The 6th Extinction (Sigma Force 10)

“We’ve lost containment levels four and five,” she gasped behind him, monitoring the threat rising up from below on a handheld bioreader.

But the screams that chased them were enough of an assessment.

“It must be in the airways by now,” Irene said.

“How could that be?”

His question was meant to be rhetorical, but Irene still answered it.

“It can’t be. Not without massive lab error. But I checked—”

“It wasn’t lab error,” he blurted out more sharply than he intended.

He knew the more likely cause.

Sabotage.

Too many firewalls—both electronic and biological—had failed for this to be anything but purposeful. Someone had deliberately caused this containment breach.

“What can we do?” Irene pleaded.

They had only one recourse left, a final fail-safe, to fight fire with fire. But would it do more harm than good? He listened to the strangled cries rising from below and knew his answer.

They reached the top floor. Not knowing what they faced—especially if he was right about a saboteur—he stopped Irene with a touch on her arm. He saw the skin on the back of her hand was already blistering, the same along her neck.

“You must go for the radio. Send out a mayday. In case I fail.”

Or God help me, if I lose my nerve.

She nodded, her eyes trying to hide her pain. What he was asking her to do would likely end in her death. “I’ll try,” she said, looking terrified.

Burning with regret, he tore the door open and pushed her toward the radio room. “Run!”

7:43 P.M.

The truck bumped hard from the paved road onto a gravel track.

Leaning heavily on the gas pedal, Jenna took less than twenty minutes to climb from Mono Lake to the eight-thousand-foot elevation of Bodie State Historic Park. But she wasn’t heading to the neighboring park. Her destination was even higher and more remote.

With the sun a mere glimmer on the horizon, she bounced down the dark road, rattling gravel up into her wheel wells. Only a handful of people outside of law enforcement knew about this military site. It had been rapidly established, with barely a word raised about it. Even the building materials and personnel had been airlifted into place by military helicopters, while defense contractors handled all the construction.

Still, that didn’t stop some information from leaking out.

The site was part of the U.S. Developmental Test Command. The installation was somehow connected with the Dugway Proving Grounds outside of Salt Lake City. She had looked up that place herself on the Internet and didn’t like what she had found. Dugway was a nuclear, chemical, and biological test facility. Back in the sixties, thousands of sheep near the place had died from a deadly nerve gas leakage. Since then, the facility continued to expand its borders. It now covered almost a million acres, twice the size of Los Angeles.

So why did they need this extra facility up here in the middle of nowhere?

Of course, there was speculation: how the military scientists needed the depths of the abandoned mines found here, how their research was too dangerous to be near a major metropolis like Salt Lake City. Other minds concocted wilder theories, proposing the site was being used for secret extraterrestrial research—perhaps because Area 51 had become too much of a tourist attraction.

Unfortunately this last conjecture gained support when a group of scientists had ventured down to Mono Lake to take some deep core samples of the lake’s bottom. They had been astrobiologists associated with NASA’s National Space Science and Technology Center.

But what they had been searching for was far from extraterrestrial; in fact, it was very terrestrial. She had been able to have a brief chat with one of the researchers, Dr. Kendall Hess, a cordial silver-haired biologist, at Bodie Mike’s. It seemed no one came to Mono Lake who didn’t enjoy at least one meal at the diner. Over a cup of coffee, he had told her about his team’s interest in the lake’s extremophiles, those rare bacterial species thriving in toxic and hostile environments.

Such research allows us to better understand how life might exist on foreign worlds, he had explained.

Yet even then she had sensed that he had been holding back. She saw it in his face, a wariness and excitement.

Then again, this wasn’t the first secret military site set up at Mono Lake. During the cold war, the government established several remote facilities in the area to test weapons systems and carry out various research projects. Even the lake’s most famous beach—Navy Beach—was named after a former installation once set up along its south shore.

So what was one more secret lab?

After a few more teeth-rattling minutes, she noted the fence cutting across the hills ahead. A moment later, her headlights swept over a roadside sign, faded and pebbled with bullet holes. It read:

DEAD END ROAD

NO TRESPASSING

GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

From here, a gate normally blocked the road, but instead it stood open. Suspicious, she slowed her truck and stopped at the threshold. By now, the sun had vanished behind the hills, and a heavy twilight had fallen over the rolling meadows.

“What do you think, Nikko? It’s not trespassing if they leave the door open, is it?”

Nikko cocked his head, his ears up quizzically.

She lifted the handset and radioed park dispatch. “Bill, I’ve reached the base’s gates.”

“Any sign of problems?”

“Not that I can tell from here. Except someone left the gate open. What do you think I should do?”

“While you were en route, I placed a few calls up the chain of military command. I’ve still not heard any word back.”

“So it’s up to me.”

“We don’t have jurisdiction to—”

“Sorry.” She bobbled the radio’s feed. “Can’t make out what you were saying, Bill.”

She ended the call and re-hooked the radio.

“I’m just saying . . . we came all the way out here, didn’t we, Nikko?”

So let’s see what all the fuss is about.

She pressed the accelerator and eased past the gate and headed toward a cluster of illuminated buildings crowning the shadowed hill ahead. The small installation appeared to be a handful of Quonset-style huts and hastily constructed concrete-block bunkers. She suspected those buildings were nothing more than the tip of a buried pyramid, especially from the number of satellite dishes and antenna arrays sprouting from those rooftops.

Nikko growled as a low thumping reached her.

She braked and instinctively punched off her headlights, respecting her own intuition as much as her dog’s.