The Dragon Factory (65 page)

“Stairs!” Bunny said, pointing, and we cut right and went through the doorway as fast as safety would allow. The stairwell was empty, so we climbed, taking turns covering each other on the corners, never stopping. If Alpha Team still held the far end of the hall, then I was hoping to catch the Russians by surprise. A few flash bangs and then some frags would make the odds more even. They would literally be in the dark, so we’d use that against them.

We got to the main floor and opened the door cautiously. No sounds of gunfire from inside the building. No way to tell if that was good news or bad. I could hear sounds of a pretty heated exchange outside, though.

This next part would be tricky because we couldn’t risk using our flashlight, but we had to get down that hallway.

I leaned close to Bunny and told him what I wanted to do.

“Roger that,” he whispered.

I slung my rifle and drew my Beretta. Moving carefully, I found the far wall with my left hand; Bunny kept one hand on my shoulder. Like a couple of blind beggars negotiating an alley we walked forward. I let my fingers glide along the wall and never moved faster than my ability to recognize the terrain. Each time I found an opening—a hallway or a doorway—I stopped, tapped Bunny’s hand twice, and then moved in a shuffle until my fingers made contact once more with the long, curving wall. Being in total darkness makes you realize how much of every action relies on sight. Sudden darkness for a sighted person opens up a feeling of great vulnerability. Movement is clumsy and slow. To overcome
this you have to create a system of movement and constant analysis. Speed is an enemy to sightless orientation.

So, it took us a while to navigate that hallway, but the way we did it brought us all the way to the main doorway. The big glass doors were closed, so I followed them to the other side and found the wall again. Now I knew where we were and how far from the hatch.

We went another forty yards and then stopped. I found Bunny’s hand, tapped it three times—a cue that I was about to give instructions—and then followed his hand up his arm to his chest and then to the grenades hung on his battle rig. Then I found his big hand and drew a series of letters in his palm. He tapped my wrist every time he needed me to repeat one.

When I was done he gave my wrist two sets of two taps. Message received and understood.

We reoriented ourselves and moved farther along the hall until we could hear voices. Whispers from several men. Low, quiet, and in Russian. I could make out what they were saying, but there wasn’t time to translate for Bunny. Besides, none of it was tactically important. One man asked another when the lights were coming back on, and a gruff voice—probably a sergeant or team leader—told him to shut the hell up.

I holstered my pistol and took two grenades from my harness. A flash bang in my left and a fragmentation grenade in my right. From the faint rustle I knew Bunny was doing the same.

“Light ’em up!” I hissed, and we pulled the pins on the flash bangs.

If the Russians heard me, it didn’t matter. We sailed the grenades into the emptiness in front of us, squeezed our eyes shut, and covered our ears the best we could. Even so, the blast and starburst was like a hot knife through the brain.

It was far worse for the Russians.

The grenades burst in the air right above them and I opened my eyes a second after the detonation. I saw them—maybe twenty in all—reeling back from the intense light, screaming at the pain in their ears, too shocked and confused to do anything. The last sparks of the flash gave Bunny and me perfect distance and angle.

“Frag out!”

We threw.

They died.

Not all of them. We had to shoot three of them.

But the rest took the shrapnel full in the face. The fools had been spooked by the dark and had grouped together for safety. It had been a stupid mistake, but they probably thought they owned this hallway.

Now it was their tomb.

The echo of the blast rolled up and down the hallway, and my head rang from the thunder. Even pressing your hands to your ears can only block out a portion of that noise.

I turned on my flashlight and swept the beam over the charnel house.

“God Almighty,” said Bunny.

I cupped a hand around my mouth.

“Hopscotch!” I yelled.

A moment later the reply echoed back to us.

“Jump rope!”

It was Redman. Alpha Team had survived.

We converged on the hatch. We pulled chemical light sticks and threw them down so that we all met in a mingled blue and green glow. One of the Alphas came last, supporting Top, who looked ashy and ill.

“How you holding up?” asked Bunny, hurrying over to help.

“Just fucking peachy, Farmboy. Took you long enough.”

“Yeah, we stopped at a titty bar for a few beers.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Redman closed on me while I was examining the hatch. “First Sergeant Sims won’t accept any painkillers. He threatened to kneecap the first son of a bitch who tried to give him morphine.”

“He seems to be in that kind of mood. Leave him alone. We have other fish to fry. We need to get through this hatch.”

Before he’d been promoted to Grace’s number two, Redman had been the demolitions expert for Alpha. He ran his hand over the hatch and then crabbed sideways and knocked on the wall.

“Okay, Cap,” he said, “we couldn’t blow that hatch with an RPG,
but the wall is just block. If we can knock a big hole in it, I can rig a compressed charge and maybe make us a doorway. We have just about enough C4 for that; it’s the hole that’s going to be the problem.”

“I need solutions, not problems.”

Redman looked at the dead Russians, then turned to one of the Alphas. “Beth—check the bodies. I need grenades and explosives. If they have any, it’ll be Semtex. Detonators, too. Whoever has the most Semtex will have the detonators. Do it now.”

Alpha Team moved with a purpose, and in under two minutes Redman had twenty grenades and four tubes of plastic explosive. Three of the four Russian detonators had been broken, but he said he only needed one.

He set to work rigging the grenades together over a wad made from half of the Semtex. He draped it with three layers of Hu’s polymer blast dampening cloth, placed the detonator with great care, and started backing up, unspooling wire as he went. I chased everyone back to the sharp bend in the corridor and we all flattened out on the floor by the wall.

“Fire in the hole!” Redman called, and clicked the detonator.

