by Julie Rowe
“I’m not about to throw my life away,” she said in a softer tone. “I won’t take any unnecessary risks.”
“Who gets to define what unnecessary risk means?”
She sighed. “Both of us.”
He stopped and pointed a finger in her face, when what he really wanted to do was kiss the fight right out of her. “If things go to shit, you follow my commands. No arguing or hanging back.”
“As long as you let me do what I need to, no problem.”
He held out his hand and she shook it.
“Jesus Christ, I’m outta my fucking mind,” Sharp muttered as he resumed their journey to the staging area. And in love with a fucking angel. That, he didn’t say out loud. She’d run like hell if he did.
A helicopter was waiting for them, fueled and rotors turning when they hit the helicopter pad twenty minutes later. They took off into the setting sun.
The trip wasn’t a long one, only forty miles away, but Sharp got their pilot to slow down and fly low as if on a search pattern a couple of miles out from their target. They hopped out as the bird disappeared behind a rise, then the bird popped back up as if nothing had happened.
Sharp’s team spread out to watch for incoming threats as they moved closer and closer to their target, likely a cave system.
As darkness fell, they put on their nighttime goggles, Grace too, and continued.
They came across the first roving sentry thirty minutes after departing the helicopter. Smoke took him out quietly with a knife to the throat and hid the body.
They moved forward with more caution and took out two more sentries before having to move down into the rocky gullies in search of the place the road led to.
There was a cave with a mouth about three men wide and two high. Four men, armed with Soviet-made rifles, manned the opening. None of them appeared to be wearing night-vision equipment.
Sharp flashed a signal at Smoke, who moved location slightly, then called out for help in Dari saying he’d twisted his ankle.
Sharp settled into his half-crouch shooting position and found the four in his scope. They were a little too far apart.
The men guarding the cave gathered together, talking about what their response should be, whether one of them should investigate or if two should go.
Sharp couldn’t have asked for a better scenario. He let his breath out and fired.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Dead.
Behind him, Grace sucked in a breath.
He waited for her to say or do something to berate him for shooting the men, but nothing came. No one yelled or moved.
A second later, he and his men were on the move, Grace tucked in behind him. Like she’d been when they’d hightailed it to the hills to hide after the helicopter crash. Her breath came in short pants, just loud enough for him to hear. Just loud enough for him to know exactly where she was even though all his attention appeared to be in front of him.
They moved like a mist, low to the ground in a smooth rush that suddenly contracted and circled the cave’s entrance.
Smoke took point, advancing into the cave. Hernandez followed. He gave the all-clear hand signal and Sharp went in with Grace so close he could feel her body heat penetrating his clothing and armor.
Twenty feet in, voices became audible. Men, speaking in Dari.
Smoke slowed their forward momentum, giving everyone enough time to stay in close formation. Darkness faded as gas lights appeared overhead.
Two men suddenly came toward them carrying a crate, headed toward the cave’s exit. Smoke let them pass.
Hernandez didn’t. He and Clark grabbed a man each and thrust knives into the backs of their skulls. They dropped like dead fish onto the ground.
Smoke and Sharp caught the crate before it could crash on the rocky floor of the cave. They moved it to one wall and went to pry the lid off, but it wasn’t nailed down.
Grenade launchers.
Sharp put his mouth to Grace’s ear. “Could the spores be put into a grenade and launched without risk to the person doing the launching?”
“I doubt it, but I don’t think that would stop him. Them. Whoever.”
He squeezed her shoulder to show his agreement. The asshole behind this insanity didn’t give a shit about anyone. Not even himself.
That made him unpredictable. Deadly.
His gut reaction was to grab Grace and get her the hell out of there, but he couldn’t do that and not damage the trust he’d built with her.
Trust he needed more than he needed to wrap her in plastic Bubble Wrap and hide her away from the world.
“We’re looking for weapons and bad guys,” he said almost soundlessly in her ear. “You look for anything that could be used as a spore deployment device.”
She nodded.
“Stay right behind me. Put your hand on my back. Remember?” When they’d had to hide to evade capture, she hadn’t hesitated to stay in contact, close enough for him to hear her breathing escalate.
She nodded again, and kissed him.
It was nothing more than a quick touch of her lips to his. Over in a second, but that second told him she was good with what they were doing. Good with what they had to do.
It was just his luck she’d toss him on his emotional backside while on a kill-or-be-killed mission.
He picked up his scattered wits and flashed two hand signals at the team, then led them farther into the cave.
Chapter Twenty-Six
They encountered no resistance in the next twenty feet. No sign or sound of people, though there continued to be gas lanterns hanging every so often from hooks in the ceiling of the cave. They came to a fork. One was lit with more lanterns, but there must be a bend or turn in the cave because they couldn’t see more than thirty feet. The other was dark.
Sharp didn’t want anyone coming up their asses, so he sent Smoke on reconnaissance while the rest of them continued down the easy path.
