Flint worried about Scarlett and Leatherneck. Suarez had sent them on their way without so much as a wish for good luck. Sure, she had briefed them about what they should blow up, but they were going into an occupied area completely blind, whereas Suarez seemed to have the upper hand on how things would go.
She was moving ahead of him. He debated whether he should have his rifle readied against the enemy or her. The halls were dark, giving them places to hide. The crews were thin as night wore on, leaving Suarez and Flint more room to freely roam unimpeded. They continued on until Suarez made a turn off the main hall and headed for a hull door. She quickly spun open the hatch wheel and stepped inside, waiting for Flint to join her. Once he was there, she jammed her survival knife into the wheel mechanism, the blade still red with the young guard's blood.
She slid down the wall until she was seated on the floor. Out came the pack of cigarettes. Suarez lit one up and took a long drag from it. She held up the pack to Flint. He declined.
"Might be your last chance," she warned.
He took the cigarette from the pack and tapped it against the back of his hand, packing the tobacco. He, too, sat down on the floor, opposite her.
She tossed her lighter over to him. He looked on the silver surface of the Zippo. Her initials were engraved in stoic letters on the side. He studied her as he lit his cigarette, anger welling again that she had put them all in this situation.
"So what now? We just wait?" he asked her, flipping the lid of the lighter closed, smothering the flame.
She smiled slightly, catching the lighter in her hand as he tossed it back at her. "Until we hear the big boom."
The smoke from her cigarette wafted straight upward, pulled by a strong air current. Only then did he realize they were sitting at the bottom of another escape shaft. Tiny lights illuminated the shaft for as far as he could see. He blew his own trail of smoke up the shaft, watching it dissipate into nothingness.
"So, this change of plan," he said, straightening his legs and looking at her, "you do this often?"
"What – changing horses mid-stream?"
"Is that the scientific name for it?"
"'Evolution' obviously doesn't satisfy you. Perhaps farm animal analogies will go farther."
He was not amused. "Your point?"
"The point is that we're almost back on schedule. We wait here until they get the power plant fired off. Then we'll make our move to the objective. In the meantime, we have a few smokes in here, enjoy the quiet that three-inch thick steel brings, and hope to hell nothing else unexpected happens."
"Too bad we forgot the deck of cards and a six-pack," he said, with heavy irony in his voice. "How long are you and I going to wait around in this piece of paradise?"
She checked her watch. "Six more minutes. See, they're going to be caught by the guards."
He lurched forward. "What!"
"Relax, Flint," she said casually. "They're captured for all of thirty seconds before Leatherneck head-butts one of them and gets them out of the jam."
He threw down the cigarette and made a sudden move for the door, but he stopped short when he heard a round racking in the nine-millimeter she wore. Without turning around to look, he knew the barrel was pointed at his back.
"Don't make your own evolution, Flint," she warned. "Things are in motion, and it's best that you let them happen as they should. Sit down."
He slowly turned around to face her. She was pointing the weapon at him casually, not in any way alarmed. Her finger was not even on the trigger. It lay against the side of gun, ready to slip down in a fraction of a second to change his life forever.
"See," she said as she watched him return to his spot on the floor, "I know how this ends. Like you, I have a mission to accomplish. I can't let anything or anyone stand in the way of that."
"Hard to tell whose side you're on," he said quietly.
"I'm on a team you couldn't possibly understand. You won't live long enough to see my team even form."
"Pretty ominous."
"No, just a matter of fact. Scarlett and Leatherneck will complete their mission, and then I'll start mine. After that, you won't see me again."
"Why?"
She smiled, her eyes suddenly looking tired. "Because it's the end of the line for me. I go on to a new mission, and you return to life as it should be." She furrowed her brow. "Look at it this way, Flint – I'll be out of your hair and out of your life. Provided there's no reason for me to come back to this line, your emancipation is at hand."
Flint resisted the urge to let his hand slip to his own sidearm. It would serve no purpose. Even if he managed to get a shot off at her, he was in the belly of an angry whale and needed her to get out of it. Regardless of whether or not he was completely convinced of her story, they were still in the center of an underground Cobra base with an enemy force more than capable of subduing them.
"So," he said, "no chance anyone is going to find those bodies we dumped off to the side every so often on our way here?"
"There's always a chance. Remember, the timeline has been corrupted."
"By you?"
"To some degree," she admitted. "Mostly, what's been corrupted has been by your hand or of those around you."
