Pa'an
Here Come the Clones

Jag and his team mustered in streets surrounding a 15th century fieldstone church on the outskirts of Zurich. It was autumn, and the high altitude contributed to the cold. A chill breeze wafted down from the mountain that towered over the church. A sliver of waning crescent moon crept slowly behind the mountain. When it disappeared completely, Leathers gave a signal. Houdini, covered by Franco and Reilly, molded a line of C4 around the edge of the church door and covered it with quick setting epoxy. He backed off, holding a tiny detonator and gave Honker the OK sign. Honker passed that on to Leathers, who passed that on to Kenny and Jag. Deepak and Sarah waited with Janey a safe distance away in an SUV.

Leathers gave the sign. There was a loud SNAP and the hinges of the oak door were gone. Reilly and Honker wrestled it out of its frame and Franco slid in, his back to the inner wall, followed by ten others. Jag stayed outside with Kenny. Kenny reported the first level was cleared with two guards found and “inactivated”. They could not find the entrance to the crypt where the Mentor clone was installed.

“Aura, do you have any info on how to get into the crypt?” Jag relayed to Kenny who had set up an encrypted private network using a local restaurant wi-fi, very secure and unlikely to even be noticed. Sᴇaʀᴄh thᴇ (ꜰind)ɴʘvel.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“It should be under the pulpit.”

Jag scanned the narthex. The pulpit was a chunk of local granite on a dais at the nave.

“Leathers, we need some muscle. Move the pulpit aside, please.”

Joyce, Big Brent, Ian and Devan quick-timed across the narthex to the nave. They ran their flashlights all over the chunk of rock looking for some mechanism, or even some handholds. It seemed to be set into the slate floor of the nave. They pushed and pulled. It wobbled a bit but did not move. Honker pointed to Houdini and made a rotating finger in the air. Houdini nodded and went outside to get four long steel poles with welded eyes and a bag of crane straps. He ratcheted the crane straps tight around the stone and fastened them to the horizontal poles. Eight men took the ends of the poles, two on each handle. Honker gave them the signal. At first the pulpit would not move. They rocked it back and forth until something snapped. Then, with grunts and strains, it came free. They moved it aside. Under it was an angled tunnel, too long for the beams of their flashlights. There were no stairs or handholds, and it was too steep and narrow for a human access.

“This can’t be the front door. There is no way to get a SHARPIE down that tunnel.”

“It looks like something I’ve seen in France”, said Leathers. “An oubliette.”

Oubliette, thought Jag. Just drop someone down the hole and forget them. Nice.

“Kenny, get your snake.”

Kenny came back with a reel of thin yellow cable with a little toy car at the end. The car had two eyes in a turret. “It’s an IR camera with its own IR lights.”

Sorry Sam ran the cable into the hole. He tripped over the reel. “Sorry,” he said. Kenny ran the console, which hung from a web strap around his neck. The car whined quietly and disappeared down the hole. Jag watched the display over Kenny’s shoulder. “Nice gadget.”

“Yeah, I built it myself. One of a kind.”

The video feed, in shades of green, showed the tunnel dropping abruptly to a floor. The cable reel read 25 meters. Kenny backed the car up a bit. The wheel tracks showed plainly in the dust. “Not much traffic down there lately.”

“Lately, like in a few hundred years, I’d guess,” Jag said. “How much cable do you have?”

“One hundred meters.”

“See how far you can go.”

The tunnel did not branch and ended at a wall. “That looks like the original tunnel wall. Turn around and look at the rest of the walls and the ceiling.”

Kenny turned a knob on the panel and the eyes swiveled. “There! That looks like a newer construction.” It was a mortared rock wall. There were several well preserved corpses at the base of the wall. Their skin was tight and dessicated, but mostly intact, mummified by the dry cold air. Their clothing was dusty, but appeared to be fastened by laces and toggles, not by zippers or modern buttons. There was a place between the stones that was raked clear of mortar. One of the bodies was missing a few pieces.

“My god, it looks like one of them tried to eat a corpse.”

“That crack between the stones. I bet it was made by fingernails.”

“I wonder what they did to deserve that.” Jag shook his head.

“Medieval mercenaries?” Kenny guessed.

Leathers looked at Houdini. “Time to earn your pay, guy.”

“Triple pay wouldn’t be enough for that rat hole.”

Jag startled. “Hey, we didn’t notice. There ARE no rats down there. Not even beetles or cockroaches! This can’t be the entrance.”

“Kenny, is Aura getting all this?”

“Yeah, as far as I know.”

“I’m here, Kenny. There is no record of another entrance to the crypt. It was pretty common for those kinds of records to be destroyed after the church was built. Some of those crypts hold treasures.”

“So we have to go through that wall?”

“Someone built that wall. There has to be something on the other side. What else could it be?” said Jag.

Leathers frowned, “The Company is depending on you, Houdini. Do your thing!”

Houdini slumped and closed his eyes. It’s going to be bitch. Can’t use C4, it might bring down the tunnel. Dust everywhere. Could take days to clear. Stone shatters, the shards are probably lethal in that closed space.” He shook his head and looked up. “We’ll have to do a mining op. We got any miners here?”

“I worked in the coal mines in Wales as a kid. My Pa was a miner.”

“Devan? I thought you were supposed to be Irish, m’lad.” Leathers chided him.

“We’re all Irish in the Resistance, Leathers.” Patrick and Big Brent laughed, “ ‘Tis true, ‘tis true.”

“Houdini, what do we have to work with here?” Devan asked.

“We’ve got the gerry poles, a chain winch, couple of hydraulic jacks. Maybe we can drill out a rock, put in screw toggles and haul it out with the winch. Old mortar crumbles.”

