GRIDER

 

Wednesday January 8 - 2312 MST

Seven days until Turbocharger activates

 

 

"Controlled det in five seconds!"

The warning was repeated over the radio and aloud so everyone had a chance to take cover. And cover we did. The demo team had packed Semtex into every crevice of the vault door and then formed shaped charges over the rock face that covered the hinges. When it went off, the explosion would tear the gigantic door out of the mountain.

The blast shook the granite under my feet as I crouched behind a boulder to keep from getting a face full of Rocky mountain shrapnel. Everyone stayed in place an additional three seconds after the blast. Any sooner and you risked getting clocked in the head by falling debris. Any longer and you lost the advantage of having your enemies concussed into tactical paralysis.

The Triplets leapt into a sprint with me hot on their heels…for a few seconds at least. God those freaks were fast. They peeled away from me after just a dozen strides. Sporadic double taps from rifles were my only indication of where the Praetorian men were at. They'd moved in through the blown out entrance and were engaging targets within the mountain. My team was somewhere ahead, but I couldn't see more than ten feet through the cloud of raining granite dust. Not that it mattered, nothing is as pitch dark as the wilderness at night. And we were about as far into the wilderness as you could get. I could hear but not see our helicopters circling above.

Transition through the blown doorway didn't help my visibility problems much. The falling dust wasn't as bad, but I still couldn't see much with my carbine's flashlight on. Numerous arc lights and tripod mounted worksite lights stood by idly, their power cut. Or maybe they had been knocked out by the blast. Panning the light around I found myself surrounded by temporary structures like the kind you find at construction sites. Inside and around them I saw more mannequins that had been freshly decorated with bullet holes.

My breath caught in my throat when I looked down though. The floor we were standing on was just steel grates laid out in a grid over some scaffolding, but what was underneath I could not tell you. It was just a big hole that swallowed up the light from my SureFire. Other lights panned around the cavernous interior of the mountain. Praetorians were covering up above and down below as the Triplets removed several of the grates and secured rappelling lines to make a descent. One of the three was ratcheting down bolts to firmly hold some small machine. When I caught up to them I saw that it was an electric winch. Then it dawned on me why they'd brought it along.

"You're going down there?"

Kuzmin shoved a tangled mesh of nylon into my arms. "Put on harness. We're going with them."

I expected him to be laughing again but his face had a deadly calm to it. Kuzmin had flipped the switch into quiet professional mode. Before I even got the mess in my arms untangled Kuzmin, a pair of his men, and two of the Triplets were already descending. A couple of the Praetorians were tossing flares down into the hole to give us some lighting. They fell a very, very long way before coming to a stop. Several of the flares had hit ledges on the way down highlighting the fact that it wasn't a straight stovepipe down. It was more like a cone with the deepest part in the middle.

Clipping my harness's carabiner into place I begin descending face first in the classic assault style using one hand to steady my descent and the other to handle my M4. The first lit ledge that I passed wasn't a ledge at all. It was part of a walkway. When I ran my light up and down the path I found it actually curved upward around the edge of the cavern. The whole thing ran in a spiral from the entrance all the way to the bottom. And all along the wall that ran beside it were carved symbols that crawled and slithered their way up along every inch of the path. They were like the runes I'd seen etched into the frames of the contraptions used to summon demons to Earth. These runes must not have been correctly made because they didn't give me a migraine like the real ones do. I wondered if the real site would give me killer headaches, or something much worse.

"Fire in the hole!"

Two back-to-back detonations echoed throughout the colossal cavern as Kuzmin dropped a pair of hand grenades onto the spot we would touch down upon.

The grate and scaffolding was now hundreds of feet above me. The lights of the people still up there were like twinkling stars in the night sky. Being suspended there in the middle of it all really brought home how enormous this place was and how much time, money, and effort they must have put into constructing it. What we were after at the real site must be something truly scary. If it wasn't I wouldn't want to be the guy to explain to the American taxpayers why we built this place on their dime.

