by Matt Rogers
Griffin spotted the ledge spiralling down the cavern wall toward the floor.
He set off in that direction, ignoring the nausea tearing through him.
A shot rang out, causing everyone in the cavern to flinch. The unsuppressed gunshot resonated off the walls, echoing around the space. Griffin barely heard it though, because a shower of rock shards sprayed over him. The bullet had gouged a divot out of the wall right by his head. He ducked low but didn’t freeze up — by this point he was so accustomed to forward motion that even a near-death experience couldn’t slow him down.
A wet squelch sounded on the rock ledge underneath him and he glanced down to see a trail of blood following him down the ledge. The crimson stuff poured out of his boot — one look at the injury confirmed it was worse than he expected. He stared straight back up at the path ahead and resolved not to pay any attention to the bullet wound until his work was complete. The longer he spent focusing on it, the greater his chances of freezing in his tracks and collapsing in shock.
And that couldn’t happen, because two of the scientists far below him successfully reached the mouth of the tunnel complex and disappeared into its depths, falling out of the floodlights’ reach.
They vanished from sight.
Griffin pushed himself faster. He had to catch them…
It took a few minutes to descend to the cavern floor, and Griffin sensed his health deteriorating with each step. He didn’t want to consider how much blood he’d lost from his foot, but he knew it was bad. He tried not to focus on it, but it was hard to ignore the swimming vision and freezing chill that descended over him as he made it to ground level and burst out into open ground.
His condition had worsened to such an extent that he didn’t even consider where the hell the other three mercenaries had disappeared to.
By the time he reattached himself to reality and wheeled in a circle, bracing himself for an attack, it was already too late.
They fell on him in a pack — which surprised Griffin, as it would have been rather effortless to step back and blast his brains out as soon as he reached the cavern floor. They had tucked themselves in a tight unit into the shadowy space underneath the natural ramp he’d just descended. They were all armed — Griffin noticed the flash of steel as they tackled him to the floor — which made him wonder why they hadn’t killed him already.
Someone tore the Cherokee from his hands and the grip of a pistol came scything out of the air toward his face. Before he could raise a hand to protect himself it crunched against the bridge of his nose, eerily similar to the punishment he’d dished out on the blonde mercenary upstairs.
The sound and sensation of breaking bone rang through his head.
He gasped for relief, in a world of pain. Someone crashed a fist into his stomach and he spat blood over the dusty stone, already bleeding profusely from both nostrils.
The cold barrel of the same pistol pressed into the side of his head, crushing against the soft skin above his ear.
‘How many more of you are there?’ one of the three snarled.
Griffin could barely see straight, but he craned his neck to spot a couple of the scientists hovering by the entrance to the tunnels, observing the proceedings with cold, calculated gazes.
‘Go!’ one of the mercenaries roared. ‘Don’t risk it. Get out of here. We’ll rendezvous later. Take the mountain trail.’
The remaining pair nodded and fled into the darkness.
Just like that, all the scientists had vanished.
Griffin had failed.
21
‘How many?!’ the second mercenary yelled.
Griffin couldn’t even make out their faces. All the floodlights were pointed at the cavern’s ceiling, which cast a murky shadow over the cavern floor itself. He sensed an amalgamation of lab equipment and workstations dotted across the floor, but all the bulbs usually illuminating the scientists’ work surfaces had been either smashed or switched off. It didn’t help that the injuries were beginning to accumulate, and he’d entered what felt like a drug-induced haze.
‘Eight more,’ Griffin muttered, as if terrified to divulge the truth. He tried his best to act like a man who had been backed into a corner and forced to co-operate. ‘They’re coming down now.’
None of the three mercenaries could hide their fear. They cast each other dark glares, alternating between looking at their surroundings and staring straight up at the hole in the wall a hundred feet above.
‘You’d better let me go,’ Griffin said. ‘Or they’ll kill you.’
‘I don’t think so, buddy.’
The third mercenary — the biggest of the three, who hadn’t said a word so far — hauled Griffin off the ground and pressed his semi-automatic pistol to the side of his head. The guy wheeled Griffin around to face the rock ledge, treating him as a human shield in case any reinforcements decided to show up and take a potshot.
Griffin muttered something inaudible.
‘What?’ the third guy hissed.
The other two mercenaries backed off — Griffin imagined their guns were trained on the space far above, anticipating an imminent firefight.
Griffin croaked, ‘I said…’, and then trailed off.
The mercenary tightened his grip around Griffin’s throat. ‘Spit it out.’
‘You should check your six.’
The guy imperceptibly glanced over his shoulder. Of course, there was nothing there, and there were no reinforcements on the way, but none of them knew that. Griffin jerked his head away from the mercenary’s BUL Cherokee pistol and reached up with both hands, moving lightning fast, aware that his life was on the line. He seized the guy’s wrist and wrenched him off-balance. The mercenary stumbled a step and Griffin dropped him with a perfectly placed left high kick, probably breaking his jaw in the process.
The mercenary hit the stone, and before he’d even come to rest Griffin had the man’s Cherokee in his own grip.
