Interrupt (47 page)

Drew dragged her beneath the complex. A two-foot gap existed between the raised structure and the steel pipes running along the cavern floor. Emily cracked her temple as they ducked in. Then they were through. The flat space was almost four feet tall between the cold dirt
and the steel beams overhead. Thick steel coils stood every five yards, bearing the one-hundred-ton weight of the complex. There were no lights. Fifteen feet from the gap, she could barely see.

“Do you have a weapon?” Drew hissed, leading her forward.

The coils were a mathematically precise forest of smooth, ribbed tree trunks. Emily cut her palms on the gravel as they scrambled into the oppressive space.

Claustrophobia made her paranoid. She thought she heard someone else crawling ahead of them, but every sound rustled and multiplied. She stopped in despair. “You took my gun and there wasn’t time to look for—” she said.

“Give it up, motherfucker!” a man yelled behind them. “You’re trapped!”

“Shh,” Drew whispered. “Over here.”

Emily dodged after him and they hid by a coil, huddling together. He opened his arm. She pressed her bruised temple against his chest.
There wasn’t time to look for a gun by the dead men,
she thought. In fact, neither body had seemed to have a weapon except for their sidearms, which felt wrong.

“Get some lights!” the man yelled.

Emily made sense of the missing guns at the same moment she became certain she and Drew weren’t alone beneath the complex. Her voice was hoarse with terror. “Marcus took their rifles,” she said. “He’s in here.”

“What are you—”

Emily pointed through the dark space, remembering her comparison of Bunker Seven Four’s layout to a comma. The cavern was the round body, containing both the complex and the trailers. The tunnel to the world outside formed the comma’s tail.

Two exits led from the cavern into the tunnel—the blast door at the front of the complex and an emergency access directly through the rock.

“He’ll sneak beneath the complex to the far side,” she said. “Then he can surprise the guard at the emergency door.”

The shouting behind them grew louder as two men scrambled beneath the complex.

Drew moved away from her, preparing to intercept them.

“We can’t let Marcus get outside!” she said. “That must be where he’s going. If he’s even half as smart out there as he is now—”

He might help P.J. stay alive.

“Marcus could be the most dangerous hybrid on the planet,” she said as Drew glanced back at her. They were stuck. It was too dark to read his face, but Emily felt his indecision in the rigid muscles of his shoulder. She could hear it in the sharp rhythm of his breathing.

Behind them, the bunker personnel were coming in. In front of them was a madman with at least one automatic weapon. Drew couldn’t protect her from both directions, so Emily made the decision for him. She scrabbled past the nearest coil, using it to prevent Drew from stopping her.

Marcus might help P.J. stay alive, but he could also become the Neanderthals’ greatest general.

They’ll kill us all.

A man rose in the darkness forty feet ahead of her. Emily saw a gleam of metal seconds before he squeezed off the entire clip in his submachine gun.

Bullets chewed through the thin space.

BUNKER SEVEN FOUR

D
rew jumped for another coil as ricochets thunked into the rock and dirt, filling the air with dust.
Emily!
he thought.

If he knocked out the gun, he could save her.

Sneezing, giving himself away, Drew tried to circle to Marcus’s side. The weapon had a flash suppressor—but in the shadows, orange light lanced and popped among the coils. The sustained chatter of the gun was deafening.

Then it quit. Marcus’s weapon was empty.

Drew heard a shifting in the darkness. Drew was twenty feet away, but he thought Marcus might have dropped the submachine gun in favor of another weapon. Then he saw Marcus’s silhouette. Marcus had retreated to the edge of the complex where there was more light, framing himself against the gap.

To his right, beyond the complex, Drew heard running feet and yelling. Marcus slipped up into the noise. Drew might have scrabbled after him. Instead, he went back for Emily, listening for the other men. Had they retreated?

He found Emily pressed against the ground in the dark.

“Are you hit?” He felt along her torso and leg. Her clothes were torn and damp with blood. But he couldn’t find a wound. The blood wasn’t hers.

“My face,” she gasped. “I’m all right. My face. Where is he?”

Drew bent closer. Her cheek was bleeding. It wasn’t a gunshot wound. She’d taken a spray of shrapnel, probably rock kicked up the bullets. “You’re all right,” he said with more calm than he felt. She’d nearly lost an eye.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“He crawled out.”

They started after Marcus, and Drew realized the gunfire might have worked in their favor. Behind him, he recognized a voice yelling, “No! No, sir!”

Macaulay had refused to enter the crawl space. They didn’t know Marcus was free, or, if they’d put that together, they didn’t know Marcus had ducked beneath the complex before Emily and Drew. They thought Drew had fired.

His team probably hadn’t discovered who they were chasing until a minute ago. Inside the complex, in the heat of battle, his friends would have joined the barracks personnel as a matter of course to repel the SEALs’ invasion. Now they were arguing.

Drew heard incredible confusion in the cavern, although most of the voices weren’t behind him. A crowd had gathered between the complex and the trailers lined up against the far wall of the cavern. That was useful. As he led Emily beneath the complex to the gap where Marcus had climbed out, Drew expected to emerge behind the crowd.

Who were they?

He glanced through the equipment stacked against the complex. Two fat rolls of chain link, a Bobcat, and a big Craftsman tool chest blocked most of the gap.

Ahead of him was the emergency access from the cavern into the
tunnel. It was another steel door like a bank vault. It should have been closed and under guard, but four bodies lay twisted on the concrete. The door had been opened manually.

