the device from Eden directly into a large chamber within. His people came in, added some renovation, made sure it all looked dangerously unstable, and even planted some of this brush. As you can see, it’s taken over the entire hillside. It grows quite fast—”
“Doc,” Kyle interrupted.
“Sorry.” Jensen started forward. “There’s a security system panel that should disconnect the claymores just inside.”
Kyle and Jeff pulled up short.
“Doc?”
“Joking,” Jensen shouted over his shoulder as he trudged on. “You don’t think we’d risk killing hunters or local kids looking for a place to throw a kegger, do you?”
The entrance to the mine had a rusted, yet still solid mesh grill set into the rock face. There were old danger signs and some newer ones posted by the State of Idaho’s Department of Lands, detailing several different types of dangers inherent in old mines. Everything from collapse danger to dangerous gases was highlighted. Between the warnings and the very much intact physical barrier, no one was going to ‘accidently’ get inside.
“Should be right here.” Jensen was pressing on a visible knot in the vertical railroad tie on the right edge of the entrance. They could all see the hidden button depressing into the wood, but nothing was happening.
“Doesn’t seem to be working.” Jensen stood back from the entrance and ran a hand through his short-cropped white hair.
“What’s it supposed to do?”
“It releases a mechanism, and the gate swings upward.”
Kyle leaned against the heavy wire mesh. “Push it again.”
Nothing.
“Shit . . .”
Kyle and Jeff shared a look of concern at the outburst from Jensen.
“I’m getting old.” Jensen turned to smile at both of them.
“Mr. Krouse.” Jensen pointed to the opposite timber on the left. “If you would depress that knot there, while I push this one.”
That worked. A hidden mechanism clicked loudly, and the gate came up, along with the timber supports, rolling up into the ceiling like a solid-piece garage door, revealing a concrete-and-steel entranceway within. The mine, starting about fifteen feet inside the entrance, sported a poured concrete floor visible via the line of LED tube lighting that flickered to life. They could see the narrow hallway running back, gently curving to the right until it disappeared.
Jensen flashed them an embarrassed look of chagrin. “I hope I didn’t forget anything else.” The doctor reached down, grabbed his own pack off the ground, and entered the mine, waving at them to follow. “Come on, it’s as safe as a hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old silver mine can be.”
“I can’t tell if he’s fucking with us on purpose,” Jeff whispered as he held out an arm, indicating Kyle should go first. “Or if he really is a crazy scientis
t.”
“Little bit of both.” He grinned. “I hope.”
They walked on a gradual downslope for what Kyle figured was about a hundred yards. They came to a well-lit chamber with a finished concrete floor about thirty feet square. Jensen went directly across to a railing on the far side that terminated in a metal set of stairs that led downward.
“Last time we were here, we used this area to set up in,” Jensen said. He indicated the open gallery that looked to have been hewn from the rock by chisel and pick. “The portal room is just down these stairs,” Jensen announced before leading the way.
They followed the doctor down a much wider tunnel until they were stopped by what looked like a very out of place bank vault door. Jensen stood there waiting for them with a big grin on his face.
“Some minor renovations?” he asked, admiring the vault door.
“Courtesy of Sir Geoff,” Jensen answered, before pointing at the floor at Jeff’s feet.
“There’s a hidden panel in the floor. The seam in the concrete should be visible if you look closely.”
He couldn’t see anything until Jeff took a knee and wiped away the accumulated dust from a wide area.
“Got it.”
“Facing me, depress the upper left and lower right corners of the panel firmly.”
“You sure?” Jeff asked, his thumbs hovering over the panel.
“I hope so.” Jensen nodded. “There aren’t claymores inside, but if we screw up, the charges will take out enough of the phone booth to make it inoperable.”
“So, you’re sure?” Jeff asked again.
“Yes, I’m certain.” Jensen may or may not have been screwing with them earlier, but he looked dead serious right now.
Jeff depressed the panel just as he’d been instructed, and the panel popped open on a spring-loaded, hinged lid. Inside was a simple toggle switch.
“Don’t touch the switch, Mr. Krouse.”
“I’m not touching anything.”
New Shores: The Eden Chronicles - Book Three Page 10