Darkness Under Heaven

by F. J. Chase

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Parachuting into Grenada.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That beats med school finals, or my first surgical procedure.”

  “But having done those, you know the anticipation is always worse than the execution.”

  “I’m not so sure this time. You know, the only symptom you didn’t describe was…”

  “You feel like you could shit through a screen door without touching the wire, right?”

  Doctor Rose burst into laughter. Rocking back and forth, straining against her seat belt. Wiping her eyes, she said, “Oh, I feel much better now. Thanks, Pete.”

  “One strong emotion always counteracts another.” Avakian took the exit off the West 3rd Ring Road. “We’re getting close.”

  “If you don’t want me talking, tell me to shut up.”

  In his experience, there was no way that keeping a woman from talking was ever going to make her less nervous. “Doesn’t bother me. Go right ahead.”

  “Why haven’t I ever heard of something like this?”

  “Well, two reasons,” said Avakian. “First of all, terrorists are mainly concerned with making a big media impact. Their attacks aren’t military operations, they’re armed propaganda operations. The second reason is not politically correct.”

  She smiled in the darkness. Then it was probably going to be good. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. The vast majority of today’s terrorism is Muslim, with Arab origins. And the only thing Arabs are really any good at is murder.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t hate anyone you didn’t know personally.”

  “I did a security contract in Saudi Arabia. For the first and last time. And the less said about that, the better.”

  “Sounds like they didn’t make much of an impression on you.”

  “They didn’t. Now, what were we talking about?”

  “Terrorism.”

  “Right. Critical system vulnerabilities aren’t spectaculars that lend themselves to great TV. Beijing had major water supply problems even after they expanded their infrastructure for the Olympics. And I just happen to know that they’ve got eleven treatment plants in the city, most of them in a circle between the 4th and 3rd Ring Roads, and six in the suburbs.” The map was taped to the dashboard. “There’s probably a battalion of troops guarding each one. Which, since we don’t have a thousand Rangers hanging around, means we won’t be getting anywhere near those plants. But we don’t have to. Okay, here we go. A likely looking spot.”

  Main water and sewer lines always followed main roads into cities. Avakian had picked a location that wasn’t residential, with no businesses that were open at night. Traffic of course—it was Beijing after all. But you couldn’t have everything.

  He pulled over near the curb and activated his four-way flashers. Reaching under the seat, he pulled out the magnetized revolving red light. Turning it on, he leaned out the window and stuck it on the roof of the van.

  “You remember the routine,” he said.

  “You made me practice it enough.”

  As soon as they’d gotten into the van they’d changed into cheap one-piece white Tyvek plastic coveralls, with hoods. Splash suits. With high rubber boots. And since those suits were damnably hot, nothing but underwear underneath. The suits not only looked right, but they were going to make cleanup a lot easier.

  And before they exited they donned full-face respirators, the industrial type with filter canisters on each side. They were a good disguise against non-Oriental features, and Avakian was worried about toxic gases. Rubber gloves were also going to be necessary. And, strictly for camouflage, yellow plastic construction hard hats and reflective safety vests.

  Opening the back door Avakian saw that he had in fact stopped right in front of one of Beijing’s attractively ornate steel manhole covers. Perfect.

  He stuck another revolving light on the back roof. They looked official enough, and no one was likely to be checking for vehicle logos in the middle of the night.

  With the traffic whipping by, Avakian unloaded the construction barriers he’d stolen from an unattended site, arranging them around the manhole. Cheap yellow-and-black plastic sawhorses with solar-powered yellow blinking lights. Then farther down the road a line of reflective red plastic traffic cones.

  “Should we be calling this much attention to ourselves?” Doctor Rose asked, her voice muffled by the respirator.

  “Sneak around and people get suspicious,” Avakian replied. “Look and act like you’re supposed to be there, no one pays any attention.”

  With a narrow pry bar in one hand and a crowbar hook in the other, he wedged the manhole cover up and dragged it clear. Clicking on the big 12-volt lantern, he shined it down into the hole. Good news and bad news. Good news: it wasn’t a sewer. Water lines didn’t run down sewers—only flowing streams of sewage did. Bad news: it wasn’t a sewer but it still looked pretty bad. He glanced over at the good doctor. And foresaw problems.

  Avakian pulled the sliding metal ladder out of the back of the van, extending it to full length as he ran it down into the hole. At least it hit bottom. That had been a major concern.

  Now he returned to the van and unlocked one of the three large metal toolboxes. Removing the top tray revealed shiny pipe bombs swaddled in bubble wrapping. He took out two and completed the connections, wrapping the bare wire in electrical tape. Then he tucked them back into their bubble wrap and carefully zipped the package into the nylon duffel bag he slung across his back. “Check your respirator.”

  She clapped her hands over the filter canisters and took a breath. The rubber sealed to her face, and no air leaked in. “It’s working,” she reported.

  “Okay, follow me.”

  He started down the ladder. From the look of the walls in the lantern beam the respirator was going to be a godsend. Because there seemed to be about a thousand years of grossness down there. He stepped off into a few inches of liquid. Oh, this was not going to go over well at all.

  But on the bright side it wasn’t like a manhole—there was actually a tunnel continuing down a ways. Though relatively narrow and only slightly higher than himself.

  There was a big pipe that had to be a conduit into the sewers. It actually looked like it was made out of…he gave it a knock to confirm. It really was made out of clay. And running right above it a smaller diameter cast-iron water pipe. And was that a gas line? It sure looked like it. An added benefit.

  Doctor Rose was coming down now. Seriously stressed, if the indications were correct. She was breathing through her respirator like Darth Vader. He began war gaming what to do if she freaked out on him down here.

  It started for Judy Rose as she came down the ladder into the tunnel. She couldn’t take her eyes off the walls, from which were hanging mini stalactites of filth. Just what kind of filth she tried hard not to speculate about. Her stomach was rolling around enough as it was.

  The bottom of the tunnel held a liquid that only an optimist would have guessed to be water. She hadn’t thought it would be that small. She also hadn’t thought she was claustrophobic. But she was definitely feeling claustrophobic.

  Her lantern barely penetrated the gloom farther down the tunnel. Oh my God.

  Without realizing it, she’d said it out loud. When the hand grabbed her arm she almost leaped all the way up the ladder.

  “You need to slow and shallow your breathing,” Avakian was saying. “You’re breathing harder than those filters can give you air. You’ll get hypoxic.”

  So that was the source of the headache. God, she couldn’t even diagnose a medical condition now. Come on, Judy. This wasn’t as bad as…okay, as her first human dissection. She looked around the tunnel again. No, this was worse.

  “Why don’t you wait here,” he suggested. “Just lean against the ladder and look up. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Back from where?” she demanded. Oh, now even she could he
ar the panic in her own voice.

  “Farther down.”

  “Why can’t you put them here?”

  “Because the tunnel goes farther down,” he explained patiently. “We want to make this hard to locate and repair.”

  He started down the tunnel. But when the darkness swallowed up his light and she couldn’t see him another wave of panic hit her. It was more scary to stay. She hurried after him but the sewer pipe took up so much space she could only walk sideways. The top of the pipe was at low chest height.

  Avakian saw her light coming. He shined his down at her and waited. Wonderful. Just wonderful. If they were all going to be like this he might get one more done before dawn.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Too scary to wait.”

  “Okay, let’s get moving,” he said.

  She thought it would be cooler underground, but it wasn’t. The pipes probably conducted a lot of heat. The humidity was incredible, with water—or whatever it was—dripping off everything. And the plastic suit definitely didn’t help. Salt sweat was pouring into her eyes, out of reach inside the respirator. She could feel the perspiration running down her legs and squishing inside her boots every time she took a step. It was actually easier to think about dying of heatstroke than thinking about the tunnel closing in on her.

