Moon Mask (16 page)

King studied the darkness but it was impregnable. He had led them this far through the well excavated tunnels by sheer dumb luck. But the hidden tunnel he had found the previous day was deep within the underground maze, difficult to get at even with the large halogen lamps the excavation team carried with them. Nevertheless, he groped the walls, feeling his way forward.

“Even if I can,” he asked. “What good will it do? We demolished the retaining wall so you could go play Indiana Jones with the crocodiles.”

“Just get us there,” Raine replied. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

UNESCO Base Camp,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela,

Colonel
Ming ripped through the canvass flap of the mess tent, eliciting startled gasps from its dying inhabitants.

Order had been re-established following the explosive excitement and five guards now stood inside the tent, training their weapons on its occupants.

Ming walked through the crowd of groaning scientists to the rear of the tent where two women had been tied to one of the poles. A guard stood beside them.

“You,” he snapped at them. He had removed his helmet now that the mask and its radioactive properties were not in the vicinity, and now that his men’s cover had been blown anyway. Secrecy was no longer important. He had gone to Plan B. Instead of Plan A’s subterfuge - a snatch and grab operation under the guise of U.S. Special Forces - the backup plan was far more brutal: a full-on assault, leaving behind no trace of their presence. All of the scientists would be eliminated, their deaths blamed on Venezuelan terrorists.

Glancing around at the tent’s occupants, he wondered whimsically whether he could save on his men’s ammunition. Without treatment for severe radiation sickness, these people would be dead in a matter of hours anyway.

He stopped in front of the women, noting their attractiveness. The Indian woman’s eyes glanced up nervously at him, but the Russian woman, whom his men had dragged in earlier, held a defiant gaze.

“Communist pig!” she snarled.

Ming surprised himself when he was unable to stifle a laugh. “Coming from a Russian,” he replied, “I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.” Then his eyes darkened and he crouched down to the Russian’s level. “For your sake, I hope it was a compliment.”

Nadia bit back a quick and angry response. “What do you want?”

“Want?” Ming’s English was flawless. His face was almost perfectly rounded, his skin silky smooth. He might even have been considered attractive in some circles, if it wasn’t for the wickedness of his narrow eyes, stained nicotine-yellow. “I would have thought that was obvious.”

“The mask.” She had, of course, already known the answer, but she was surprised when he corrected her.

“Wrong.” A pause. “I want to know
where
the mask has been taken.”

Nadia couldn’t prevent a coy smile from curling her lips. She had seen Raine and King heading for the sinkhole. The intricate network of artificially built tunnels and natural caves twisted like a maze, many criss-crossing, some circling back, others leading to dead ends. Ben King knew them like the back of his hand, and with Nathan Raine’s resourcefulness she had no doubt they were easily eluding their pursuers. She also had no doubt as to their destination: the hidden, skull-lined passage. It was where she would have headed.

“Why do you smile?” Ming asked.

“Because if they are inside the tunnels,” she replied smugly, “then you will never find them . . . at least not before the Americans get here.”

“Who would have thought it? A Russian cheering for the Americans.”

“Better American do-gooders than you Chinese arseholes.”

The back of Ming’s hand angrily struck her face, slamming her inside cheek against her teeth. Her head whipped to the side and she spat out globules of blood before glaring back up at her attacker with a frightening degree of anger.

“Colonel,”
a voice squawked over his radio in Mandarin. Nadia translated it. “
We have the thieves cornered. Closing in on their position now.”

Ming enjoyed watching the smug expression slide from the Russian’s face and he smiled victoriously. “Kill them and bring me the mask.”

The Labyrinth,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela,

Two
dozen Chinese troops had swept into the labyrinth of tunnels which burrowed into the Sarisariñama tepui, fanning out to flush out the thieves. Night vision goggles illuminated the gloom, casting the network of tunnels in a ghostly green pall.

