Callsign: Deep Blue (Tom Duncan) (Chess Team, #7)
Jeremy Robinson
CALLSIGN: DEEP BLUE
LOCKDOWN
1.
Post 3, Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Tom Duncan knew he was in trouble when the door slammed shut. His assistant, Lori Stanton, screamed as the thunderous boom echoed around the hangar. Duncan couldn’t blame her—he’d practically jumped out of his own skin at the sudden noise.
“What the hell?” she asked, her embarrassment over her scream now manifesting as anger.
“I don’t know. Let’s take a look.” Duncan walked across the hangar’s concrete floor to the entrance that should have remained unobstructed.
The hangar door was massive at over a hundred feet wide and thirty feet high. The door was steel and several inches thick. Hidden hydraulics raised and lowered it, and it must have weighed a ridiculous amount. There was no way it should have just snapped and fallen down as hard as it had.
Duncan quickly checked the electronic keypad at the side of the door for an error code, but the LCD screen was dark. It also had a built-in intercom system for communicating with the similar pad on the outside, but that too wasn’t working. No way to contact Carrack.
Matt Carrack led the security team Duncan had brought with him. He’d asked Carrack to wait outside the door with his men, and Carrack had been fine with that. Duncan was just grateful none of the security team had been under the door, when it fell. They would have been turned to greasy paste.
“What are we gonna do?” Lori wanted to know.
“Relax, it’s probably some glitch. Remember that the whole computer system was wiped at one point. Lemme call White One, so he doesn’t worry.”
Matt Carrack was designated with the callsign: White One. Most of the support team did not know each other’s names. They just knew each other by their callsigns. Carrack had the security team of himself and White Two through White Five. They were all outside the door, and probably wondering what was going on.
Duncan tried to reach the man with his cell phone, but there was no signal through the thick steel door. He noticed that Lori was trying her phone as well, but the frown on her face told him she’d lost her signal too.
“Alright, we’ll try this another way,” he said, as he strode across the concrete floor of the hangar toward a glassed-in control room at the far end. That was where the nearest computer was, and computers controlled everything in the place. As he walked, and Lori fell in step with him, he mentally catalogued the equipment that was stacked on pallets and was still wrapped in plastic on the hangar floor. Literally tons of equipment. Weapons, computers, lab components and vehicles. Even two stealth modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters sat lonely on the floor of the massive echoing space, their rotor blades secured down by straps, as they had been transported on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. Everything was new and it was all still in its original packaging. They had a lot of work to do setting this place up, but most of the staff wouldn’t arrive until the next day. Duncan had wanted to come poke around a bit with just a couple of helpers. He had Lori with him for some computer work, and he’d sent the other assistant on a mission deeper inside the facility a half hour ago. He hadn’t been planning to stay all day, and he certainly hadn’t planned to spend time troubleshooting the damn security doors. Oh well, Duncan thought, new facility, new glitches.