Killer Thrillers Box Set: 3 Techno-Thriller, Action/Adventure Science Fiction Thrillers (53 page)

They’d been attacked by an overt force, and now by an unforeseen one. Was it the same one? Were they being toyed with one team member at a time?
 

Carter tried to imagine the woman’s final thoughts. He wasn’t much for sentimental reminiscing; he just wanted to gain insight into her untimely death. It was brutal, that was certain. But was it purposeful?
 

Were they not alone in these caves? Maybe there was something tracking them. Maybe there was something about this place that none of the previous inhabitants—none of the builders even—knew about.
 

He was getting ahead of himself. As a trained military officer, he was strategic-minded. When his subordinates thought through current situations, Carter thought three steps ahead. This mission was no different. He’d been thinking strategically since they’d disembarked.

He’d thought of the big questions.

Would they find whatever it was they were looking for?
 

Would they be able to retrieve Jen’s son?

Would they be able to stop whatever it was
Nouvelle Terre
was planning?

But he also thought through each of their situations in terms of cause and effect breakdowns. If they did A, would the enemy do B? And what if they didn’t? What were the alternatives? What were the pros and cons of each move?
 

He thought through these situations with the resolve needed by an officer of his command, but he also knew it made him cold, impersonal rather than charismatic, calculating rather than empathetic.
 

But he didn’t care.
 

He wasn’t good at what he did because his units
liked
him; he was good because he got the job done.
 

This was no different. It was a job, one that had defined objectives and specific deliverables, and he’d die before he gave up on them. He had nothing else in this life to lose, so he’d do what was required. A sharp stab of pain lanced through his body, but he just as quickly pressed it back down. He’d been told these psychological exertions were precursors to a more chronic form of PTSD, but he wouldn’t let something like that get in the way of his line of duty. He’d been down that road before.
 

Their current situation was unfortunate, but not mission-critical. They’d lost a member of their team, but it was a C-team member, at best. Dr. Richards, he knew, was here as a secondary
backup to Dr. Pavan.
 

A backup
to the backup.
 

If Jen couldn’t figure out what
Nouvelle Terre
wanted and deliver it, Dr. Sanjay Pavan—by all accounts an equally accomplished scientist—would. They’d move heaven and earth to get the job done because
Nouvelle Terre
had done their job extremely well.
 

They’d created an incentive for Jen that was impossible to ignore.
 

Jen spoke up from behind him as he walked. He’d almost forgotten he’d delivered an instruction.

“Carter,” she said. “I disagree. I think we need to stay here.”

Carter slowed, but he didn’t stop moving.

“We should at least try to figure out what attacked Lindsay, right? I mean, it’s still out here somewhere.”
 

He paused, trying to formulate a response.
 

“If we get to the upper levels and this—whatever it is—follows us there, we’ve got two problems.”

Carter finally stopped walking. He turned to Jen and the others. “Yes, but only one
of those problems will attack us. We need to get a jump on finding what
Nouvelle Terre’s
looking for.”
 

“But—”
 

Carter saw Jen’s husband frown at her, silently pleading with her to stop arguing. She hesitated, but then resumed her stubborn reasoning.
 

“Listen, Carter…
Sergeant
Carter…we’ve
got
to figure out what attacked Lindsay, and that’s going to be here. This cave system isn’t large, remember? We should be able to—”
 

“We’re moving.” Carter’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t argue further.
 

Jen opened her mouth to speak again, but was cut off by Dr. Pavan’s loud shout.
 

“Hey! Over here—look at these!” The man was standing on the side of the cavern, scrutinizing the cave wall. “Can someone shine their light over here?”
 

Saunders pointed her flashlight toward Dr. Pavan, illuminating the entire section of wall. She stepped forward, trying to see what the scientist had gotten excited about.
 

Carter couldn’t see anything either, but he stood his ground.
 

Erik and Jen both approached the wall as well, and it was Erik who spoke first.
 

“They’re scratches. Just like the ones on Lindsay.” He swallowed hard at speaking his former boss’ name.
 

“They’re all over this wall, and some of them are deep,” Jen said.
 

Carter was intrigued, but only momentarily. “It doesn’t matter. We need to get to that power plant and see what this is all about.”
 

“No, Carter,” Jen said. “I’m staying. This wall—those scratches on Lindsay—they’re not normal. These marks were caused by something, and we’ve got the evidence right in front of us to figure out what it is.”
 

“Why don’t we split up?” The group looked toward the speaker—Mark Adams. “We could split into two groups, one staying here, and one heading toward the power plant. There’s also a geothermal station on Level Four that I saw on the map. It’s probably tapped into the same plant, but it’s no doubt going to be more hospitable.”

Carter considered this option. He didn’t like it, but it was better than staying in one place. Jen would of course stay behind, as well as Dr. Pavan. Aside from examining the level surrounding the power plant, his mission was to find and eliminate the hostile force pursuing them. He’d need as much firepower as possible for that.
 

“Okay, fine. Mark, Erik, you’re with me. Mason and Saunders, you too.” The group began shuffling around, half of them preparing to leave with Carter.
 

“The rest—Jen, Dr. Pavan, Hog—you stay back. We’ll head to the main level first and make our way down using the stairs. Anything moves from that
direction—” he motioned with his head down the tunnel,“shoot it. Ask questions later.”

He nodded once, checked over the two groups, and turned to leave. He caught Mark’s eyes as he turned—wide and surprised—and knew that the man hadn’t intended this outcome.
 

Jen, however, seemed fine.
 

“Great. Dr. Pavan, what do you make of these marks?”

CHAPTER 23

“SO YOU’RE A COMPUTER GUY, then?”