The other two had started to react, but not fast enough. By the time they had their weapons — both fully automatic Kalashnikovs — Griffin had fired two shots.
The first shot tore straight through the forehead of the guy on the left.
The second missed.
Griffin dove into a wild tumble-roll as the second guy let loose with a hail of gunfire, so loud in the cavern that a newcomer would have imagined an impending apocalypse.
Thwack.
Strange… being shot didn’t feel like Griffin had expected.
He’d always anticipated a crippling, debilitating wave of imminent agony.
But this was … somehow even more terrifying.
Mid-dive, his right shoulder jerked back unnaturally and he spun out of control, tumbling head over heels and finally ducking behind one of the giant steel workstations erected in the centre of the cavern floor. An entire laboratory had been set up, and Griffin pressed himself down below the line of sight as a wave of gunfire followed. A strange disconnect set in, separating him from what he considered real — the same sensation he’d experienced back in the monastery. This was somehow worse, though. A strange numbness set into his shoulder, and the blood flowing down his arm didn’t become apparent until it trickled through his fingers.
Then he noticed it, and looked over to find his right arm covered in blood.
He didn’t even know where he’d been hit.
There were more pressing issues to worry about right now.
The gunfire ceased and Griffin stood up from his crouched position behind the workstation. In hindsight it was one of the most ridiculous tactical mistakes he could have possibly imagined, but the same effects were washing over him, obscuring his common sense.
This wasn’t a concussion, though … this was blood loss.
And it would be the death of him before long.
He saw the last remaining mercenary frozen out in the open, searching for another magazine with a perplexed expression on his face.
Then Griffin realised that the man in front
of him had made the exact same ludicrous tactical mistakes. All-out combat often stripped the best of their sensibilities, and this man was not the best. The guy had watched all thirteen of his comrades die grisly deaths in a state of disbelief, and now he’d foolishly emptied his weapon in the wild hope of finishing off this terrifying intruder. Now he stood in open ground, flabbergasted at how the tide had changed, searching his belt for a fresh magazine.
Griffin shot him three times in the chest before he had a hope of reloading his Kalashnikov.
And then there was complete silence.
Griffin stood rigid for a moment, gazing out over all he’d accomplished. Fourteen trained combatants lay dead before him. Even if he’d been at optimal health, it wouldn’t have seemed real. Right now, with waves of nausea and chills running over him, the entire ordeal drew parallels to an extended dream sequence.
Griffin knew he would drop dead if he stopped moving.
So, even though he’d done more than he considered humanly possible over the course of his time in Bhutan, he turned on his heel and jogged straight into the network of tunnels.
He had a convoy of scientists to catch.
22
It didn’t take long to work out that — if he didn’t receive medical attention — he had a finite amount of time left on this planet.
‘You’re in bad shape, Colt,’ he muttered to himself as he staggered through endless tunnels with no end in sight. ‘Real bad shape.’
He didn’t know where he was headed, or what he would do when he got there. The long stretches of stone passages seemed to blur together into a continuous stream of confusion. Griffin wasn’t sure he’d have been able to work it out even at one hundred percent capacity.
Now, though, he was running on ten percent.
A number that dwindled with each passing second.
Nine percent.
Eight percent.
Seven…
He couldn’t see a thing. Every now and then he passed a dim LED cylinder fixed into the wall in a half-hearted attempt to light the way. But these tunnels were clearly unimportant to the scientists — albeit for an escape plan — so they’d opted to prepare minimal lighting on their trek out of the mountain. Perhaps they’d already plotted and memorised a route through the tunnels, which would allow them to know exactly where they were headed in the event they needed to flee.
After ten minutes, Griffin began to work out that he had no hope of catching them. They had every advantage one could possibly imagine — they knew the terrain, they weren’t injured, they had nothing to bear to slow them down…
Unless…
He recalled what the blonde mercenary had told him.
They’re the ones paying us.
These weren’t money-hungry scientists with no allegiance to anyone in particular. They were self-motivated, self-funded bioterrorists who had employed an army of fourteen paramilitary soldiers to protect them while they slaved away at a chimera virus deep underground. They weren’t ordinary, run-of-the-mill bad guys. They had purpose in their actions. Intent in everything they did. If they had successfully created a pathogen, they would do anything to protect it.
Including giving their lives.
Griffin couldn’t imagine they would allow their concoction to be placed in jeopardy. He posited what he would do if he was in their position.
Send all four of them running for the hills with a shred of a plan?
Or trust one man with the payload, and use the other three to hold back and ensure…?
He hadn’t even completed that thought when he rounded a shadowy corner of the tunnel complex and the crowbar hit him full in the face.
23
There had been little noise — certainly nothing like a gunshot — but it had sounded like that inside Griffin’s skull. He let out a moan as he crashed to the tunnel floor, whiplashing the back of his head against the ground as he fell. There had been nothing to dilute the force of the impact, and an ear-splitting headache roared into life behind his eyeballs as he rolled desperately out of the way of a follow-up shot.
