He was about to switch on his night vision when he realized there was, in fact, light in the room. He noticed small red dots along the walls near the ceiling. Some sort of emergency lighting that had somehow remained in operation.
Instead of night vision, Gant switched on a tactical flashlight, as did others on the team.
"Hold, gentlemen. Let your eyes adjust," Gant said. The tactical headset worked, but there was plenty of static. Apparently the EMP shielding built into the walls was not going to allow the units to work over long distances; probably no better than line of sight.
As his pupils expanded his surroundings took hold. The now-sealed vault door was ten yards behind. Open black space stretched forward even farther. He could see the form of walls on either side of his team, but the details of those walls remained hidden. Still, the hall was a lot wider than he had expected.
"Listen up. Franco, take us out. Stay sharp, stay focused."
The air was cold enough that he caught glimpses of frosty breath in the collection of flashlight beams. At first it felt as if they had stepped into a refrigerated room, but adrenaline kept any chills at bay.
He sensed a combination of smells in the air. Something like mold, another something like chemicals, and even a subtle hint of spent cartridges, as if a battle had taken place here long ago and the air of the sealed sublevel had captured and held traces of the aroma.
Another smell carried in the air: the smell of dust. Opening the door had kicked up a storm, and every breath nearly induced a sneeze.
His eyes adjusted more completely.
The walls were battleship gray ad looked much newer than he thought they should, despite the dust. There were no functioning light fixtures other than those red emergency lights. As they slowly moved forward, the team worked around some kind of tables and what might have been toppled chairs. After a moment, they cleared the clutter and the area opened up.
Gant spotted Franco at the head of the team. The point man stopped, knelt, and held one fist in the air. The rest of the soldiers followed suit. The major crept forward, weaving between the members of his unit, until he was alongside Franco.
Thom saw why Biggy had halted their brief progress. The hall they traversed came to a choke point, a set of large containment doors dented, scorched, and knocked halfway out of the heavy frame holding them in place.
He thought about what they knew of Briggs's containment order. It had been for expanded containment with, he had assumed, the vault door they had just entered being the perimeter of that expanded containment. So why a set of bulkheads here, and why were they obviously broken open?
"Wait a second," Gant muttered and surveyed his surroundings, but wobbling, thin flashlight beams did not illuminate the area well enough.
"Watch your eyes, people," he warned and lit a flare, which he flung into the center of the hall. After a burst of sparks, a blood-red flickering glow fully lit their surroundings.
They were not, in fact, in a hallway at all. They were in a room that had been segmented into two distinct parts. The unit had already come through the first part, but now the flare showed what they had not seen before in the dark.
What they had thought to be tables were, in fact, consoles equipped with cracked and smashed monitoring equipment. The consoles were perfectly positioned to monitor the second segment of the room, a big chamber housing the broken bulkheads just ahead of Franco.
While Gant said nothing — not at first — the sergeant managed to encapsulate his feelings perfectly.
"Deja fucking vu."
Sal Galati flashed his light over the remains and said, "Didn’t we just leave this place?"
Thom bit his lower lip as he felt his arms tremble, not in fear, but with anger. If Borman had not bothered to fill him in on the important detail that quarantine had been broken sometime in the past — that whatever lurked in the sublevels had actually expanded its reach over the years — then how many more important details had been withheld?
It was all a carbon copy of the vestibule and vault room they had just passed through on their way in, except this one was not shiny and new. It gave Gant the feeling of seeing ancient ruins from Rome or Greece, in the sense that bits and pieces of the structure remained, enough to envision what the entirety had once been.
Suddenly Brandon Twiste — hauling the duffel bag carrying the V.A.A.D.'s batteries — was in his ear, saying, "The bear went over the mountain, and what do you think he saw?"
Beyond the smashed bulkheads waited a dark hall. For a terrifying moment, he wondered if this was what they were in for: layer after layer of observation rooms and containment doors, each one broken and replaced. Thunder had told him there were stretches of time missing from the files. Had Borman covered up the fact that his expert security had repeatedly failed?
Gant spoke into his headset: "Listen up. Wells, Galati, Moss — get up here."
The three soldiers moved forward until they huddled at the front with the sergeant and major.
"Let’s make this a clearing operation. Franco, take these three and slice the pie. We’re looking for a stairwell that goes down… should be twenty yards or so ahead."
Gant remembered the general layout of the facility. Stairwells and elevator shafts were contained between certain levels, most going between only two floors. That is what had made sublevel 5 the choke hold for the complex. All of the elevators and stairwells below were self-contained. No way to the surface except through the main elevator on sublevel 5 on the far side of the nonquarantined zone.
Yet this made their mission more time consuming. They had to search for stairs to take them to sub-6, then either a stairwell or an elevator shaft to go to sub-7, and again to get down to sub-8.
Franco, Galati, Wells, and Moss moved into the hall at angles, almost like a game of leapfrog, with the rearmost team member moving forward while covered by the others. Then the next, then the next — each sweeping his zone of fire, looking for targets and covering the others in the process.
"Clear," came Franco’s voice over the headset. He was only a few yards away but the static was intense.
"Let’s go." Gant moved the others ahead, with Campion still guarding the rear.
Franco and Wells stood at a junction of halls. This made for a good stopping point, not only due to the convergence of passages but because of what they saw ahead: emergency lights mounted high along the wall, shining so brightly it seemed their bulbs were brand new.
Those lights shined in sharp beams creating alternating patches of very bright light and complete darkness. A couple of overturned equipment carts cast long shadows, and doors — some knocked off their hinges, others closed tightly — lined the hall.
Gant did not welcome the extra illumination. He did not like the sharp shadows it created. If it were darker, they could use their night vision or flashlights. If all the interior lights worked, then, well, things would be easy. This was a halfway compromise that seemed to favor all the negatives.
Or, of course, it might just be his nature to be a pessimist.
"Keep moving, Sergeant. We have a long way to go."
"Door right," Franco ordered, and Moss stuck his weapon and its attached tactical light into a storage area, finding buckets, mops, and rusting containers of ancient cleaning supplies.
"Door left," Franco ordered again, and Jupiter Wells used the barrel of his SCAR-H to push open a partly shut door. He found a file room where it appeared someone had once — long, long ago — used old paperwork to start a fire.
"Thom," Twiste said, kneeling and shining his flashlight directly on the concrete floor, revealing a pair of spent ammunition cartridges. "Looks like 5.56 to me."