The bottom of the cone was a small circular expanse of polished granite where the spiral path finished its windy trek down the inside of the mountain. I hadn't noticed it before but there was a pentagram etched into the ground. Each point touched the opening of a cave. When my feet hit bedrock a dozen pops went off in one of the caves, like fireworks. A silhouette target flopped up from the ground and promptly fell back after Kuzmin put two into its chest and one in the head. The rest of the team kept their muzzles leveled at their appointed caves unflinchingly, like professionals who had done this drill a thousand times.

Damn, that took a lot of trust. When you heard gun fire coming from behind, you naturally want to face it. Keeping your back to that danger while you watched your assigned sector could only happen when you had absolute faith that your teammates would have your back.

Kuzmin broke the silence. "Okay, who has strongest sparkler signal?"

Everyone slid the window of their sparkler open and the walls around us were bathed in multicolored light from the glowing particles within. I saw blues and greens around us but one was shining violet. Turning a slow circle I saw mine changing color as the opening of my sparkler faced each cave. There were exo artifacts in there or something that fooled our sparklers into thinking so. The team was using the sensor devices in a way I hadn't seen before, to determine the direction of the otherworldly energy.

One of the Primes, Hooper, was the first to speak up. His hand pointed straight at his tunnel. His eyes and M4 never wavered from his assigned cave. "It's in there."

Kuzmin wordlessly waved us forward. We moved as a group watching our sectors to keep from being flanked. Then as we entered the cave the team realigned so half were watching the back and half the front. The tunnel dipped sharply downward, enough that the builders found the need to install a handrail to keep visitors from losing their footing on the smooth floor. More of those mind bending symbols covered the walls here, but again they weren't the kind that gave me vertigo.

About forty yards in, the tunnel opened into a larger cavern. Shining my light around the ceiling I saw it was shaped like a pyramid. And at its center was a pedestal carved from black basalt that stretched up from the floor like a podium but then abruptly split into a Y shape at its apex. The twin arms of the Y held aloft what I would best describe as a pair of pyramids stuck together at the base. There was no doubt in my mind that the vaguely football shaped object was our artifact. It was about three feet long and made entirely of concrete.

As I reached out to get a feel for its weight, Kuzmin snatched my wrist and yanked it back. "Do not touch it. The real artifact will kill a normal man. That is why Primes are here." With a sideways nod of his head he directed our two white ninjas forward.

Hooper grabbed one of the pyramid halves around the tip and looked to his partner on the other end. "You good?"

"I am." I was surprised at first to hear a female voice respond. With the heavy winter clothing she looked to be as big Hooper, and he was huge. I suppose that's just my animal brain at work. Big equals manly.

"On three. One…two…three." Hooper and the lady Prime grunted with effort to lift the artifact. They certainly didn't make it sound like it was easy. Being supersized didn't make solid concrete any lighter.

I shifted up to point as we began our exfiltration from the storage area. So far the mission had proved to be one extra large serving of weird. What I wanted was to get it wrapped up and get some answers. The organizers had other plans though.

There was a strange buzzing coming from the top of the tunnel and it was moving our way fast. At the edge of our light I saw one, then several knee high things rolling towards us.

When your mind can't classify something you see, it shifts into a kind of backup plan mode and just paints it as something from your imagination. In this case I ended up visualizing monsters. There were squids, giant grasshoppers, and even some black jackrabbits.

"Contact front!" I lit into them without hesitation. Leaning against the left wall for support I put a controlled pair into the first thing I saw, a squid with its dark tentacles flared out like some demonic sunflower. That was followed by another controlled pair to the menacing looking insectoid thing behind it. I was clearing a lane on the left since I was on our left flank. The Praetorians would just have to clear their own lanes and I would have to trust them to do it. Kinda hard to do with someone you just met.

But then my mind started processing what I was actually seeing. The beasts I was seeing were actually images printed on sheets of paper. These sheets were held up on plastic frames mounted to the top of small remote control cars. That buzzing was the whine of their electric motors.

More gun fire erupted to my right. The Praetorians were now in the fight as well pouring fire into the approaching horde of paper silhouettes. They didn't seem to mind destroying the electric carriers of the targets and proceeded to pound the little machines into splintered fragments of silicon.

One of the cars rolled right up to me, its target wearing a fresh cut double impact through its printed head. I wasn't sure if letting it run into my foot would count as a scenario failure so I kicked it over onto its side where it continued to helplessly spin its wheels.

