Chapter 69 - Footsteps in the Permafrost
Jared moved through the hemlocks like a ghost. He had spent his entire childhood hunting these ridges; he knew every drop-off, every shale outcropping, and every game trail that bypassed the frozen ravines.
Clad in white insulated coveralls over his tactical vest, carrying a suppressed 12-gauge Remington shotgun and his grandfather’s Colt .45 sidearm, he descended toward Spur 09. The cold was brutal, settling in his lungs with every breath, but his blood was pumping hot with adrenaline.
Spur 09 was an abandoned rail spur half a mile north of his property line, cut into the limestone bluffs during the timber boom of the 1920s. At the dead-end of the rusted tracks sat a squat, windowless bunker constructed of poured concrete—the secondary drainage intake for the deep borehole facility.
As he closed within fifty yards, Jared smelled high-grade diesel exhaust and burning electrical insulation.
Parked beneath the snow-laden pines were two unmarked, matte-black tracked utility carriers—vehicles designed for deep Arctic operations, completely devoid of license plates or national insignia. Beside the carriers lay three bodies in commercial tactical gear, their uniforms bearing the private security insignias of Victor Graves’ corporate network. They had been executed cleanly, each with a single shot to the back of the skull.
Graves’ mercenaries had been liquidated by the very people they had brought to the mountain.
Jared crept behind a snow-covered boulder, raising his shotgun. The heavy steel door of the bunker hung open, sheared off its hinges by a precision thermite charge that was still hissing and dripping molten orange slag onto the ice.
From inside the darkness of the bunker came the rhythm of heavy, booted footsteps and the cold, flat clinking of magazines being tapped against helmets.
"Set the secondary charges on the bypass manifold," a man spoke from the entrance, his English heavily accented with the flat vowels of Eastern Europe. "If the pressure drops in the lower chamber before the retrieval canister surfaces at Bay 1, the pneumatic seals will lock down for another seventy-two hours. We will not have another window before satellite coverage realigns."
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"And the woman?" another voice asked from the shadows.
"Leave her tied to the high-pressure line. When the valve releases, the steam will incinerate everything in this room anyway. No witnesses. No bloodline trace."