They hit the bend, and Clark, who’d taken point, eased around it with the skill of a ghost. Three seconds passed before he returned and gave the all-clear signal.
Sharp went around the corner, Grace right behind, but the gas lights ran out and they switched to night-vision goggles.
This part of the cave appeared unoccupied, as there were only cast-off bits and pieces of wood, metal and wire strewn about.
Those guys with the grenade launchers came from somewhere.
Up ahead, Clark signaled for everyone to stop. Contact. Someone was moving around, but Sharp couldn’t make anything out. Maybe the cave turned another corner.
After a few more seconds, Clark signaled the all clear and they moved forward, but he set the pace even slower than before.
Light teased the edges of his vision, and Sharp realized the cave opened out into a huge room, hundreds of feet in diameter, with more gas lights in use. The room appeared empty until you looked across the space and saw crates stacked, some being used as tabletops, others with their lids off and their contents on display.
As they crept toward what looked more and more like a work area, Sharp figured out what one of the oddly shaped items in plain view on one of the crates was.
A microscope.
Sharp hesitated for a moment. A microscope, but no light source. Wouldn’t a generator be needed?
Gas lanterns were in use and no sign of a generator.
He turned to Grace. “Does this setup seem weird to you?”
“As opposed to working in a lab free of dust and contaminants, with good ventilation and a sterile work area?” She grunted and apologized. “Sorry. Yes, it’s weird and wrong and I’d like to kick the ass of the idiot who decided he could play weekend microbiologist and create the
next deadly plague on earth.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant.
“Would you work in here? Would it even be possible to do the work required to weaponize anthrax in here?” There were conditions and situations where certain pieces of equipment just didn’t function well. Underwater, high winds, long distances.
“Yes. You don’t need clean. In fact, an environment where random factors might be introduced to the bacteria might even help the process. Anthrax isn’t any more difficult to work with than any other bacteria, it’s just more deadly than most.”
“No generator,” he said.
“If I wasn’t actively working on something, I’d shut it off to save fuel.”
“He could be out scouting his next target, or firing on his next target. We don’t know his timeline.”
Clark searched the other side of the crates for unfriendlies and gave the all clear.
Sharp nodded to Grace, and she darted around him to investigate the equipment. He nodded at Clark, who moved forward, following the rock wall of the cave. There was too much air movement for there to be only one entrance and exit.
Hernandez, Runnel and March took up watch positions, facing the way they’d come in, their rifles tucked into their shoulders, ready to fire.
Sharp surveyed the room at the same time as keeping watch on Grace. Her movements were quick and excited, like a predator on the trail of prey. Something snapped, a rubber-bandy sound. She’d put on gloves.
The microscope was given a quick investigation, but she moved on in seconds. The lid of one crate came off and she peered inside. The lid was placed back. Another was opened.
Silence.
Sharp glanced at her. She stared into the box with a horrified expression on her face.
“Grace?”
“It’s full of grenades,” she whispered.
It took him all of two seconds to reach her. The grenades looked completely normal...for individual devices with the power to tear a person’s legs off. If the whole crate detonated, every person within thirty feet would be ripped to shreds.
He reached in with one hand to pick one up for inspection, but Grace stopped him with a softly worded, “No. I’m wearing the gloves.” She pointed at the surfaces in clear view. “There’s a fine layer of dust.”
He withdrew his hand and she plucked one of the grenades out and showed it to him, turning it this way and that so he could see all sides of it.
“It looks undisturbed.” He nodded at her to put it back.
“Can you tell if he’s in the middle of something or what he’s doing with all this stuff?”
“No. Aside from the microscope, there’s nothing else here to indicate he’s actively using this site as a lab.”
“Nothing?”
“Nope.”
Men moving munitions. Crates of more munitions and a microscope left where it could draw attention.
“Fuck me,” he said as he flashed the get the hell out of Dodge signal. He grabbed Grace by the arm and pulled her into a fast trot toward the way they had come in.
An explosion threw them all on their asses in the dirt.
Sharp’s head rang like a church bell on Sunday. He staggered to his feet and bumped into Grace, who’d gotten as far as her knees.
Where were Clark, Runnel and March?
A rock hit his shoulder. From above. Once glance told him the ceiling of the cave was in the process of collapsing.
A muffled yell, and a yank on his arm, brought his attention around to Grace, on her feet now, as she dragged him toward his men, two of whom lay still on the dirt. Where had Runnel gone?
Sharp stumbled after her and grabbed up Clark, who’d taken point. He was out cold, but it looked like he was still breathing. Sharp got him up and over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and walked quickly through the cave as it rained rocks toward the far wall, where he’d felt fresh air flowing.
He was about to put Clark down and go back for March, but when he turned, there was Grace not five feet behind him, dragging March by the heels. He could walk a little farther.
He followed the slight flow of air several more feet and found a narrow opening in the wall.
