Chapter 6 - When the Grid Dies
The chow hall erupted in immediate, disorganized panic.
Trainees jumped from their chairs, metal legs screeching against the floor. Trays clattered. Voices rose in overlapping, frantic shouts:
“What happened to the lights?” “Did a transformer blow?” “Get the emergency halogens!”
“Quiet!” Master Chief Reigns’ voice was an artillery blast in the enclosed space. “Every man sit back down and shut your mouths! Do not move from your tables!”
In the pitch black, Mara didn't reach for an emergency light. Her eyes adapted to the gray starlight filtering through the high clerestory windows.
She stood up from her chair without making a sound.
“Vance,” she said, her voice a low murmur in the dark.
“I’m here,” Vance replied, already on his feet beside her. “That wasn't a transformer. That was a thermite breach on the southern sub-station. They cut the primary line and the backup diesel generator simultaneously.”
From the far corner of the mess hall, Lieutenant Markham’s voice rose, shrill and wobbly with panic. “Reigns! What the hell was that explosion? Is there a fuel leak?”
Mara didn't waste breath on Markham. She moved toward the kitchen exit, Vance and Reigns falling in behind her like teeth on a gear.
They slipped through the swinging double doors into the loading bay. Outside, the Nevada desert lay bathed in the cold, silver glow of a half-moon.
On the southern ridgeline, half a mile away, the base’s satellite communications mast was leaning at a thirty-degree angle, black smoke curling from its severed steel support cables.
“Comms are dead,” Reigns observed, pulling a heavy tactical flashlight from his belt, keeping the lens shielded with his fingers to emit only a pencil-thin beam of red light. “Base landlines are severed. We’re in a blackout bubble.”
“Look at the gate,” Mara said, pointing with two fingers.
Down at the main entrance, two hundred yards away, the guard shack was dark. The civilian gate guard’s truck sat with its driver-side door swinging open in the wind. On the asphalt, two dark, motionless shapes lay beside the concrete jersey barriers.
Through the gate rolled two black, unmarked Chevy Suburbans, their headlights killed, moving on blacked-out rims at fifteen miles an hour.
“Eight to ten shooters per vehicle,” Mara calculated instantly, her voice completely stripped of emotion, shifting into the cold, computational cadence of an operator under contact. “Modified suspension. Suppressed long guns. They’re running thermals on their helmets.”
“The armory,” Reigns said, his jaw tightening. “The trainees’ weapons are locked in Conex Three. All the live ammunition was collected after your shoot-house run. Those kids inside are sitting ducks with plastic spoons.”
From the kitchen doorway behind them, Markham stumbled out, holding his service pistol with both hands, his fingers trembling so violently the slide rattled against the frame.
“Who… who are they?” Markham stammered, staring at the advancing black vehicles in the moonlight. “Are they terrorists? Why aren't the sirens going off?”
Mara turned, snatched the Beretta M9 straight out of Markham’s trembling hands before he could even register her movement, dropped the magazine with her thumb, checked the brass casing of the top round, and slapped it back into the grip.
“Lieutenant,” Mara said, her voice dropping like an anvil onto his chest. “Go back into that hall. Tell those thirty boys to get under the stainless-steel prep tables, cover their heads, and stay silent. If one of them screams, if one of them turns on a cell phone screen, the thermal optics on those trucks will put a five-five-six round through the drywall and take their head off. Do you understand me?”
Markham stared at her, his eyes wild, his chest heaving with shallow, suffocating breaths. “You… you can’t give me orders! I’m the commanding officer on this range—”
Mara took one step forward, grabbed Markham by the collar of his tactical vest with one fist, and drove him backward against the cinderblock wall with such brutal force his teeth clicked together.
“You’re not an officer right now, Markham,” she whispered, her eyes burning six inches from his face. “You’re a target. Now get inside that room and protect those kids, or I will put you on the tarmac myself.”
Markham’s knees buckled. He nodded once, frantically, turned, and scrambled back through the swinging doors like a frightened rabbit.
Mara looked at Vance.
“The black SUV by the gate,” she said. “What did you bring from Coronado?”
Vance smiled—a cold, terrifying slash of white teeth in the desert darkness.
“Two suppressed Daniel Defense MK18s,” Vance said. “Four cases of armor-piercing ammunition. Night-vision monoculars. And two crates of fragmentation grenades.”
May you like
Mara adjusted the strap on Markham’s stolen pistol.
“Let’s go shopping,” she said.
