Shadows Rising

by Ernest Dempsey

Adriana and June stepped inside, following four of the men. The building had a dusty, metallic scent.

  Ancient mining carts sat on old tracks that disappeared into a tunnel boring into the mountain. Huge racks, full of automatic guns and larger weapons, like RPGs, lined the walls. From a rapid assessment, Adriana figured there had to be a few thousand guns in the room. And that was just one area.

  Rusty metal stairs ascended to a second floor where a catwalk wrapped around the center of the building. More stairs went up to the third floor, but it was difficult to see what was there. Men in black clothing were scurrying around as if preparing for something. Adriana had a bad feeling about whatever it was they were doing. No chance it was going be good. These men were bent on bringing death to the innocent, taking away life, liberty, and the pursuit of anything remotely decent. They had enough weapons and ammunition to start a small war or, in their case, wreak havoc on society.

  So much for gun control in this country. Apparently it wasn’t something the Albanian government cared to stem. Or maybe Tosu simply had them in his back pocket. Either way, the man appeared to be planning something big.

  The door slammed shut behind them, startling the prisoners.

  Adriana and June both looked back and saw Tosu surrounded by guards. He stared at the women for a moment before addressing them. He stepped by them with long, deliberate strides and then spun around when he was between them and the mining carts. His hands went out wide as if showing off a new home to special guests.

  “Do you like it?” he asked. There was a hint of pride in his voice that only someone who craved destruction could appreciate.

  “Looks like you’ve been busy,” Adriana said.

  “You could say that.”

  “It also looks like you’re planning something big,” she added.

  “Very astute of you. Of course, I’m sure you’d love to know what that is, but you’ll have to wait and see with the rest of the world.”

  First clue. Whatever the Red Ring was getting ready to do, it would be on a grand scale.

  No doubt all the major news outlets would be covering it. It was a downside to the modern world. Everything went viral in a matter of seconds. Videos were streamed by millions every minute. The moment something bad happened, news channels were on the scene, sharing the horrors and tragedy with the planet.

  It was one of the reasons Adriana never watched the news. She couldn’t take it. Only Sean and a few of her close friends knew that about her. On the outside, she was as tough as the proverbial nail. On the inside, however, bloomed a delicate flower that cared deeply for the good of mankind. It was one of the reasons she’d set out to right the wrongs of World War II and the thievery that had been carried out by the Nazis.

  Now she was in a bind. There was no doubt Tosu and his men would torture her and June. They would do whatever it took to extract who they were, who they worked for, and what the agency was planning next.

  The terrorists wouldn’t get what they wanted. Adriana knew that much. It was the only card she and June had left to play—defiance.

  “You’re gonna need a lot more than this if you want to take down the free world, Khalil,” June said through clenched teeth. Her words were lathered in fury.

  Tosu flashed a toothy grin. “Oh, I’m well aware of that. This is just the beginning. Take them down,” he said to one of the guards.

  The man immediately shoved June in the back, guiding her toward the mining tunnel. Adriana was pushed into line right behind her.

  The group marched into the corridor that had been bored into the mountain long ago by men seeking their fortunes. Dusty wires lined the rock walls, running into a light every twenty feet or so before continuing their seemingly unending journey deeper into the mine.

  They walked for what seemed like an hour, though in reality it was only ten minutes, until they arrived at a crossroads in the path. The train tracks forked in three directions. One set went farther into the tunnel ahead. The other two split to the right and left. The curves in the tracks were merged with a manual handle jutting up from the base to the right so miners could change directions easily when they arrived at the junction.

  “What did they mine here?” Adriana asked, figuring it couldn’t hurt anything to have a friendly conversation.

  She didn’t see Tosu raise a curious eyebrow at the question. He was three guards back, bringing up the rear. “Gold, originally. They found a few veins of it here long ago, but not much. The thing that brought most of the money was bauxite. The original owners of this property stripped it clean. When the bauxite was gone, they moved on to other things and left the mine as you see it now.”

  Adriana had seen a bauxite mine before. She’d been on a hike with Sean in the hills of Southern Tennessee and stumbled across tracks and carts similar to the ones in this mine.

  She didn’t say anything else to Tosu, instead letting the corridor fall into a tense silence.

  The men led them down the passage to the left. The tunnel opened wider, providing enough room for the guards to walk four across if they wanted. Up ahead, sounds of metal grinding echoed off the roughly hewn rock. Hammers, drills, sanders, welders, and other tools caused it to sound like a big-city construction zone rather than an abandoned mine.

  It didn’t take long for them to learn where the sounds were coming from.

  The corridor widened toward the mouth and led into a gigantic room. The place wasn’t a natural cave; that much was clear. Steel support beams ran along the ceiling, grounded with huge concrete bases that must have gone ten feet into the earth.

  The room looked like Santa’s workshop for terrorists.

  Workers were busy making bullets, assembling weapons, and constructing explosives. Adriana had heard of terrorist camps before. Usually, they were out in the middle of nowhere, covered with sand-colored camouflage netting to keep satellites and planes from spying on their activities, or in some cases, finding them to begin with.

