Objekt 221 Page 9

  “So, we’ll be Team Alpha and you’ll be Team Bravo,” Alex Scott said, smiling.

  “No dice, Beef,” replied Rick “Ahab” Everson, hefting an eyebrow.

  The two men were of similar age and experience level, but they couldn’t be more different physically. Scott was slim and wiry. He had blond hair and fair features. He grew up in Texas, but was mentally a California boy—embracing the surfer culture. Ahab Everson was a bruiser. A battering ram. A human tank. Standing nearly 6’5” and tipping the scales at 280, his fatigues had to be custom fit. Dark hair, a dark beard, and scars up and down the knotted muscles of his arms.

  “Okay,” Beef decided to try again. “We’ll be Team Gold and you’ll be Team Silver.”

  Many of the men in the hold of the Boeing helicopter were on the common team communication line. They were laughing.

  “If you are Gold, then my team is Titanium,” Ahab countered.

  “Hmm,” Alex said. “Won’t work. Too many syllables. It might confuse the radio operator. One, Two? Legends, Leaders? Upper, Lower? Just spitballin’ here.”

  Ahab laughed and clapped Beef on the shoulder blade. His hand nearly covered a quarter of the man’s back.

  “Everything you suggest implies a primary and secondary function. A number one team and a support. You have to change your mindset, Beef.” Ahab squared his shoulders and hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his pants. All 10 men were listening, now, including the pilots. “Pick two of the same thing. Sure there might be personal preferences that puts one above the other, but two types of guns. Two types of trees. Of cars. Two colors. How about that?”

  “Hmm,” Alex said for the second time. “Like Team Charger and Team Challenger?”

  “There you go,” Ahab said, shooting him a winning smile. “You are Team Charger. We are Team Challenger.”

  There was a short pause as Beef considered this.

  “Charger. I’m definitely gonna forget that shit.”

  * *

  Many of the Wraiths knew each other across teams, either through actually working together or by reputation. There were 11 men on the combined assault force, including the two commanders. There was an offsite mission overwatch currently maneuvering a military drone to do a fly-by over the Owl Mountain property.

  The men were tracking through the forest, stalking toward what their intelligence indicated would be the least-guardable entrance.

  “All clear,” Overwatch radioed in from his remote location.

  “Copy that,” Ahab responded. He looked toward Scott who was walking immediately to his right. “You smell that?”

  Beef was silent for a few steps, breathing deeply. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Finally, he nodded.

  “I’m getting smoke,” he said, glancing around. “Not seeing any bonfires.”

  Ahab nodded in response.

  “Right.”

  On the far side of the flanking formation, two men, reunited for the first time since college ROTC, were talking off mic. Lonny “Doc” Watley and Ben “Cross” Christianson did their undergrad together at Purdue, went into the service after graduation and were split up after basic.

  “So,” Doc said, carefully stepping over a fallen branch. “Are we looking to find hidden Nazi gold or something?”

  “What?” Cross replied, not looking at his old friend.

  “These tunnels. Project Riese. Don’t you watch the History Channel? The rumor that the Nazis wheeled a train full of gold in here and walled it off before the end of the war. Ten billion dollars in gold. You never heard about this?”

  Ben simply shook his head.

  “You think Allied found it first?” Doc asked. “Maybe that’s how they got so rich. Found an assload of gold hidden in the mountains. Talk about your initial investment.”

  “I suppose,” Ben said. “They’re the bad guys, right? The bad guys never seem to have a problem with funding.”

  “I suppose that’s true, too,” Doc said.

  They were approaching the ventilation shaft.

  “Do you smell smoke?” Doc asked.

  “Okay. Charger on the left. Challenger on the right. Form up,” the instructions came from Ahab Everson as the two commanders split their teams up into two, one on each side of the ventilation shaft.

  The men all paused. Commander Scott pulled off his right glove and held his bare hand up to the mesh covering of the ventilation shaft. Two men—one on each side of the portal—began unbolting the big cover. Alex pulled his hand back and looked at his opposite number on the other team.

  “It’s warm,” he said. “Warmer than it probably should be.”

  Ahab nodded.

  “Still smelling smoke,” he said. “I’m getting a real scorched earth feeling here.” He paused for a minute and then spoke into his throat mic. “Overwatch, how many in the facility?”

  There was a slight pause as Overwatch—a young specialist sitting comfortably in mission control in front of two computers, three monitors, and a laptop screen connected directly to a series of military-grade drones—tapped away at his primary workstation.

  “Eight researchers logged in this evening, sir,” he said. “Eight security. I’m showing all internal security is disabled. All door locks are disengaged. None of the workers have logged back out.”

  “Has the remote uplink come through?”

  In the darkness of his tech room, Overwatch nodded in response.

  “Yes, sir, 98 percent uplink,” Overwatch said. “It’s coming through just now.”

  There was a pause. The two men had removed the final set of bolts from the cover. The ventilation gridwork was being held in place by gravity and a little rust.

  “Um,” Overwatch said. “I have no video, sir.”

  “No video?” Beef asked.

