chapter 40
TEAM 1 & 2, YEAR: 1200
Time Remaining: 15 Days
Jake awoke to a blood-curdling scream coming from somewhere within the camp. He threw on a pair of shorts, dashed outside and saw a body lying on the ground with someone crouched over it, just past Mole Control. Jake’s sleepy mind chugged to process the situation as the crouching person called and waved him over.
Jake ran to the pair and fell to his knees. “Lexi,” he said, near-whisper. When she failed to respond, he called her name again, louder. He fumbled with her wrist, desperate to feel a gentle pulse but found nothing. He looked up at Maya’s tear-stained face. “What happened?” Within seconds, Riley, Finn, Darren and Tyler approached the scene.
Maya shook. “Someone hit her!” Finn took Maya in his arms. “It was so horrible!” Her words were muffled by Finn’s thick hoodie.
Riley fell to her knees at Lexi’s side, opposite Jake. “Maya, what do you mean ‘Someone hit her?’ Who hit her? Where?”
“Her head. In the back of the head or maybe the side.” Maya slid out of Finn’s arms and fell to her knees crowding Riley. Riley eyed Finn and he pulled Maya to her feet and backed her away.
Maya’s words came out in sobs. “I heard a noise outside, like a door slamming. We thought it was weird, and with all the bizarre things that have been happening, Lexi thought we should investigate. We watched out the window for a few moments, and we saw someone run out from between the trailers. Lexi bolted out the door after the guy…well, I’m sure it was a guy. We didn’t see his face, but he had the same kind of build as the guy in the video from the other night. He ran out of sight past Mole Control and Lexi followed him. But I guess he’d doubled back and hid. As Lexi passed the trailer, he stepped out and hit her in the head with something.”
“Which way did he go?” asked Finn.
She pointed in the direction of the lake. “That way!”
Like hounds released to pursue their quarry, Finn and Tyler raced toward the rocky cliff that led to the lake. They climbed down as fast as the steep rocky face would allow using the floodlight setting on their VersaTools to light their way.
Riley looked at Jake. “She’s got a strong pulse, I think she’s just unconscious. You take her. I’ll help look.” Riley disappeared behind the house trailers.
Jake scooped Lexi up with ease and strode toward his trailer. “Maya, please grab the MediScanner. Darren, an ice pack, please.”
Jake carried Lexi’s small, limp body carefully over the threshold into his trailer and lay her on the unused of the two beds. Inside the trailer, Jake saw a cut on Lexi’s right temple. He brushed her blond hair away from the cut and her eyes opened. She looked around the trailer then at Jake. Her eyes seemed unfocused for a moment then righted themselves.
“Jake…” She struggled to sit up.
He gently patted her on the shoulder and eased her back down. “It’s okay, you don’t have to talk. Maya will be here in a sec.”
Lexi sat up, agitated. “I need…” She wobbled slightly and Jake steadied her with a hand on each shoulder. She leaned over the side of the bed and threw up on his sandaled feet.
Darren, who had opened the door just in time to see Lexi get sick, tossed the ice-pack on the bed beside Jake, tore into the bathroom and slammed the door. Jake heard retching sounds followed by the toilet flushing.
Semi-delirious, Lexi leaned forward and rested her head on Jake’s shoulder. He stroked the back of her neck, unsure of what else to do. He wanted to avoid being thrown up on again, but it was better than the alternative—her getting sick while lying down. He could only sit in his sticky sandals and wait for Maya to come with the MediScanner. He heard Darren enter round two in the bathroom. Again, the toilet flushed.
Maya rushed in carrying the MediScanner and a blue plastic basket of first aid supplies. She stepped between the beds to avoid the puddle of vomit and seated herself on Jake’s dishevelled bed. She turned on the scanner and made a pass over Lexi’s hunched body.
“She’s got a pretty good concussion, and thankfully that’s all. I think it’s best if we don’t move her and she stays here tonight. You can have our trailer tonight and I’ll stay here with her. That way I can monitor her.”
Jake was unsure of how to say what he wanted to say without sounding disrespectful or implying that he thought that women were unable to take care of themselves. However, his first priority was to keep his team members safe. “I agree, but I’m staying here, too. Tomorrow, I think that you and Finn should bunk up.” Maya met Jake’s eyes with an unmistakable look of relief.
The rainy morning seemed fitting to Jake; his gloomy mood rivalled the dreary grey of the stormy sky. He sat down across from Riley at a table in the dining room, finally able to ask her where she had disappeared to after Lexi’s attack. Finn and Tyler’s search of the surrounding areas had yielded nothing.
