In silence the two of them continued on their way. The narrow corridor gave way to a wider one. Four bodies in bloodied white lab coats lay crumpled at irregular intervals. Wareagle hesitated over the first; his face showed revulsion. Blaine could see it was a woman and got close enough to see something else.
Her face had been torn apart.
“Mother of God, Johnny! What the hell did this?”
Wareagle gave no answer. He continued on to an open door from which a burning smell emanated. McCracken followed him inside what had been a conference room. Its chairs had been upended to clear a space in the middle of a floor now covered with embers and ruined tile. Against one wall a series of file cabinets lay tipped over and emptied. Obviously their former contents had fueled the flames. McCracken noticed the blackened edge of a page fragment wedged beneath one of the fallen chairs and retrieved it while Johnny surveyed the rest of the damage.
“Anything, Blainey?” he asked. Blaine held the page up to the room’s single emergency light. “Too badly damaged to lift anything off. Except…Wait a minute…There is something. Not much, but…”
He was able to trace four bolder letters at the edge of the page, all that had not been lost to the fire. O-M-I–C.
“Mean anything to you, Blainey?” Wareagle asked from behind him.
“Not a fucking thing, Indian.”
They checked the room thoroughly, but could find no further fragments. Whoever had hit the complex had been thorough. Since the hit had come from the inside, though, the victims had quite obviously known their killers. He thought of Ben Norseman, wondering if for some reason this had been his work. This might not have been even Ben’s style, but there was no other logical explanation.
“I can’t believe Ben Norseman and his men would do something like this, Indian.”
“I don’t believe they did, Blainey. Outside the installation, their tracks indicated they returned here after the massacre, and they went out again.”
McCracken put it together in his mind.” After whatever was responsible, a trail that took them to the area of the Tupi camp before we made our appearance yesterday.”
“The camp was the Green Coats’ trap, Blainey, just as we suspected.”
“Only whatever was behind this massacre didn’t go for it.”
Wareagle’s stare grew distant. “The people here were killed from within,” he said.
“By what, Johnny?”
“Perhaps the installation can still tell us.”
They proceeded on in their investigation of the facility, but everywhere the results were the same. Equipment smashed. Hallways, rooms, and labs littered with bodies. The killing had been carried out with brutal efficiency, no one spared, no mercy given.
Wareagle looked to the walls as if they might provide some explanation. “The dead feeling present in the forest is strongest in the steps we have followed. It started here and spread outward.”
“Then there’s something we can be sure of, Johnny. To take all these people out so quickly and systematically, there had to be more than one of these Spirits of the Dead, whatever they turn out to be.” His eyes bulged in realization. “Meanwhile, Norseman must still be after them. Seven Green Berets armed to the teeth who eat nails for breakfast.” McCracken looked at his Remington. “Better shape than we’re in.”
“This complex would have been in better shape, too.”
Close scrutiny of a rear wall revealed to McCracken a hidden door behind which were stairs descending into the bowels of the complex. The air instantly felt chillier, and Blaine imagined a breeze sifting by him as he and Wareagle headed down. The lighting here was brighter, and the first door on the right was open. It led into an office of some kind. The remnants of a paper shredder’s work had overflowed from a trash can. Filing cabinet drawers were open down here as well. They had been yanked out and completely rifled.
“Looks like somebody was busy on this level, too, Indian. Destroying everything, by the looks of it.”
“Not everything, Blainey,” Wareagle said as one of his massive hands emerged from the depths of the shredder bin with a partially mangled leather report cover.
He showed it to Blaine so the title was clearly visible: THE OMICRON PROJECT.
McCracken recalled the letters O-M-I–C from the fragment on the floor above. Omicron, the fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet. Slightly distracted now, he followed Wareagle onward. The next series of rooms all housed medical laboratories that still smelled faintly of alcohol. It was almost a refreshing scent, considering what they had been exposed to in the complex thus far. Lab bottles and test tubes lay in pieces everywhere, and they found another five corpses covered with debris. The glass doors of locked cabinets had been smashed, and their contents coated the floor with a carpet of slivers. The remains of needles could be seen, along with shards of thicker containers.
The final door on the hall led into what appeared to be a surgical unit. Much of the equipment in here had proved too bulky to destroy; what remained was a collection of machines of a sort Blaine had never seen before. “Imagers, I think,” he said, fingering one. “Used during microsurgery and for diagnosis.”
There were standard X-ray and CAT scan equipment as well, along with an operating table that was bolted to the floor. Dangling from all four of its sides were leather straps used to tie a patient down.
“Looks like the Omicron Project involved some pretty heavy medical R and D,” said McCracken. “Using human subjects.”
“Or what used to be human.”
“The only thing we know for sure about them is they’re gone. Let’s check out the next floor.”
They found the door at the end of this corridor to be different than the others: ten-inch slab steel with an electronic locking mechanism. The door had been opened and the mechanism shorted out to keep it that way. The air grew still colder as they descended to the complex’s second underground level. The corridor here was slightly shorter, and six doors thinly spaced apart opened on either side, with an equal number closed.
Blaine and Johnny’s inspection found them to be identical in every way: windowless cubicles complete with bed, chair, desk, and bureau. Joined to the near wall of each was a closet-sized bathroom. The door was of six-inch steel, with triple-thick hinges and an electronic locking mechanism. At ceiling level on the far wall was the protruding tip of a video surveillance lens.
“Not a great place to bring a date, under the circumstances,” said Blaine.
At the other end of the corridor rose another steel security door, this one featuring a thick glass slab at eye level.
“One-way glass,” Blaine said when he got there.
He pressed his eyes against the cold surface and peered through. It was a room much like the others, except it was bigger. The mattress had been shredded, the bed frame pulled apart at the joints, and the chest of drawers smashed into splinters. Blaine backed away so Johnny could get a better look, but even without the Indian’s spirits there to tell him, Blaine had the feeling that what had happened in the complex had started right here, behind this final door.
McCracken felt a tremor of fear pass through him. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sensation and sometimes was even welcome. But this time it lingered long enough to become distressing. He had the urge to find a radio and call for help, even though he knew the communications equipment would surely have been trashed.
“Forget the Spirit of the Dead,” he said to Johnny. “Looks like your friends the Tupis were up against a tribe of spirits.”
“Wakinyan is the Sioux word for them, Blainey.”