Deep
Iron Storage Facility
Saturday, August 28, 3:59
P.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 1 minute E.S.T.
I kicked my way out from under the boxes and
rolled over into a crouch, pulling my Beretta.
Top Sims knelt nearby, his M4 in his hands.
He had a shallow cut across the bridge of his nose and one eye was
puffed shut.
“Clear!” he yelled.
“Clear!” I heard Bunny growl, and to my
right I saw him crawling out from another mountain of toppled
boxes.
“Where are the hostiles?” I
demanded.
Bunny switched on a minilantern and pointed
to the rear door, which stood ajar. He kicked it shut. There was no
interior lock.
“We giving chase?”
“No. Barricade the door.”
We worked fast and stacked boxes in front of
both doors. Top was watching me as we worked.
“What?” I asked.
“Looked like that last box hit you in the
head. You need me to go through all that ‘do you know who you are
and who’s the President of the United States?’ crap,
Cap’n?”
“I know who I am, and for the record the
Vice President’s a total dick,” I said.
Top grinned. “You’ll live.”
Bunny sat down on the floor and began
applying butterfly stitches to a long, shallow slash on his thigh.
“Well,” he said, “this was fun. Don’t know about you fellas, but
I’m getting tired of being ambushed by people who shouldn’t even be
mad at me. I mean. what the hell was that all about? Did we just
have a firefight with the Hulk and the Thing?”
“Something like that.” I looked at the
bloody remains of the Russian team.
Top said, “Any idea what the hell we just
stepped into, Cap’n?”
“I’m starting to,” I said but didn’t
elaborate. “It seems pretty clear that there were at least two
teams down here searching for the same stuff.”
“Three teams,” said Top, “if Jigsaw’s down
here somewhere.”
I didn’t comment on that. If Jigsaw was in
Deep Iron and hadn’t come to investigate the gunfire, then it meant
that they weren’t able to. Top read my face and didn’t pursue it.
Bunny was watching us both and he cursed under his
breath.
The flashlights did a good job of lighting
the room. The firefight with the Russians had taken place in one
corner, over by the door through which we’d come. That part of the
room was a charnel house of mangled bodies. I’d seen a lot of death
and I’d caused a lot of death, but there was something about this
that was jabbing wires into my brain. I wanted to turn away, but I
knew that would be the wrong choice. Denial is always a bear
trap-you’ll forget about it and step in it later.
Top pulled the magazine from his M4, saw
that he was down to three rounds, and replaced it with a full one.
“Cap’n, either I’m getting too old for this shit or we nearly got
our asses handed to us by just two guys. They were winning, too,
until you shanked one in the mouth.”
“No joke,” said Bunny. “One of those guys
knocked my rifle out of my hands-and not to blow my own horn, but
that’s not so easy to do. So I laid into him, hit him four times.
Two uppercuts, a hook to the ribs, and an overhand right. I might
as well have been brushing lint off his lapels.” Bunny had
twenty-two-inch biceps and could bench 460. When he laid a
combination into a pair of boxing mitts, whoever was holding them
went numb to the wrists. Bunny’s blue eyes looked deeply spooked.
“Son of a bitch didn’t even grunt. It’s not doing a lot for my
self-esteem.”
“He’s right, Cap’n,” Top agreed. “I put a
full mag into both of those assholes and it barely even knocked
them back. Sure as hell didn’t knock them down. I think we’re
seeing a new kind of body armor, something that absorbs impact like
nothing I ever seen. It was only when I went for a head shot that
he turned tail and ducked behind the boxes. But. until then I was
slowing him down, but I wasn’t hurting him.”
“Nobody’s got body armor that good,” Bunny
said.
“I may have clipped one of them in the
leg-the one you didn’t stab-because he was limping when he went out
the door. He should have been Swiss cheese, though. And,
considering how strong these guys were, maybe we’re looking at an
exoskeleton. They’ve been working on that stuff
for-”
Bunny cut him off, “No way. He was hard,
Top, but that was flesh and bone I was punching.”
“Rubber cushions with air baffles and metal
struts can feel like muscle and bone,” Top suggested. “What with
all the confusion-”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They had
something extra, so we’re lucky we were able to turn the tables on
them. We may not have dropped them, but we didn’t get our heads
torn off, so let’s put it in the ‘win’ column.”
“Glass half-full,” said Bunny, nodding. “I’m
okay with that.”
They stood on either side of me and looked
at the bodies. I turned and assessed the room. The blood was
contained to that one corner. There were blood spatters everywhere,
but most of the floor was clear.
