Daredevil Riders

84

Maybe they were afraid we’d all go mad and kill them.

He slipped his g*n from its holster and another object from his belt. The entrance was straight ahead. He assumed Mr. Green had given strict orders. Do not kill, at least him. Bring him to me. Then she would kill him, probably after making him watch the deaths of Caleb and Mirabel.

He reached the outside of the entrance. Readying his g*n, he held out the other object, a telescoping rod. He flipped it out to its full six-foot length. He nudged the wall in front of him that represented the back of the cabinet on the pin swivel. It had been painted to resemble black rock, but it was only wood. Rotted wood now. He pushed harder with the rod. The wood gave way, the pin swivel did its job and the wall swung inward.

Something shot out of the opening and hit the rock Herbert was standing next to. This he’d expected. A dart. Paralyze, not kill. He pulled the pin on the lump of metal he’d taken from a compartment on his vest and tossed it into the opening at the same time he slid behind a large outcrop of rock.

There was a small pulse of energy followed by a dense cloud of smoke. Herbert slid on his gas mask and counted. He stopped counting when he heard the man behind the wall hit the floor. He moved through the opening and looked down. The Russian was large, with a shaved head, a small goatee and a dart pistol in his hand. It was probably not in the man’s nature to seek to stun instead of kill. He’d not been very good with the dart g*n. Herbert used two pairs of plasticuffs to immobilize the man’s hands and feet. Clear of the gas, he removed his mask and moved forward into Murder Mountain.

At the front entrance to the facility, Finn, Anthony and Knox stood facing a metal door revealed in the rock face of the mountain where they’d pulled aside a curtain of kudzu that covered it. Herbert had told them where the door was located and had given them a key that he said would open the portal. But there wasn’t even a keyhole to try the key in. He’d also told them that he was the only one who could make it through the hidden entrance, because there was no way for someone to follow him closely enough not to get lost. He told them he would rendezvous with them at the front door.

“He snookered us,” moaned Knox, who was holding the useless key. “I can’t believe I fell for it. Like he’d have a damn key to this place after all these years.”

“He’s going it alone,” said Finn.

“The hell he is,” snapped Anthony. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out a slender metal object with a magnetized edge.

“What is that?” asked Knox.

“Well, love, at MI we call this a doorbell.” She attached it to the metal door where it met the doorjamb. She motioned them to step back. She drew a remote from her pocket, slid open the protective hard plastic covering and pressed a button. “Don’t look at the laser,” she instructed.

They all looked away as a burst of red light erupted from the device she’d placed on the door. It cut neatly through the locking bar, and the door swung free on its hinges.

“Pretty cool technology,” said Knox.

“One-time power pack, good for most secure doors, metal or otherwise,” she explained.

“I see Mr. Q is still alive and well in British intelligence.”

“Actually, it was a woman who invented this little toy. But you can just call her Ms. Q.”

Guns out, they approached the door. With Anthony and Knox covering him, Finn slowly pulled the door all the way open. He aimed his g*n into the darkness and then nodded at the others. They pulled on protective goggles, as did Finn. A second later Finn hit the opening with a pulse of blinding white light. There was a shout of pain from inside and then the light vanished.

Before the men could move, Anthony was through the opening. They hustled after her in time to see her nimbly disarm the man and then smash her foot into his face, sending him rocketing backward against an interior wall. The man, partially blinded by the light, ricocheted off the wall and came at Anthony, big arms swinging like pistons. Finn moved to step between the attacker and Anthony, but the MI agent had already launched off the ground. With her left foot she hit the man with a crushing blow to his right knee. They all heard the bone in his leg snap. He crumpled downward at the same time she delivered a kick to his chin, flipping him heels over a*s. When he tried to rise, his gut pushing in and out with painful breaths, Anthony laid him down for good with an elbow strike to the base of his neck. She rose and placed the muzzle of her Walther against the unconscious man’s temple.

“Wait a minute,” snapped Knox.

“What?” she asked.

“You’re just going to shoot him in cold blood?” asked Knox.

“Do we want to leave witnesses?” she asked calmly.

“Witnesses to what?”

“To whatever’s going to happen here tonight. Like me killing Herbert for him playing us for fools.”

“We’re not killing anyone unless they’re in a position to kill us,” Knox said firmly.

Anthony deftly cuffed the unconscious man. “Suit yourself.”

Finn said, “Where’d you learn moves like that?”

“Maybe you blokes think otherwise, but MI is not a b****y girls’ school. Now let’s get going.”

She turned on a flashlight and headed down the corridor.

Finn and Knox looked at each other and then quickly followed the woman.

THOUGH THE ENTIRE FACILITY itself was quite large, with barracks, kitchens, an infirmary, a library, offices, classrooms and other specific free spaces, the most intensive training areas of Murder Mountain were set up in the form of a pair of large steel cylinders divided into parallel sections and separated by a main hall. Once you entered the first section, you had to continue on until the last section in that cylinder. The massive entry doors locked behind you and did not allow passage back. And one couldn’t simply block the door open, because if one did the next door would not open. It was a way to keep reluctant recruits focused and on mission and always moving forward. Herbert’s plan was simple. He was going to take the section on the right and follow it through. If he didn’t find his quarry there, he would exit this cylinder, walk back down the main hall and

enter the other cylinder.

Herbert made his way slowly down the hall to the first door. One man was down and there were five more to go, plus Mr. Green, whom Herbert considered probably the most skilled of the bunch.

He felt no guilt about tricking his friends. If anyone was going to die trying to rescue Caleb and Mirabel it was going to be him. This ultimately was his fight, not theirs. He’d lost enough friends. He was determined not to lose any more tonight.

He ran off the order of the training sections in his head. Shooting range first, where he had fired off hundreds of thousands of rounds in the year he had been here. They threw every imaginable distraction at you while you were aiming at the targets. It had been good training, because out in the real world a perfect field of fire with accompanying idyllic conditions was impossible to find.

After the shooting range was a room outfitted like the famed Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy. Here Herbert and his teammates had practiced what they’d learned in the classroom. After that room was the lab. It was there where the psychological testing took place—really glorified t*****e to determine what your breaking point was. Herbert had seen hard-as-steel men weep in that room, as the technicians played numbing games with their minds, which would never be as strong as their physical side, no matter how much they trained. There were proven exercises that would enlarge and strengthen muscle. The mind, on the other hand, was not so easily quantifiable. And the recruits all carried hidden mental elements with them here that would jump out at unexpected times and cause them to falter, to fail, to scream in rage. Herbert had felt all those emotions. No place on earth had ever humbled him like the lab at Murder Mountain.

After the lab was a series of rooms that served as holding cells. Herbert never knew what persons might have been “held” here, and he didn’t want to know. If Caleb and Mirabel were not down this way he would start through the other cylinder where there were only two sections. The first was a tank full of foul liquid. One would fall into this muck if one did not know where to step on a catwalk that constituted the top of the tank. Once inside the tank it became a fight to the death. After the tank came a maze that Herbert thankfully had the answer for. Or at least he thought he did. He now wondered if Mr. Green had built some surprise for him.

Of course she has. She’s enjoying this. I ruined her plans. She has a half billion dollars she can’t spend. She’s going to take it all out on me. At least she’s going to try to.

But again something tugged at the back of Herbert’s mind, telling him there had to be more to it than that. He listened as the flap of wings evidenced that birds had gotten into Murder Mountain. That had happened when the place was operational. Herbert had even made a pet of one bird that had built a nest near where he slept. It was the only tie to the outside world he’d had.

The place had been built in the 19 0s, and the design reflected the era. There were even ashtrays built into metal consoles. Everywhere he looked he saw something hopelessly out of date. But when it was new, Murder Mountain was a state-of-the-art facility. The government funds to build it, Herbert had been told once, had been buried in a huge spending bill that included subsidies for hog farmers and the textile industries.

Local Are

What was a little governmental assassination with your ham and polyester?

He cautiously entered the firing range. It was here that he had killed the first man he’d shot in thirty years. He had done it to save himself and Reuben Rhodes. His gaze traveled to the very spot where the man had fallen and died. The fluorescent overhead lights were too weak to allow Herbert to see if the man’s blood was still there. At least his body wasn’t. The place had been cleaned up after his last visit here. He wondered why they hadn’t just imploded Murder Mountain, burying it under tons of steel and rock. Maybe they were holding on to it, in case they needed to use it again. That was a chilling thought.

The lights were on, though, however feebly. Which meant Mr. Green had figured out how to use the old generator system to create a bit of power. He crept forward, past the tattered targets, ducking under the sagging wires on pulleys that allowed the paper targets to be moved back and forth. He stopped thinking about anything other than what would be waiting for him.

The bare scrape of a shoe on the dusty floor caused him to drop low behind a wooden counter where he had once stood daily to fire his allotted rounds. The sound had come from his left, ten yards at most. He wondered if they were all using darts until the moment of truth came. It didn’t really matter. If he allowed himself to be knocked unconscious by a tranquilizer round he was as good as dead anyway.

Crouching down, he circled backward, his g*n covering both front and rear flanks in alternating swivels. This tactic must’ve confused his opponent, who probably thought Herbert was moving forward and not backward with every creak of boards. When the man emerged from his hiding place to fire at a target that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Herbert placed one round in the man’s arm, disabling him. As he clutched for his wounded limb, Herbert fired the kill shot into his neck, neatly bypassing his body armor. The man dropped on the spot, his carotid severed.

Herbert studied the door, did the math in his head. It was probable that the man he’d just killed was a ruse to flush him. Sacrifice one to accomplish the mission. The landing at Normandy in 1944 had followed this same strategy, only the number of lives sacrificed had been in the thousands. On the other side of that door were probably at least two shooters waiting to take him.

So he waited. He counted off the seconds in his head. Patience. He had spent years learning that trait. There were few men who could outwait him. Ten minutes passed and the only part of Herbert that moved was his chest, with each shallow breath.

The only problem was that Mr. Green, and thus her men, knew that one could not go back in these sections. One had to go forward. How long were they willing to wait? How long was Herbert willing to wait?

We’re all going to find out.

“WAIT A MINUTE, HOW’D YOU KNOW to bring that laser thing?” Knox asked Anthony as they crouched in the darkness.

“Like your Boy Scouts, it’s the mission of MI to always be prepared.”

“Meaning you didn’t believe Herbert?”

“The key?” Anthony scoffed. “Of course I didn’t believe him. Reading his psychological profile was fairly easy. He wasn’t going to endanger us too.”

“He let us go to New York with him,” Finn pointed out.

“I guess he believed the South Bronx was safer than this place,” pointed out Knox.

“Murder Mountain,” said Anthony. “Made for interesting reading.”

Both men looked at her.

“I researched it, of course,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

Knox cleared his throat. “How did you know what to research? Herbert didn’t mention the place until we were on the way here.”

“The place where it all began? Remember, that’s what Ming said back in New York. So I did some digging, got my folks back in the UK doing the same. I knew that Herbert started out his career in Triple Six. What I didn’t know was that it began with a year’s worth of training right here. Got a file emailed to me two hours before we left. Like I said, interesting reading.”

Finn looked down at the laminated plan of the place Herbert had given him. “Looks like multiple spots to be ambushed.”

“That cuts both ways,” said Knox, and Anthony nodded in agreement.

She pointed at the plan and said, “We have two choices. Go through each side together or split up.”

Finn said, “I vote for getting out of the open. If we need to go through these section things, let’s split up. I’ll go to the left and you two to the right.”

Anthony shook her head. “No, you two go right, I’ll go left.”

The men looked at her again. “What?” she said. “A woman can’t go it alone? She needs a precious man to hold her poor, fragile hand?”

“It’s not that,” said Knox uncomfortably.

“Good to hear it,” she said. “I’ll take the one on the left. Now here’s some little tidbits you need to know about the section on the right to traverse it safely.” She filled them in on particulars she’d gained from her research.

“Got it?” she said, looking at them.

“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” said Knox.

“Why wouldn’t I?” shot back Anthony. “It’s my job.”

“Good luck,” said Finn.

“Cheers.”

She left the two men standing there staring after her until she disappeared into the darkness.

Herbert was still waiting in the firing range room. He considered his options. It didn’t take long since there weren’t many. He could stay here until he starved to death. Or he could go through the door.

Or…

He got up, grabbed the wire that the targets rode on and pulled it free. He wound one end of it around the door handle and over the existing pulleys. Then he crouched down behind the counter and wound the remainder of the wire around his hand. He counted to five and aimed his pistol at the door opening. He slowly pulled on the wire. The door handle lifted. He tugged harder. The door started to open. As soon as it was open halfway, a barrage of bullets poured through, clanging off metal surfaces in the firing range room.