Ragnarok

TWENTY-SIX

Pinckney Bible Campground, NH

3 November, 0700 Hrs

George Pierce sat atop a brown picnic table with his feet propped on the bench. Pierce knew the campground would fill with people in the summer, but right now, he was the only human being in sight. When Chess Team fought the monstrosity Manifold Genetics had created from the original Greek Hydra a few years back, the battle destroyed parts of the campground.

After the fight, Deep Blue had arranged for the Army to take over the entire area, while Hazmat teams cleaned up the secret Manifold facility hidden under the mountains behind the campground. Then they had the base refurbished and refitted to house Chess Team and its extended support crew, now collectively dubbed Endgame.

Pierce had assisted in the project at the time, before he was formally a member of Endgame. Finally, once the base was finished and operational, its secret entrance in the mountain sufficiently concealed again, Deep Blue had accepted Pierce’s suggestion of restoring the campground itself. After all, the public would become wary if a supposed chemical spill was being ‘cleaned up’ by the Army, but once that process was completed, they didn’t turn the land back over to the public. The last thing Endgame wanted was more scrutiny from the public. Besides, the base sprawled underground over miles. There were other entrances and exits, which afforded more privacy, and which did not require movement through a formerly public area.

Still, when Pierce felt the crushing claustrophobia of the underground base weighing on him, he liked to slip out of the vehicle entrance located behind the campground, and come out here to think.

He was exhausted, after spending all night researching Norse mythology. It wasn’t his field, and there was so very much to learn, although he had found little in reference to the dire wolves. In addition, the dire wolf roar had rendered him nearly useless for much of the night. He still suffered the terrifying visions that the sound induced in him, but they had lessened in their intensity, and he knew them to be nothing more than echoes of his hallucination.

Carrack had later told him he had fled the computer room at the sound of the roar, but Pierce had no memory of that. What he saw when the dire wolf roar had assaulted them over the speakers of the room, before Aleman had been able to switch off the audio, was worse than anything his mind could come up with in a normal nightmare.

And George Pierce had plenty of nightmares.

When Chess Team had gone up against Manifold a few years earlier, Pierce, much like Bishop, had been tortured and experimented upon. But unlike Bishop, Pierce had received DNA directly from the Hydra sample. His skin had changed into a green and scaly substance. He had been half-man and half-reptile by the time Manifold finished with him. The nonhuman genes attached to his body were eventually blocked and he had suffered no relapses. But the bad dreams had taken far longer to go away than his skin had taken to slough and repair itself.

Pierce sighed and watched his breath in the cool morning air. Some might say chilly, but he had quickly acclimatized to the cold, despite his years spent in Greece and even in the humidity of Peru. His hallucinatory reaction to the dire wolf roar still haunted him. It was far worse than any Hydra nightmare he had yet to experience. He’d seen Julie, King’s deceased sister, his fiancee who had died long ago in a fighter jet accident-except it hadn’t been her. It was Julie as she would have been if she’d been the one Manifold infected. She wore a flight suit and her skin had the same sickly green scaly look that Pierce’s had when he was altered by the Hydra DNA.

It was so real, he thought. I could smell her.

He hadn’t run from the computer center as Carrack had said. The monstrous Julie had chased him from the room in his hallucination.

She was going to eat me.

Julie’s death had initially led to Pierce and King falling out of touch. The Hydra incident, which had begun with Pierce on an archeological dig site in Nazca, had brought them back together. Pierce’s ordeal cemented their friendship.

He took another sip of the now cool coffee and vowed never to tell King about the hallucination. It was simply too terrible, and Jack Sigler had enough to deal with.

Pierce took a deep breath and closed his eyes, bringing his mind back to the present. Soft footsteps approached him from behind. He turned and opened his eyes to see Anna Beck striding toward him from the direction of the base’s concealed door.

Beck, callsign: Black Zero, was Deep Blue’s right-hand woman. Ostensibly, the man’s bodyguard, she did far more fieldwork for Endgame. She was dating Knight, Pierce knew, or he might have asked the woman out. She was cute, although not stunningly beautiful. But she was tough and had a razor-sharp wit that often manifested in blistering sarcasm. Pierce liked her.

Beck walked across the yellowing grass. Her brown hair, pulled back into a ponytail, swayed as she walked. She wore her customary all-black military battle-dress uniform, and strapped to her leg was her ever-present sidearm. Pierce had asked her once why she was always armed. Her answer had been that the base creeped her out.

After the facility had been attacked by Manifold agents, before its restoration was complete, Pierce could understand that. Although Matt Carrack, callsign: White Zero, was officially in charge of security at the base, Pierce knew that Beck played a significant part in stopping the Manifold incursion. They had lost several security members of the team during that incident-the soldiers formerly known as White Two through White Five. Pierce understood afterward that was the reason Deep Blue had insisted on naming the White and Black team members with numbers. It would be harder on Chess Team field personnel to get attached to their support members. Replacing their identities with numbers would lessen the focus of the field team on the loss of these team members in emergencies. They were expendable. Pierce realized the strategy hadn’t worked completely, especially when he saw that Knight and Beck had become a thing. Still, Pierce was glad he hadn’t been given a numbered callsign.

“What’s up?” he called to Beck.

“Aleman wants everyone back for a meeting.”

Pierce leapt up and strode over to her, tossing the remaining cold coffee from his cup into a nearby pine tree and shaking the drips out onto the grass as they walked.

“Everyone?” he asked.