Even though he had trouble staying conscious, he realised he could see the tunnel walls around him…
He caught a distant glimpse of an opening in the side of the mountain — daylight spilled through and flooded down the tunnel.
He was so close to the exit…
But the three men descended on him like a rabid pack of wolves, exactly as he’d imagined they would.
Of course they did.
They were highly motivated, experts of their craft. He should never have doubted them. They didn’t have combat ability or weapons training of any kind, but they had determination, and sometimes that was enough. They possessed the initiative and the courage to independently create an underground laboratory and set to work going where no scientist had ever gone before. They were brilliant minds, and brilliant minds didn’t always possess a moral compass.
These thoughts rang through Colt Griffin’s head as they beat him down in the tunnel, the outside air so close he could taste it, the end goal within such close proximity yet so far away at the same time…
He had failed. The BUL Cherokee was nowhere to be found, knocked down the tunnel when he’d been taken off his feet by the initial crowbar attack.
Then, something clicked in his mind. Kicks and punches rained down on him, and the crowbar smashed into the small of his back, but above that some kind of ancient understanding took hold. He was not a particularly religious man, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the proximity to death’s door releasing strange hormones into his mind or some kind of deeper connection, but suddenly everything became clear to him.
This pain didn’t matter.
He was still conscious, and if it didn’t kill him he could walk through it for a minute or so.
Then he would collapse.
But only then.
So he surged to his feet amidst the barrage of attacks and thundered a fist into the jaw of the closest scientist, shutting the guy’s lights out with a single strike. He dropped like a rag doll and Griffin stepped over his unconscious body to smash a front kick into the solar plexus of the second guy, driving him back into the stone wall. The guy bounced off the wall and Griffin floored him with a colossal head-butt, smashing the hardest portion of his forehead into the guy’s nose. With two men hitting the deck, enough space opened up to wind up for a final strike on the third guy.
The one with the crowbar.
Griffin saw the steel whistling through the air toward him, but now momentum had transferred over to his side. He sidestepped the wild swing and beat the guy’s face in with three well-placed punches to the forehead, nose, and jaw. Teetering on his feet, the man refused to go down, simply swaying on the spot and bleeding profusely from every orifice.
Big mistake.
Griffin stepped back, twisted a full revolution on the spot to build up momentum, and leapt into a side kick that struck the guy’s throat with the equivalent force of a baseball bat. Shin connected against soft tissue and the guy went down in a bloody heap.
Probably dead.
Griffin didn’t have time to even consider what he’d done, or what kind of state he was in. He couldn’t find the Cherokee, but there was no time to search for it. There was one guy left, and Griffin had become possessed.
He spotted the narrow window of light far in the distance, and surged toward it.
One final man…
And he was the most important target of all.
Because he had the chimera.
And the keys to armageddon.
24
It seemed ridiculous to Griffin that all the savagery he’d put himself through over the course of this operation all came down to a single duffel bag.
He burst out into the open, daylight flooding over him, only a half-minute after dealing with the three scientists who had elected to stay behind. He knew one man remained, even though it was highly possible that there was a separate convoy of scientists and
all his efforts had been in vain.
But he knew.
Deep down, in his core, he knew this was the final hurdle.
It had to be. He couldn’t go on any longer. As soon as he stepped out onto the thin rocky ledge facing out over the Paro Valley, he looked down to properly get a sense of his injuries.
Blood still pumped out of the toe of his boot, and the wound on his shoulder had started to hurt in a way he didn’t consider possible — a deep, guttural sensation that tore through him and threatened to cripple him on the spot. On top of that the accumulated beating he’d absorbed was beginning to set in, dragging his limbs down as if they were moving through quicksand. He stifled a moan of agony and took his attention away from his broken body, looking out over one of the more picturesque views he’d ever seen.
This side of the mountain faced a luscious valley of vibrant green, dipping down away from the mountain range like a giant bathtub. Griffin had emerged roughly halfway up the mountainside, and a couple of steps forward would send him over the edge of a precipitous drop to the valley floor hundreds of feet below. The forest at the base of the mountain ran for several miles in every direction before giving way to scenic farmland for as far as the eye could see, only transforming into mountain ranges on the other side of the valley dozens of miles away.
‘Beautiful,’ Griffin muttered.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Unsteady on his feet, he shuffled forward and peered over the ledge. Sure enough, this was not the only exit point for the tunnel complex. Below him were two separate holes in the side of the mountain, maybe a dozen feet underneath the ledge he stood on. A wild zigzagging combination of rock ledges and shelves arced away down the mountain, a natural trail leading to the base of the cliff.
Griffin began positing a way down to the forest floor when he spotted the last scientist on the ledge below him.
He couldn’t help but think that fate had aligned them both. The natural slope of the mountain resulted in Griffin having a perfect view of the top of the guy’s head. Their paths would intersect — albeit a dozen feet apart on the mountainside — in just a few short seconds. The guy hadn’t seen him. He was sprinting along the narrow ledge, heading for the natural slope of the cliff in order to reach the forest floor as fast as possible. His feet were only a few inches from the side of the ledge.