The Aeschylus

1

Two catwalks led into the employee barracks at the northwest end of the platform. Melvin looked at the one that wasn't blown to shit and shook his head. “I don't like this.”

“What do you want to do?” Christian asked.

“Anything on the radio?”

“Just static.”

“Too much ground for just the two of us. You agree?”

His partner looked around, then nodded. “Yeah. I reckon.”

Melvin knew he should be moving, but he felt rooted. The place was so goddamned empty. The last time he remembered feeling this spooked was on his first tour in Kandahar. His unit had been ordered to clear a cave about three miles outside of the city. They didn't find any insurgents, but what they did find was a mass grave: seventeen bodies, mostly local men and teenage boys. Two of them were missing their heads. It was the first time most of the guys in his unit had seen a dead body. Melvin had seen plenty since, but it was the only time he remembered being scared. All those bodies, filed next to each other like old cigars in a cheap box — it made you feel small, like you could be snuffed on a whim. It's how he felt here, now. He felt alone. And he felt the odds of finding another of those mass graves was pretty good, only it would be over two hundred bodies this time instead of seventeen.

Christian pointed. “Hey. Look at this.”

“What is it?”

“We got a body.”

Speak of the devil.

Melvin prepared himself for the worst. When he got close, however, he saw that the thing in front of him didn't even look like a body. It was completely black from head to toe, slimed and overgrown with fungus. It was like the stuff from below deck had grown into him, through him. It gave him the goddamned creeps.

Christian prodded it with a gloved hand. “It's hot.”

“What do you mean, hot?”

“I mean hot.”

“Fever?”

“Don't know.”

Melvin shook his head. Shit was getting weirder by the minute. Dead bodies did not get warmer, even kids knew that. “Get your hand off that thing, man.”

Christian wiped the gunk on his pants. “What about that stuff over there? Looks like crude oil, don't it?”

It did. Ahead, Melvin could see the walls of the employee barracks, and it looked like they'd been splattered with oil.

The radio crackled, making both of them jump. “Anyone there… come in… still… anyone… report… there?” It was hard to make out.

“Sounds like that Trenton prick.”

Melvin nodded.

Christian pressed his earpiece to talk, but then, the static crackled so loudly that he had to take his hand away.

“I'm getting the fuck out of here,” Melvin said. “We're going to need more men.”

2

Kate was pacing, and she knew it. Her father had known something, and she'd spent the last twenty-four hours trying to figure out what. She still didn't know why he had chosen her, and why he hadn't shared whatever he had known with the intelligence community. Then a horrible thought struck her: what if he had? What if this whole goddamned mess was the result of some CIA experiment gone awry? What if they had murdered all of the witnesses to cover it up? But that was absurd. When she had been younger and her father had first taken office, she had berated him with every conspiracy theory she could think of. What about Roswell? Was there really a secret 9/11 plot? Did Oswald act alone? He was the second most powerful man in the country, and if anyone got a security brief on those types of things, it would be him. Maybe the idea that the Joint Chiefs would sit down their officials and tell them every dirty secret of U.S. intelligence was equally absurd — like they were indoctrinating them into some kind of cult — but Kate couldn't help herself. There were too many things she wanted to know. Old Stan McCreedy had waved her off each time except the last. That last time he had hugged her and chuckled. She had been thirty-one, but he sat her down like she was five, conferring one of life's great secrets. “The government is run by people, darling,” he said. “There are a lot of smart persons in the government. Very smart. But as a rule, people are not smart. In fact, they can be downright dumb. So when you hear that kind of rubbish, just remember that it would have had to be done by people.” It had been disappointing, but she never doubted that he was right. Now? Now she began to wonder. Her father had wanted her to find something by leaving those pictures. The growths beneath the platform were a part of it, but she didn't think they were the only part. Something happened here, was still happening.

“Is there anyone there?” AJ said. Kate looked up to see him over by the helicopter, shouting into the radio mic.

The pilot was sprinting towards him. “Get off that thing! What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Come in, goddammit! We're still here. Can anyone give us a situation report? Anybody hear me out there?”