  When she’d been rushing to catch up she’d focused her light down the tunnel and ignored everything else. Now as they moved she played the beam over the tunnel wall. And the wall seemed to be moving. The light, which had been steady a moment before, now began to shake along with the hand that held it. The moving wall was a mass of cockroaches, disturbed by the light.

  Avakian heard a sound like moaning behind him. He turned around quickly and saw what the light was focused at. He grabbed both her shoulders. “If you feel sick do not take off your respirator, no matter what. Breathe through your nose, head back to the ladder, and climb up.”

  “I’m okay,” came the muffled reply.

  She had guts, all right. They’d probably gone far enough. He’d been watching the lengths of pipe to see how often there was a joint.

  He finished examining one of those joints and swung the light back down the tunnel. Two small, narrowly spaced reflections flashed back at nearly head height. Just as Avakian registered the fact that they were eyes, the rat ran straight at them down the top of the sewer pipe and skittered past at impressive speed. He’d been keeping his hand on the pipe for balance. He pulled it off and reared back with his light, ready to take a swing as the rat passed by within a couple of feet.

  There was a shriek from Doctor Rose, and before he could turn around she’d jumped onto his back.

  From a distance it probably looked like one of those great old Warner Brothers cartoons, Sylvester the Cat and Porky Pig. But Avakian had other things on his mind just then. He had one hand on his respirator to keep it from coming off under the assault, but otherwise hadn’t moved a muscle. He tamped it all down, forcing himself not to yell. Nothing to add to the general panic. Instead he said calmly, “Judy, everything’s all right now. Very carefully, without a lot of bouncing around, I need you to climb down off my back. Right now.”

  It was that calm voice that awakened Judy’s sense of shame and caused her to realize just how profoundly humiliating it was to be clinging to the poor man’s back with both arms wrapped around his neck, probably choking him to death. If he’d thrown her off or something it would have been easier to deal with, but he just stood there as if she wasn’t actually clinging to him like a barnacle. There was little dignity to be salvaged from the situation, but with what she could muster she extended her feet until they touched ground again and then released her death grip on his neck. And managed to get out, “I am so very sorry.”

  “No one likes rats,” Avakian replied, as if he were ordering lunch. “It’s just that I’m carrying two live bombs strapped to my back.”

  She took two very fast, very involuntary steps back. That happened to be a little piece of information she’d totally forgotten in the crush of events. And also forgetting all about rats for the moment, she put her hand on the sewer pipe to steady herself. Well, if she hadn’t passed out by now she probably wasn’t going to.

  Now that she’d given him a little room, Avakian took off the duffel bag and set it atop the sewer pipe. He also set his light on the pipe and aimed the lens down. “If you could shine your light over here, too, that would be great,” he said, unzipping the bag.

  First of all, the timer buttons hadn’t been hit and the timers weren’t running. He’d picked ones without any prominent front-mounted buttons, and that was looking like a really good call right now. Now that priority had been dealt with, he checked everything else out. He’d taped the wires down so they couldn’t be pulled out, and the taped connections were intact. “Everything’s okay,” he reported.

  She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until he said that. And she started to breathe again. Now she felt so hot, sweaty, and exhausted that she’d forgotten how disgusting she’d felt just a moment before. “Don’t worry. If I see a hundred rats come screaming down this tunnel I will not do that again. I may try to knock myself unconscious with the flashlight so I don’t have to see it, but I will not do that.”

  “Well, try to do none of those things,” Avakian replied. He flashed his light back down the tunnel. It looked like it ended just up ahead. “Let’s go just a little farther.”

  The tunnel did stop, which was probably why the rat had run toward them. The pipes branched out in a T connection. One kept going straight ahead, the other two at ninety-degree angles. All vanishing into the earth. A major stroke of luck. “I think the universe has delivered the message that this is the place. Light?”

