by Bryan Devore
David holstered his gun and crawled up the pile of large limestone pieces. He tried to pull away a few chunks of rock where the pile touched the ceiling, but that only sent other rocks sliding toward him and filling in the part he had tried to clear.
“It’s not very stable,” he said, “but I think I can clear a way through in five or ten minutes.”
“We don’t have time,” John said. “They’ll be on us again any moment. We have to keep moving.” He looked right. “Rebecca, will this way lead us out of the catacombs?”
She recalled the brown line running through the tunnel map, indicating the tour path. It was long and winding, but it was essentially a single path that didn’t really branch out into side tunnels. So far, they had been like rats in a maze, hitting dead ends and being forced to backtrack, but this was their best chance yet of finding a way out. She nodded.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“Left takes us toward the exit,” she said, “but it’s blocked with debris from whatever they did to blow that gap behind us. Right takes us north, through the catacombs and toward the entrance on the other side. Maybe a little more than a mile through this tunnel.”
“It’s so far,” John said. “If they follow us, they’ll be moving a lot faster. We might not make it.”
“What choice do we have?” David asked.
“I could stay here and try to hold them off,” John suggested.
“No,” the president said. “We stay together.”
“Ma’am, it may be the only chance of getting you out of here.”
“We should stay together for as long as possible,” Rebecca said. “We don’t know what we might face ahead.”
David added, “We need to keep the protective bubble tight, sir.”
John nodded. “Okay. For now, we stay together.”
With David in the lead, they continued their mad dash into the Empire of the Dead.
Rebecca felt a shiver of revulsion. Sure, this was a well-traveled tourist path during the day, but right now it just felt like an ancient crypt, abandoned in time. The walls were lined with human skulls and long bones—all stacked neatly from floor to ceiling like so much cordwood. The most terrifying haunted house in the world couldn’t come close to the eerie feeling of being surrounded by so many actual human remains. Running along, she felt as if the skeletal faces with their deep, empty eye sockets and flat nasal cavities were watching her, appraising her. Still, better these than the living, breathing demons now cutting and clawing their way through the tied gate not so far behind her.
52
MAXIMILIAN SAW FLASHES OF LIGHT glinting off the moist limestone walls. Stopping, he held out his arms, halting the men behind him. “Hamilcar!” he yelled down the tunnel at the distant men, still unseen.
He waited, and someone in the darkness ahead called back, “Barca! Barca!”
Waving his men on, he charged ahead. The lights ahead grew brighter, illuminating the smaller group of men, pushed like flood debris up against an iron gate.
“She’s on the other side?” Maximilian asked Kazim.
Kazim turned. “Yes! We were so close! She barely escaped!”
“You saw her?”
“No, not her. But her men. They were not many. Fewer than ten.”
“I wish you had seen her,” Maximilian said. “There is still the risk we’re pursuing a false target.”
“I’m certain they are Secret Service. And those people don’t run from anything unless they are taking their president away from danger.”
Maximilian nodded. He saw the bundle of plastic cuff ties wrapped through the bars and holding the gate shut. Kazim was cutting each tie individually with a small knife, and he had already gotten through half of them.
“Allow me,” Maximilian said, pulling out a much larger tactical knife. Its heavy nine-inch blade was designed to do anything from gutting an animal to cutting through barbed wire. Putting the thick blade between the four remaining ties, he levered it against the iron bar, jimmied it back and forth a few times, and snapped it downward to cut the four remaining ties. Then he stepped back and kicked the rusty iron. The gate swung open with a long, groaning shriek.
“Which way did they go?” Maximilian asked.
“Toward the hole we blasted to get out of the catacombs.” Kazim pointed left. “Right is the path we took from the catacombs to the hotel. We’ve circled around to here.”
“They’re going back the way we came,” Maximilian said. “Into the catacombs.”
“There is no quick way out of them,” Kazim said. “Not anymore. Both the tour entrance and exit are blocked by demolition rubble.”
“But they don’t know that.” Maximilian looked at Kazim as it dawned on both men that victory was all but certain. “They think they’re going to make it out through the tour path. This is even better than burning her alive in the hotel. We’re going to slaughter the American president inside the Empire of the Dead.”
53
DAVID TRIED NOT TO LOOK too closely at his surroundings. The darkness of the ancient tunnels had been bad enough, but now that they had entered this vast boneyard, it was beyond creepy. His flashlight beam jittered across a wide, square pillar to his left. Moving past it, he glimpsed a dozen lines of engraved verse in French or Latin. Probably a warning to visitors: fear this place.
Seconds later, he ran past a giant sphere made up of skulls and arm and leg bones. It stood to the right of the path and reached from floor to ceiling. Empty eye sockets glared accusingly at him as he rounded a left bend in the tunnel. He nearly hit his head on the ceiling, as it ramped downward before rising suddenly.
The path was strange: loose gravel lined the edges, but the center was smooth, polished rock, worn down by millions of tourist feet over the years. Rounding a hard left bend, he skidded on the slick stones and nearly fell into a wide stone monument.
