A HIGH-TECH VERSION OF A VICTORIAN OPERATING THEATER, LIT by the glow of three Cyalume sticks.
Banks of seating extend three tiers up from a circular floor area.
There are workstations for half a dozen people.
A three-foot-high circular plinth stands at its center. Bits of broken kit lie everywhere.
One of three large screens hangs on its wires. Two are on the floor, beyond repair.
Hayden raises his NVGs, jogs down a gangway, squats and runs a gloved hand across a six-inch-deep crater beside the plinth. Hetta and I stand next to him. The two others carry on sweeping the room.
‘Fragmentation damage,’ he says. The light from the Cyalume catches his breath as he speaks. ‘It’s still warm.’
I was wrong. They’ve refined the lag time: down from twelve hours to ten. They knew we were coming, but only just.
Feet tramp down the stairwell. Two CAT agents appear at the door.
‘We got company,’ one blurts. ‘There’s a fuckin’ convoy of Humvees coming up the road. What to do, boss?’
Hayden gets to his feet. We’d preplanned for this. His voice remains calm. ‘Secure the perimeter. Don’t let them on site. Where’s—?’
There’s a muffled bang below us. The vibration shakes the floor.
I look at Hetta, then at Hayden.
He turns to his men. ‘They want to parlay, fine. Graham’s in charge. He can keep ’em talking. It’s what he does. They want a fight, give ’em one.’ He glances down. ‘We got company too.’
The two agents tramp back upstairs.
Hayden turns to Hetta and me. ‘You both ready for this?’
He unholsters his SIG, racks the slide and hands it to me.
There’s a door at the back of the room. Hayden pulls the handle toward him. I’m hit by the smell of electrical equipment. Blue, red, green and white LEDs blink in two large equipment racks. They extend floor to ceiling, and front to back. Four fan ducts, each the height of a man, are set in the wall behind a wire mesh screen. Their paddle blades are motionless.
We spread out. A flight of steps leads down from the end of the chamber. The acrid smell of the detonation rises to meet us. Wisps of smoke hang in the glow of the diodes and LEDs.
Hayden is the first to descend. Then Hetta. I follow.
The next level down is a duplicate of the one we’ve just left. Another flight of steps leads into the bowels of the facility. I wonder how deep the thing goes.
The two figures crouching between the racks on the far wall are barely visible and too busy doing what they’re doing – assembling another charge – to see us. Against the thrum of the servers, they’ve heard nothing either. I raise my weapon.
Hayden yells: ‘Right there, fellas!’
One of them rolls left, the other right.
Hayden and Hetta fire at the exact same moment.
Muzzle flashes light up the room. Bullets ricochet off the metalwork. There’s a burst of return fire. Hayden staggers and hits the ground.
Hetta covers me as I crawl through a rack to reach him. I check his pulse, roll him onto his back and pull out a flashlight. He’s taken rounds in the left shoulder and in his medial right thigh.
I tear open the top of his pants and a jet of arterial blood arcs past my face. I jam the palm of my left hand into the wound, stick the flashlight in my mouth and rummage through the pack for a wad of combat gauze. I shove it in the wound and press down with all my strength. Hayden screams.
Good. He’s conscious.
I slip a tourniquet around his thigh. Working it with one hand takes too long. I pull it tight ten centimeters above the wound and shine the light in his eyes.
‘John? You hear me?’
He nods.
‘I need you to work the tourniquet.’
He nods again.
I’m guessing he’s lost a liter of blood. If he loses another, he’ll become confused, his pulse will weaken, his heart rate will jump, his systolic blood pressure will drop and he’ll go into shock.
‘Am I going to die?’
‘I saved you before, didn’t I?’
‘Am I?’
‘No.’
If I don’t stop the bleeding in the next ninety seconds, though, he will.
I wrap his fingers around the end of the tourniquet and tell him to pull.
Still applying pressure to the wound, I reach into the pack and grab a pressure dressing. I let go of the flashlight, tear the wrapper with my teeth, unfurl the bandage and wrap it tight around the wound. I then elevate the leg by lifting his foot onto the pack.