"Tell me something – would we have found this place had you not come back?"
"You would have been a day late and dollar short. By the time anyone would have known the extent of the infiltration, nothing could have stopped it."
She held the weapon lazily, letting the barrel finally trail down toward the floor. She pulled out the pack of cigarettes and lit up another, leaning back on the bulkhead.
"You going to hold me at gunpoint until this is over?" he asked, relieved to see her relax as far as the gun was concerned.
"If I have to, but it would be a shame if it came to that."
There was no sense in trying to fight her. He was there with her, stuck in the center of the mountain. All he could do was make the best of his situation.
"Does everyone in the future smoke as much as you do?" he asked, holding out his hand for the pack.
She shrugged and tossed it to him. "Outlawed, actually. During another mission I was on, smoking was required to blend into the timeline. I got hooked and managed to take a case with me when I finished. Been enjoying the hell out of them ever since."
Flint noticed she seemed conversational. "Back at the base, you said you had lost someone close to you on a mission. What happened?"
Suarez flipped him her lighter. "Never said we were close. I just indicated that I lost someone on my team."
Flint was no stranger to what it felt like to lose a team member. He could tell by her demeanor that she was lying. It rang out through the look in her eyes. "Not buying it."
She smiled more to herself than at him, as though she had been successfully cornered and found it amusing. "People in my job don't have long relationships. They're short and to the point for a reason. It's relegated to the work environment."
"But this one wasn't," he said, taking his turn at putting her on the offensive.
Her face became serious. "No. I got closer than I should have – just like you." She took another drag on the cigarette. "And then he was gone, and I've been alone ever since."
For the first time, Flint truly felt for her. Her anguish, though she bottled it well, seemed genuine. It lay strategically buried under sarcasm and rage and control. He knew because that was the same place he hid his.
"I'm sorry," he offered.
She nodded solemnly. "Me, too."
Flint wanted to capitalize on her apparent willingness to talk. "I have to ask you – in the briefing, you told us this was a one-shot deal. Then you say you get to move on to another mission. So, which is it?"
She craned her neck sharply. He heard several tiny pops as the vertebrae realigned themselves. "Again, you assumed that what Scarlett said was gospel. If you'll recall, I didn't say anything in response. It really is something you need to work on. You know what they say about when you assume . . ."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said before she could finish.
"Look," she said obligingly, "what I meant was that if we were in my world, we could literally play this over and over until we got it right, much like a simulator. When I'm in a real world, it's game time. Everything is real. Once the mission is finished, provided the agent is still alive, he or she gets to go home or moves on to something new. A paper cut is a paper cut to me here. I'm not immune to injury or emotion. Barring a really good reason, no one pulls my butt out of the fire."
"It would take a mission to fix a mission, right?"
"Now you're getting it," she said with satisfaction.
She had said she would not answer questions that required revelation of classified information, but he felt he was on a roll with her.
"How many times have you done this?"
"Time jump?"
"Yeah."
"Ninety-seven, including this one." She seemed comfortable with the number, as though it was not unusually high.
"I take it you've trained a lot?"
"My team has had the opportunity to become proficient at what we need to get the job done."
There was no pride in her voice. She was confident, speaking as a matter of fact and not boasting of her skills. He had been around special operations groups, including his own, that by their very nature wanted others who were cleared to hear it know of their accomplishments. It was a competitive career that relied not only on proper and effective planning but also of the belief of its participants that they were the best of the best and could accomplish anything. They compared their exploits over beer and whiskey, competing for the best story yet all the while knowing they were all a part of a team, of a mission to protect the free world. He silently wondered if Suarez and her comrades did the same.
She checked her watch again, not saying a word as to what the time meant.
He eyed her intently. "If anything happens to them, I'll hold you personally responsible."
"They'll be fine," she said, almost sounding as if his concerns bored her. "I wouldn't have sent them on their own otherwise."
"But you wanted to send me with them."
"Only to keep you as much out of harm's way, Flint. I don't need you to get my part done. In fact, you're a liability to me. You were just the key to getting in here."
"You used me," he accused calmly, his voice low. "You've ripped apart countless lives, and there are some that might never recover from that."
She pulled her other leg up, resting her left hand with the lit cigarette on it. Her finger was still dangerously close to the trigger of the gun in her right. "I know it seems that way, but I promise you it was with good reason and intent. You can't even begin to imagine the consequences if what has begun is allowed to move forward in time."
"Yeah, I know," he said impatiently, "the next apocalypse."
