‘Tell me,’ Kurt snapped.
Ethan listened as Jenkins described the layout of the rooms.
The central core of the facility consisted of three large, round rooms hewn from the interior of the mountain in a line facing north — south. The main control room was first, connected to a corridor facing north that led to the laboratory with the huge seats in the center, and then a further corridor connected to a final room in the depths of the mountain that held a series of large containment cages.
‘The cages are huge,’ Jenkins reported. ‘The kind of thing they put tigers in, but heavily reinforced.’
‘What about the side rooms, like this one?’ Kurt asked, and gestured to the locked door behind him.
‘The control room and the laboratory each have two rooms flanking them, one each to the east and west. Those doors aren’t locked. The control room leads onto a medical facility on the west side and a living space to the east, probably where the scientists who worked here bedded down. The laboratory leads onto this door, and on the other side is a store room. Nothing much there but racks of dehydrated food, water bottles, shit like that.’
‘Self-contained facility,’ Ethan said. ‘Whoever was working here was probably shipped in by night, stayed over for days or weeks before being pulled out again.’
Kurt didn’t reply to Ethan, instead looking at his men.
‘You didn’t find any power generators?’
‘Just the two that are running now,’ came the reply from Milner. ‘Diesel pumps, they’re sealed into a wall cavity somewhere above the laboratory. Looks like they’re plumbed into what must have been the mine’s ventilation shaft. The main generator is right out back. It’s a battery system, completely out of juice now. My guess is this place has been out of commission for about two weeks.’
Ethan looked at Lopez.
‘Whatever was in here broke out, killed everybody on its way and vanished. Somebody sends a team to clean up, they get wasted too. If this is government funded, there must be something up here that’s important enough that they can’t just level the place with an air strike to hide it.’
‘So they send in an elite team instead,’ Lopez replied as she put the pieces together and looked at Kurt. ‘To grab the data, and then blow the place with the high explosives they’re carrying with them.’
Kurt, his face demonically half-lit by the emergency lights, lifted a service pistol and aimed it at them.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ he said.
51
Ethan and Lopez walked out of the corridor and back into the laboratory with their hands in the air. Duran, Mary, Proctor and Dana stared in surprise as Kurt and his men followed them out, their weapons at the ready.
‘I knew it,’ Duran spat.
‘Everybody, out back,’ Kurt snapped.
His men fanned out across the laboratory in a loose phalanx with their weapons drawn, blocking escape. They advanced, forcing Proctor, Dana, Duran and Mary down the north corridor toward the rear of the facility. Ethan and Lopez followed, pacing down the narrow passage until they entered the third and final chamber.
Another pair of reclining seats dominated the first half of the chamber, each of them festooned with wires and strange devices that looked like helmets. Behind the seats was a large mesh fence and beyond that a series of huge cages that lined the rear wall of the chamber. There were no further exits or corridors. Ethan guessed it made sense that whatever was being held captive here would be at the very back of the facility. It only backfired when the creatures somehow escaped and were forced to fight their way out.
Kurt turned to Dana Ford but kept his weapon trained on Ethan and Lopez as he spoke.
‘I want to know what was going on here,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me everything.’
Dana glanced nervously at Ethan as she spoke.
‘Judging by the tables, the medical freezers and the seats I’d say it was clinical trials, maybe some sort of drugs testing. The subjects were strapped down and subjected to experiments, probably against their will.’
Ethan looked at the size of the seats. Far too large for a human and the helmets were slightly conical in shape and had large eye-shields attached.
‘I’m beginning to figure out why these things hate humans so much.’
Duran glanced at the seats. ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘There would be a reason why creatures like this would start tearing up hikers in the hills.’
Proctor lifted one of the helmets up and looked inside.
‘Looks like a spatial-awareness shield,’ he said.
‘The hell’s one of those?’ Kurt asked.
‘It’s designed to deny the wearer any sense of where they actually are,’ Proctor explained. ‘The eye-shield prevents sight, obviously, while the earphones block all sound. Then images are played to the wearer through the eye shield.’
Ethan looked down at the seats. ‘Looks like that’s not all they were given.’
The ends of the cables were tipped with electrodes, sharp crocodile-clips that most likely had been attached to bare flesh.
Dana Ford looked at the clasps and Ethan saw her make a connection, one hand flying to her lips.
‘Cerebral reprogramming,’ she blurted.
Proctor nodded in agreement, speaking before Ethan or Lopez could ask Dana what she was talking about.
‘Military-devised assimilation program,’ he said. ‘The subject is shown endless images of people, locations or whatever, and learns to associate them with either a threat or a welcome. So they’d show these things images of enemy soldiers or whatever, while subjecting them to electric shocks, therefore engendering in them a deep-rooted psychological hatred of enemy combatants.’
Dana lifted an intravenous line that was dangling down from one of the seats.
‘Or show them images of their captors while putting drugs into their system to calm them, make them feel better, maybe just straight morphine or similar.’
Ethan quickly got it.
‘Programming them to obey. But to what end?’
It was Duran Wilkes who replied.
‘War,’ he said simply. ‘Men have done things like this for thousands of years.’
During his training as a US Marine at Quantico, Ethan and his fellow recruits had been taught about the history of warfare. Even modern combat sometimes made use of tactics developed by military legends such as Alexander the Great and Saladin. Alexander himself had made extensive use of elephants as a sort of ancient version of tanks, using their might and bulk to crush enemy warriors during battles.
‘The American military has made use of all kinds of animals to support troops in war zones,’ Duran said bitterly. ‘Dogs to sniff out explosives and take down enemy soldiers in the trenches of the First World War and pigeons trained to carry messages over long distances. They even placed pigeons inside cruise missiles after training them to peck at a screen if it was drifting off-course.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Lopez muttered.
‘You think that’s nuts?’ Duran said. ‘The military once spent twenty million dollars on a project to implant cats with microphones, antennae and batteries in their chest and tails, then set them loose near the Russian Embassy in the hopes they’d be taken in, allowing the US to eavesdrop.’
Proctor nodded, examining a discarded syringe as long as a pen as he spoke.
‘The US Navy regularly train dolphins to detect underwater mines on ships,’ he said. ‘It’s been alleged that they’ve even trained the animals to plant mines on enemy ships, but the military denies it of course.’
‘Some armies trained dogs to carry explosives on suicide missions into enemy troop formations,’ Dana said. ‘When it comes to winning wars there’s not much that mankind won’t stoop to.’