He paused, looked ahead. The entrance he was searching for was up ahead. It was built into the back of a kitchen cabinet on a swivel pin. Stone had always assumed that another group of trainees before his time had done that. Stone and his teammates had merely discovered it one night and followed it out. They weren’t the only class of Triple Six recruits who wanted a bit of freedom, it seemed. Or maybe the people who ran Murder Mountain had done it, sensing that the recruits needed to believe they had a bit of control over their lives, that they could take a few moments rest from a hellish experience.
Maybe they were afraid we’d all go mad and kill them.
He slipped his gun from its holster and another object from his belt. The entrance was straight ahead. He assumed Friedman had given strict orders. Do not kill, at least him. Bring him to me. Then she would kill him, probably after making him watch the deaths of Caleb and Annabelle.
He reached the outside of the entrance. Readying his gun, he held out the other object, a telescoping rod. He flipped it out to its full six-foot length. He nudged the wall in front of him that represented the back of the cabinet on the pin swivel. It had been painted to resemble black rock, but it was only wood. Rotted wood now. He pushed harder with the rod. The wood gave way, the pin swivel did its job and the wall swung inward.
Something shot out of the opening and hit the rock Stone was standing next to. This he’d expected. A dart. Paralyze, not kill. He pulled the pin on the lump of metal he’d taken from a compartment on his vest and tossed it into the opening at the same time he slid behind a large outcrop of rock.
There was a small pulse of energy followed by a dense cloud of smoke. Stone slid on his gas mask and counted. He stopped counting when he heard the man behind the wall hit the floor. He moved through the opening and looked down. The Russian was large, with a shaved head, a small goatee and a dart pistol in his hand. It was probably not in the man’s nature to seek to stun instead of kill. He’d not been very good with the dart gun. Stone used two pairs of plasticuffs to immobilize the man’s hands and feet. Clear of the gas, he removed his mask and moved forward into Murder Mountain.
At the front entrance to the facility, Finn, Chapman and Knox stood facing a metal door revealed in the rock face of the mountain where they’d pulled aside a curtain of kudzu that covered it. Stone had told them where the door was located and had given them a key that he said would open the portal. But there wasn’t even a keyhole to try the key in. He’d also told them that he was the only one who could make it through the hidden entrance, because there was no way for someone to follow him closely enough not to get lost. He told them he would rendezvous with them at the front door.
“He snookered us,” moaned Knox, who was holding the useless key. “I can’t believe I fell for it. Like he’d have a damn key to this place after all these years.”
“He’s going it alone,” said Finn.
“The hell he is,” snapped Chapman. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out a slender metal object with a magnetized edge.
“What is that?” asked Knox.
“Well, love, at MI6 we call this a doorbell.” She attached it to the metal door where it met the doorjamb. She motioned them to step back. She drew a remote from her pocket, slid open the protective hard plastic covering and pressed a button. “Don’t look at the laser,” she instructed.
They all looked away as a burst of red light erupted from the device she’d placed on the door. It cut neatly through the locking bar, and the door swung free on its hinges.
“Pretty cool technology,” said Knox.
“One-time power pack, good for most secure doors, metal or otherwise,” she explained.
“I see Mr. Q is still alive and well in British intelligence.”
“Actually, it was a woman who invented this little toy. But you can just call her Ms. Q.”
Guns out, they approached the door. With Chapman and Knox covering him, Finn slowly pulled the door all the way open. He aimed his gun into the darkness and then nodded at the others. They pulled on protective goggles, as did Finn. A second later Finn hit the opening with a pulse of blinding white light. There was a shout of pain from inside and then the light vanished.
Before the men could move, Chapman was through the opening. They hustled after her in time to see her nimbly disarm the man and then smash her foot into his face, sending him rocketing backward against an interior wall. The man, partially blinded by the light, ricocheted off the wall and came at Chapman, big arms swinging like pistons. Finn moved to step between the attacker and Chapman, but the MI6 agent had already launched off the ground. With her left foot she hit the man with a crushing blow to his right knee. They all heard the bone in his leg snap. He crumpled downward at the same time she delivered a kick to his chin, flipping him heels over ass. When he tried to rise, his gut pushing in and out with painful breaths, Chapman laid him down for good with an elbow strike to the base of his neck. She rose and placed the muzzle of her Walther against the unconscious man’s temple.
“Wait a minute,” snapped Knox.
“What?” she asked.
“You’re just going to shoot him in cold blood?” asked Knox.
“Do we want to leave witnesses?” she asked calmly.
“Witnesses to what?”
“To whatever’s going to happen here tonight. Like me killing Stone for him playing us for fools.”
“We’re not killing anyone unless they’re in a position to kill us,” Knox said firmly.
Chapman deftly cuffed the unconscious man. “Suit yourself.”
Finn said, “Where’d you learn moves like that?”
“Maybe you blokes think otherwise, but MI6 is not a bloody girls’ school. Now let’s get going.”
She turned on a flashlight and headed down the corridor.
Finn and Knox looked at each other and then quickly followed the woman.
CHAPTER 97
THOUGH THE ENTIRE FACILITY itself was quite large, with barracks, kitchens, an infirmary, a library, offices, classrooms and other specific free spaces, the most intensive training areas of Murder Mountain were set up in the form of a pair of large steel cylinders divided into parallel sections and separated by a main hall. Once you entered the first section, you had to continue on until the last section in that cylinder. The massive entry doors locked behind you and did not allow passage back. And one couldn’t simply block the door open, because if one did the next door would not open. It was a way to keep reluctant recruits focused and on mission and always moving forward. Stone’s plan was simple. He was going to take the section on the right and follow it through. If he didn’t find his quarry there, he would exit this cylinder, walk back down the main hall and
enter the other cylinder.
Stone made his way slowly down the hall to the first door. One man was down and there were five more to go, plus Friedman, whom Stone considered probably the most skilled of the bunch.
He felt no guilt about tricking his friends. If anyone was going to die trying to rescue Caleb and Annabelle it was going to be him. This ultimately was his fight, not theirs. He’d lost enough friends. He was determined not to lose any more tonight.
He ran off the order of the training sections in his head. Shooting range first, where he had fired off hundreds of thousands of rounds in the year he had been here. They threw every imaginable distraction at you while you were aiming at the targets. It had been good training, because out in the real world a perfect field of fire with accompanying idyllic conditions was impossible to find.
After the shooting range was a room outfitted like the famed Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy. Here Stone and his teammates had practiced what they’d learned in the classroom. After that room was the lab. It was there where the psychological testing took place—really glorified torture to determine what your breaking point was. Stone had seen hard-as-steel men weep in that room, as the technicians played numbing games with their minds, which would never be as strong as their physical side, no matter how much they trained. There were proven exercises that would enlarge and strengthen muscle. The mind, on the other hand, was not so easily quantifiable. And the recruits all carried hidden mental elements with them here that would jump out at unexpected times and cause them to falter, to fail, to scream in rage. Stone had felt all those emotions. No place on earth had ever humbled him like the lab at Murder Mountain.
After the lab was a series of rooms that served as holding cells. Stone never knew what persons might have been “held” here, and he didn’t want to know. If Caleb and Annabelle were not down this way he would start through the other cylinder where there were only two sections. The first was a tank full of foul liquid. One would fall into this muck if one did not know where to step on a catwalk that constituted the top of the tank. Once inside the tank it became a fight to the death. After the tank came a maze that Stone thankfully had the answer for. Or at least he thought he did. He now wondered if Friedman had built some surprise for him.