Chapter 19

100 feet under nowhere, Montana

The last partial transmission Armis managed to hear from Io was ‘Add fi... ‘ and then everything was quiet on all the FM frequencies and on her comm chip.

Meanwhile, they were descending rapidly to level 1 ... whatever that meant. There were only 2 buttons to push. Level 0 was the ground level. It must have been a long way down; it took 14 seconds for the elevator doors to open on level 1.

“Come this way, chica.”

‘The name is Armis.’ That’s what she intended to say. But her voice reproduction circuit could no longer reach Io, and nothing came out. She mulled over the option of talking with her normal mouth, but decided that she didn’t really have anything to say.

He opened the door to what was obviously an interrogation room. She didn’t try to upset any apple carts and she just took the seat across the table from the one-way mirror.

“You can call me John. Do you want to tell me who you work for?” the Latino man said. It was obviously a false name.

Just then she got an FM transmission on 110.5. ‘This is Io. Do you copy? Waiting.’

She was about to answer when “John” swung his right arm and backhanded her across the mouth. The force was sufficient to knock her off the chair. John was 6’2” and heavily muscled. Armis was 5’4” and a slight girl.

“You are going to answer me,” he said. “Today or next week. Now stand up!”

She got up, wiping the blood from her lip. Damn that hurt! She thought as she remembered the line from the old movie “Pretty Woman” where that Julia Roberts actress said, “What do they do, take the boys all aside in high school and show you how to hit a woman?” Well ... she knew it wasn’t exactly those words. She started to wonder if her eidetic memory was failing.

“Well,” John said. “We’ve learned a bit. She has red blood, not like a Vulcan.” He laughed. “Are you going to answer me now?”

She just glared at him.

“Okay. Take off all your clothes and shoes. You can leave them here and visit them sometime in the future. Maybe my boys will come around and help you decide you want to talk. -- Oh, yes. I’m not scared of you ‘doing’ magical things to me, now that you’re out of touch with your spaceship or whatever.”

She didn’t move.

“TAKE IT OFF!” he shouted. “Or I’ll rip it off you.”

She peeled off the dress from the hemline up, pretending to fumble a bit at her breasts, while she palmed the amulet that had been affixed to her skin. When she straightened her long blonde hair, the amulet was snuck in to attach to the back of her neck. She was nude under the dress; she had a small tuft of silky blonde pubic hair, and was fairly flat chested -- an ‘almost A’ -- she would call them. She dropped to one knee to preserve some level of modesty as she unlaced first one boot then the other.

“Not bad, chica, not bad. A little puny for my tastes. What are those, baby tits? Maybe Jimmy would like to try you out. Huh? Whaddya say? A big black guy for a little blondie?” He laughed again, and reached for her arm. “Come’on.”

He jerked her down the hall, around several corners, and tossed her into a cell. Perhaps it was a storeroom in a previous life. The room had absolutely nothing in it.

Armis heard the door close and it was all black in the room. She remembered four bare walls and a heating/cooling vent in the ceiling. There were indirect lights above, but she had no chance to reach the ten foot ceiling. She sat on the floor and the cement was cold and hard on her naked bottom. The door opened again; she turned to look but could only see the silhouette of a man. She retreated into the corner, trying to make as small a target as she could.

“Just a little shot to make the time pass faster.” It was John again. He grabbed her arm and held it fast; she didn’t struggle. Inevitable is inevitable. The needle went into the bicep of her left arm and she could feel the -- whatever it was -- entering her body. “There, that wasn’t so bad. Nitey-nite.” And he left. It was all black again.

She felt her arm, but of course, didn’t sense anything.

Armis now found some time to put together a brief message to Io. She wasn’t sure the message would not be listened to by the bad guys. She dredged through her mind and came up with a temporary solution. She’d combine Latin, some old style Japanese she once picked up and an Indian dialect she’d learned from a game friend in Bombay. Translated, her message read: ‘Bad guys perhaps listening. Drugged. Am naked locked in cell. Promised visitors to rape me later. Out.’

Io took a few seconds to decipher the message and a few more to decide what to answer. Io sent back only one word: ‘Persevere’ in Latin. She didn’t dare send more with the possibility of listeners; certainly she couldn’t mention the possibility of rescuers.

The computer intelligence was really angry. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do anything directly. Instead she found the number of General ‘Black Jack’ Patton’s head comm and began sending to it. She sent ‘You’re going to die unless Armis is released immediately.’ Followed by a noise so intense that the man collapsed in the middle of a National Security briefing on the situation in Greece.

In her anger and frustration, it didn’t occur to Io that Patton couldn’t do anything to get Armis released with the terrible pain he was dealing with. She would have gone after President Ellis too, but he had had his head comm removed, two years ago, when he ran for office.

At least Io didn’t forget about the SEALs, and she sent them a message repeating Armis’ words. And the words, “Gloves off.”

Armis fought down her panic. Finally, she relaxed enough to be able to formulate some sort of plan. She’d be absent. They couldn’t do anything to her mind. Her body could take some damage until it died. But they’d never reach her mind. She thought it kind of sad that her mind -- which had been her bastion, her refuge, and the agent that tipped the scales toward pride -- would be her final redoubt in this, what was probably her final time on earth.

She did forget about the four dozen SEALs that were at this very minute gaining access into the silo.

