SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

He felt a twitching sensation at the back of his neck, and quickly whirled around, scanning the swirling white and tan haze. The base looked abandoned, but King’s instincts told him it wasn’t. Not being able to see or hear in the field was as limiting as wearing a bag over his head. With the helmet keeping in heat as well, he couldn’t even smell an attacker sneaking up on him. The only thing the team had going for them was the weather. It was unlikely any Bright Tomorrow security would be outside in this mess — and the building looked pretty sturdy against attack. Between its remote location, the camouflaged roof and the extreme temperatures and low visibility, they probably had their forces set up inside the outer walls of the building. It would be enough. That’s how King would have done it.

“Knight, are you in position in back?”

“We’re up top, in back. Place is totally deserted. Looks like no one has been up on these walls all winter.” It didn’t surprise King that Knight and Pawn would have taken the initiative to scale the back wall without reporting on the lack of posted guards. They all knew each other’s strengths and played to them.

“North and east are clear,” came Bishop’s thick Slavic accent.

“South is… wait. Do you feel that?” Rook said.

King was about to reply when he did feel it. A tremor in the ground. Aleman had briefed them about the region, which was prone to mild earthquakes and aftershocks. After a second, the rumbling sensation faded. “Just a quake. Moving on the door. Watch me.”

King stood in a low crouch, waited for a strong gust of wind and then sprinted forward, toward the looming doors of the big building. He zigzagged as he ran, hoping to throw off the aim of any guards Knight and Pawn might have missed. They were at the back of the square, castle-like base, and the length of each wall was over 100 yards, so even with Knight’s keen eye, they might have missed someone in the front. But with Rook and Queen on one side of him, and Bishop on the other, King felt safe in making the dash to the wall.

When he reached the sloped surface next to the looming doors, he turned his back to the stone, sweeping his SCAR back toward the snowstorm. If there was a threat above him on the fortress wall, Bishop would have him covered. He was far more concerned about the concealment the storm afforded anyone circling behind the team. And if he was honest, the rumors of supernatural creatures had him on edge — he’d faced things that shouldn’t have been possible on more than one occasion.

He turned and faced the door, prepared to plant one of Rook’s explosive spikes in the dirt in front of the threshold, but at the last second he had an idea. The doors had massive circular iron rings for handles, about the size of dinner platters, hanging at King’s shoulder height. He guessed most of the much shorter Mongolians would have had to reach up for the handle. King just reached straight out and grasped the ring in his gloved hand.

He tugged, and the door opened, as if its hinges had been oiled at least sometime in the last week — otherwise all the grit in the air would have jammed them up.

“The place might look abandoned, but someone’s here.”

3

Knight hurried along the edge of the crenellated wall, running his hand along the edge of the parapet for balance. He knew Pawn would be on his blind side, doing the same. The wind was worse up on the forty-foot tall wall, and the snow and sand blew so hard that he couldn’t see more than a few feet.

They had been lucky to get one of the gusting bursts that had cleared the air temporarily, so they knew they were alone on the top of the wall. As they raced to the nearest corner watchtower, they stayed low, but speed was now more essential than stealth. With the snow untouched on the walkways along the walls, and on the pagoda-like central building inside the outer wall, anyone even glancing out this way during a clearing in the storm would see the new footprints.

“This feels all wrong,” Pawn said, speaking directly to Knight on a separate sub-channel they had between them, for additional communication. It was another subtle tool they used to compensate for the loss of Knight’s left eye, but they rarely needed it for that purpose. Instead, they used it to talk privately, away from the ears of the others. The system was set up so that if anyone spoke over the network, they would hear the exchange in their left ears. If Pawn and Knight wanted to speak exclusively to each other, they would hear the replies in their right ears. A toggle switch allowed them to choose on which network to broadcast. So far, they hadn’t mixed up the channels.

“I agree. I know it’s brutally cold out here, but they don’t even have any cameras,” Knight said, as he reached the doorway into the corner tower.

“Sand would probably scour the lenses on the first day,” Pawn observed.

“Front door’s open. Going in,” they heard King report from the front of the building. “Stay frosty. The hinges have been oiled recently.”