  She’d been looking for more rats, and irrationally wondering if there were anything like alligators in Chinese sewers. But now quickly swung her light back to the bomb.

  Avakian checked the clock on the timer by his watch, then switched it from clock mode to alarm. He double-checked that setting, and that the AM and PM were correct. Then said, “May I borrow your finger?” Taking her gloved index finger, he pressed it against the button to activate the alarm, which happened with a surprisingly loud beep.

  “Is it on?” she asked.

  “You just started it.” Said in a very preoccupied way, because he’d just realized that he couldn’t reach the top of the water pipe with the bomb in his hand. “You’re going to have to hold this for a second.”

  She just stood there. Too much thinking, Avakian decided. He was offering too many choices, too much information. He grabbed her hand and wrapped it around the pipe bomb. “Don’t move.”

  He pulled himself up on the sewer pipe, and grabbed the overhead water pipe with one hand. “Okay, give it to me.”

  She extended her arm up, and that bomb was shaking all over the place. Nothing she could do about it, because everything she had was going into the death grip to keep it from slipping out of her hand.

  Avakian took the bomb, and she was still hanging on. “You can let go now.”

  She actually had to will herself into doing that, finally releasing the steel casing before he had to pry her fingers off.

  The water pipe ran right against the wall of the tunnel. And the crevice where the two came in contact was where Avakian placed the bomb. Perfect. It couldn’t be seen, and the tunnel wall would focus the force of the blast into the pipe. No patch or collar was going to be able to handle that. They’d have to break ground to make repairs. And no bomb dog was going to be working down there, so the only thing that could go wrong was the bomb not going off.

  Which was why he placed the second device on the other branch of the T connection. So more than one section of replacement would be necessary. And because, as they said in the demo trade: two is one and one is none. The odds were a lot better that at least one of two bombs would go off. If he hadn’t screwed up somehow in making them.

  “Lead us back to the ladder,” he told Doctor R
ose.

  She proceeded to shatter the world record for moving sideways down a sewer tunnel.

  Back aboveground the hot summer night air felt positively arctic by comparison.

  “You can take off your respirator,” Avakian said. “Unzip the suit and open it up to get some air. Push the hood back, but don’t take the suit off, whatever you do.”

  Judy removed her respirator. The pooled sweat actually poured from the rubber face piece. She took a few cautious whiffs. “Whew. Not as bad as I thought it would be, but still bad. You sure about the suits? We’ll stink up the van.”

  “That’s why I covered the seats with those garbage bags,” Avakian said. “The van is going away tonight, but if we take the suits on and off we’ll never get the smell off ourselves. Go have a seat and pound some water down. I’ll pack up.”

  No way. She had to redeem herself somehow. “I’ll help you,” she said, trotting off to retrieve the traffic cones.

  Avakian grabbed the ladder and pulled it out of the hole. He was going to have to figure out a way to get her to actually follow some simple instructions without an hour of negotiations. Otherwise this I’m-a-doctor-and-I don’t-have-to-listen-to-anyone shit was going to get them both killed.

  They drove south with all the windows down, and after a while the smell either dissipated or they got used to it.

  Avakian had planned on maybe nine more manhole trips as they traversed the Ring Road around the city. Time permitting, of course. And it wouldn’t if they ran the rest of them like that one.

  As he was driving around looking for the right spot to do the next one, he said, “What about staying by the ladder this time?”

  She didn’t like that one bit. It was like giving up. Something she acknowledged she had real issues with. But then she also had to acknowledge newly discovered issues with claustrophobia and…what the hell did they call fear of rats? Not to mention fear of sewers. And…well, it was past time to swallow her pride and say it. Because if she didn’t he was probably going to. “You’d be justified in pointing out that I’ve done everything wrong tonight. All the while you tried to tell me the right way. I was dead wrong, and pigheaded to boot.”