Armis decided to analyze a chess opening: specifically, the Queen’s Gambit Declined, more specifically the Albin Countergambit, which offered some interesting positional possibilities.

d4 d5

c4 e5

This pawn move was first played -- as far as anybody knew -- by Cavallotti against Salvioli at the Milan tournament of 1881. And she was off ... the room melted to nothingness around her as she got deeper and deeper in the analysis. She only got to move 18 before the drug kicked in. She started to sleep. And dream.

Lt. Cmdr. Sam Redstone was leading the first attack team. They entered the complex through an emergency exit on the back side of a small hill. Well... ‘leading’ was an honorary title. His SEALs were in front. They were more than capable and were, in fact, better at this than he was -- at his advanced age. He laughed to himself. 32 was not an advanced age. Not even for a SEAL on an op. But he got to his current position because of his brain, not his brawn. He was in the second echelon of people going down the stairs.

The XO of the outfit, Lt. Bob Melchior, was of the same general age as his team, too. At 35 he could still do anything that he asked of his men. His second attack team was going down the stairs that paralleled the elevator shaft. They were going slowly and quietly. For perhaps the hundredth time in the past five years, he wondered why there wasn’t some sort of sound muffling covering they could put over their boots. The ‘quiet’ thump of ten men descending a 100 foot metal staircase could be heard, he was sure, all the way to the bottom. They moved in a half-crouch, expecting bad guys around every turn in the stairs: 8 steps and turn, 8 steps and turn, 8 steps and turn.

The 18 operators of the third attack team were led by Senior Chief Raven Dubois. She was fourth on the rope going down the missile silo itself. The first two men down ran forward to check that they had no company and attached a microphone to the door, so they could hear if they were going to have company of an unfriendly type. The other members came down the ropes on a fast rappel; the only sounds were the whine of rope through the gear the SEALs wore. The hardened palms of the gloves they wore would probably have to be replaced later; the friction as they came down fast were plain hell on gloves. But gloves were cheap. The skin on the palms of your hands was expensive.

Raven Dubois was a black woman, a Creole from Hackberry, Louisiana. She grew up in a dirt-floored shack on the oil barge canal on the west side of Calcasieu Lake, in the extreme southwest part of Louisiana. Hackberry was an underwater locale now. She would have been pregnant by the time she was 14 if she wasn’t as tough as nails. That she had four brothers may have had some influence on her early life. They all left for the service as soon as they could -- it was the only reliable way of getting out of Hackberry. They were all Marines, scattered around the Middle East now. And they all tried to piss on her dream of being a SEAL. Not for women, they told her.

She joined the Navy, and went through the hell of getting trained. It was double hell for a woman. Women just didn’t become SEALs. But there were several women scattered through the SEALs now; she suspected that each of them could tell a story like hers. The 71 weeks of training to become a SEAL only got her in the door. She worked her way up to Senior Chief, and she now got more respect from her team than almost anybody. Three fellow SEALs tried to rape her early in the training -- once. One man had a ruptured testicle, one got a boot in his side that broke 3 ribs, and the other almost died from a partially crushed throat. Her C.O. marked it all down as training injuries, but the three were washed out of the SEALs. Word got around, and she was never touched again. Senior Chief Dubois still had a chip on her shoulder about the C.O.’s actions.

“SEALs just don’t try to rape other SEALs,” he had said.

“Well, they damn sure tried to rape me,” she had thought. It left a mark that was hard to erase. She had made it to SOCM - Master Chief Special Warfare Operator -- the highest non-com on the team’s roster. Every promotion gave her an additional reason to spit on her attackers.

She led her attack team down the silo shaft and when they all hit bottom, they began to try for a breach of the door. They fed a fiber optic TV under the door and saw an empty hallway leading to the east. They also saw a crude -- but likely very effective -- booby trap on the door itself.

“Shit,” said the camera operator. “It’s got a booby trap. Looks like C4 or something similar, sir.” Everybody senior to you was ‘sir’ in the SEALs, regardless of gender. Raven Dubois didn’t even notice it any more.

She tapped on her comm unit. It was tuned to the team’s combat frequency. 3 taps -- she was third team. Pause. 1 tap -- everything okay. Pause. 4 taps -- have encountered enemy trap. Pause. 1 tap -- explosives. The other teams didn’t reply. So she held her ground.

The team frequency started up. 4 pause 1 pause 1. That worked out to Team 4: that was the team at the head of the elevator, led by Art Thornton, the Team’s Senior Master Chief -- the SOCS or Senior Chief Special Warfare Operator - who was strangely enough junior to the Senior Chief (SOMC) Dubois. In other words, he was tougher, harder, a better fighting man, and all around superior to Raven Dubois – at least in his mind – but she out ranked him. That hard man was watching the elevator, where no one expected action, and ‘discussing’ things with the captive goons. Everything at his site was okay. Nothing to report.

Actually SOCS Thornton had quite a bit to report, but nothing related to the current op; just info on who and what their contacts were. His discussion with each goon in turn provided all the information each had. Amazing what a combat knife making very light cuts on a man’s scrotum will do for his ability to quickly and quietly spill his guts. Now, nobody would expect that to work on a trained agent ... but these weren’t trained men. Anybody could see that, and Art Thornton wasn’t just anybody.