Darkness Under Heaven (20 page)

“No one likes rats,” Avakian replied, as if he were ordering lunch. “It's just that I'm carrying two live bombs strapped to my back.”

She took two very fast, very involuntary steps back. That happened to be a little piece of information she'd totally forgotten in the crush of events. And also forgetting all about rats for the moment, she put her hand on the sewer pipe to steady herself. Well, if she hadn't passed out by now she probably wasn't going to.

Now that she'd given him a little room, Avakian took off the duffel bag and set it atop the sewer pipe. He also set his light on the pipe and aimed the lens down. “If you could shine your light over here, too, that would be great,” he said, unzipping the bag.

First of all, the timer buttons hadn't been hit and the timers weren't running. He'd picked ones without any prominent front-mounted buttons, and that was looking like a really good call right now. Now that priority had
been dealt with, he checked everything else out. He'd taped the wires down so they couldn't be pulled out, and the taped connections were intact. “Everything's okay,” he reported.

She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath until he said that. And she started to breathe again. Now she felt so hot, sweaty, and exhausted that she'd forgotten how disgusting she'd felt just a moment before. “Don't worry. If I see a hundred rats come screaming down this tunnel I will
not
do that again. I may try to knock myself unconscious with the flashlight so I don't have to see it, but I will not do that.”

“Well, try to do none of those things,” Avakian replied. He flashed his light back down the tunnel. It looked like it ended just up ahead. “Let's go just a little farther.”

The tunnel did stop, which was probably why the rat had run toward them. The pipes branched out in a T connection. One kept going straight ahead, the other two at ninety-degree angles. All vanishing into the earth. A major stroke of luck. “I think the universe has delivered the message that this is the place. Light?”

She'd been looking for more rats, and irrationally wondering if there were anything like alligators in Chinese sewers. But now quickly swung her light back to the bomb.

Avakian checked the clock on the timer by his watch, then switched it from clock mode to alarm. He double-checked that setting, and that the AM and PM were correct. Then said, “May I borrow your finger?” Taking her gloved index finger, he pressed it against the button to activate the alarm, which happened with a surprisingly loud beep.

“Is it on?” she asked.

“You just started it.” Said in a very preoccupied way, because he'd just realized that he couldn't reach the top
of the water pipe with the bomb in his hand. “You're going to have to hold this for a second.”

She just stood there. Too much thinking, Avakian decided. He was offering too many choices, too much information. He grabbed her hand and wrapped it around the pipe bomb. “Don't move.”

He pulled himself up on the sewer pipe, and grabbed the overhead water pipe with one hand. “Okay, give it to me.”

She extended her arm up, and that bomb was shaking all over the place. Nothing she could do about it, because everything she had was going into the death grip to keep it from slipping out of her hand.

Avakian took the bomb, and she was still hanging on. “You can let go now.”

She actually had to will herself into doing that, finally releasing the steel casing before he had to pry her fingers off.

The water pipe ran right against the wall of the tunnel. And the crevice where the two came in contact was where Avakian placed the bomb. Perfect. It couldn't be seen, and the tunnel wall would focus the force of the blast into the pipe. No patch or collar was going to be able to handle that. They'd have to break ground to make repairs. And no bomb dog was going to be working down there, so the only thing that could go wrong was the bomb not going off.

Which was why he placed the second device on the other branch of the T connection. So more than one section of replacement would be necessary. And because, as they said in the demo trade: two is one and one is none. The odds were a lot better that at least one of two bombs would go off. If he hadn't screwed up somehow in making them.

“Lead us back to the ladder,” he told Doctor Rose.

She proceeded to shatter the world record for moving sideways down a sewer tunnel.

Back aboveground the hot summer night air felt positively arctic by comparison.

“You can take off your respirator,” Avakian said. “Unzip the suit and open it up to get some air. Push the hood back, but don't take the suit off, whatever you do.”

Judy removed her respirator. The pooled sweat actually poured from the rubber face piece. She took a few cautious whiffs. “Whew. Not as bad as I thought it would be, but still bad. You sure about the suits? We'll stink up the van.”

“That's why I covered the seats with those garbage bags,” Avakian said. “The van is going away tonight, but if we take the suits on and off we'll never get the smell off ourselves. Go have a seat and pound some water down. I'll pack up.”

No way. She had to redeem herself somehow. “I'll help you,” she said, trotting off to retrieve the traffic cones.

Avakian grabbed the ladder and pulled it out of the hole. He was going to have to figure out a way to get her to actually follow some simple instructions without an hour of negotiations. Otherwise this I'm-a-doctor-and-I don't-have-to-listen-to-anyone shit was going to get them both killed.

They drove south with all the windows down, and after a while the smell either dissipated or they got used to it.

Avakian had planned on maybe nine more manhole trips as they traversed the Ring Road around the city. Time permitting, of course. And it wouldn't if they ran the rest of them like that one.

As he was driving around looking for the right spot to do the next one, he said, “What about staying by the ladder this time?”

She didn't like that one bit. It was like giving up. Something she acknowledged she had real issues with. But then she also had to acknowledge newly discovered issues with claustrophobia and…what the hell did they call fear of rats? Not to mention fear of sewers. And…well, it was past time to swallow her pride and say it. Because if she didn't he was probably going to. “You'd be justified in pointing out that I've done everything wrong tonight. All the while you tried to tell me the right way. I was dead wrong, and pigheaded to boot.”

That was the breakthrough he'd been hoping for. But he just said, “It was a route we had to take.”

That definitely rubbed her the wrong way. “What are you saying?”

He almost told her to calm down, but a man saying that to a woman was like waving a red flag at a bull. “I'm saying that if we were in the army, if we'd met for the first time and had to do something dangerous I'd give you orders and you'd carry them out, because I outranked you. Then after a while you'd see that I knew what I was doing, and you'd follow me willingly. Here, I couldn't just give you orders.”

She was torn between knowing she wasn't going to like the answer, and dying to know the answer. “Why not?”

“You wouldn't be a surgeon if you weren't very smart. And if you didn't have an ego you wouldn't be a good surgeon. So if I told you that you needed to follow my lead because your lack of experience with this kind of work made it impossible for you to make the right decisions on your own, that wouldn't go over all that well, would it?”

This was going to be harder than she thought. But once again, Judy, you brought it up. “No, it wouldn't.”

“Even though it would be like me trying to make surgical decisions against
your
advice.”

Once again, it stuck in her craw but she had to admit it. She was the surgeon and he'd just been a soldier. Well, she'd learned her lesson about the skill set involved in just being a soldier. “You're right.”

“Okay, we've worked it all out and you realize I know what I'm doing. We managed not to get hurt during the learning process, and we're still friends. Right?”

She had to give him credit. Compared to the arrogant and abusive way doctors were educated—especially women doctors—he was like the laid-back uncle who taught you to drive because your father made you cry. Especially considering that she could have blown them both up or had a full-blown panic attack in the middle of a Chinese sewer. “Right.”

He stuck his hand across the cab, and for a moment she didn't know why. Then she got it and shook it. “I'll stick by the ladder.” That was still very hard to get out. “I thought the military was all about yelling and screaming.”

“Only in the beginning, when they're teaching you to function under pressure. Otherwise it's usually counterproductive. The trick, of course, is to keep yourself from yelling and screaming.”

“Do you have an ulcer?”

He laughed. “No.”

“High blood pressure?”

“No. At West Point they called me Tas.”

“Tas?”

“Short for Tasmanian Devil. Remember I told you about the little guy with the chip on his shoulder? It's been a lifelong project.”

She smiled as she thought about the cartoon. She would
have liked to have seen that young guy. Now—well, maybe with the Chinese soldiers. But even then he switched it on and off like she never would have believed possible.

At the next two manholes their new agreement made everything go a lot faster. That and practice really cut the equipment setup time. They did number two in twenty minutes, and three in under fifteen.

After that they'd finished the trip west and were driving north. Avakian suddenly pulled over. Carefully, because it seemed that sometimes the Chinese considered highway breakdown lanes to be a waste of expensive asphalt.

“There's a sewer around here?” Judy said.

“No, a railway bridge,” Avakian replied, pointing ahead. “That's the Beijing-Qinhuangdao line below. Bring your flashlight, and wear your helmet.”

He turned on the revolving lights, and set the traffic cones out behind them. Opening the back door, he grabbed one of the toolboxes. He already had the duffel bag slung across his back. “Follow me. Use your flashlight.” He headed down the hill.

Standing on the edge of the highway embankment, nostrils assaulted by the transition between leaded gasoline exhaust and newly cut sun-scorched brown grass, Judy Rose felt like her legs were made out of stone. Every step had to be consciously forced. She'd thought being out in the open would be easier than underground with the rats. But she was wrong. Even though it was pitch dark, it still felt like walking naked across the Rose Bowl field on New Year's Day. But Avakian's light disappeared down the hill and she was not going to be left there alone.

Avakian waited at the bottom of the hill for her to catch up. They reached the tracks and followed them under the
bridge. He half expected to find a vagabond or two camping out there, but they were alone. Picking his spot, he opened up the toolbox. “Light, please.”

Judy was practically hopping up and down from the sheer tension. What made it even worse was the fact that they were standing under a bridge in downtown Beijing about to put a bomb on a railroad track, and he was acting like he was only sorry he'd forgotten his lawn chair, tiki torches and margarita. Not only that, but she was wearing reflective clothing and holding a flashlight on him while he was doing it. She felt like digging her own manhole just for someplace to hide.

Focused on the job at hand, Avakian was oblivious to her mood. He'd made up a few bombs with an entirely different firing mechanism. The one he was holding had its wires soldered to two thin sheets of copper. Positive and negative circuits, the sheets were held apart by only a few nonconductive pencil erasers. He slipped that in a narrow gap between the steel track and a tie. The weight of a train would squeeze the plates together and complete the circuit. But there was also a clock attached to the system. Until the timer went off there would be no power running through the circuit, so any number of trains could pass over harmlessly until then. He used the roll of duct tape in the toolbox to secure the bomb to the track channel. Then the can of black spray paint to camouflage the shiny metal pipe, and a couple of handfuls of dirt thrown onto the wet paint for good measure.

“We're done,” he said. It hadn't taken more than a few minutes. He put his hand to the track. “Train coming. Don't worry, that's not a problem. We've got plenty of time to get out from under the bridge.”

The train arrived just as they were preparing to reclimb
the hill. The engineer was leaning out of the cab, wondering if there was a problem. Avakian flashed his light and waved. There was a friendly blast from the train whistle.

She couldn't believe it.

The trip up was a little harder with rubber boots on dew-covered grass. Avakian set the toolbox back in the van. “I'll get the cones.”

Judy was standing behind the open back door when a police car coming up the highway changed lanes twice to get into the right-hand one and headed toward them, slowing down.