Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

Wheeler stayed very still, aware even a small slip of his hand could throw his results out of whack. Resembling a tablet computer with two nubby antennae, the device transmitted and read a wide cone of radar pulses in the one-to-ten gigahertz frequency range—bands that could penetrate wood, glass, and concrete barriers and were sensitive enough to pick up the slightest motion, the softest intake of breath, even the presence of a breeze or buzzing fly on the other side of the wall. Wheeler knew the unit had certain limitations. Its Doppler pulses couldn’t penetrate walls more than a foot thick. Nor could they pass through sheet metal. But they hadn’t used steel construction in walls this old, and running into it would be its own kind of giveaway, a sign of some later renovation.

He checked the Wally’s readout screen, suppressing a flicker of impatience. Its scan took about a minute, and the results would display on his screen as both numeric values and Doppler imagery. Meanwhile, the two Quickdraw guys who had accompanied him into the chamber were concentrating on their own specified tasks.

E4 Begai’s was to sniff for things that might blow other things to smithereens, his next-best skill to blowing things up himself.

In the middle of the cavernous room now, he stood waving a terahertz scanner that resembled the spectrographic wands used by airport-security personnel. Its T-rays inhabited the so-called terahertz gap—a bandwidth region that sounded as if it had been named by Anakin Skywalker and fell somewhere between microwaves and infrared light. Whereas TTWS pulses could travel fifty or sixty feet through most walls, terahertz beams went a bare fraction of that distance before becoming absorbed by chemicals and gases at different and differentiable rates, making the wand just right for close-range bomb detection.

Begai had entered the chamber ahead of Wheeler, leading the way with the wand, sweeping for hidden explosives that could bring the walls and ceiling—real or false, original or not—down around their heads. But the space was the size of an auditorium, and they had no way to know how much time was available to them. The Wolf’s security personnel might or might not be aware they were down here. They might show at any moment or not at all. That uncertainty put pressure on Wheeler and Begai to make haste, but they were also being careful not to make mistakes. The trick was just to stay focused on the job that had to be done.

It was up to Sparrow to provide his teammates with cover. Wearing a balaclava sewn with the patterns and colors of his ancestral Seminole war paint, he stood facing the archway with his back to them, his rifle pointed out toward the curving passage they had just come from. Handpicked for the mission by Carmody, he was good at handling firearms of every type, and no wonder. His father ran a firing range on the Big Cypress Reservation near Lake Okeechobee, and while other kids were shooting hoops in the high-school gym, Sparrow had been shooting at silhouette targets and eventually beating seasoned three-point aces in local tournaments.

Now he carried a pair of his personal firearms in addition to Quickdraw’s standard-issue MP7. Specifically, an Mk 12 SPR designated-marksman rifle in a back sling, and a side-holstered Glock 34 pistol. Both were combat modified.

“This room’s clean,” he heard Begai report to Wheeler. “I didn’t pick up any traces.”

Wheeler grunted in acknowledgment. It was a distinct positive to know the floor wouldn’t blow up underfoot. But he also had yet to find evidence that the rock walls were anything but walls and that the Wolf’s computer room was in fact where Carmody’s top-secret intel source indicated it was.

He went deeper into the shadowy chamber, stopping every few feet to hold the TTWS unit up to the wall, waiting the requisite sixty seconds for each reading.

“Sparrow?” he said and glanced over his shoulder at him. “How’s the passage?”

“All quiet, sir.”

Wheeler grunted again and kept scanning. The wall was fairly straight. The room more or less rectangular. Clean and quiet. It seemed too good to be true. He couldn’t help wondering about the complete absence of guards.

He reached the end of the wall and started on the rear of the chamber. After a minute, Begai joined him. They had gone about halfway along the width of the rear wall when he noticed Wheeler looking at his Wally’s display with perked interest.

“Find something?” he asked.

Wheeler held up his free hand in a wait-a-second gesture. His attention went from the screen to the wall.

“Something, yeah,” he repeated vaguely and ran his eyes over the stones. The radar wasn’t picking up any objects behind the wall. It wasn’t finding any people, either. Only space. A whole lot of space.

And what seemed to be breezes.

“I don’t see normal dimensions for a room here,” he went on. “It’s like...I dunno...like the other side isn’t just empty. More like it’s big and hollow .”

Begai didn’t know what to make of that. He watched Wheeler fiddle with his unit’s controls, checking and rechecking its readings.

After a long minute, Wheeler shoved the Wally into its harness pocket and slipped a Maglite out of a leather holster on his belt. He shone it on the wall in front of him, gliding its beam over its bulges and cracks, probing with his gloved fingers. His hand went to a seam between two large irregular stones. Then went to the stone itself.

He pressed one of them with three fingertips. Nothing happened. He slid his hand onto the stone on the opposite side of the seam. Pressed again. And felt it give slightly under his touch.

“What the hell’s going on?” Begai said beside him.

Wheeler didn’t answer. He pressed the stone harder, and it gave some more. A moment later there was a grinding noise, a shifting of weight, and the wall to his right moved outward.

Begai took a reflexive step back. “It’s a door,” he said, answering his own question. “A God almighty door.”

They were both silent. The stack of rocks that composed the moving section of wall was rotating on a central axis. Begai thought crazily about the Hardy Boys mysteries his grandfather had kept dustily boxed away in his attic on the reservation.

Within seconds, the pile of stones had swiveled perpendicular to the rest of the wall, creating openings on its left and right. Each was large enough for one person to enter at a time.

Wheeler hoisted his carbine, slipped cautiously through one of the openings, and sucked in a breath of damp air. His mouth a wide, amazed O under his balaclava, he glanced back over his shoulder at Begai.

“You’ll want to see this with your own eyes,” he said.

Begai slid through the door, came up next to Wheeler, and stopped cold.

“Whoa,” he said. “What is this place?”

Wheeler shook his head. He was at a complete loss. They were on a circular ledge, actually the rim of what looked like a huge cylindrical well shaft, its mouth thirty or forty feet in diameter. The cellar’s vaulted ceiling rose high above them. The surface of the rim underfoot was fairly level and flat, the stones worn and smooth. A couple of yards to their right, it curved down into a sort of channel that resembled a water sluice, then ran another few feet counterclockwise to a helical staircase. The stairs wound along the walls of the shaft, descending through a continuous series of arches supported by narrow, carved piers.

Wheeler aimed his Maglite into the mouth of the well but realized he wouldn’t need it. There was a soft, cool, diffuse radiance coming from under the arches. Electric lighting. Probably LED panels.

He guessed the shaft plunged two or three hundred feet into the ground, the stairs and arcade running all the way to its bottom. The walls were mortared stone. The arcade was mortared stone. The columns and stairs and landings were mortared stone. All their surfaces were patchy with moss. Except for the stairs. The stairs looked clear and clean.