Night was a relative term. Outside the caves Antarctica was in perpetual daylight that was stark and intense, or diffused and dim, depending on the cloud cover. In contrast, Area 71’s labyrinth of passageways lay in the eternal dusk of a mall at midnight. The always-on LED lights in the passageways were triggered by passive infrared sensors and flared with gold light when someone was close, then died back to a low umber.

  Some of the team slept during that timeless twilight, but others remained at work, inspired by Christian O’Connor’s violent death. Now it was clear that hostiles were somehow loose on the base, the light-hearted banter among the Green Berets had darkened, and minds had focused on what needed to be done.

  Ghost wasn’t anywhere in the upper living areas, Ramirez was sure, which meant that the team would need to descend at least a level to chase him down. Sly didn’t think it was a coincidence that Marcus and O’Connor had been stationed as sentries near the shaft to L3, either. Somehow, Ghost knew the importance of the elevator.

  One frozen instant from Marcus’s encounter with Ghost offered another nugget of insight about the killer. The image presented a grainy hand holding a sliver of light, a knife a foot long and wavy in design.

  A kris. One serious knife, used by Ghost to kill a man.

  Sat together in Sly’s room, Ramirez had drawn an important conclusion from the pictures they reviewed together.

  “Ghost doesn’t have a gun,” Ramirez said, eyes wide. “If he’d had a working firearm, he’d have used it on both O’Connor and Marcus. He wasn’t slow to use the knife to kill O’Connor. It wasn’t restraint that held him back.”

  “He either didn’t carry a gun, or it was out of ammo,” Sly agreed.

  Ramirez worried thoughts were reflected on his tired face.

  “You want us to go down into L3,” he said. “That means using the cage-hoist, but that’s about the same as climbing into a shark cage when the great whites are armed with spearguns. The first guys down to L3 could, will probably come under fire from Ghost and friends. Now you tell me they maybe don’t have guns, which is great. But they’re known to have crossbows. Coming down slowly in a cage won’t be fun.”

  They decided to kit out the first row of men in the cage with shields that could handle an initial attack, assuming the killers had nothing better than projectile weapons, like javelins or bows. Ramirez gave the task to Michael Lee, who took lightweight polyurethane into the well-equipped workshop near the garage to make three shields with straps. Eli Brown and Nio Gonzalez contributed their labor.

  Meanwhile Nguyen, Clarke and Singh searched the executive rooms. The soldiers used the first three minutes to pack the researchers’ possessions, using Gus to inventory the items stored. Army-trained packers could put television decluttering experts to shame, at least for speed.

  Then the trio scoured each room thoroughly. Clarke explored all the cavities in the sparse bedroom furniture and pulled out rubber stoppers from the collapsible beds, while Singh opened the toilets and unscrewed the sinks. When this produced nothing, Richard Nguyen thought a moment and then pointed up, at the spars for the lights. Sly watched Singh sigh and go for a ladder.

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  Sly slept for most of an hour before Nguyen presented him with his final haul. It was a mostly empty wooden container, the size of a cigar box. Sly lightly shook it and heard something slide. He tipped the contents into his hand. It was a small transparent baggie holding two smallish gems.

  “You scored,” Sly said, thinking the bag might have held weed in another life.

  “Someone smuggled in cut gems,” said Clarke, forcing a small, tired smile.

  “A payment they didn’t want traced?”

  Sly held the stones up to the light. Diamonds?

  He was no expert, to him they resembled his daughter’s sparkly art supplies.

  “How much would a full box be worth?”

  Nyugen carefully considered the question and replied after a second.

  “A kilo of diamonds is five thousand carats. High quality melee diamonds like those in the bag can range from three hundred to two thousand dollars per carat. Say, two million bucks and up, in a box that size.”

  Sly mind stuttered. He hefted the container in his hand, which suddenly looked huge. He put it to one side and thoughtfully zipped the diamonds into a pocket.

  About then, a satellite crossed above their heads. Seconds later Sly was interrupted, as he received notice that the link-analysis he’d asked Gus for days ago was complete. He tensed as he read the analysis, followed the mind-map and contemplated the timeline the AI presented. There was a short snippet of video, zoomed in on Peck’s lips. Gus’s subtitles, generated from lipreading software, were ambiguous in some ways, incredibly revealing in others.

  With all that, naturally he forgot about the diamonds.

  When Sly next woke it was morning. That’s what Gus called it, though the half-lit tunnels looked much the same. He showered, thinking about the day ahead, then shaved and found breakfast. Captain Ramirez was studying the shields at the edge of the kitchen, asking if the polyurethane sandwiches would hold against a crossbow.

  Ramirez was rough, he hadn’t slept well.

  “No sir,” Lee said, not at all put out by the criticism. “Crossbow quarrels are designed to hit with high-impact, penetrating chainmail and very occasionally steel plate, if hit at the right angle. With respect, Captain, that’s not the point. If the bolts are going through this stuff, it won’t be going through us. I designed these to slow and catch a bolt and not let it all the way through.”

  Lee paused. “Sure, we’ll feel like fools if the other guys have a chain-fed MG.”

  Someone chuckled at Lee’s off-hand, laconic drawl.

  Without humour, Ramirez grunted. “Let’s not worry about that now.”

  As the mission’s oversight officer, Sly did worry over the safety of the volunteers in his care. Although supreme professionals, the Green Berets on this mission were away from the normal comforts of base, family and their usual teams. O’Connor was in a body bag in a cold storeroom, and that was already a sign of failure. Sly, who wanted to avoid more of his people joining him there, was greatly relieved Ghost didn’t have a working chain-fed machine gun.

  Colonel Sylvester Harris hadn’t achieved his Bronze Star by being a coward, but neither had he got his rank for ignoring his advantages. If the tangos lacked guns, find how to make it count.

  First, he needed a way to flank the enemy.

  There was only a single hoist, but the cage wasn’t the only way down. Regretfully the other path was no path at all. It was an endless chasm, no way out.