Tango rose up on his elbows. He groaned as the pain stirred.
He guessed that the blow had knocked him out for about one minute, maybe less, maybe a little more. Hadn’t been long, though. He ignored the pain and focused on clawing his way up out of the mud. He got to his feet, staggering backward a few steps in the slop. Glanced up and remembered the big metal doors. Saw his grenade held fast to the gray seam and remembered his unfinished task. He touched a hand to the noticeable indentation on the Kevlar vest. The silly thing had saved his life. He wiped some mud and grit from his unshaven, grizzled face, and scowled. He was ready to kill somebody.
* * *
Simeon put the crosshairs back on him. He traced the tip of his tongue across his upper lip. The first shot hadn’t finished the job. This one was going through the skull.
Simeon concentrated. His finger rested gently on the trigger. He relaxed and let out a calming, focusing breath. He watched through the lens of the scope as the man staggered toward the entrance of the tunnel.
“Smile for me, sweetheart,” he whispered under his breath, settling the reticle onto the bridge of Tango’s nose.
Simeon had nestled himself in along the crest of the ridge at an overlook that offered a generous view across the open plain. In the three minutes since the first shot, he had advanced to a better vantage point, using a flat, eroded rock the size of a small car tire as a rifle rest. He watched Tango again approach the door. He eased down on the trigger, his touch little more than a loving caress.
“Sayonara,” he breathed, prepared to propel the 55 grain bullet across four hundred yards of desert terrain. He applied pressure to the trigger with the infinite patience of a Buddhist monk.
“Simeon?” The voice crackled through the earpiece of his handheld radio.
The sound of her voice broke Simon’s concentration and he jerked the trigger, pulling the shot wide.
“Bloody hell!”
* * *
The bullet struck the upper right corner of the big panel door, near a hinge, the shot ringing loudly off the metal. The led slug glancing off the metal produced a spark, sheering off a small sample of the desert camo paint.
Tango flinched and fell to his face, pressing his body flat against the mud. His eyes flicked to the gray silhouette of the mountains. He could see nothing. There was still no clear evidence of which direction either shot had come from.
He glanced at the panel doors. He needed to get inside.
He crawled like a crab the fifteen feet to the mound of earth where the door was and took shelter behind it. He sat with his back to the mound and checked his rifle. He broke radio silence to tell his team he was pinned down by enemy fire.
* * *
“Simeon,” she called again. “Can you hear me?”
Simeon glanced through the eyepiece of the riflescope. His target had taken cover. Simeon sat still for a long moment, waiting. He held his breath as rain and darkness loomed in the scope’s field of view. He blinked once. Twice. Held steady. But the mercenary remained out of sight behind the mound at the tunnel’s opening.
Simeon closed his eyes, dropped his chin away from the rifle stock and hissed the breath out between his wet lips.
What the hell is she doing? he thought.
“Please answer if you’re there,” she continued.
Simeon shook his head. Raised his walkie.
“Lindsay, what do you want?”
“Someone called your satellite phone.”
An intricate webwork of lightening spread out across the distant skyline, branching out and expanding into an awesome display of bluish-white electricity.
Simeon’s attention momentarily snapped away from the mercenary hiding four hundred yards away. Rain sizzled on the plastic face of the radio in his hand.
“Say again,” he replied.
“The satellite phone in the camera monitoring room, it’s been ringing. I finally answered it and spoke to two different women. I don’t know who was who. Neither gave a name. But they both mentioned you and Raj and Archer by name.”
“Hmm. What else did they say?”
“The first voice asked who I was, and then asked for you and Raj. The second woman asked if I was Lindsay Hammond. She wanted to know if Archer was here. And she told me to relay a message to you.”
Simeon blinked away rain from his eyes.
“What was the message?”
“That your sister is in danger.”
CHAPTER 93
There’d been no ID of any kind on either the second or third of the dead mercenaries. Archer had scoured the corpses. Investigated quickly but thoroughly. He still wanted answers, but getting answers was still not his top priority.
He reached a narrow slot canyon. Perhaps twenty feet high and six or seven feet wide at its widest point. It looked like just a crude split in the earth’s crust. The limestone had been eroded almost smooth. A shallow tributary of rainwater snaked down the canyon floor, gurgling between his legs.
Following the slot through the ridge instead of going over or around would save him valuable time. He simply didn’t want to get boxed in. He pushed through the canyon, struggling against the surprisingly strong current.
Archer listened to the radio contact between Lindsay and Simeon. Something was very wrong.
Thunder boomed, amplified by the strange acoustics of the shaped and textured walls of the slot canyon.
He couldn’t see a thing in front of him but kept moving. Surely sooner or later the groove in the limestone would have to open up. He navigated by touch, keeping one hand against the canyon wall and the other hand on the Beretta. There were still seven of them out there by his count. He needed to hurry up and even out the numbers.
