The Aeschylus (14 page)

“The question is, where would you go? You don't have the faintest idea where land is, or how far.” The tall soldier Jan stepped out of the shadows with an eerie silence.

“A man can look, I suppose.”

Jan nodded, turning towards the railing and looking out to the sea. “You have a lot to live for, sir. I wouldn't go getting any ideas.”

Dominik stared at him. He figured the other man would either offer him a smoke or haul him off to the lieutenant for insubordination, but he didn't do either. Instead, Jan flicked his spent butt over the railing and turned to leave.

“I'm off to clean my gun. You better get back to your family before someone finds you here and beats your head in.”

Dominik thought this was good advice.

The Aeschylus:

Present Day

Two catwalks led into the employee barracks at the northwest end of the platform. Melvin looked at the one that wasn't blown to shit and shook his head. “I don't like this.”

“What do you want to do?” Christian asked.

“Anything on the radio?”

“Just static.”

“Too much ground for just the two of us. You agree?”

His partner looked around, then nodded. “Yeah. I reckon.”

Melvin knew he should be moving, but he felt rooted. The place was so goddamned empty. The last time he remembered feeling this spooked was on his first tour in Kandahar. His unit had been ordered to clear a cave about three miles outside of the city. They didn't find any insurgents, but what they did find was a mass grave: seventeen bodies, mostly local men and teenage boys. Two of them were missing their heads. It was the first time most of the guys in his unit had seen a dead body. Melvin had seen plenty since, but it was the only time he remembered being scared. All those bodies, filed next to each other like old cigars in a cheap box—it made you feel small, like you could be snuffed on a whim. It's how he felt here, now. He felt alone. And he felt the odds of finding another of those
mass graves was pretty good, only it would be over two hundred bodies this time instead of seventeen.

Christian pointed. “Hey. Look at this.”

“What is it?”

“We got a body.”

Speak of the devil.

Melvin prepared himself for the worst. When he got close, however, he saw that the thing in front of him didn't even look like a body. It was completely black from head to toe, slimed and overgrown with fungus. It was like the stuff from below deck had grown into him, through him. It gave him the goddamned creeps.

Christian prodded it with a gloved hand. “It's hot.”

“What do you mean, hot?”

“I mean hot.”

“Fever?”

“Don't know.”

Melvin shook his head. Shit was getting weirder by the minute. Dead bodies did not get warmer, even kids knew that. “Get your hand off that thing, man.”

Christian wiped the gunk on his pants. “What about that stuff over there? Looks like crude oil, don't it?”

It did. Ahead, Melvin could see the walls of the employee barracks, and it looked like they'd been splattered with oil.

The radio crackled, making both of them jump. “
Anyone there... come in... still... anyone... report... there?
” It was hard to make out.

“Sounds like that Trenton prick.”

Melvin nodded.

Christian pressed his earpiece to talk, but then, the static crackled so loudly that he had to take his hand away.

“I'm getting the fuck out of here,” Melvin said. “We're going to need more men.”

Kate was pacing, and she knew it. Her father had known something, and she'd spent the last twenty-four hours trying to figure out what. She still didn't know why he had chosen her, and why he hadn't shared whatever he had known with the intelligence community. Then a horrible thought struck her: what if he had? What if this whole goddamned mess was the result of some CIA experiment gone awry? What if they had murdered all of the witnesses to cover it up? But that was absurd. When she had been younger and her father had first taken office, she had berated him with every conspiracy theory she could think of.
What about Roswell? Was there really a secret 9/11 plot? Did Oswald act alone?
He was the second most powerful man in the country, and if anyone got a security brief on those types of things, it would be him. Maybe the idea that the Joint Chiefs would sit down their officials and tell them
every dirty secret of U.S. intelligence was equally absurd—like they were indoctrinating them into some kind of cult—but Kate couldn't help herself. There were too many things she wanted to know. Old Stan McCreedy had waved her off each time except the last. That last time he had hugged her and chuckled. She had been thirty-one, but he sat her down like she was five, conferring one of life's great secrets. “The government is run by people, darling,” he said. “There are a lot of smart persons in the government. Very smart. But as a rule, people are not smart. In fact, they can be downright dumb. So when you hear that kind of rubbish, just remember that it would have had to be done by people.” It had been disappointing, but she never doubted that he was right. Now? Now she began to wonder. Her father had wanted her to find something by leaving those pictures. The growths beneath the platform were a part of it, but she didn't think they were the only part. Something happened here,
was
still
happening.

