The Cain Conspiracy (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 8), page 15
“So… what does that mean?” Julie asked.
Ben sighed. “It means I want to get out of this base, alive, more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.”
“Yeah, but that means —”
“It means I want to kill Garza more than ever.”
III
Act 3
37
Ben
The inside of the base appeared to be, at first glance, nothing but a mine. Ben had to duck as soon as he’d entered, as the ceiling of the hallway they found themselves in upon opening the tunnel door fell to a low height. The air tasted like sulphur, old dust, and the stale salty breath of a cave.
He took a few steps forward, trusting his dive light to illuminate enough of the hallway to reveal anything noteworthy. The others followed behind him, and Reggie, last in line, closed the door behind him. There were shallow puddles on the floor, the imperfections in the mine shaft collecting the slow drips of water from humidity into small pools. He sidestepped these as he traveled along, moving with one arm in front of him, the other on the wall next to him.
It was cold inside the shaft, cooler than even the drainage tunnel they had been in previously, and it felt to Ben as though he were spelunking in an ancient cavern system. The walls had obviously been cut by human hands — the rough streaks that had taken out chunks of the black rock were still visible, and he even saw boring holes in certain spots, areas where the rock had been tested for whatever precious metals the miners had been searching.
He wasn’t sure how long the mine had been here, but Beale’s team’s dossier had indicated that the mine had been active up until the late 70s. Ben was no expert in engineering or mining, but by his estimate that put the mine into the ‘modern’ category. This was no ancient, hand-cut mine. He wondered why it had been abandoned in the first place: perhaps the mine had been too expensive to operate, or it had been depleted?
When they were all in the hallway, Ben walked to the opposite side of it, finding another door. This one was similar to the one they’d entered through, but it was smaller, due to the lower height of the ceiling. He opened it slowly, careful to avoid any unnecessary noise. When it was open fully, he stepped through.
Into a hallway that was, unlike the cramped space he’d just emerged from, wide and tall. LED lights had been mounted every ten feet, near the ceiling, and that ceiling was studded with lines of cabling and electronic wiring.
When the rest of the team entered the more modern hallway, their communicators clicked back to life with a quick crackle. Ben didn’t hear any chatter over the airwaves, which meant that they were likely in range of Beale’s broadcaster, but the Green Berets were not currently speaking. Still, Ben held up a hand and told the others to wait for a moment, to ensure they were safe to move forward.
Forward, in this case, meant one of two directions — left, which seemed to offer miles of empty, long hallway, or right — which offered a t-intersection a few hundred feet down.
“Anyone have any idea which way they went?”
He saw Julie shake her head, and Reggie responded. “Negative. But they engaged with some Ravenshadow guards here. They may have headed that way.”
He chose to head to the left. First, it seemed like heading away from the center of the mountain would keep them on the perimeter of the interior base. It could provide them with an emergency exit point, or at least a place to hide if things went south. Second, he thought he could see a door about fifty feet down.
No one argued. He pointed that direction and then began to move. In his mind, he ran through the plan: find somewhere to hide, then make a plan.
It wasn’t much, but he knew he didn’t want to be caught in the middle of this hallway between the Green Berets and Garza’s men.
He jogged toward the door and considered their options. The cabling on the ceiling, power and lighting and what he assumed was CAT-6e — ethernet — cables meant that the Ravenshadow crew had run communications all the way here, from wherever their “headquarters” inside the mountain was to whatever these outposts on the extremities were. In other words, it meant that they were connected, and there was not likely a place they’d be able to hide that the Ravenshadow soldiers wouldn’t be able to find them.
One thing at a time, he thought. One problem at a time.
The major problem he had to deal with was that he had no idea where he was, where Garza was, or where Beale and his men were. He needed to find Garza, but there were too many other unknowns waiting for him inside this base.
The problem preventing him from tackling that goal was that he was here with his wife and friends, and keeping them alive was far more important than finding and rooting out Garza.
It was the predicament he’d found himself in more than once before, and he had yet to figure out a way to solve it: by going it alone, he would just about guarantee his failure, but by allowing them to help, he put them in danger.
Relax, he tried to tell himself, they’re adults. They’ve chosen to come along, and they knew the risks.
The door was unlocked, and Ben looked through its rectangular window as he opened it.
The others were right behind him as he entered.
“Stairs,” he said.
“Well, up or down?” Reggie asked, closing the door silently behind him. They were standing on the landing of the stairwell, and Ben saw at least two floors above and below them — both paths were dark, lit only by a single bulb mounted above each of the landings, casting an ominous golden glow that spilled out onto each set of stairs.
“Up,” Ben said, without hesitation.
“You sure?” Julie asked.
He looked at his wife. He wanted to reach out and hug her, to pretend that this was all a dream, a horrible nightmare that they’d both found themselves in, and that they were really on a vacation to celebrate their marriage.
