by Sam Fisher
'There's a micro-tear in your suit. Tom's onto it and the nanobots are already stitching it up. Our sensors tell us your suit is coping well, but what does it say on your screen? Can you see it?'
Stephanie fought back the terror. She could feel the glucose boosters doing their work. She could hold on, but what could she do about the tear? She tried twisting to see the flexiscreen on her wrist, but it was impossible.
'Can't see it,' she said.
'Mai – what's your status?' Mark asked.
Mai had her wire out and was attaching it to the inside of the duct. 'Almost there,' she replied, and slid down the wire to B2.
'Keep the wire in place, Mai.'
'Wilco that.'
A red light appeared on the holoscreen above Tom's virtual keypad. 'Shit,' he exclaimed.
Mark glanced at the figures darting across the screen, which each represented one facet of Stephanie's cybersuit. He could see the rip was being repaired at an incredible rate. But he could also see that the suit's temperature control was failing, and the methane levels in the air were increasing.
Hanging above the burning motor oil, the shards of metal and glass glinting in the blue light, Stephanie began to cough. Then she noticed her feet were warming up.
'Mark, I think there's a problem with the thermal control of my suit.' She coughed again.
Mai was within a few feet of the hole, moving forward with exaggerated care. The wire had played out behind her, but the tension was being automatically regulated. If she fell suddenly, it would hold her.
She reached the rim of the hole. The metal had severed along a join. As she approached the hole, Mai could see Stephanie. She looked like she was at the point of exhaustion. Under the plastic of her visor, her face was wet with sweat.
'Take my hand, Steph,' Mai said. Stretching forward, she could see the mess below, the ghastly spikes and the black smoke. Stephanie's eyes were ablaze in the beam from Mai's helmet light.
'I can't . . . I'll –'
'Steph. You have to take my hand. I'm wired up. It will easily take our combined weight.'
Stephanie couldn't move. Terrified, she had seized up. It was all she could do to keep gripping the rim.
The metal lip of the hole creaked, then it buckled. Stephanie screamed as she dropped six inches. Flames played against the soles of her boots.
Mai slid around the edge of the hole. The wire tightened, holding her in place. She looked down at Stephanie and could see her friend's gloved fingers clinging to the metal lip. Then she saw them begin to slip down over the buckled metal.
Mai's arm shot out. The metal beneath her gave way, coiling under itself, leaving only air directly beneath her. The wire reacted automatically. Mai had Stephanie's upper arm, gripping it tight. Stephanie let go with her other hand just as the metal lip tore away from the duct. She grabbed Mai's wrist.
Mai told the wire to retract slowly and they moved up through the hole, narrowly avoiding the jagged edge. They pushed on the walls of the vertical chute with their feet as the wire slowly raised them through the fumy air. Stephanie was coughing. Nanobots released oxygen into her helmet and she could breathe better. The glucose boosters helped her push against the walls of the duct.
In few moments they were inside the air-con channel on B1 and the air was clearer. Two more minutes crawling through the duct and they were back in the office, where Josh helped them down.
62
Foreman and Dave managed to scramble past Todd on the ladder so they could get to the lift shaft doors on B3. Between them, they wedged open the doors using the aluminium struts, which Foreman had slipped into his back pocket. He was first off the ladder, followed by Dave, and then they helped Marty and Todd over the lip of the opening onto B3.
The smell of smoke hit them and they started to wonder if it had all been worth the effort. Todd collapsed onto the concrete floor just beyond the doors, exhausted. He had lost a lot of blood and was growing weaker by the second. The senator bent down to take a look at his injury. None of them had any medical know-how, but a section of bone was protruding at least an inch through his skin.
'Todd,' Foreman said gently. 'We have to keep moving. Can you get up?'
'I'm fucked, man,' he replied. 'I can't feel my arm, and I'm so cold.'
Dave came over and crouched down, their earlier fight forgotten. 'We'll get you out of here, Todd. Just be strong, yeah?'
