Survivalist - 17 - The Ordeal (18 page)

“There is activity beyond the doors. This way,” and he gestured for her to join him on the other side of the recreation hall.

She moved quickly, toward him, mildly surprised that she wasn’t feeling greater fatigue as a result of the relatively sedentary lifestyle she’d been forced into by her pregnancy.

She stopped beside Mann and he raised a finger to his lips, signaling silence. Her eyes moved around the room. Colorful murals covered the upper portions of the walls, their theme apparently Chinese folklore, because there were dragons, princesses, scraggly-bearded men in flowing robes who looked like some cross between monk and wizard.

Mann’s voice through her radio: “Schmidt—come in. Schmidt?”

There was no answer from the tall, very Nordic-looking Sergeant Schmidt whom Colonel Mann had left guarding the

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kitchen to the corridors just fronting the end of the tunnel. “Schmidt?” Still no answer.

Mann’s face seamed with worry lines and he said, “Quickly—into the hallway. Standard entry pattern. On my mark!”

The remaining men of Wolfgang Mann’s command moved out as if they were pre-programmed automatons, but she realized that it was training instead. One man on each side of the doorways, the others in an arc just behind them, weapons ready.

Mann joined the team on the left, Sarah stopping beside him until he pushed her behind him. “Close your coat. It has bullet-resistant properties, or did I mention that?” Awkwardly, with his left hand, he withdrew the antique Walther P-38 he carried, the STG-101 in his right hand only.

“No.”

“Close it, then.” And he turned his head toward the men at the other doors. “Be ready— Now!”

As her eyes moved to the doors nearest her, for the first time she realized the stethoscope-like listening devices had been removed and, where the doors seamed, there was a small rectangular object, black in color. She guessed an explosive charge and, in the next instant, both sets of doors blew open outward and in the well-lighted corridor beyond, she saw a dozen Soviet Elite Corps commandoes in their black BDUs, assault rifles at the ready, wheeling toward the explosions. But Mann’s people fired first.

There was gunfire from behind them and Sarah automatically turned toward it, more of the Soviet commandoes pouring into the recreation hall through the kitchen doors.

She hit the bolt to cycle one of the grenades into the assault rifle’s launcher, then pulled the trigger, the butt of the weapon braced against her hip.

As the first grenade exploded she was already launching a second, Mann beside her, spraying one of the forty-round

magazines empty, the P-38 9mm firing from his left hand.

There were voices shouting commands, everyone speaking at once. Sarah Rourke kept firing the grenade launcher, unable to understand anyone clearly enough to know what was being said.

The Russians coming through the kitchen doors fell back.

Mann tapped her arm with the muzzle of his pistol, the slide locked back, the gun empty. “Sarah! Come with me!” And he was running, toward the blown-open doors. Sarah ran after him …

They had reached a landing and at the end of the landing, a long, high-ceilinged tunnel ran perpendicularly to the tube. It looked like a possible way into the Second City, perhaps through the missile-launching station itself.

The tube they had worked their way down seemed to go on forever.

Han Lu Chen carefully enunciated each word, as though his normally perfect English might be insufficient to the task of translating writing from his native language. The Chinese characters—each several inches high—covered approximately one hundred twenty degrees of arc of the tube’s total diameter. “Any unauthorized access beyond this point will activate the defense system. Unauthorized persons should turn back immediately. Warning. Dangerous. Turn back.”

“They’re certainly explicit enough,” Michael remarked.

Vassily Prokopiev volunteered. “Since I am less physically capable than any of you at the moment because of my earlier wounds, I am the logical person to go first.”

“That’s a great and noble thought, Vassily. But you’re also less capable of running away from whatever gets started and we need you alive if we bump into any of your troops.”