Hal reached the chopper and grabbed the other man, pushing him to the ground. “I told you the goddamned radio's acting up. Now quit.”

Dutch made a shove off gesture, then picked AJ up.

“I'm fine, I'm fine.” He looked at Kate. “I'm sick of being here. Just what the hell did you get us into?”

“I don't know, I—“

Behind them, Hal was strutting back over. He had one hand out and looked ready to shove the lot of them.

“AJ!” Kate shouted.

Then they heard the shots.

3

They came from the generator room.

Mason felt the air whoosh beside his head before he heard a sound. And then, the air exploded with a thousand firecrackers. Nicholas screamed and dropped to the ground, a piece of his ankle misting into the air.

“Get down!” Jin yelled. “Get the fuck down!”

Mason ducked behind a stack of metal pipes, pulling the kid to safety with him. He looked over the defilade and counted five. Five of them, at least. Two were in the security bunker, and another two stood on either side of the walls. Mason saw the last one lying prone by the stairs.

Another tracer whizzed by his head, and this time, he recognized the sound of M16s. Whoever they were, they were well-armed.

Jin fired back, and Mason joined him, ducking out from behind cover and picking shots. “Air support!” he screamed. “Get the goddamned helo in here!”

Jin pressed his earpiece, but a moment later, he ripped it out and threw it to the ground. “Nothing!”

Ahead, Mason saw two of the shapes move to the left and out of his field of view. “They're flanking. We got to move!”

“What about Nick?”

Mason looked down. “You're gonna have to play dead, kid.”

“Don't leave me!” he yelled. “Don't you dare!”

Mason kicked the boy's hand away. Some guys, they lost their heads when they got shot. If the kid would just shut up and lay still, he'd have a better chance, and he should know it. “Play dead. That's an order. We'll cover you from the wreckage back there.”

“No!”

A round clipped Jin in the shoulder, and the side of his jacket flicked red. The shock on his face wasn't pain; it had come from the wrong direction. There was someone they couldn't see. They were pinned now, men closing in on all sides. If they didn't do something, they would be toast.

Mason changed magazines, and then the wreckage behind them exploded. Two bodies rag-dolled through the air, blasting off of the edge of the platform and into empty space. Mason heard the boom of a shotgun and saw the man by the stairwell collapse. A moment later, one of his friends followed. Melvin came jogging up, carrying his Mossberg. Christian was right behind him. They saw the two hostiles inside the security office and stacked up outside the door. The men inside pulled further back. Melvin pulled out a grenade, yanked the pin, then tossed it in. Seconds before it detonated, both of the attackers came running out, guns lowered. Christian shot them in the back. The grenade went off a second later, shattering the windows and blasting the inside of the security bunker to bits.

One man remained.

He was backing along a catwalk but still firing at them with a pistol. Mason saw Peter St. Croix walking after, reloading his grenade launcher like he didn't have a care in the world. He had that monkey grin on his face, the one that made him look like a serial killer. Today, that grin was like a ray of sunshine.

The would-be assailant dropped his pistol. No, that wasn't right. He threw it down. He began waving his arms, yelling and bucking his feet. The man was acting like a bull. He's going to charge, Mason thought. It was crazy, but that's what it looked like. He looked like he was going to run straight into the barrel of a loaded weapon. Peter saw it too, and his grin faltered.

Then, the man did. He actually charged straight ahead, his head thrashing, his mouth screaming.

“Don't kill him!” Mason yelled, but it was too late.

Peter fired and hit the poor bastard in the stomach. The force of the impact launched the man backwards, flinging him twenty feet into the side of the security bunker. His body exploded in a ball of fire and disgusting black fluid. The spray went further than the flames, spattering Christian with black gore. He opened his palms to Peter. “What the hell, man?”

Peter just shrugged and held up his weapon. “Not bad for a Chinese piece of crap, huh?” The crazy, monkey grin was back on his face.

4

“Step back,” the voice on the other side of the door said. It began to count. “We're live in five, four, three…”

AJ looked at Kate. “You might want to cover your ears.”

