Bishop paced in the small Honeymoon Cottage living room. It was uncharacteristic for him to show any kind of impatience or exasperation, but given that others in his position had succumbed to madness by this point, he was doing well enough. King sat at the dining room, looking at the screen of a laptop. The silhouetted view of Deep Blue looked back.
"I had the map you sent analyzed and compared to topographical maps of the area surrounding the campgrounds. If the map Beck gave you is accurate… and not some kind of trap, you should find Manifold somewhere beneath Fletcher Mountain. I've got a team covering every square inch of the site for possible entry and egress points, but they've covered their tracks fairly well."
"If Knight followed protocol we'll have all the intel we'll need." He pet Thor's head.
"I'll contact your PDA if we find anything," Deep Blue added. "Good hunting. Oh, and King… the gloves are off. I don't care what kind of a coverup we need to generate at the end of this. Manifold cannot be allowed to skip town again. Do whatever it takes."
The screen went blank.
Bishop stopped his pacing. "We ready?"
King turned and faced Bishop. "Think you can contain that rage building within you for a little while longer?" "You know I can." "Then let's go."
The two men climbed into the Chevy Tahoe with Thor. The engine roared as King pulled out of the pine needle-carpeted clearing that served as a driveway and drove through the campground. As they passed by the quad, King took note of the pickup soccer game, and farther beyond, at the baseball field, two long strings of kids playing red rover. As much as he wanted to wipe Manifold off the map, doing "whatever it takes" could not involve allowing these people to be hurt. He frowned as he realized that was probably why Manifold set up shop at this location — off the beaten path, but human shields abounded.
After passing through the campgrounds, they drove up a tall hill and discovered what looked like an abandoned kids camp. The GPS tracker on King's PDA showed their current position was just under a mile from Knight's signal. Not wanting to get too close and set off security, they pulled into the woods, covered the vehicle with camouflage netting and pine branches, then set off on foot, fully armed and led by Thor.
After ten minutes of hiking, off path, toward Knight's signal, they came upon a clearing full of cabins. They crouched at the side of an incline, searching the area for signs of movement, organic or electronic. Seeing nothing, they stood and moved up behind one of the decrepit brown cabins. King checked the PDA. "We're right on top of the signal."
The trees above swayed in the breeze. Bishop looked up. "Or the signal's on top of us." He placed his machine gun, muzzle up, against the cabin, locked his fingers together and lowered them, palms up. King placed a boot within Bishop's large hands and was quickly launched to the cabin's roof. He laid low on the roof, waiting in silence to see if the movement had garnered any kind of response. Even the snapping of a twig would be enough to tip him off. But other than the twitter of birds and swish of wind through pine needles, the forest was silent.
He turned his head the other way and found Knight's backpack, rifle, GPS transmitter, and an open can of SprayTrack. He shut off the tracking unit and placed it into the pack, which he dropped over the side to Bishop's waiting arms. While Bishop hid the pack inside a rotted fallen tree, King leaped down from the roof with the rifle and Spray-Track. He slung the weapon over his shoulder before kneeling down to Thor. He held the can out to the dog. "Do your stuff, boy. Stay quiet."
The dog whined in response. The "stay quiet" command had been developed to keep dogs from barking when stealth was required.
Thor entered the U-shaped campsite, sniffing the ground. He stopped in the middle of the dirt road and whined again. Scent found. "Follow. Slow."
The dog began following the trail, walking at a casual pace with his nose to the ground. King and Rook kept pace, from twenty feet within the woods. Anyone watching the road would see a loose dog out for a stroll.
Twenty minutes into following the scent trail, King noticed a tree mounted camera sweeping back and forth. It was small and camouflaged, but its movement in a direction opposite the current breeze gave it away. They waited for it to point toward Thor, then bolted past before it swung back around. Best-case scenario, they wouldn't think anything of the dog. Worst case, they had a shoot-to-kill order for the special ops dog, too.
After another five minutes of slow going, mostly to be sure they didn't trip any alarms, they saw Thor stop and sit. The trailed ended at an overgrown vertical wall at the base of the mountain. This was, no doubt, an entry point into Manifold's subterranean facility, but they couldn't get any closer. Queen had noted, in her report on Tristan da Cunha, the amount of visual, infrared, and motion sensors the Manifold facility had had. He doubted this would be any different. They would have to find another way in.
King whistled a command that would sound like any of the local birds, but Thor recognized as a simple command: go home. The dog stood, turned, and just as casually backtracked. He would follow the SprayTrack back to the campground, their own scent trail back to the Tahoe, and the car's scent back to the cabin where he would wait for their return.
Laying low in a patch of tall ferns, King turned on his PDA and waited for a connection. He looked at Bishop, whose eyes were still on the hidden entrance. He looked like he was about to blow the door down and open up with his machine gun until every last living thing inside keeled over. When he saw Bishop's hand on a grenade he realized that might actually be what he had planned. He placed a hand on Bishop's arm. "Soon."
Bishop took a breath, released the grenade, and nodded.
A text message scrolled across the PDA's screen as it was received and decrypted. It read:
Found ventilation on Fletcher. Also, potential helipad. Actual pad obscured. Same as Amazon. Take your pick. — DB
A map of Fletcher Mountain loaded next. Two vents were marked with red circles. The helipad with a blue question mark. "Thoughts?" "I think I'm too big to fit in a vent shaft." King smiled. "Good point."
After circling the base of the mountain for a half mile, they began their upward climb. The grade was fairly even, but fallen trees and scads of oddly shaped boulders slowed their climb. After reaching an elevation of one thousand feet, they headed sideways again, stopping twenty minutes later on the opposite end of the mountain, directly above a helipad. Once again, the trees had been cleared diagonally so that a helicopter would have to fly into and under the canopy. The pad was currently empty, but two armed guards stood to either side of the pad, scanning the forest below.
King looked at Bishop, whose facial expression asked a very simple question, "Now?"
King nodded, but then held his index finger to his lips. The message was equally simple. Kill them quietly. The men split up, each moving toward their intended target. The battle for Manifold Alpha was about to begin.
FIFTY
With widening eyes, Knight peered through the large glass window, forgetting for a moment to conceal himself as he watched a spectacle beyond comprehension. The forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-tall, and equally wide room was brightly lit from above. Red lines stretched across the highly polished hardwood floor. But it wasn't the boxy room's size or lack of decoration that held his attention, it was the two people throwing themselves around the space, grunting, stretching, and occasionally cursing when the ball was missed. A racquetball court in a science facility would have been odd enough. But the two players on this court fought for the ball and victory like combatants at the coliseum. It would have normally been an impressive sight, except that the man and woman inside looked older than Knight's own grandma. Pushing eighty, at least, if not older.