Page 87 of Heart of Danger
“That room is essentially a storehouse for equipment that needs recycling or repair or discarding. No one enters except tech guys on a schedule. We’re now in a part of the facility used for maintenance. It’s off the security camera web system. We should be okay until we get to level 4. And pray there is one.” She was panting as she spoke. Mac let her lead. He had the layout of the Millon facility memorized but they were off the blueprints.
Once again, she was saving their asses.
The corridor ran over 300 meters and at the end there was an elevator—a freight elevator from the size. They ran to it and Catherine swiped the CEO’s card. They filed in and she swiped the card again. There were only 3 buttons, but when she swiped the card, a big 4 pulsed on the screen. She pressed the screen and they dropped.
Nick had managed to herd a troop of Antz into the elevator and they clung to the ceiling. Mac looked at the handheld and saw them in a bird’s eye view.
The doors opened onto a huge, gleaming hallway.
An alarm sounded, a big foghorn sound, wailing every two seconds.
Shit.
Catherine looked up at Nick. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do now. Nick, can we use the Antz to check the rooms?”
He was already deploying and the nearly invisible creatures were scattering, scrambling along the walls, looking into every room. They watched the screen showing room after empty room.
Catherine put her hand on his arm as she watched and Mac felt warmth and hope and fear in equal measure enter his system. With the Colonel in his arms he couldn’t cover her hand with his so he bent down and kissed the top of her head.
“Wait! Have them back up.” She still had her hand on his arm and he could feel a jolt of excitement in his system and had no way to tell whether it was hers or his. “There!” She pointed. A dimly lit room with three beds. Three bodies hooked up to machinery.
Outside the door was a brightly lit corridor. As they watched, two people, a man and a woman, both wearing lab coats, came out of a room. Jon was already pulling a flashbang from his backpack.
“Turn your back, close your eyes, open your mouth,” Mac said urgently to Catherine. Nick and Jon had already fitted their tiny ear protectors, handed two to Catherine. Mac gently eased the Colonel over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and fitted his own in. He gave Jon a nod.
“Fire in the hole,” Jon whispered, peered around the corner and lobbed the canister down the corridor.
Light bloomed around the corner accompanied by a sonic boom that was nearly painful in its intensity even through the muffler buds.
The jagged image the few Antz who’d followed them broadcast showed the two techs falling to the ground, curling up in a fetal position, hands clutching ears. Two sentries ran around the corridor. Nick checked the handheld, stepped out and took them down, one shot each. The screen showed them down, dead
“Go go go!” Mac chanted and they rushed the corridor.
Catherine ran to the room, looked in, then looked over at him.
Mac stiffened. Her look was sorrowful, solemn.
It was bad.
They rushed to the room and stopped on the threshold.
It was very bad.
Romero, Lundquist and Pelton were in three beds. If Mac hadn’t seen the jagged, moving colored lines of the machines next to each bed and heard the soft beeps, he would have been convinced they were dead.
They looked worse than the Colonel. Thinner, more messed up. The surgeries had been more extensive, probably the drugs they’d been subjected to stronger.
They were very strong, resistant young men. The kind of men sick fucks loved to mess with. They were comatose, sunken faces already looking like death masks. Dark blue patches showed where IV injections had been used for prolonged periods of time.
Each man was naked, without even the dignity of a hospital gown, spread eagled out as if a human sacrifice, which was true since they were sacrifices. To someone’s greed.
All three men, young and strong and brave—the best in the world—looked like POWs in a particularly savage prison camp. And yet they were here—in Silicon Valley in the good old US of A.
Mac never went into battle enraged. Rage, anger, revenge—they were all emotions he couldn’t afford. You don’t go into combat with emotions because they blinded you. They were handicaps and they were dangerous. So he made sure he fucking well washed away all emotion before suiting up for an op and when he went operational he was all cold clear reasoning and hard calculation.
That was all swept away right now as pity for his men swamped him. Pity that they’d been brought to this. Clearly tortured, tormented, treated as less than animals by their own countrymen.
The rage washed over him, a huge uncontrollable wave he was helpless to resist. He knew he was endangering them all, endangering Catherine and the Colonel and there was nothing he could do.
