When Duncan stepped into the hangar back in Central, he wasn’t surprised to find the lights still out. He had emerged from the submarine to find the flames in the dock area dying down and the lights on up on the ceiling above the twisted catwalks and the water. The salamanders were nowhere to be seen. He reasoned that the computer operator left behind in Central that had engineered the power outage had set the computer systems to reboot after a certain period of down time, and the power to turn back on in Dock at a prescribed time, so that the Gen Y men could make their planned escape out with the Typhoon. But Duncan had put the kibosh on that plan, and the salamanders had probably done enough of a job of it even before he had arrived to be the monkey in the wrench.
He assumed correctly that they would have instructed the computers to leave Central dark. When this was all done, he was going to have to rip out every last damn circuit board in the base and replace it to ensure Manifold never regained control of the computers in the base again.
After leaving the sub and stepping over the remains of charred and blackened salamander carcasses, he had climbed the metal rungs in the freight elevator shaft, back up to the train platform. He gratefully collapsed in the engine car of the train as it whisked him along the rails in the underground tunnel back up to Mount Tecumseh and the Hangar. He had hoped that Carrack and Beck would have been there already and would have successfully stopped the bomb and apprehended the Gen Y man with the egg sample. He would explain that he’d had a date with a salamander the size of a dinosaur, but as he stepped into the hangar, everything was dark and quiet.
He sensed at the last moment that he was in danger and crouched low, just in time to avoid a body in the dark, swiping at him with a knife. The room wasn’t in pitch blackness—Carrack had cracked a half a dozen glowsticks that he’d left on the floor of the hangar, but they had faded now and only provided a minimal glow. Duncan realized it was the scent of the man that had tipped him off. Cologne, sweat and something else. Nicotine? No. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it had been enough to save his life. He sprang to his feet and backward from the man as he loomed forward and took another swing with the blade. Duncan’s left arm, already injured by the metal shrapnel earlier, took the blade lengthwise. The cut felt deep to Duncan and he backed further into the darkness, pulling his M11—the EOD variant of the Army’s M9 bayonet—out of its sheath on his hip. The knife was the last weapon he had on him. He didn’t even have a flashlight.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Duncan,” came an Irish brogue from the gloom. “Martin Damien here. I could not believe me fookin eyes when I saw who it was blowing Holy Mary, Mother of God, out of me men back there. I’m a big fan. Loved your public bloody meltdown. Makes yer man William’s indiscretion with the cigar look like grammar school, it does.”
Duncan remained silent in the darkness as he circled away further into the gloom. He moved over to the pallets, careful to stay out of the small and ever diminishing circle of ambient light cast by the fading glowsticks. Still, Damien had been waiting in the dark for a while and seemed to know exactly where he was. “Come now, Tom,” the man called out. “Ye’ve got yer pokey bit there. Let’s have some fun.”
Damien rushed Duncan with his knife thrust forward like a spear at Duncan’s mid-section. Duncan moved the M11 to block the strike, but Damien turned the blade downward and slashed toward Duncan’s inner thigh. Duncan saw the attack at the last second and threw his weight over to the side, so his leg came up, the knife slashing across the front of his kneecap. The blade cut, but it was a shallow wound. Duncan followed through with the leg raise, as he fell to the side and cracked Damien in the back of the man’s head with a steel-toed combat boot.