Thick smoke wafted past him, surrounding his head and making him cough. Smoke?
Adrenaline hit his system like a freight train and he ducked into the opening and walked several feet until the narrow crevice widened into something two men could in walk side by side. He put Clark down and went back for Grace and March.
He found them just as she was dragging the fallen soldier into the slim opening. Sharp didn’t say anything, but as soon as he touched her shoulder on his way past her, she let go of March’s feet and headed away from the main cave chamber.
Smoke now filled the air three feet up from the ground and up. A fireman’s carry wasn’t going to work. Sharp grabbed March’s feet and dragged him much faster than Grace had been doing. If he lived he was going to have a hell of a headache.
Sharp had to stop a couple of times to cough, and it was getting harder and harder to breathe. Finally, he made it back to Clark and Grace, who was doing a quick triage of the unconscious soldier.
Runnel, he had to find Runnel.
A rumble of rock from the main cave roared through the air like a tsunami wave. Followed by a rapid succession of explosions, one after the other. Smoke, dust and crushing darkness blinded him.
* * *
Silence.
Sharp lay still. His breathing...odd. What was sitting on his chest?
He tried to lift his right hand to brush the offending object away, but found he couldn’t move it. At all.
He sucked in a breath to try again, but all he got was a lungful of dirt and a coughing fit that didn’t subside. He struggled to find real oxygen, to sit up and sweep the dirt off his face, but he couldn’t do either and his struggles increased. Choking. He couldn’t move and he was choking to death.
A wet cloth touched his face and someone yelled in his ear, “Sharp, try to relax.” The cloth came back for a second run on his face and he finally took a breath that wasn’t filled with dirt.
“We’re digging you out,” the voice said. Grace. It was Grace’s voice. “But it might take a while.”
“What?” he croaked out through his irritated throat.
“The cave collapsed,” she said. “Some of this part of it too. It nearly buried you alive.”
“March, Clark?” he asked hoarsely. “Runnel?”
“March is alive. Unconscious, but alive. Clark...didn’t survive the falling rock. I think we lost Runnel in the initial blast.”
Fuck. Two more of his men, his friends, gone. Anger surged through his bloodstream, giving him a jolt of energy and strength, but he still couldn’t move. The weight on his chest and extremities got heavier and heavier until he found breathing nearly impossible.
Focus, man. Focus.
“What about Smoke? Any sign?” he asked.
“Here,” said the man himself, appearing on the other side of him. “Took me some time to find my way to you.”
“Is there—” Sharp stopped to suck in a couple of breaths “—a way out?”
“Yes.” Smoke didn’t continue for a couple of seconds. “But not close. Not easy.”
“Any escape...is good. Call for...extraction?”
“No signal,” Smoke said.
“Stop talking,” Grace ordered, reaching across his body to remove a hefty piece of rock. “Conserve your strength while we get you out.”
“Were the explosions...accidental?” Sharp asked. She was probably going to get mad at him for not following his instructions, but he needed information.
“Don’t think so,” Smoke said. “Found wire and grenades.”
“I don’t like grenades,” Grace
muttered.
Grief made him nauseous. “Don’t like them much either,” Sharp whispered.
Grace and Smoke worked silently to remove the rocks and debris from trapping his body. Someone had turned on an LED flashlight, but he still couldn’t see much in the dim light. Dust hung in the air like a fog.
When had he lost his night-vision goggles? Probably in the rockfall.
He stared at Grace as she worked and noted she was covered in the fine dust, though a few places on her head, face and neck glistened as she moved around. Blood? Nothing that slowed her down, given her steady movements. If she had died...nope, not going there. He sneezed, which started another coughing fit. This damn dust was going to be the death of him.
Dust.
Spores?
“Doc,” he said softly. “Could we be breathing in spores?”
She paused in her rock removal, more of a stutter, a hesitation, before continuing on. “I doubt it.”
She didn’t sound convinced. “Explain that to me.”
“There wasn’t any evidence this place was ever used as a lab, not even a crude one. I think the microscope was window dressing. If he had spores to kill us, he’d have booby-trapped his stuff with it. He wouldn’t leave it lying around for just anyone to get sick.” She paused for a half second longer this time. “He blew us up instead.”
Sharp tested the words. “This was a trap.” It sounded right, and every one of them had fallen for it, from the general on down.
“I think so.”
“Agreed,” Smoke rumbled. He rolled a larger rock, the size of a carry-on suitcase, off of Sharp’s right leg and suddenly he could move it. The claustrophobia gripping him let go a little and he flexed, trying to wake up his circulation.
Grace and Smoke worked a little faster.
A moan echoed close by and Grace disappeared. “March?” she asked.
He couldn’t see her or March, but he could hear the stress in her voice. “How bad is he?”
“Broken arm and concussion. I’m not sure he’ll be able to walk on his own.”
Smoke moved another large rock from over his torso, and Sharp found he could breathe easier.