by James Axler
Jeb eyed him suspiciously. “Don’t try and be a smart-ass bastard,” he snarled. “Don’t use big words you know I won’t understand just to look big. I can still work out what you mean. And I’m smart enough to know that you can still show us a way out even if I blast your fucking toes off first for being such a smartass. You get me?”
If Doc was taken aback by the cold venom of the words, he didn’t let it show. Instead he said calmly, “You must excuse my verbosity. My tendency to let my mouth get carried away with itself. I only meant to say that I credit you with the foresight to have planned to hold one of us hostage. And indeed, you would be a fine judge of character, as Mildred and I would not be parted.” He swept an arm around the room. “In truth, I do not care who waits for you or why. I can see that you have comradeship. As do Mildred and myself. Further, I would suggest that one of your men accompanies me at close quarters, so that he may be able to relay the route to you all. Perhaps your friend Maddock? After all, he has always been convinced that this route exists.”
It was a smart move. Mildred could see from the way that Maddock was almost frothing at the mouth with excitement that he wouldn’t let Jeb refuse—not without one hell of a fight. And, looking around at the rest of the assembled coldheart crew, she could see that any such refusal would make them restive. They wanted to get out of the redoubt, and although they accepted Jeb as their leader, he would be endangering the respect they held for him if he backed down on this one.
Thing was, how the hell was Doc going to pull this off?
She was soon to find out.
“Okay,” the one-eyed man nodded, his tone grim. “You and Maddock, stranger. We keep your friend here. See that you don’t fuck with us, okay?”
“That, my dear sir, is perfectly fine by me.” Doc shrugged. He gave Mildred the briefest of looks, and an even briefer wink. “Shall we get going then?” he directed at the excitable Maddock.
The young coldheart looked at his one-eyed leader, almost as if needing the assurance that this could go ahead. Jeb nodded, and the young man beckoned Doc to him.
“I’m gonna keep this on you,” he said, gesturing with his SMG, “just in case you might get any smart ideas.”
“That, my dear sir, is the last thing on my mind. Indeed, may I further suggest that we are accompanied by another man, as there will be a moment when you find yourself at a disadvantage.” Then, noticing that Maddock was trying to hide his puzzlement, he added, “There is the way into the tunnels to think about.”
Jeb gestured to another of the coldhearts to join them, and with the two men covering him, Doc left the room, with Mildred’s wondering glance following him.
At the back of her mind, she knew that the time left to them before the automatic return function on the mat-trans ceased was getting shorter and shorter.
Doc had better have a good idea of what he was doing.
Chapter Thirteen
Doc walked in front of the two men, moving as swiftly as he dared, but trying at the same time to make his motion look easy and relaxed. Like Mildred, he was only too well aware of time left before the LD button ceased to work. But to arouse suspicion at this point would be to invite disaster.
Doc led them down the corridor and past the dogleg that would allow them to take the incline to the next level down, past the point where they had been captured. The netting in which they had been entangled still lay to one side of the corridor, a reminder that these people weren’t as stupid as their ragged appearance and coarse manners might lead him to assume. He would have to play this one carefully.
But he already had his plan mapped out in his mind. Chance, he mused, was a strange and fickle beast. It was a preternatural sense of how tricky these coldhearts may be that had first seeded in his mind the idea that was now—he hoped—to bear fruit. It was seeing that they had gathered their ordnance in the one room. It was the need to have kept an eye out behind him because of the maintenance vents and shafts that he knew peppered every redoubt. It was the realization that the coldheart band didn’t realize what the mat-trans unit could do. All of these things had come together in his head.
Now he could only hope that the layout of a redoubt and its maintenance shafts was a generalized phenomenon.
He came to a halt in the corridor.
“Why have we stopped?” asked the coldheart who as accompanying Doc and Maddock.
The man was looking around.
“That’s a damn good question, old man, ’cause I sure as shit can’t see anything that looks like a tunnel,” Maddock said.