She laughed. "No," she said, drawing the word out and shaking her head. "An apocalypse would be a blessing. It would mean an end to the spawn of hell on Earth. They just aren't that lucky in this timeline."
Suarez took one more drag of the cigarette and crushed it under her boot. "On your feet, Flint. We have an egg to crack."
"I didn't hear any . . ."
The metal he was leaning against suddenly shook with violence. It rattled his bones to the core as an explosion tore through the facility. Dust rained down on them, filling the chamber with a choking cloud. He recovered and moved to the door, weapon at the ready. Suarez twisted her knife out of the hatch wheel and sheathed it. The wheel was free to turn once more. She cracked the door open slightly and surveyed the hall. He moved to open the door more, but she held up a hand to stop him. He heard the sound of boots on metal in the hall. Once the sound died away, she nodded for him to proceed. He pulled on the door and allowed her to step into the passageway.
He instinctively raised his rifle, looking for target. The sense of chaos that was filtering through the base was heavy in the air. Klaxons blared a warning that something was desperately wrong, that the base was under attack. The passing patrols were literally running headlong down the hall, never taking notice of Flint and Suarez as they patiently waited for the next opportunity to move ahead from their hiding spaces.
Flint looked at the halls and immediately wished he had brought a bag of breadcrumbs. Everything looked the same. There were few markings on the wall he could use to identify where he had been and just which way was home should they actually make it out of the situation alive. Suarez was leading him down one way, then another in a manic pace. He had little time to memorize the way.
The lights dimmed for a moment. Then they cut out completely, plummeting everything into darkness. The klaxons went silent. Flint reached for his night vision goggles and slipped them on his head. The world turned green again. Pitch-black corridors came to life once more. Suarez had done the same. She motioned for Flint to follow down the hall toward a closed set of steel double doors.
He saw her reach for the handle on the right door. He raised the G36 again, nodding to her that he was ready for what lay beyond the barrier. She pushed down on the hand slowly, opening it as quietly as she could. Despite her efforts, there was a squeak in the hinge. His eyes immediately acquired two targets fumbling in the dark. One of them turned at the sound of the door opening. He dropped the trooper with two quick taps of the trigger. The other trooper turned quickly, frantically trying to find his partner and the sources of the new sounds.HeH Flint gave him no breaks as he tapped two more rounds from the rifle into the second trooper.
Suarez moved in, taking point. There was no need to move the bodies now. It had begun. Suarez continued down the hall, her pace quickening. Flint took a moment to notice landmarks. Cobra, true to form, had marked the walls with department headings. There were rooms marked as storage, some designated as communication closets. They had security measures on them, requiring magnetic cards for entrance. If he had not known where he was, the habits could have passed for any Joe installation. For all intents and purposes, Cobra was an organized military entity. It had rules, even administrative ones, which kept it in order. Anything less would have made it just another fly-by-night terrorist cell that would be easier to eliminate. Cobra, though, had intelligence behind its design. It had discipline and rules. Its soldiers were subject to regulations imposed by its commander, despite the fact that those rules were meant to bring about the reign of terrorists over the civilized world.
They passed by an open medical facility, the entrance to a small galley and two more locked storage units. Twice, Suarez and Flint ducked behind support columns to hide as frantic soldiers hurried down the hall to help with the explosion at the generation plant. Flashlight beams bounced wildly off the white cement walls as soldiers tried to find their way in the darkened facility. The next set of security doors received the same treatment as the first. Two guards were neatly dispatched to their deaths by the silenced weapons of Joe infiltrators, all while the lights were dark.
Suarez checked the security panel at the door. "This is it, Flint," she said, working a code into the keypad. "You ready for this?"
"We've come this far, haven't we?" he asked.
"Everybody has regrets, Flint."
The internal tumblers in the door moved. A sharp click sounded as the bolts pulled to the side to unlock the door.
"Take off those goggles. It's going to get bright," she warned.
He did as he was told, having no choice but to trust her words. She pulled on the door. A loud hissing sound revealed the contained pressurization of the next section. She opened the door a crack, revealing a seam of bright white light. It assaulted his eyes with a piercing pain. He squinted against it until his brain adjusted. His weapon was up, waiting to take out whatever stood in the way on the other side.
Suarez whispered a countdown to him. "One, two . . ."
