She took a bearing and started roughly northeast. She knew that over a mile above her, the Labs section eventually connected with an underground electric train that ran a ruler straight rail 10 miles deeper into the mountains and directly into the Central section. Her first goal was to determine whether there was access to the rail tunnel from this cavern. She started hiking across the sand, soil and rock of the cavern floor, scrambling where necessary over boulders and, she was surprised to see, the vegetation that resembled roots on a large tree. The roots came in and out of the rock all over the floor, reminding her of the mangroves she had seen in Florida.
Beck didn’t think that giant tree roots grew in caves, but she didn’t know for sure. She pulled out a digital camera and snapped a few pictures of the roots just in case. Ridley had been experimenting with all kinds of genetic muck in the labs above her head and the gun battle that had led to the capture of the base had resulted in a chemical soup of ungainly hazmat proportions spilled all over the place. While it wasn’t part of her mission today to look for environmental problems, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility in Beck’s mind that some of that chemical goo could have seeped down into the cavern and mutated harmless lichen into arm-thick roots. She might get back to Central only to have Deep Blue inform her that there were hundreds of subterranean plants that might fit the bill and there was nothing to worry about. If that happened, she’d be fine with it. But she’d rather be overly cautious where anything concerned Richard Ridley. The camera’s flash made a feeble attempt to light the darkened space, but the bright glare from the flashlight would be more than sufficient to capture the pictures. That task completed, she slipped the camera back into a nylon zippered case and deposited it in her black BDU cargo pocket on the side of her leg.
She took a sip of water from the CamelBak pouch’s straw that was embedded inside the facemask, and wiped a stray wisp of her long brown hair away from the Plexiglas shield over her face. She should have worn a hood, but the thought of neoprene headgear, when she was already sweating, made her glad she hadn’t.
She was about to continue deeper into the cavern when something brushed past her ankles and calves, hard enough to cause her to lose her balance and fall over backwards. She rolled backwards with the fall, coming up in a crouch, her Beretta M9 already out of her tactical leg holster and aimed in the direction of whatever had hit her. In the other hand, she played the spotlight in a slow arc, but to her consternation, she didn’t see anything.
A small scritching noise came from behind her and she rolled again, blasting the beam of light into the shadows behind her. She thought she had seen something move at the edge of the beam’s radius of ambient light, but every time she moved the beam further, whatever it was, seemed just out of reach.
More shuffling to the side of her, and again, behind her.
She started breathing heavily and swung the beam of light in a full circle, fast.
Movement on three sides of her—the things were black and shiny, and huge and fast.
She checked her Suunto’s compass, and started hauling ass back toward the rope. She didn’t know what it was that was down here with her, but she knew there was more than one of them, and she knew they were hunting her in the dark. Whatever the things were, they seemed to be confined to the ground, so the rope was her salvation. She spun a 360 turn a few times while running, playing the arc of the spotlight all around the cavern, but she still caught no more of a glimpse of her attackers than just shuffling movement in the shadows, just beyond the edge of the light.
Whatever they were, they were damn fast.
As the rope came into focus in the beam of the spotlight ahead of her, Black Zero knew she had made it, and she would get out of the cavern to return with more light and bigger weapons.
Until she saw the rope move, that was.
She thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, because the rope was moving and moving quickly. And it was moving in the wrong direction—down. She leapt aside as nearly a mile of 11 mm black climbing rope came pooling out of the air and slamming to the ground at her feet.
Someone had cut her rope.
Then the scritching noise came from behind again.
4.
Post 2, Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH