Girl Stalks the Ruins

by Jacques Antoine

  Col Hassan gestured to one of his men, who brought Emily’s bag, and he peered inside. “Pardonnez moi, s’il vous plait, Mademoiselle.” He pulled her passport out and flipped through it. Je suis désolé, mais… we haven’t been introduced yet.” He handed her bag to her, with passport, and said, “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Captain Tenno.”

  “Technically, it’s Major Tenno,” she grumbled.

  “… and you are, Monsieur?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Perry Hankinson, United States Navy.”

  “May I assume that you do not command a ship, but are… how shall I say… a member of some elite unit… as I fear I must assume for both of you?”

  “I can’t speak for him,” Emily said, with a smirk. “But I plan on retiring before the year is out. Until then, I am nothing more than a lowly adjutant on the Pacific Fleet Admiral’s staff, stationed in Sasebo, Japan.

  Hassan led them upstairs, and out to the meadow beyond the hedgerow they’d hidden behind earlier. Perry couldn’t help wondering how she’d come up with the fiction she’d just told, or why she’d bothered… unless she’d figured out what Adm Crichton, or Gen Lukasziewicz, must have been trying to accomplish by promoting her behind the scenes. He began to consider whether she might have some other scheme in mind. But what had she seen in Hassan that such a story could work upon? He found out soon enough.

  “May I assume that you have brought your team here without notifying Rémy or Levautrin?” Emily asked. “If so, perhaps I can hazard a guess that you did not rely on satellite imagery, so as not to alert the DGSI as to your activities?”

  Hassan’s reluctance to comment on this question in front of his men was obvious, and he pulled them both aside. “I have some little bit of freedom to act on my own in this matter. But it may not last more than a few hours. Once my superiors hear of this incident, we will be summoned back to base.”

  “Then we don’t have much time,” Emily said, and held out her hand for the burner phone Hassan still had in his possession. She flipped it open and touched the only number in its call log. A few quick words in Japanese – Yuki must have answered – and then she gave Michael a SITREP. “We lost them in Orcines. But a friendly Gendarmes unit may be willing to assist us.” Hassan nodded when she glanced his way. She handed him the phone.

  After a moment’s conversation, in which Hassan only grunted an occasional affirmation, he turned to her. “Your friend says traffic cameras south of Nîmes picked up deux camions…”

  “How far is that from here?” Perry asked.

  “Cinq heures par autoroute… five hours. Your friend thinks they are heading further south, to Marseilles… though he gives me no explanation of his information.”

  “How long by helicopter?”

  Hassan conferred with one of his pilots over a handheld radio. “Maybe two hours, though fuel will be… how do you say, tight?”

  “We need to leave now,” Emily said. “If we lighten the load on one of the birds... those are Kawasaki 117s, rated for twelve passengers. If we only bring six, leave some of the ordinance behind, we can shave forty minutes off that time, and save some fuel.”

  Perry got lost in her calculations, but she was the one who actually knew how to fly these things, not him, so there was no point challenging her on this. Hassan was a tougher sell, but eventually he also acceded to her plan, and even agreed to let them ride along in the lead helicopter – more than one touch of the wrist was required to persuade him. For much of the flight, Emily leaned forward to confer with the pilot, pointing and urging him on. Somehow, after consulting a map, she convinced him to leave the highway, crest the ridgeline of the Monts d’Ardeche north of Aubenas, and follow the Rhône the rest of the way, skimming barely twenty meters above the water. Perry only felt airsick once or twice.

  “If you don’t want your superiors to be able to track us…” she’d said to Hassan, and he nodded.

  Chapter 15

  Into the Catacombs

  After some further airborne consultations with Michael, it was decided to land on the outskirts of Port-Saint Louis-du-Rhône. A 19th century port town carved out of the limestone soil on the southern end of the vast marshland known as the Camargue, it was now part of a vast network of industrial shipyards and docks stretching west of Marseilles. Very little of the old town was visible to a cursory inspection because of all the new construction.

