Callsign: King II- Underworld (12 page)

Pierce nodded. “It’s a
banliang
coin, from the Qin Dynasty. This coin is more than two thousand years old.”

“How in God’s name did it get here?”

Pierce grimaced. “You were right about there being another way out.” Pierce said, unable to keep the awe from his voice. “I just hope we don’t have to walk that far.”

23.

King had done more than his share of covert infiltrations, some more successful than others. Luck played a role, but what really made the difference between an effective sneak-and-peek and a clusterfuck of epic proportions was advanced planning based on reliable intel. With Deep Blue guiding them remotely, updating them with real time satellite imagery or infrared surveillance from an unmanned drone, Chess Team had become masters of stealthy insertion into potentially hostile environments.

King had none of those advantages tonight. No Deep Blue, no eye in the sky, no backup. And perhaps worst of all, no time.

He spent several minutes studying the area surrounding the cinderblock structure that had been the final destination for the driver of the SUV. There didn’t appear to be any security cameras or motion sensors, and he saw no evidence of a security patrol. Although he could have been wrong about any one of those observations, there was nothing more to be gained through further surveillance.

“I’d much rather do this alone,” he told Nina, then forestalled her immediate protest with a raised hand. “I think we both know that it’s not a good idea to split up. But you’re going to have to follow my lead and do everything I say.”

She nodded, but was clearly irked at being relegated to the role of tagalong.

King left the Humvee concealed behind a low hill and they set off on foot across the open ground, a distance of about half a mile. They moved low and slow at first, with King in the lead, constantly scanning for trip wires and other early warning detection systems. As they got closer though, King realized his caution was unnecessary.

The building he now thought of as the Bluelight Facility, might have actually had a working security system at one time, possibly even earlier in the night, but precautions designed to keep out human intruders had been of little use in turning back a wave of Mogollon Monsters.

The eight-foot fence surrounding the building had been ripped apart like the wrapping on an eight-year old’s Christmas present. Beyond the fence line, were the shattered remains of two passenger cars, and King saw that the white SUV had also taken a pounding. There were holes in the concrete wall, some decorated with snags of long dark human hair and streaks of blood. The metal door leading inside was still on its hinges, but the exterior doorknob had been ripped off, and it was evident that the panel had been repeatedly hammered with fists and feet.

King led the way through the wreckage and cautiously pulled the door open. The entry foyer beyond was dark, but judging by the lack of damage, it appeared that the creatures had not breached the interior of the building.

A strip of light, barely visible to the naked eye but glowing bright in the night vision display, shone from beneath a door at the end of the corridor. King switched off the monocular, shouldered his carbine, and stealthily approached the door.

There were voices beyond—at least two people—engaged in a conversation. He twisted the doorknob slowly and opened it just a crack.

“—all left when those things attacked. It’s just me now.” The voice was male—probably Copeland, King thought—and his tone was almost frantic.

“Are you able to verify a direct link between this incursion and activation of the Bluelight generator?” This voice was female and considerably louder, filling the room. King realized right away that it was issuing from a speaker, but there was something odd about the person’s speech pattern. There was a barely perceptible lag between each word, and an almost total lack of emotion.

“A link?” Copeland replied incredulously. “Every time we fire the damn thing up, those creatures show up and start killing everyone. What more evidence do you need?”

“There is an eighty-two point one percent probability that these events are correlated. However, until the mechanism explaining the connection is understood, the experiments must continue.”

“It sounds like one of those automated phone call systems,” Nina whispered in King’s ear.

King had already figured that out. Computer voice technology had come a long way from the synthesized speech depicted in movies like the classic
War Games
. Modern software could almost instantly piece together sentences from prerecorded words, assembling them like fragments cut out of a dictionary and pasted onto a sheet of paper, but there were limits to the technology; it was impossible for the software to mimic the natural tone and inflection of a real person. But it was something else the voice had said that caused a huge piece of the puzzle to fall into place.

Oblivious to his revelation, Nina continued. “It sounds like they know that whatever they’re doing here is driving the Mogollons crazy.”

“Shhh.”

“No, no, no! We don’t dare turn it on again.”

“The objective cannot be achieved until the external threat is mitigated,” the female voice replied blandly. “You must accelerate the timetable. Drawing the hostiles into the open will provide military assets with an opportunity to eliminate the threat permanently.”

“Those things wiped out your precious military assets. Dozens of soldiers are missing…probably dead. The general blames me for that.”

“Blame is irrelevant. Military assets now have a more complete understanding of the threat, and will subsequently escalate their response. There is a seventy-eight point three percent probability that the threat will be completely eliminated within three experimental cycles.”

Any lingering doubts King might have had were swept away by the electronically produced voice’s second probability assessment. Brainstorm!

Just a few short weeks ago, King had learned of the mysterious entity known as Brainstorm. Hardly anything was known about Brainstorm. Deep Blue had hinted at the possibility that it was in reality an artificial intelligence program that had infiltrated computer networks around the world. It was surreptitiously controlling corporations and governments alike, all to advance an unknown, but almost certainly apocalyptic agenda; King’s first encounter with Brainstorm had uncovered a scheme intended to turn literally billions of people into a mindless drone labor force.

During that mission, King had interacted directly with Brainstorm utilizing a similar electronic voice interface that effectively masked the true identity—the true nature—of Brainstorm, but whatever he, she, it or they was or were, Brainstorm saw the world entirely in terms of probabilities.

Brainstorm didn’t think small. Whatever its interest in Bluelight, it almost certainly spelled bad news on a global scale.

“Commence the next activation cycle in forty-seven minutes, and fifteen seconds. Mark.”

King immediately pressed a button on his wristwatch, activating the stopwatch function.

“This is insane,” Copeland muttered.

