I.D. MINUS 20 DAYS
Matt Hamilton raised the Taurus OSS, sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger-once, twice, three times. The first shot nearly ripped the target in half. The following two finished it off.
If not for the ear protection he was wearing, the roar of the pistol in the enclosed firing range would have temporarily deafened him. As it was, the muffled pop was still enough to cause his aging ears to ring.
He took aim again, this time imagining where the target had been, and sent off three more shots in rapid succession. It wasn’t quite as satisfying when there was nothing there to hit.
He pushed the retrieval button and the remnants of the target rushed toward him. So far, he’d already gone through fifteen of them and an entire box of ammo. It was the only thing he could think of doing to keep himself from going crazy. The concentration down the sight, the power of the gun, the smell of the powder-each took his mind away, and kept him from wondering what was going on.
He clipped in a new target and hit the button again, sending the paper flying back toward the other end of the range. He raised the.45, and imagined the flight his bullet would take.
“Matt!” a distant voice called out.
He pulled the trigger, and watched unmoving as his shot hit the imaginary foe in the bridge of his nose. He held his position for a moment longer, then lowered his gun and turned. Standing just outside his shooting stall was Rich Paxton.
Matt raised a hopeful eyebrow. “They check in?”
Pax shook his head. “No.”
That made it seventy-two hours since their missing scout team had last made contact. Matt had been trying not to assume the worst, but he couldn’t avoid it now. The irony, of course, was that this could very well mean the team had discovered what it had been sent out to find.
He closed his eyes for a second. Yes, they were fighting a war, and yes, people were going to die doing things he sent them out to do, but he didn’t have to be okay with it.
He removed the mag from the Taurus, emptied the chamber, then put the gun and the unused ammunition on a shelf along the back wall.
Nodding to his friend, he said, “Let’s go.”
He followed Pax into the corridor and down to the Bunker’s communications room, ignoring as he always did the pain in his bad knee.
Sometimes it was hard to remember they were over thirty feet below the basement level of the Lodge-the Ranch’s main building. At that moment, though, Matt was keenly aware of it, feeling every inch of dirt pressing down on him.
The year that was finally coming to an end had not been a good one. First there had been the Sage Flu outbreak in California during the spring, a planned attack meant to test a particularly vicious viral strain. There was no question in Matt’s mind that the people of Project Eden-the people he and his meager group of like-minded individuals were trying to stop-considered the test a success. Even at conservative estimates, when the virus was in its deadly phase, its mortality rate was near 99.8 %. Unleashed on a worldwide scale, it would mean the deaths of seven billion people, and unleashing it on the world was exactly what the Project had in mind.
Not long after the outbreak scattered, reports came in from all over the globe. The few warehouses and depots owned and operated by the Project that Matt’s people had been able to identify were being stocked with food, medical supplies, weapons, and pretty much anything else the Project would need to survive the apocalypse it was planning on causing. These were just the tip of the iceberg, he knew. There had to be more, hundreds, maybe over a thousand.
Matt and his people, taking a cue from the French in World War II, had started referring to themselves as the resistance. They’d been trying for years to get a better handle on the Project, and to figure out a way to stop it before the organization carried out its plans. Sometimes it felt like Matt and his team were getting close, that they would be able to stop the horror before it happened. But that had just been a dream.
The Project had been going on for decades, and now had people entrenched in governments and businesses and organizations all over the globe, in position to obstruct any potential threat to their plans. In the last six months, the resistance had been falling farther and farther behind, and then, three weeks earlier, the message had come in from Heron, the only operative they still had within Project Eden. They didn’t have years to stop the coming genocide. They didn’t even have months. Seven weeks, the message had said. Tops. Which meant no more than four now.
The Project was calling it Implementation Day.
Such a sterile name for such a horrific plan.
The Bunker’s communications room had become the de facto command center for the resistance. There were nearly two dozen people there when Matt and Pax arrived. While a handful was manning the actual communication terminals used to keep in contact with field teams, most were gathered in the far corner near the conference table.
Rachel Hamilton, Matt’s sister, was the only one sitting down. The others were looking at a map of the Arctic Circle pinned to the wall.
Out of habit, Matt glanced at the row of monitors that had been set up on a table nearby. Five were playing feeds from the major cable news networks: CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PCN, and BBC. At the moment, the reports seemed to be the typical crap that had no relation to anything important. If Heron’s message was right, though, that would change soon.
As Matt walked up, the others moved to the side so he could approach the map. Black Xs marked the current locations of the different scout teams that had been sent north. Each team had been given a list of ten to fifteen research stations and outposts to check. This had been the final part of Heron’s message, an arrow pointing in the direction of Bluebird, Project Eden’s main facility where all the decisions were supposedly made.
Best location BB n of sixty-six. Sci fac.
Best location for Bluebird, north of the sixty-sixth parallel. Science facility.
The sixty-sixth parallel was basically the location of the Arctic Circle, minus a few degrees. Though sparsely populated, there were a considerable amount of scientific outposts north of the imaginary line. If the information was correct, one would be Bluebird. The problem was, which one?
Five teams had been sent out, each designated by a color: orange, green, purple, yellow, and brown. Lines were drawn from location to location, indicating the path a particular team was taking. Those places already checked and cleared were circled in black. So far the tally was twenty-seven. Those that had been checked but with inconclusive findings were circled in blue. There were only two of these. Once Bluebird was found, it would be circled in red.
The missing team’s color was yellow. Matt retraced its progress from where the team had started along the northern edge of Greenland, then across the Lincoln Sea to Ellesmere Island in northern Canada, Axel Heiberg Island, Yanok Island, Amund Ringnes Island, Ellef Ringnes Island, and then nothing.
“The weather’s pretty rough up there right now,” Leon Owens said. “Could be they got caught in a storm.”
That had definitely been a chance they’d taken, sending their teams out as winter was approaching, but given the deadline, they couldn’t very well just wait until spring. At first they’d been aided by a mild fall that seemed to affect the entire Northern Hemisphere. Matt had hoped that would continue, but always knew it was unlikely.
He touched the X on Ellef Ringnes Island. This was where the team’s last transmission had originated from. The outpost they had checked there was a relatively new facility constructed only a few miles away from a permanent automated weather station that had been on the island for years. Was it possible that the facility was Bluebird? Had they, perhaps, hidden their identity enough so that yellow team had reported the location as checked and cleared, then been eliminated by the Project? Or had the team made it to its next destination, only to be captured or killed soon after arrival?