Then something leapt at my face.

I fell backward on instinct to avoid the impact as three rounds went off near my head. One of the Praetorians caught me which kept me from taking a long, hard roll down the steep tunnel. That was when I saw my attacker. Some sadistic bastard had mounted a remote control car on the railing that I had been leaning against. It had wheels that gripped the rail from above and below so that the silhouette could be projected outward, right at the level of my face.

There were three holes in the target, a wasp like creature, right through its thorax and head. Kuzmin glanced at me. "You're welcome. Now move."

We hustled up through the tunnel with me and Kuzmin on point and the two Praetorians providing rear guard while the Primes huffed and grunted with the artifact. At the pentagram platform they wrapped netting around the artifact before hooking it and themselves onto our rappelling lines. I followed their lead and attached a line to my chest rig.

Kuzmin looked to me. "Call it in. In real operation I might not be there."

He had a point. You always wanted to practice other roles in exercises. That way if there was a combat casualty you could swap into that other role without that moment of "Oh-shit-my-team-lead-just-died-what-did-he-want-us-to-do-next?"

I squeezed the radio transmit toggle clipped to my vest. "Bulldozer has hands on the precious cargo. We're headed up."

A voice I didn't recognize responded in my ear piece. "Overwatch copies. Hang tight."

The rappelling lines went taut and tugged at my harness. Within seconds the entire team along with the net holding the artifact were ascending to the roof of the colossal cavern. In the distance above us I could hear the winch motor straining to pull us all up.

"That swarm was not here last time." Kuzmin swept the light of his AK-103 around the spiral path searching for targets. Though he wasn't looking at me when he spoke I knew his comment was directed at me. "It is certain that Hungarian devil Madarasz put those toys there to spite me."

That wasn't a shock. There was no love lost between the old CTTC crew and the people that had pushed them out. The Praetorians and General Basser didn't waste time in getting Sterling's old crew moved out of the Underground and into the hangars of Dugway's airfield. Even after seven months the divide was still there. The airfield half of Slipstream lived on the wrong side of the tracks as far as the Underground dwellers were concerned.

I swept my side of the pit in case more of Madarasz's handiwork decided to jump out of the shadows at us. "Gotta keep us on our toes. Exos love to spring surprises on us."

"There is much truth in that. I have scar on my head from one such surprise."

And I had scars on my psyche from too many exo surprises. As far as I was concerned transient horrors that were buried should stay buried.

The winch clicked off when we reached the top of the ascent. The third of the Triplets we'd left behind was waiting and slung the artifact over his shoulder with a grunt. He didn't wait around and was headed out the blown cavern entrance surrounded by a half dozen Praetorians guards by the time I got out of my climbing harness.

The MH-53 was back on the deck and kicking up a blizzard with its rotor wash. We pounded up the rear loading ramp and grabbed hold of whatever we could to keep from falling as the big helicopter roared into the sky. Within seconds we were a hundred feet above the camp and the cavern entrance soaring off into the west with our Apache escorts.

That big cargo container that had been chained to the deck was now open. It was empty inside save for an opening cut into the shape of two pyramids joined at the base. The Triplets eased the artifact into the slot and then latched the top of the box down over it. Our prize was now secure.

Kuzmin held out a stopwatch and read the time off its face. "Nine minutes, thirty eight seconds. This is good. Almost one minute to spare before relief arrives."

I hadn't realized we had been in there that long. It had all gone so fast.

One of the Praetorian men removed the thick winter glove from his right hand and held it out to me. I shook it uneasily, unsure of why he was acting like he knew me. "Good work, Captain Grider. I would never have guessed this was your first time. You ran that like a pro."

When he folded back the hood of his parka and doffed his goggles I immediately recognized the youthful face of Jake Priestley, my counterpart in Shadow team. I guess I wasn't the only one that had been conscripted into this mad plan.

The last bit of Kuzmin's clipped congratulations is what got me worried. This enemy we fought had a relief force in position to reinforce the cavern guards in ten minutes. And he wanted us out before they arrived, as if they were too strong for us to hold off even with a pair of gunships flying top cover. Whoever this opposition force was, they had some serious firepower at their disposal.

I hoped he was right about that time table. Because if he wasn't, we were dead men.