But instead he saw her, saw the strong, confident woman he’d loved for so long, and knew that his decisions here were not only supported by her and the others — they were strengthened by their presence.
“I’ve never been sure of stuff like this,” he said. “But it’s about time I start being sure of it.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, until Reggie broke the silence. “Well,” he said. “I guess that’s a good enough reason for me.”
38
Julie
Julie, Mrs. E, and Reggie followed Ben up two flights of stairs until they reached the top of the staircase. If this was the highest point of the mountain’s base, they’d reached it. Ben stopped, waiting by the door.
Julie reached Ben, placing her hand on his shoulder. “Let’s do this,” she whispered.
He nodded, then pushed the door open. Like the one below, this door was unlocked. Either the Ravenshadow group didn’t know they were inside, or they were not concerned about the intruders.
It was the latter option that terrified Julie. They could all be waiting for us, she thought. Just letting us walk in and getting us corralled into a single spot so they can —
“Jules!” Reggie’s voice broke into her thoughts. “Come on!”
She started jogging, realizing she was the last one to step over the threshold. The others were inside, their guns drawn and pointing down the hallway.
And it was a hallway, only… different. Rather than the cut-stone mine shafts they’d walked through, and the modern industrial concrete-and-metal staircase they’d ascended, this hallway was different. It appeared as though Julie had walked back in time. The stone was the same stone that had built the rest of the mountain, but its surfaces were curved and smooth rather than cut, as if they were natural.
The rectangular shape of the hallway itself seemed man-made, but just barely. The right angles at the corners weren’t absolutely perfect; the slight bends and bows in the walls dipped and thrust outward in irregular ways. The entire shaft held the appearance of a funhouse that had been erected 3,000 years ago.
“Weird,” she whispered as she stepped forward. “It seems… old. Older than the rest of this place.”
“Yeah,” Reggie said. “Probably one of the first shafts that was cut by the miners.”
“You think?” Ben asked. “Beale’s guys said the Peruvians started mining around 200 years ago. This seems older than that.”
“Like, Atlantis old?” Reggie asked, with a mocking tone.
“It wouldn’t have to be that old,” Julie said. “I mean, not necessarily as old as Atlantis. We found evidence of the Hall of Records in Egypt, and we had reason to believe it had been moved. And the last time we were here…”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She felt silly — all of them remembered the last time they had been here. The time they had nearly been killed, wiped out by literal giants, gunned down by the Ravenshadow private army, or blasted by the Guild Rite’s tank.
The memory caused her to shudder, but then she recalled the real reason they were here: Vicente Garza.
No matter what hell she had been through, she would push forward until Garza was dead. Finding the Hall of Records was more in line with the CSO’s stated goal, and unraveling the true history of the ancient world was certainly exciting, but Julie simply couldn’t focus on any other goal than ridding the world of the scourge that was Garza and his personal army.
She looked at the walls with interest, but the examination would have to wait.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Garza’s here, somewhere. Let’s find him.”
Ben and Mrs. E nodded in agreement, and Reggie turned back to the route. “Looks like it dead-ends about thirty feet up. This may be an ancient tunnel, but Ravenshadow uses it. There’s light and power conduits on the ceiling.”
Julie looked up and saw that Reggie was right. Furthermore, the two conduits ran alongside one another toward the dead-end and then turned sharply to the right.
“There’s a door there, I bet,” she said. She took off at a jog, and found soon enough that she was correct. The ancient hallway terminated, but on the right wall there was a more modern rectangular doorway cut through the stone. She slowed and peered around the corner.
“It’s another room,” she said. “Modern.”
“Empty?”
“Yeah.” She stepped inside the room and spun around, allowing her small dive light to prove that they were alone. She noticed a light switch on the wall near the door, and flicked it on. The room was immediately bathed in an orange glow.
And she immediately understood what it was. Rows of computer servers, sleek and black, sat in 19-inch racks beneath slanted desks on two sides of the square room. The desk itself was outfitted with multi-panel video displays, ranging in size from a mere few inches to more standardized widescreen HD monitors.
A video controller joystick sat next to a recessed rolling ball, similar to the one found in old arcade games, and those were both affixed to one of the desks that sat in front of a four-panel monitoring console on the wall. She’d seen desks just like these back in college, in the broadcasting suite for the campus news station, as well as in the video production studios near the computer information systems department she spent most of her time in.
“It’s a video production setup,” she said. “I can hear the hum of the processors, so it’s on and working, even though the screens aren’t on at the moment.”
“Must be some sort of observation room,” Ben said. “Maybe a security control room?”
“I don’t know,” Reggie said. “Seems a little unsecure for a security station. That would likely be behind closed and locked doors in the center of the base, not at the end of a hallway at the top of the mountain.”
“Reggie and Julie are right,” Mrs. E said. “Whatever they are doing here is for observation and recording purposes, but I do not think it is related to security. These video production suites are usually set apart from wherever the main event is, for isolation and control purposes. That is why there are no windows, either.”