“Okay,” I said slowly, “here’s what we need
to do. We have to check the bodies for ID. Probably won’t find
much, but we have to look.”
“Balls,” murmured Bunny.
“Then I want to move the remains to that
section of wall.” I pointed to a ten-foot stretch where there were
no boxes.
“Why touch ’em at all, Cap’n?” asked
Top.
“Because we have work to do and we don’t
want to have to trip over anything. You feel me?”
He nodded.
I squatted down and began searching the dead
Russians. It was grisly work, and though Bunny and Top joined me,
none of us were happy about it. Bunny paused and pulled a tube of
peppermint ChapStick from his pocket, rubbed some under his nose,
and handed it around. We each dabbed our lips. Peppermint kills the
sense of smell pretty quickly, and between blood and other bodily
substances the room was getting ripe.
As expected, the search yielded nothing. No
ID. Nothing.
Without saying a word we began moving the
bodies over to the wall. I knew that Top had done this kind of
thing before in Iraq-pulling bodies out of the rubble after suicide
bombers. Bunny and I had our own separate experiences. I’d been
part of the contingency of Baltimore cops who worked Ground Zero
after the planes hit the towers. It was always bad, always beyond
the capability of the rational mind to associate this with
deliberate human action. I know, that’s a funny thought coming from
a guy like me-someone who’s killed people with guns, knives,
grenades, garrotes, and bare hands-but there is a difference
between combat killing and this. I wasn’t even sure what to call
it. “Murder” is too vague a word, and “mutilation” seems oddly
clinical. This was. what? The two brutes we chased out of here had
done this to the Russians here and to the staff upstairs. They had
enjoyed it. Maybe that was the key. Even when the death of an
opponent-say a terrorist holding a gun to a sixth grader’s head-had
given me a bit of momentary satisfaction, I’d never enjoyed it.
Never gotten a visceral or erotic delight from the death of another
person. and I believed that’s what I was seeing
here.
As this was going through my head, Top
muttered three words that said it all.
“This is evil.”
Bunny and I looked at him and then each
other. None of us spoke as we worked, but we knew that Top had put
his finger on it. This was evil.
WHEN WE WERE done we washed our hands from
our canteens and used the lids from some of the file boxes to cover
the corpses as best we could.
I turned and surveyed the rest of the room.
Half the boxes had fallen to the floor. So far it looked like all
that was stored here was paper.
“Top, Bunny. the guys we chased off, did
they take anything with them? Boxes, computer records?
Anything?”
“Not that I saw, unless it was small enough
to fit into a pocket,” said Top. “We staying or going,
Cap’n?”
“We’re staying for the moment. If those guys
with the body armor are out there I don’t want them dogging us all
the way back to the elevators, and there’s not enough of us to
guarantee a safe run back.”
“I’m good with that, Cap’n,” said Top.
“Don’t know about you fellas, but I’ve never been roared at by
enemy combatants. Can’t seem to get that noise out of my
mind.”
Bunny nodded. “Yeah, that’s hitting ten on
my freak-o-meter, too.”
“All the more reason to stay put,” I said.
“We’re secure in here. Besides, if they didn’t take anything, then
that means that it’s still here.” I went over to the wall so I
could see the room better and assess its layout. “We still have our
primary mission objective, so we need to go through these records.
We have at least two players-the Russians and the other team-who
think this stuff is worth killing a lot of people over. Let’s find
out why.”
It was clear from the expressions on Bunny’s
and Top’s faces that they didn’t like it any more than I
did.
“If those guys are on their way out of here
then they’re going to run into Brick,” Bunny said. “It’d be just
him against them.”
Top snorted. “Him in an armored vehicle with
a minigun. Body armor be damned.”
Bunny grinned, but it was mostly faked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Either way, it’s beyond our control,” I
said. “We’ll leave that up to the gods of war. In the meantime
let’s get to it. We’ve been behind the curve on this thing all
along. Let’s see if we can figure out what the hell’s going
on.”
So we set to work. but as we worked we each
listened to the big silence outside of the storage unit. Listening
for the sound of elevators, for the shout of familiar official
voices, for the sound of footsteps running with that precise speed
that you only hear with SWAT or special ops teams. We heard
nothing.
We were alone down here, and as long as the
NSA was still chasing the DMS, there was no chance of the cavalry
coming.
We tried not to think about that; we tried
to focus on the task at hand.
We tried.