Plague Ship (38 page)

Moving cautiously, he realized the garage doors were the only exit and was certain the radio wouldn’t mask the sound of one of them rattling open. There was really only one avenue open to him.

Brute force it is, he thought.

The wrench he grabbed was at least eighteen inches long and weighed ten pounds. He hefted it like a surgeon taking up a scalpel, fully knowing his capabilities with the instrument. He had gotten into his first real fight as a teenager when a strung-out junky brandishing a knife had tried to rob his uncle’s gas station. Max had knocked out eight of the would-be thief’s teeth with a wrench identical to the one he carried now.

He moved cautiously across the garage, finding cover where he could and stalking slowly because the human eye’s peripheral vision is adept at picking up movement. Any sound he made was drowned out by the radio.

One of the mechanics had his face covered by a darkened welder’s shield to protect his eyes, so Max concentrated on the second, a tall, lanky man in his thirties with a bushy beard and greasy hair tied in a ponytail. He was bent over the engine compartment, running his hands over a bundle of hoses, so he never felt Max’s presence behind him until Max brought the wrench down with a measured swing.

The blow dropped the mechanic as if he’d been poleaxed, and the egg it left on his skull would last him weeks.

Max turned. The welder had sensed motion and was just straightening, reaching to pull off his mask, when Hanley stepped forward and, like a batter in the all-star game, swung the wrench. At the perfect moment in his swing, Max let the wrench fly. The case-hardened tool smashed the plastic visor, which saved the welder from having his face torn off, while the power of the throw tossed the man bodily into a nearby rolling toolbox. The blowtorch, on its long rubber lines, dropped at Max’s feet, the blue jet flame making him step back when he felt the heat on his bare feet.

A third mechanic who had been hidden on the far side of the truck suddenly appeared around the front bumper, drawn by the commotion. He stared at the unconscious welder sprawled against the toolbox before turning toward Max.

Max watched as confusion became understanding and then anger, but before the man could give in to his flight-or-fight reflex Max scooped up the still-burning torch and tossed it in an easy underarm throw. Another instinct took over, and the mechanic automatically grabbed for it as it came at him.

At over six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the tongue of burning oxygen and acetylene needed the briefest contact to char flesh. The mechanic caught the torch with the nozzle pointed directly at his chest. A smoldering hole opened in his overalls instantly, and skin and muscle sizzled away to reveal the white of his rib cage. The bones blackened before the massive load of shock made him drop the brass torch.

His expression didn’t change in the seconds it took his brain to realize his heart had stopped beating. He collapsed slowly to the concrete floor. The smell made Max want to retch. He hadn’t intended to kill the hapless mechanic, but he steeled himself. He had to save his son, and, unfortunately, this man stood in his way.

The welder was the closest to his size, so he took a moment to strip him out of his coveralls. He had to take the third mechanic’s boots because the others were hopelessly small. He did so without looking up from the man’s feet.

With a pair of wire cutters, he moved to the two trucks and opened the hoods, cutting the wires that sprouted from the distributor caps like black tentacles. As he started for the quad bikes, he saw a coffee machine set up on a workbench. Apart from filters, mugs, and a plastic container of creamer powder, there was a box of sugar. Max grabbed it, and, rather than waste time messing with the Kawasakis’ electronics, he unscrewed their fuel caps and dumped sugar into their tanks. The bikes wouldn’t run for more than a quarter mile, and it would take hours to clean out their fuel lines and cylinders.

A minute later, he was astride the one idling four-wheeler he hadn’t tampered with and pressed the button that opened the garage door. It was night, and wind-ripped rain lashed through the opening. Max couldn’t have asked for better conditions. There was no point closing the door. Kovac would know he was gone and how he was making his escape.

Slitting his eyes against the rain, he twisted the throttle and shot out into the unknown.

CHAPTER 24

KOVAC’S ORDERS HAD BEEN SPECIFIC TO THE FIVE men he’d dispatched to watch over the dismantled Responsivist facility in the Philippines. They weren’t to interfere with people investigating the building unless it became apparent that they were going to breach the underground sections. In the weeks they had observed the site, the only interest shown had been a couple of Filipinos on a well-used motorcycle. They had remained only a few minutes, looking over the building to see if there was anything worth looting. When they realized everything had been stripped, they had roared off down the road in a cloud of blue exhaust.