“What?” she asked.

The door to the stairwell blasted backwards, flying off its hinges and tumbling over the railing. It clanged over the side and fell, bouncing off every level before ending up in the ocean. And just like that, the doorway to the helipad was open.

AJ took his hands away from his ears.

Kate regarded him with what looked like… contempt? Nah, couldn't be; she liked him. “You asshole! Why did you let me get this close?”

Because you wanted to and wouldn't listen to me, was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't say it. With some girls, it was just damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

“Say something.”

He pointed one finger to his ear and shook his head. “Can't hear,” he mouthed. Then, with what might have been a over-the-top, even for him, “That was loud, wasn't it?”

She made a disgusted noise and went back to the helipad.

“What's up with her?” Dutch asked.

Before he could answer, Mason passed through the doorway and pushed past them, looking around as if he expected trouble. Given what they had just been through, he wasn't surprised. AJ himself wanted answers, but now wasn't the time to press.

Mason looked at Hal. “Any word from Reiner?”

“No. And still not much on the radio, even up here.”

“Cell phones?” Mason asked.

AJ pointed to one of the crumpled towers. “Collapsed. You're not going to get a signal out here.”

“I wasn't talking to you.”

AJ saw the fury in Mason's eyes, reading it for what it was — post-battle stress — and he let it go.

Mason looked back at the pilot, but the man only shook his head. “Like the man says.”

“Get the equipment from the chopper. The fifty caliber, too. Meet us below on Deck Two, and make sure everyone's with you.” He indicated the others.

The stairwell stood open to the air, and AJ peered over the railing to the carnage below. He could see Melvin's bald head leaning over Nick, Christian and St. Croix wrapping up a dead-check. The bodies lay scattered across the deck, crumpled in those poses that didn't quite look like sleep, even from a distance.

When they arrived, he had thought this could have been as simple as a downed communications tower, but he supposed they wouldn't have bothered to track him down if that's what they had expected. They wanted someone who knew the platform in and out. They wanted someone who knew the blueprints by heart, who could make decisions about how to isolate and protect various wings of the facility. They wanted someone who could do a little shooting if he had to.

“You all right, buddy?” Dutch asked. He was behind AJ now, following his gaze.

“Yeah. This is just turning into one fuck of a weird day.”

“You got that right. You ready to head down?”

Once they were below, AJ got a better sense of the damage. It didn't look like any of the Black Shadow team were downed save for Nick, though.

“You missed the fun.”

He turned to see the kid looking at him. Melvin had wrapped his ankle and was busy splinting it with a pair of metal rods. Even from where he was standing, AJ could see that the area above the kid's foot was as soft as putty, the bandages soaked through.

“We got 'em,” he said. “Whoever they were, whatever they did to this place, we got 'em!”

“How about you? How are you doing, kid?”

“Okay, I guess. Doc says I'll never line-dance again.”

“If you dance anything like you play football, that's not necessarily a bad thing.”

Nicholas shot him the bird, but he was smiling. That stopped as soon as Melvin tightened the splint, and the kid hollered.

“What's his status?” Mason asked.

Melvin looked up and shook his head. “He can't stand. We need to sedate him.”

“No!” Nicholas said. He was gritting his teeth. “One shot! Just one. I can take it.”

Melvin looked at Mason, who only shrugged. Reaching into his vest, the medic withdrew a small ampoule and jammed it into Nick's thigh. The kid relaxed, his breath slowing into great, long gasps.

“Okay, that's one. You start to act a fool, I got another one here for you. Got it?”

“Yeah,” the kid said. “Thanks.”

AJ wandered around the circumference of the platform, watching as the others took inventory. The men were maintaining a perimeter, but they were too few to cover every gap.

Dutch, who was trailing a few steps behind, seemed to come to the same conclusion. “I wish I had my rifle with me.”

“Why don't you go help secure the northwest corner? They're light there.”

Dutch, effusive under the most somber circumstances, only nodded. He headed towards the bridge to the barracks, close to where Peter and Christian were keeping watch.