“Negative. If your supposition is correct, and the events with hostiles of unknown origin are directly connected to the activation of the Bluelight generator, then repeated aggravation of the hostiles by that method is the only way to ensure their extermination. The Bluelight facility will be adequately protected. Military assets are now aware of the true nature of the threat and will be able to eliminate it more effectively. This is the course of action with the highest probability of success, and will ensure continued operation of the Bluelight generator.”

As the electronically produced voice droned on, King began his own probability assessment. He didn’t know what Bluelight was, but it was plainly evident that Copeland was critical to its operation.

King eased the door open a little more, and saw the physicist seated at a workstation in a room that looked like a scaled down version of NASA mission control. Copeland was alone.

Take Copeland…or take him out…and Bluelight is dead in the water. Problem solved
.

But before he could take that next step, something in his pocket started buzzing like a swarm of angry bees.

Damn it, Aleman
. The tech expert should have known better than to call in the middle of an infiltration. King eased the door closed and dug the phone from his pocket.

His heart skipped a beat when he saw the name on the caller ID.

“Who is it?” Nina whispered.

King fought to find his voice as he retreated from the door to the Bluelight control room. “I have to take this.”

24.

Pierce and De Bord ran for their lives.

Pierce blamed himself. He had been overconfident in his belief that the creatures would continue to ignore them, and so had ventured further into their subterranean territory than was, he now realized looking back, wise.

It wasn’t like they had strolled through the middle of a gathering. In fact, he wasn’t sure exactly how they’d gotten by the group of monsters that now stalked them. To the best of his knowledge, they hadn’t passed any junctions.

After leaving the burial cave, he and De Bord had continued through the exit passage, in the creatures’ wake. Although he secretly hoped to discover more about the strange, almost human beings, Pierce’s foremost goal was always to find a way back to the surface. It was plainly evident however that they were descending, deeper and deeper into the Earth’s crust. After more than a mile of walking, the cool cave air growing warmer with each vertical foot of drop, Pierce had begun second-guessing the initial decision to move forward.

“This ain’t gettin’ us anywhere,” De Bord had announced, as if tuning into the same psychic channel. “The entry was there. We both went through it. We must’ve just missed it somehow.”

Pierce had been on the verge of agreeing to the request when a glinting reflection caught his eye on the path ahead. “Let me check something out. Five more minutes, then we’ll turn back.”

De Bord hadn’t been happy about it, but he’d nodded, and Pierce had moved ahead into a cavern almost as large as the burial chamber. What he saw there left him speechless. It was, he imagined, the archaeological equivalent of winning the lottery.

It was impossible to say what purpose the room served for the beasts. It might have been the equivalent of a treasure room or perhaps a museum; if they were as intelligent as the totem necklaces seemed to indicate, then it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they might recognize the value in other human artifacts. Or, they might simply have been great big pack rats feathering their nest with anything shiny that caught their eye. Ultimately, the creatures’ motivation didn’t matter nearly as much as the actual content they had collected.

The room was piled high with artifacts from every part of the globe. Pierce’s eye was drawn immediately to something familiar, a pile of bronze armaments—swords, spearheads, helmets—from the early Greek Classical period. But right next to those were gold figurines that looked Meso-American. There was no logic to the arrangement; the only common thread was that all the pieces were metal, specifically metals or alloys that were resistant to corrosion. Reddish and green lumps on the floor marked the resting places of objects of iron and copper that had not survived the passage of centuries…millennia, even.

Yet, it was not the temporal journey of these artifacts that interested Pierce, but rather their physical journey. How had artifacts from civilizations in every corner the globe come to rest here, in this cave in Arizona?

There might have been an explanation for the ancient coins—the
banliang
and the
tetradrachm
—worn by the creatures as amulets. Coins had a way traveling well beyond the borders of their country of origin, and there was plenty of evidence to suggest that ancient mariners had visited the Americas many centuries before Columbus. Coins brought by travelers might have found their way into the underworld. But Pierce had also been entertaining another possibility, and what he saw here seemed to reinforce that theory.

Then De Bord had hastened into the cavern. “They’re right behind me,” the soldier had shouted, gripping Pierce’s shoulder and propelling him forward. “And they’re pissed.”

And so they had run. Deeper, ever deeper into the Earth.

The creatures, when he happened to glimpse them in the distance, were not driven by the rabid fury that had possessed them during the attack on the camp, but they were nevertheless agitated by the intrusion. Their shrieks multiplied as the sound echoed down the long tunnels, like the cries of the damned rising up from Hell itself. What he could not comprehend, what he dared not even stop to think about, was why they had not already been caught. The creatures were fast, and on their home turf; by all rights, Pierce and De Bord should have been caught a dozen times over.

They’re toying with us
, Pierce thought.
Some kind of cat-and-mouse game
.

Yet what alternative did they have but to scurry like mice?

“Left or right?” De Bord shouted.

Pierce glanced ahead and saw two diverging tunnels framed in the circle of the soldier’s flashlight. It was the first time they’d been confronted with such a choice, and now the enormity of the consequences of making the wrong decision seemed too terrible to contemplate. There were no obvious cues to suggest which path—if either—would lead to safety. Unlike the elaborate ruins he’d had occasion to explore, these passages were the work of nature, carved by flows of water and the vagaries of geology, without any thought for superstitious preferences. It was a coin-flip really.

“Left,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “Stay with the main passage.”

That it was the wrong choice became evident almost right away. Almost as soon as they passed the opening on the right, the creatures pursuing them let loose with a bone-jarring chorus of shrieks. Then, as if to answer them, a second cacophony erupted from the darkness directly ahead of them. They were caught between two groups of the creatures. De Bord skidded to a halt and raised his carbine, ready to make a desperate last stand.