He flashed his light on a shiny red object, encased in glass, on the stone wall. It bore stenciled French words, ending in “L’ALARME.” Inside was a button, below the words “ALARME INCENDIE.”
“There’s a fire alarm or something here,” he yelled at the others running in front of him. Maybe they hadn’t seen it.
“It’s an emergency incident alarm for the tour,” Rebecca shouted back. “In case someone has a heart attack, or something. There should be dozens of them along the tour path.”
“Should I trigger it?” he asked.
“No!” John said. “Don’t. No one would get here in time, and it would only help the terrorists know how far ahead we are.”
As they rounded more turns, the stone walls again gave way to walls of bones and skulls, stacked like firewood along the passageway. They rose about four feet high, like a crudely trimmed privet hedge. It was the most terrifying decor he had ever seen. He couldn’t fathom how many human remains haunted these endless tunnels. Occasionally, the passageway appeared to branch in two different directions, but when he got closer he could see that any alternative passageway was always blocked with barred doors, as if from an old French prison or dungeon, keeping the adventuresome from veering off the designated path.
He splashed through a shallow puddle. Tipping his flashlight upward, he saw thousands of dark water droplets clinging to the wavy rock ceiling, each seemingly ready to fall from its miniature stalactite. The air in the tunnel had been cool and damp from their moment of entry, but this was the first real sign of water.
Their footfalls echoed less here, damped as they were by the surrounding walls of bones. They rounded more turns, passed more pillars reaching the six and a half feet to the ceiling, and followed the dark path unspooling forever in front of them. A crypt appeared on his left, followed by a tombstone with Latin inscriptions, then a stone altar, then a white-painted cross embedded in a block of skulls. He couldn’t tell whether the intent of this place was to honor the dead, or to remind the living of what eventually awaited them. All he knew was that he needed to
get the president the hell out of this house of horrors as soon as possible.
On they scrambled, through the Empire of the Dead. David kept hearing faint snaps and clomping behind him, but each time he whipped his head and gun around, he found nothing but shadows hiding behind bones and pillars. This place made it difficult to keep one’s inner bearings. There was nothing to orient them to the outside world, and he had to wonder whether they might be running in a giant underground circle.
Then he saw something new: two wood panels, painted black, each with a white diamond shape, spaced like opened doors outside an entrance. A metal screen door had been kicked in from the other direction and hung bent on one hinge. They were moving along the tour path in reverse, so this was where tourists entered the Empire of the Dead along the larger catacomb tour path.
The walls of skulls, tibias, and femurs ended, and they entered a wider tunnel chamber. They had left the Empire of the Dead behind them, but they were still in the catacombs.
The chamber ended, and David followed the others into a narrow tunnel whose floor sloped downward as the ceiling rose high with Roman arches. Then it sloped up and entered a round room with a shallow pool of clear water surrounded by a stone wall, which he nearly tripped over.
They rounded a few abrupt turns, where he was surprised to see models of ancient city ports carved into the rock, like something found in a museum. Then they passed a fat stone pillar and turned into a long, narrow tunnel only three to four feet wide. Everything echoed here, and the ground changed yet again from slick, polished stone to crunching gravel. Numbers were engraved periodically on the limestone walls, followed by a wiring box at eye level along the right side, and a strange half-faded black line stretching along the center of the ceiling.
“The way out is just ahead,” Rebecca called back. It was the first any of them had spoken since leaving the Empire of the Dead. “The tour entrance has a spiral stairwell that goes up to street level inside the tour office.”
But just when David found his hopes rising, he heard the president say, “What’s that?”
Then came Rebecca’s irate “No! No!”
David was last to see the wall of rock rubble completely blocking the tunnel in front of them.
“This isn’t possible,” Rebecca said, stopping at the blockade.
“It is,” John said. “They blew through here earlier tonight, just like the hole that first led us into this section. We’re still on their path.”
“What do we do?” the president asked.
“There still has to be a way out,” John replied. “How did they get in the catacombs?”
“Here,” said Rebecca, first to reach the rubble. “A small breach tunnel on the left wall, just in front of the blockade. It’s more of a tall hole than a tunnel. You have to step up into it.”
David stepped past them and tried to move the rubble. The first few rocks didn’t budge, but he finally managed to dislodge a smaller one on the side. “It could take ten minutes to make an opening to get all the way through,” he said. “I can’t tell how thick it is.”
“Judging from how much rock they had to clear away, it could be ten feet thick.”
“We’ll never get through that in time,” David said. “They can’t be far behind us.”
“Then we have to keep moving,” the president said. “If they used this hole to get in, we can use it to get out.”
Rebecca nodded in the dim light. “It must lead into one of the IGC tunnels. They have to have occasional access shafts going up to the Paris streets.”
“Okay,” John said. “We don’t have a choice. Head into the hole. But we have to move faster. If this passage was part of their planning, they know it well. David, you stay in the rear. I expect they’ll catch up with us soon, and we have to be ready when they do.”
David nodded.
