“Maa-aat” she stretched his name out into almost three syllables, but he was hearing her over his shoulder, because he had exited the stairway on the laboratory level. “We’re running out of time!”
“Three minutes,” he shouted back at her. He was racing back along the corridor two levels up from the one they had just run. As he darted into a lab door, he caught sight of her chasing him down the hall.
“What the hell are you—oh. Oh, you’re good.”
Carrack was kneeling beside a huge airtight chemical safe. He was spinning the dial of the lock to the combination he had memorized. He knew the code for every lock in the facility by heart. He took his job seriously, and he had done a lot of late night study of diagrams and schematics over the last few weeks. He threw the lever and the door to the large green safe opened. He dumped the bag with the bomb inside and pushed the handle and spun the dial. Beck was already turning to leave the doorway.
“Left!” he shouted. She faltered for just a second because she had been planning to turn right, heading back to the stairwell. She turned to face left, and he slammed into her from behind, shoving her down the hallway in the direction he wanted, but he held onto the strap of her tactical vest, so she wouldn’t stumble and fall. As he helped her right herself, she turned to face him as they ran for the end of the corridor.
“But out is up,” she pointed out with dripping sarcasm.
Carrack pointed to the end of the hallway up ahead at the former staircase that had been destroyed years earlier in the Hydra battle.
“More fun to go down.”
Next to the stairwell was a large pile of concrete rubble and debris that had been swept into a pile before the restoration in this wing had been cancelled. Deep Blue had been embroiled in the golem incident with Chess Team and was orchestrating his political exit strategy—there hadn’t been time to oversee things here in Labs, so they had shut down the clean-up. Beyond the rubble pile, was a large orange plastic tube. It ran vertically down the three levels to the foot of the ruined stairs that Carrack had seen a few moments ago as he ran past it. Construction crews used tubes like this one to drop debris down to the ground level. In this case, the clean-up crew hadn’t even used the tube yet.
Carrack jumped into it feet first, only widening his stance as he neared the bottom to slow his descent. Each segment of the tube was about a meter long, and the piece below it fit snugly around the outside of the segment above it. Objects going down the tube faced no resistance as the tube repeatedly widened after each joint and then narrowed slightly again. Carrack burst out of the bottom of the tube and moved away just in time to avoid getting stomped on by Beck’s boots. They sprinted back to the train platform only to find yet another surprise waiting for them.
“The train!” Beck shouted with delight.
“Hot damn. All aboard. It’s faster than the bikes!”
They jumped aboard the train that had returned in the moments they were in the upper levels of the Labs section of the base. Carrack operated the engine, setting them off past the blasted bio doors and down the tunnel, gaining speed as quickly as he could coax the train to do so.
“Time?” Beck asked.
Carrack checked his watch. “Ten seconds.”
He mashed the throttle as far as it would go and the train sped through the tunnel, the safety lights on the walls blinking past. He guessed they were maybe a quarter of a mile away when Beck leapt down to the floor and the bomb detonated. They felt it more like an earthquake than an actual explosion. He could only just see down the length of the electric train to the end of the tunnel as debris rained down onto the platform they had just vacated. A cloud of dust and rubble burst into the end of the tunnel behind them, but they were far enough away now that the train experienced no damage.
Carrack slumped to the floor next to Beck and they both breathed hard for a few minutes, neither saying anything as the train sped along the ten-mile distance to the Central section.
“How the hell did we get lucky enough that the train came back?” Beck asked.
“Maybe it was an exit for the guy with the bomb?”
“Nah, they came in this way.” She shook her head and her long brown ponytail swayed over her shoulder.
“Deep Blue then. Or an automated reset function after a power outage?” He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling of the train’s engine car. Beck leaned her body against the wall next to him and slid down until she was almost lying on the floor again.
“Mission accomplished. Well done, Steed,” she told him.
“Thank you, Mrs. Peel,” he said with a smile.
24.
Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH