Mark Young - Off the grid

“I say again-is this sacrifice they’re making for nothing?” Beck seemed to express how both men felt.

The colonel nodded. “Not exactly. Primary mission has been accomplished. They breached Project Megiddo in New Mexico. Gerrit knew what the cost might be going in. We still had to send them in. Even if Joe wasn’t there. We had to make it look good.”

“Well, it looks like they did a bang-up job. Kane’s sending everything he has to take them out. We’ve got him fooled.”

Both men looked out the passenger window. Below, dots of light lay across the high desert as they flew over Idaho’s capital city. Beck stared out into the blackness, feeling helpless as he thought of what Gerrit, Willy, and Alena faced. Sometimes he wished he were God. But that would be stupid. Beck had enough problems dealing with the troubles of this investigation, let alone carrying the burdens of the world.

In his own investigation, he learned to respect what Gerrit’s father had tried to achieve. First, Thomas O’Rourke tried to shoulder the whole load after learning how his research would be used by Kane and his people. The father tried to protect his son by trying to bring him back to MIT where he could be protected.

Instead, Gerrit went off to war, unaware of what his own father was struggling with back home, angry that he couldn’t make his father understand. Unknown to Gerrit, his father knew quite well what was at stake. Like some international thriller, Thomas O’Rourke struggled against a growing technological invasion that threatened the entire international community. Ironically, it was the father’s death that brought his son home. And then Gerrit struggled to find out why his father died, not knowing his ignorance was the only thing keeping him alive.

Beck hoped Gerrit lived long enough to learn what his father had sacrificed.

This thought took him to a night many years ago when Joe told him he’d recruited Alena to be a part of the team. At first, Beck told Joe he was crazy. They knew what she had done in her past and he thought the risk too great. Joe fought him every step of the way, even though he knew what the woman had brought on Joe’s own family.

“People change. Redemption is always possible if a person is willing to confess his or her sins and make amends.” That was all Joe would say.

It looked like Joe might have been right about her. Maybe. And Beck hoped Gerrit would still be able to work with Alena once he knew the entire story about his father and that night many years ago.

Gerrit would handle it one of two ways. He’d learn to work with her and put the past behind him.

Or he’d kill her.

This whole conflict might be moot if Gerrit and Alena didn’t survive tonight. Help was still minutes away.

He prayed they lasted that long.

Gerrit pulled the pin and rolled a flash-bang into the darkened lobby. Lights inside the building had gone dark the moment he blew the door. They must be waiting inside.

He wanted to even their chances of survival. He counted off the seconds before the explosion. As soon as it went off, he peeled around the doorway and entered the lobby to the left. Alena swept past him toward the right. Once again, he and Alena had to pass through the kill zone.

Red emergency lights flashed on. He quickly scanned the lobby. No movement.

“Gerrit, follow me! Tell Willy to stay right behind us.” Alena’s sharp command caught him unaware for a moment. She brushed past him and, using her M4 rifle, blew the lock off a door leading from the lobby. “Forget the elevator. It’s no use.”

Gerrit scanned the lobby once more. Empty. Where was everyone? This place had to have a small army working inside.

She kicked the door open and rolled another flash-bang down a bank of stairs. They turned away from the blast, standing on either side of the doorway, until it triggered below. After the explosion, Alena dashed down the stairs with speed Gerrit thought bordered on recklessness. He quickly tried to catch up, knowing that there had to be more security below.

A pulsating red glow illuminated the stairs in the same way the lobby had been lit up. Somewhere, a lockdown system had kicked in, triggering emergency lights and automatically locking all passageways through the building.

She moved through the building like someone who’d been here before. How did she know the door above led to these stairs? There were no markings in the lobby.

A chill began to work its way through his chest. Unless…? What were the chances Richard Kane had two traitors in their midst? Gerrit had watched her in action, and he found it hard to believe she worked for the other side. She had been genuinely shocked to find Redneck had been a plant. The look on her face was as if Redneck had betrayed her-personally-not just the group she worked with.

He forced these thoughts from his mind. Needed to concentrate on finding Joe and getting out of this building alive. Later, when they had time, he’d confront her.

Gerrit motioned for Willy to rejoin them. “Move ahead of me, but stay behind Alena. I’ll cover our six, make sure no one climbs down our back.”

Nodding, Willy moved ahead, trying to stay up with Alena.

The stairway snaked back and forth, carrying them deeper belowground. He’d lost track of how many flights of stairs they traversed. Four or five? The last landing led to a concrete slab, bordered by a wall of cement. A single metal door stood at the foot of the stairs. Off to the left, a keypad.

He moved closer to Alena. “The only way we can get through that door is to blow it with the det cord I have left.” He heard a backup generator pounding away nearby, and the keypad lit up.

Alena looked at him earnestly. “Gerrit, do you trust me?”

The thought that troubled him earlier came back in a flash. He paused for a moment, thinking hard about his answer. “Yeah. I do.”

“I’ll tell you everything later. Right now, just trust me to do the right thing.” She strode over to the keypad and punched in a series of letters and numbers. The lock clicked and she opened the door, then held it open. “Stay close.” She peeled through the doorway to the right, and Gerrit moved to the left, leaving Willy behind.

At first, the place seemed empty.

They stared at each other and then scanned the room once more. A cluster of consoles and monitors, grouped together at one end of an expansive room, stood next to a forest of tall computer servers. Each workstation was linked to a series of cables that rose to the ceiling, strung together like strands of spaghetti until they reached the servers. The cables came to a glass wall, through which they passed into what appeared to be a climate-controlled and dust-free environment.

Kane’s nerve center.

The workstations looked like a duplication of NASA’s control center, everyone’s desk facing the mammoth screens like so many pagans worshiping their god. On these screens, streams of data code and file directories were broadcast. In the far corner, a half-dozen men and women cowered, their white lab coats broadcasting that they were technicians-not soldiers.

Willy came in behind them and whistled. “Oh my! What do we have here?”

Gerrit moved toward the huddled technicians, ordering them to lie on the ground. He found a box of plastic ties and used these to bind up the technicians. Within minutes, he had the group bound hand and foot.

Willy was already at one of the consoles, his laptop tied to a USB port. “I can get a signal down here. They must have a wireless system set up to reach upstairs. I am going to start sending out data from their system to ours.” Willy glanced at one of the screens. “Uh-oh.”

“What?” Gerrit moved closer. “It looks like they’ve accessed NSA, Langley…and the Pentagon.”