by Andy Straka
“That part I haven’t figured out yet.”
“I’m thinking we need to find a way to get down this tunnel and see what’s at the other end,” he said.
“The problem is, I don’t think either you or I are going to be able to fit in there very easily to check it out.”
I stepped up to the spot where the tunnel narrowed and approximated its girth with my hands. No way Toronto would fit with his wide shoulders. I might barely make it. But it would be like climbing down a blind cave with virtually no margin for error. I could easily get stuck. On the other hand, the girl with the owl and Sammy Yel Bak with his slender fingers curved around the trigger of the Kalashnikov, would have no problem. Neither would Nicole.
“The tunnel could open up again further in, and the other end might have a larger entrance,” he said.
“Which we could confirm if we knew where it was. Or that there even is such an entrance.”
Toronto flipped out his cell phone. “No reception down here,” he said. “I say we head back upstairs and call 911. Maybe they can get some sand rats or tunnel people in here to check this out.”
He turned to go. I held out my hand to stop him.
“Hold on a second.”
“Why?”
I had the unmistakable feeling I would find Nicole alive somewhere on the other side of this hole.
“We may not have time,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Before Jayani and her people killed Raines, they may have forced him to tell them where the other entrance is in the park.”
“If there is another entrance.”
“Right.”
“And if Nicky is even in there with these guys.”
“Right.”
“Lot of if’s.”
“Nicky’s in there somewhere.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel it.”
While we were standing there with our thumbs in our mouths, the time for debate came abruptly to an end. From somewhere deep inside the tunnel echoed an ominous crack, followed in quick succession by another and then another. The unmistakable sound of a handgun going off.
“Gotta go.” I dove toward the opening, reaching for my Glock.
“Here,” Toronto said, snatching a small penlight from one of his pockets and shoving it. “At least use this. I’ll get the cavalry.”
I ducked my face below the lip of the opening and plunged ahead onto my stomach, leading with the dim light and my gun. A wormhole for a coffin. Now wouldn’t that be nice?
“Hey, Frank,” Toronto said from behind me as I began wriggling down the narrow with barely an inch or two between my shoulders and the walls. “Keep your light down and your face to the stone. Makes it harder to see you coming.”
What did he think this was, Tora Bora? I felt the tunnel begin to swallow me, its brick and stone supports chafing at my knees, elbows, shoulders, and forehead. A dim green phosphorescent glow of the penlight became my world. Face to the stone.
31
The passage through the narrow rock tube seemed to take five years. I squirmed forward inch by inch, the safety still on at the base of my Glock just in case. The last thing I needed was to deafen myself and possibly injure someone at the end of the tunnel ahead. It had to end somewhere. That gunfire hadn’t come from the moon.
I focused on the rock face in front of my nose. I tried not to think about all the weight of the earth around me, the rocks and roots and trees, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel, stone, and pavement that made up midtown Manhattan. Instead, I concentrated on a memory of an outing with Torch earlier in the spring.
It was a warm March day, nearing the end of the season. The sun was out and a light breeze was blowing, but not enough to affect our hunting or cause Torch any trouble. In fact, the sky was completely clear and such an electric blue, it seemed to pulse with energy. Torch, following on as I negotiated my way through a variable grove of thicket and woods, soared from tree branch to tree branch, the only sound the faint deep note of his bells.
When a rabbit burst from the thicket, a large buck, Torch was all business, having stalked and sensed him long before I. His stoop was an eye blink of beauty, timed for the kill as he’d done hundreds of times before.
But this buck was no ordinary cottontail. He feinted and dodged as expected but he also managed to skillfully employ his cover—a rock outcropping, a jagged fur pine, and a dense rhododendron—in such a way as to cause Torch to pull tail fur but miss clutching the big rabbit’s body with his talons. We chased and stalked him all over that wood it seemed, but he finally got away.
Half an hour later, Torch caught another rabbit, which made it a successful outing. But I couldn’t forget the skill and the cunning of that big buck. Torch might not have been the baddest hunting hawk to ever come down the pike, but he was no slouch either. The buck had proved a more than worthy foe.
This is what some of those sign carrying fools at the courthouse who hated all kinds of hunting failed to understand, precisely because the vast majority of them had never actually picked up a rifle or a bow or, for that matter, flown a bird of prey at live quarry in the wild. Their minds were numbed to reality by Disneyfied visions of Bambi killers. The truth was more complex than that. The strong and the determined survived, hunter and prey alike. It was the height of human vanity to somehow believe man had completely evolved beyond all that.
Thinking back to the ludicrous scene with the dueling protestors kept me going. I focused on the green glow of the rock around me.
Soon, the air began to grow cooler. The walls of my tunnel remained as suffocating as ever, but I could sense a wider opening ahead.
I risked lifting my head slightly to look and there it was: a dim light filtered into the curving tunnel from up ahead. I was nearing the end of my torture, for better or worse.
I extinguished the pen light. With my arms extended out in front of me and no clearance to pull them back in to my sides, whoever was at the end of the passage and had fired those shots would be able to spot me coming if they focused on the tunnel. I slowed my progress too. There’d been no more shooting and I didn’t want to risk making any noise. I still couldn’t make out the end of the passage, but I guessed I was only about twenty or thirty feet from whatever awaited me there.
“You guys are friggin’ idiots. I told you not to shoot anybody unless it was a last resort.”
The voice was excited and out of breath.
“But look at the size of that rat. It just popped out of nowhere, man. Scared the beejesus out of me.”
“I don’t care about the goddamned rat. Where’s your head at? We’ve got to figure out how to get all these bitches back to Jayani without looking like we’re leading a parade up Malcolm X Boulevard.”
“Sorry. What you want to do about Sammy and the white chick?”
“Jayani will take care of the white chick. As far as Sammy, I’m not going to spend any more time looking for him. Let him rot down here with the rats.”
“That’s nasty.”
“Hey, that little bugger has practically blown this whole deal for us. He deserves it.”
“What about the pets? Maybe we should lock them up down here and leave them for the rats too?”
“Nah. We’ll let the rest of ‘em out too. Someone will find them, or let ‘em find their ways home if they can. Then maybe these crazy people upstairs will start forgetting about all this.”
“How about the owl?”
“You want to carry that thing out of here?”
“Not me, man.”
“Leave it tied down where it is. No reason to go near it.”
“Hey, I know. We can feed the rat to it!”
“I said leave it be. We’ve got other things to worry about.”
As they’d been busy talking, I’d managed to inch forward to where the end of the hole became visible. All I could see through the opening, however, were the jittering patterns of a pair of flash
light beams being trained on a brick wall and an invisible ceiling overhead. I was probably still somewhere under the street but nearing the park.
“All right. Let’s get going then,” the second voice agreed.
The lights swirled about in tandem. A rusty hinge echoed through the chamber as they opened what appeared to be a door. The lights disappeared and the sound of their footsteps receded into the darkness.
Good timing. Deciding to forgo a light until I was through the tunnel and had a better idea what I was facing, I pulled myself forward until I poked out of the opening.
Fresh air. The atmosphere in this new chamber, while probably only marginally better than anywhere else in this subterranean area, felt like a cool breath of spring on my face after the rock shaft. But no sooner had I enjoyed the feeling than a bitter odor struck my nostrils. The rat, I guessed. I hoped I wouldn’t be catapulting out of the opening and landing on the dead thing’s carcass. There was no sound in this darkened room. But when I paused to listen more closely, I could make out an intermittent whoosh and rumble, muted, probably coming from the traffic several yards overhead.
I managed to find a small pebble and tossed it out the opening to gauge the distance to the floor. It was only a few feet down it seemed. Good thing, because I’d be scrambling out head first.
I made the maneuver?no easy feat while clutching the Glock?and a few seconds later found myself standing on solid ground again. I reached down and felt the surface of the floor. Like the wall, it appeared to be made of old bricks, built for who knows what purpose. I took a stance and raised the gun into a defensive position, switching on the green penlight again.
It was a storage room of some kind. A rack of old fifty-five gallon drums took up one wall. Stacks of empty boxes and empty food containers littered the floor. They had been the rat’s hoped for prize. The large rodent lay curled in a pool of its blood in one corner.
An old wooden door hung part way open on the opposite wall. Beyond it, I could begin to make out a darkened passageway with narrower walls but a ceiling of similar height to the room in which I stood.
I had just begun to edge toward the doorway when I heard the muffled noise.
It sounded like the guttural grunts of some wild animal confined to a cage. In the eerie half light of the chamber doorway, the sound could have come from some otherworldly dimension.
When I heard it a second time, however, I knew that these were human voices. Not just one or two, but several. I stepped through the door and began moving toward the source of the noise sound but stopped short when another door slammed shut somewhere far down the corridor.
I doused my light. I heard the sound of laughter and I could make out the bright beam from a large flashlight followed by a torso and a pair of legs rising into the darkness as if ascending a ladder.
Then a soft word was spoken, indecipherable. Abruptly, the light reversed course and began descending toward the floor again. Whoever was behind the beam, it was a safe bet they weren’t exactly friendly. Before I knew it, the light had reached the bottom and had turned and was heading straight in my direction.
I barely had time to step gingerly behind the door before the powerful beam extended its long reach back into the chamber behind me. Footfalls on the brick approached, and a man breathed heavily. I squeezed the gun in my hand. But he obviously had no clue about my presence. There was no hesitation as he approached and moved right past me through the open door.
He stopped and began to fiddle with some piece of equipment, swearing under his breath, more out of aggravation at some petty annoyance than anything else. The beam, I could tell now, was trained into the room away from me.
Time to make a move.
I stepped around the door to see the silhouette of a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt bent over something in one corner of the darkness. The flashlight had been set on the floor beside him.
Two steps forward. Flip the safety on the Glock.
At the last second the man must have sensed my presence because he began to rise and turn in my direction. But it was too late. I swung the butt of the gun hard, felt the jolt as it crashed against the back of his skull.
He slumped heavily to the floor. I recognized him as one of the other guards from the building. I turned him over and searched him. He had been bent over a pouch full of marijuana, half its contents spilling onto the dry brick floor. He must have dropped it when he was in here earlier and realized his mistake as he was climbing up the ladder.
He had a nice Beretta Cougar with a full clip tucked into a hip rig under his sweatshirt which I helped myself to, the holster as well. Now I was heavily armed with the mini-Glock as backup.
There was no telling how long my friend here might be out, so I scrounged around the storeroom looking for something that might slow him down a little. I found exactly what I needed behind one of the big drums, a coiled length of black rubber gardening hose I was able to filet with my jackknife into strips that served nicely to bind his hands and feet.
The human sounds coming from the other end of the black tunnel appeared to have quieted, but I could still hear them as I picked up the flashlight and left the room again, leaving the guard bound in the darkness.
I would need to work fast. Jayani and whoever else might have been with this guy might begin to wonder where he was by now. The only good news being that having to crawl down the rungs of the ladder would make them a sitting duck for anyone taking aim on them, namely me.
Maybe sensing my presence, the voices seemed to be pulling me toward them again, like ancient sirens from the darkness.
Past the ladder at the end of the corridor a much larger and heavier wooden door stood closed. It was rough wood and coated in heavy and uneven black lacquer, caked with dust that nonetheless still managed to sparkle in the light from my beam. Large white letters on the door read PROPERTY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK and FDNY.
The fire department. Maybe this place was used to access additional underground water lines or something. Whatever its original purpose, it didn’t appear to have seen any use for years. Until now, that is.
I checked the readout on my digital phone. Still no signal down this deep. A two-way radio was all I needed to let Toronto know what I had discovered so he could direct help my way, but in our haste, that piece of equipment hadn’t been on the requisition list.
The voices had stopped for the moment. Maybe they’d heard my footsteps and wondered if the guard or one of the others were coming back.
The heavy door had been secured from the outside with a freshly installed latch bolt. I unbolted the door and pulled it open, shining my light through the opening.
Human smells?urine, feces, fear even?washed over me. There were most definitely people left in here in the dark. My beam caught a stick-like arm first. Then a hand, a torso, a face. More faces, four or five altogether. All of them bound and gagged with duct tape, their faces and clothes smudged with dirt, all of them African and female.
I shone the light back down the hall on the distant ladder to make sure no one was coming. Then I pushed through the door and into the room.
I started with the girl closest to the door. She was tall and thin, clad in nothing more than cutoff jeans and a T-shirt, the whites of her eyes wild with terror as she squinted into my beam.
“It’s okay, it’ll be okay,” I said, patting the girl’s arm as I began to undo the tape. She gave a sharp cry as the tape ripped away from her cheeks. “Shhh, it’s all right. It’ll be okay.”
Pulling tape, trying to calm them, I moved down the line from one girl to the next. They were all terrified, emaciated and dehydrated. I wished I’d thought to bring along a bottle of water. All of them looked to be between ten and fourteen years old. None spoke any English.
When the last one was free I poked my light outside and checked the ladder again. Still no sign of anyone returning to check on the guard. I was closing the door and turning back to the frightened girls when it happened.
So
mething hard and cold poked into my ribs.
“Hole up there, bro.” Sammy Yel Bak slid into the room like smoke behind the barrel of his AK-47. “Put your hands up.”
“Where’s my daughter?” I asked.
“She ain’t here no more. They took her.”
“Who took her?”
“Los Miembros. They took her and most of the rest of the girls, and after you knocked that fool on the head, now they be back any minute.”
“Why’d you take my daughter?”
“‘Cause she look like I could trust her.”
“Not me.”
“No. Not then.”
“I’m on your side,” I said.
“I know,” he said, flipping the safety on his rifle and letting the barrel drop to his side. “That’s what your daughter told us. Now we all gotta move in a hurry.” He motioned with his gun for me to move back into the room with the girls.
I did as he instructed. The refugees, rather than being more frightened, seemed to have calmed down considerably at the sight of him.
“C’mon, let’s go.”
He motioned to the group of girls, turned on his own small flashlight, and we all followed him to a back corner of the room where he shone his light on the low ceiling. There among the cobwebs overhead was a narrow line in the concrete. A trap door.
Sammy slung his gun over his shoulder. Three or four of the girls stepped forward holding out their hands to help boost him up. I lent a hand.
A couple of minutes later, we were all safely up through the opening, the door was closed and Sammy had bolted it shut from our side. Wherever we were, it was much cooler than below. The chamber was similar to the one we’d just left, except it was empty and connected to a much larger tunnel. Sammy and the girls began moving down the tunnel.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
After fifty yards or so, the tunnel forked. We followed the left hand tunnel for another few yards until we entered another much larger chamber with posters and hand painted pictures on the wall. Sammy bent over and lit a lamp. There were signs of habitation everywhere?water bottles, food wrappers, more lanterns, a ventless cook stove, portable CD players, even blankets and mattresses laid out on the floor.