by Gabriel Hunt
“No,” said Dinanath, uncertain whether his rank was being usurped.
Gabriel picked up a flashlight. “Mask these like so. Focused beams, not wide light.” He was halfway through the doorway when Dinanath yanked him back, bodily.
“You could have a weapon just inside the door,” the big man explained calmly.
“How could I…?” Gabriel raised his hands in conciliation. “Okay. You’re the boss.”
Dinanath directed two men to precede Gabriel. They self-consciously stayed as quiet as mute cats in a library, whispering back a description of the hundreds of miniature warrior figures they saw inside.
The information grapevined through the rest of the men and Gabriel could witness its effect. They were eager, hoping for treasure and measuring the capacity of their own pockets for same.
Dinanath posted two gunners at the base of the idol. Two more at the mouth of the shrine room. Two more on perimeter, outside. Their check-ins were leapfrogged so that the first sign of trouble would bring a radio alert to the unit on Dinanath’s belt.
“Now you,” said Dinanath, directing Gabriel to step through.
The men inside were already picking up the small soldiers, examining them for traces of precious metals or jewels. The men behind Gabriel were eager to start nosing around on their own. Dinanath squeezed through behind Gabriel.
“Cover pattern,” he hissed to his subordinates. “Keep sight of the man in front of you!”
Men were filing in behind them, grouping, oozing the point of the expedition through the second chamber and toward the head of the stone stairway. They had begun to notice the abundance of creepy-crawly life-forms among which they were standing, and Gabriel turned back to shush them. “They’re not poisonous,” he whispered. “Just move through them swiftly.” Several of the men nodded. The more he asserted himself as knowledgeable and a leader, the more they would look past Dinanath to him for guidance when things went wrong.
This was Gabriel’s third foray into the realm of the Favored Son’s Killers of Men. His first exploration had released the bats. His second had revealed to him the ways in and out of the massive vault. Before he’d left the second time, he’d also observed the mechanics of the giant, pendulum-like iron baskets bracketing the stairway that led down from the stone arch. He had set to work on them, using the tools and climbing gear he had to restore the ancient mechanisms’ original function. And then he’d paced off the distance from the entryway to the spot below the funnel that wound its way to the outside. Keeping himself precisely oriented as to distance and direction, he could now move to that exact location even in the dark.
Standing at the head of the dung-befouled stairway, Gabriel reached back to tug Dinanath forward by the sleeve. “The Killers of Men,” he whispered, shining his masked flashlight forward into the void.
Dinanath’s mouth dropped open at the sight. His men crowded in behind him, eager to see for themselves.
Gabriel gave Dinanath a hard shove. The big man lost his balance against the thick oilslick of guano on the floor. Then Gabriel dived onto the right-hand balustrade and slid down into darkness as everybody started shooting.
Qi and Mitch heard a sound like two congested little barks. Squirrel coughs in the darkness. The helicopter pilot and his buddy dropped, tumbling lifeless out of the open cockpit doors, their cigarettes still smoldering.
“What the hell—” Mitch said.
Qi signaled her to keep quiet. Neither of them had seen even a muzzle flash.
Qi spoke with her eyes. Don’t move. Not a sound.
Five minutes later, still frozen and silent, they still hadn’t seen anything to explain what had happened. All they could see was the two dead guys by the chopper growing deader.
“Let’s take the bird,” Mitch whispered, impatient.
“No—too obvious. We would be exposed. We wait.”
“I don’t know if I can,” Mitch said, feeling her condition worsening.
“You must,” Qi said.
In the hunter’s-hide silence that descended around them, they could finally hear the sounds of gunfire coming from deep within the mountainside.
The iron plates of the floor inside the entry rooms were pressure-sensitive, Gabriel knew. His investigation showed that the ordeal of sliding open the large iron door at the base of the idol had a secondary purpose, which was to cock the mechanism for the long-dormant catapults. The weight of a single man could not trip it, but the weight of many would cause the floor to shift exactly one quarter of an inch. It was similar to the bed on a truck scale. And its purpose…
Gabriel surfed to the floor of the main chamber in a sludgy mudslide of decay, guano and worse.