On an unspoken three, she ripped open the door. It took only a second before he acquired his first target. He tapped off two rounds and was immediately greeted with four shots in return from a weapon on the far side of the hall. The echo of the report ripped through his senses, awakening him to the task. Suarez ducked inside the door, taking cover behind a stack of polymer crates. She fired off a series at the enemy, giving Flint the chance to enter and take up position on the opposite side of the hall. He looked out before him, seeing an endless tunnel of light and enemy agents. They were on the defensive, firing at the two lone invaders crouched for their lives behind plastic boxes.
The door closed again. The locking mechanism inside it flicked shut, metal clacking against metal. Suarez turned and lit up the control panel, making an exit impossible. Shock shuttled through Flint as he realized what she had done. The good doctor had sealed their only means of escape.
There as no time to give it any more thought. The Cobra troopers were pushing forward, firing down the hall in a steady hail of bullets. Flint took out two more, but the troopers were not letting up on them. He unhooked a grenade from his vest and pulled the pin. His hand stayed securely around the explosive until the right moment. Then he launched it through the air at them. The spring-loaded arm popped off and made a tinkling sound on the tiled floor as it slid under a pallet. The grenade sailed like a round black bird. It rolled on impact with the floor. Nearby troopers took notice of it with a panic but had nowhere to go. Only those who had the luxury of distance escaped the splinters of shrapnel that spewed out of the small explosive. Flint heard screams as three troopers took the brunt of the assault. One of them was thrown forcefully against the gleaming white wall. He crumpled to the tile in a heap, no longer a threat to Flint or Suarez.
"Cover me!" Suarez yelled over the din.
She dashed up to the next set of containers, firing the whole way. Rounds plinked off the concrete, spitting fragments in her face as she crouched down behind the boxes. Once she was safe, she popped over the top of the containers and let loose with a volley, allowing Flint to leapfrog ahead to the next set on his side.
As a return favor, a grenade flew through the air at them, landing close to Suarez. Without thinking, she reached out and picked it up, hurling it back in the direction it had come. It sailed twenty feet farther than Flint's throw, knocking out another contingent of troopers. Flint took the opportunity to move forward to the next place of cover. He squeezed off several more rounds. Suarez was like a well-tuned machine, using his action to gain more ground.
Another seven troopers flowed into the corridor. They began a counter assault, causing Flint and Suarez to duck down low behind the crates for deep cover. Flint tried to pop over the top of his container to take a few shots, but the troopers drove him back to the floor with their own wave of fire. Suarez tried, too, with the same results. They tried again and again to take shots at Cobra's forces only to be held at bay.
Flint looked over at Suarez. She had her back against the containers. He saw the dark smoldering look in her eyes as her anger and frustration built. He knew what she was thinking. He had done before, himself, and had gotten lucky.
"Don't do it!" he yelled over the sound of shooting.
She looked at him, boiling over with fury. In one smooth motion, she turned around and knelt on one knee, opening fire with abandon. She gave a cry of war and began moving forward, as if invincible to what was trying to kill her. Suarez trotted down the hall, blasting anything that moved. When her magazine was dry, she ejected it and slapped in a new one from her belt. Flint supported the action with cover fire, giving her time to reload.
Now it was his turn to navigate down the hall, though he was not as brazen as the doctor. He kept behind the crates, weaving in behind them for protection. Soon, he and Suarez were synchronized in their movement, taking their pick of targets in the thin corridor.
He looked deeper down the hall and saw their eventual goal – another set of doors with windows. Beyond that, he could see something that looked like a control room. He saw the tops of heads looking over consoles, eyes fearful at the sound of a firefight just outside the door.
He and Suarez kept making progress down the hall. The smell of gunpowder burned Flint's sinuses. It was like a drug. It triggered the animalistic killing instinct in him to eliminate every enemy he saw. His rifle blazed, kicking into his shoulder again and again as he pulled the trigger. When he smelled the blood of his enemy rise up from the floor, his mind was filled with an odd satisfaction that they were dead and he was not. He was not sure if Suarez shared his feelings, but she moved like a winner, running with confidence, shooting with invincibility. Once again, they spotted each other as magazines were spent and replaced.
There were only four troopers left at the end of the hall, and they showed no fear as they fought. Their combined fire drove Flint and Suarez back into cover one last time. Without communication between them, they each pulled the pin on one more on a grenade and simultaneously tossed their munitions in the direction of the remaining troopers. Flint cowered low, covering his head when the realization that the explosion was going to be significant.
It was.
