do. He could eliminate this intruder on his own, and with that kind of heroic deed, he’d never be asked to perform desk duty again.
So he pressed the button to open the door and simultaneously dropped his other hand to his sidearm. He’d be able to draw it as the intruder rounded the corner. Henderson would get three shots into Tyler before he knew what hit him.
The intruder waved Deal to the door. Deal came through, and at the same time Henderson heard a clatter on the floor. Instinctively, his eyes dropped from Tyler to the floor. He saw a metal cylinder bounce against the wall and come to rest near his feet.
His peripheral vision registered that Tyler threw himself to the ground behind the glass, but Henderson realized too late that the cylinder at his feet was a flash grenade. He was looking directly at it when it exploded in his face.
Locke crouched against the wall, pressed his fingers into his ears, and shut his eyes tightly. He’d pulled the pin on the flash grenade and counted to two before flicking it with his wrist in the direction of the open door.
The grenade went off with a loud thump. The grenade was intended to disable with a bright light and concussive force of the explosion. In most cases, the explosion wasn’t injurious, but stunned its targets by rendering them deaf, blind, and dizzy.
Locke leapt to his feet and dashed through the doorway. Both Deal and the guard were lying on the floor clawing at their eyes. Before the guard could recover, Locke slammed him in the back of his head with the butt of the rifle he’d appropriated from one of the guard’s dead colleagues. The guard dropped to the deck unconscious, but breathing. The smoke lingered as the ventilation system struggled to dissipate it.
Locke took advantage of the smoke cover and smashed the sentry room’s camera, but he knew that it wouldn’t take Cutter’s security team long to notice it wasn’t working. When that happened, they’d first think it was a technical glitch. Then they would call the guard to confirm there wasn’t a security breach. When they got no response, they’d send a guard to check. Locke guessed that they had two minutes at most.
Grant and Turner, who’d heard the blast through the earpiece, rushed through the outer door. Locke hadn’t been able to tell them about his improvisation, so they came through the door with their guns at the ready. When they saw Locke was the only one standing, they lowered their weapons.
“Looks like you’ve got things under control,” Grant said.
“He tried to take me down by himself,” Locke said.
“Big mistake.”
“Where’s Knoll?”
“He’s keeping watch outside.”
“We’d better hurry.”
Turner removed a packet of plastic restraining ties from his pocket. He threw a couple to Locke, who used them to bind the guard’s hands and feet behind his back. Grant did the same with the groaning Deal while Turner radioed his sergeant.
“Ares Leader to Ares One,” he said.
“Ares One here.”
“We’re through the front door. We’ve still got five minutes before those guards are supposed to check in. Maintain your position. I’ll alert you when we’ve secured the barriers. Make no move before then unless you get confirmation from me.”
“Roger that.”
Locke checked the hallway leading from the guard station, where it reached an intersection. To the right and left were long corridors that ended in doors. Locke turned and saw two elevators with only one call button. Down. Across from the elevators was another door, a triple-thick heavy-duty metal slab that could probably take a direct hit by an RPG. Locke eased it open.
It was the interior of the hangar, a huge chamber. About fifty feet away, Locke could see the open hangar door and next to it, a large service elevator. Two guards stood at the elevator, observing the movement of equipment. Apparently, the thick door had muffled the flash bang well enough for it to go unnoticed amid the noise the guards were making.
The hangar contained only one thing, but there was a hell of a lot of it. Dirt. Massive piles of it stretching to the ceiling and filling every corner of the hangar, leaving only a wide path to reach the service elevator. All of it had been bored out of the earth below him and stacked here so that no one would see dump trucks leaving the facility. They could put up the buildings without much permitting, but digging out thousands of tons of dirt and rock would have invited unwanted questions about what was being built. The other hangars must have been filled to the brim as well.
Locke closed the door without the guards seeing him. They were too focused on the other side of the hangar. He walked down one end of the long corridor past the elevator and opened the door to see a wide stairway leading down.
At the first landing, there was the horizontal concrete barrier that was recessed into the wall. At the press of a button at the central security station, the barrier would come out of the wall over the landing and nestle into the opposite wall, covering the entire stairwell. It would take far more explosives than Locke had in his bag of tricks to blast through it.
He couldn’t hear anyone in the stairwell and closed the door. Locke jogged back to the guard station and saw the computer monitor sitting on the guard’s desk. If they could log into the system, they might be able to get a schematic for the underground facility.
“I’m going to check…”
Those were the only words Locke got out. He heard a shot outside the building. The outside door crashed open, and Knoll’s lifeless body tumbled inside. A guard rushed in and jumped over Knoll. He stopped in his tracks when he saw the residual smoke and the three men standing in the guard’s chamber.
The guard raised his weapon to fire, and Locke lunged for the button controlling the security door. He slammed his hand down on it as bullets from the guard’s machine gun thudded into the wall behind the open door. Grant ducked under them, and the security door slammed shut. The guard put another round into the glass, but it was, indeed, bulletproof, and the rounds simply smacked into it.
The guard whipped the radio to his lips, and Locke realized that he, Grant, and Turner had only seconds to get down the stairs because the guard was radioing that security had been breached. Oasis was going to be locked down.
“Come on!” Locke yelled and ran toward the east stairs.
Grant was behind him, and Turner followed, yelling into his radio.
“Ares One! This is Ares Leader! We’ve been made! Start your attack!”
“Roger, Ares Leader!”
Locke plunged through the door and took the stairs down two at a time. A klaxon sounded. He was just past the landing when the barrier began to emerge from the wall and slide across the stairwell. The concrete slab must have weighed tons, but it was closing quickly. It was already halfway to the opposite wall as Grant hopped over it and down the stairs.
Turner dove over the railing and into the opposite wall. He tucked himself in and rolled down the stairs, just squeezing through before the barrier slammed with a clunk into the wall.
The klaxon reduced to a quarter volume, and a female voice said, “Intruder alert. Stay in your rooms.” The message repeated ten seconds later. Locke assumed the message was aimed at the facility’s civilian occupants.
He helped Turner up. “You all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” Turner said, massaging his shoulder.
“Try your radio.”
Turner called for the sergeant three times. No answer except static.
“The barrier’s too thick,” Turner said.
“And if we can’t raise them, we can’t radio the bomber.”
“Then our first objective after we find the bioweapon is to get the barrier open again.”
Locke simply nodded. They all knew what they were up against. There were seven levels to explore, at least