  This, however, was no ordinary terrorist camp. It was an assembly line of death.

  Something caught Adriana’s eye on the other side of the giant chamber. A separate group of men were working in white lab coats. There were several large tables. On top of them was the unmistakable shape of rockets. Beyond the tables, a steel door had been fitted into the wall. There was a reinforced window set into it, but she couldn’t see beyond. Adriana didn’t need to look through it to have an educated guess as to what it might be.

  “Germ warfare?” she asked, though it was more of a statement in her tone.

  Tosu only offered a stupid grin in response as he tilted his head back. That was answer enough.

  “So,” June said, “you’re building dirty bombs. You realize that in the free world we have the resources to knock out that kind of stuff, right?”

  Tosu put his hands behind his back and raised up on his tiptoes for a second. Then he lowered himself down slowly. “Ah, you must be talking about your Patriot missiles and their newest iterations.”

  June neither confirmed nor denied.

  “Well, you’ll be glad to know that these midrange weapons are equipped with jamming and cloaking devices. The latter makes it nearly impossible to detect on radar, while the former scrambles a hard lock any antiaircraft missile would utilize. So far, our tests have shown an increase of 120 percent accuracy over previous weapons.”

  “Like the Scuds Saddam Hussein tried to use?”

  He let out a laugh. “My dear, that was so long ago. Your government really needs to update their information if that’s what you think I’m comparing it to.”

  June bit her lip.

  “Now that you’ve had the tour….” He turned to one of the guards. “Lock them in their cells.”

  Adriana frowned. She wondered when the interrogation was going to begin. One guard grabbed her left arm just under the shoulder. Another took the right in the same way. Their strong fingers felt like vice grips squeezing her muscles.

  “I don’t know what you t
hink you’re going to get out of us,” June said. “But we won’t tell you anything. You might as well kill us and get it over with.”

  Tosu nodded as if contemplating her statement. “Oh, I know I’m not going to get any useful information out of the two of you.” He leaned forward like he was about to share a deeply intimate secret. “The bad news for you two is I don’t need any information you could give me. I don’t care what agency you work for, what country. I don’t even care who you are, so spare me the whole speech about not telling me what I want to know. I don’t want to know anything.”

  June frowned. “Then what are we doing here?”

  He rolled his shoulders. “You’re the enemy. And more than that, you’re a heathen, scum of the earth. You and all the other nonbelievers must be purified by fire. Part of that purification is watching everything you stand for burn to the ground.”

  That was a little dark. Adriana didn’t know anyone who thought like that—well, no one sane. Now it was starting to make sense. Tosu wanted the two of them to sit and watch while his men carried out their next attack. Perhaps after they’d been forced to view the destruction they would be given the comfort of death. Adriana doubted it would be that simple. They, no doubt, would be forced into a few other disgusting actions before finally receiving a bullet to the head as their prize.

  She could sense the way the men in the room were looking at them. The pervasive sense was that their expressions were both disdainful and full of lust. There was no telling how long they’d been down here, not to mention how long since they’d seen a woman. Surely they lived in the city and had somewhat normal lives. Then again, the way most terror cells operated consisted of a lonely life, one that required an absence from society so the soldiers could focus on their primary objective. They prided themselves outwardly by professing chastity and total allegiance to Allah. The truth was they engaged in wretched behaviors, often turning the camp into a lewd scene more befitting a maximum security prison.

  Adriana shook off the thought. No sense in getting worked up about something that hadn’t happened yet. That was the beautiful thing about the future; it wasn’t written in stone.

  The guards ushered them across the room to another steel door set between two high shelves. The storage spaces were filled with parts for guns, makeshift explosives, and any number of other things. Wires, bits of metal, ball bearings, and several tubes were strewn about.

  Adriana half wondered how the members of the Red Ring hadn’t blown themselves up as a result of their carelessness. One wrong wire, an incorrectly placed chip, and one of those rockets would go boom and take out every man inside.

  She snuck one last glance at the men working on the weapons as the guard in front opened the door to their cell. June was shoved inside first, then Adriana. The door was slammed shut, leaving the two women inside with a few mattresses on the floor, a tin bucket, and a couple of thin blankets.

  “The least they could have done is taken off this duct tape,” June said, looking down dejectedly at her wrists. She twisted her hands and pumped her fingers back and forth to keep the circulation going.

  Adriana was already thinking about how to get the tape off her wrists. It was part of the plan her mind was busy formulating, a plan to escape.

  13

  Tirana

  What do you think they’re going to do to us?” June asked. She was expecting the worst despite what Tosu had told them. It was only a matter of time until the boss retired for the night, leaving the two women in an underground prison cell with hundreds of hormone-driven men who probably hadn’t seen a woman in a long time.

  Adriana didn’t say it, but she had the feeling that June had never been in this kind of situation before. For Adriana, it was far from the first time, and she had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  “Don’t worry?” June sounded exasperated. “We’re locked in this cell with no way out. And even if we could find a way out, they took our guns and all our gear. We’re screwed, Addy.”

  Adriana let her friend vent and then waited another ten seconds before she said anything. “You done?”