She looked at him with a grim expression. “Yeah. Even Boucher is going to be on the call. Then I’m off to Norway as soon as we’re done.” Domenick Boucher was the current director of the CIA, and although Pierce hadn’t met the man, he knew that Boucher was an Endgame ally in the US government.

“Norway? You’re going after Rook?” Pierce asked.

“Yeah. Him and Queen both. We need everyone for this mess.”

They entered the vehicle entrance in the mountain and rapidly descended to the lowest level of the part of the base christened Labs. The main computer lab was a ten-minute ride away by underground tram, in a different section of the expansive base known as Central. They sat silently on the tram, each lost in their own thoughts. Once at Central, they proceeded to the main computer lab down quiet corridors.

The main screen showed a view from Deep Blue’s helmet of the massive energy globe suspended above Manhattan. Aleman was in his customary jeans and t-shirt, straddling the futuristic workstation in the center of the room. Sara Fogg stood with baggy eyes in a corner, leaning against a wall. Seated next to her was King’s adopted daughter, Fiona, who wore a Disney t-shirt and pajama bottoms, and sleepily ate a colorful breakfast cereal from a porcelain bowl. Her striking Native American facial features were partially obscured by a thick shock of her long black hair that had managed to escape her ponytail. She leaned her head against Fogg’s hip. Pierce was pleased to see how well King’s ‘family’ was working out for the man.

Matt Carrack leaned against another wall, wearing his usual forest-pattern BDUs. The other five members of the White security team were standing next to him and looking anxious. No doubt, Carrack had already briefed the men on the severity of the situation worldwide. Each man was a crack soldier from the alpine 10 ^th Mountain division at Fort Drum. Pierce had yet to learn any of their names or even speak to them. He had made that mistake with the last batch of White Team members, and now they were all dead.

Pierce knew the two White Team scientists in the room, but they were easy to recognize from their white lab coats. White Six was an unusually tall, gangly man. At just under seven feet tall, Six had to duck his head when going through most of the doors in the base. Ironically, the tall man with the dark mop of black shaggy hair hated sports. Especially basketball. When he wasn’t working on chemical analyses for Endgame, the man was building models from toothpicks and popsicle sticks. The structures were incredibly intricate, and when Six chose to design something recognizable, like the Eiffel Tower, the structures were meticulously accurate to every detail. Pierce had joked with the man that he had missed his calling as an architect. Six’s serious response was simply “I know.” But Pierce liked the gentle giant.

White Seven, the other scientist on the team, was a short, burly man with a gruff demeanor. Pierce rarely spoke to the man, but was impressed by the scientist’s wide knowledge of everything but social graces.

The White Team was completed by a weapons expert named Reggie. Reggie was technically callsign: White Eight, but despite Deep Blue’s admonition that White and Black support team members each keep their names to themselves and use only their callsigns, Reggie had introduced himself to everyone at the base as Reggie, so the name had stuck. He was the consummate joker, but the sort whose jokes were more frequently directed at himself. Everyone liked the man. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about every weapon they had on the base. Reggie certainly destroyed any stereotypes Pierce had had about weapons training experts. He pictured most of them to be hard-assed drill instructor types, and he wasn’t surprised to discover that King had thought much the same. Reggie was also the only one around to best King at horseshoes up on the campground.

On the other side of the room, the Black Team was under-represented, because half of them-the pilots, callsigns: Black One through Black Four-were currently out in the field. Two mechanics that repaired the team’s helicopters and the Crescent were present. Both men wore bib overalls, and both tended to keep to themselves. Pierce had seen them around the base a few times. They were both short and skinny men, with grease caked under their fingernails from a lifetime of mechanical work. Both men were dark haired, and Pierce occasionally wondered if they were brothers. The men were callsigns: Black Seven and Black Eight.

Black Five was an overweight man of at least sixty years old. Deep Blue had introduced Pierce to the man only a few weeks earlier. Balding and always wearing half-moon glasses, Black Five probably looked older than he was. When Pierce had seen him, he was neck deep in computer programs, on the phone or both. Deep Blue had introduced Black Five as an intelligence analyst, but he had been recruited because he also had a Ph. D. in physics. Deep Blue liked team members to pull double duty, which was why Pierce was expanding his expertise into general history and even paleontology, should dinosaurs ever emerge from Antarctica. Sounded ridiculous, but the ridiculous was kind of their thing.

Black Five stood against the wall, speaking softly to a man Pierce had never met. But Pierce knew this wiry, muscular man in the charcoal suit could only be one person. Black Six was the team’s only former Central Intelligence Agency member. He was a field operative. The team’s very own spy, like James Bond. But due to the nature of his work, he was usually in the field. Pierce had, until this moment, only heard of the man, and never actually laid eyes on him. Black Six was younger than Pierce might have thought-perhaps in his mid twenties. He had a strong jaw and blue eyes, but the cut of his hair was a bit long, and Pierce could easily picture the man sliding undercover as an executive one week and as a surfer the next.

Lewis Aleman cleared his throat.

“We’ve got General Keasling, Deep Blue and King on the line in New York. Bishop, Knight and Black One and Two are also online as they transit to Europe. Mr. Boucher, is on the call from DC. I have the rest of Endgame here with me. Here’s the situation as we have it so far.

“We’re dealing with a threat unlike anything we’ve seen before. I’m afraid most of the news I have is pretty grim…”

“Lewis,” Deep Blue interrupted. “Let’s start with the bad news.”

“Okay,” Lewis said, looking down at the floor. When he looked up again, sorrow hid behind his eyes. “The world is going to end in four days.”