Prokopiev’s broad shoulders shrugged under his torn Soviet uniform. ■’ I can—

! I

Michael looked at Maria Leuden. “No. Aside from the fact I ‘ won’t let you, you’ve got the best chance of making enough sense out of their computer that we can enable an abort program.” And Michael looked at Han. “And don’t you start. I’ve gone first since we started down the chimney and there’s no reason to change that now.” Michael began loosening the knot holding the rope about his waist. “This may be bullshit,” and Michael Rourke nodded toward the wall. “Or the defense system hasn’t survived the centuries. Or maybe it still works. I’m going to put a lot more distance between us and we’re changing the order, here. Han—you rope in behind me, but keep about twenty-five or thirty feet back. We’ve got rope to spare. Then Maria—you and Prokopiev rope onto Han. If they have electronic traps, they might have trap doors, anything. This way, if the floor goes out from under me, I’m covered but nobody’s so close that if it’s something else they’ll be hurt. The important thing is that Maria’s computer knowledge and Han’s knowledge of Chinese come together at the fire-control center for the Chinese missiles. If they really are planning on detonating, that’s the only chance we have to stop them.”

Michael looked at Vassily Prokopiev and shot the KGB Elite Corps commander a smile. “And guess what that makes us, Vassilyf’

“The word—it escapes me, but I understand.” Michael looked at him a moment longer. “The word’s ‘expendable.’”

The growling in the tunnel darkness grew louder. “If we use guns, we’ll attract whatever’s human anywhere within a quarter of a mile at the inside, if the gunfire outside hasn’t attracted them already.”

“I understand, but I’m more worried about what isn’t human,” Paul Rubenstein whispered beside him.

John Rourke let the M-16 fall to his side on its sling. His right hand closed over the haft of the LS-X and he unsheathed it. He heard the snap closure on Paul’s Gerber MK II fighting knife popping open, the sound of steel against fabric.

They began walking again.

From the darkness outside the cones of their flashlight beams, Rourke heard the sounds of footfalls and breathing so heavy it sounded labored. John Rourke wheeled toward the sounds, calling out to Paul, “Watch out from the left!” As Rourke swung the light, something out of a nightmare materialized less than a yard from him. It was a bear, he knew, on a rational plane, but the creature was horribly disfigured, one eye gone, the wound where the eye had been obviously from a burn. The bear’s right front paw slapped toward him and Rourke dodged back, the bear coming at him again.

“Holy shit!” Paul Rubenstein half shouted.

“Watch out!” The bear turned awkwardly toward Paul Rubenstein, snarling at the flashlight in the younger man’s hand, growling now as though somehow it were in pain.

John Rourke lunged, the LS-X held in his right fist as if it were a rapier, thrusting into the bear from behind against the area which in a human would have been the branches of the external carotid. But he felt the primary edge of his knife slip against muscle, the bear shrieking its anger and spinning toward him, Rourke backstepping just in time.

He aimed the light toward the animal’s remaining eye, Paul visible in silhouette to its right side. Paul’s knife stabbed downward, buried halfway to the hilt. The bear twisted, its face contorted in a rictus of agony, the right forepaw slapping backward, Paul Rubenstein catching its full force and thrown against the tunnel wall and down.

Rourke’s right arm flashed forward again, the flashlight in his left hand still aimed toward the bear’s solitary eye, the LS-X stabbing into the bear’s throat. The hulking body twisted, Rourke still holding to the knife, wrenched from his feet, his fist still locked to the knife, the bear starting to fall on him. Rourke ripped at the knife, pulling it free, rolling right as the animal crashed downward, paws clawing at the tunnel floor, visible in the wildly gyrating beam of the anglehead which had fallen from Rourke’s grasp.

Rourke threw himself onto the animal now, the LS-X in both fists, hammering down into the neck and head and shoulders, stabbing again and again, the animal’s body heaving under him, the cries emanating from the creature at once frightening and pitiful.

The body seemed to convulse, and as the head turned right, Rourke drove the knife half the length of its foot-long blade into the side of the neck.

And suddenly all movement ceased.

Rourke let go of the knife and fell back from the animal to the tunnel floor.

“John? John!”

“I’m all right,” Rourke answered the voice from the darkness. “How about you?”

“Knocked the wind outa me—holy—”

“Yeah.” Rourke reached out for the anglehead flashlight, picked it up, shone the light toward the sound of Paul’s voice, and already his friend was getting shakily to his feet. “Your light’s over there,” Rourke told him, seeing the second anglehead a few yards distant.

“I see it.”

