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When the sun went down again they let go the anchor and allowed the craft to rise upward to surface. In the dimness the tiny hatch was unnoticeable, barely protruding from the still waters of the lake. Armored and kitted out completely, they deployed fitted floats to allow them to swim to shore while snorkeling. Several plans existed for extraction; they hoped one would work.
As the craft settled below the surface on its bottom tether, the two ungainly figures finned toward shore, powerful cybernetic legs pushing them in a reasonable facsimile of swimming while the floats kept them from sinking. A few minutes later they climbed onto the shore next to a large drainage pipe, about two meters across.
Tight security in a military base was almost always a misnomer. As a military police specialist, Reaper knew how difficult it was to secure a large base, especially one that included shoreline and was built on the bones of an old civilian town. Almost by definition there were holes aplenty, and who better than a cop to identify them?
And she had, studying intelligence reports and overhead imagery in normal photographs, IR, radar, and other more exotic spectra. She probably knew more about the base than its owners, especially regarding its underground.
With carbon-fiber prybars strong enough to accept cybernetic pressure without bending, the two quietly broke the pins that held the rusty grate that covered the outflow.
“Wait,” Muzik said before Reaper pulled it off. He reached carefully inside, lifting a dirty, innocuous-looking wire with a fingertip. “Alarm.”
“Got it.” Flipping up her HUD faceplate, she quickly ran a bypass, blessing the intense Agency training of the past few months. Then she picked up the three-hundred-kilo barrier to set it carefully aside.
In they went.
Faceplates down and HUDs up, the IR lamps on their foreheads illuminated the tunnel like miners’ lanterns. High-frequency sonar projected from their suits looked ahead like bat vision, and the computers in their suits built pictures for them from all available data. Such active ranging carried with it a small risk, believed by the Agency people to be acceptable.
Acceptable to an analyst is always a bit different from acceptable in the field, when your butt is on the line, Reaper thought.
“Motion sensor,” Muzik called at about the same time that Reaper recognized it for herself. The distinctive box, set high in a corner to cover that section of tunnel, also gave off continuous sonic pings, on a different frequency from their own. But while the detector could only receive its own wavelength, their sonar could see in a much wider range.
And do much more.
“Got the freq? Turn on your masking,” Muzik breathed into his suitcomm, and selected a function on his sonar, as did Reaper.
Their computerized emitters had analyzed the detector’s frequency and characteristics, and now blasted out a tone on the same wavelength that overwhelmed the sensitive sonic receiver on the detector with noise several orders of magnitude more powerful. Since it was set to analyze minute Doppler shifts from moving objects, this effectively deafened it.
The two infiltrators walked directly past the device, confident that it could not see or hear them, and it was too unsophisticated to report an anomaly like something screaming in its “ear.”
They handled two more such detectors in the same manner before they reached their destination, an undistinguished point on the tunnel map. “Now it gets interesting,” Muzik mumbled.
Reaper replied, “You know, it occurs to me that the Agency could have used non-Eden nanocommandos and gotten this far, and then just planted one hell of a big bomb.”
“Yeah, I thought of that too...I even asked about it. Obviously they think retrieving the data is worth risking our very expensive selves, and we can’t be sure it would be destroyed. And then there’s the collateral damage.”
“No innocent lives, I know. I feel the same way, but the coldly rational part of me believes it might be worth it.”
“Always easier to think that way when the pucker factor rises.” he paused. “There might be another reason.” Muzik stared at her imperturbably, faceless in his armor.
“You think they are trying to get rid of us again?”
Even through the face shield she could sense his surprise. “Not that at all. I just bet there’s a lot of folks that would love to see us go up against Shadow Men for real. You don’t think these suits are wired to record everything? Performance intel might be secondary, but you know analysts.”
She grunted, not happy with Muzik’s theory. “Well, let’s get to it.”
“Yeah. Turn around.”
Muzik unclipped the lightweight back-rack she had been fitted with, much smaller and slimmer than the Space Marine model on which it was based. Instead of bulky weapons, it held EMP grenades and breaching charges. He took off several of the latter, sticking them to the ceiling in a circular arrangement guaranteed to open a hole all the way through to the room above. Wiring them together, he attached a radio detonator.
