by Matt Rogers
The mine would implode.
They would be crushed under millions of tons of falling rock.
He shook the thought away and concentrated. Sweat dripped off the bridge of his shattered nose.
‘Right, here.’
Slater wheeled him around the bend. They powered up an incline. King felt himself slipping. One of his legs gave out, and he scrambled for purchase on the smooth ground.
For a terrifying instant, he toppled backwards.
Slater snatched him by the collar and wrenched him back on course. ‘Don’t you fucking dare give up on me now.’
‘Understood,’ King whispered. It was all he could manage.
Head pounding, eyes watering, nose and wrist screaming for relief, senses fading, he ran.
Once he built up momentum, he tore Slater’s hands away from supporting him.
‘Let’s go,’ he snarled. ‘I’ve got this.’
Together they sprinted through the underground maze, running with animalistic fervour. King let instincts take over. He wasn’t sure how he stayed upright. He pumped his arms and legs like pistons, tearing down the cramped tunnel towards the mine shaft.
‘What if the elevator’s not there?’ Slater said.
King shook the thought off and pushed forward. If anything sapped his will, his legs would give out and he would be helpless.
He couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t think.
‘Left!’ he roared.
In unison they exploded out into the wider tunnel. If he had got it right, the mine shaft was directly ahead. As they skidded into the final stretch, King heard panicked shouts of encouragement up ahead.
Running blind, he forced his legs to reach top speed.
The elevator was there.
The five health workers waited inside.
They screamed for Slater and King to hurry.
They powered through the open cage doors and crashed into the far wall of the elevator. King collided with someone at full pelt, who let out a grunt of surprise.
It was Léo.
Still thriving off the terror of time ticking away, King snatched blindly for the remote fixed into the side of the elevator wall. None of them had a flashlight to see with. They were fumbling in sheer black.
He found the steel device and crushed all the buttons at once, pleading for the elevator to ascend.
The steel cable — fixed into the roof of the cage — groaned.
With a jolt of momentum, they started to rise.
It was slow. Painfully slow.
There was no way to speed up the process, so King slapped himself in the cheek as the elevator crawled towards the surface.
Stay conscious, he begged with himself. Just stay conscious.
He heard panicked rasping close by. One of the health workers was hyperventilating.
‘Breathe deep,’ Slater commanded. Somehow, he managed to keep his voice from wavering. His calm tone allowed the man to settle.
‘Th-thanks, man,’ the guy spluttered. It was Marcus.
The seven of them pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped cage, all silently willing the elevator to rise faster.
‘How long do we have?’ King said. His head drooped involuntarily, nostrils flaring with what felt like liquid fire. He let out a gasp and forced the pain back down.
Not now, he thought. Not yet. Stay awake.
‘I don’t know,’ Slater said. ‘Don’t focus on that.’
‘What vehicles do they have up there?’ King said. ‘We need to be ready.’
‘There’s a few all-terrain vehicles,’ Slater said. ‘Like modified rally cars. I’d say that’s how they got into the peninsula so quickly.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I saw a cluster of snowmobiles.’
King let his commanding instincts take over, instructing the health workers even on the edge of consciousness. ‘You five pile into one of the big ATVs. I’m assuming you’ll be able to start it up, but if they’ve removed the keys, move to the snowmobiles. Two men per snowmobile. Fire them up with the pull start mechanisms and get the fuck away from the warehouse.’
They murmured their understanding. Léo piped up. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m slower,’ King said. ‘Don’t want to hold you back. Focus on yourselves.’
Light spilled into the mine shaft above their heads. King craned his neck and saw the faint glow of the warehouse lights.
They were close.
‘You all ready?’ he said.
He saw their outlines now. The five men nodded in turn. He saw their terrified faces, their shaking hands and quivering legs. He saw the sweat dripping from their pores.
This was a different kind of fear.
‘Don’t look back,’ King said. ‘Just drive. Got it?’
More nods.
The elevator slammed home, jolting to a stop at ground level. The mine cage took a second to open as an internal mechanism activated the doors. They swung outward, spurred by an electronic command.
The seven occupants of the elevator ran for the vehicles like men possessed.
50
Two steps out of the elevator, King blacked out.
There was a sharp pop inside his head, horrifying in its intensity. His vision disappeared — like a sheet had been draped over his head. He still had feeling in his limbs, but he felt them give.
He had reached the point of no return.
He couldn’t take another step.
He fell face-first towards the concrete floor of the warehouse.
A strong hand slammed against his chest, halting him in his tracks. He felt his feet lift off the ground, and something hard and bony drove into his stomach. He blinked hard, and his vision returned for an instant.
A single flash of colour.
Slater had him draped over one shoulder, powering across the warehouse floor with King in a fireman’s carry. King’s head dropped and he lost all consciousness.
Bang.
For what felt like the hundredth time, he jolted back to reality. It hit him in a whirling pool of distorted images. Nothing felt real.
Except the gravity of the situation.
This time, he stayed conscious.
Overwhelming brightness flooded his vision.
Daylight.
It had been far too long since King had experienced it.
Despite his shaky grasp on reality and the unbearable pain searing through his nerve endings and the ballistic missile roaring toward their location, he felt relief as the claustrophobia fell away.
He stared out at open plains for miles in all directions. It was a gloomy day — he guessed mid-afternoon. The sky held a canopy of grey, overcast storm clouds. King glanced up at them and gulped back terror.
None of them would see the missile coming until it was right on top of them.
Slater had dumped him on the back of a snowmobile. The impact had shocked his system into activation. Through half-closed eyes he saw the health workers piling into a military-style buggy with thick all-terrain tyres. Léo leapt into the driver’s seat and stamped on the accelerator. The car rocketed away in the other direction, speeding into a patch of forest and disappearing from sight.
King glanced down at the snowmobile he rested on and noticed how different it was to the ones he had previously commandeered. This looked to be five times the price and five times the horsepower. Mikhailov had resources to spare, it seemed.
‘How long… do we have?’ he said, struggling to form the words.
Slater didn’t respond. The man pull-started the snowmobile with a single, vicious tug of the ripcord. The engine roared to life.
There was sheer desperation in Slater’s eyes. He was focused on nothing but getting them away from the impact zone, ignoring everything else.
‘How long?’ King barked, louder.
‘A minute,’ Slater said. ‘Maybe two.’
Slater swung a leg over the seat, slotting into the space between King and the handlebars. He wrenc
hed the throttle before he was even seated. The rear tracks screamed into motion, kicking up two plumes of white powder behind the vehicle.
The snowmobile shot off the mark.
It was certainly high-powered. King snatched the back of Slater’s jacket with sweaty hands, preventing himself from tumbling off the back of the seat from the burst of sudden momentum. He held tight as Slater hunched low and gave the engine everything it had.
Biting wind whipped at their clothing. King’s vision blurred against the intense chill. He shielded his eyes with a single hand and twisted in his seat, looking back at the warehouse. The building — and its surroundings cliffs — shrank into the distance with each passing second.
Would it be enough?
He could hardly see. Snowmobiles with this kind of power required helmets and visors to protect from the elements. Falling snow and sleet lashed against his face. They tore through the gloom, pushing faster, abandoning all caution.
Slater turned his head and screamed over his shoulder. ‘What’s the blast radius?!’
‘I don’t know!’ King roared back. ‘Could be up to a mile. Depends what kind of firepower they’re using.’
Slater glanced at the speedometer behind the handlebars. ‘We’re not there yet.’
They shot forward into a stretch of land devoid of all vegetation. The ground was dead flat for as far as the eye could see. King cocked his head as he looked out over the desolate plain. It contrasted with the mountainous terrain he had become accustomed to in this region.
Something wasn’t right.
‘What is this?’ he yelled. ‘Where are we?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s too flat.’
Slater paused. ‘Let me check the map.’
He kept the pressure on the throttle, but reached into one of the pockets built into his khakis at thigh-level. He extracted a small weatherproof device with a digital screen displaying a satellite image. He squinted and shielded his eyes from the slicing wind, peering hard at the picture.
‘Oh, fuck.’
King went pale. ‘What?’
Slater tucked the device back into his pocket and snatched the handlebars in shaking hands. Eyes wide, he changed course, aiming the snowmobile diagonally to the right. The rear tracks almost slid out on the ground below. For the first time King noticed the change in texture. The land beneath their snowmobile felt hard.
Like ice.
‘We’re on Kharchinskoye Lake,’ Slater yelled. ‘All this ice is going to break when the missile hits.’
‘Jesus Christ…’
They heard it. An ominous rumbling in the sky, growing steadily closer. King twisted again and peered back.
‘Go!’ he roared at Slater.
The missile shot through the clouds, just over a mile behind them. It could have weighed thousands of pounds for all he knew. From this distance, it appeared as a flaming streak that sliced through the gloomy canopy of the storm. He glimpsed it arcing toward the cliffs for a brief second.
Then it flashed against the peninsula — impacting almost directly on top of the mine — and detonated.
King turned away, shielding his eyes from the blast. Without any kind of visual on the explosion, it became a waiting game.
The shockwave hit first.
The ground all around them screamed and rumbled as the vast sheet of ice coating the frozen lake tore apart. An invisible barrier of displaced air punched King in the back, smashing all the wind out of his lungs.
He gasped as the sensation blasted through him.
They were far too close to the impact zone.
The snowmobile underneath them almost lifted off the ground from the force of the shockwave. Its rear tracks went airborne for a split second. Slater careered into the handlebars, precariously close to hurtling over the hood.
When the vehicle slammed back onto the ice, it found nothing to support its weight.
The front skis dipped into the freezing lake, catching against the dark body of water.
With such a drastic loss in forward motion, the snowmobile simply stopped.
King went airborne. He twisted, limbs flailing. Wind and snow and shattered ice pounded his face, numbing him to the experience. His swollen nose had almost forced his eyes shut entirely, blinding him to the landing area.
He hit the surface of Kharchinskoye Lake upside-down at close to fifty miles an hour.
Silence.
51
The impact didn’t knock him out, but it might as well have.
Immediately, he lost all sensation from the neck down. The water was arctic, so cold that it took a horrendous, gut-wrenching effort just to tread water. The icy swell splashed over his face, aggravating his wounds.
He had foolishly lifted his broken wrist in front of his face before landing, an instinctual reaction to being thrown from a vehicle at speed. The plunge into the lake would have ground the broken bones against each other, worsening the injury.
At least he couldn’t feel it.
The effects of exhaustion took over. The sheet of ice had almost entirely disintegrated, shattering under the force of the blast radius. Fragmented chunks had drifted away from where King and Slater had landed. He spun uselessly, searching for anything to hold onto.
It only took a few seconds for the lake to start dragging him down.
The weight of his gear swamped him. The heavy combat boots, the thick khakis, the cold-weather jackets and bulletproof vest. It all tightened around him, constricting him as the material filled with water and dragged on him like a deadweight.
His nose and mouth dipped below the surface. The last shreds of energy left in his bones began to fade.
A firm hand seized the back of his collar, wrenching him above surface level. He gasped and spluttered, treading water to complement the added help. He spun to see Slater dragging him through the icy water, face scrunched up in determination.
The man’s eyes had turned hard and emotionless. All his attention was focused on a single objective — survival. He had shed his heavy jacket, wearing nothing but a tight compression shirt. He kept King from sinking with one hand, and used the other to swim. He kicked out, his strokes measured and powerful.
King swam weakly, lending what assistance he could, but it proved futile. Slater was responsible for almost all of the effort. Without his help, King knew he wouldn’t last ten seconds above water.
It was a terrifying predicament.
Broken, beaten, vision swimming and ears ringing, his pathetic strokes gave way to exhaustion. A moment later they stopped altogether. He lost all sense of time, succumbing to either the mind-numbing pain in his broken bones or the hypothermic reaction to the arctic waters.
Either a minute or an hour later, his hands drooped…
…and touched solid ground.
With a final, all-encompassing heave of effort, Slater thrust him ashore.
King sprawled into a dirty puddle of snow and slush. He reached through the mushy layer and felt hard earth beneath. His teeth chattered relentlessly. Steam clouded in front of his face with each breath, and freezing water leaked from all facets of his clothes.
He dropped his forehead into the sludge and willed for his breathing to return to normal. Each inhale came in a rattling gasp, and the subsequent exhales sent him into spluttering coughing fits. He lifted his head to see a gargantuan plume of smoke rising in the distance. The blast had obliterated an entire section of the peninsula.
The mine — and all evidence of its secret purpose — had been demolished in a single attack.
Slater crawled onto the shore beside him and slumped in a heap, breathing just as hard. They lay in the sludge as the minutes ticked by, surrounded by desolation and emptiness. King wished for a relief from the agony. He wished for a warm bed and a long period of time where he didn’t have to worry for his life.
He looked back to where they had swum from. Kharchinskoye Lake dwarfed them. The ice had shattered to reveal a sweeping stre
tch of dark arctic water. If the missile strike had destroyed the ground underneath them a few moments earlier, they never would have made it to shore. The distance would have been too great.
Slater’s last-second effort to correct course for the nearest edge of the lake had saved them.
‘That was a hell of a swim,’ King said through shaking teeth.
Slater groaned as he rolled onto his back. The journey had sapped him of all strength. ‘I didn’t make it this far to die in a fucking lake.’
‘I would have. I don’t know how you did it.’
‘I haven’t taken the same amount of punishment as you. You looked like you were on death’s door when I found you.’
‘I still am.’
‘Well, don’t knock yet. We’re almost out of this.’
King took a moment to gaze out in all directions. Nothing for dozens of miles.
No civilisation.
No aid.
‘How?’ King said. ‘How do you propose we get out of this?’
Slater extracted the slim satellite device from his pocket. ‘I can make the call.’
King hesitated. ‘You said you wouldn’t do that. You know Black Force won’t be happy if you return.’
‘I don’t see an alternative.’
‘Wait for the WHO guys to find us,’ King said. ‘Then disappear. Stick to the plan.’
‘I don’t know, King. I feel like you’re going to need me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said you were here unofficially.’
‘I am.’
‘Isla sent you.’
King paused a beat, considering whether he should share the news. ‘One of the workers was Isla’s sister.’
‘Sister…’ Slater muttered.
King knew what he was thinking. Slater hadn’t seen a woman in the mine.
‘She’s dead.’
‘Oh.’
‘And you’re right,’ King said. ‘We’re fucked. Her and I both. I decided to continue through with it, even after I found out it was a ruse. We’re both accountable for it.’