“Well, I knew that all eyes would be on Clint for this, and I wanted to look for evidence. I knew if we waited until the morning there would be none. Think about it: if it was Clint who attacked her and he snuck back into his trailer feigning sleep, he’d be out of breath and sweaty from running. If he wasn’t in his trailer, that would be equally damning. So I thought I’d pay his trailer a visit. If he or Ben were awake, I would ask them if they’d seen anything and, at the same time, see what kind of physical shape Clint was in.”
Jake was impressed by her quick thinking at such an ungodly hour.
“Out of courtesy, I knocked on their door. Actually, I hammered on it and no one answered. I knew that Ben wouldn’t be fast to answer the door, but if Clint was there, he should have heard. When no one answered, I assumed Clint wasn’t there and that Ben had taken sleeping pills or something. I went inside and flicked on the lights. Both men were passed out, dead to the world. Even after flicking on the lights they didn’t wake up. Before waking them, I took a good look over Clint.”
Jake was anxious to hear the answer. “What did you find?”
“Nothing. His breathing was normal and showed no signs of any recent physical exertion. Further to that, he had ear plugs in. Ben was snoring like a buzz saw.”
Jake leaned back and looked contemplative. “So Ben was passed out from the sleeping pills, and Clint didn’t hear you because of the ear plugs.”
“So I would say that it was not Clint that attacked Lexi last night. But I guess she’ll be able to tell us for sure.”
Jake shook his head, frustrated he could not catch a break to save his life. “I asked her this morning. She doesn’t remember being hit.”
“Dammit,” breathed Riley.
“Rile, that brings me to my next topic of discussion. Room assignments. I’ve moved Lexi in with me. I want Finn to move into the girls’ trailer and stay with Maya. Darren and Tyler are fine where they are, as are Clint and Ben.”
“Sounds good.” She shot back the rest of her orange juice.
Jake hesitated. “Do I need to be worried about you?” He wondered if he should ask. He suspected that if he tried to bunk Riley up with a man to protect her, Jake might find himself needing protection. He felt sorry for any person who mistook her for an easy target. “I think you should bunk up with Owen. Two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. Plus, he’s pretty vulnerable without those crutches.”
Riley looked at Jake in earnest. “Yeah, I guess he is, eh? Well, whatever you think is best.” She left the table and turned to take her dishes to the dishwasher. Despite her best efforts not to, she smiled.
With no tools to fix the problem-riddled Moles, the teams needed to blast away the remaining stone from around the Elevanium deposit and manually clear it away. While Clint and Owen had two very different professional backgrounds, their combined knowledge and experience made them invaluable assets. They discussed blasting strategies and tested them with a simulation program.
Jake found himself in the dreaded, worst-case scenario. During the planning phase of Operation TimeShift, Jake’s doubts
about the Moles’ abilities to get the job done were met with sales pitch assurances of unparalleled performance and nominal downtime. So when he asked for a second Mole and enough explosives for a small country, his request had been met with considerable indignant resistance. Jake knew that for some unexplainable reason, catastrophic failures always seemed to take place when stakes were the highest.
The door to Mole Control opened and Maya slid into the boardroom. She stopped abruptly when she saw Clint. She pulled her wet hood back and brushed her windswept hair off her face. Her grave expression made Jake’s stomach sink.
“Jake, can I talk to you for a sec?” Her eyes moved from Jake to Clint, to the floor and back to Jake.
“Sure.” Jake stood and looked at Owen. “I’ll leave you guys to this.” She motioned for him to follow her and he ran after her hooded figure as she darted across the camp in the direction of Ben and Clint’s trailer. Jake caught up with her, shielding his eyes from the driving rain. “Maya, what’s wrong?”
She stopped, her hand gripping the handle of Ben and Clint’s trailer door. “There’s something you need to see. Darren was cleaning and he found something.”
Jake followed her inside and found Ben sitting up in bed, magazine in hand. Darren greeted Jake by holding a box out to him.
“I was doing my cleaning rounds and when I knelt down to vacuum under the bed, I found this.”
Jake looked in the box and his eyes widened. “I’ll be damned.” He slid his earpiece in and called Riley on the com-sys. She arrived at the trailer in less than a minute and Jake held the box out to her. “Darren found this under Clint’s bed.”
Clint entered the open trailer door, eager to know why the leads were congregating in his trailer. “What was found under Clint’s bed?”
“You tell us,” said Riley, as she pushed the box roughly into Clint’s chest. The box’s dimensions were identical to the one held by the man in the video.
Clint took the box and looked inside. Rattling around inside were handfuls of compressed objects from around the camp—the tools from the work shed, two WeatherShield sensors and two perimeter sensors. All of the colour drained from Clint’s face and he looked pleadingly at Jake. “I swear to you I didn’t do this. I didn’t put these here. I’ve never seen this box before in my life!”
“If it helps at all, I’ve never seen that box before either,” said Ben.
“Me neither, and I vacuum under there once a week,” added Darren.