* * *
Bravo had taken a shot to the throat and Sierra had died from a single bullet in the forehead. Both had clearly perished quickly and without putting up much of a fight. Alpha crouched down between the bodies, his assault rifle resting across his thighs. He studied the bodies through the green field of view of his goggles. They had been ambushed. The battle had been brief.
Foxtrot was thrashing and crunching through the nearby brush. Looking down, shining a flashlight into the scrub and mud, he paused and squatted beside a mangled desert plant.
“The incoming shots were fired from over here,” he said, gesturing with the beam of light. He plucked a spent shell casing from the gray muck between his boots. “Looks like nine-millimeter rounds. All of them.”
Alpha nodded, grimaced.
“Never saw him coming,” he said.
“Who do you think did this? Who’re we dealing with?”
Alpha stood.
“Someone who knows what he’s doing,” he said.
“How many of them?”
“One man did this. Only one set of prints leading in and leading out. But there are at least two of them out there.”
“They don’t stand a chance,” Foxtrot said.
“Kill anything that moves.”
Foxtrot nodded.
“Whoever did this has used up all his good luck,” Alpha said. “We are closing in on him now. He’s in way over his head.”
* * *
By the time Simeon got his riflescope back up and had pressed his eye to the lens, it was too late. In that instant he managed to catch just a flash of movement, followed by a brilliant flash of light through the gloom. The sound of the explosion reached him seconds later.
* * *
The explosion peeled the steel doors slightly inward at the seam, like a knife stabbed through an aluminum soda can. The sound of the explosion against the steel was enormous. Tango had thrown himself clear, covering his head with his arms. The ground beneath him shook. Smoke billowed up into the rain and gloom. When the blast was over, he raised his head and turned to inspect the damage.
The door panels were pocked from shrapnel, but the split in the doors was minimal. The detonation had rent the steel barely enough for him to fit a leg through, at best. H
e’d have to detonate a second charge. He waved away the smoke, gagging on the toxic tang. He fetched a second grenade from his pouch and leaned against the slightly twisted surface of the doors, squinting through the smoke and rain to see what he was doing.
Tango pulled the pin, extended his arm through the narrow gap between the door panels up to his elbow, and tossed it inside.
* * *
Simeon couldn’t see anything through the smoke. He held the reticle steady. If he got the opportunity for a third shot, he was going to make it count.
* * *
Lindsay jumped. She dropped the walkie and nearly fell on her face, tripping over her own feet. She didn’t know what she’d heard. The sound reverberated through the walls of the camera monitoring room. The light fixtures vibrated. Equipment rattled on the table. A few things fell from metal shelving on the walls. The power waned for a fraction of a second, the lights briefly dimming.
Lindsay scrambled to retrieve the radio.
* * *
The smoke dissipated enough for Simeon to see that damage had been inflicted upon the doors to the tunnel.
Good God, he thought. They’re going to blow it open.
* * *
“What just happened?” Lindsay said into the radio to no one in particular.
Simeon answered immediately.
“Lindsay, did you feel that?”
“Yes, of course! What was it?”
“Get inside the room where I put you and shut the blast door! Do it now!”
“Why? What’s going on out there?” A shiver stalked up her spine.
“Lindsay, just run!”
And then the second grenade exploded.
CHAPTER 94
The force of the detonation rocked the underground bunker. It sent tremors through the concrete walls. Smoke and debris from the explosion funneled down the tunnel in a swirling plume. The shockwave again disrupted the primary power, and the auxiliary unit failed. The lights flickered, waned, and then winked out entirely.
The entire underground bunker was cast into darkness.
The exterior door panels bubbled outward. Smoke from inside plumed up and out. The doors bucked against their hinges. The pneumatic arms held, but the three-inch steel of the panels was fatally weakened by the blast and had peeled apart several feet. The rain poured in.
Tango clicked on the tactical light beneath the barrel of his rifle and dropped into smoky blackness. He landed on blast-charred concrete and aimed the light through the swirl of smoke and dust. He intuitively followed the slope of the ramp deep into the tunnel and moved fast, charging through the darkness.
* * *
The second blast shook the walls of the camera monitoring room, shelving collapsing, equipment crashing to the floor. Lindsay was struck hard several times by falling objects as she tried to dodge out of the way. An overhead fixture holding several fluorescent tubes broke loose at one end and swung down from the ceiling, catching her on the back of the neck. In the next instant, the power failed.
Lindsay crashed to the floor. Pain spiked at the back of her head. It felt like she’d been struck with a hammer. Her eyes were shut tight, but sparks of light danced in the blackness behind her eyelids. She blinked them open and found she couldn’t see an inch in front of her face. The walkie-talkie radio had skittered out of reach into the pitch-blackness. Her ears were ringing from the blow to the head, and equipment was rattling around on the floor and the table, still settling after the abrupt spill, but she thought she could hear voices coming over the radio from an unseen direction.
“Lindsay!”
The sparks of light danced and swirled.
“Lindsay!”
She could feel blood oozing in her hair.
“Are you okay?” a voice crackled over the radio.
She attempted to sit upright. It felt like the world was spinning sideways. She was dazed.