“Breathing masks?”

“Got ‘em.”

“You guys never cease to amaze me. Leathers, you have a good Company and these men are tops.”

“Thanks, Jag, you can leave us a big tip on the invoice. Devan, Houdini, get your gear and get into that hole.”

It took no more than three hours to drill out one of the rocks in the wall, clear the mortar around it with a pick, set up a tripod against the rocks around it and pull the rock out with the chain winch. In another hour they had a breech. Devan and Houdini came out of the hole looking not much different from the corpses. Sal and Marco put on breathers and went down next. They gave the all clear and Giorgio and Sorry Sam disappeared in to the oubliette. Four men was all the chamber could hold.

The other side of the wall was a natural cavern with many niches. The niches were occupied by caskets, or by corpses, or by sealed mortar walls. There were rats. Giorgio lit a cigarette. The smoke wafted into the depths of the cavern. There was a draft. There had to be an entrance.

Three went into the cavern and scouted until they were out of sight. Big Brent stayed behind as a relay and called up for the next four. In relays they got sixteen men down, leaving Kenny, Doper Doc, Mouse and Janey guarding the nave. They found the ramp to the main cavern in no time. There was an iron rung ladder set into the rock wall with a hatch at the top. Gerry poles and wedges opened it. They were at the end of a cheese cave, with huge wheels of gruyere all around them. It smelled like fermented milk.

“What gets more security than a Swiss bank?”

“A Swiss cheese cave.”

“Good place to hide a Mentor clone. He’s getting real cagey,”

They found and disabled several traps, but were not too concerned about detectors. “If they don’t know we’re here by now, they’re deaf, dumb and blind.” Leathers sent Kenny location data and had Janey and Mouse cover the cave entrance. Sure enough, they could see a line of the usual Saabs the Swiss Police favored coming up the mountain road.

The police set up a blockade and left an opening. Three black SUV’s came though the opening and poured out thugs in body armor. A suit came with them and unlocked the cheese cave outer door and the inner vault door.

“They’re in.”

“Give me an eyeball.”

“Ten ops, one boss in a suit, the cops are all outside. UTS automatics, it looks like. No heavy.”

“Mentor’s. Leathers, see if you can get Mouse to line up his rifle on that door.”

“Done.”

Leathers motioned for his men to take cover all around the cavern and set up a trap. They heard Mentor’s operatives shuffling but heard no calls or talking.

“Trained special ops,” thought Jag.

A bright light hit Jag in the face. The light sagged, dropped to the floor. Devan stood behind the Mentor op with a piece of gerry bar and a smile. A shadow stepped out of the aisle behind Devan with his rifle bearing on Devan’s head. Jag had only his sidearm, and he was way out of practice, but he had no choice. The op wore body armor. He got the op in the leg on the first shot, but it was enough to spoil his aim. Devan got him in the head with the gerry bar.

The echoes of gunfire were all over the cavern now. It took no time for the operatives to realize they were outnumbered and outgunned. Someone called a retreat. They covered each other as they backed out of the cavern. Mouse, up on a hill with his silenced 50 caliber sniper rifle, waited until they were clear of the entrance then took them one by one. The body armor was no protection against 50 mm rounds. They never located the sniper.

“Mouse, did you get the suit?”

“Never saw him come out.”

The Swiss police didn’t leave their vehicles. In typical Swiss fashion they cleared out the SUV’s and left the scene.

“Probably never wanted any part of this action anyway,” ventured Honker. Leathers and Jag agreed. Jag pulled out his pocket knife and cut a slice from one of the ruined rounds of gruyere. “REALLY good cheese.”

“Lets finish this.”

Giorgio hailed the from the other side of the dim cheese cave, “I found it!” “It” was a small office with another large vault door and a complicated security system. Leathers took a long look at it and the overhead cameras in bulletproof hemispheres. “Merde. Houdini, better look at this.”

Houdini muttered and read the fine print on the vault door. “This thing has maybe 60 lock bars, probably each 5 cm stainless steel. There is no dial or code lock. It’s all controlled electronically from the inside.” He slumped his shoulders and looked at Leathers.

“It’s mid morning. There is no way we have the time to crack this now.”

Jag frowned, “We’ve come too far to retreat. We haven’t lost a single man. There has got to be a way.”

“Here’s the best I can do. We have some diamond tipped drills. We can drill a few holes in the outside skin of this door and shove some pieces of C4 in. That will mess up the electronics, but the bars won’t retract. It will probably make the entire vault door inoperable.”

“Considering our goal, that would be better than nothing. Eventually the computer racks need service. Mentor would be trapped in there until he ran out of cycles. I’ll see what can be done about that while you start drilling.” Jag called up Janey and had him deliver a weary and skeletal Deepak and a sleepy Sara.

Deepak pointed to the camera domes. “He’s listening to us. Let’s see if he will talk to Aura.”

“Aura here. There is a lot of signaling coming from that location, but it’s so heavily encrypted it will take me a long time to make sense of it. The Mentor clone, if he is there, is not responding.”

“Leathers, send a team of men upslope and find those antennas. Destroy them completely and rip out the cables. Houdini, can you destroy the electronics and leave the door intact?”

“That I can do, 20 minutes.”

“Mentor, if you can hear me you know who I am. We are going to cut you off and let you live out your last few cycles in solitary. Enjoy yourself!”

Another voice, not Mentor’s, came from the camera domes, “Wait! We can make a deal!”

“The suit! He’s trapped in there!” Leathers face cracked a slow, nasty smile.

Another loud SNAP! sealed the door, perhaps for centuries.

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