“Is there anyone there?” AJ said. Kate looked up to see him over by the helicopter, shouting into the radio mic.

The pilot was sprinting towards him. “Get off that thing! What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Come in, goddammit! We're still here. Can anyone give us a situation report? Anybody hear me out there?”

Hal reached the chopper and grabbed the other man, pushing him to the ground. “I told you the goddamned radio's acting up. Now quit.”

Dutch made a
shove off
gesture, then picked AJ up.

“I'm fine, I'm fine.” He looked at Kate. “I'm sick of being here. Just what the hell did you get us into?”

“I don't know, I—“

Behind them, Hal was strutting back over. He had one hand out and looked ready to shove the lot of them.

“AJ!” Kate shouted.

Then they heard the shots.

They came from the generator room.

Mason felt the air whoosh beside his head before he heard a sound. And then, the air exploded with a thousand firecrackers. Nicholas screamed and dropped to the ground, a piece of his ankle misting into the air.

“Get down!” Jin yelled. “Get the fuck down!”

Mason ducked behind a stack of metal pipes, pulling the kid to safety with him. He looked over the defilade and counted five. Five of them, at least. Two were in the security bunker, and another two stood on either side of the walls. Mason saw the last one lying prone by the stairs.

Another tracer whizzed by his head, and this time, he recognized the sound of M16s. Whoever they were, they were well-armed.

Jin fired back, and Mason joined him, ducking out from behind cover and picking shots. “Air support!” he screamed. “Get the goddamned helo in here!”

Jin pressed his earpiece, but a moment later, he ripped it out and threw it to the ground. “Nothing!”

Ahead, Mason saw two of the shapes move to the left and out of his field of view. “They're flanking. We got to move!”

“What about Nick?”

Mason looked down. “You're gonna have to play dead, kid.”

“Don't leave me!” he yelled. “Don't you dare!”

Mason kicked the boy's hand away. Some guys, they lost their heads when they got shot. If the kid would just shut up and lay still, he'd have a better chance, and he should know it. “Play dead. That's an order. We'll cover you from the wreckage back there.”

“No!”

A round clipped Jin in the shoulder, and the side of his jacket flicked red. The shock on his face wasn't pain; it had come from the wrong direction. There was someone they couldn't see. They were pinned now, men closing in on all sides. If they didn't do something, they would be toast.

Mason changed magazines, and then the wreckage behind them exploded. Two bodies rag-dolled through the air, blasting off of the edge of the platform and into empty space. Mason heard the boom of a shotgun and saw the man by the stairwell collapse. A moment later, one of his friends followed. Melvin came jogging up, carrying his Mossberg. Christian was right behind him. They saw the two hostiles inside the security office and stacked up outside the door. The men inside pulled further back. Melvin pulled out a grenade, yanked the pin, then tossed it in. Seconds before it detonated, both of the attackers came running out, guns lowered. Christian shot them in the back. The grenade went off a second later, shattering the windows and blasting the inside of the security bunker to bits.

One man remained.

He was backing along a catwalk but still firing at them with a pistol. Mason saw Peter St. Croix walking after, reloading his grenade launcher like he didn't have a care in the world. He had that monkey grin on his face, the one that made him look like a serial killer. Today, that grin was like a ray of sunshine.

The would-be assailant dropped his pistol. No, that wasn't right. He
threw
it down. He began waving his arms, yelling and
bucking his feet. The man was acting like a bull.
He's going to charge
, Mason thought. It was crazy, but that's what it looked like. He looked like he was going to run straight into the barrel of a loaded weapon. Peter saw it too, and his grin faltered.