The four of them stared across the car park level, which was shrouded in smoke. It was packed with cars, but none of them looked the way they had when they'd been parked earlier that evening. Windows were smashed, and concrete supports and steel beams had flattened the roofs of at least a dozen vehicles. Others had popped bonnets or blown tyres. One four-wheel drive had rolled onto its neighbour.
'What now?' Dave asked.
'Good question,' Foreman replied with a heavy sigh. 'The smoke is thickest over there.' He pointed east, to the far side of the car park. 'You three wait here. I'll go take a look.'
Instead of heading straight across the car park, Foreman first veered left to check out the emergency stairs. A narrow paved path ran from the elevators to the exit, which was directly below the emergency door they had tried on the Ground Level. He didn't need to go the whole way. He could see from twenty yards away that it was blocked by a single piece of concrete that probably weighed a couple of tons.
The senator paused for a moment to get his bearings in the shrouded half-light. The smoke burned his throat. He yanked at his shirt sleeve, the hand-sewn seams giving with surprising ease. Covering his nose and mouth with the expensive fabric, he moved along the driveway, between the rows of decimated cars. Fifty yards on, he jumped suddenly as the alarm went off in a Toyota Prius. It was loud, amplified by the concrete all around. In a few minutes he had reached the centre of the level – four giant concrete columns, pitted and blackened with smoke, that stood on either side of the ramps leading up and down.
The smoke was thicker here, and Foreman started to cough. His eyes stung and watered. Then he saw reddish flames and a pink tinge to the fumes. The smell of burning plastic was overpowering. There was no way they could get out that way, even if the emergency exit that side of the level was clear.
He glanced back towards the elevators but he could no longer see his companions. For a fleeting second he had an almost uncontrollable urge to run, just run and never look back. Gazing at the ramp leading up to B2, he almost did. The others would find their own way out. He saw Sandy's face and the imagined face of his unborn baby.
Foreman spun on his heel and ran back to the elevators. The shapes of Dave, Todd and Marty solidified through the smoke. They were sitting with their backs to the wall where the air was a fraction clearer.
'The far exit is impassable. That's where the fire is. But there's a car ramp, up and down. It's our best hope.'
Dave helped Todd to his feet.
'I'm okay,' he said shakily. 'I can walk.'
'The smoke's getting worse,' Marty said gravely.
'It is, and it's worse still over there,' Foreman replied, nodding towards the ramp. 'But there's no alternative. He ripped his other sleeve away and handed it to Todd. 'Use this.'
Marty tore at his own shirt sleeve and Dave ripped it in two. They covered their mouths with the cloth and followed Foreman into the thickening smoke. Then they all froze as they heard a loud series of explosions close by.
'Sounds like they're coming from the ramps,' Dave said.
'Not on this floor though,' Foreman noted. 'Come on!'
Rather than retracing his steps to the ramp, Kyle led them away from the elevators and towards the front of the building. The fumes were a little less suffocating there. They turned down the first aisle but stopped after only a few yards. A car had been pushed into the aisle and blocked the way. It was covered with glass and dust. Foreman led them between two other cars and they reached the second aisle. To their left and a few yards ahead a four-wheel drive was burning.
A car horn
blared. They ran past it and saw a man's smashed head slumped on his steering wheel. One of his arms lay across the dash and protruded through the shattered windshield. His hand had been split down the middle to the wrist between his third and fourth fingers. Blood fanned out across the bonnet and was still dripping onto the concrete like leaking oil.
As he ran, the senator felt a growing sense of foreboding. They were doing something wrong. He had just seen something that wasn't right. Dave was next to him, then Marty. Todd was struggling along a pace behind.
'How you doing, Todd?' Dave called, glancing back without slowing his pace.
'I'm doing,' he gasped. His face was lathered with sweat, streaked black with soot and grime.
Dave dropped back. 'You can make it, man.' He went to put his shoulder under Todd, but Todd shook it off.
'No, I'll slow you down. I'm cool.'
A trunk lid lay in the middle of the aisle. Todd and Dave went around it different sides.