“Next one’s up here,” Muzik led them another hundred meters along the pipe to an intersection. There he function-tested the detonator they had set, well away from any possible mistake. His handheld showed ready, in the green.
He turned to let Reaper remove his charges from his back-rack and do the same.
Once she had emplaced the second detonator, with a different encryption code, they moved carefully toward their egress point. Once there, she tested the detonator function, then clipped it to her armor within easy reach. Now they had two sets of explosives ready to provide surprise access from above to the underground.
Reaper looked around. They stood in a large cistern that brought many smaller feeds together into one location before exiting through the pipe they had entered and to the lake. Several of them drizzled small amounts of water, condensation or drainage seeping through the ground. No rain had fallen for some days, and none was expected.
A rusty ladder led up to a hatch in the top. Muzik eyed it, then reached up to grasp a rung, and set a foot on another. Slowly he put his full weight on the lower one, then began climbing.
The third snapped under his foot.
He skipped that one, climbing up farther, gingerly testing each. The seventh also broke, then the eighth.
“I’m too heavy,” he said, climbing back down. “Plan B.”
“Right.” Reaper eyed the hatch ten meters up. “I’m going to jump and try to grab the rim up there. If I can, I’ll attach a cable and you can climb it. Catch me if I fall, will you?”
“Right.”
Catching her was not necessary to avoid injury, but noise. She could probably rebound and land on her feet without difficulty, but it might be quite loud. Muzik could reduce that considerably if he must.
“Ready, set, go,” she said, then leaped flatfooted, with as much accuracy as she could muster. Her hands scrabbled on the cement lip of the hatchway, then she fell.
Muzik caught her, chest and back, taking enough of the shock to set her down on her feet without trouble. They froze that way for a moment, listening with their suit microphones. They heard nothing, so after a full minute, they tried again.
This jump she grasped the rim with her fingertips and held on. Placing one foot gently on the rusty ladder, she used it to bear some of her weight. Then she put her other foot on a different rung, and let go one hand to take out a gas-powered piton.
This was the most dangerous part of the operation yet, or at least, the most likely to draw attention. She took a deep breath, then triggered it.
Compressed gas shot the spike into the crack between the cement rim and the old steel hatch. Enough of both had deteriorated that the piton lodged deeply. Reaper attached a thin cable that unrolled from her suit. “Wait,” she said. “If I open the hatch, the piton will fall out. I have an idea. Give me your hook.”
Muzik unrolled his own cable and gently tossed the hooked end up. Reaper caught it and ran it around the braces that connected the hinges to the hatch, then clipped it to itself. “That should hold you. Come on up.”
Carefully, Muzik climbed his line, reeling it back into its receptacle as he did so. Soon he hung awkwardly below the hatch, cable-locked. “What now, maestro?”
“Now we get up and through this awkward-ass thing.” She placed a hand on the hatch hinge brace, hoping it could take a few more kilos, and moved her weight off her own cable, unclipping it from the piton and stowing it. Now she hung with two feet on two separate rungs and one hand on the hinge.
With the other she took out a small block of plastique and handed it to Muzik, who had both hands free, supported by nothing but his cable. “Break me off about twenty grams of that.”
“It’s not going to work. As soon as you set it off, it will blow you off the ladder even if your armor holds – or the rungs will break, or the braces will break.”
“Yeah, I just figured that out. Plan C then. Stick a cap in it and give me the whole block.”
“Okay...” Muzik handed her the whole 500-gram chunk with the blasting cap in it. “You know that canks Objective One. A blast will alert the whole base.”
“Yeah, I know. Too bad. I told them I did not do wet work. If they wanted Winthrop Jenkins dead so badly, they should have sent someone else. The data will have to do.”
“I’m all right with that.”
Reaper jammed it opposite the hinges, where the latch should be that must hold it closed from the other side. Then she leaped to the shallow water below, making a loud splash. “Come on, rappel down your line.”
“Right.” He slid down as the mechanism belayed him, then backed up into the tunnel. “This cable might survive the blast. Is that your plan?”
“No, I was just going to jump through the open hatch.”
Muzik looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. “That big an explosion is going to drop the crap in the pot, you know. We’re full-on breach from now on.”
“I know. That’s what we’re trained and equipped for.” She hefted the detonator. “Ready? Fire in the hole.”
Pressed it.
