Thomas Greanias - The Atlantis Prophecy

"Easy, sir," said the CP officer. "The R.A.T.S. are coming."

"Rats?"

"Recon and Tactics Squad," the officer said. "A select group of us have undergone special training to access the miles of utility tunnels underneath the Capitol complex. They're arriving now."

Seavers turned to see the elite unit march up with their navy blue baseball hats, flak jackets that said R.A.T.S., and special night-vision Haz-Mat masks. The laser-sighted automatic machine guns in particular impressed Seavers, as he instantly recognized them to be German-made G36s by their distinctive translucent magazines. Their short-stroke gas system enabled them to fire tens of thousands of rounds without cleaning, perfect for use in the tunnels. And he especially admired the commanding officer's AG36 40mm grenade launcher.

"Well, it's about time," he said.

The knife-thin commanding officer lowered her mask to reveal a young, dark-skinned face. "I'm Sergeant Randolph, sir."

"Have you ever done this before?" he demanded.

She ignored him as she unfolded her classified schematics of the steam tunnels and reviewed choke points with her team.

"We won't have any radio signals down there," Sergeant Randolph said. "We'll stick to light signals. Converge at point C."

Seavers said, "Where is point C?"

"I'm sorry, sir," she said, folding up her blueprints and slipping them inside a hidden vest pocket. "But the Capitol Police can't provide any further details about how we protect the tunnels. You know, national security."

Seavers watched her put on her mask. She motioned a man to widen the open grating and a blast of scalding steam came out. Seavers covered his face and watched Sergeant Randolph and her R.A.T.S. vanish into the pipes.

CONRAD RAN THROUGH the dilapidated network of steam tunnels beneath Capitol Hill, hands up to brush aside falling debris from the crumbling ceilings. He could hear his heavy breathing inside his mask and feel the sweat drench his body. He had found the cornerstone but no globe, and right now his only mission was survival.

He knew that all the buildings in the U.S. Capitol complex could be entered through the steam tunnels. But he never imagined their state of repair to be this poor. Not after the feds just spent a billion dollars on the underground Capitol Visitors Center. They must have just sealed off the new construction and said to hell with the steam tunnels.

He came to a cross tunnel. Something inside prompted him to stop and listen. Besides a continuous low rumble in the background, he couldn't hear a thing. But when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the green glow of night vision gear.

He started to run.

A shot rang out, and he ducked as a bullet ricocheted off the tunnel wall. He froze as several chunks of the ceiling came down around him. Slowly he turned around and squinted in the dark.

A thin shadow was wafting toward him. He looked down and saw the glowing red dot on his chest.

Suddenly a beam of white light blinded him and a voice in a ringing alto shouted: "Hands up where I can see them!"

It was a woman's voice, and she was mad as hell.

Conrad put up his hands and heard a deafening crack. But he wasn't shot. It was the floor-it was beginning to crumble.

The policewoman yelled: "Stop!"

But Conrad stomped on the floor as hard as he could. His knees began to buckle. The tunnel floor gave way under him and he plunged into darkness.

Sergeant Wanda Randolph kept her G36 steady in spite of the tunnel collapse, both eyes peering through her electronic red dot sight. But when the smoke cleared, her man was gone.

Quickly but cautiously, she moved through the dust to the crater in the tunnel floor, coughing through her mask. Finger on her trigger, ready to unload a round, she pointed her G36 down and hit her high beams, bathing the rubble below in light. There was no suspect underneath the chunks of concrete.

There was, however, another tunnel, one not on her schematics.

"Sweet Jesus," she said, although she wasn't surprised.

Before she joined the Capitol Police, Sergeant Wanda Randolph spent two years in Tora Bora and Baghdad crawling through caves and bunkers and sewers ahead of American troops in search of Bin Laden and later Saddam Hussein. She was tall and lean, with narrow shoulders and hips that enabled her to slip through holes and places people just weren't created to go. And while dogs could sniff explosives with their noses, they couldn't see tripwires, so they sent her ahead of even the dogs.

It was a year later that ten employees who worked in the Capitol Power Plant tunnels sent a letter to four members of Congress to express their concern that there was no police presence in the underground tunnels. The tunnels provided steam to heat and cool the Capitol campus and ran from the Capitol Power Plant to the House and Senate office buildings, the Capitol and surrounding buildings.

Now she was "Queen Rat," chief of the Hill's special Recon and Tactics Squad. The mission of the R.A.T.S. was to police the crumbling, asbestos-lined tunnels that had become a giant health trap to federal employees and a gaping hole in national security. As dirty and humble as her life's work had turned out to be, she was the best at it and proud to serve the United States of America.

"All R.A.T.S., report," she called into her radio, but knew it was no use even before static filled her earpiece. She flashed her call sign twice into the dark. No response.

As usual, she was on her own.

She climbed down into the new tunnel, using the rubble like a staircase until she reached the bottom and straightened up with her G36 pointed ahead. She hit her high beam again and gasped.

The tunnel wasn't a steam tunnel at all, but something else, like something out of ancient Rome. With one arm still holding up her weapon, she ran her other hand along the stone wall, awed by the solid construction of the stonecutters. She had seen enough tunnels beneath centuries-old cities to know this tunnel was older than the steam tunnels above, which themselves were more than a hundred years old. For all she knew, this tunnel was older than the republic.

Either the government had forgotten this tunnel was here, or knowledge of its existence was way beyond her pay grade. In any case, she had an intruder to capture or kill, and she marched down the corridor.

About three minutes later she saw the perp in his yellow Haz-Mat gear standing before a fork in the tunnel, his back to her.

"Turn around, hands up, or I shoot in three," she shouted, her G36 up and locked on the perp. "One…"

His arms seemed to waver but he wasn't turning around.

She aimed the glowing red dot between his shoulder blades.

"Two…"

Now his right leg seemed to waver, but still he didn't turn around.

She took a breath and tightened her grip on the trigger.

"Three."

One of his arms came down and his body twisted toward her. She wasn't about to wait for him to get off a shot and pulled the trigger, letting loose a burst of fire.

The bullets hit her target in the chest, blowing him back into the tunnel.

She ran down the stone floor to the crumpled body, her G36 pointed at the mask. She lowered the barrel and lifted the mask to see that it was empty. The perp had shed the suit and strung it up.

She looked down one tunnel with her high beams and saw nothing, then down the other and saw a glint of metal. She gave a war cry and ran down the tunnel only to find a shiny vaultlike door at the end.

It was an emergency hatch. All the old sublevel hatches were replaced several years back with new ones. And like all the safety precautions in place in the tunnels, it was designed to keep people on the outside from getting in, not people on the inside from getting out.