The Templar Chronicles (39 page)

He just hoped he was in time to prevent any more of them from coming through.

Riley’s path took him diagonally through the center of the room, twisting and turning through the maze of Nautilus machines and other exercise equipment, headed for the dark maw of the entrance to the women’s locker room on the far side. His course took him past the demons threatening Cade and the others. As he passed, he pumped two shots into the back of one of the beasts and was very nearly taken out by a stray shot from one of the other knight’s weapons, but then he had left them behind and reached the entrance to the locker room.

He heard Olsen shouting behind him, telling him to wait, but he plunged inside the entrance without slowing.

Riley took half a dozen steps and then his foot came down on something round in the darkness and he felt himself tumbling forward, out of control. He hit the ground hands first and the shotgun he was carrying went off with a roar, nearly taking his arm off at the shoulder.

Disgusted with himself and with the fact that he’d just lost any opportunity of surprise, Riley glanced at the floor as he climbed back to his feet, curious to see what he had stepped on.

A human hand, severed about half way down the wrist, lay nearby.

Considering the Templar ring on the fourth finger, there was very little doubt as to who the hand had once belonged.

Callavecchio.

Feeling like he’d just been punched in the gut, Riley reached down and picked the hand up, just as Olsen came charging down the hall and caught up with him.

“Is that…”

“Yeah.” Riley stuffed the hand in his pack, knowing it might be the only piece of their friend they would get the chance to bury given the nature of the things they were facing. At least the coffin won’t be empty, he thought, and then turned his attention back to the job at hand.

They came around the corner into the locker room proper, weapons at the ready. Unlike the men’s locker room, with its four sinks and accompanying mirrors, this room had one long mirror that extended the length of the wall and the two men were just in time to see a pair of reaper demons disappearing back through its surface, carrying Callavecchio’s limp body with them.

From the way the man’s head hung half off his shoulders, it was clear that their teammate was beyond assistance.

Now unhindered by concerns over Callavecchio’s fate, Riley didn’t hesitate. With a twitch of his finger he turned the mirror into a shower of shattered glass, preventing the demons from returning along the same path. Behind him he could hear more breaking glass and knew Olsen was doing the same to another mirror elsewhere in the locker room.

By the time the two men re-emerged into the main area, their teammates had dispatched the rest of their foes.

Echo had survived their first attack, but not without casualties.

It didn’t bode well for the hours ahead.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Commander Williams’ self-imposed deadline had come and gone. Convinced that the men of Echo had met an untimely demise, Mason had no choice but to move on to the next phase of the plan that he and the commander had agreed upon before the other’s departure.

He gave the necessary orders and fifteen minutes later all five of his squads were suited up and assembled outside the command center, ready for action. He intended to lead them into the base himself, descending into the tunnels that Echo had uncovered below, and mount a frontal assault on whatever they found there. Summaries of what they had discovered were already on their way to headquarters by high speed courier, so in the event they failed the next unit wouldn’t have to start over from the beginning, but Mason was convinced that if he waited any longer whatever it was inside that base would only grow stronger and that was a chance he couldn’t afford to take.

The men mounted the waiting HWMMVs, weapons at the ready, and Mason gave the order to move out. One by one, the armored vehicles turned and headed in the direction of the gates.

But it was not to be.

As Mason’s men drew close to the entrance of the base, the strange storm that they had been watching for hours moved to intercept them. Mason had not other words for it; it was as if the storm had a living presence of its own, that it moved with intelligent forethought and intention. The black funnel cloud roared down the main thoroughfare toward them, kicking up waves of dust and dirt that mimicked the powerful sandstorms of the Arabian desert. In seconds, visibility was reduced to a few feet and then down to nothing. Radio communication between the vehicles died and each unit found itself on its own, unable to see and as a result, unable to move forward at any decent rate of speed without endangering those in the vehicle before them.

Mason ordered his driver to leave the road and try to go around the storm, but the howling wind and blowing sand made that next to impossible. While the HWMMVs were designed for strenuous off-road travel, the land around them was crisscrossed with steep ravines and treacherous sinkholes. If they couldn’t see, they couldn’t maneuver around them and driving blindly into such an obstacle would ruin their day for certain.

In the end, Mason had no choice but to give the order for his driver to turn around and do his best to get the back to base, hoping that the drivers of the other vehicles would have the initiative to d the same. They had no defense against the power of the storm and pushing forward would just result in the useless deaths of more of his men. He would regroup at the command center and wait for the storm to die down again before making another attempt.

If they were still alive, Echo was on their own.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Not wanting to remain in the same place directly after the attack, Cade ordered the team to make for the stairwell at the other end of the corridor, intending to take them up another level and away from the scene. Unfortunately, as the old saying went, even the best laid plans can come undone.

When they arrived at the end of the hall, they discovered that the target stairwell was completely blocked by a convoluted pile of discarded furniture. Everything from desks to bookcases to box springs seemed to have been tossed down the stairwell from above until they filled not just the first staircase and its landing but also at least the one above that as well. None of the jumbled mass was balanced very well and Cade had visions of it tumbling down on them the minute they tried to work their way over it or through it. He had no desire to see any more of his men injured in such a useless manner and he quickly made the decision to take an alternate route.

He didn’t want to chance going through the exercise complex again, so he turned his attention to the elevator shaft beside the stairwell.

Prying back the doors revealed the fact that the car itself was somewhere below and that was all Cade needed to know.

They would go up the shaft.

Ropes were quickly rigged and minutes later Chen and Davis were hauling themselves hand over hand up the elevator cables to the floor above. Finding the doors on that level open and the corridor beyond clear, the former stood guard while the latter secured himself to the ledge to serve as a belayer and then sent a rope down for the next man.