Jake looked angrier than anyone had ever seen him. He looked at Clint and then to Riley. “We need to chat.” He motioned to the door and Clint walked out. “Riley, take Clint to the meeting room. Neither of you leave until I get there.”
Jake handed the box over to Lexi in Mole Control, instructing her to scan each tool for fingerprints before sending them to Tyler so he could begin working on the Moles. He stopped into the work shed to bring Tyler up to speed. As Jake finished explaining what had occurred in the last twenty minutes, a quadrahex wrench—one of the Moles’ proprietary tools—materialized on the surface of the transport pod on the workbench, sent by Lexi from Mole Control, scanned for prints and ready for work.
“Oh, thank God!” He picked up the L-shaped tool and spun it through his fingers like a seasoned grease monkey. “Finally, I can do something productive.”
Jake smiled, happy something was going right for someone. “I like the sounds of that. But before you do, I need you to do something for me.” Tyler’s eyes widened at Jake’s request, but he nodded wordlessly.
As Jake turned to leave, two more tools appeared on the transporter’s flat surface. Jake heard Tyler talking to the tools as the door closed behind him. “Oh, the span wrench, how I’ve missed you!”
“Clint, we’ve got some serious problems.” Jake sat across from his sub in the meeting room. Riley stood in the corner, silent and observing.
“Jake, I didn’t take those tools, I swear!” Clint pleaded.
“Clint,” Jake said, exhaling in frustration. He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know what to think. There’s been a lot of bizarre shit going on around here lately. First we have the WeatherShield going down. You are nowhere to be found when it happened, and you can’t prove whether or not you were in bed or on a walk. The parts show up under your bed.”
“I had nothing to do with that! I told you I was walking to blow off steam!” His eyes pled with a desperation equal to his voice.
“Then, a perimeter sensor is broken and two go missing. The parts show up under your bed. Tools are taken. They show up under your bed. We have a video of a man, roughly your height and build, wearing a field op uniform who is familiar enough with our set up to know the location of the light override switch.”
“I suppose you’re going to blame me for letting the bears in next?”
“I don’t know. Did you? You treat everyone around here like they’re your personal verbal punching bags. Even when they turn the other cheek, you continue to bully and alienate them. You’re arrogant, you have a warped sense of entitlement that I can’t figure out, and your attitude sucks.”
A brief moment of silence passed between the two men.
“Are you done?” Clint asked.
“No. Lexi was attacked. Neither Riley nor I believe that was you. And I don’t really know what motive you would have to destroy the perimeter alarm or the WeatherShield. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, duh. Do you think I like walking around in the rain?” retorted Clint.
“You’re walking one hell of a fine line here, sub. But you’re lucky because there is no physical evidence pointing to you.”
“There’s no fucking evidence because I didn’t do any of it!” Clint stood in anger and, seeing Riley’s expression, sat back down again.
“But there is also no hard evidence that clears you of any of this either, except the attack on Lexi. So to summarize, I don’t believe you attacked Lexi. But in all of these other incidents, you’ve been MIA, and that, unfortunately, makes you my number-one suspect.”
“So what does all this mean?” asked Clint defiantly.
“It means, Clint, that it seems like you’re jeopardizing this project, and that’s enough to hold you for now. We have just over two weeks left in this project and you are proving to be a threat. And on an op this critical, I can’t take any chances. I’m holding you until more evidence is collected. Unfortunately, I’m really busy, so that might take a while. Riley, do you have anything you need to add?”
Riley shook her head.
“Wait. Holding me? What, like prison?”
Jake wanted to believe that Clint was not capable of doing these things, but every shred of circumstantial evidence pointed to him. “Come on, Clint. Let’s go.”
Jake and Riley escorted Clint out of the main tent, each with a firm grip on Clint’s arms. The wind caught the door, whipping it out of Riley’s hand and all three were greeted by a gale of freezing rain. Clint’s leads escorted him to the cube, a holding cell for use in the field.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” Clint yelled as Jake and Riley led him inside. “This is crazy! I didn’t have anything to do with any of this! I’m going to sue your asses off when we get back!” Jake closed the door and locked it. Riley could see Clint screaming through the window in the door, but the sound proof walls contained his profanity to the cell.
Riley and Jake walked back to the unoccupied eating area and Jake sat down heavily, shaking the table.
“My God, Riley. Did we really just lock up one of our men? Did we do the right thing?” Jake marvelled at Riley’s calm demeanour as she sat across from him, biting into an apple she took from a basket on the counter. He felt sweat beginning to bead on his forehead and his heart pounded like a hammer. He steadied his shaking hands on his thighs but refrained from looking at them for fear that Riley would see. He wondered if anything ever rattled her. After some of the stuff she had seen in her career, throwing some punk in a cell was probab
ly like taking out the trash.
