Chapter 12 - The Chimera Archive
The underground bunker smelled of ozone, gun oil, and stale instant coffee. Walls of CRT monitors, reel-to-reel magnetic tape machines, and modern radio transceivers buzzed in harmony, creating a cocoon of electric static.
Vance took the titanium cylinder with tweezers, treating it like live ordnance. He seated it into an adapter he had evidently built by hand decades ago, wired directly into an air-gapped terminal.
"Your old man didn't just run dogs," Vance said, his fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard with surprising speed. "He was the courier. During the pull-out from Southeast Asia, the brass wasn't just abandoning hardware. They abandoned a multi-million-dollar slush fund diverted from covert heroin pipelines. It was meant to fund an unauthorized black-budget intelligence arm inside domestic borders. They used the K-9 unit to move the flight manifests and bank records out of Saigon."
"Why the dogs?"
"Because nobody searches an attack dog's harness or cuts into a war hero’s casket," Vance spat, leaning closer to the flickering green screen. "The records were miniaturized into micro-capacitors. But Thomas figured out what they were carrying. He realized that the officers running the operation were planning to liquidate the handlers and the dogs as soon as they touched down at Dover."
The screen flickered. A cascade of scanned military documents began unspooling across the monitor.
Names. Dates. Offshore account numbers.
And at the top of the master dossier was a name that made my breath catch in my throat: *General Donald Campbell.*
Campbell wasn't just a retired war hero. He was the current Chairman of the National Security Oversight Committee. The same man who had personally signed the formal apology Harold had received only hours ago.
"The apology wasn't remorse," I said, cold fury washing over me. "It was Campbell tying up the last loose end. He needed to verify Harold was harmless before he made his bid for the White House."
"Worse than that," Vance muttered, his face turning pale under the green monitor light. "Look at the sub-file. Project Chimera wasn't just paper. They were running biological tests at Outpost 4. Tracking devices. Neurological triggers."
Rex suddenly stood up, letting out a sharp, ear-splitting bark.
He wasn't barking at the monitor. He was barking at the ceiling.
Above us, the faint, thudding rhythm of helicopter rotors cut through thirty feet of solid earth.
May you like
"They found the frequency," Vance said calmly, reaching under his console and pulling a pair of heavy master switches. "Kill the lights. They didn't bring deputies, Miller. They brought the sweep team."
***
