When similar e-mail problems occurred at offices of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main office and many regional offices of the World Health Organization, the Coordinating Center for Health Information and Service, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, and the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response and a dozen other health crisis management organizations, there were no alarms rung. Each group received a completely different kind of e-mail from all the others. There was no actual damage done, and other than minor irritation there was no real reaction. Viruses and spam e-mails are too common.
The real threats had not yet been sent.
The Extinction Clock still had ninety-three hours and twenty-nine minutes to go.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Deep Iron looks like a water treatment plant. From outside the gate all we could see were a few medium-sized buildings and miles of electrified security fence. According to the info Bug had sent me, the surface buildings were mostly used for equipment storage and garages. The main building had a few offices, but mostly it’s a big box around a set of six industrial elevators, two of which were big enough to fit a dozen SUVs. The real Deep Iron is way underground. The upper tiers of storage start one hundred yards down and the rest are far below that.
Brick drove us to the front gate. There was no guard. We exchanged a look and Bunny opened the door and stepped out. He checked the guard shack and leaned close to the fence for a moment and then came back, a frown etched into his face.
“Guard shack is empty, no sign of struggle. The fences are electrified but the juice is off,” he said.
Top pointed to my PDA. “Stuff Bug sent says Deep Iron has its own power plant.”
I took out my cell and dialed the contact number for Daniel Sloane, the sales manager, but it rang through to voice mail. I called the main office number, same thing. “Okay, we’re playing this like we’re on enemy territory. Lock and load. Bunny, open the gate.”
Bunny pulled the gate open and then jumped onto the back step-bumper of the truck as we rolled into the compound. Brick did a fast circuit inside the fence. There were eleven cars parked in the employee lot. None of them was a DMS vehicle. We paused at the rear guard shack, but it was also empty. I told Brick to head to the main office and we parked outside, the vehicle angled to keep its reinforced corner toward the building’s windows. We were already kitted out with Kevlar and we used the truck’s steel door to shield us as we stuffed extra magazines into pockets and clipped night vision onto our steel pots. None of us said it aloud, but we were all thinking about Jigsaw Team. A dozen of them had come out here this morning, and now they were missing. Were they in hiding? Was there still that chance? Or were they truly MIA?
Now three of us were going down into an unfamiliar vast cavern system that may have swallowed all of Jigsaw. No backup except Brick, and he had one leg. We couldn’t even call the State Police or the National Guard.
I caught the looks Top and Bunny were shooting back and forth and made sure my own eyes were poker neutral as I began stuffing flash bangs into a bag.
I glanced at Brick. “Don’t take offense at this, Gunny, but are you able to provide cover fire if we need it?”
He grinned. “Don’t need two legs to pull a trigger, Captain. Little Softee here,” he patted the side of the truck, “has a few James Bond tricks built in to her.”
Brick clambered into the back of the truck, folded down a small seat by the wall closest to the building, and fiddled with some equipment on rails. There was a hydraulic hiss and a metal case on the floor opened to allow a six-barreled, air-cooled minigun to rise and lock into place. Brick reached across it and slid open a metal vent on the side of the truck, then turned back to us, beaming.
“The whole floor has rails on it so the gun can be maneuvered to either side and down to cover the rear. I have grenade launchers fore and aft, and the truck body is half-inch steel with a ceramic liner. I’ve got enough rounds to start a war, and probably enough to end it.”
“Fuck me,” said Top.
“Hey, boss,” said Bunny, “can we send him in and wait here?”
Brick chuckled. “Five years ago, kid, I’d have taken you up on that.”
“Outstanding,” I said. “Okay, Gunny, if the power’s off in there we may not be able to use landlines, and once we’re down deep we’ll lose cell and sat phone communication. I don’t even know how to estimate how much time this is going to take, but if Church can get the NSA to back off then I’d very much appreciate you calling in every U.S. agent with a gun and send them down after us.”
“You got a bad feeling about this, Captain?” he asked.
“Don’t you?”
“Shit… I’ve had an itch between my shoulder blades since I got up this morning.”
“Keep one eye on the sky, too,” said Top. “We didn’t see any vehicles that don’t belong here. These jokers may have come by chopper.”
“I got me some SAMs if I need ’em,” Brick said. I really wished he had two good legs.
I said, “If you send anyone down after us, give ’em today’s recognition code.”
The day code was “bluebird” for challenge and “canary” for response. Anyone in DMS tactical who logged in after 2:00 A.M. would know it. Anyone we met down there who didn’t know it was likely to have a worse day than we were having.
We synched our watches and checked our gear. I gave them the nod.
Even with all the unknown waiting for us, it felt good to stop running and start hunting.
Bunny took point and he ran low and fast from the corner of the truck to the corner of the building while we covered him. Except for the whisper of his gum-rubber soles on the asphalt of the parking lot there was no sound. There was no wind at all, and the sun was behind us. Bunny hit the wall and crouched to cover Top as he ran in, and they covered front and back as I joined them. We couldn’t see Brick, but knowing that the cold black eye of the minigun was following us was a great comfort. Brick had the look of the kind of soldier who generally hit what he aimed at, and I doubt anyone ever caught him napping.
The door to the office stood ajar and we crouched down on either side and fed a fiber-optic camera in for a snoop. Nothing. Bunny checked for trip wires and booby traps and found nothing. We moved inside.
According to the intel Bug had provided there were four guards on each shift, two two-man teams made up of ex-military or ex-police. We found them right away, and right away we knew we’d just stepped into something bizarre and unbearably ugly.
The four guards had been killed, and there was a fifth man in a business suit. Sloane, the sales manager. Each had been shot repeatedly, but their bodies were in an indescribable condition. Legs and arms were broken and jerked out of their sockets, the victims’ heads were smashed, their faces brutally disfigured.
I couldn’t stop and stare; there was too much to do. We rushed deeper into the building and worked as a three-man team to clear each room, taking it in turns to be the one to open a door and step inside while the others provided high and low cross-fire cover. There were six rooms in the building. Mostly offices and a bathroom. Nothing else, and no one else.