  Through Emily, Michael was able to direct them to a ruined fortress west of the Parc de la Revolution, where a pair of panel trucks had been incongruously parked on the grass beneath a pair of dead Chestnut trees. Hassan’s men cleared both vehicles, and discovered a few indicators that armed men had been in them recently. But how many remained of the team that had attacked the Louvre? This was more difficult to ascertain.

  “I’d assume eight to ten, or more,” Emily said, before retreating to the helicopter. “We’re probably outnumbered.”

  “How does she have access to this sort of intel in real time?” Hassan whispered, pulling Perry to one side.

  “They retasked a NATO keyhole satellite passing over Montenegro,” Emily grunted. “It will be out of range in a few minutes.”

  She lingered by the helicopter to extract black trousers from her bag, and slipped them on under the sundress. With a finger gesture, she got the men who stood nearby to turn around, shimmied out of the dress, and pulled a charcoal gray blouse over her sports bra.

  “Who are they?” Hassan pressed.

  “They are every family connection I have,” Emily growled. “Their intel has gotten us this far. Don’t go soft on me now, Colonel.”

  “The rest of my men are thirty minutes out,” he said, after consulting his radio. “ We should sweep the area for signs of les Russes, but keep our distance until the others arrive.”

  “They didn’t come here by chance,” Perry said. “No city population to hide in. That can only mean they plan to escape by boat.”

  “Either there’s a boat waiting for them at the bottom of the cliffs,” Emily said, with a gesture to the far end of the park. “… or there will be soon.”

  One of Hassan’s men signaled to him from a stand of trees some distance away. His gestures suggested he’d found something, and didn’t want to yell from there. Another man, the one who’d accompanied Hassan to Akram’s apartment the previous evening, and who wore lieutenant’s bars on his collar, spoke to him as they jogged across the intervening ground, with Perry and Emily following behind.

  “He says he grew up nearby, in Marseilles,” Hassan said. “There used to be the ruins of a Roman fort near here, and the cliffs are riddled with caves.”

  “Caves?”

  “Oui, mademoiselle,” the lieutenant said. “Il y a un reseau des cavernes sous la ville…” He took a breath and tried to express himself in the limited knowledge of English he possessed. “There are catacombes Romaines étendues, underneath us, extensive catacombs.”

  “Do they lead out to the river?” Perry asked.

  “Where is the entrance?” Emily asked.

  “The main entrance is près de la mairie… by city hall… but there may be others.”

  “Show me,” Emily said, and pulled the man toward the park entrance, where the buildings of the town could be seen.

  “Attendez,” Hassan shouted. “Wait… we need a plan of attack, at least.”

  “I am tired of waiting.”

  “They left the vans here for a reason,” Perry said. “There must be another entrance nearby… somewhere in the park.”

  Just then, a whistle from one of Hassan’s men caught their attention. He waved them over to where he’d located a possible entrance, covered by an overgrown clump of sweet flag grass. When they pulled the grass away, its scent filled the air, and dry red berries lay scattered over a concrete abutment it had concealed. A circular steel plate with a hinge on one side was exposed, and some of the rust had flaked off a hinge on one end.

  “Looks like it’s been opened recently,�
� Perry said.

  “Non, mademoiselle,” Hassan said. “It is too dangerous. What will we find down there? …and we are only seven. They may be ten or more, and heavily armed. You said so yourself.”

  “Fine,” Emily said. “You stay here, wait for the rest of your team. But I’m going after them.” Perry took her hand from the steel cover, and she glanced back into his eyes. “I have to do this,” she said. He nodded, no longer willing to restrain the fire in those eyes.

  “Send two of your men to cover the entrance by city hall,” he said to Hassan. “When the rest of your people get here, come after us.”

  Emily raised the cover, which creaked a loud complaint. “So much for stealth,” she muttered. Like a sewer entrance, a concrete tube led down into a darkened tunnel, with tubular rungs fixed in the sidewall to act as a ladder. She lowered herself in, and Perry stepped in after her.