Outside, the counterbalanced door slid back into position and locked, crushing one of Dinanath’s men who was half-in, half-out. Six men had been posted as sentries outside the idol. That left Gabriel with twelve inside, plus Dinanath.
As everybody unslung their hardware and started shooting, the thousands of bats in the cave awakened and began flying in every direction.
Thin flashlight beams swung wildly about the room, each extending three or four feet into the darkness before petering out. Muzzle flashes lit up the darkness as well, providing confusing snapshot contrasts of shadows and light, strobing in all directions, not aiding sight but blinding everybody.
The shooting ceased in a wave as Cheung’s men furiously swatted at the bats swarming over their heads. Then another wave of shooting came, mostly wild, aimed toward the ceiling.
The floor mechanism—thanks to Gabriel’s repair—was now able to do its intended job. Counterbalances clicked and cogwheeled belaying gears swung the ironbound baskets, hurling their deadly projectiles in the direction of Dinanath’s desperate men. Gabriel heard two dozen impacts, some of metal into walls or floor, but many into flesh.
Dinanath was still trying to find his footing, having fallen halfway down the dung-slick stairs as everybody went berserk. The pistol in his hand was lost to a quicksand of liquid waste as though it had disappeared through pie crust.
A wheeling bat smacked him in the face and knocked him down again.
Gabriel shut his eyes and sprinted. Five running steps, left, touch helmet of skeleton with raised sword on right-hand side, turn ninety degrees and haul ass straight out for twenty steps.
He kept his eyes shut, depending on his rehearsal in the dark to guide him according to touchpoints. Five more steps.
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” Mitch whispered. “Please. I can get that helicopter in the air in minutes from a cold start. Whoever shot the pilot can’t be out there any longer. Let me do it.”
They could hear the thunderous sounds of gunfire below, muffled by layers of rock. “You would just leave Gabriel in there?” said Qi.
“If Gabriel’s in the middle of that, he doesn’t have a hope in hell. But we still do. We’ve got to get back to the city. Save his brother from Cheung.”
“Is that how you do it?” said Qi. “Exchange one goal for another? Your sister for his brother? Me for someone else?”
“Well, what do you think we should do?”
Qi thought for a moment. “I have confidence in Gabriel. I believe he had a plan. But,” she said, letting her eyes slide shut, “you are right. Our object must be Cheung.”
With one final glance back toward the pagoda, she came out from behind the cover that had shielded them and began to run toward the chopper.
In the harsh and uneven illumination provided by a dozen flashlights, many of which had fallen and were now casting their beams crazily into the darkness, Gabriel could see a flurry of still-circling bats and the bodies of dead men both ancient and new.
Two-thirds of Dinanath’s crew seemed to be down. The spiked metal siege balls had killed a few and bloodied several more—and the bats could smell the fresh blood. The rest were struggling to regain their footing and orientation, or firing madly, their bullets pinholing the muddy air. Panic shots bounced off the cavern c
eiling or ricocheted off moist stone. Scabs of encrusted dung jumped away from the impaled corpses in their warrior drag. Near Gabriel, a warrior’s head—a featureless blunt point beneath waxy layers of droppings—was vaporized like a kicked anthill by a stray 9 mm slug.
Gabriel caught a glimpse of Dinanath. He was furiously emptying his magazine in what he must have thought was Gabriel’s direction, but he might as well have been shooting blind. One of his men, trying to claw a wriggling bat off his face, hit Dinanath from behind and the big Indian went down to hands and knees.
Falling bats pelted them like black hailstones. Other bats flew directly into the walls and dropped, unconscious or dead. The rest of the flock made for the funnel vent.
