Kill Zone

14

Right after the Senator activated his cell phone, another ratcheting alarm blasted through the tunnel. The deafening interruption startled him, but he seemed oblivious to what he had done. Pulaski scowled and pressed the phone against his ear, ready to shout as soon as anyone on his staff answered.

Shawn reached him first, grabbing his arm. “What the hell are you doing!” He tried to seize the cell phone.

Simultaneously, Adonia yelled, “Any signal will trigger RF sensors—”

The Senator yanked his arm away from Shawn, dropping the phone to the ground. As it clattered on the sealed concrete, Adonia dove for it, hit End Call, then powered it off, but it was too late. She held the phone and looked up at Shawn, her eyes wide as the emergency alarm continued to clang.

Pulaski looked at both of them, indignant. “What the—”

Adonia shook the phone in front of his face. “Your call just triggered another set of security countermeasures on top of the lockdown!” She wanted to strangle him, whether or not he was a senior senator. As she considered how he had just thrown the equivalent of a live hand grenade into all the interconnected sensors inside Hydra Mountain, the safety and security systems, the automated responses, she couldn’t articulate how furious she was.

Shawn barely restrained himself from shouting. “How many times were you told no electronics inside the Mountain? We couldn’t have been more clear!”

Pulaski looked at the two of them as if they were nothing more than insects. “You can’t talk to me like that. Hydra Mountain is under my oversight. This is an encrypted phone, approved by the NSA—”

Adonia made a disgusted noise. “Missing the point! With all the defensive systems in this facility, who knows what your signal just triggered?”

Garibaldi pursed his lips, rocked back on his heels. “Well, I think the technical term for the situation is ‘The shit has hit the fan.’ Good job, Senator.”

Booming alarms continued all around them.

Glaring, Pulaski turned to van Dyckman, but the other man looked just as distressed. His expression began to waver. “But what does it matter? I couldn’t even get a connection — all this rock must be blocking the signal.”

“You’re deep inside a mountain — of course you won’t get a signal,” Victoria Doyle said in a withering voice. “But your transmission triggered a lot of detectors and automatic countermeasures.”

Battling anger with every diplomatic skill he possessed, Shawn opened the thigh pocket in his battle fatigues and yanked out the blue electronics-storage bag. He took the cell from Adonia and zipped it inside the bag, which he held in front of the flummoxed Senator’s face. “I’m confiscating this phone. This packet is a miniature Faraday cage, so signals can’t get in or out.”

Pulaski raised his voice into the continuing alarms. “Colonel, I will have that phone back. It contains my calendar and all my contacts.”

With forced calm, Shawn secured the packet in his thigh pocket; Adonia knew him well enough to read even his well-concealed expressions, and she had never seen him so upset.

Shawn spoke in a measured tone. “Senator, you knowingly carried unapproved electronics into a classified, special-access area and put us all at risk. That could cost you your clearance and your committee position — if not time in jail. But if it makes you feel any better, the packet is padded and waterproof.” He patted his thigh. “You’ll get it back when we’re safely out of here.”

Pulaski seemed about to lash out, but faltered as he realized that everyone else in the group looked at him with equal consternation.

Adonia raised her voice over the continuing siren. “Listen up! Mr. Harris told us to stay close to the vault door — and not set off any sensors. Thanks to the Senator’s phone, we’ve already failed there, so let’s move back near the intercom. Maybe Rob can turn off this new alarm and get us out of here.”

Shawn’s voice was clipped. “First, does anyone else have electronics on them? Anything that might emit electromagnetic radiation — including smart watches? I thought we were perfectly clear, but I don’t want this to happen again. Last chance for amnesty.” He looked around the sheepish group, but no one produced undisclosed electronics.

As they headed back to the vault door that blocked off the main tunnel and the ops center, Garibaldi’s face scrunched up in a quizzical look. He sniffed deeply. “What’s that odor? I’ve smelled that before.” Then he coughed and staggered backward. “I remember that from one of the Sanergy protests that got out of hand. Tear gas!”