  June’s eyebrows lowered to reflect her frown. “What?”

  “I have a plan.”

  “Plan? What plan? There is no plan! Our hands are literally tied here.” June held up her hands to show the duct tape still binding them. She wrestled her arms around in another desperate attempt to get free of the bonds, but it was no use.

  Adriana just flashed a crooked grin and stepped over to the tin bucket sitting on the floor. The thing was stained on the inside and smelled like a porta potty that hadn’t been cleaned in a year.

  She winced at the odor and choked back the impulse to vomit as she took a knee next to the receptacle. She reached out with her bound hands and pried a finger under the pail’s wiry handle. It creaked as she lifted it. Good, it’s loose, she thought. A quick inspection of where the handle was attached to the bucket revealed the loop had a small gap as it wrapped around to meet itself.

  “That thing is disgusting,” June said. “I hope you’re not thinking of using it right now.”

  Adriana ignored her and pulled hard on one end of the handle, twisting it while she braced the edge with her foot. The tin bent easily under her leverage, and the gap in the handle’s loop increased. She planted her foot back on the ground and checked her handiwork. Then she twisted the handle again and pulled the end through the hole on the bucket.

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Funny thing, duct tape,” Adriana answered without looking up. She twisted the other end of the handle the same way she’d done the first and a moment later had removed the entire piece of metal from the pail. “It’s extremely strong but very easy to tear.”

  She twisted the wiry handle around in her fingers. “Come here.”

  June wasn’t sure what Adriana had in mind, and then it hit her. The handle’s end had the slightest of edges to it. She hurried over to Adriana, who set to work scratching into the thick gray surface. It took less than a minute before there was a small cut on the bonds.

  They would have simply torn the tape free with the end, but Tosu’s men weren’t stupid. They knew the women would think of that, so had wrapped the end of the duct tape inside where their wrists were and then mashed it down so it couldn’t be peeled by prying fingers.

  Three minutes passed before the cut was wide enough to peel back. Once that was done, Adriana set the handle on the ground and used her fingernails to pry the tape away from the wrappings. One loop at a time, she unraveled the bindings until June’s wrists were free.

  Overwhelmed with relief, and blood flowing to her fingers gain, June repeated the process for Adriana, making quick work of the duct tape.

  Adriana tossed the makeshift bindings on the floor and rubbed her wrists to get the feeling back.

  “Okay, so we’re free of those things,” June said, “but we’re still stuck.”

  Adriana flashed a mischievous grin. “I have a plan for that, too.”

  She moved over to the door and pounded on the surface with a fist. There was no response. She rapped on the door again, harder than before. The impact with the base of her hand hurt, but she didn’t care.

  “Hey, we need some help in here!” she shouted.

  Still nothing.

  She kicked the door this time, using her heel to keep the impact to her foot to a minimum. “You hear me out there? We need help with the bucket!”

  June raised an eyebrow, imagining the images going through the minds of the guards who were stationed just outside the door.

  At that moment, the sound of the lock releasing clicked through the metal barrier and Adriana put her hands behind her back. They’d wonder how she’d gotten free of the duct tape if they saw her wrists. She was banking on them not realizing her hands were behind instead of in front of her until it was too late.

  The door swung open, and the two guards stepped in.
One had a submachine gun pointed at Adriana. The other held a pistol out in front of him. These guys were taking no chances.

  “What is the problem?” the first guard asked, lowering his weapon slightly. The muzzle was pointed right at Adriana’s abdomen.

  “The bucket,” Adriana said. “We can’t use the bathroom with our hands tied like this.”

  The guard frowned and stepped farther into the room. He lowered his pistol while the other guy stood in the doorway with his gun still pointing menacingly at Adriana. The first guy turned his head to see what she was talking about.

  June was standing near the wall with her hands behind her back. She offered a sheepish grin. “Sorry,” she said. “I really gotta pee.”

  The guard shook his head and started to move toward her when he felt something grab his left wrist. He tried to spin around to face the threat, but Adriana was counting on that. She used his momentum to turn him in a 180 degree arc until he was facing his comrade. Then she jumped on his back and wrapped her forearm around his thick neck, and squeezed.

  The second guard moved his weapon around but couldn’t get a clear shot.

  June saw both men were preoccupied and grabbed the bucket off the floor. She flung it at the guy in the doorway, striking him in the temple.

  Stunned but not knocked out, he slumped against the doorframe, rubbing the side of his head.

  It was all the time June needed. She flew across the room like a banshee.

  The man saw her coming, but there was nothing he could do. He raised his weapon to fire, but June leaped into the air and plowed the heel of her boot into the same place on his head the bucket had struck a moment before. The other side of his head smashed into the rock wall, and he fell limp to the floor.

  Meanwhile, Adriana was having the bull ride of her life. The first guard spun around in circles, desperately swinging his arms to free himself of the parasite. He saw his partner go down in one kick from the other prisoner and tried to lift his gun to end her life right then and there. Adriana saw what he was doing and wrapped the fingers of her other hand around his face, digging her nails deep into his eyes.