Ten minutes later all seven of them were standing on the third level of the complex, the elevator door behind them now closed in an effort to give them some warning should anything attempt to follow them up the same route.

Continuing their investigation, they found that the corridor in front of them extended only a few feet before taking a sharp turn. Around the bend they discovered a massive vault door prevented them from progressing any further down the hall.

With the way ahead sealed off and the path behind under tight guard, it was as good a place as any to take that much needed, and previously interrupted, rest. Cade ordered the group to do just that.

The men knew the routine, knew the watch schedule and who was in charge of preparing meals for the others, so Cade settled down against one wall of the corridor, leaning his head back and closing his eyes as he mentally worked through what they’d encountered so far.

His thoughts were quickly interrupted however, as Riley settled down next to him with a look of concern on his face.

“How are the men?” Cade asked.

“They’re doing okay. This place has them on edge, but I’m okay with that. It’ll keep them ready for whatever it throws at us next.”

Cade nodded, agreeing with the sentiment. “Something else on your mind then?”

“I don’t want to make the other men nervous, but back in the locker room, before the reapers attacked, I saw something.”

Cade waited for him to continue.

Riley shook his head, as if trying to knock loose an unwelcome memory. “As weird as it sounds, I saw you.”

“Me?”

“Not you personally. Or rather, I know it wasn’t really you. But whatever it was, it certainly looked like you.”

Riley went on to explain how the creature had questioned him about Vargas and how it had turned violent, summoning the reapers, when he had refused to answer it.

Cade gave it some thought and then ordered Riley to keep the information to himself. The idea that their enemy could mimic them at will was not a comfortable one. If it got out, every single one of them would be wondering about the guy next to them and that would be disastrous for team morale.

Riley agreed and got up to supervise the meal preparation. As he turned to go, Cade called out to him once more.

“How’d you know?”

Riley looked puzzled. “Know what?”

“That it wasn’t me?”

The master sergeant grinned and pointed to his face. “The scars. They were on the wrong side.”

Cade nodded and, in a sense, felt some relief.

At least their enemy wasn’t infallible.

And with that he leaned his head back once more and was soon fast asleep.

*** ***

A short time later Chen shook Cade awake. “You need to see this, Commander.”

He led him around the corner to where they’d found the vault door, except now the thick steel barrier was wide open, revealing another short corridor that ended in another door similar to the first. This, too, now stood open.

“How’d you do that?” Cade asked.

Chen grinned. “You’ll have to ask the Master Sergeant about that, sir. Claims it came to him in a dream.”

Considering what they’d been through so far, Cade was almost ready to believe it.

Almost.

He moved through the corridor and through the second vault door to find himself in an enormous room the size of a large warehouse. It was a good three stories high, with a complex arrangement of steel catwalks extending throughout. In the center of the catwalks, suspended equidistant from the floor and ceiling, was another, smaller room. This one was fashioned of what appeared to be high density Plexiglas and its walls, ceiling, and floor were all opaque. The room itself was held in position by thick metal columns at each corner that stretched down to the floor below.

From where he stood in the doorway, Cade could see Riley and Duncan standing on the catwalk across from the glass enclosure. He radioed that he was coming up. Chen led him to a staircase he hadn’t seen in the corner of the room and then up through the maze of catwalks. As he got closer to where the men were standing, he could see his two sergeants carefully examining a set of controls built into a small pedestal at the edge of the catwalk.

“Okay, Houdini, how’d you do it?” Cade asked, as he stepped up to meet them.

Riley grinned. “Had a hunch. The combination was 7:2:8, the same as the verse on the door leading into this place.”

Genesis 2:8, with G being the seventh letter of the alphabet.

Cade had to hand it to him; he wouldn’t have thought of that. “So what’s this?” he asked, indicating the control box the other two were studying.

Riley straightened up. “Best as I can figure, it’s an extendable drawbridge. Seems to provide access to the holding cell over there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the smaller room across the open space behind him.

This close Cade could see that access to the “cell” as Riley called it, was provided through a door set in the middle of the wall directly across from where they stood. Like the walls themselves, the door was made of the same, see-through material, though the steel locking mechanism set within it was plainly visible even from this distance. So, too, were the furnishings distributed throughout the chamber; a table and four chairs, a couch, even a king-size bed, all of which were made from the same strange material. Cade now understood why Riley had called it a holding cell. Its see-through exterior would allow its occupant to be monitored twenty-four hours a day and not even the furnishings would block the view of the prisoner. He glanced up at the ceiling high above. It took him a few minutes to find them but eventually he could make out the shapes of several close-circuit cameras hung amidst the tangle of pipes and cooling ducts.

“Must have been one heck of a prisoner to require a set up like this,” Chen said.

“Let’s get a closer look,” Cade said, his curiosity raised.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Duncan replied. He flipped a switch on the console and the ground beneath their feet shook slightly as the drawbridge began to extend itself out from under the catwalk and across the open space before them. A few minutes later it settled into place on the far side with a loud clang.

Duncan swept his arm out with a flourish. “Ask and you shall receive.”

Cade stepped out onto the walkway, testing it. Satisfied, he headed across with Riley and Duncan close on his heels. Chen remained behind to guard the approach and to man the drawbridge controls in case of an emergency.

The three men quickly crossed the extended platform and stood on the small landing before the door. Expecting the door to be both locked and heavy, Cade was surprised when it swung open silently at the light touch of his hand.

Despite the fact that they could see the room was empty, they entered cautiously, weapons at the ready. Duncan and Riley fanned out on either side of Cade as soon as they were through the doorway, each of them alert for the unexpected and wary of a trap. After several moments, when it was clear that they were alone and unlikely to be molested, they relaxed and set about examining the strange tableau laid out around them.