Deep Fire Rising - v4 by Jack Du Brull Read Free Book Online Page B

weather. He’d spent enough time with Ira to fairly judge his moods. The stress lines around his eyes and on his forehead hadn’t been there the last time they’d shared a drink at Tiny’s. And his pallor went far beyond a normal end-of-winter hue. “What’s going on here, Ira?”
    Briana Marie answered, “There’s been an accident. People are dead. We need you to carry on with their work.”
    The whistle of wind beyond the hangar doors sounded like a mourning dirge.
    Mercer learned he’d be spending the night at the main complex. Tomorrow he’d be taken to an even more secret base on the Area 51 grounds, a place Ira called DS-Two. Ira asked Captain Sykes to show him to his billet in a building behind the hangar. A metal roof covered the walkway, presumably to hide foot traffic from orbital observation.
    The room was like any hotel Mercer had ever stayed at, only the door locked from the outside. To leave, he had to buzz a uniformed staffer seated in the barracks’ reception area. He took his first shower since Canada, thirty-six hours and roughly five thousand air miles ago. Returning west had fortunately nullified his jet lag. As the scalding water sluiced across his body, he thought of the old joke about a harried tourist on a package tour. “Oh, it’s Monday. Then this must be Rome.”
    By the time he’d toweled dry, he’d figured out what Dr. Marie was working on. With Yucca Mountain only a short distance away, the answer was obvious.
    Sykes was waiting for him at the reception desk when the corporal on duty allowed him out of his room.
    “Is this your regular posting?” Mercer asked as Sykes led him across the facility.
    “Nah,” Sykes drawled. “Me and my team have been here a month.”
    “Team?”
    “Delta Force.” This was the army’s elite hostage rescue team. “If you don’t mind a little free advice, Doc, I’ve learned you get along better out here if you don’t ask too many questions.”
    Despite their awkward introduction, Mercer found he liked the soldier. He’d already realized his slow demeanor wasn’t laziness. Rather, Sykes possessed a cool deliberation, as if he knew when he woke each morning every action his body would take and every word he’d need to speak. It was only a matter of doling them out at the right time.
    “And let me guess,” Mercer commented, “one question is too many?”
    Sykes grinned. “You’re catching on.”
    Sykes led him to a nondescript building, a slab-sided office cube with the architectural flair of a Soviet apartment house. Most of the base had been built in the 1960s and substantially expanded in the ’80s, yet it retained the Cold War sterility of its roots. The buildings Mercer could see were laid out in geometric blocs. There was no ornamentation, no landscaping and certainly no streetlights.
    Nor, he noticed, were there any people. It was like walking around a postapocalyptic ghost town.
    “Kinda creepy, huh?” Sykes seemed to be reading Mercer’s thoughts as they reached the building’s door. “I guess the isolation really gets to some of the people out here, having to live under cover all the time. A couple days after I got here, a bunch of the younger soldiers were given permission to put on a show for a Chinese spy satellite.”
    “What’d they do?” Mercer followed Sykes to a flight of stairs. The building’s interior was as drab as the outside.
    “They laid themselves out on the runway in nothing but their birthday suits. They used their bodies to spell out ‘Up yours, Mao.’ ”
    Mercer laughed. “Would the Chinese be able to see it?”
    “Shit, they’ve stolen enough of our technology to be able to tell which ones were circumcised.”
    At the head of the stairs, Sykes opened a paneled door into a conference room, then told Mercer that Ira would escort him back to his room. The two men shook hands at their parting.
    Heavy drapes were drawn over the room’s picture window, and banker’s lamps reflected puddles of