A wave of dust and debris rolled toward his hiding position, choking the back of his throat when it hit. He could not contain the cough that erupted from it, his eyes watering and tears rolling down his cheeks. Even Suarez was not immune to it. It did not prevent her from moving again toward the end of the hall. She stepped over two bodies that lay in the center of the aisle. Flint looked around him, back to where they had come from and then toward their destination. Not one of the bodies was moving. He did a quick count of the dead and estimated they had killed almost thirty troopers in a span of three minutes. He had kept count in his head of how many he had taken out, realizing that Suarez had done most of the work.
Suarez was changing out to another magazine as she walked toward the door. He caught up with her at the next security checkpoint. While there were windows, the thickness of the door made getting through a much more daunting task. Workers in the console area on the other side frantically gathered and huddled in small groups, not knowing what to do. He looked at them, trying to decide what their fate would be if and when he and Suarez could get through to the other side.
"What do we do with them?" he asked Suarez, nodding to those in the next room.
"Let them go," she said, shrugging out of her pack. "They're not going to make it anyway."
She opened the zipper on the pack with purpose, routing around inside until she found a detonator and a small package of C4. She molded the clay into the seal of the door, right where he imagined the locking mechanism was housed. Then the detonator was pressed into the soft material. She set the timer for twenty seconds and began falling back to the second set of crates from the doors. He followed her, crouching down low and plugging his ears.
"Fire in the hole!" she cried, just before the explosive blew.
The concussion brushed against his left leg as more debris was kicked down the hall. Something heavy and metal dropped to the floor with a clang. Suarez was on her feet and running for the doorway, weapon raised. It was his turn to pull the doors open as she readied to make an entrance.
Inside, five console workers huddled low, fearing the enemy that bore down upon them with raised weapons would open fire.
Flint followed behind Suarez, identifying every target he could and worried about the ones he could not see. She did not seem so concerned, calling out to them to get on their feet and move to one side of the control room. They were herded like animals into one central mass from behind the oak consoles where monitors displayed operational information. The room was small, just large enough to house the consoles and the operators. Six glass panes led to a view of another larger room with an access door to the right of the area. For the first time, Flint looked through the windows and was awed by what he saw. Indeed, just as Suarez had described it, there was a large egg-shaped vehicle. He had not accurately imagined its size based on her description in the briefings. It was at least twenty-five feet across with one pedestrian access way. To the right was a larger ramp that looked like it was used to ferry cargo from inside the egg. His mind drifted to old television shows of Lost In Space, except this was no spaceship, and the egg was planted firmly inside a mountain, not adrift in the blackness of the universe.
Suarez neared the group of workers, aiming to one in particular. She pulled him to his feet by the collar of his white lab coat. He was young, maybe her age, but the fear in his eyes said he had never seen the likes of combat in the name of Cobra, much less had he ever been taken hostage. Sweat was rolling down the sides of his face, and thinning black hair was matted down, probably from having been crushed by his forearm in an attempt to shield his eyes from certain death.
"Get up," she said calmly, almost gently. She sounded as though she had no intention of hurting him. "What's your name?"
"Gideon. Please, don't kill me," he begged, his voice shaking and cracking slightly.
She held the G36 on him, poking the barrel into his side. "Open the door, Gideon."
He put his hands on top of his head in submission. "I can't."
"That is not the answer I want to hear," she said. "I have four more just like you I can try this with, so let's not waste any more time." She pushed him toward the consoles. "Open the door."
Flint kept watch over the four remaining contestants as Gideon leaned over the keyboard of the center console and began to type.
"He knows you're here," Gideon stammered, typing madly.
Suarez was nonplussed. "It would be a disappointment if he didn't."
Gideon finished his typing. A red light over the door to the right turned green, indicating the lock had been disabled. Suarez pushed him toward the hall exit where the main battle had taken place. She shooed the rest of the workers in the same direction.
"Get out of here," she ordered.
They wasted no time in taking her up on the offer, bumping into one another as they made their escape. Then, Flint and Suarez were in the control room alone.
"I thought you had a way in there?" Flint challenged.
For the first time, she looked disconcerted to him. Her demeanor had changed, one that was not as confident. "In all our haste, I forgot the code," she said.
She was breathing harder. It was not like she had run a race. It was more akin to stress settling in on someone. She saw him observing her and straightened her back until she appeared in charge again.
Suarez checked the magazine in her rifle once more, putting it back with purpose. "What do you say we go find the man responsible for this little party?"
With that, she headed for the control room door.