Primal fears took over. Terror of the dark, which their guns could not push back. Terror of the bats, which their guns could not track. Terror of more sharp killing objects, perhaps a second salvo of ancient metal death. Claustrophobia. Group panic, as men retreated to the sliding iron doorway only to find it cinched shut on the still-spasming arm of one of their comrades.
Dinanath was ground face-first into the sucking black mire by the panicked trampling of his own men.
Gabriel threaded himself into the vertical harness he’d left waiting the last time he’d been here, anticipating the possibility of a return under less than sanguine circumstances. He grabbed a short-handled dagger out of the scabbard at the waist of the nearest impaled skeleton, used it to saw through the anchor rope, and hauled himself toward the ceiling on his three-to-one pulley setup, which towed him at about fifteen feet per second.
Careening bats swept by him as he reached the cavern ceiling and began to corkscrew his way through the funnel. His ascent was designed to leave no dangling rope behind.
Gabriel had left himself a weapon on the eastern slope the first time he’d made this ascent, one of Qi’s LMT shortie rifles. He grabbed it now, before quickly scrambling down to the nearest of the shrine rooms.
But when he reached the room, there was no one to shoot. The sentries posted outside the idol were all facedown in pools of their own blood, sniped off by throat hits.
Gabriel hustled past two more deceased guards to the other shrine room, where he dived into the iron tub to wash away some of the foul, clotted wastes clinging to him.
When he rose, dripping, he saw a man walking toward him from the shrine room’s entrance…a man with a gun in his hand, and the gun was pointed at Gabriel.
“Hello, Mr. Hunt,” said Ivory.
Chapter 22
While the engines were spinning up, Mitch noticed the helicopter was not outfitted with any exterior firepower. Kamovs were workhorses adaptable to a number of applications, including air ambulance and search-and-rescue over land or water, but they were originally developed by the Russians as antitank choppers. Not this one. Fully stocked with armament, the machine could chew up and spit out a Cobra gunship, but this one was fangless, with not a gun or bomb in sight. At least its defensive features were still in place: the energy-absorbing seats, the beefed up landing struts, the nonfragmenting fuselage. The rotor blades were made of a composite material that could withstand a hit by a 23mm projectile and keep functioning.
“This thing is a taxi,” Mitch said as the rotors reached takeoff speed. “Stripped down for fast insertion and extraction.”
“Good,” Qi said. “We should try some fast extraction now.”
Running from their abandoned cover to the chopper, both Qi and Mitch had scanned the area for any sign—any glint of metal in the distance, any sound—that might portend imminent gunfire, but they’d reached the vehicle and the two dead bodies before it without attracting anyone’s attention. The two men had been neatly shot—but by whom? They’d put the question to one side much as they did the bodies themselves, then climbed up into the cockpit and began preparations to leave. As Mitch worked the controls, desperately forcing her hands to remain as steady as she could get them, Qi held their small arsenal of guns at the ready and watched for trouble.
But none had surfaced, and now, after readjusting her seat several times and getting the feel of the throttle, Mitch was able to float their craft into the night air. They hovered at about ten feet while she triplechecked her board. Then she seemed confident enough to loft them into the sky.
The helo accident for which Mitch had been cashiered out had occurred during a soft landing on an aircraft carrier, strictly a milk run. She was an Air Force loan-out for Naval pilot trainees, occupying the Number Two slot on the MH-60S Knighthawk when wind shear and a rolling carrier made tacking on the landing platform more difficult than her superior, the pilot, had been prepared for. They counter-rolled as the ship surged upward on the tide, and the rotor blades snapped off like popsicle sticks against the deck, gravely wounding two runway rats and scratching one chopper at a cost of about $28 million. No time was wasted in assigning a scapegoat, especially since it would boil down to a Navy versus Air Force beef.
But Mitch could jockey these beasts. She knew it, and the brass knew it too, even if they’d never admit it. She’d longed for a gunship and the chance to deploy its devastating firepower in combat, just once. This might have been that chance, but Kuan-Ku Tak Cheung, wily devil that he was, had provided no bangbang aboard this eggbeater.
