Darkness Under Heaven (19 page)

“A
ny second thoughts?” said Avakian. “I can still take you back to the apartment, no problem.”

“No thank you,” said Doctor Rose.

“Just so you understand this means you have to go where I go. You don't want to be sitting here alone in the van if someone stops by and wants to know what you're doing. And where I'm going tonight won't be all that pleasant.”

That combination of what she considered to be condescension veiled as consideration was really starting to annoy her. “No matter how many times you tell me, I still understand. Even the way I'm feeling now, it's better than staying behind in that apartment.”

“Everyone feels that way the first time they do something like this. I feel tight right now myself.”

She didn't buy it. He looked like he'd just scored free tickets to the hottest show in town. Having the time of his life. While as soon as she heard what she'd agreed to do she had to go to the bathroom. Every time she went she felt like she had to go again a minute later. “I doubt that anyone ever felt like this.”

“Your stomach's squeezed down to about the size of a raisin, right? If your hands aren't shaking your knees are.
And if you haven't sweated through your shirt yet, you will.”

She looked over at him as they weaved through the evening traffic. “You described all my symptoms perfectly. At first I thought I was starting menopause. Which was just what I needed right now.”

Avakian chuckled. Menopause.

“
You
felt this way?” she said.

“You'd better believe it.”

“Doing what?”

“Parachuting into Grenada.”

“Okay,” she said. “That beats med school finals, or my first surgical procedure.”

“But having done those, you know the anticipation is always worse than the execution.”

“I'm not so sure this time. You know, the only symptom you didn't describe was…”

“You feel like you could shit through a screen door without touching the wire, right?”

Doctor Rose burst into laughter. Rocking back and forth, straining against her seat belt. Wiping her eyes, she said, “Oh, I feel much better now. Thanks, Pete.”

“One strong emotion always counteracts another.” Avakian took the exit off the West 3rd Ring Road. “We're getting close.”

“If you don't want me talking, tell me to shut up.”

In his experience, there was no way that keeping a woman from talking was ever going to make her less nervous. “Doesn't bother me. Go right ahead.”

“Why haven't I ever heard of something like this?”

“Well, two reasons,” said Avakian. “First of all, terrorists are mainly concerned with making a big media impact. Their attacks aren't military operations, they're armed
propaganda operations. The second reason is not politically correct.”

She smiled in the darkness. Then it was probably going to be good. “Go ahead.”

“Okay. The vast majority of today's terrorism is Muslim, with Arab origins. And the only thing Arabs are really any good at is murder.”

“I thought you said you didn't hate anyone you didn't know personally.”

“I did a security contract in Saudi Arabia. For the first and last time. And the less said about that, the better.”

“Sounds like they didn't make much of an impression on you.”

“They didn't. Now, what were we talking about?”

“Terrorism.”

“Right. Critical system vulnerabilities aren't spectaculars that lend themselves to great TV. Beijing had major water supply problems even after they expanded their infrastructure for the Olympics. And I just happen to know that they've got eleven treatment plants in the city, most of them in a circle between the 4th and 3rd Ring Roads, and six in the suburbs.” The map was taped to the dashboard. “There's probably a battalion of troops guarding each one. Which, since we don't have a thousand Rangers hanging around, means we won't be getting anywhere near those plants. But we don't have to. Okay, here we go. A likely looking spot.”

Main water and sewer lines always followed main roads into cities. Avakian had picked a location that wasn't residential, with no businesses that were open at night. Traffic of course—it was Beijing after all. But you couldn't have everything.

He pulled over near the curb and activated his four-way
flashers. Reaching under the seat, he pulled out the magnetized revolving red light. Turning it on, he leaned out the window and stuck it on the roof of the van.

“You remember the routine,” he said.

“You made me practice it enough.”

As soon as they'd gotten into the van they'd changed into cheap one-piece white Tyvek plastic coveralls, with hoods. Splash suits. With high rubber boots. And since those suits were damnably hot, nothing but underwear underneath. The suits not only looked right, but they were going to make cleanup a lot easier.

And before they exited they donned full-face respirators, the industrial type with filter canisters on each side. They were a good disguise against non-Oriental features, and Avakian was worried about toxic gases. Rubber gloves were also going to be necessary. And, strictly for camouflage, yellow plastic construction hard hats and reflective safety vests.

Opening the back door Avakian saw that he had in fact stopped right in front of one of Beijing's attractively ornate steel manhole covers. Perfect.

He stuck another revolving light on the back roof. They looked official enough, and no one was likely to be checking for vehicle logos in the middle of the night.

With the traffic whipping by, Avakian unloaded the construction barriers he'd stolen from an unattended site, arranging them around the manhole. Cheap yellow-and-black plastic sawhorses with solar-powered yellow blinking lights. Then farther down the road a line of reflective red plastic traffic cones.

“Should we be calling this much attention to ourselves?” Doctor Rose asked, her voice muffled by the respirator.

“Sneak around and people get suspicious,” Avakian replied. “Look and act like you're supposed to be there, no one pays any attention.”

With a narrow pry bar in one hand and a crowbar hook in the other, he wedged the manhole cover up and dragged it clear. Clicking on the big 12-volt lantern, he shined it down into the hole. Good news and bad news. Good news: it wasn't a sewer. Water lines didn't run down sewers—only flowing streams of sewage did. Bad news: it wasn't a sewer but it still looked pretty bad. He glanced over at the good doctor. And foresaw problems.

Avakian pulled the sliding metal ladder out of the back of the van, extending it to full length as he ran it down into the hole. At least it hit bottom. That had been a major concern.