Doc smiled knowingly and shook his head. “Well, you would not, would you? It could hardly be a concealed route if it was out in the open. Otherwise you would have spotted it before, would you have not?”
“I guess…” Maddock looked at his coldheart companion and shrugged.
“Anyway,” Doc added, looking around, “it is not actually out here. That would be just silly.”
Beckoning to them to follow, he headed for the empty medical facilities. “This way, gentlemen. No tricks, I promise,” he added, seeing their suspicious looks.
Once inside, and aware that the two armed men at his back were on a hair trigger, his gaze frantically raked over the room. It should be…
Ah, yes…. There, in the corner of the room, barely visible behind what would once have been the medic’s workstation was a grille set into the wall, six inches from the ground. If he was correct, then it would lead into a series of rising and falling shafts that were angled around the inside of the redoubt structure, allowing access to the inner workings should anything need repair.
There were such grilles in only a few rooms. In others, there were access routes set into such pieces of equipment as air-conditioning units, allowing them to be swung free if the need to effect repairs became a necessity.
Which, of course, now gave them a use that was quite different to that originally intended. Especially since the coldheart crew was smart enough to store their plundered ordnance in a room that was kept temperate.
“Help me move this,” Doc said, moving to the workstation. Maddock hesitated for a moment unsure as to whether this was a trick. But, as he saw the grille become more visible, and with a nervous glance to see that his companion was covering him, he moved across to help Doc heave the workstation clear.
“This leads to the outside?” Maddock questioned. “How the hell can it do that? Not big enough to get anything through. What about all the crap these predark bastards used to carry around with them? All the shit we got from here, for a start. And then from the armory—”
Doc gasped as he dropped his end of the workstation. “For heaven’s sake, young man, will you please be quiet. The whole point about these exits was that they were intended for emergencies. In such an eventuality, do you really think they would want to pack up the whole camp and move on out? No, it was the barest essentials and then out as soon as damn well possible. And as such, it would not require much space. And of course, if it was as big as you seem to think, then it would hardly be a secret, would it? No wonder you never tumbled to it, even though you had the right idea. Now, do you want to go first, or shall I lead the way?”
Doc tagged the question on to the end of his speech with no little deliberation. He could see that the young man was eyeing the enclosed space with some trepidation. Of course Doc knew it would make more sense for him to go first, but he wanted the notion to come from his captor.
“You’d better go first,” Maddock said, unable to quite keep the wavering note from his voice.
Just as I wanted, Doc thought. But the words that he used came out as “If you insist…”
The old man dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the confined space, maneuvering himself into the narrow tunnel that allowed maintenance. It was lit at irregular intervals by red strip lighting. Boxed-in cabling and old panels peppered the four sides of the tunnel. There was just enough space for the bony and angular Doc to turn and look over his shoulder
as he advanced. For the bulkier more muscular young Maddock there was barely the room to keep moving ahead, with no looking back. As he moved along the tunnel, Doc could hear Maddock grunt as he squeezed himself into the tight angle, wheezing out instructions to the coldheart left behind to wait and keep the open space covered.
And then he was at Doc’s tail, following as the old man crawled along the narrow space until he reached the first junction where the maintenance shafts crossed.
Now it would get tricky. Doc had to work out how to double back to the room where the ordnance was kept, while at the same time keeping Maddock from being suspicious.
The first junction came up. The tunnel along which they crawled was opened up on the left by one that ran for a short distance before running into a dead end that was vertically dissected by another tunnel, this one equipped with ladders. Doc was unsure which way to proceed. The quickest way to get back to their destination would be to go up. But if he did, would the man at his rear find that suspicious, seeing as Doc and Mildred had originally come from down below?
Perhaps he would be overexplaining, and certainly wasting time that he really couldn’t spare, but if he was to make this work in the optimum time then perhaps it would be as well to take a short detour.