Meanwhile, AJ stuck his head into the destroyed security bunker. There wasn't much left. Any hopes of gathering intel were shot, though he reminded himself that gathering intel was Kate's job, not his. Not that he could do much. Aside from the brief conversation at the top of the helipad, Mason didn't seem interested in taking his advice. He grimaced. At least the girl had a level head. That was good, especially now. He looked around and found her outside the door, bent over one of the new bodies by the bunker.

She looked up as he approached. “Don't touch anything.”

“I wasn't planning on it.”

“Look at this,” she said, pushing the corpse with her foot.

“Wait, why do you get to touch it?”

“Just look.”

AJ squinted. The blood smear behind it was black, almost venal, but it was too black. It wasn't the only weird thing, either. It took him a moment to realize what it was: it was the smell. The body had an odd odor, something like dead flowers.

“It looks almost like… like those things below, doesn't it?”

“I don't like it, whatever it is. And since we're out here playing doctor, you might as well call me AJ.”

“This stuff, it's still growing, AJ. It looks like it's gotten onto the bodies here.”

“You're wrong about that,” he said. “That spatter came from inside his body. If that stuff was growing in him, it was growing in him before he died.”

They looked at each other, and then both took a step backwards. AJ felt his skin crawl. He didn't know a thing about biology, but if this stuff was growing inside of people before they died, he didn't have to.

“There's something else,” Kate said. “Take a look at the uniform. You recognize that symbol?”

The patch on his arm showed a pair of crisscrossed anchors. “Christ.”

“What?”

“Argentinian navy.”

“What?” she repeated, as if she hadn't heard him correctly.

“They're not terrorists, that's for damn sure.”

“So what are you telling me, that they're the good guys?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Melvin asked. He was walking up behind them. Jin Tae, now sporting a bright white bandage around his left arm, was not far behind.

AJ stepped aside. “Have a look.”

Melvin did, but this just seemed to irritate him. “That don't make any goddamned sense.”

Jin shook his head. “So what is this? A bunch of Argentinians just decided to hijack an oil platform?”

Mason, who'd been patrolling the level, finally sensed something amiss. AJ remembered he had a nose for it and wasn't surprised when the big man came striding over. “What's going on here?”

“Why don't you tell us, boss?” Melvin said. “They ain't jihadies. So what the hell were they doing here?”

To his credit, Mason looked believably perplexed. “You got me, son. All I know is that they shot at us first, and they got what was coming.”

“No argument there, sir,” Jin said.

“What are you two doing snooping here, anyways,” Mason asked. Just like that, he shifted the focus to Kate and AJ. Clever.

“You're the one who told me to find something to report to the shareholders,” Kate said. “So that's what I'm trying to do. It looks like you just iced half a dozen navy crewman.”

“Navy, huh?” Mason sounded unconcerned.

Just then, Hal appeared at the top of the stairs. AJ guessed the man had gone down to the boat docks and back. Judging by the sweat on the man's face, that seemed like a pretty good guess.

“The lady is right. There's only one boat down there, and it's marked RDF.”

Kate looked puzzled, so AJ leaned over. “Rapid Deployment Force. They're like the Special Forces of the navy.”

“Like SEALs.”

“Yeah.”

“What about the rest?” Mason asked. “According to the intel, there should be half a dozen transport boats below.”

Hal shook is head. “It's a twister.” By that, he meant a brain-twister. “Ropes are cut. Nothin' on the surface. If you ask me, I'd say they were scuttled.”

“How could that be?”

Hal shrugged. “Those satellite images are twenty-four hours old now. The boats were there, but now they're not.”

A silence fell onto the group. AJ felt his mind spinning. There were a dozen possibilities that could explain the RDF here, and none of them were good. The bigger question was what Mason knew and what he was withholding from the rest of the grunts. And where the hell was The Aeschylus crew? So far as AJ could tell, none of them had been found.

A moment later, the big man broke the silence. “All right, we're not out of the woods yet. Sectors One through Four and Six are secure. The northwest wing is still hot.”

