He and White Three, whose name was Bryan West, had used a small hand-held blowtorch to cut through the grills at the tops of the ventilation shafts. Then they had each taken a shaft and started their respective descents. Bryan was the only other team member whose name was known to Mealey. Well, of course he had recognized Deep Blue as the former president as well. Tom Duncan was well regarded in Mealey’s family as the best president since Kennedy. Mealey hadn’t gone in for politics much himself, even though he came from a political Massachusetts family. But as far as Mealey could tell, Tom Duncan had done right by the military as a president and he was still doing right as Deep Blue. Mealey had been thrilled to meet the man and had been excited with the offer to join Chess Team.
Now Duncan was trapped inside the new base, possibly with hostiles inside, and White Two was determined to get inside and offer help if needed. He took a breath and brought his arms in again to move past the ledge and lower into the shaft. It was a repetitive task of expanding his shoulders and upper arms against the walls of the shaft while bringing his legs in and his knees up slightly. Then he would open his legs like a pair of scissors, pressing the sides of his legs and his combat boots against the aluminum walls, and move his arms forward again. Tiring and boring, but the repeated action of his stilted shuffle was doing the job. He moved deeper down the shaft toward the thin grate he knew was far below him. There he’d clip into an anchor on a small shelf just above the gate that he knew from Deep Blue’s computer schematics. He would pull the rope out of the small rope bag he had removed from his larger backpack on the summit and strapped to his midsection before the descent. His plan was to rappel down to the hangar floor from the edge of the vent shaft, after first checking that no hostiles were present.
At about the halfway point, he knew there was a bend in the vent that wasn’t quite an S-bend, and the low light from his red LED headlamp showed a dim reflection up ahead. He knew he was getting close. Shortly before the bend, he knew there would be another small ledge based on the frequency with which he had encountered them so far. He was breathing hard and looking forward to the little rest stop. Then he would take a longer break on the bend, which was about a 45-degree angle, and would feel like lying in a bed compared the vertical feet of metal above him.
At least the air was fresh. He always expected cramped dark spaces to smell bad too, like a cave or the smell of rotting vegetation in a damp forest, but the metal of the shaft only conducted blessedly cool, fresh mountain air.
His arms were getting tired faster than his legs—rock climbing is mostly a delicate balancing act with the legs. Only fools tried to power their way up climbs with their arms. As a result, the bulk of Mealey’s strength was in his quads and not his biceps and triceps. He was an excellent climber and good with balance and position, but not so good for sheer strength and long endurance. He preferred the shorter and more technically challenging climbs to long drawn out big walls.
Where the hell is that damn ledge?
Mealey continued his shuffle, sure that he must have passed the point where the last seam should have been. At least the bend was coming up. He lowered his arms and drew in a breath to expand his shoulders and elbows, wedging himself in yet again, when his elbow slipped.
He started to slide down, even though his boots were scissored out tightly against the walls. No seams came up to stop him. He gulped out his breath involuntarily, unintentionally bringing the pressure off his upper body and his slide sped up. He was heading fast toward the bend and struggling to get purchase again, when his body slammed into the bend hard and picked up speed. The walls were no longer offering friction of any kind. He thumped through the bend, literally bouncing off the walls, and Austin Mealey realized in a moment of utter horror why he couldn’t find purchase. The walls had been coated in grease. All of four of them.
He was in the straightaway below the bend, with nothing but two hundred feet of vertical drop below him until the grate in the ceiling of the hangar—and then another fifty feet of open hangar below that! His body was picking up speed like a runaway train and his limbs slid down walls of the vent like a kid on a Slip N’ Slide. He knew his only chance was to get his knees up to his chest and then lunge out laterally, hopefully forcing his way past the grease and denting the thick aluminum outward with the force of his body’s thrust. There was no way he’d be able to snatch the small anchor before bursting out of the hangar’s ceiling. But it was hard to raise his legs at his speed of descent and with the disorientation of being upside down and falling fast.
He had almost done it and he thought it was going to be close when the glare from his headlamp reflected off something just up ahead and above the grate at the bottom of the shaft. He recognized it for what it was a half a second before he hit it.