Rourke shone the light on the dead bear. There could be more creatures like this confined in the tunnel, but somehow he didn’t think so. Paul’s knife was still buried in it and, bracing his left foot against the dead animal, Rourke wrenched the blade free, then set it on the floor just out of the growing blood pool. His own knife had bitten deeper and was harder to extract, but he got it free.

“Should have tried grinning him to death like Davey Crockett did,” Paul suggested, his voice still unsteady-sounding, no humor in it.

“Yeah, well, you try that technique next time and let me know how it turns out. And I’ll loan you my knife just in case the bear’s near-sighted.” Bears usually were, one of the reasons why, in the wild at least, bears might attack when unprovoked, mistaking a human for another like itself.

“You bet,” the younger man said, half laughing, but the laughter hollow-sounding.

With the flashlight, Rourke scanned the creature’s body. Burn marks and other less immediately identifiable signs of mutilation were everywhere on the back and paws and head, clearly deliberate torture.

“Why’d they do that to him?”

“Bred him to be a maneater, then kept him set up with a constant supply,” John Rourke almost whispered. “Deliberately caused him as much pain as possible, kept him enraged. He’s the source of all our bones down here, or maybe he had a predecessor who contributed some of them. They’re in various stages relative to approximate age—the bones.”

“That’s why they kept their zoo. To use the animals. Shit. The bastards—”

“It looks like that.” Rourke nodded. “You up to moving on?” As Rourke spoke, he wiped the blades of both knives as clean as possible against the hide of the animal.

“Poor creature,” Paul observed, his voice edged with genuine sadness. “What kind of people—damn them! This animal, the people they put in here for him to kill. What kind of people are they?”

“The kind of people we’ve come to stop from detonating a nuclear warhead. The bear was their watchman and executioner at the same time. Come on.” Rourke sheathed his knife and started moving deeper into the tunnel.

At any moment, a warhead might be triggered and, Rourke realized, he would never know it because he would be instantly vaporized, just gone. Like shutting down a computer without saving the information fed into it, vanished.

The angle of the tunnel floor began to rise sharply, steadily, the light Rourke had seen from the doorway suddenly brighter now, yellow-looking still. They kept moving, no more strange breathing noises, no growls from the shadows. But what lay ahead, Rourke realized, might be far worse than a mutilated animal exploited to kill.

By the luminous black face of his Rolex—it was no longer dark enough for the luminosity to be effective and too dark to see the watch clearly, so he used his flashlight—almost an hour had passed since they had entered the tunnel, how much of that time consumed by the fight with the bear impossible to say. It could have been seconds, or several minutes, violence tending to dilate and distort one’s perception of time, the more intense the violence the greater the perceptual distortion.

The bones were fewer here and considerably less concentrated than farther back and this caused John Rourke to consider that something near the end of the tunnel might have kept the bear away. What? Rourke wondered.

They kept moving.

“What do we try to do exactly once we get where we’re going?” Paul Rubenstein asked him, his voice hushed.

“If they have a detonation program begun, we try to stop it,” Rourke whispered back, stating the obvious. But he knew the intent of the younger man’s question well enough. “If we can’t stop it, then we try to think of something to neutralize or at least minimize the effect.”

“You mean, if it’s a missile, we keep it from launching and let it detonate inside the mountain. What about the other warheads, though?”

“That’s a risk,” Rourke answered after a moment. “A very real risk. But if it gets to that, there won’t be that many options left anyway.”

“What about Michael and the others?”

“There’s a chance they’ll get the job done and this will be unnecessary. But as long as there’s a chance they won’t— They’ve got about the same chance we have. Not very good.” And Rourke felt a smile cross his lips as he clapped Paul on the shoulder. “But when’s that ever stopped us, hmm?” Only idiots or persons with a death wish pursued hopeless danger— or persons with no other options remaining. Such had been the relationship between Rourke and Paul Rubenstein—no other options. Rourke thought back to the times between the Night of the War and the Great Conflagration. Then or now, he could have asked for no finer friend, known no braver, no finer man.

They kept moving, the tunnel floor rising so steeply now that it was like walking up a hillside, the added effort imposed by the incline slowing them.