The way the two approached today had put the guards on immediate alert, and when the blast echoed across the open field they knew their caution had been well founded.

AMID THE TUMULT of crashing cement, Juan fell through the hole Linc had created, landing solidly on his feet on a flight of steep stairs. The air was an impenetrable wall of dust, forcing Cabrillo to run blindly down the steps, trusting that Linc had cleared out of the way. A piece of cement the size of his head hit his shoulder with a glancing blow, but it was enough to throw him off his feet. He tumbled the last few steps and lay dazed on the landing, as more debris rained down all around him.

A powerful hand groped for the back of his bush shirt and drew him into an antechamber and out of what was becoming an avalanche.

“Thanks,” Juan panted as Linc helped him to his feet.

Both men’s faces and clothes were a uniform shade of pale gray from the dust.

The timber scaffolding that supported the weight of the concrete plug gave way entirely, and tons of cement and broken wood crashed onto the staircase, completely filling the entrance to the antechamber with rubble. The darkness inside the chamber was absolute.

Linc pulled a flashlight from his haversack. The beam was as bright as a car’s xenon headlamp, but all it revealed were clouds of concrete dust.

“Remind you of anything?” Linc asked with a dry chuckle.

“Little like Zurich when we sprang that banker awhile back,” Juan answered with a cough.

“What do you think of our reception committee?”

“I feel like an idiot for thinking it was going to be that easy.”

“Amen, brother.” Linc flashed the beam across the choked-off doorway. Some of the concrete slabs had to weigh half a ton or more. “It’s going to take a couple of hours to dig our way out of here.”

“As soon as we open even a small hole, they’re going to gun us down like fish in a barrel.” Juan purposefully engaged his pistol’s safety and slid it into his waistband at the small of his back. “Outgunned and most likely outnumbered. I don’t fancy clawing our way into an ambush.”

“Wait them out?”

“Won’t work. We’ve got one canteen and a couple of protein bars. They could sit out there from now until doomsday.” As he spoke, Juan was fiddling with his satellite phone.

“Then we can call in the cavalry. Eddie can have an assault force here inside of forty-eight hours.”

“I’m not getting a signal.” Cabrillo turned the phone off to conserve its battery.

“All right, you’ve shot down all of my suggestions, what’s up your sleeve?”

Juan took the light from Linc’s hand and played it along the downward-sloping tunnel that had been bored into the earth decades ago. “We see where this leads.”

“What happens if they come in after us?”

“Hope we have enough warning so we can lay an ambush.”

“Why not wait for them right here?”

“If I was leading that team, I would lob in a bunch of grenades before committing my men. We’d be mincemeat before they needed to fire a single shot. If we hung back out of grenade range, we’d be too exposed in this tunnel. Better to find a more defensible position. On the bright side, if they do bother to come after us it most likely means there’s another way out of here.”

Linc considered their options, and with a broad sweep of his arm indicated they should proceed down the subterranean passageway.

One wall of the tunnel was a long, continuous slab of stone, while the other showed signs that it had been worked by tools. The two men could walk comfortably side by side, and there was at least ten feet of headroom.

“This is a natural fissure the Japanese expanded during their occupation,” Cabrillo said as he studied the rock.

“Most likely split open by an earthquake,” Linc agreed. “They built their factory, or whatever the hell it was, where the hole reached the surface.”

Juan pointed out dark splatters on the stone floor. The spray pattern indicated it was blood—copious amounts of blood. “Gunshot.”

“More than one victim, too.”

Juan jerked the light away from the grisly tableau. His mouth was a thin, grim line.

The air temperature dropped and the humidity built as they descended deeper into the earth. It was thinking about the misery that had occurred here rather than the plummeting temperature that made Cabrillo shiver.

The tunnel wasn’t straight, but rather corkscrewed and twisted as it fell away at a gentle angle. After twenty-five minutes and more than two miles, the cave floor leveled out, and they discovered the first side chamber. The entrance was partially blocked by a minor cave-in, and the tunnel’s ceiling was a fractured mess of stone ready to collapse at any moment. This cavern, too, had been a natural geologic feature that the Japanese had expanded. The room was roughly circular, fifty feet across, with a ceiling that was at least fifteen feet high. There was nothing in the cavern except some bolts along the walls that had once carried electrical wiring.