“Any way to find out what they’re observing?” Ben asked. “I mean, without letting them know we’re here.”
Julie’s headset crackled. She’d forgotten she was still wearing it. She still had the microphone turned off, so they were in no danger of Beale’s crew hearing them, but it did mean that they were close by.
The others heard it, too, as each of them reached up and fiddled with their over-ear clips.
“To answer your question,” Julie said. “Yeah, I think I can get some of the monitors on, at least.” She walked over to the largest of them and started looking around the desk. The desktop was bare, but there were single drawers directly underneath, above the server racks. “The monitors are probably all on, they’re just asleep. I need a —”
“A mouse?” Reggie held up a wireless computer mouse, then handed it to Julie. “Do the honors, Jules. You’re the computer expert, after all.”
She laughed. “Yeah, right. My comp-sci degree and systems management experience at the CDC all led to this moment. Of turning on a bluetooth mouse and letting it connect to a computer.”
She flicked the on switch on the bottom of the mouse and then set it on the desk. Within ten seconds a red LED light on the mouse lit up, and a computer monitor on the desk in front of Reggie turned on
Ben smiled. “Well, for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have thought of that.”
The computers must have been linked, because as soon as the first computer monitor turned on, others around the room began flickering to life as well.
Julie was about to examine the desktop icons on the screen in front of her when her eyes were drawn to the multi-panel display to her right.
Her eyes tried focusing on the image on the screen, until she realized that it was a video feed that was still buffering. The image started blurry, then slowly came into focus.
She frowned, squinting at it until it was clear.
Then her jaw dropped.
39
Ben
Ben strode over to Julie’s side and peered up at the computer screen. Julie had been able to drag the video file to another monitor that was mounted on the wall above the desktop. It was one of the larger monitors, and the four of them were easily able to see the HD, full-color video feed.
Ben’s clothes were nearly dry from their scuba trip through the river, and he shook off the leg of his pants, dropping a few drips of water on the stone floor as he stared at the computer display.
Onscreen, Ben saw that the camera feed was showing them the inside of a large space. The floor and back wall of the space were identical to those of the room they were currently in — beige stone, scraped out of the core of the mountain by either the original mining crews or by contractors hired by Ravenshadow when they took over the mine.
But that was where the similarities ended.
The space they were looking at was absolutely massive. Ben estimated its size to be at least as deep as a football field was long — three hundred or so feet, and he couldn’t see the left and right walls, as the room was simply too large to fit within the frame of the camera.
He thought it might have been a trick, an illusion played on his eyes by the camera and display, except for another feature of the room that gave him some sense of scale.
In the center of the stone-walled warehouse, dozens of rows of biped-like machines stood next to one another, shoulder to shoulder, facing the left-hand side of the screen. It reminded him of a scene from one of the Star Wars movies, the rows of thousands of stormtroopers standing at attention, preparing for battle.
Except these weren’t fictional film characters. He was looking at an army of machines, each shaped like a human soldier, with wide, broad shoulders and a rounded back that he assumed held whatever power source the machine used, and thin, short legs with knee-shaped joints that he knew would be hydraulically powered.
“What the…” Reggie whispered.
“It’s some sort of army,” Ben said. “Of machines.”
“Exoskeletons,” Reggie replied. “Gotta be hundreds of them down there.”
“You think they… work?” Julie asked.
Reggie shrugged, and Ben didn’t answer. Knowing Garza, they probably do.
His eyes were pulled to the left side of the screen as they detected movement. Small, shapeless forms — shadows — appeared on some large crates and wooden shipping boxes that had been piled in stacks on the edge of the floor.
“What is that?” Mrs. E said, pointing at the shadows.
Where the shadows had been a second ago, they were now gone.
Julie frowned, but Ben nodded. “Yeah, I saw it too — there!” he poked at the screen, and just next to one of the boxes, he saw it.
A foot.
More accurately, a boot. A soldier’s boot.
“Beale’s team,” Reggie said. “Looks like they found the payload right away. Almost like they knew exactly where to look.”
“Judging by their conversation earlier, I’d say they do know exactly where they’re going. Or at least what they’re looking for.”
Ben recalled their words from the comms when they’d first entered the mountain base.
Sturdivant wants an update.
“‘Sturdivant wants an update,’” he recited. “That was your old boss, right?”
“He was a lieutenant colonel back then, XO of our brigade. Now he’s probably a colonel, or brigadier general.”
“Which means?”
“Which means he’s in charge. Of a lot of stuff.”
“Strategic sort of stuff?”
Reggie nodded. “Yeah, covert stuff, the things higher-up generals don’t want to mess with, or stuff the US government might want to wash their hands of. They’ll send it down the chain to a guy who’s got the grit and experience to know how to handle diplomatic situations with the delicateness needed.”
