Beck led the way and Carrack was right behind her with his backpack and hers, while she wore the flamethrower. They moved into the station and up onto the platform, stepping between the bones and tattered remains of black BDU clothing. Carrack didn’t see much of anything that looked like flesh anywhere. Beck took off the fuel tank backpack for the flamethrower and laid it down carefully on the platform floor. They couldn’t take it any further for fear of possibly igniting the gas fumes from the cavern below this section of the base. Carrack tossed her the backpack he’d been carrying for her, and she donned it before pulling out her own LED Flash Bang grenades—one for each hand.
Now Carrack led the way down the corridor toward the stairs that would take them up toward the supply closet with the access tunnel to the cavern. He ruminated on the absurdity of needing first to go up four floors to the level with the barracks room before they would then need to descend the same distance within the cavern, but this approach worked best for their plan. After no sign of the Gen Y men or any more salamanders for a while, Carrack was becoming curious. When he and Beck arrived at the top level of the Labs section and made their way to the open door to the supply closet and the gaping hole in the floor that was the entrance to the cavern, he spotted something. On the floor, not too far from the hole, was a combat boot. Easily size 15, and unfortunately, its resident foot was still at home inside it.
Carrack tilted it until it was standing upright and aimed the beam of his Wagan spot directly inside the still tightly tied boot.
“Charming,” Beck whispered. She was buckling the straps on her harness. “Ready for this shit?”
Carrack turned the beam of the light upward so she’d be able to see his face and he could see hers. “Why not?”
Beck smiled back at Carrack and then turned to the opening in the floor of the closet. She donned her facemask so she’d have a proper air supply inside the cavern. Carrack put his on at the same time. Beck then held one of her LED Flash Bang grenades over the hole.
“Three seconds,” she said. “On my mark.” She depressed the triggering button and dropped the device into the hole. “Three…two…one.”
On ‘one,’ Carrack tightly squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away from the hole. The advanced electronic LED grenade was still bright enough for him to sense the burst of bright light, even through his closed eyelids. The sounds of squeals came up at them from below.
“That woke them up,” Beck said, then she cracked and dropped several bright orange chemical glowsticks. She turned to face him and smiled before she jumped in the hole. Pointing his Wagan spot down after Beck, Carrack followed her a few seconds later. Once he cleared the hole, he counted ‘one-Mississippi’ and deployed his chute. Beck had already deployed hers below him. The fall to the cavern floor was almost a mile below the supply closet floor—or 1600 meters—plenty of space in which to perform a successful BASE jump. Carrack blasted the Wagan spot around the cavern as he saw the walls shift in the gloom around him. Now it was his turn to let loose with an LED burst.
“Three seconds,” he called out to Beck, as she had done for him.
“Roger that.”
“Three…two…one,” he held the reusable, electronic-light bursting device behind his back and squeezed his eyes shut as it burst like a billion blinding suns. More shrieks and squeals of retreating salamanders echoed around the chamber. As the light faded, Carrack opened his eyes and swung the Wagan spotlight again, this time catching sight of several salamanders freefalling from the cavern ceiling above them.
Twenty seconds later, Beck was approaching the floor of the cavern and shouting out the repeated warning that she would be popping an LED flash. Carrack closed his eyes at the appropriate time and reopened them to discover that Beck was nearly on the ground, maybe twenty meters below him. Then he heard a thump and the lines up to his chute went slack as it collapsed, a salamander body careened off it into the darkness and Matt Carrack began to freefall.
20.
Section Dock, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
The fighting in the dock was thick. Salamanders were on the walls and the ceiling of the massive space that acted as a dock and unloading platform for the cargo hauling decommissioned Typhoon. At over 170 meters in length, the sub’s dark and flattened hull made it look like one of the world’s longest whales. But this whale had speckled six-to-eight foot long salamanders crawling all over it.