Riley leaned in, elbows on the table. “Jake, we’re in an awkward spot here. We’re on an extremely unorthodox op. Half of us aren’t even doing what it is that we’re trained for, myself and Finn included. I’ve never gone on an op like this, neither has Finn. Lexi’s a drone jockey, Tyler does communications and none of us except Clint have ever seen a tunnel-boring machine before. So we’re kind of flying blind here, and this is why we’ve been given so much time. To take our time and do things right. We can’t expect perfection, and protocols are more relaxed. I mean, really, when was the last time you had cold beer, folding chairs and marshmallows on an op?”
“Okay, good point.”
“This is a non-combat op and, as bizarre as it sounds, not fearing for your life every minute changes the dynamic. In terms of order and control, that lack of fear makes the op much harder for the lead. People listen if they feel you can keep them from dying. This is more like a working vacation. But at the end of the day, we are on an extremely critical mission and that’s no different than any other op. As leads, our goal is to protect the integrity of the mission while working with what we’ve got. Clint is draining the team of morale. Between you and me, one more outburst like we had the other night and I would have cubed him myself. If you feel for one minute that someone is jeopardizing the mission or other people, you can hold them in the cube. You can’t beat the hell out of them, unfortunately, but you can hold them.”
Riley guessed by Jake’s shakiness and pallid colour that he had never had to seriously discipline a subordinate before. As time sensitive and as crucial as his operations were, Mechanical and Infrastructure Recovery never attracted the egos that Black Ops seemed to draw. She had cubed a handful of problem subs over the years.
Jake’s colour and confidence had returned for the team briefing in the meeting room. Within minutes of it happening, everyone knew Clint had been cubed. Jake wanted to discuss the morning’s events before the camp turned into a rumour mill.
After the group had been brought up to speed, Jake asked them all to report. Lexi had finished scanning the contents of the box and the box itself for fingerprints. Until they returned to the future, no database existed for them to cross reference the prints against. Her study of the video revealed nothing more than what they had already seen. Finn and Owen, with Lexi’s help, got the WeatherShield and the perimeter alarm back online.
After the meeting, Owen returned to Mole Control with Jake and continued working on the blasting simulations. Lexi and Tyler returned to the work shed to attack Mole1’s failure in the cooling system. Finn and Riley, with Ben’s direction, had the main shaft removed from Mole2 by the end of the night.
Jake was pleased that the day had ended on a reasonably productive note, despite the harrowing events of the morning. He still felt uneasy about Clint and the lack of hard evidence, but he pushed it out of his mind. Not to mention, he thought, the cube isn’t exactly a hardship. The spacious holding cell had full plumbing, a kitchen area, comfortable bedding and some entertainment in the form of outdated books and magazines.
Owen returned to his trailer and found his new bunkmate having a shower. “Is there room for one more in there?” Owen asked, stepping into the shower. Riley held out her hand and helped him limp in.
Owen stared at the stream of steaming water as he rubbed shampoo into his hair.
“Hey Rile, I’ve been doing some thinking about this whole Clint thing. I can’t see his motivation for any of this. Sure, he’s one of the biggest dicks I’ve ever met, but I can’t see what he’d get out of petty vandalism. Despite his crappy attitude, the guy’s done five months of flawless work. I can’t see him throwing his career away for a couple of missing sensors and tools to spite people. Plus, why would he leave the box somewhere where it could be so easily found?”
Riley looked contemplative as she rinsed the conditioner out of her hair. “I know. That part doesn’t make sense either, but there’s no real alternative suspect.”
“Well, we’re pretty confident that Clint didn’t attack Lexi, right?”
Riley nodded as she rinsed her face.
“It seems then, that it’s more likely someone else attacked Lexi.”
“True,” Riley agreed.
“Do you suspect that anyone else on the team would do this?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone here would do it. Of course, we can’t prove that either. But other than Clint, there really isn’t anyone with a height and body frame matching the guy in the video except Ben, and he’s not that mobile.”
“What are the odds that someone snuck back in time with you in a crate or something and has been hiding in the bushes this whole time? What are the odds that the op is being sabotaged? From what Jake says, the Moles aren’t running nearly as well as they are supposed to.”
Riley chuckled. “I think the odds are better that it’s the Elevanium curse. All of this stuff was packed by Defence staff. Jake and I oversaw it.”
“But you couldn’t have seen every box being packed.”
“True. But ninety percent of the crates were compressed. A human’s never been compressed before. It’s probably possible though. I know they’ve tested compression on cadavers successfully, but it’s never been tried on a living human.” She turned off the water, grabbed their towels off the rack and handed Owen his. “Well, I think it’s very unlikely. But no more unlikely than anyone here attacking Lexi.”