Reaching out and pulling himself up on the rungs of the ladder until he was able to drag his legs free so that they hung down enough to place his feet on lower ladder rungs, Doc started to descend. He looked up to see the face of Maddock staring down at him, eyeing him with suspicion.
“Why are you going that way? Surface is up,” he snapped.
“And we came up from a lower level when you first detected us,” Doc said smoothly. “Think about it. These tunnels are on every level, so that they can be accessed from those very levels. We climbed down to the lowest level to explore from the base up. But the way the tunnels run, it is sometimes quicker to take a tunnel down to hit a straight run up.”
It was a lie, but Doc hoped that his honeyed tone and the grain of sense on what he said would be enough to carry the words. He was also banking on the look of discomfort on the young man’s face. Maddock was finding the tunnels a little claustrophobic. Doc couldn’t say that he blamed him. However, the time traveler had found himself in—literally—tighter corners, and was sure of his superior capability when it came to keeping his nerve.
He knew he had won the battle when Maddock said, “Okay, that makes sense to me.”
“Good.” Doc nodded, meaning it in more ways than the young man would ever realize. “Then I suggest you trust me while we are in here, and I will take us the shortest route out. Even if it may not necessarily seem that way.”
Then, without waiting for the young man to answer, he descended to the next maintenance shaft entrance, sliding himself in and moving along, listening to the clanging of Maddock’s feet on the ladder rungs behind him. Knowing he couldn’t be seen, he allowed himself a vulpine grin of triumph before proceeding.
Having won the man’s dependence, if not his total confidence, it was now time and a sense of direction that was his major enemy.
Face set grim, Doc began to crawl along the maintenance shaft. His mind was working overtime. As always in times of great stress, there was a part of him that was geared toward protection—part of his mind would gladly descend him into madness as a kind of refuge. Inside that secluded and sylvan glade, the outside world didn’t matter. He was safe, no matter what happened to the physical shell he inhabited. With the claustrophobic confines, the man at his rear, and the knowledge that Mildred was relying on him mixed in with the pressure of a severe time limit, there was a part of Doc that wanted little more than to escape to his refuge. But the greater part of him didn’t want to let his companion down, and leave her to a fate over which she had no control. As well, he owed it to Ryan, Jak, J.B. and Krysty for the times they had hauled his bacon from the fire. The fate of all of them rested on his shoulders, especially as he had a plan that, if carried through, would give them a fighting chance against Crabbe and his men.
If only he could hold his sanity together until the first part was realized.
Sweat spangled his brow, both from the heat that permeated the tight tunnel and from the inner tensions that racked him. It was, if only anyone could have realized it, a heroic struggle of titanic proportions. And one he was determined to win, if only he could work out where he was going.
That was how to do it—focus. As he led Maddock up, through, down and along the maintenance shafts, moving at a pace that had the man behind him struggling to keep up and wondering why it was necessary to move in such a space at such a speed, Doc concentrated on trying to keep his mind running along the straight lines of maintenance tunnels.
Redoubts all followed similar patterns of design. They might differ in size, but these were little more than expansions and contractions of the same model. Therefore, the maintenance shafts that were in them would follow a similar ideal. Doc was aware of how one of these had run in a redoubt that he had been confined in many years—centuries in some senses—before. Allowing for the similarities between the old bases, then it was pretty obvious that the shafts worked on a grid principle. Doc visualized such a thing as it would appear on paper—like a map viewed on a table—and then transposed this into three dimensions. All the while he kept moving, using this visualization process to keep him focused and in motion.
It was working. With a renewed vigor and purpose he took junction after junction, moving down one ladder to access a shaft that would take him up two. He knew which way he was moving, and he was convinced that he was right.
Up one ladder and along a shaft—about halfway along, he could see light spilling through a grille. Faintly, he could hear voices. They were too indistinct for him to make out any individuals, but the distant sound could only mean one thing. There was only one place in the whole of the redoubt that was inhabited. He had reached his destination.