“When I say
go
, run for it,” Drew whispered.

“Marcus killed them!” Emily said. Her shock was muffled by the hand she’d clamped against her cheek.

“No. Marcus didn’t fire until we crawled in after him,” Drew whispered. “Those men were dead before he got here.”

What was happening in the tunnel? More fighting?

One of the uniformed bodies was Rick Fuelling. Another man was a civilian.
What a cluster fuck,
Drew thought, trying to make sense of it.

ROMEO had planned to seize the bunker in order to control all communications as they flew their teams to the destroyers in the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, the civilian population was under lockdown—most of them innocent—because of a few desperate men and women who’d hatched their own scheme to take control, exile the soldiers, and keep the bunker for themselves.

When the shooting started inside the complex, Fuelling must have subdued the guards at the emergency access. Then he’d led his SEALs into the cavern. At the same time, the ringleaders of the civilian conspiracy had seen an opportunity. Apparently they’d overpowered the guards in the tunnel, taking their weapons and running to the emergency access.

Had Fuelling schemed with the ringleaders? He might have tried to enlist them as reinforcements. If so, he’d underestimated their selfishness and their angst. Close-range gunfire had killed Fuelling, two guards, and the civilian sprawled in the emergency access. Then the civilian rebels had stormed the cavern.

Listening to them yell, Drew thought there were more civilians in the cavern than uniformed personnel, although he had no doubt the civilians would quail when met with an organized military force. The
divided soldiers and airmen would unite against the civilians. Then they would disarm or shoot them.

Right now, no one else was coming through the emergency access.

“Go,” Drew said, helping Emily out from beneath the complex. He brought the empty submachine gun. A bluff was better than nothing. He might find a spare clip on Fuelling.

They charged the access, where Drew paused to rummage at Fuelling’s body. The civilian rebels had stripped him clean.

Drew looked up and saw at least eight civilians in the cavern. They were spread to either side, taking cover as the bunker personnel hollered at them from deeper in the cave. One woman had already given up. She pressed her back against the complex wall with her hands on her head. Another man cowered against a vertical band of pipes, removing himself from the fight.

The soldiers would get through in seconds.

Drew chased Emily to the door. Where was Marcus?

This far into the mountain, the tunnel narrowed to a width of fifteen feet where a knob of granite had been left to shield the emergency access. The other side of the rock would be the perfect spot for Marcus to set a trap, shooting them point-blank.

But they couldn’t slow down. Behind Drew, the soldiers’ commands were overwhelming the civilians’ disorganized shouts.

He and Emily sprinted into the main tunnel, where most of the civilians had stayed. Two men were helping an Army sergeant with a head wound. Ahead, a wall of crates and supplies blocked the width of the tunnel. To their left, the primary blast door was sealed.

“What happened to Marcus?” Emily whispered.

Drew didn’t answer.

The guards assigned to forward points by the entrance had probably mingled with the noncombatants by now, taking new positions to secure the tunnel. The good news was those guards would stop Marcus. The
bad news was Drew and Emily couldn’t wade into the pandemonium. The crowd would be like a minefield, hiding soldiers and airmen.

Something rattled above Drew.

“There!” he said. A desk fan dropped off the highest crate, pushed by a foot or a knee. Marcus had scaled the wide blocks of pallets and crates onto the loose items on top.

Drew hurried to the wall. “Stay here!” he said.

But Emily ran with him. Blood trickled from the wounds peppering her face. The bruise in her temple had grown into a goose egg. “Boost me up,” she said, latching onto the rim of the first crate with both hands.

Drew remembered how well she’d climbed the fence at the highway where Julie died. “Stay here,” he said. “Let them capture you.”

“We can’t. Marcus is too dangerous to let outside. If he’s a Nim—”

Drew set his hand under Emily’s backside and pressed the submachine gun against her. The weapon must have hurt her, but she got up. She climbed the next two layers of crates herself. Drew climbed after her. Then they were twelve feet above the floor of the tunnel.

Below them, shadows mixed with the beams of flashlights. Drew also saw a well-lit area. About twenty people milled through the pathway and the closest sleeping area as he led Emily to his right, hurrying in the same direction Marcus must have gone.

The long, high surface of the crates was a nightmare. Thousands of crevices lurked in the darkness. Sharp-edged bolts and wire covered the ceiling, and the uneven rock was never more than six feet above them.

The maze was worsened by odd groupings of bikes or PVC pipes or appliances like microwave ovens and toasters. Drew’s blind spot made every other step a game of Russian roulette. He stepped on a cardboard box that collapsed. Then he crashed into the pallet next to him, a plastic-wrapped bundle of bulk-buy children’s mac and cheese in purple boxes.

“Shit! It’s like walking on—”

A bullhorn overrode his frustration. “THIS IS MAJOR WHARTON OF THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE! ALL CIVILIANS GET ON THE FLOOR! GET ON THE FLOOR!”

The voice came from the tunnel behind them. The bunker personnel had won. Now they would spread out, hunting for Drew.

“Marcus will go for the entrance,” Emily said. “If we—”

“LAY FACEDOWN ON THE FLOOR!” the bullhorn shouted. “LAY FACEDOWN ON THE FLOOR OR YOU MAY BE SHOT!”

Drew clambered forward with Emily. The beam of a flashlight stabbed at them from the next room down among the pallets and crates. “Someone’s up there!” a woman cried. The beam of light danced over Emily, lost her, then lit her blond hair again.