Death Cry

“You see?” Kane cut her off, triumph in his tone. “Like I said—just finding.”

Brigid chose to defer to Kane’s judgment for now, but she knew that if District Twelve or another Russian agency got wind of their presence there, there would be a lot of explaining to do.

Once Grant had made his sixth pass, this time beneath the cloud cover and at what amounted to a slow crawl for his Manta craft, he confirmed that the area was definitely uninhabited.

“Think we can go in?” Kane asked over the Commtact, his own Manta hidden in a high bank of wispy, white clouds.

Grant’s even tone came back to Kane after a moment. “Now’s as good a time as any.”

The Cerberus field team had located evidence of a military installation nestled between two of the snowcapped mountain peaks and decided that this was likely the installation that they sought. A tiny concrete building, perfectly square and little more impressive than a tool shed, stood guard at the end of a small paved road. From the air, the short road curled around into the shape of a hangman’s noose, a turning circle for vehicles. The rusting remains of a military transport lurched to one side of the road, its canvas roof cover long since lost. Other than the black strip, there seemed little to distinguish the area from anywhere else in the mountain range, but Brigid confirmed that this area tallied with the coordinates listed in the decrypted surveillance files.

Kane deployed the Manta’s various scanning capabilities, but the data that came back was inconclusive. “Could be there’s an underground bunker there,” he told Brigid, “but it sure ain’t anything special.” He ticked off the basic scanning checklist for her. “No reactors, no indication of any power source, no personnel showing on thermal—no one alive, at least. No significant metallic content, nothing out of the ordinary for the mountain range in general.

“I’m no expert,” he continued, “but I think the best we’re going to find is an air-raid shelter.”

“How big?” Brigid wondered.

She heard Kane suck air through his teeth in thought. “That,” he told her, “is something that would require landing and maybe getting the shovels out.”

Shortly thereafter, Grant brought his Manta in for a fast vertical landing, bringing the craft down swiftly and smoothly to park beside the short strip of blacktop. Kane followed two minutes after, descending rapidly from high cloud cover once he was certain that no one was coming to investigate Grant’s appearance.

Grant waited across from the landing area that he and Kane had chosen, crouched within a small patch of scrub grass, clutching a Copperhead close-assault subgun, scanning the area with alert eyes and ears. The Copperhead subgun was almost two feet in length but looked like a toy in Grant’s huge hands. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the gun to be used single-handed, and an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides the Sin Eater, the Copperhead was Grant’s favored field weapon, thanks to ease of use and the sheer level of destruction it could create in short measure.