The Cain Conspiracy (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 8), page 14
Julie frowned. “They’re… still moving.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “It’s like you didn’t even touch them.”
“I definitely hit them. More than once. What the —”
He fired again, this time aiming a bit lower. Julie saw all the rounds impact the water just in front of the snorkels, but when the water and mist settled, they were continuing to make their way up the tunnel shaft.
“Who the hell are these guys?” Ben asked. “Robots?”
“Try again,” Julie said, her voice low. She was feeling the pangs of panic beginning to build in her chest, and she tried to ignore it. There’s something strange about these divers, she thought.
Ben and Reggie raised their rifles and crammed close to one another on the ledge, Ben leaning outward just a bit and Reggie straddling both ledges with a foot on each. Mrs. E was watching, waiting, with Julie.
Both rifles kicked to life and they sent multiple bursts of gunfire toward the swimming shapes. They were still halfway to the entrance, but it seemed to Julie as though they may have begun to speed up.
Ben pulled one of his shots a bit to the right of the snorkel and suddenly the entire tunnel lit up in a flash of light.
A shockwave, followed almost immediately by the sound of a deafening blast, filled Julie’s ears. She rocked sideways on the ledge, her head narrowly missing an impact with one of the fast-moving propeller blades. A surge of water pushed backward against the current, causing a torrent of whitewater that pressed upward for a few seconds, then receded.
Julie blinked a few times, and then leaned out to look down the tunnel.
“It’s… gone. Both of them.”
“Holy mother of God,” Reggie said. “They weren’t divers. They were bombs.”
“How’s that even possible?” Ben asked.
“Submersible-controlled demolition devices,” he said. “Usually just MacGyver-ed together with whatever you’ve got on hand. These were radio-controlled, judging that snorkel-periscope thing. It was actually an antenna.”
“They were driving them to us?” Julie asked.
“Must have been. Probably had a little radar scanner updating its position back in one of their cars. I’ve seen them made from grenades, RC boats, walkie-talkies — really, anything that’s automated and blows up.”
“These seem… a bit more advanced than that…” Ben said.
“Not really,” Reggie said. “They’re just semi-submersible RC boats that they’ve wired up a remote detonator. Like C4, or something that can be triggered from somewhere else. Your shot hit one of them, but the blast must have knocked out the other one, too. Probably factored in the integrity of the place, too — just enough to smear us all over the walls without damaging the fan or walls, or bringing the mountain down around us.”
“Well, whatever they are, there’s more,” Julie said. She was watching the entrance to the tunnel shaft and saw two more tall, skinny shapes — what they had thought were snorkels — begin their ascent up the shaft.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ben said. “They can just drop in a couple at a time, let us take potshots at them, get our ammunition store depleted.”
“And I don’t even have a gun,” Julie said. She was once again reminded about the soldiers’ betrayal. Her list of people she needed to confront had just grown.
Ben raised his rifle and prepared to shoot at the newcomer submersibles, but Reggie pulled the barrel of his gun down.
“What’s up?” Ben said.
“I think we’re far enough from the Green Berets by now that we’re out of radio distance.”
“Which means?”
“Which means I think it’s time to head into the base, see what we’re missing out on.”
Ben frowned. Julie was confused as well, until she saw what Reggie was doing.
35
Ben
Reggie had his right arm lifted into the air and he was gently waving it back and forth. “It’s way stronger than these blades,” he said. “And I think I can do what Julie was trying to do with the rifle.”
“You think… it is safe?” Mrs. E asked.
“What’s the worst that’ll happen? I lose my arm?” He grinned, walking on the ledge toward the fan. He held his prosthetic arm up and then placed his closed fist against the flat part of the concrete ceiling. “I thought about it right away,” he continued, “but I wanted to save it for… you know, something like this.”
“Something like our getting betrayed and left for dead?” Julie asked.
“Yeah. I wasn’t clear on the specifics, but I just had a feeling things wouldn’t go as planned.”
“Well I’m glad you did,” Ben asked. “But if you lose your arm again, I’m never forgiving myself.”
Reggie laughed. “This time it was my choice.”
Without delay, he shoved his elbow out and into the rotating circle of blades. The impact was nearly immediate, and the clang of metal on metal rang out in the confined space.
But the trick worked. Reggie’s prosthetic arm held in place, stopping the blades and opening gaps between which the team could climb.
“Go,” Reggie said. “Hurry up. Those little bomb floaters are catching up.”
Ben glanced backward and noticed that they were, in fact, moving faster than they had been previously. They would be at the propeller in less than a minute, and while the increasing current that had been pushing against them would have slowed their progress, for the time being, there was no current.
“Can you hold it?” Julie asked.
“We’ll find out. Better get through quick,” he answered with a grin.
Ben and Julie slid through the gap, then Mrs. E, and finally Reggie, contorting his body so he could step through. He rotated his elbow and shoulder as he did, ending up in the same spot on the opposite side of the fan.