  “Attendez,” Hassan said, and gestured to his men. “You will need this.” He handed over his sidearm, a Sig P226, and a flashlight. His lieutenant passed another Sig and two extra magazines down to him, along with a second flashlight. “Do not engage until we arrive, monsieur.”

  “Bonne chance,” the lieutenant added.

  Although mainly dark, some light crept in from behind them, beyond their entry point, though Perry couldn’t localize the source. Up ahead, and perhaps around a few corners, a brighter light flickered, and voices were faintly audible, as well as footsteps. He decided to risk the flashlight to get a better sense of the surroundings, and to reconnect with Emily, who was already on the move.

  “Em,” he called, in an urgent whisper. “Slow down.”

  Catching up to her was going to be a chore, especially with two large, 9mm pistols in his belt. He’d be lucky not to shoot himself if he tried to run, and he tried not to focus on whatever body parts might get clipped. A moment later, he heard the faint creaking of the steel cover in the distance behind him, and assumed Hassan had sent more men down.

  Around a corner, he thought he glimpsed her bleached blond hair ducking down an incline, and the ceiling seemed to reach down for him. Steps had been carved into the limestone, changing direction at each of several landings, and seemed to descend another thirty feet. If he’d kept adequate track of the turns, they were now heading at right angles to the original direction of the first tunnel. Some fifty meters ahead he spied Emily, standing flush against the limestone outcropping, listening. A dim glow beckoned down one of three forks in the cave, and now he saw the electrical wiring tacked to the ceiling.

  “Take this,” he whispered, and handed her one of the Sigs and an extra magazine. “Courtesy of Hassan. Are we even moving in the right direction?”

  “There’s activity down that way, but it’s a straightaway for the next stretch. No cover. We can’t risk pursuing until we know whoever it is has cleared the next corner.”

  “What about these other tunnels? Just because they diverge here, doesn’t mean they don’t connect again.”

  “If we separate, we might not meet again until…”

  “It’s a risk,” he conceded. “But it could buy us a tactical advantage.”

  Emily paused to consider the suggestion, and Perry looked for clues to her thought process in the faint shine of her eyes.

  “We may already have a significant advantage,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t have expected us to get here so quickly. “Skimming the river canyons in Hassan’s helo…”

  “Running into Hassan a second time was a stroke of luck, it turns out. If they were relying on the misdirection… sending the pursuit north…”

  Emily nodded, and tilted her head, as if to calculate the relevant probabilities. “Yeah, they’ve been two steps ahead of the French this whole time. Wouldn’t it be nice to return the favor?”

  Perry moved toward the middle passageway, and Emily took off at a run down the passage to the left, the one with the lights in the distance. As soon as he heard her footfalls speed up, he began to run, too, holding the flashlight as steady as was compatible with stealth.

  “At least they won’t have had time to set up booby traps in here,” he muttered.

  The thought occurred to him that they could have set traps before the attack on the Louvre, and he slowed his pace. He imagined Emily now sprinting toward a confrontation with heavily armed men, and quickened his pace, hoping to arrive timely at some useful place. So much of his decision to propel himself forward, he now realized, assumed the passages would converge again. But it was too late to backtrack now.

  His light showed a bend up ahead, veering toward the left, and this was encouraging. When it veered to the right, he couldn’t keep from moving faster, until he was moving as fast as he could, in a dark, narrow space. In places, the ceiling dipped and he needed to stay alert to keep from smacking his head into the limestone. Distant echoes reached him, which at first sounded like men’s voices, though as he went along, they began to resemble some strange music, or perhaps animal cries.

  After a period of contraction, during which the pressure on his chest and lungs increased, and he began to wonder if he might only find a cramped defile and a dark nook at the end, the ceiling seemed to rise again over his head… or was the floor falling away? His flashlight flickered, and he tapped it against his wrist without slowing his pace. He grew more certain that the floor fell away rather than the ceiling rose. Soon, he found it easier to run, and to breathe, as the incline favored his pace.

