Callsign: Deep Blue - Book 1 (A Tom Duncan - Chess Team Novella)

  Callsign: Deep Blue

  Book 1

  By Jeremy Robinson and Kane Gilmour

  © 2011 Jeremy Robinson. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information e-mail all inquiries to: info@jeremyrobinsononline.com

  Visit Jeremy Robinson on the World Wide Web at:

  www.jeremyrobinsononline.com

  Visit Kane Gilmour on the World Wide Web at:

  www.kanegilmour.com

  Ebook layout by Stanley J. Tremblay, www.findtheaxis.com

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  FICTION by JEREMY ROBINSON

  (click to view on Amazon and buy)

  The Antarktos Saga

  The Last Hunter - Pursuit

  The Last Hunter - Descent

  The Jack Sigler Thrillers

  Threshold

  Instinct

  Pulse

  Callsign: King - Book 1

  Callsign: Queen - Book 1

  Callsign: Rook - Book 1

  Callsign: Knight - Book 1

  Callsign: Bishop - Book 1

  Callsign: King - Book 2 - Underworld

  Secondworld

  Origins Editions (first five novels)

  Kronos

  Antarktos Rising

  Beneath

  Raising the Past

  The Didymus Contingency

  Short Stories

  Insomnia

  Humor

  The Zombie's Way (Ike Onsoomyu)

  The Ninja’s Path (Kutyuso Deep)

  FICTION by KANE GILMOUR

  Resurrect

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  Sample - Secondworld by Jeremy Robinson

  Sample - Resurrect by Kane Gilmour

  Sample - The Sentinel by Jeremy Bishop

  CALLSIGN: DEEP BLUE

  LOCKDOWN

  1.

  Post 3, Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH

  Tom Duncan knew he was in trouble when the door slammed shut. His assistant, Lori Stanton, screamed as the thunderous boom echoed around the hangar. Duncan couldn’t blame her—he’d practically jumped out of his own skin at the sudden noise.

  “What the hell?” she asked, her embarrassment over her scream now manifesting as anger.

  “I don’t know. Let’s take a look.” Duncan walked across the hangar’s concrete floor to the entrance that should have remained unobstructed.

  The hangar door was massive at over a hundred feet wide and thirty feet high. The door was steel and several inches thick. Hidden hydraulics raised and lowered it, and it must have weighed a ridiculous amount. There was no way it should have just snapped and fallen down as hard as it had.

  Duncan quickly checked the electronic keypad at the side of the door for an error code, but the LCD screen was dark. It also had a built-in intercom system for communicating with the similar pad on the outside, but that too wasn’t working. No way to contact Carrack.

  Matt Carrack led the security team Duncan had brought with him. He’d asked Carrack to wait outside the door with his men, and Carrack had been fine with that. Duncan was just grateful none of the security team had been under the door, when it fell. They would have been turned to greasy paste.

  “What are we gonna do?” Lori wanted to know.

  “Relax, it’s probably some glitch. Remember that the whole computer system was wiped at one point. Lemme call White One, so he doesn’t worry.”

  Matt Carrack was designated with the callsign: White One. Most of the support team did not know each other’s names. They just knew each other by their callsigns. Carrack had the security team of himself and White Two through White Five. They were all outside the door, and probably wondering what was going on.

  Duncan tried to reach the man with his cell phone, but there was no signal through the thick steel door. He noticed that Lori was trying her phone as well, but the frown on her face told him she’d lost her signal too.

  “Alright, we’ll try this another way,” he said, as he strode across the concrete floor of the hangar toward a glassed-in control room at the far end. That was where the nearest computer was, and computers controlled everything in the place. As he walked, and Lori fell in step with him, he mentally catalogued the equipment that was stacked on pallets and was still wrapped in plastic on the hangar floor. Literally tons of equipment. Weapons, computers, lab components and vehicles. Even two stealth modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters sat lonely on the floor of the massive echoing space, their rotor blades secured down by straps, as they had been transported on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. Everything was new and it was all still in its original packaging. They had a lot of work to do setting this place up, but most of the staff wouldn’t arrive until the next day. Duncan had wanted to come poke around a bit with just a couple of helpers. He had Lori with him for some computer work, and he’d sent the other assistant on a mission deeper inside the facility a half hour ago. He hadn’t been planning to stay all day, and he certainly hadn’t planned to spend time troubleshooting the damn security doors. Oh well, Duncan thought, new facility, new glitches.

  As they entered the glassed in office at the far end of the hangar, Duncan was about to slip into the chair in front of the computer there, but Lori slid into the chair first. Duncan was smiling and she was furiously typing already. He had hand picked Lori, callsign: White Zero, just as he had chosen all the other members of the support team. She was brilliant, determined and a magical touch on a computer—much like himself. The only downside for Lori was that she was a bit meek in social interactions and she had no physical training to speak of. She wasn’t in bad shape, but neither was she athletic. And should the shit ever hit the fan, she’d be useless in a fight. Duncan knew he’d have to get her some physical training, but for now, she was strictly a computer tech, and in that capacity, she was flawless. Put the meek girl with the mousy brown hair near a CPU and a monitor, and she came to life with personality and flair. He was smiling at how quickly she had transformed from somewhat tentative and scared in the hangar to a vicious keyboard hound as she ran through the system searching for reasons why the hydraulics on the door had failed. He watched fascinated, as she ran through several troubleshooting protocols he might not have thought of.

  As the former president of the United States, there were of course, many things he hadn’t done for himself at the White House, but
as Deep Blue, the mysterious support person for the former Delta Force team known as Chess Team, he was used to being the one doing the typing on the computer keyboard. After the recent fiasco with the team’s nemesis, Richard Ridley of Manifold Genetics, bringing golems to life, Duncan realized he wasn’t giving the team all he could, because his duties as president had become more of a hindrance than a help. His own inability to provide support on matters the team were involved in—matters that affected the security of not just America, but the globe—had become more and more of a frustration for him, and he had yearned to be free to act, as he had in the old days when he was an Army Ranger. In the end, he had opted for a carefully orchestrated political suicide, so he could neatly step out of the spotlight.

  There would always be someone lining up to be the president, but only Duncan could be Deep Blue. He had cultivated contacts all over the world, and had had plenty of time to set the team up as a completely black operation, burying the financing at the Pentagon and arranging for the team to take over the Manifold facility they had captured during the Lernian Hydra incident.

  Duncan watched White Zero come to the same conclusion he had, although she was maybe a half a second slower in reaching it. The hydraulics hadn’t failed. All doors to the facility had been security locked. Half the computer system was locking her out. All methods for communication with the outside world were cut off. She knew, just as Duncan did, that they hadn’t yet set up a new system to go with the security cameras that peppered the facility—it was still packed in boxes on the hangar floor. Someone had fried the last control center with an electric baton during the Hydra battle. So Duncan watched as White Zero tried the same alternate technique he would have used. She started checking motion sensors for the three main branches of the facility, and when she got to the section of the base hidden under Fletcher Mountain, his suspicions were confirmed.

  The base had been infiltrated.

  They were not alone.

  2.

  Matt Carrack acted quickly. Within seconds of the huge hydraulic door slamming shut, he was at the control pad mounted on the wall to the side of the hangar’s entrance. As soon as he determined it was dead, he was speed dialing Deep Blue on his satellite phone, but there was no reply. He shut down the phone and turned to his four men.

  Each man, White Two through White Five, without being told to, had assumed a defensive posture around the closed hangar door. They were good. Each man had automatically determined that they were under attack and had dropped to a crouch, forming a small semi-circle around the door and pointing their Mk 17 FN SCAR assault rifles outward toward any potential enemies. Carrack was pleased. He and Deep Blue had chosen each member of the security force from 10th Mountain Division men at Fort Drum. They were all natural climbers and excelled at alpine war craft.

  “White Two and White Three, air vents. Go.”

  Carrack wasn’t done barking the order when two members of the team slung their weapons, ran to the side of the massive metal door and began scaling up the rock wall toward the summit of the mountain. Although trained to utilize all types of climbing apparatus and safety equipment, many 10th Mountain troops were avid free solo rock climbers, and the rocky terrain outside the hangar hardly presented any challenge to the two security members. Within 30 seconds, they had already moved above the height of the top of the door set into the rock. Carrack knew that each man had scanned the rocky wall the first time they had seen it, and would have mentally catalogued where all the best holds were, and how best to ascend the climb. He knew he had. White Two and White Three made it look like a walk in the park. The hangar had two exhaust vents concealed in its roof near the summit of Mount Tecumseh. The climbers would find the vents and infiltrate the hangar from above.

  “White Five, get to Post 2. If it’s locked down like here, blow the door. Rendezvous inside the hangar. Four, you’re with me.”

  White Five raced away from the looming steel door and down toward the security team’s parked, matte black, HDT M1030M1 all-terrain motorcycles. HDT had manufactured the bikes for the US military to run on JP-8 fuel or diesel. But Deep Blue had had these retrofitted to run on biofuels. Carrack didn’t know how much better for the environment they were, but he knew they were wicked fast. In seconds, White Five was astride the bike and tearing off down the unpaved road toward NH49, which would take him down to the small hamlet of Campton, and then on to Pinckney. The journey by the curving mountain roads was 18 miles, but Carrack knew the distance was a lot shorter via the straight underground rail tunnels Ridley had installed to connect the three sections of the facility. If White Five could get into the base down in Pinckney, he’d be back in less time than it would take for him to get down there.

  The hangar door Carrack remained in front of with White Four, was set into the side of a mountain, about 10 miles northwest of the Pinckney Bible Campground, where Chess Team had discovered entrances into the facility. Those entrances were now designated as Post 1 (a concealed vehicle tunnel leading to a loading dock) and Post 2 (a door next to a helipad that Manifold had cleverly placed under a canopy of trees, where the pilot of a helicopter would have to fly in and out of the trees at a 45 degree angle). After the Lernian Hydra episode, and the subsequent cleanup, Deep Blue had arranged for the military to purchase the campground and had paid off the families of those affected for their silence about the incident. The last thing the US government wanted was a bunch of families on the news yelling about seven-headed monsters in New Hampshire and a giant military cover-up, so people had been paid well.

  The exploratory team sent in to sanitize the Manifold facility had eventually discovered that the portion of the facility Chess Team members had seen only made up a third of the overall compound. On a map, the three main sections of the facility formed a capital letter A, with the section under Fletcher Mountain that had its access at the campground forming the lower left point of the letter. Deep Blue had designated that section of the compound Labs, because it was where Richard Ridley had conducted his experiments into regeneration. Labs also contained a full gymnasium, barracks, an armory that Manifold had been kind enough to leave behind and access to a cavern that ran deep under the building.

  This section of Alpha, designated Central, contained the hangar Chess Team would use for its vehicles, the computer rooms and surveillance equipment that Deep Blue would use to orchestrate Chess Team field operations and a variety of smaller labs and offices. Central sat at the top point of the letter A.

  Finally, the lower right leg of the A-shape was the Dock. Carrack couldn’t believe it when he had actually seen the place. A full-fledged submarine dock, hidden in an underground complex, some 60 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Ridley had apparently discovered and augmented a natural cavern that ran under the New Hampshire seacoast and all the way up to Lake Winnipesaukee, where the underground Dock had been constructed on its northern end. Longer than the Panama Canal, Deep Blue had called the tunnel an ‘absolute genius work of engineering,’ and Carrack understood that it wouldn’t have even been possible for Ridley to construct the tunnel, if it hadn’t mostly been in situ as a natural cavern. Carrack was still blown away by the man’s audacity, and his execution of the project in total secrecy.

  Like with many large lakes in the US, local residents had constructed legends about a sea monster in Lake Winni. Carrack had heard about them since he was a kid and wondered how many people had really seen a glimpse of Ridley’s 575-foot long decommissioned Russian Typhoon submarine and thought it was a living creature. The thing had been retrofitted for cargo hauling with approximately 15,000 tons of cargo space after the removal of its ballistic missiles. Deep Blue hypothesized that Ridley had managed the construction of much of the compound by smuggling equipment and supplies in and debris out, with the massive sub. When Carrack had seen the beast in the concrete underground dock a few weeks ago, he had been so stunned that his mouth had fallen open like some cartoon character. Deep Blue had clapped him on the back saying, “You’l
l get used to wacky shit like this, son. It’s what we do.”

  Now Carrack suspected he was seeing the start of more wacky shit. He had been fully briefed on the Alpha compound, and then had taken it upon himself in his spare time to study some of the information about the place Deep Blue had been able to obtain while mining Manifold’s old data architecture. Carrack knew about the hydraulics on the hangar door, and he also understood that several redundancies were in place in its mechanical make up to prevent a failure that would result in the door slamming shut from its recessed place in the rock above the entryway. He understood automatically what it took Deep Blue a few minutes to figure out on the other side of the door—the doors had been security locked. What he did not understand was why. He knew that Deep Blue would not have locked him out. Either there was a glitch in the computer system or they were under attack. Carrack assumed the latter. That’s what he got paid to do.

  “Four, I’m going to check Post 4, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be the same story. You get to Dock and get in that way. Any way you can, understood?”

  Carrack knew that White Four, a former 10th Mountain sergeant named Ravenelli understood completely. He’d trained with the short man for weeks and knew he would move Heaven and Earth to get into the facility through the Dock.

  “Sir.” White Four was already heading toward his own waiting biofuel-powered dirt bike.

  Everyone on Carrack’s team, Carrack included, would willingly give his life for Deep Blue. There was no hiding the fact that the man was the former president of the United States, and for that reason alone, probably any US military member would have willingly gone to work for him. Duncan had been good to the armed services while he was in office. But after vetting each man and explaining why the man had engineered his political demise, what Chess Team was and what their ultimate goals were—protecting the US and the world from threats too outlandish for the normal military—each security solider would have been crazy not to sign on.