Page 21 of Into the Storm

She gave a sharp nod, and he dropped his hand. Precious seconds were ticking by.

“Have you been inside the yurt before?” he asked.

“No.”

“The basement is divided into two semicircular rooms. We’ll search both, then take the curved stairway along the wall to the main floor, where the command center is.”

He turned, crouched low, and headed for the basement door. She followed on his heels. They reached the door, and he took a position on the opposite side. “I’ll go in first. You come in behind me, covering the part of the room I’m facing away from.”

“Got it.”

Xavier couldn’t believe he was about to enter and clear a building with an archaeologist armed only with a paintball gun as his backup. This after finding a man who’d been nearly decapitated with an axe, and before that, grappling with a man wielding a knife and sporting an AK-47 on his back.

This shit was real, and she had zero training on how to handle it, but he had to give her credit for facing it head-on. That was more than he had any right to hope for.

He slipped his key in the lock he’d oiled just yesterday. It turned smooth and silent. He pocketed the key before giving Audrey a nod. Go time.

He used his flashlight to scan the room, hoping to temporarily blind anyone in the dark or wearing NVGs. Audrey slipped in behind him, moving too quickly and nearly tripping on his heel, but he was damn lucky to have any backup at all.

The room was empty, and they repeated the flanking maneuver and entered the basement utility room. A fast search showed it was also empty.

He led the way up the stairs, footsteps muted by seventies-era shag carpet and rain pounding on the metal roof. The yurt had the musty smell of wet dog and furnishings made ten years before he was born. Add the scent of spicy Mexican food to the smell and it could be his grandmother’s house. He’d been living in the yurt for the last week, and the reminder of his long-passed abuela had been comforting until now.

The lake-facing part of the main floor was a circular living room with a magnificent view in daylight. A gas fireplace filled the center, the chimney running up the rooftop spire, the ceiling high and cone shaped. The low fire offered some light, but it didn’t reach the tables his team had set up beneath the windows that provided a two-hundred-and-forty-degree view of the lake.

On those tables, they’d arranged a bank of monitors to receive feed from closed-circuit lodge cameras, computers, phones, and a military-grade modem with direct feed to SPECWAR—NSWC’s computer system. The signal jammer didn’t affect the equipment they’d installed here. It was all hardwired.

The room felt vacant to Xavier even before he left the staircase, but he knew better than to go on instinct alone. He’d changed the flashlight beam from white to red and shined it low, below the window line. The windows reflected a flat, black void.

Rain on the metal roof reverberated through the room, masking all other sounds. He crouched low as he crossed to the worktables. The red light landed on one table, then another, and a chill ran through him as deep as any he’d felt on a combat mission. Every piece of electronic equipment on the tables had been destroyed. Smashed. Cleaved in two as if with an axe.

The table was splattered with a liquid that could be blood, but he couldn’t be sure with the red light. Finally, the light hit an object that turned him hot and cold at the same time, and it answered the question about the splatter marks on the table.

Lying next to a shattered monitor was a tattooed, severed human finger that belonged to his partner in running this exercise, Master Chief Petty Officer Paul Cohen.