It had seemed a futile task as the two man teams wandered in circles, bisecting one-another’s paths without even knowing it. But then the breakthrough had been made. Drops of blood on the ground . . . and then more further on . . . a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight to the hapless heroes.

The team that had found the blood trail followed it to the remains of a hastily de-constructed wall, the demolished stonework now only waist high. Four other teams had rendezvoused with them, huddled beneath the wall, waiting.

A glance down the sealed hallway revealed two figures, huddling around a distant bend, just out of the troopers’ rifle range.

The team leader held up a hand, counted down on his fingers and, on the clench of his fist, all ten men hurdled the low wall and moved silently down the tunnel, nearing their prey, rifles raised-

With a resounding boom and a lurch, the ground dropped away from the first line of soldiers and they plummeted into the hole in the ground.

But as they fell they reached out, grasping the edge of the hole. Huge stone blocks came away in their hands, one after another as they scrambled for purchase, the hole growing larger and swallowing up the second rank of men, then the third. Plumes of dust erupted, followed by the staccato of rifle fire.

As the dust began to settle, a figure appeared in the tunnel above them, brandishing a stolen rifle. He moved to the edge of the hole and peered down.

Illuminated
by the flare of muzzle flashes, Nathan Raine pinpointed seven men sloshing in the murky water, firing maddeningly into it. Dark shapes glided with surprising agility around them.

An explosion of gunfire, an agonised scream and the sickening crunch of bones brought seven men down to six, then five.

Raine watched the absolute panic in the chamber as the troopers fired desperately at the enormous shapes in the water. King came up alongside him.

“Don’t look-”

“Oh god,” he gasped, turning away, stomach clenching.

Five men became four, then three, two-

A bullet struck the wall of skulls that lined the corridor behind them. Raine whipped out a hand, pulled King down to ground level and fired off a couple of rounds at the demolished dividing wall from where the shot had originated. Through the ambient glow of muzzle-fire he could make out shapes moving there.

“Now what?” King shouted to him. The ruse with the hole had worked. They had lured half of their pursuers into the hidden corridor and the trap Raine had set.

It was a gamble, but it had paid off.

The price of the gamble was that the corridor was a dead end. They had no place else to run.

Except one.

“Into the hole,” Raine ordered.

“What?”

More bullets flew overhead as reinforcements arrived.

Raine grabbed hold of the rope which he had left there after extracting the human remains the previous day. He secured it to the baton he had hammered into the wall and then threw the length into the hole. He fired an erratic burst of bullets at the wall, blind in the darkness and the dust. “Go!” he bellowed and this time King obeyed, scrambling down the length of rope.

Below King’s dangling feet the chamber was completely dark, the gun fire ceased, the silence broken only by the gut-curdling crunching of human bones and the sloshing of competing beasts.

This was madness. He was being shot at from above while being lowered to a gnashing death below. His options looked grim.

“Hurry,” Raine called down.

As silently as he could, King’s feet touched the hard surface of the platform at the side of the chamber. The water sloshed around his knees, much deeper than it had been the previous day. He also heard the sound of water falling from above but could not see the cascade in the darkness.

“Okay,” he half-whispered back to Raine before hugging the wall, skirting, petrified, around it, as far away from the silhouettes of the reptilian monsters as he could.

Above him, Raine emptied the remainder of his rifle clip on the phantom shadows beyond the wall, causing just enough of a distraction to allow him to vault into the hole. The rope took his weight, swinging as he quickly slid down it like a fireman’s pole-

The baton wrenched free of the wall above and he dropped like a stone, splashing into the fetid water below!

He broke the surface, gasping, retching, and immediately came nose to snout with something huge, something deadly, something-

That exploded in a gristly eruption of crocodile skull, brains and mashed up leathery skin.

The roar of weapons fire was accompanied by the inhuman war-cry of a terrified archaeologist as Benjamin King emptied one of the dead soldiers’ discarded rifles into the attacking crocodilian’s skull. It clicked to empty and Raine took that as his cue to scramble out of the pool and sidle up to King. The other beasts turned on their own fallen, thrashing about, ripping limbs and tearing flesh.