They raced into the breach hole one at a time: first Rebecca, then the president, with John close behind her. And then David. Once they made it into the wider IGC tunnel on the other side, David ran twenty feet behind them, leaving enough room so he could hear and engage the enemy before they posed a direct threat to the president.
They had just left the catacombs, but the tunnels of the Paris underground continued to unwind into the darkness before them.
54
KAZIM HAD WANTED TO LEAD the chase after the president, but his trust in Maximilian’s intelligence held his impatient rage in check. He moved with Maximilian behind the half-dozen men serving as their shields while they advanced through the dark tunnels. Their headlamps only half illuminated the shadowy underworld, distorted by the kaleidoscopic effect from dozens of lights cutting through one another.
They entered the short blast tunnel that the demolition team had created earlier that night to get them from the Empire of the Dead to the president’s hotel. Now, moving in the opposite direction, it would return them to the catacombs. He stopped when Maximilian raised a hand. All the men stood in silence.
“What are we doing?” Kazim murmured.
“We need to be careful we don’t make a mistake,” Maximilian said. “Careful we don’t miss them.”
“What do you mean?” Kazim questioned.
“One of the few times Hannibal was deceived during the Second Punic War was one night when Nero marched seven thousand men in secret, away from his army in front of Hannibal. While Hannibal thought Nero was still in the Roman camp, Nero marched those men a great distance, in quick time, to Metaurus. There he intercepted and destroyed the army of Hannibal’s brother, Hasdrubal. Returning to camp, Nero threw Hasdrubal’s severed head into the mud in front of Hannibal’s camp. When Hannibal saw the head of his brother—his only hope for reinforcements in Italy—he knew he had lost the war. Nero’s march was one of Rome’s greatest moments in the sixteen-year war, and his deception to hold Hannibal in camp during the march was the key misdirection that sealed Rome’s victory.”
“You fear we are being deceived?” Kazim asked, wanting only to continue the chase. He could almost taste the moment of his revenge.
Maximilian turned his head left to cast light on the stacked rubble blocking the exit to the tour. The men had built it while clearing the blast tunnel, just as they had built the first blockage, near the tour entrance on the other side of the catacombs. “What if they escaped through there?”
“But it’s blocked.”
“What if they worked their way through it and replaced the stones to hide their escape?”
“They wouldn’t have had time to clear enough of the rubble,” Kazim said. “And even if they had, they wouldn’t have taken the time to replace it.”
“Unless they wanted to deceive us.”
“They are not Nero. They’re running scared.”
“But what if they are more than that? They’ve already made two clever escapes tonight: first in the elevator shaft and then into these tunnels. The other side of this rubble is the shortest route to safety. They may have known that. The open direction into the catacombs goes for more than a mile, past the dead, and leads only to another blockade like this one.”
“What are you saying we do?” Kazim asked.
“You take a dozen of your best men, clear through this rubble quickly, and make certain they didn’t somehow go this way. I take the rest of the men into the Empire of the Dead and follow the passage toward the entrance. If you don’t find traces of them, come back here and follow our path into the catacombs. There are places to hide in there. If we pass them, they may come out and double back, only to find you ten minutes behind us.”
Kazim sent one of his men up the mound of rubble to start pulling out the broken rock for other men to stack along the left wall. Even ten protectors could not easily have climbed through here and rebuilt it so quickly, but someone had to check because this was the fastest way out. Still, as Kazim frantically helped his men clear an opening, he had the sickening feeling that Maximilian was moving toward the president while
he wasted his time on a false trail.
55
JOHN RACED AHEAD, GUN IN ready position. He hated not having a deeper shield of bodies around POTUS. But the best he could do was an agent in front, one with the president, and one in back, and this left too many open shots for a gunman, especially considering the ricochet potential.
Along with not having textbook cover around the president, they also lacked speed. They weren’t familiar with this area of the tunnels, which was a huge problem. The president never went anywhere that the Secret Service hadn’t been at least a dozen times to scout, plan, and, if possible, lock down. But now they were in a place they had never dreamed of bringing the president. He had no idea what objective dangers they might encounter down here. There could be deep wells, pitfalls or even collapses, toxic levels of chemicals or methane from nearby sewer systems or gas lines. This had all the elements of a nightmare scenario for any Secret Service agent, especially the agent in charge of the PPD. Indeed, if he had had any better alternative than a burning building full of heavily armed attackers, he would never have brought the president here.
And John’s instincts told him they wouldn’t make it in time. The long tunnel felt like their best bet, but he could almost sense the pursuers catching up. They would never make it if they kept running along this main tunnel. Sooner or later, they would have to dig in and fight.
“Stop,” John said to the others. “We won’t make it.”
“We have to make it,” David said.
The president stared at him. “What’s wrong?”
“Listen,” John said, holding up his finger in the dim light.
They stood uncomfortably in the silent dark. They had been rushing frantically through the tunnels for so long that even a few seconds’ pause felt dangerous. The meager illumination from their flashlights seemed to shrink under the weight of shadows, as if a cold, dark force were slowly drowning out their last flickering hope.