The blast was massive. Smoke and dust blew over us, funneling around the curved corridor.

As soon as it was clear, I was up and running, a cloth pressed to my face, squinting through the smoke. There was a smoking crater in the wall that was at least eight inches deep, and fissures ran outward from side to side and floor to ceiling.

“Damn,” Redman said, “I’m good.”

He set to work on the second part of the job, gouging the cracked inner stone to make a tight crevice for his C4. He packed it tight. A compressed blast does far more damage, and we needed damage. We needed a doorway big enough for me to climb through.

Once he was done we repeated our retreat and he clicked the detonator.

This blast was bigger but not louder. A lot of the force went into the stone wall with such intensity that we felt the vibration run along the floor.

Again I was up and running, and as I approached the wall I knew that Redman had broken through. I could feel a breeze of moist heat coming at me through the smoke. I waved furiously at the cloud of dust and shined my light at the hole.

It went all the way through.

But it wasn’t big enough.

Not for me. Not for any of us.

And we’d used all of our explosives.

The Chamber of Myth

Tuesday, August 31, 2:53
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 33 hours, 7 minutes E.S.T.

Grace moved away from the corpse of the Berserker and retraced her steps to the path. Ahead of her in the darkness she could hear the whispered conversation of Hecate and her father. It was no longer stationary. Grace crouched and listened, tracking the sound even though she couldn’t make out the words. The sound moved from left to right in front of her. There were no points of reference to guess distance, especially with whispers, but it couldn’t have been more than twenty yards.

What was to the right?

The sound told her. The soft hiss of the waterfall. That’s where Hecate was going. She remembered that metal panel in the back. A door or access panel. Grace was willing to bet a lot on it being a door.

She adjusted her course, feeling ahead for the terrain. She found a line of small rocks and recognized them as stones that lined the path used by the groundskeeping staff. Perfect.

“—give me a second—”

It was a snatch of a comment and Grace froze. Whoever said it couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet in front of her. She drew her pistol and listened.

“—here it is!” whispered Hecate. “There’s a release right under the—”

Grace fired in the direction of the voice. She knew that her first shot would probably miss, but the muzzle flash would show her where to put the second shot.

After the absolute darkness the flash was eye-hurtingly bright, but it froze a picture in her mind. The back of the waterfall. Hecate reaching up under the overhang of moss, her lithe body stretching. Cyrus behind her, his fist clutched around something that hung from a lanyard around his neck. Otto Wirths in the foreground, bent in the direction of the panel.

A flash image. There and gone.

Grace smiled and squeezed off five more shots.

She heard a scream.

And then the wall five feet to her right exploded, showering her with debris. A chunk of rock the size of a fist struck her on the side of her shoulder, and her last shot was high and wide.

Grace fell over and her gun vanished into the darkness.

A moment later Hecate slammed into her, snarling and spitting with insane rage, grabbing her arms with insane strength.

“You fucking bitch!” snarled Hecate as she drove Grace Courtland into the dirt. They rolled over and over again through the darkness, tumbling sideways down the hill away from the waterfall, colliding with rocks and smashing through plants. Hecate snarled continuously and Grace could feel hot spittle on her face and throat. The woman was enormously strong, her fingers like iron bands crushing into Grace’s arms with enough force to crush skin and muscle.

Grace jammed a forearm under Hecate’s chin to keep those sharp white teeth away from her throat. With her other hand she shoved back on the woman’s shoulder, trying to create space. Grace twisted to bring her knee up between them, using the long thighbone as a strut to separate them.

What the hell was she fighting? Had this mad bitch used her own genetic science on herself? Everything about Hecate provoked an image of one of the big fighting cats. Hecate even hissed like a panther.

Hecate suddenly let go of Grace’s arms and grabbed her throat. It was like being crushed by a vise. All at once Grace was unable to breathe.

Grace stopped pushing on Hecate’s shoulder and immediately hit her in the face—once, twice, again, pounding on the side of Hecate’s cheek and eye socket. The pressure eased by a tiny fraction. Grace dragged in a spoonful of air, but then Hecate tightened her grip, overlapping her thumbs to try to crush the windpipe. Grace pressed her chin down on the thumbs, forcing them against her sternum to slow the choke while continuing to hammer at Hecate. She cupped her palm and slapped Hecate over the ear.

Instantly Hecate howled in pain and toppled sideways. Grace pivoted on the floor and kicked out with both feet, catching Hecate on the hip and stomach, driving her farther away. Grace didn’t want to escape; she needed to breathe and reorganize. She spun around and came up into a crouch.

OTTO WIRTHS TORE
away the decorative vegetation and ran his hands over the panel. The moss had hidden four wing nuts and Otto grabbed the first one and tried to twist it. It resisted and he growled in fury and frustration—and then it moved. He spun it around and around until it reached the end of the thread and fell away.

“Hurry!” Cyrus urged. “They’re breaking through the wall.”

“I
am
hurrying, damn it.” Otto attacked the second one, which was stuck just as firmly as the first. “What about Hecate?”

Cyrus was invisible beside him. He said, “She’ll catch up.”

The second wing nut began to turn. “And if she doesn’t?”

“We have a large family, Otto.”

Otto dropped the second wing nut and began turning the third. That one was looser and it yielded immediately. The fourth was harder, but he threw all of his strength at it and the nut turned.

“Otto . . . ,” Cyrus hissed. “I hear something. . . .”

THERE WAS A
second and much bigger explosion and debris flew outward into the chamber. A jagged piece of stone whistled through the air and struck Grace on the side of the head and she spun and fell facedown on the grass and did not move.