Now he returned to the van and unlocked one of the three large metal toolboxes. Removing the top tray revealed shiny pipe bombs swaddled in bubble wrapping. He took out two and completed the connections, wrapping the bare wire in electrical tape. Then he tucked them back into their bubble wrap and carefully zipped the package into the nylon duffel bag he slung across his back. “Check your respirator.”

She clapped her hands over the filter canisters and took a breath. The rubber sealed to her face, and no air leaked in. “It's working,” she reported.

“Okay, follow me.”

He started down the ladder. From the look of the walls in the lantern beam the respirator was going to be a godsend. Because there seemed to be about a thousand years of grossness down there. He stepped off into a few inches of liquid. Oh, this was not going to go over well at all.

But on the bright side it wasn't like a manhole—there was actually a tunnel continuing down a ways. Though relatively narrow and only slightly higher than himself.

There was a big pipe that had to be a conduit into the sewers. It actually looked like it was made out of…he gave it a knock to confirm. It really was made out of clay. And running right above it a smaller diameter cast-iron water pipe. And was that a gas line? It sure looked like it. An added benefit.

Doctor Rose was coming down now. Seriously stressed, if the indications were correct. She was breathing through her respirator like Darth Vader. He began war gaming what to do if she freaked out on him down here.

It started for Judy Rose as she came down the ladder into the tunnel. She couldn't take her eyes off the walls, from which were hanging mini stalactites of filth. Just what kind of filth she tried hard not to speculate about. Her stomach was rolling around enough as it was.

The bottom of the tunnel held a liquid that only an optimist would have guessed to be water. She hadn't thought it would be that small. She also hadn't thought she was claustrophobic. But she was definitely feeling claustrophobic.

Her lantern barely penetrated the gloom farther down the tunnel. Oh my God.

Without realizing it, she'd said it out loud. When the hand grabbed her arm she almost leaped all the way up the ladder.

“You need to slow and shallow your breathing,” Avakian was saying. “You're breathing harder than those filters can give you air. You'll get hypoxic.”

So that was the source of the headache. God, she couldn't even diagnose a medical condition now. Come on,
Judy. This wasn't as bad as…okay, as her first human dissection. She looked around the tunnel again. No, this was worse.

“Why don't you wait here,” he suggested. “Just lean against the ladder and look up. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

“Back from where?” she demanded. Oh, now even she could hear the panic in her own voice.

“Farther down.”

“Why can't you put them here?”

“Because the tunnel goes farther down,” he explained patiently. “We want to make this hard to locate and repair.”

He started down the tunnel. But when the darkness swallowed up his light and she couldn't see him another wave of panic hit her. It was more scary to stay. She hurried after him but the sewer pipe took up so much space she could only walk sideways. The top of the pipe was at low chest height.

Avakian saw her light coming. He shined his down at her and waited. Wonderful. Just wonderful. If they were all going to be like this he might get one more done before dawn.

“Sorry,” she said. “Too scary to wait.”

“Okay, let's get moving,” he said.

She thought it would be cooler underground, but it wasn't. The pipes probably conducted a lot of heat. The humidity was incredible, with water—or whatever it was—dripping off everything. And the plastic suit definitely didn't help. Salt sweat was pouring into her eyes, out of reach inside the respirator. She could feel the perspiration running down her legs and squishing inside her boots every time she took a step. It was actually easier to think about dying of heatstroke than thinking about the tunnel closing in on her.

When she'd been rushing to catch up she'd focused her light down the tunnel and ignored everything else. Now as they moved she played the beam over the tunnel wall. And the wall seemed to be moving. The light, which had been steady a moment before, now began to shake along with the hand that held it. The moving wall was a mass of cockroaches, disturbed by the light.

Avakian heard a sound like moaning behind him. He turned around quickly and saw what the light was focused at. He grabbed both her shoulders. “If you feel sick do
not
take off your respirator, no matter what. Breathe through your nose, head back to the ladder, and climb up.”

“I'm okay,” came the muffled reply.

She had guts, all right. They'd probably gone far enough. He'd been watching the lengths of pipe to see how often there was a joint.

He finished examining one of those joints and swung the light back down the tunnel. Two small, narrowly spaced reflections flashed back at nearly head height. Just as Avakian registered the fact that they were eyes, the rat ran straight at them down the top of the sewer pipe and skittered past at impressive speed. He'd been keeping his hand on the pipe for balance. He pulled it off and reared back with his light, ready to take a swing as the rat passed by within a couple of feet.

There was a shriek from Doctor Rose, and before he could turn around she'd jumped onto his back.

From a distance it probably looked like one of those great old Warner Brothers cartoons, Sylvester the Cat and Porky Pig. But Avakian had other things on his mind just then. He had one hand on his respirator to keep it from coming off under the assault, but otherwise hadn't moved a muscle. He tamped it all down, forcing himself not to
yell. Nothing to add to the general panic. Instead he said calmly, “Judy, everything's all right now. Very carefully, without a lot of bouncing around, I need you to climb down off my back. Right now.”

It was that calm voice that awakened Judy's sense of shame and caused her to realize just how profoundly humiliating it was to be clinging to the poor man's back with both arms wrapped around his neck, probably choking him to death. If he'd thrown her off or something it would have been easier to deal with, but he just stood there as if she wasn't actually clinging to him like a barnacle. There was little dignity to be salvaged from the situation, but with what she could muster she extended her feet until they touched ground again and then released her death grip on his neck. And managed to get out, “I am so very sorry.”