It was then that the burning car they had just passed blew.
63
Thick smoke hung low along the road that circled the CCC. The Dragon ran along the tarmac. Reaching the rear of the mall, he ducked into a small car park. The body of a man lay sprawled face-down on the concrete, his back a field of glass shards. For a second the corpse looked to the Dragon like some sort of macabre porcupine, and he laughed. This was the first victim of the evening's handiwork he had seen up close, and he felt not a scintilla of guilt nor remorse. His overriding emotion at that moment was contempt for the dead man, who had been fool enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He swung open a door at the loading bay at the back of the car park and found himself in a warehouse behind the Kmart. The place was deserted. He ran along a corridor, seeing no one. But he pulled out his Smith & Wesson just in case. He turned a bend and went through another door, and then he was on the shop floor.
The store had been closed for an hour when the bombs went off, so it had been empty. The front windows had been blown in, sending glass across the shop right to its rear wall. It crunched under the Dragon's boots. Once-neat shelves holding everything from paperback books to the latest toy robots were scattered randomly, flung around the space like a deck of playing cards flicked into the air.
The Dragon strode to the wall at his left. Close to the rear of the store was a door with a sign reading 'Maintenance'. It was locked, but one shot from the Smith & Wesson and the Dragon had smashed a hole above the handle, shattering the locking mechanism. He kicked the door in and it flew back, smashing against a brick wall.
Flicking on a light switch to the right of the doorway, he could see a narrow corridor. Storerooms led off left and right, and at the end of the passageway was a hatch in the far wall. It too was locked, but not for long. Switching on a torch strapped to his head, the Dragon pulled himself up into the opening and began to crawl forward.
The maintenance conduit was a little over a hundred feet long and lined with wires and dotted with junction boxes and larger units that bristled with cables. He covered the distance in 30 seconds and reached a metal ladder. It rose 25 feet, bringing him out into another tunnel.
The light from the torch bobbed about the walls of the maintenance passageway, illuminating more metal boxes, wires, thick ropes of multicoloured cable and glass-fronted panels. It was absolutely silent here. The Dragon felt cut off from human existence, a physical enactment of what he had felt in his heart and his shrivelled soul ever since he was a boy. It pleased him.
He knew from the map Dexter Tate had shown him that this conduit was only a couple of hundred feet long. It covered the short distance from the mall to B2 of the CCC, but with every step it felt as though the tunnel was growing longer and that he would never reach the end. It was hot and confined, and a lesser man – one without his years of training – might have panicked. But the Dragon kept his breathing steady and his pace even, and in less than two minutes he had reached the far end, a metal door that opened from the inside. It swung outwards, a few feet above the floor of B2.
He jumped down, the door slammed against the wall, and he leaned back against the opening. He wanted to breathe deeply, but the air was scorching and fumy. He removed the gas mask from his shoulder bag and pulled it on.
A few dozen yards to his left the Dragon could just make out the ramp leading down to B3 and up to B1. Here, in the eastern part of B2, the car park was ablaze from at least three intense fires. Two of these lay between him and the centre of the level, where the ramp was situated. A fierce fire was also raging to his right, at the eastern end of B2.
He pulled out the GPS and glanced at the screen. The red circle marking Kyle Foreman's position showed he was moving east from the elevators, towards the ramps. So the Dragon had no choice. If he was to intercept the target, he would have to get through the fires to his left. Only then could he reach the ramp and get down to B3.
He ran between the rows of cars, taking steady breaths filtered by the mask. He had to push north, towards the back of the CCC, to get around the more intense of the two fires, constantly aware that at any moment a car could explode next to him. He approached the ramp from the north and looked down to B3. There was no sign of Foreman. That was good. He jumped over a low parapet and landed on the tarmac slope.
Once he could make visual contact with Foreman, he would take him lower down, into the bowels of the building where he could deal with him unseen. The senator would end up just another charred corpse, most likely unidentifiable.