“Yep. Been working in computer security for my entire professional life; just moved into management a few years ago,” Mark responded. He focused on the back of the soldiers head as they moved upward through the cave system.
 

Mark had been fielding questions the entire half hour they’d been walking, except for when they stopped in the large cavern where Lindsay’s body lay. The civilians wanted to bury her, or at least move her body somewhere else out of respect, but Carter knew that wasn’t an option. The ground was solid rock, and they didn’t know these tunnels well enough to know what “out of the way” meant.
 

Carter approached the sprawled figure, eyeing around it for further evidence, but saw nothing. He peered around the room, looking for any sign of life or activity.

Satisfied, he nodded once, and the team continued their ascent.
 

Immediately after leaving the large cavern, the line of questioning continued. They asked Mark about his professional and personal life, about Reese, and about Jen. Erik seemed especially interested, but even Carter asked him a few questions. The only seemingly uninterested one of the five was Saunders.
 

Mark could see her slender figure in front of Mason sliding along at a steady and effortless pace. He wasn’t attracted to her, as she was cold and seemed apathetic about his personal situation, but he noticed that she wasn’t a physically unattractive woman.
 

Mason asked another question. “So, you work at a government place?”
 

Mark knew the soldiers—at least Carter—had been briefed on all of the civilians’ professional and personal lives, so the questions did seem a little forced.
Is Mason trying to make friends?
Mark thought.

“Uh, well, yeah, I guess you could say that,” Mark responded, caught a little off guard. “We weren’t originally. Most of our contracts were private sector security or IT companies. About three years ago we pretty much sold out to the government, though. But they don’t have a controlling interest, and we don’t do any contracting outside of their projects anymore. They send us work, sometimes their own, sometimes from companies they work with, but it’s always sourced through them.”
 

“Hmm.”
 

Mark wasn’t sure if he was being asked another question—implied in Mason’s silence—or if his answer had satisfied.
 

He decided to ask one of his own.
 

“What about you guys? What brings you to the States?”

Mark quickly rephrased his question. “I guess I mean, what brings you
here
—under five miles of ocean to help a scientist find her kid?”

Carter answered this time. “We were given orders from the top. My team and I usually operate like a special forces unit, and this time around the orders came from somewhere above my pay grade.”
 

Mark thought about this answer a moment. “Were you stationed around here? Or in the US?”
 

Mason answered. “Nope, we were on leave. Happens all the time though. ‘Leave’ to us just means, ‘get ready to leave again.’”

He didn’t give more details, so Mark dropped the subject and kept walking. Within minutes, they reached the cave opening on Level Four, and Carter held up his hand.
 

“Hold up here. Mason, why don’t you see what’s going on out there.” Mason stepped forward and crouched in the cavern entrance. Saunders fell in beside him, her gun pointed outward.
 

Erik and Mark waited behind the three soldiers until Carter walked out onto the concrete street of the housing district. He moved swiftly toward the first of the white houses on their right. Moving past the first floor windows facing the cliff, Carter stopped at the end of the house’s wall and looked around the corner.
 

“I don’t see anyone,” he said softly. He was one hundred yards away but his voice carried easily through the air. The two other soldiers waited a few seconds, then Saunders told the civilians to move toward Carter.
 

Mark and Erik jogged side-by-side toward Carter and joined him at the side of the house, finally followed by Mason and Saunders.
 

“Let’s stay between this row of houses and the cliff until the housing district ends, then we’ll move along the tracks toward those buildings in the distance.” He pointed with his gun at the large, rectangular buildings—four in all—about four hundred yards away. He started running next to the line of houses until he reached the end and crouched next to the track that encircled the entire level.
 

The others followed, with Mark next to Erik, followed by Saunders at the rear. They reached the buildings and Mark could see that they were each labeled with a large black number on their sides. “4” was directly in front of them, with “5” next to it. He assumed they were in a section of the base that handled part of the food requirements, as he became suddenly aware of a faint fishy odor in the air.
 

“Smells like dinner,” Mason said.
 

“These are all fish hatcheries. It’s a seafood farm,” Carter said, walking toward the first building in the block—“1,” which sat adjacent to “4” in front of them.

“Alright, let’s get to that geothermal station,” Saunders said. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d left Jen and the others behind, and Mark could tell she wasn’t interested in poking around any longer than they needed.
 

Carter reached the end of building “1” and stopped to look around. They still hadn’t seen—or heard—anything of their earlier attackers, nor had they found any more evidence of Lindsay’s mysterious killer. Carter wasn’t taking chances though, and he waited a full thirty seconds before stepping out toward a small building set a few paces away from the fish farms.
 

Mark noticed immediately why Carter had chosen this target. The building, raised from the floor of the base by cinder blocks, had large pipes shooting outward from the base of the building and into the ground. They were the same type of apparatus that housed his company’s long-distance cabling, meant to help them communicate on a closed network across the entire campus.
 

It was a communications building—small, but most likely home to some sort of station-wide schematics, internal diagrams, or something else that might be useful.
 

“Mark, come inside with me and Erik. Saunders and Mason, stay behind and keep watch for anything suspicious. I don’t want us to all get caught inside that building. We’ll be sitting ducks.”
 

Mark and Erik followed closely behind Carter and entered the small shack. It was dusty and dark, but Carter found a working light switch. Dust covered everything, but Mark could see lights blinking on and off below the thick layer of silt, and he could smell the heated electronics.
This place is on and working
.
 

He immediately started looking around. Stacks of processors sat along one wall, surprisingly small considering the decade in which the station was built, and rows of computer monitors sat on a waist-high table along another.
 

“Know what any of this junk is?” asked Erik.