Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

He waited a few seconds and checked the tiny indicator lights on the gumsticks. They were all blinking green. The devices had successfully piggybacked onto a wireless signal and initiated the mirror-transmit. Their lights would turn solid green once the uploads were complete.

He looked around in the meantime. The setup seemed to have been vacated, cleared out, but not on the spur of the moment and not in any kind of rush. It was too neat and orderly. He had a hunch a physical search would be a waste but would take a look around anyway.

He was about to get started when he heard more rumblings. This time he was sure they were coming from overhead.

He looked straight up above him but didn’t see anything. Just the old mineral-and-moss scaled walls, stairs, and archways climbing three hundred feet to the mouth of the well.

After a second, he lowered his eyes to Begai, who was standing at the rose’s east-facing door.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Okay,” Begai said. He was holding the Wally up to the wooden planks. “We’re alone, so far.”

Rmmbrmmmbrmmmmbmmmmbrmmmrmmmmmmmmm...

The men exchanged glances, listening, neither of them speaking a word. The tension in their eyes said everything. That had been the loudest, longest string of rumblings yet. It was like a cannonade.

Alone except for that god-awful noise , Wheeler thought. He drew a breath, motioned for Begai to proceed, and turned to recheck the computers. The gumsticks were still blinking. He hurried to get on with his search.

He found the desktops bare, the media-storage cabinets empty. There was nothing in the trash cans but their plastic liners. He crouched on the balls of his feet, looking around and under the workstations. Nothing. Not a slip of paper. Not a gum wrapper or a bread crumb.

He rose to his feet and ran his hands over the curvature of the walls, feeling for built-in drawers or panels. Nothing. He noticed a couple of narrow ventilation slots about fifteen feet above his head and decided to inspect them with his Maglite. Cool, dry filtered air whiffed his face as he got up onto a desk and shone the flash through one of the grates. He saw nothing stashed in the metal ducts behind them.

Nothing anywhere.

Nothing at all.

He stood still a minute, his eyes ranging around the walls. Where hadn’t he looked? What might he have missed? He couldn’t think of anything. The place was like a movie set. All crazy, surreal scenery and deafening sound effects. Castle of the Technologie Vampiri . It looked authentic in its own weird way. But it wasn’t functional. Or at least wasn’t operational. At least, not now.

Wheeler was about to hop off the desktop when his eye fell on a dark, round hole on the wall to his right, roughly between the desk he was standing on and the one in the next triangular petal of the rose. The size of a silver dollar, it was a little below the air vents. He saw at once that it was covered with nonreflective glass. And that the glass was flush against the wall.

Crap. Should’ve figured.

He looked around some more and noticed another circle of tinted glass. It was the same height above the floor as the first, but halfway around the circumference of the rose.

Jumping to the floor, Wheeler pushed the desk under the first hole, careful not to accidentally unplug the computer on top of it. Then he climbed back up for a closer look. There was a concave video camera lens behind the tinted glass. Around the lens were tiny infrared LEDs. The camera was night-vision capable.

A few strips of 100-mph tape—a SEAL’s best friend—would take care of it.

He got a roll out of a gear bag, then reached into a trouser pocket for his KA-BAR folding knife. He cut a strip about three inches long with the KA-BAR and stuck it vertically on the wall over the round glass pane. Then he cut a second three-inch strip of the heavy-duty adhesive tape and put it across the first piece. Good enough . The glass was covered. The camera would be blind, day or night.

He blocked the other camera the same way, pushing the nearest desk underneath it, climbing up, and taping it over. When he got back down, he cut four additional strips of tape and covered the tiny camera lenses on all four computer monitors as an added precaution.

Finally, he returned to the gumsticks. The first was solid green. Wheeler pulled it out and dropped it into a shoulder bag and waited. After a moment the second stick’s progress light stopped blinking, and he went to pull it from the slot.

“Sir?”

Begai. He’d moved around the circle to the east-facing door.

Wheeler turned to face him.

“Someone’s coming,” Begai said, his eyes wide.

At that instant, the Russian freelancer named Krask was racing toward the opposite side of the door through an underground passage, five of his men close behind him. He’d lost the livestream from the computer room in his helmet reticle, but that wasn’t the thing that bothered him. The American task force was obviously top-notch. Krask had half expected they would notice the cameras.

He ran on. With or without the video feed, he still held the element of surprise. Surprise because of his opposition’s unfamiliarity with their surroundings and his prior familiarity with them. It gave him a distinct edge.

But the noise...the distant, rumbling roar he’d heard almost since his descent from the castle... It was admittedly making him apprehensive. It sounded like a train wreck in progress. Or water crashing through a dam. Or something. None of the images it conjured in his mind were any comfort. The sounds gnawed at his attention precisely when he had to be at his sharpest.

He peered ahead into the dimness, keeping up his hurried pace. The passage was a slender, jagged, rough-walled tunnel hewn out of solid bedrock three hundred feet below the castle’s foundations. The strip lights winding along its top and bottom provided adequate illumination for him to see his way along and gave the large, luminous likeness of Vladimir Putin inked on his neck a spectral and vaguely sinister shimmer—not that he was at all focused on that right now. The rumbling sounds were getting stronger, and the weird acoustics of the tunnels made it impossible to know where they were coming from. What if it was an earth tremor? It might be centered somewhere miles away. Too far off for him to feel its vibrations, but close enough so he could hear them. The noise might be a warning. A precursor to a full-fledged quake. How could he know? He was a security professional, not a seismologist.

Damn Matei, his orders, and most of all the Wolf’s mad fixation with these subterranean burrows. Krask had no clue how many hundreds or thousands of years ago they had been excavated. Or by whom. Nor did he give a shit. He only knew that he did not want to be trapped here when the tunnels started caving in on themselves. And he only cared that this particular tunnel would bring him to the computer room and the Americans.

He would get the job done and get out.

But he wasn’t about to blunder through the door. He was no rank amateur. While he did not know all the many twists and turns of this nightmarish worm’s nest—did not think it was possible to know all of them—he had deliberately acquainted himself with the passages leading to the well bottom. And therein lay his advantage.

Krask ran about ten more yards and then raised a clenched fist to signal a halt. Just ahead, the passage tentacled off in three different directions. He could see the big arching wooden door to the computer room a little beyond the split. The two offshoots sprouted off to the left and right, but really converged to form a single, circular loop around the well bottom, with the other doors to the compass rose lined along them.