Then, the man did. He actually charged straight ahead, his head thrashing, his mouth screaming.

“Don't kill him!” Mason yelled, but it was too late.

Peter fired and hit the poor bastard in the stomach. The force of the impact launched the man backwards, flinging him twenty feet into the side of the security bunker. His body exploded in a ball of fire and disgusting black fluid. The spray went further than the flames, spattering Christian with black gore. He opened his palms to Peter. “What the hell, man?”

Peter just shrugged and held up his weapon. “Not bad for a Chinese piece of crap, huh?” The crazy, monkey grin was back on his face.

“Step back,” the voice on the other side of the door said. It began to count. “We're live in five, four, three...”

AJ looked at Kate. “You might want to cover your ears.”

“What?” she asked.

The door to the stairwell blasted backwards, flying off its hinges and tumbling over the railing. It clanged over the side and fell, bouncing off every level before ending up in the ocean. And just like that, the doorway to the helipad was open.

AJ took his hands away from his ears.

Kate regarded him with what looked like... contempt? Nah, couldn't be; she liked him. “You asshole! Why did you let me get this close?”

Because you wanted to and wouldn't listen to me
, was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't say it. With some girls, it was just damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

“Say something.”

He pointed one finger to his ear and shook his head. “Can't hear,” he mouthed. Then, with what might have been a over-the-top, even for him, “That was loud, wasn't it?”

She made a disgusted noise and went back to the helipad.

“What's up with her?” Dutch asked.

Before he could answer, Mason passed through the doorway and pushed past them, looking around as if he expected trouble. Given what they had just been through, he wasn't surprised. AJ himself wanted answers, but now wasn't the time to press.

Mason looked at Hal. “Any word from Reiner?”

“No. And still not much on the radio, even up here.”

“Cell phones?” Mason asked.

AJ pointed to one of the crumpled towers. “Collapsed. You're not going to get a signal out here.”

“I wasn't talking to you.”

AJ saw the fury in Mason's eyes, reading it for what it was—post-battle stress—and he let it go.

Mason looked back at the pilot, but the man only shook his head. “Like the man says.”

“Get the equipment from the chopper. The fifty caliber, too. Meet us below on Deck Two, and make sure everyone's with you.” He indicated the others.

The stairwell stood open to the air, and AJ peered over the railing to the carnage below. He could see Melvin's bald head leaning over Nick, Christian and St. Croix wrapping up a dead-check. The bodies lay scattered across the deck, crumpled in those poses that didn't quite look like sleep, even from a distance.

When they arrived, he had thought this could have been as simple as a downed communications tower, but he supposed they wouldn't have bothered to track him down if that's what they had expected. They wanted someone who knew the platform in and out. They wanted someone who knew the blueprints by heart, who could make decisions about how to isolate and protect various wings of the facility. They wanted someone who could do a little shooting if he had to.

“You all right, buddy?” Dutch asked. He was behind AJ now, following his gaze.

“Yeah. This is just turning into one fuck of a weird day.”

“You got that right. You ready to head down?”

Once they were below, AJ got a better sense of the damage. It didn't look like any of the Black Shadow team were downed save for Nick, though.

“You missed the fun.”

He turned to see the kid looking at him. Melvin had wrapped his ankle and was busy splinting it with a pair of metal rods. Even from where he was standing, AJ could see that the area above the kid's foot was as soft as putty, the bandages soaked through.

“We got 'em,” he said. “Whoever they were, whatever they did to this place, we got 'em!”

“How about you? How are you doing, kid?”

“Okay, I guess. Doc says I'll never line-dance again.”

“If you dance anything like you play football, that's not necessarily a bad thing.”

Nicholas shot him the bird, but he was smiling. That stopped as soon as Melvin tightened the splint, and the kid hollered.

“What's his status?” Mason asked.

Melvin looked up and shook his head. “He can't stand. We need to sedate him.”

“No!” Nicholas said. He was gritting his teeth. “One shot! Just one. I can take it.”