Hot Zone (21 page)

"Really?”

"Yeah, unless it's a rat, we don't want to waste bullets."

With everything he had, Ice slowly turned the wheel, its creak echoing down the tunnel. A gush of putrid air spewed out causing Ice and Jordan to cover their noses and mouths as the door swung. As instructed, Jordan extended the gun in the doorway expecting a monster to leap out at her, but there was nothing but silence and the smell of death.

Ice took the gun out of her hands and stepped into the room with Jordan close behind.

"Jordan, close that door behind us."

"Why."

"Because we're being followed."

"What."

"The guy we were chasing is now chasing us."

"How."

"Just close it, hurry."

With a huff Jordan swung the door shut, snapping the lock in place. "But now we're trapped."

"Hush. Keep quiet for a couple of minutes while we check things out."

Ice began looking around the small room. Two bunk beds on opposite sides, a small table pushed up against the wall and on it: A lantern.
Yes!

Two seconds later the room was brought into light as the green glow of their light sticks faded.

With the light came the answer for the sickly air they had to breathe. On the bunk beds four rotted bodies, not quite skeletons lay in their beds.

"Oh my god." Jordan whispered.

Ice walked over to one of the bunks, looking over the bodies. They were dressed in French Foreign Legion fatigues; the two Ice was looking at held guns in their left hands which rested next to their temples.

They had killed themselves. Why?

"Ice." Jordan said "Over here, I found something."

Jordan was looking on the top bunk on the other side of the room. In the right hand of the cadaver was an old, leather bound book. Jordan was hesitant to pry it out of the surprisingly tight grip.

Next to her now, Ice saw what Jordan was looking at. He noticed the bodies on this side of the room had also taken bullets to the head. "You think that's a journal?"

"What else could it be?" Jordan said.

Finally she gathered the courage to ease the journal away from the cadaver. She opened it to the first page, noticing immediately that the pages were brittle. Shaking her head she said: "It's in French I think. I can't read this, Ice."

"I knew that twelfth grade French would be useful one day."

"Huh?"

"Relax. I know a little French, comes with the job."

* * *

Yanick had been following the two Americans when the tunnel began splitting off into more and more corridors. The Americans had rounded a corner and before Yanick could turn into the tunnel behind them the green glow had disappeared.

They had gone into one of the rooms that lined the corridor but to open each and every door would be suicide. There was no chance of Yanick entering a room where they hid without hanging a target around his neck. His only option was to hunker down at the end of the corridor and wait for the Americans to re-appear and when they did he would attack.

* * *

Sitting at the small table, Ice began to read the first couple of paragraphs of the journal. His French was rusty at best but he could make out the general theme.

"What does it say?" Jordan asked.

"I think it's going to tell us everything we want to know. If only I could read this guy's scribble. He must have been a doctor."

Jordan was looking at the bodies in the room. They all had the look of thousand year old mummies with their skin still covering a good portion of their skeletons. Their sunken faces and hollowed out eyes gave her the creeps. She had also noticed the gunshot wounds each one had suffered and wondered what had drove these men to take their own lives.

"Do you think if you read the last page of that journal, Ice, it might tell us why these guys off'd themselves together. This kinda looks like a cult suicide thing."

"I like to read my books from cover to cover. There's only fifty or so entries in here, most of them short. It won't take long."

"Great. Are you going to share them with me?"

"Pull up a seat."

Jordan sat down next to Ice and exhaled.

Finally she had been able to sit down after what had been a couple of difficult hours. The dives had drained her and then running away from the French had compounded the problem. The fact that she had had little sleep on her flight to the south pacific was starting to catch up with her.

"So where are we?"

32

Today is the day. Today mother France shows the world its full nuclear capabilities. Today we become the strongest and most feared nation in the world.

We will be watching the blast from inside the hillside bunkers on Taotui Island, just south of the blast sight of Mururoa. We have video cameras set up inside the control room to record this momentous event in history.

We are just one hour away from detonation.

* * *

Ice stopped his translation upon hearing a low-moaning sound surge throughout of walls. He turned to Jordan and saw he fear in her eyes. "That doesn't sound very friendly, whatever it is."

"What could possibly be living down here after all these years?" Jordan asked.

