The infiltration team made short work of the door at the helipad. After all, even though it was a few years after Manifold had abandoned the place, they still had the original security codes for the entrances. It was an easy task for Martin Damien’s Gen Y security team to slip past the guards stationed at the front of the former Bible campground, unlock the helipad door and then send all entrances and exits into all branches of the facility into lockdown. Of course, the new residents had changed the basic entry codes for the security doors, but they had yet to mine through the former data architecture of the base deeply enough to discover the override codes that Gen Y had installed back in the day. Now it was too late.
Damien was the eldest member of the security team at twenty-four and the only member of the infiltration squad that had been employed by Manifold at the time of the Hydra incident. He absently rubbed a hand over the cruel scar that marred his otherwise boyish good looks, and then continued to run his fingers up and through his thick shock of black hair. He’d been waiting for a chance to get back at the bastards that had scarred him. Although intel suggested that the field team was not on site yet, meaning that jackrabbity Korean wouldn’t be here, Damien would still be more than happy to inflict a little pain on Chess Team’s support members.
“Secure the barracks,” Damien murmured the command into a tactical throat microphone, and his men branched out down the short hallway off the helipad and into the section that had formerly been used to house Damien and his fellow Gen Y security members, when the facility had been Manifold’s. Gen Y, a security firm comprised mostly of former military members, was a company with just the one client—Manifold Genetics. Manifold had been Richard Ridley’s baby, with locations all over the globe and cutting-edge research into biotechnology. Damien had been happy to work for them, first in a post in Iran, then later at Tristan da Cunha and here at the former Manifold Alpha base in New Hampshire. Anything to get away from his native Ireland. But things had gone to hell, first in the Atlantic, and then here too. That bitch, Anna Beck, had gone over to the other side, and the hopping Asian wonder, the Chess Team member named Knight, had ruined the Hydra lab, setting off all kinds of crazy. The base was lost to the military and Ridley was gone—Gen Y took their orders from another leader now.
“Sir,” Adrian Kepler, Damien’s second in command was calling him over, startling him out of his remembrances.
“What is it?” Damien walked over to the doorway leading off the barracks, to an unfinished surface of rock walls that led down to the caverns below Alpha. Most of the rest of this level had floors under it as well, but this closet went right into the rock of the mountain under which this section of the base was built. Kepler was pointing to a thick climbing rope that had been secured to the anchor at the top of the vertical tunnel going down into the depths. “Is someone on the line?”
“Hard to tell, sir. It goes down a ways.” Kepler replied.
“You don’t have to tell me, Adrian. I was down there. Cut it and let’s move on.”
Kepler pulled out an SOG Seal Pup knife from the sheath attached to the front of his black BDU blouse and in one slick swipe, cleaved the rope. The tail of the rope quickly slithered off the floor and down the hole like a retreating snake.
The other twenty team members had moved further into the complex toward the freight elevator, past the gym. Each team member, in their solid black BDU uniforms, and armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, staggered themselves along the hallway, covering both ahead of them and behind, as they had been taught. Damien doubted whether the feeble five-man Chess Team security force on site would pose any threat. They’d probably have a hell of a time just getting into the base. By that time, Damien and his men would have what they had come for and would be long gone. Then Damien would take the utmost pleasure in finally destroying the base, as it should have been destroyed years ago.
5.
En route to Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Tom Duncan smiled broadly.