“Administration area?” Linc wondered aloud.

“Makes sense, being the closest room to the surface.”

They found two smaller side caves before discovering a fourth in which the Japanese had left artifacts behind. This chamber had a dozen iron bunks bolted to the floor and several flimsy pressed-metal cabinets along one wall. As Juan checked the drawers, Linc examined the bedsteads.

“You wouldn’t think they would have bothered giving their prisoners beds,” Linc said.

“There’s nothing in any of these drawers.” Juan looked at Lincoln. “They needed the beds because they had to restrain their victims. Someone intentionally infected with typhus, cholera, or some type of poison gas is going to thrash around.”

Franklin snapped his hands away from the metal bunk as though he’d been burned.

They found four more side chambers like this one, some large enough to hold forty beds. They also found a small, waist-high cave entrance in the main tunnel. Juan wriggled his head and shoulders into the aperture and saw that the cave beyond dropped precipitously. At the extreme end of his light’s range, he could see the floor of the cavern littered with all sorts of unidentifiable junk. This had been a communal dump, and amid the rubbish were human bones. They had become disjointed over the decades, so Cabrillo couldn’t tell how many there were. Five hundred would be a conservative estimate.

“This place is like a slaughterhouse,” he said when he pulled himself free. “A death factory.”

“And they kept it running for eighteen months.”

“I think the surface facility was used solely to maintain the secret laboratories down here, where they experimented with the really nasty stuff. Using a cave system meant they could isolate it in a hurry if they ever had a viral outbreak.”

“Ruthless and efficient.” There was no admiration in Linc’s voice. “The Japanese could have taught the Nazis a thing or two.”

“I’m sure they did,” Juan said, still a little unsettled by what he’d just seen. “Unit 731 has its roots going back to 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. Just before war’s end, information and technology transfers went the other way. Germany supplied Imperial Japan with jet and rocket engines for suicide aircraft, as well as nuclear materials.”

Linc’s next comment died on his lips.

Deadened by distance and the surrounding rock, they couldn’t hear the explosion at the cave’s entrance. Rather, both men felt a jolt of air pressure against their bodies, like the windblast of a passing truck. The Responsivists had breached the pile of debris and were now in the tunnel system hunting them.

“They probably know the tunnels and will be coming on fast,” Cabrillo said grimly. “We have maybe a half hour to either find a way out of here or someplace we can defend with a pair of pistols and eleven rounds of ammunition.”

The next medical chamber hadn’t been stripped as much as the others. There were thin mattresses on the beds, and the cabinets were stocked with jars of chemicals. The labels were in German. Juan pointed this out to Linc, as it proved his earlier point.

Linc studied the labels, then read aloud in English: “Chlorine. Distilled alcohol. Hydrogen peroxide. Sulfur dioxide. Hydrochloric acid.”

Cabrillo had forgotten Linc spoke German. “I’ve got an idea. Find me some sodium bicarbonate.”

“I don’t think this is the time to worry about a bellyache.” Linc remarked blandly as he scanned the bottles and jars.

“High school chemistry lessons. I don’t remember too much about the safe stuff, but my teacher delighted in showing us how to make chemical weapons.”

“Lovely.”

“He was this aging hippie who thought we needed to defend ourselves when the government eventually came to seize all private property,” Juan explained. Linc threw him an odd look and passed over the appropriate glass container. “What can I say?” Cabrillo shrugged. “I grew up in California.”

Juan asked Linc to find one other jar of chemicals.

“So what do you want to do with this stuff?” Linc handed over a jar containing an amber liquid.

“Chemical warfare.”

They agreed on a spot to lay their ambush in one of the smaller medical wards. Linc bundled up some blankets and mattresses, in the shape of two men huddled under the farthest bedstead. Juan rigged a booby trap using a roll of electrical tape from Linc’s bag, the chemicals, and his canteen. In the uncertain glow of a flashlight, the mannequins were more than sufficient to lure the Responsivists. He placed Linc’s cell phone on walkie-talkie mode between the two inert figures.