Only now am I aware that the shooting’s stopped.
‘Hetta!’
She’s gone.
I direct the flashlight beam onto the gap between Hayden’s torso armor and the Kevlar protecting his upper arm. I cut open his shirt and the T-shirt underneath. The round has punched in and out, tumbling through bone and muscle. It’ll be hurting like hell, but it won’t kill him.
I glance at the thigh wound. The bleed’s stopped, so I stick a fentanyl lozenge in his cheek and tell him to hold completely still. The fentanyl kicks in quickly and is as good as IV morphine.
‘Josh!’ Hetta’s voice reaches me from across the room. ‘We got a man down here. He’s dead. The other guy’s lost blood. Trail leads through one of the ducts. I’m going after him. Stay with Hayden,’ she tells me. ‘And keep your weapon close.’
I look around. In all the excitement, it’s gone.
Hayden tugs at the sleeve of my jacket and points to his SR-16.
It’s lying where he dropped it, two meters away.
I get up, take a step toward it. Out of the corner of my eye, I see somebody silhouetted at the base of the stairwell. He must have worked his way behind Hetta, through the ducting.
I glance at the SR-16.
‘Don’t even …’ the guy breathes. I can’t see his face. It’s in shadow. With his gun, he lets me know what he’ll do to Hayden.
He spins me around, shoves his rifle into the small of my back and starts to push me up the stairs. Standing at the top, half in shadow, holding her gun in front of her with both hands, is Hetta.
The guy sees her too. He drops his rifle, grabs me around the neck and jams a pistol against my temple. ‘I’ll kill him,’ he yells.
I look down. He’s wearing a pair of Nike Airs.
‘Josh?’ Her voice is eerily calm. ‘You OK?’
Is she kidding me?
He tightens his grip around my neck.
‘You’re going to be all right.’
Shut the hell up, Hetta.
‘I’m going to get you out of this.’
He squeezes my neck so hard I can’t breathe.
Shoot him, fuck’s sake.
‘You know who this guy is?’
I don’t care. Shoot him.
‘Tell me who he is, Josh.’
I can’t. I can’t breathe. Shoot him, shoot him.
‘His name, Josh.’
I twist enough to allow me to gulp some air.
As Karl Dempf’s body tenses, she fires.
The Humvees belong to a Utah National Guard unit. The territory on which we’ve landed, like the Utah Data Center itself, is leased from the military by the NSA. The twenty-five-man platoon had been taking part in an exercise on the other side of the ridge when they saw the helicopters land and drove over to investigate.
By the time we emerge from two levels below ground, accompanied by two CATs carrying Hayden on a litter, Graham has persuaded the unit’s commanding officer to transport him to a military hospital outside Salt Lake City, supervised by one of their medics.
Hetta and I retreat to the entranceway of the bunker so that we can sitrep Reuben, but I’m stopped from making the call by Graham waving his cellphone.
‘Guy from our local field office is on the line,’ he says, like this is an entirely normal thing. ‘Wants to speak with you.’
He hands Hetta the phone.
Hetta frowns. She looks at me and switches to speaker.
‘This is Agent Hart. Who am I speaking to?’
‘Rich Lewis, ma’am. Deputy Special Agent in Charge, Salt Lake.’ His voice bounces off the concrete walls. ‘You at the site?’
‘The site?’
‘The UDC at Bluffdale, ma’am.’
‘Please state your business, Agent Lewis.’
‘A man walked in here fifteen minutes ago. Says he has information to do with an investigation you’re running out of D.C.’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘Nothing. He’ll only speak with you.’
‘Name?’
‘Say again.’
‘What’s his fucking name?’
‘Oh … His driver’s license says Jon … J-O-N … Silver. S-I-L-V-E-R. Forty-two. Says he’s a contractor out there. He’s real jumpy. Claims Silver ain’t his real name too; says it’s really Schweizer. Doctor Joel Schweizer. S-C-H-W-E-I-Z-E-R.’