“The barracks?” Hal asked.

“That's affirmative. The north bridge has been destroyed, and the bottom stairwell is barricaded. That means there's only one way in. That right, Calle?”

Melvin nodded. “Yeah, boss. West bridge only.”

“Then it's time to get your heads out of your asses. We've met hostile resistance on the main deck here, and it's entirely possible more of them are ahead. You know what to do. Stay sharp, and stay alert. We move in pairs up the walk. Vy and St. Croix will secure the bridge, then we move in nice and easy. Jin?”

“Yeah?”

“I want that fifty cal set-up on our side, and I want you to be ready for anything. We haven't found the bodies yet.”

5

Bodies.

Kate shuddered. They hadn't expected survivors from the get-go. How could they have known? Somebody wasn't telling her something, and she knew it. She looked down and saw her hands were shaking. A moment later, AJ turned and put a hand over hers. It was warm, and despite what her better judgment was telling her, not entirely unwelcome. Over his shoulder, she watched as Jin mounted the large machine gun to the deck. The other men were taking position around the bridge leading to the barracks, crouching behind crates and checking their weapons.

She came to a realization then, and as she looked into AJ's face, she understood that he knew it too. “We're together in this, aren't we?”

“I guess maybe we are.”

“It's us and them, isn't it? It has been from the start. They know something, don't they?”

He looked at the others and then nodded. “You told me back in Puerto Aisén that nobody knew what was going on here, right? That the workers were missing and that's all you knew?”

“That was the truth. For me, anyways.”

“Doesn't look much like a search and rescue to me. Does it?”

She shook her head.

“Just stay close to me and Dutch.”

She felt a smile work its way onto her face and couldn't help it.

“What?”

“I was just thinking about what I would have said an hour ago if you would have told me the same thing.”

He grinned. “I'm a slow-starter but not a no-starter.”

That didn't make sense, not exactly, but she got it. And maybe he wasn't so bad after all. Even so, she was still shaking. She couldn't remember a time when she had been so scared.

“Just stick close to me,” AJ repeated. “Whatever they find over there, just stay close.”

6

Mason felt a tickle in the back of his mind. Something wasn't right, and he knew it, but that was hard to reconcile with how amped he felt. They'd just taken out an entire squad of hostiles with only one injury, and that was to the newest kid on the team. Mason might be getting old, but he still had it, whatever it was. When he made his bang off of this job and retired, he could do it knowing that it wasn't because he was slowing down. He'd led his team and they had prevailed, same as always. The fact that the hostiles were Argentinian RDF and not an MTP-funded guerrilla cell, that was admittedly troubling. Well, at least they looked like RDF. For all Mason knew, the terrorists could have stolen RDF uniforms. That was a little easier to swallow, but he had cleared three-quarters of the platform and still didn't have any answers. And what if they were the real deal, out here investigating the same thing Black Shadow was sent to do? In that case, they could always dump the bodies, sink their boat, and get Valley Oil to play dumb. Why not? With no evidence, there would be nothing to prove the RDF team made it out here at all. He was sure VO would want it that way. His executive contact had made it clear from the start that they didn't want any outside interference. So he let his mind return to the plan: secure the location, set up a perimeter, reestablish communications.

No problem.

They had one wing left to secure. Inside the barracks, they'd find the survivors or the bodies, and it would be over. And what about the answers?

“Answers,” he said, and laughed.

The McCreedy woman was hell-bent on figuring out what caused the disappearances. Mason himself was curious, but only curious. The reason things went to shit weren't really his concern. He'd seen it a hundred times before in a hundred other places. Sometimes things just went bad. When they went killing bad, that's when Black Shadow went in. The answers, one way or another, never affected their objectives. As for the stuff growing underneath the platform, he'd let the techs figure it out, whenever they arrived. Hell, they could package it up and sell it at McDonald's for all he cared. Whatever made the client happy.

And so he let that tickle, that itch slip from his mind. He had more important things to worry about than answers.