When he finished, he looked back at the others. “Here goes nothing.” He yanked his arm out from its position between the ceiling and the blade, and with a heavy thud it pulled loose. The propeller began to move once again, rotating faster and faster with each revolution until it was moving full speed.
This time, however, the team was on the correct side of it.
Or, rather, they were on the side they wanted to be on. Ben wasn’t quite sure if being on this side of the fan put them in a better or worse predicament than they had been in before, but they were — so far — intact, in one piece, and together.
Let’s hope it stays that way, he thought.
He turned to focus on the next leg of their mission. The ledges continued toward the interior of the mountain, and he now saw that the tunnel was on a slight tilt upward. There were two stairs on each side of the shaft, and then a long stretch of flat ledge, and then another two stairs. His dive light wasn’t strong enough to see beyond that.
“Let’s move,” he said.
“You got it, boss,” Reggie said. “What do we do if we see —”
“Treat everyone like the enemy, but if you see a Green Beret, at least give them the chance to explain themselves. Jeffers, for one, helped us. We’d be unarmed without his intervention. And Lang didn’t seem to be so bad himself.”
“Doesn’t mean they didn’t leave us behind too,” Reggie muttered under his breath.
“No, it sure doesn’t. But they’re against Garza and Ravenshadow, too. For now, it’s ‘the enemy of our enemy’ and all that. But if they start firing at us, they’re toast.”
Reggie and Julie nodded, and Mrs. E silently stared ahead. Reggie set off on his ledge, while Julie, unarmed, set off along the other one.
Mrs. E was about to start walking as well when Ben pulled at her elbow. “Hey,” he said, quietly. “You okay?”
She sniffed, then looked back at him. “I am fine. I just — Ben, I am sorry. I led you into this trap, and I had my suspicions.”
“Whoa, hey, this isn’t your fault,” Ben said. “No one could have predicted —”
“I could have,” she shot back. “I should have. This never should have happened. Those men — the Green Berets. We should have sensed something was wrong.”
Ben nodded, but was about to argue with her further, when he came to the realization that she was right. “Yeah, he said. “You are right. But we all should have seen it. It’s just… there’s something else. Something about the way…”
He stopped, then looked ahead at his teammate and wife, moving forward cautiously. I need to work it out first, he thought. Turning back to Mrs. E, he said softly: “Don’t worry about it. I’m thinking about something, but I need to chew it around a bit. Let’s just get out of this hell shaft, okay?”
She nodded, her face showing a complete lack of emotion, and then they started up the right-side ledge.
Ben wanted to keep talking to her, to keep his mind off what he thought might be a major shift in their understanding of this mission. But he knew she wouldn’t budge; when Mrs. E was determined — in this case, to not talk — there was no way to change her mind. She was as stubborn as Ben, when she wanted to be.
But then again, this wasn’t about her. Ben knew it — he hadn’t been upset with her before she’d admitted to him that she took these events as her fault. He couldn’t have been. The CSO was in his charge, and he had followed his own wife here to avenge the death of their friend.
None of this had made much sense from the beginning, and even up to the point where Beale and his group betrayed and abandoned them, it didn’t stack up.
And that was just it. It hadn’t stacked up. Until now.
Ben jogged behind the other three members of his group, then saw that Reggie had reached a closed door. Julie was right behind him, and when he caught up with them Reggie was facing him, awaiting his order to open the door.
“Wait,” he said.
“For what?”
“I — I want to mention something.”
Mrs. E flashed him a glance, but he continued anyway. “We all… sensed that something was off about the soldiers. Beale obviously didn’t want us tagging along, but he let us anyway.”
“Because we set this whole thing up.”
Ben cocked his head sideways. “Right. But… did he?”
Julie frowned, stepping closer to her husband and placing her hand on his forearm. “What are you talking about? We called them, right? Reggie knew how to get in touch with them?”
Reggie’s eyes widened and he lifted his arms, palms-up. “Whoa, hey. I didn’t know them, I just knew some of the guys they used to work with. I had no idea —”
“Hey brother,” Ben said. “No one’s accusing you of anything. But the truth is they betrayed us, after they let us help them get here. Why?”
“Why’d they let us help them?”
“Yeah, why not just refuse to let us come along at all?” Ben said.
Reggie cleared his throat. “They needed our help, they told us that. But…”
His voice drifted off.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “That’s my point. If they didn’t want us along, they could have just not taken our call. But they did, and they came. That tells me, at least, that they also wanted to be here, but they didn’t want us to be here.”
Julie picked up his thread. “But they couldn’t let us know that,” she said. “They couldn’t let us get here as well, and find out…”
“That they have other business here.”
Ben finished the thought as if putting the cap on a conversation that had taken place only in his mind, with only his own thoughts. He was about to agree, to ask what it was exactly that ‘other business’ might be, when his headset wavered to life with a crackling noise, then a voice — Beale’s — buzzed into his ear.
“— stay alert —” than a gunshot, then another. “Go, go. Move out! Jeffers, get — body behind something. We can’t — see us.”
There was a half-minute pause, and Ben and the others waited, trying to decide if the attack was over. Whatever was happening inside the door was happening very close to them — otherwise the tiny communicators wouldn’t have worked.