They had their rifles, and the guns taken off the dead pilot and his companion. Mitch had spotted a few racked grenades. And they had the helo.
“This puts us into the center of things,” said Qi.
“Meaning?” Mitch concentrated on the rudder, which was a little slushy-feeling. She wiped sweat off her forehead.
“Cheung’s helipad directly accesses his headquarters. No infiltration, no disguises. No strategy. All that is left to us is the lightning raid.”
“You mean barge in, guns blazing, and hope for the best?” Mitch sucked air between her teeth. “Sorry, but that sounds a lot like your other plans, based as they were on the idea of a one-way mission. I’m no kamikaze.”
“We have the Killers of Men as a bargaining chip. Cheung may hate us. He may want us dead on sight. But he is not so foolish as to risk this prize.”
“So we fly right in like we own the place?”
“Exactly. Without Ivory or Dinanath, Cheung’s subordinates will stand down.”
“You hope.”
Qi almost smiled. “Always. But I also prepare for the worst.” She went to work stripping and cleaning the guns.
Ivory had a layer of bandage pads taped to his forehead and his eyes seemed to glitter unnaturally in the dim light of the shrine room, candlefire making them appear too starkly white.
He sat with his lethal OTs-33 held loosely, dangling between his knees as he perched on the canvas-tarped pile of one of Qi’s caches.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” Gabriel said, even though it was obvious, standing as he was in an elevated metal cauldron.
Ivory said nothing.
“It appears we may have the same enemies now,” Gabriel added, waving in the direction of the neighboring shrine room, where Cheung’s men lay dead. He pointed at Ivory’s gun. “Quite a weapon. Russian, isn’t it?”
“It is adequate to my needs.”
“Yeah, I heard you weren’t too fond of Glocks.”
One of Ivory’s eyebrows arched. “That, too, served its purpose. Mr. Hunt, is it your intention to waste time with banter? I have never understood that about Americans; their reluctance to address a point directly.”
“‘Warfare is the tao of deceit,’” said Gabriel, quoting Sun Tzu. He thought he saw Ivory roll his eyes. No doubt sick of Westerners quoting The Art of War.
Gabriel considered climbing out, then thought better of it. Any abrupt movement might get him killed.
“These two women,” said Ivory without prelude. “Your dedication to them is unusual. My experience of most Westerners is that they are little more than infants incapable of seeing beyond their little personal dramas, attitudes, whims or appetites. What binds you to them?”
“Ah, now you are being less than honest. Believe me, I know. I, too, have been less than forthcoming, with Cheung. My covenant was to lead him to this place. Instead I came alone, and found you. And as you have said, we seem to be on the same path, now. But I must understand how you got here.”
“All right, I’ll be honest,” Gabriel said. “I don’t want to see either Qi or Mitch hurt. That’s what I’m here for. The rest is incidental. There’s also my brother—I need to get him free. The quickest and surest way to accomplish these things is to eliminate your boss. I’m sorry, Ivory, but the man is a Grade-A certified lunatic, and I think you know it. If you didn’t, I’d be dead already.”
“I cannot—”
Gabriel overrode him. “You don’t have to. The women are on their own now—they can fend for themselves. And if you return with me to the city and present me to Cheung, I can get my brother back. You were supposed to find this place for Cheung—well, you’ve found it. By bringing me back to Cheung you will have discharged your duty. Cheung has already offered amnesty if I can reveal the Killers of Men to him; the women go free, my brother and I return to America.”
“If you believe Cheung’s word.”
“I don’t, not for a second. But look at what he wants versus what he’s got. We have leverage. Frankly, it’s what happens to you I’m not so sure of.”
“I have earned no mercy in this, no special consideration.”
“Except from me,” said Gabriel. “I’ll help you—if you let me get out of this pot.”
He watched this handsome, conflicted Asian work the variables out in his mind. For whatever it was worth. Ivory had still not pulled the trigger on Gabriel.