Just then, the cavernous hangar, the glassed in computer room on its edge and both corridors leading out of the hangar were plunged into darkness. All the electricity in the base was out.
“If we could only keep our friends from deserting us.” Beck quipped in the low pale blue light from the tongue of flame at the tip of Duncan’s flamethrower.
ENDGAME
18.
En Route to Section Dock, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Tom Duncan, former president of the United States, now the leader of Chess Team under the callsign: Deep Blue, raced into darkness and certain danger. He rode the same HDT dirt bike he and Beck had used earlier. It was a little scratched and scraped from its fall in the hangar, but it was a sturdy machine and still more than serviceable.
Duncan had attached one of the reusable LED Flash Bang grenades to the handlebars and used a zip tie to permanently depress the igniter trigger to the flamethrower. He leaned the barrel of the device across the handlebars and could reach the firing trigger at a second’s notice. On his way down to the train platform leading to the Dock section of the base near Lake Winnipesaukee, the light of his dirt bike illuminating his way through the corridors, he hadn’t seen a single salamander. They seemed to have retreated down the tunnel’s ten-mile journey to the submarine station. Still, his left hand gripped the bike’s handlebar loosely, ready to spring to the flamethrower.
As he raced along the tunnel in the darkness, he remained alert, but he used the few minutes of the ten-mile drive to let all the loose fragments of knowledge in his head about the past hours roll around and bounce off each other in his brain. He liked the analogy. Some people liked to draw flowcharts and mind maps, but Duncan let all the pieces of complex problems collide in his mind’s eye like billiard balls until connections fit into place. That was how he had come up with a fairly successful peace plan for the Middle East—well, at least the Palestinians and the Israelis were speaking again, when he left office. It remained to be seen if the plan would stay in place or, more likely, if one lone soldier on either side would fire an RPG across the border and start things anew.
The first question was the lights. He had seen from the computer station that Lori had killed the wireless before her death, and the there were no hard-wired computers in Labs or Dock that could have allowed the Gen Y men additional access to the system after he had destroyed their laptop. That meant they must have left a man behind somewhere in Central to access the system and kill the lights. Damn it. He and Beck and Carrack must have missed the man. He had to have been just a room or two away from them the whole time.
Duncan slowed the bike and briefly considered going back for that man, but then he dismissed the idea. If the lights were out, that meant the computers were down too. You couldn’t selectively kill power to the whole base except for one computer station. Just wasn’t possible. That meant that other than as a gun at his back—or maybe at Beck and Carrack’s backs—the man wasn’t as large a threat as the remaining Gen Y team at the Dock. Still, he’d be wary of an attack from his rear. Duncan sped the bike up again and continued toward the Dock.
He could feel the pressure of the mountain range above the tunnel on his ears. He swallowed and his ears cleared. The Dock was at a lower altitude than the other two sections of the base. Its train platform was higher up than the rest of it, unlike the platforms in the other two parts of the base, which were the lowest points in their respective sections—well, except for the damned cavern under Labs. Just what he needed: another doomsday device to have to prevent. His negativity wasn’t helping. He took a deep breath and let it out. Then he let his mind wander again as the breeze from the sterilized air in the tunnel rushed past his face as he sped along on the bike.
The next two problems connected in his head: what are Gen Y after and why are there no more salamanders in this tunnel?
Eggs.