"Let's hope we don't find out."

"At least not the hard way." She said

Ice turned the page to the next entry in the Journal. He immediately noticed the handwriting had changed. It was hurried now, rushed. "Something happened here." He said. "I can barely make this scribble out."

* * *

Something went wrong. So awfully wrong. We were too close to the blast radius. It knocked the camera feed out. The earth would not stop shaking. And the noise, oh god the noise. We believe the blast caused a giant wave. The entire island is under water now, we are trapped down here, the only way out is the track and we do not know if that is underwater at the other end.

Everyone is in a panic, no one is sure what to do, I do not know what to do. How long will our air last? And our food and water supplies? Does anyone even know we are down here?

There is no radio contact with the outside world the General said.

We are all alone down here. What's worse is that the radiation is leaking throughout the compound. My hair is starting to fall out as is many of the others. Peter's teeth have also begun to fall out, he was close to one of the entrances when the blast struck the island. He doesn't have much time, much less than me. Nobody wants to believe it, that we're all going to die down here. One crew tried the track and never returned, no one else has tried it since.

There has been not much to do so myself and a couple of the other scientists have been testing the birds for their reactions against the plutonium. A couple of the females have laid their eggs. It will be interesting to see what effects the radiation has on them.

* * *

"That answers that question then." Jordan said, referring to the tests and the noise they had just heard. "They were testing animals with nuclear radiation. They would be strung up for that if they did those things today."

"Given their situation I don't think they really cared at the time, Jordan. Besides, they're French."

"You said it."

"They mention something about "trying the track" here. I wonder what that means, ‘the track’? Some kind of escape route?"

"Maybe, but judging by the size of this place we could be looking for that for a long time and then we don't know where it leads, he said they never came back right?" Jordan's tone was negative, Ice didn't like it.

"Jordan. We're getting out of here. Whether we find that track or not I will find a way, even if it means we have to dive back up and fight the monsters of the deep. Keep your chin up."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. You have been put, we all have been put into an unbelievable and very dangerous situation. We are trained for it, you are not, but you have to keep those positive thoughts flowing."

"What does the next page say?"

"His writing is getting more and more erratic; this might take a little longer to translate."

33

The smoke in the corridors thickened before Roo or Jansen had the chance to adjust. Both of them took in thick gasps of the thick air as they made their way down the corridor and away from the Frenchman. They came to a large metal door, slightly ajar, the red and amber flames of the fire licking the opening. The sight of the fire stopped them in their tracks. Roo's mind worked in overdrive to come up with a plan.

Then he remembered the fire extinguisher he had seen in the kitchen of the mess hall. As old as it was there was still a slim chance it might work. He really only needed it to work enough to get himself and Jansen into the room and through the fire, he didn't need to put it out.

"Stay here, keep low." Roo shouted over the roar of the blaze.

"Where are you going?"

"I'll be back in twenty seconds." Roo turned and disappeared into the darkness.

Racing down the dark tunnel he cracked another glow stick just before he came to the mess hall. He ripped the fire extinguisher from the wall next to the skeleton he had found earlier and left the mess hall as quickly as he had come.

As he rounded into the tunnel he threw his glow stick as far back into the mess hall as he could. He was hoping the Frenchman would see the green glow and search the area, buying him enough time to find the others without any further incursions.

Screaming Jansen's name as he approached in the dark so as not to get shot, Roo pulled the safety pin out of the extinguisher and shook it as hard as he could to stir up whatever remaining gases might lay dormant in the tank.

"Stand clear Pete, I'm not sure what's going to happen when I pull the trigger. And if it works, we gotta move quickly through this, okay."

Jansen nodded his head.

Roo, wearing non-slip workout gloves, which he always did when he was on duty, gave the red hot handle of the door a mighty pull and squeezed the trigger on the extinguisher. At first nothing happened. Then Roo shook the tank with the trigger squeezed and slowly a steady stream of compressed water shot from the tank.

"Pete, let's go, keep low behind me."

Roo cleared a path through the flames as they edged their way through the fireball, all the while scanning the area for anything that looked like a first aid kit.

The room itself was a filing room and office, oak desks ablaze throughout and the contents of the filing cabinets was the perfect gas to fuel the fire.