  “No, sir,” mission control said. “I have a strong uplink, but I’m receiving no signal. Scratch that, sir. I’m receiving static from two surveillance cameras. Completely dark on the other six.”

  Thousands of miles away, the two commanders looked at each other.

  “They went dark waiting for us?” Beef said.

  “Or it’s destruction protocol,” Ahab responded. “They knew we were coming and burned the place down rather than have us take it.”

  Beef thought for a moment and then nodded his head.

  “I got a bad feeling about this,” he said.

  * *

  Utter devastation.

  There were probably three miles of winding tunnels that made up the Rainier Mesa facility—the 11th secret underground complex buried beneath the Owl Mountains. As the two Wraith teams entered the facility through the oversized air vent and split up to neutralize the hostile force, they noticed two things.

  One: there was no hostile force.

  Two: the facility had been incinerated.

  The walls were caked in soot and the polished concrete floor throughout the facility was covered with ash. The air was so thick with the lingering smell of smoke that the men all wore respirators.

  “Scorched earth,” said Doc Watley into his microphone as he and Team Charger explored the west wing of the facility.

  “Clearly they didn’t want to lose any more data after losing two facilities,” Ahab spoke to the team at large. “Our mission parameters only slightly change. We need to verify that the facility is clear of hostiles and call in the information extraction team to see if there’s anything to salvage.”

  The two teams continued to work apart from each other. Charger to the west and Challenger to the east. They would advance on a room, enter and clear it, and then move on to the next.

  “Also curious about the 16 bodies that clocked in for the evening, but never clocked back out,” Beef said as his team approached the farthest point on the east of the facility.

  There was a general silence punctuated by a few grunts in the affirmative. A sudden intake of air, however, broke the silence as the final room in this section was reached.

  “Oh, wow,
” said Wilson “Dandy” Reid. “Sir, there is definite scarring on the door and surrounding area, but it appears to taper off. Metal hinges and door latch appear to be unharmed.” There was a nameplate on the high center of the door. Dandy reached up and rubbed his hand across the laser-carved letters. S. Mathias.

  The Challenger team was standing in several puddles of wet foam. While the door to S. Mathias’s office was slightly damaged, the opposite wall of the hallway was virtually untouched. Wet, and a little slimy, but untouched.

  “Copy that,” Beef said. He looked up, the helmet-mounted light illuminating the ceiling. “I have an undamaged sprinkler right here,” he said. “Foam fire retardant on the floor. They must have deactivated the sprinkler system and set fire to the facility. This one, unfortunately for them, still did its job.”

  “We couldn’t be that lucky,” Ahab said over the team channel.

  “Breaching, sir,” Dandy said as the two forward men were in position. There was a sharp crack as the locking mechanism was destroyed. The door groaned as it was pushed open against the char and soot that had made its way to this final room.

  “Whoa,” said Beef as the team’s flashlights played across the interior of the office. It was crowded and disheveled, but untouched by the fire that had destroyed the rest of the facility.

  “We’re on our way,” Ahab said.

  * *

  The data extraction team was on their way to the Owl Mountain complex. Everything else in the facility was a charred mess. S. Mathias’s office, however, had been untouched by the destruction due to a faulty tamper job or an aggressively efficient fire-retardant system—depending on the perspective.

  They had guessed correctly from the main hallway. It was truly an office, albeit nondescript. There were no architectural details save for the door and two vents—a heat register and a return vent. There was a desk, a large bookcase, a combination whiteboard and corkboard on one wall, a small table, and a guest chair in the corner. All told, the office was a 3.5-meter square.

  With the support team en route, most of the Wraith squad was manning the entrances/exits of the hidden facility. Two men were sweeping for booby-traps that might have been missed on the initial examination. The two commanders, however, remained in the office. They were making small talk and nosing around the room to pass the time.

  “So,” Ahab said, flipping through a stack of paper and dropping it back on the small desk. “Initial assessment is what?”

  Alex “Beef” Scott had his back turned to his co-commander. He was studying the corkboard and the various bits and pieces that get attached to them. A calendar with notes about birthdays and anniversaries. A postcard from a friend on vacation. A letter, opened and returned to the envelope, presumably to be replied to. In and around these personal touches, though, was a litter of important business notes. A memo with bits of text highlighted about new security cards. A diagram of the facility. A slip of paper, folded against itself and hidden behind another paper. It was a list of passwords to various company systems.

  Beef shrugged.

  “Not sure,” he said, turning back to face his partner. “It certainly doesn’t seem too serious. My first thought was that it was a storage facility. Possibly data mining.” He shrugged again and added another, “Not sure.”

  Something, however, caught his eye.

  He leaned down to a small table that was desk-adjacent. On it sat a small, ancient, bubble-jet printer. It was stacked high with books and manuals and black binders. Perhaps that was the reason that a few pages sat on the printer tray, ignored. Beef picked the small stack up and scanned through it.

  “Uh oh,” he said.

  Ahab turned and closed the distance to the other man with a couple steps.

  “What is it?”

  There were three sheets printed on cheap paper. Beef Scott fanned them out and then handed them to Ahab who started flipping them back and forth.