Then, he looked over to Trenton and the McCreedy woman, and he remembered they did have one other unpleasant objective, one that came straight from the old lawyer. Truth be told, it didn't bother him that much. You take the money, you suck the dick. That was just the way of the world.

“Who's taking point, boss?” St. Croix asked.

“You and Vy. Calle and me follow. Jin Tae and Hal will cover us from the main deck. Got it?”

St. Croix nodded, flicking the safety off of his weapon with a large, hairy hand.

They moved slowly across the bridge, watching for any sign of movement. There was only one way over, but the building itself had two entrances. Mason and Melvin took one, Peter and Christian took the other. With a little luck, they'd clear the place and it'd be Miller Time inside of ten minutes.

Mason approached the door, a large metal seal with a crank valve. They were designed to be air tight, like doors on a submarine, not that it mattered. If it was locked, he had enough explosives to blast the whole damned wall apart.

It wasn't.

He turned the crank and then pushed inside. The hall beyond was dark, and he paused long enough to snap a mini flashlight under the barrel of his rifle. The light revealed a break room, just like the blueprints had said. It was trashed. Cabinets hung open, papers and garbage lined the floor. A coffee pot lay shattered in the corner. Mason stepped forward, his feet crunching on glass.

“Anyone here? We're search and rescue on behalf of Valley Oil corporate. If anyone's in here, show yourself.”

When he reached the first doorway, the smell hit him. He wasn't sure how many bodies lay in the hall, but he guessed about twenty, their figures strewn along the length of the passage.

“You seeing what I'm seeing, boss?”

Mason, surging with androgens moments before, felt only confusion. What was this? What the hell was this? A man in the corner had a thumb from another worker buried in his eye. The attacker had his skull split open, his brains leaking onto the floor. At Mason's feet, he saw a dead woman who had died with her mouth clamped on another man's neck. There were others, others much worse. These people — ordinary working people with jobs and responsibility — looked like they had literally torn each other apart.

Melvin walked over to one of the dead men. “Look at this.”

Squinting, Mason saw that there was something growing out of the man's nose and ears. They looked almost like small flowers.

“We in some shit, ain't we?” Melvin whispered.

A shape appeared from nowhere and ran across his field of view. Screaming, Mason fired. A white-hot burst thundered through the hall, ricocheting off of the metal. He stumbled backwards, slipping on blood. “Goddammit!” he yelled. “Secure that sector!”

Melvin was away before he blinked. Mason pushed himself to a squat, wiping his gloves on his pants. He was furious, his heart trip-hammering in his chest. He told himself that it was just nerves, but this was different. It was primal.

Answers, he thought again. Never did care. He laughed crazily, his voice echoing in the dark.

Then, he heard someone else. “North wing is secure. You in here, sir? We heard shots.”

It was St. Croix. He and Christian appeared from the rec room, looking troubled. A moment later, Melvin reappeared from another door at the end of the hall. “No sign of movement.”

“And the intruder?” Mason asked.

Melvin shook his head. “No sign of anyone.”

Mason felt cold. He was sure that he had seen someone. He was sure. The alternative — that he was cracking up in the dark — was unthinkable. “You secure the rest?”

“That's an affirmative,” St. Croix said. “Just stiffs. They're all done up.”

“Everyone?”

Vy nodded.

All three men stared at him, and all three had a look he didn't like. It was the kind of look you got when you were trapped in a building, surrounded by forces that outnumbered you four to one.

“Just what the hell happened here, boss?” Melvin asked.

Mason was about to open his mouth. He was about to tell them that their job wasn't to play detective. Their job wasn't to worry about how the dying started, when it started. Their job was to secure and contain. That's what they did. He figured that if he concentrated, he could even say it without laughing. That's when they heard a bang at the end of the hall.

Turning, Mason saw a heavy hinged door. A chair had been placed beneath the handle, and the door shook as someone tried to get out. A knife blade stuck out from beneath the floor crack, sweeping left and right. He held his breath, ready to squeeze the trigger and put down whoever or whatever lay on the other side.