Adonia blinked, then shook her head and blinked again. Suddenly, she felt as though her skin erupted in a hot, painful rash. Her eyes watered and burned, and she started to gag, unable to breathe.

Pushing her way to the intercom, Doyle bent over and started to cough. “It’s… coming from up ahead, by the vault door. But that’s where we’re supposed to go!”

“That’s our exit when the lockdown ends,” van Dyckman said.

Garibaldi pointed down the storage tunnel to the metal door. “Look, the vents!” Small plumes of gas curled into the tunnel, crawling out of openings in the granite wall. The plumes quickly diffused into the air, but the vapor was apparent once they knew where to look.

Pressing hands over his ears against the continuing alarms, Senator Pulaski hunched over and turned in the other direction. He lurched down the tunnel, away from the vault door. “If it’s tear gas, then we have to get away.”

Blinking back tears, Adonia coughed as she yelled after him, “But… Harris told us to stay here!”

He retched out an answer. “Harris… isn’t… being gassed!” He staggered down the corridor away from the blocked exit. “I’m sure as hell not staying here.”

With increasing distress, Garibaldi bent over and also lurched away from the tear gas, reluctantly following Pulaski. “He’s… right. For once, the Senator seems to be doing the smart thing. Score another point for your wonderful system, van Dyckman.” He ran blindly, reaching out to feel the granite walls. “Harris told us this tunnel intersects with the one that leads down to the lower level. We can get out that way, and we’ll be away from the gas.”

Although Adonia could barely breathe herself, she clung to Harris’s instructions. She was in charge of these people, but the tear gas defense didn’t make sense. Security countermeasures were supposed to drive people toward an exit, to get them out of the facility in a dangerous situation, not push them deeper inside.

As the thickening gas burned her eyes, nose, and lungs, Adonia knew it would not be possible to remain in place, as Harris had instructed them. The Senator’s panicked retreat seemed more and more reasonable as the irritating gas thickened.

Coughing uncontrollably, van Dyckman hobbled after the two. “Get to the intersection with the incline,” he called ahead in a hoarse voice. “It’s another way to reach the main corridor, as well as the lower level. The system is working. It’s just a temporary glitch, but we have to wait it out… where we can breathe.”

Undersecretary Doyle followed them, while Adonia smeared her hands over the tears that flowed from her eyes, stubbornly hoping that Harris would cut off the gas and open the vault door as he had promised. They couldn’t wait any longer.

Shawn grabbed her elbow. “They’re right… and you’re responsible for their safety. Let’s go.”

The plumes of gas were like a toxic fog, still hissing into the confined tunnel and swirling around the vault door. No exit there. Unable to stand it any longer, Adonia and Shawn staggered away, following the others deeper into the facility.

They passed Mrs. Garcia’s closed storage chamber, and Adonia hoped the technician was safe from the noxious fumes. “We might have been better off sealed in there with her.” She coughed.

“No thanks,” Shawn said. “At least this way we can keep moving, get somewhere safe.”

Behind her, in addition to the clanging alarm, a new ear-splitting siren went off, making her whole body shake. She didn’t recognize the distinctive tone as any standard alarm employed by the DOE. Maybe it was one of the old military countermeasures still functioning in the facility. But this was far worse than any alarm signal; it seemed to pierce her entire being. She pressed her hands against her ears as she careened forward. It wasn’t an alert; maybe some kind of sonic weapon?

The siren was only one component of the devilish cacophony. A deep, low reverberation rolled down the tunnel, an invisible force driving them from the vault door. Her entire body thrummed with the subsonic frequency, down to the marrow of her bones. The sound came in slow, crashing pulses, growing worse.

On the other end of the frequency spectrum, she barely detected a sharp, needle-like noise that pushed her eardrums to the edge of bursting. The ultrasonic dissonance seemed to slice through her head. This was a full-spectrum, multifrequency sonic attack!

She had no chance to think, could not choose where to go. She could only react. The sonic barrage drove her away, and she instinctively fled, anything to escape the overwhelming noise. She gasped for breath as the low subsonics seemed to squeeze the air out of her lungs, while the mid-range and higher frequencies shook her body, pierced her skull.