  “It’s an email string between Mathias and someone named Britta Vragi. Looks like Mathias printed it out earlier today and then either forgot to take it or assumed it wasn’t important enough to save and the fire would get it.”

  “Oh, shit,” Ahab said, reading. He had finished reading through the email string that covered three pages, and flipped back to the first page again.

  “Sven,” Ahab said, reading the initial email. “We will prepare Protocol Granite for several team members. Names to follow. They have ventured beyond established parameters and have become expendable. A show of faith payout to the surviving family even though they all have signed ironclad liability waivers. I need you to do a deep dive on family.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus,” Rick said. “That’s pretty cold.”

  “I didn’t recognize any of the names. Looks like some sort of cultural cross-section. Five names and then what I assume are their ID numbers. What do you make of it?”

  Ahab shrugged. He put the small sheaf of papers down on the printer tray and turned back around.

  “Support is at the gate, sir,” came the voice from mission control. The data extraction team had made it onsite. Ahab nodded.

  “Roger that,” he said and turned back to Beef. “We’ll make sure our boys see that. Looks like a group of explorers stumbled onto something they weren’t supposed to.”

  “And they’re about to get erased.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Building

  THERE WAS a brief pause as the expedition research team stood ready on the platform. One of the technicians quickly reached up and pressed a button on the side of her phone headset. Unconsciously, she dipped her head as she spoke in a quiet register—it was a subtle act of secrecy that Damon noticed from halfway across the room. He could see her lips move, but couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the technician said. She looked down at her clipboard. “Butcher, Lofton, Brunarski, Hollyfeld, Park, and Tolliver. Same team as earlier.”

  She paused, nodding her head. Damon Butcher wrinkled his forehead. The technician nodded her head one final time.

  “Yes, ma’am. Of course. At once. Thank you.” She reached up and pressed the button on the side of her headset to disconnect the call. She looked to her right, at another technician and gave him a quick “thumbs up” motion. He nodded in return and hit a quick keystroke on his computer. Suddenly, the countdown clock started at 5, 4…

  The technician who had spoken on the phone quietly said to herself, “Good luck.”

  * *

  It wasn’t even a heated debate, really. The expedition team had met once again in the awkwardly positioned conference room to discuss the pros and cons of going back to Old Russia, as that time period was known. Finally, Miles joined the meeting and said that they had Britta’s blessing. They had a set mission parameter and would explore the road, take samples, and scan as much data as they could. Cadey and Damon shot each other a sideways glance. They had yet to share the information about the hidden building for fear of getting in trouble.

  Since they had the go-ahead to go back to the past, they would let the team find the building organically. But, of course, they could guide the group without anyone actually realizing it.

  Which is what they did.

  And now, they stood in front of the structure.

  “What the fuck?” Miles asked the environment in general.

  It was a stunning sight. The team had walked several hundred meters while taking samples along the road. They had found numerous sections of concrete and even a few samples of a style of metalworking. Everyone was very excited by these discoveries. As they were starting to pack up to return, Cadey Park had looked up and indicated a clump of trees to the left of the road.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s that?”

  And then she started walking. Damon Butcher was the first to follow and then the remaining four members of the expedition. As they rounded the corner, they reached the building.

  “Oh, shit,” Damon said.

&nb
sp; The building stood three stories high and was greatly deteriorated. Parts of it were still intact while sections of it resembled a Roman ruin. One entire wing was completely overgrown with weeds, trees, and brush. Above the huge double-doors at the main entrance was a series of letters that were not immediately recognizable.

  “What language is that?” Damon asked the group.

  Emi Tolliver, the team’s language expert, simply shrugged her shoulders.

  “Outside of that one—there—vaguely resembling the number 5,” she said. “These characters don’t share any characteristics with any language I know. Or even one I’ve seen.”

  Damon turned to Miles.

  “Did you guys build this? Was this some sort of early experiment? The original time-travel landing pad?”

  Miles was quiet for a moment, and then slowly shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Not that I know of.”

  It was stylistic lettering that was clearly the name of the corporation or, at the very least, the name of the building.

  “So,” Lazlo Hollyfeld said. “This building is 100 million years old.”

  It was at once a statement and a question. The rest of the team was silent. The background was punctuated by a loud, high-pitched roar. It was an odd wheezing sound that didn’t necessarily inspire fear, but the team—minus Damon—immediately turned toward it.

  Calvin saw that Damon wasn’t eliciting the proper response.

  “T-rex,” Brunarski said. “Sounds like someone’s hungry.”

  “That’s not what a tyrannosaur sounds like,” Damon said and then caught himself at the end of the statement. Calvin smiled.

  “That’s not what movies and cartoons think a tyrannosaur sounds like,” he said. “But this is what they actually sound like. I think you’re going to have a lot of these moments. So much of what we think we know about dinosaurs are just guesses. Typically based on bones. Coloring. Hair. Feathers. Scales. Sounds. All guesses. We have the ability to set the record straight.”

  There were various dinosaur tracks in the area. Only Miles seemed to notice a small section of ground that seemed to be covered in tire tracks.