Snippets of an argument in broken, whispered voices. Whoever was talking wasn’t as close to them as Beale was. Then Beale’s voice came back on, more clearly. “Sturdivant wants an update. Nothing more. From here on out, we’re black ops, radio silent.”
Another crackle, then the line went dead.
Ben looked up at the rest of his team. This wasn’t just a betrayal.
This was much worse.
36
Ben
“Look,” Berndt said. “Your mom’s upstairs right now, sitting with your dad. You’ve had two days to process all this, up close. She’s had about ten minutes. She’s gonna need some time to just get past the emotions of it and let the reality sink in, so give her a little bit. But not too much, all right? Don’t make her wait too long. She’s gonna need you, a lot. I don’t know your mom, but my guess? If you run and hide from this, hide from that survivor’s guilt you’re feeling? That’s gonna hurt her more than if all three of you were killed out in those mountains.”
Ben hadn’t realized that he’d memorized those words. He hadn’t thought of Dr. Berndt or that moment in the hospital, looking out that window, since it had all happened.
That had sort of been the point. He hadn’t wanted to recall anything about the memory, so his mind had obliged and blocked it out.
But, as he had come to realize in about thirty-five years of life, the human mind’s ability to retain and recall information with only the slightest nudge was nothing short of incredible.
So here he was, standing in a drainage tunnel outside of a mountain filled with people who either wanted to kill him or just didn’t care one way or another, and all he could think about was why.
Why had he just thought of that? What about his father’s death — his feeling that it had been his fault — was important in this moment?
Julie must have seen it in his eyes. “What’s up, Ben?” she asked.
They were waiting outside the door, hoping the Green Berets who had already moved inside were pushing into the base, moving farther away from them, so Ben’s team could eventually enter without being immediately apprehended.
“I, uh… was just thinking.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that look before,” Julie said. “You’re thinking about your dad.”
He shot a sharp glance at her, then tried to recover. How did she just know that intuitively? Was it that obvious?
“Yeah, brother,” Reggie said. “You wear it on your face. Always have.”
“What are you talking about?”
Even Mrs. E smiled and joined in. “You know, Ben, when I first met you, you had a look about you sometimes. I saw it and thought to myself, ‘hmm, why is he so often thinking about his father?’”
“What?” Ben asked, stepping back. “No — no, that’s not —”
Julie laughed. “Ben, it’s fine. We’re giving you a hard time. But we all know who you are, where you’re coming from. There’s a reason we’re here, and that reason is you. And because you’re you, there’s a reason you’re thinking about him right now.”
He couldn’t argue with that, so he stopped trying. “Okay,” he said. “Fine. I was. I was thinking about him. When he died. How I… felt.”
“How’d you feel?”
“Like it was my fault,” he said quickly, as if mentioning it in passing would diminish its value. “But that’s not really what I’m feeling now. It’s more… it’s about control.”
“Control?”
“Yeah, like, I always used to think I ran away from my life because I wanted to be in control. And watching my dad get mauled by a grizzly was a decidedly out of control feeling.”
“Yeah, I’d agree with that,” Reggie said. He fiddled with his headset. Ben listened in on his own, trying to hear whether they were out of range yet or not. They had all figured out how to disable the microphone transmitter before they talked, to ensure their own conversations wouldn’t be picked up.
“But then I started to realize that maybe it wasn’t about control, really. Or, rather, that it’s actually about not wanting to feel out of control.”
“Can you explain that?” Mrs. E asked.
“Well, yeah, maybe. I think I don’t really care about being in control — like, I don’t have to be the guy in charge. But I absolutely hate feeling out of control.”
“What’s the difference?” Reggie asked.
“The difference is that coming here, trying to track down Garza, trying to accomplish that goal and getting out alive, and helping you guys stay alive — I don’t have to be in control of all of it. I can control what I do, and what I think, and that’s enough.
“But when I’m betrayed, left for dead, and trapped between two enemies, I feel out of control. I don’t need to be in control, but I don’t want that.”
“That makes sense,” Julie said. “But… what do we do with it? What does it mean?”
“Yeah, man,” Reggie said. “It’s real deep and stuff, but… what the hell are you talking about?”
Ben shook his head. “I know, I know. It sounds crazy. Insane that it matters, but it does. All my life I thought I was the guy who needed to be in control, at least of my immediate surroundings. But I think I’m realizing that I don’t care about that. I just cannot feel out of control, or that my situation is beyond something I can affect.”
Reggie and the others looked at him blankly, as if he hadn’t even tried to answer the question. I’m not explaining this very well, he said. He pinched the area above his nose, then took a breath.
After a few more seconds, he summed up his thoughts. “Look, here’s what you guys need to know: I’m dealing with some stuff, and it’s made me a bad leader. Getting married, then Julie running off to fight a battle knowing that we’d all follow. Then… all of this. It’s been a lot. But here’s what I promise: no matter how out of control we feel, how off that equilibrium we are, I’ve built my life around making sure I get back to that equilibrium.