“Not far now,” he called over his shoulder, adding, “Be careful, it may be a little tricky getting out if you have not tried this before.”
He cursed himself. He was talking crap. But how else to cover any of these faint sounds reaching the man behind him?
“You sure we’re there?” Maddock asked, his voice querulous, his breath short. “Seems like we’ve been going up, not down.”
“The tunnels lead to the surface, of course they go up,” Doc snapped. “Didn’t I say that we entered at a low level for a purpose?”
“Guess so,” Maddock murmured, “it’s just that this is real confusing.”
As I would hope, Doc answered, but only to himself. Out loud, he said, “Not to worry, you’ll soon be out of here. It is confining, I know. Why do you think I have been moving so swiftly? I like this about as much as you do.”
He was now at the grille, and he angled his body as much as possible to block any light or shadow that may have given the man behind him a clue as to their real destination.
Now he could see that he was where he had intended to be. The grille was set high in the room, behind the air-conditioning unit. There was a small grille space around the unit, which was built, in this particular redoubt, so that it protruded into the room. Through this lattice he could see that the room was packed tight with the looted ordnance. And, as he had been certain, some of the crates of handblasters, ammo and grens had been left open, just as they had been split to view the contents. It was the latter that took his interest. These were the key to salvation, immediate and long-term.
Doc paused and took in a deep breath, his eyes flicking over the rear of the air-conditioning unit as he did so. It was hinged, and the locking mechanism worked from both inside and out, as he had gambled that it would. If he could open it, thrust himself out, keep his balance and then take hold of a gren… It was a lot to ask of himself, but he could see through the open door the man Jeb, standing menacingly with his blaster trained on a figure out of sight that had to surely be the good Dr. Wyeth.
It wasn’
t a case of “if,” but rather of “must.” But first he had to dispose of the man at his rear, incapacitate him before he had a chance to raise any alarm. Very well, then.
Doc turned so that he was almost on his back, raising himself slightly so that he could see Maddock staring questioningly at him.
“The damn thing is stiff. The lock will not give,” he said pleadingly. “This can happen. These places are so old, and at this level they are prone to the elements. Perhaps you could try to squeeze past me, lend some more muscle to the catch?”
Maddock looked for a moment as though he was suspicious, but that passed. Either Doc’s acting skills were better than he would have ever suspected, or Maddock was just keen to get out of the tunnel confines. For he tried to move forward, muttering, “I don’t know if—”
“Let me move out of the way,” Doc murmured, making as though to create space. Yet in so doing, he raised his left leg as far as possible. To Maddock, it looked as though it was an attempt to move out of his way. As he moved closer, Doc brought the heel of his boot crashing down onto the point of the young man’s jaw with all the force that he could muster. Maddock grunted, his head snapping back and smashing against the wall of the shaft with a clang that resounded along its length. Doc cursed the noise, hoping that it wouldn’t travel through the concrete and into the rooms beyond. He had to move quickly. Pulling his leg back again, he smashed it back into Maddock’s jaw. To Doc’s advantage, the young man was jammed against the shaft, unable to move, even though he had to have been reeling from the impact. His eyes were glassy, and blood flowed freely from his mouth.
One more blow should do it. Doc crashed home his boot once more, and watched with satisfaction as Maddock’s eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped back awkwardly against the shaft wall.
Now there was no time to lose. Doc wriggled around, reaching out to loosen the catch as he did so. He pushed the air-conditioning unit outward, flinging himself through the gap. He landed on his hands, pain jarring in his wrists, but he used it to spur himself onward, rolling so that he was able to gain his feet. He knew where the gren crates were situated, and blindly thrust out a hand to grasp at the contents. It was only when he was on his feet and facing the door to the room beyond that he could see that his entry had shocked the people beyond. They were staring in from their positions, as if frozen—even Mildred, although the ghost of a smile hovered over her lips, as though knowing that she should have expected as much from him.