The Dragon lowered his shoulder bag to the floor. With deft movements he pulled out a grenade, tugged the pin away and flung it behind him. Then, as he ran down the ramp into B3, he tossed the remaining two grenades one after the other. They exploded two seconds apart, bringing huge chunks of masonry down onto the top of the ramp from B2 to B3 and showering him with dust. A moment later there was another crash from the top of the ramp as three vehicles landed on top of each other, sealing up the opening completely.
The Dragon leaned against a pillar, panting into his mask. He took one last clean breath, then ripped the mask from his face and tossed it into a pile of rubble nearby. Peering down at himself, he could see that his suit was covered with dust and stained with oil and dirt. That was good. He needed to look a little roughed up.
He tore at the sleeve of his jacket and then leaned down to rip his left trouser leg. Removing his commando knife from its sheath at his waist, the Dragon bent forward again. With a steady hand, he plunged the knife into his calf, carefully avoiding the major blood vessels. The result was a nastylooking flesh wound that bled well but would cause no long-term damage.
Ignoring the pain, he pushed himself away from the wall, sheathed the knife, pocketed his gun and limped away to crouch behind a pile of debris to await the arrival of Senator Kyle Foreman.
64
The boom was ear-splitting and was followed by a rush of material shooting outwards. Marty and Foreman were blown off their feet and sprawled forward onto the concrete.
Dave was thrown onto a car to his right and ended up with his nose an inch from the shattered windshield. He felt a burning sensation in his calf. Looking down, he saw flames leaping from his trousers. The scene seemed to be moving in slow motion. Dave hit his leg with his bare hands. They stung and he yelped. It was burning fuel. He yanked at his backpack, saggy on his shoulders, and smothered the flames with it. Then he tore the fabric away from his leg.
It was only then that he saw Todd lying face-down, his body twisted horribly. A line of burning fuel from the exploded car was racing towards him. Dave slid off the hood and ran to his friend, screaming hysterically.
He grabbed Todd's leg and dragged him along the ground away from the stream of burning fuel. Marty and Foreman were just coming to. The senator pulled himself to his knees.
'Todd?' Dave was leaning over him. The boy's face was badly burned, his skin blistered from temple to chin. One eye was open but sightless, clouded in grey. 'Todd?' Dave
shook him.
Todd started. He tried to look at his friend, but he seemed to be totally blind. He grabbed at Dave's arm and started to cry. He was trying to speak. Dave couldn't make out the words and leaned in closer, but Todd's head slumped to one side.
'Todd . . . Todd!'
Foreman and Marty were beside Dave, pulling him to his feet. 'Come on, we've got to go,' Marty was saying.
Dave felt as though time had stood still. He could see his friend's dead face, but it wasn't real. None of this was. He was going to wake up any moment and shake it off – a bad dream, nothing more. Marty's voice cut in, but Dave couldn't make out what he was saying. He turned and saw the old man's anxious face close to his. His mouth was moving but the words were soundless.
Dave felt himself propelled forward, strong hands gripping his arms. He was running, running without knowing why or where he was going. He felt the ground rise, the acrid air choking him as he gasped. He watched the ramp slide past, the concrete columns to left and right. They were close to the top of the ramp. They stopped and Dave heard Kyle Foreman swear. Marty made a loud choking sound in his throat.
Ahead of them lay three burning cars and a huge concrete slab from the caved-in ceiling. The way was completely blocked.
65
The Mole was one of the machines unique to E-Force. It was an astonishing piece of technology. It looked like a massive drill bit on tracks, and – as its name suggested – it was designed to burrow into the earth. But, although it did this with great efficiency, it could also withstand very high temperatures, allowing it to pass easily through fires.
Behind the drill was the one-man control centre, and behind that was a cylindrical capsule ten feet long and four feet wide. From the control centre the operator of the Mole had a 360-degree view of the surroundings via external cameras. Sensors in the machine's skin passed information about the external environment to the on-board nano-systems. The capsule behind the control centre was dubbed 'the Bullet' because of its shape, but it was also incredibly tough – blast-proof, radiation-sealed and resistant to almost every chemical known to humankind.