Raine and King backed right up to the corner again. He muttered his thanks as he knelt next to the body whose weapon King had lifted and plucked his night vision goggles off the corpse’s head.

“You won’t be needing these,” he commented and then donned them.

The chamber came to life, wrapping itself around him, physically unchanged since he had come down here the previous day to salvage the mysterious skeletal remains. Only this time, through the ghostly aura of the goggles, the green-tinted chamber was a cauldron of mashed body parts. The remains of the Chinese soldiers floated alongside the bloated hulks of giant crocodiles like so much flotsam and jetsam. The demonic, glowing white shapes of the Orinoco Crocodiles thrashed about, caught up in a feeding frenzy the likes of which made his stomach churn.

“Okay,” King said slowly, breathing deeply, still consumed by darkness. “What do we do now?”

Raine glanced about the chamber. Three individual cascades of water emptied from slots high up in the wall, tumbling down into the frothing pool. Some sort of drainage system, he guessed. The slots were too narrow for either of them to squeeze through, however, even if they could find a way up to them. With the rope now under not just water but dinosaurs-from-hell, there was no way to climb back up. Besides, looking up, he saw the Chinese soldiers tentatively circling the hole, NVGs peering down the length of their QBZ-95 assault rifles.

Another splash of water nearby drew his attention quickly back to the feeding crocs. It wouldn’t be long before their attention drifted from their current feast to something a little fresher. But it wasn’t one of the crocodiles that had caused the splash. Instead, it was the bloodied and torn remains of half a torso and three quarter’s of an arm.

“Ever heard of the expression,
between a rock and a hard place,
Benny?” he asked, creeping forward and leaning down to the floating remains. He kept a wary eye on the water but for now all the crocs were preoccupied.

“Yes, of course.”

Raine began stripping what he could out of what remained of the dead soldier’s torn combat webbing: a torch, a large knife, a Norinco M-77B handgun and three grenades.

“Well,” he replied. “We’re there.”

As if to punch home his point, a bullet sparked across the wall behind him. He dived out of the way just in time, just as his assailant switched his rifle from single shot to full auto. A hailstorm of bullets tore into the chamber, spitting through the water. Some embedded themselves in the crocodiles’ thick scales, inciting an even bigger frenzy. Others chattered across the walls, ripping out chips of stone and chunks of masonry.

Raine pushed King against the wall beneath the alcove where he had found the Moon Mask, just out of the shooter’s line of fire. A quick glance up confirmed that the shooter was adjusting his position. They wouldn’t just be sitting ducks. They would be ducks lying down sunbathing with their arms behind their heads and a bulls-eye painted on their chests!

Raine’s mind hurried through every possible scenario in the blink of an eye, but there was only really one option.

“Get in the water!”

“What!? Are you insane?” King protested, shielding his head from flying chips of stone. He could not see Raine grin and shrug.

“Yeah, a little.”

Then, before the archaeologist could argue further, Raine grabbed his elbow and dragged him forward, firing blindly and one handed at the hole above his head. He threw them both into the water just as three more Chinese troops took up positions and strafed the entire chamber with bullets.

12:

. . . Death Below

The Labyrinth,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela,

The
water was icy cold and putrid, stinging Benjamin King’s eyes as he squinted. Orange bursts of machine gun fire blazed above, muted by the water, distorted by the ripples . . . and, terrifyingly, revealing the silhouettes of the killing machines amidst which he now swam.

Panic rose in him. He broke the surface, gasped for air but felt something strong grasp his ankle and pull him back down.

In terror, he thrashed, kicking and punching through the water. His fist hit something hard and leathery. An enormous shape whipped away from him, a muscle-bound tail smacking into his chest like a sledge hammer. And still, whatever had hold of his ankle did not let go, but instead pulled him deeper into the churning pool of water, towards the far wall.