As they entered the glassed in office at the far end of the hangar, Duncan was about to slip into the chair in front of the computer there, but Lori slid into the chair first. Duncan was smiling and she was furiously typing already. He had hand picked Lori, callsign: White Zero, just as he had chosen all the other members of the support team. She was brilliant, determined and a magical touch on a computer—much like himself. The only downside for Lori was that she was a bit meek in social interactions and she had no physical training to speak of. She wasn’t in bad shape, but neither was she athletic. And should the shit ever hit the fan, she’d be useless in a fight. Duncan knew he’d have to get her some physical training, but for now, she was strictly a computer tech, and in that capacity, she was flawless. Put the meek girl with the mousy brown hair near a CPU and a monitor, and she came to life with personality and flair. He was smiling at how quickly she had transformed from somewhat tentative and scared in the hangar to a vicious keyboard hound as she ran through the system searching for reasons why the hydraulics on the door had failed. He watched fascinated, as she ran through several troubleshooting protocols he might not have thought of.
As the former president of the United States, there were of course, many things he hadn’t done for himself at the White House, but as Deep Blue, the mysterious support person for the former Delta Force team known as Chess Team, he was used to being the one doing the typing on the computer keyboard. After the recent fiasco with the team’s nemesis, Richard Ridley of Manifold Genetics, bringing golems to life, Duncan realized he wasn’t giving the team all he could, because his duties as president had become more of a hindrance than a help. His own inability to provide support on matters the team were involved in—matters that affected the security of not just America, but the globe—had become more and more of a frustration for him, and he had yearned to be free to act, as he had in the old days when he was an Army Ranger. In the end, he had opted for a carefully orchestrated political suicide, so he could neatly step out of the spotlight.
There would always be someone lining up to be the president, but only Duncan could be Deep Blue. He had cultivated contacts all over the world, and had had plenty of time to set the team up as a completely black operation, burying the financing at the Pentagon and arranging for the team to take over the Manifold facility they had captured during the Lernian Hydra incident.
Duncan watched White Zero come to the same conclusion he had, although she was maybe a half a second slower in reaching it. The hydraulics hadn’t failed. All doors to the facility had been security locked. Half the computer system was locking her out. All methods for communication with the outside world were cut off. She knew, just as Duncan did, that they hadn’t yet set up a new system to go with the security cameras that peppered the facility—it was still packed in boxes on the hangar floor. Someone had fried the last control center with an electric baton during the Hydra battle. So Duncan watched as White Zero tried the same alternate technique he would have used. She started checking motion sensors for the three main branches of the facility, and when she got to the section of the base hidden under Fletcher Mountain, his suspicions were confirmed.
The base had been infiltrated.
They were not alone.
2.
Matt Carrack acted quickly. Within seconds of the huge hydraulic door slamming shut, he was at the control pad mounted on the wall to the side of the hangar’s entrance. As soon as he determined it was dead, he was speed dialing Deep Blue on his satellite phone, but there was no reply. He shut down the phone and turned to his four men.
Each man, White Two through White Five, without being told to, had assumed a defensive posture around the closed hangar door. They were good. Each man had automatically determined that they were under attack and had dropped to a crouch, forming a small semi-circle around the door and pointing their Mk 17 FN SCAR assault rifles outward toward any potential enemies. Carrack was pleased. He and Deep Blue had chosen each member of the security force from 10th Mountain Division men at Fort Drum. They were all natural climbers and excelled at alpine war craft.
“White Two and White Three, air vents. Go.”
Carrack wasn’t done barking the order when two members of the team slung their weapons, ran to the side of the massive metal door and began scaling up the rock wall toward the summit of the mountain. Although trained to utilize all types of climbing apparatus and safety equipment, many 10th Mountain troops were avid free solo rock climbers, and the rocky terrain outside the hangar hardly presented any challenge to the two security members. Within 30 seconds, they had already moved above the height of the top of the door set into the rock. Carrack knew that each man had scanned the rocky wall the first time they had seen it, and would have mentally catalogued where all the best holds were, and how best to ascend the climb. He knew he had. White Two and White Three made it look like a walk in the park. The hangar had two exhaust vents concealed in its roof near the summit of Mount Tecumseh. The climbers would find the vents and infiltrate the hangar from above.