“Please talk to me, Lindsay!”
She scooted on her bottom until she found a wall. She used it as a navigational tool and pushed herself up on her rubbery legs as she felt the blood creeping down the back of her neck.
She heard the radio squawking but couldn’t pinpoint its location. She staggered one way and was halted by an obstruction. She blindly navigated around something with sharp corners, probing her hand through the darkness in search of the door.
“Close the blast door!” Simeon bellowed.
“I can’t,” she whimpered, trembling.
She kicked something on the floor as she groped along. Something metallic spun across the smooth concrete away from her foot. She eased to her knees, investigating. Groped blindly. Patted the floor in a semicircle pattern, feeling, touching with her open palms. Then she found it. Wrapped it in her hands. Identified the object purely by her sense of touch.
It was the gun.
Lindsay held it by the grip and rose to her feet.
She heard voices calling from a separate area of the underground bunker. Her children’s voices. Shouting her name. Screaming for help.
* * *
The tactical light was mostly useless until the barrier of black smoke thinned as he traveled away from the actual blast site. Tango’s heavy footfalls pounded off the walls of the tunnel. He ran with both hands on his rifle. The pain in his chest was brilliant, like he was pressed between the jaws of a vice.
“I’m inside,” he said into his walkie.
* * *
Archer stopped. Inside?
He realized it had been a mistake to leave Lindsay and the kids.
CHAPTER 95
A metal rack had shaken loose from the wall and fallen across the open door. Tools and various electronic components had collapsed to the floor and scattered. Lindsay scrambled on hands and knees through the mess, hoping she was moving toward the corridor.
Archer’s voice came over the radio in the darkness.
“Lindsay, where are you?”
She jerked her head blindly side to side. She was desperate to answer him, to let him know that she was alive.
The children’s voices carried down the corridor.
“Mom!”
“I’m okay!” she screamed.
“Lindsay, talk to me!” Archer said.
She scrabbled toward the sound of his voice. Bumped her head on the leading edge of the tabletop. Jerked back. Touched a hand to her forehead. Ducked down among the dust and loose cabling and tangled wiring. She groped randomly with an outstretched hand.
“Please answer me,” Archer called.
“I’m trying!” she said to the darkness.
* * *
Rain angled sharply through the narrow opening at the top of the slot canyon. Thunderclaps rolled in the distance. Archer ejected the magazine from his Beretta. He counted the rounds and reloaded it. He had to go back. He scolded himself for leaving the bunker. Someone had breached the tunnel. One of the mercenaries. Archer was keeping a running list of names in his head. So far he had eliminated Echo, Bravo, and Sierra. He was ready to add to the list.
He turned, reversing course, retracing his route through the limestone passage. Water streamed between his legs. There were still seven of them out there. At least one inside the bunker. Lindsay wasn’t answering the radio. Not a good sign. Maybe she was hurt. Maybe they’d already gotten to her. Maybe he had failed at his job and she was already dead.
He listened to radio chatter between Raj and Simeon. Simeon was headed back inside the bunker. Raj was holding his position, glassing the surrounding ridges for signs of the enemy. Archer reported in, stating that he was returning to the hatch beneath the bluff.
The rain fell like sparks of yellow light through the green field of view of his night-vision goggles. Water trickled down the walls of the limestone slot.
Archer was pondering the remaining seven and how to deal with them. There was one already in the bunker. That left six to deal with outside. They had to be closing in. He needed Raj to thin them out from his perch high on the ridge, take out an
other two or three, make things a little more manageable.
It would take him at least ten minutes of hard travel to reach the hatch at the bluff. Maybe longer in the rain. He tried to raise Lindsay again on his walkie, but again no reply. There had to be an explanation for that. Either she didn’t have the radio with her, or she was in serious trouble. Or both.
* * *
They followed his tracks. The tread from his shoes was pressed into the sand and mud leading away from the bodies of Bravo and Sierra. The tracks had been left by a larger than average individual, and he appeared to be traveling alone. The tracks would lead them right to his door. He would never see them coming.
Foxtrot followed the trail of impressions up a rise through the brush. He spotted the opening of the slot canyon. Motioned to Alpha, pointed.
Alpha nodded.
The tracks ended where the limestone chasm began.
Alpha motioned for his partner to go up and over. Foxtrot nodded. Alpha signaled his intention to head straight in.
If the lone gunman was in there, they would find him and then kill him. Problem solved.
* * *
Kilo and Oscar marched across a two hundred yard saddle strewn with boulders. They had entered it from its northwest corner. Weeds and scrub had sprouted up in the gaps between the massive rocks. The men were separated by a distance of twenty yards. Oscar was the first to exit the boulder field and scrabble up a severe rise to a copse of stunted trees.
The rain rattled through the branches.
Oscar paused to let Kilo catch up. He settled his back against the twisted, knotty trunk of one of the wretched-looking trees. Took a moment to catch his breath.
Thunder crackled. Clouds lit up with electricity.
72 Hours (A Thriller) Page 18