  At one point, he heard footfalls beating, somehow, in sync with the pounding of his heart. Could they be Emily’s? But how? There must be at least twenty feet of solid stone between the two passages, unless he’d lost track of his direction through all the bends. The simplest explanation, of course, was that he heard only his own steps. Soon enough, he could barely hear even those, as the floor fell away even more steeply, and he found it increasingly difficult to regulate his speed.

  His light flickered for the last time, but he couldn’t stop running to address the problem. In the pitch black – a darkness more profound than he’d ever known, viscous in its silence – he felt it swirling around him, as if it were a current in an inky stream carrying him along. “If only it would protect me from the inevitable collision, or guide me around the rocks.” His feet barely seemed to touch bottom.

  Gradually, his eyes adjusted, and lights came into focus all around him, tiny and dim, as if they shone from enormous distances. Soon entire constellations resolved themselves for him, some with nebulae frosting the interstellar spaces. Pinwheel galaxies glimmered from even greater distances, turning through unseen eddies, winking knowingly through a dusky infinitude.

  His breathing, labored earlier, was so easy now that he began to feel the diffusion of whatever was vital inside him. Had the atmosphere thinned out… or had he? Could he be dissolved entirely in this starry immensity? Something delicious peeked at him in this thought, the prospect of non-being, of letting go of all the urgency and turmoil of his life. The SEAL in him resisted this urge, all his training pulled back, tugging at his memories, at the camaraderie he’d worked so hard to earn, and the discipline. Something else tugged at him, struggling to reach full consciousness, though he couldn’t quite bring it into the full daylight of his attention.

  Boom-Boom-Boom!

  An astral dragon roared in the distance, bellowing and raging, flames belching from its throat. The lights swirled, and spun into a space so great as to defy imagining. A moment later, they seemed to collapse into a single, garish yellow. Crack crack! His mind snapped into focus and he crashed into a wall next to a large gap in the limestone that opened onto a much larger chamber, a cavern at least fifty meters long, and a ceiling high enough to be obscured by shadows. Some sort of work-light illuminated the far end – this must be what the electrical wires he’d noticed earlier led to. His hands protected him from the collision, though he couldn’t remember bracing for the impact. There was no time to dwell on the question, since he’d stumbled into the very firefight he’d an
ticipated when he chose to follow a different passage: Emily, pinned down on his left by three men, shooting from cover with better firepower. She fired economically, temporizing while she looked for an opening.

  Perry was a new factor, and they hadn’t seen him, or expected to take fire from this angle. He cut one down on the first shot, ducked underneath the return fire, and wounded a second in the leg and chest, where a round must have slipped under the edge of his body armor. When the third man turned to regroup and find better cover, firing wildly over his shoulder, Emily put two rounds through his spine. She glanced at Perry, nodded in recognition, and moved to stand over the wounded man, who would have crawled away, if he weren’t bleeding so profusely. She examined his face, and he cringed under her glare. The dead were probably Russians, one blond, one darker but with clear eyes and cheekbones. Darker, deep set eyes and a scraggly beard distinguished the one who still breathed.

  “You speak Pashtu,” she said.

  “A little.”

  “Enough to ask him how many are left, and where the hostages are?”

  “Salaam aalaikum,” Perry said, and then launched into a few phrases that sounded more or less like Arabic or Farsi to Emily. The wounded man stared up at him, either uncomprehendingly, or defiantly.

  “Perhaps you were mistaken. Maybe he’s not Afghani.”

  “These guys are tough, whatever he is, he’s not likely to give up anything easily.”

  She leaned over to get closer to his face, and he tried to turn away. She undid a kerchief from his neck, and positioned one knee on his chest, near the entry wound.

  “Tie this around his leg.”

  “Are we doing first aid now?”

  “Just do it.” She turned to the now helpless man, and used the pressure on his chest to let him breathe before his lung collapsed. Once that happened, speaking would become impossible. “Russians,” she said, staring into his eyes. “How many?” She held up three fingers, then four, and finally five, and he shook his head each time. She released the pressure on his chest, and he breathed easier for a moment, then more rapidly and much shallower. She held up fingers from two hands and he nodded at nine. She pressed down again, and his breathing eased.