She could barely think through the pounding, shrieking pain. With her eyes burning from the tear gas, Adonia saw the others in front of her careening from one side of the tunnel to the other, like drunken partygoers.

Forcing some small amount of control, Shawn urged them faster, pushing them along, but no one paid attention. Senator Pulaski screamed wordlessly as he staggered along, his eyes closed, shaking his head back and forth.

Still pressing her hands to her ears, Adonia crowded in among the rest of the group as they kept trying to escape the noise. Shawn yelled something, but Adonia couldn’t make out what he said over the cacophony.

When she tore her hands from her ears, she realized that trying to muffle the noise had not worked at all. The harsh dissonance hammered through her palms as if they were tissue paper. Maybe her eardrums had already burst, but with the incredible sonic pain, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

She collided with van Dyckman and Garibaldi, pushing them to hurry. Her ex-boss tripped and stumbled to the concrete floor, but the older scientist grabbed him, helped him forward.

As they moved farther from the main vault door, Adonia thought the insane noise decreased, at least marginally. Positive reinforcement? Slowly, step after step as they careened down the tunnel away from the main corridor, the hammering pulses abated. For some reason they were being herded away from the vault door, by countermeasures that must have been designed to drive intruders to a holding area or interception point. Maybe that was where they were headed. She didn’t care. She just needed to get away from the barrage, to find some shelter, some respite from the attack. She and her fellow team members weren’t aggressors or intruders, but the system couldn’t differentiate among its targets.

Ahead, Senator Pulaski crumpled to the floor, and Shawn bent to help him up, even though the big man outweighed him by fifty pounds. Pulaski resisted, kicking out with his feet, as if he just wanted to curl up and die.

Barely able to see, Adonia shoved van Dyckman and Garibaldi forward to join Victoria. Helping Shawn with the Senator, she yelled in his ear. “Keep moving! The noise will grow louder unless we keep going forward.” The countermeasures would ratchet up until they went in the desired direction. The intent of the system was clear.

Together, they grabbed the squirming Senator. Shawn worked his hands under Pulaski’s shoulders, and he and Adonia strained to lift the big man up. They staggered forward.

As the merciless sonic barrage continued, they worked their way down the tunnel. Van Dyckman, Doyle, and Garibaldi all stumbled forward, not knowing where they were going, just heading away from the gas and the infernal noise.

Shawn and Adonia plodded along with the Senator in tow. She suspected the man would have died there if they’d left him. Old military countermeasures didn’t have much of a humanitarian bent.

Even with the sheer reactive need to escape the hammering pain, Adonia felt increasing panic. This couldn’t possibly be a test, or even a routine lockdown. She feared that Pulaski’s cell phone signal had caused a catastrophic overload while the Mountain was in lockdown.

But what if there was some real outside emergency, like the extremist attack on Granite Bay? A significant threat to Hydra Mountain, and they just happened to be caught in the middle? What was Rob Harris responding to?

In their frantic escape, they passed numerous oval vault doors of sealed dry-storage chambers on alternating sides of the tunnel. Adonia didn’t know how far they had run from the noise or where they were supposed to go.

Almost imperceptibly, the alarms decreased in intensity. When the haggard group slowed to a stop, pausing and panting, the sound naggingly increased again, spiraling up in volume, driving them onward again. “Must be motion sensors embedded in the walls,” Adonia shouted. “We have to keep going.”

The main tunnel door — supposedly their way out of the Mountain — was now far behind them. She tried to recall the diagram they had briefly seen in the Eagle’s Nest. She thought this storage chamber tunnel ran parallel to the main corridor, separated by at least a hundred feet of granite. And Harris had said this tunnel intersected with another one they could use in case of an emergency. She hoped the security systems were at least driving them toward safety, that this wasn’t just another glitch in the facility systems.

After they had gone another hundred yards and the mind-shattering racket diminished again, she spotted a vault door directly ahead, sealed tight. If she was right, this would be a second interior tunnel, the incline to the lower level. Harris had said it would also lead back to the main corridor.

As they approached, the thick metal door slowly opened, as if beckoning them inside.