All Fall Down

by James Brabazon

  He looked up at me and cocked his head to one side.

  “My brain,” he said. “It’s different. It works differently.”

  “Different how? To what?”

  “To yours. To everyone’s.” He smiled again. “Chust chalak, my mother says.” He put on a strong Punjabi accent, mimicking her pronunciation. “Clever clogs. I remember things. Patterns. Numbers. Once I’ve seen them, I can’t forget them.” He tapped his right temple. “It’s bloody crowded in there.”

  I looked back into the hole.

  “Well, it’s going to be bloody crowded up there, too.” I waved my right hand. “Pass me the torch, will you?”

  He did. I wanted to stay dark during the climb, for when we emerged. But I needed to see what I was getting into first. I took the black barrel of the LED from Baaz’s fingers and angled the beam into the shaft so that as little glare as possible would leak out. Immediately above my face the outline of a skull leaped out, mouth grimacing in the slanting torchlight. I swept the beam out at first by a foot, and then another. As the light climbed higher, I understood more clearly the true horror ahead. No wonder no one used this exit. Even if the cops did know about it, no one would ever be stupid—or desperate—enough to try it.

  Bodies had caught down the sides of the chute, so that the length of it was lined with the detritus of the dead. There were no footholds except upturned skulls, no handholds except the unreliable levers of femurs. A rib cage jutted out here, a scapula there. Looking up and seeing the bones cascading down in frozen motion was like seeing a freeze-frame of being sucked into hell.

  “I’ll have to remind Grumpy Jock to add this to selection,” I said under my breath. And then aloud, as I worked my way out again, “There was one thing you did forget, Baaz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m nearly twice your size.”

  “Oh,” he said, at first dumbfounded and then dejected. “Oh no. Can we do it?”

  “No idea,” I said truthfully. “Can’t see the top. It curves around after four meters or so. Maybe I’ll get through, maybe not. You’re going first, anyway.” He looked at me, nervous, left hand drumming away at the air again. “You have to. I can get through what I’ve seen, but I’ll bring everything I brush past crashing down as I go.” He reached for the torch. I held it back. “It’s better you don’t see what you’re holding on to.” He wriggled his way into the hole, coughing and swearing in Punjabi as he went. I held on to his ankle to slow him down, and bent round so he could hear me better. “Baaz?”

  “What?”

  “Two things. First, if we get separated, don’t go straight home, and definitely don’t go to the cops.”

  “OK. And what’s the second thing?”

  “This was your idea.”

  I let go of his ankle and slapped his calf through his Wellingtons, and he vanished up the chute—the fine shower of bone splinters that fell into the cavern the only trace anyone was up there at all. I turned around to do a final sweep of the chamber. I slung the M4 tight to my chest and killed the torch. I waited for Baaz to get a couple of meters ahead of me, and then forced my weight up behind him, pulling myself up the rungs of the bone ladder one femur at a time, snaking my way through the shaft.

  Everything I touched snapped. In the pitch black it was impossible to tell the bones apart. My shoulders scraped the sides clean, sending a shower of osseous matter down into the cavern below. I wedged my back against the wall and pushed up with my feet, bracing, scrabbling, pulling with my fingertips where I could. Unknown lumps of skeleton fell from Baaz’s own scramble out, hitting my head, shoulders. I was at the bend now. The chimney constricted. My eyes clogged with dirt and dust. My nails bled; my face was scratched red raw. I paused to catch my breath, and tasted for the first time in hours the cool sweetness of fresh air.

  I was nearly there.

  “OK, I’ve done it. Bloody hell.” It was Baaz calling from above. By the sound of it he was out. “It’s tight, but I think you can make it.”

  “Good,” I yelled up. “Run. You hear me? Run, and don’t look back.”

  If he got busted, he’d be screwed. If he got busted with me, he’d be dead. I rested my right hand on the pistol grip of the M4 and cursed the stupidity of carrying it up with me. But as I looked down and braced myself for the last push up and out, the air filled with the pulsating boom-roar of a grenade blast. I looked down. A rifle-mounted torch probed the bone pipe. The chute flooded with light.

  Shit.

  The white faces of the dead pressed in on me. If you’re going through hell . . . keep going. So I breathed in and pushed for all I was worth against the walls. But my shoulders would not move.

  I was a dead man.

  Do something. Or do nothing.

  I tucked my chin in, squeezed my legs together, folded my arms across my chest. And dropped.

  The frozen faces fell away in a helter-skelter frenzy of bone-blurred descent. The minutes taken to inch my way up took only seconds to reverse. As I landed hard, a man’s head poked into the opening. My feet found his shoulders, pushing him back and out, exiting at speed in a slimy skull wave of broken bones that plunged us back into the charnel house together. I picked myself up. He was heavyset, black combats, tactical vest. Two twenty, two thirty pounds. And out cold. His body was half buried by the skull slide, partly lit by the rifle light wedged tight beneath him. His face was covered by a military respirator. Could have been a cop. Could have been whoever the fuck else was after me.

  I got the M4 on my shoulder, laser on. The rest of the cave was clear. The blast had been a flash-bang, not frag. Pound to a penny they’d try to gas me out. I pulled the respirator off his face and onto mine, and then I scraped a heap of bones over his rifle’s flashlight. The ossuary went darker, but not black. The lip of the arch under which we’d first entered the room threw a shadow back toward me. Then the whole edge of the roughly hewn doorway juddered as more light fell on it. It was being lit from the other side. I knelt and squinted down the passageway. Torches, not carbide lamps. Half a dozen of them, closing in.

  French GIGN assault team or Russian death squad? The motopsycho nightmare ride across the capital had floored a lot of policemen, but none had died by my hand. I intended to keep it that way for as long as possible. Fifteen meters. I took the sting-ball grenade out of my jacket pocket and stepped back from the low archway. Ten meters. I pulled the pin, let the lever fly clear and flung the little black ball down the passageway.

  A loud bang. Exploding rubber and CS gas. I heard a man fall. One screamed. They all stopped. I backed away, M4 up, facing the gateway, treading the hill of bones in reverse back to the escape hole. I imagined my shoulders grinding bone against bone as I tried to work my way up again. But there was no time to get clear.

  The men in the tunnel were already up and running, boots pounding on the passage floor. I squatted down, the stock of the damaged rifle braced to my right hip by my right elbow. In the half dark I hooked the index and middle fingers of my left hand around the T-bar of the M4’s charging handle. A metal cylinder bounded through the archway, billowing white smoke. CS gas, most likely. Then another. There was a pause as the room filled with vapor, and then the first man came in at a crouch. I landed my red dot on the shooter’s left shoulder and followed it with a single 5.56 round. I was glad of the suppressor.

  “Blyat!” he swore in Russian as he went down, twisting away from me. French cops got a second chance; Russian gunmen got no mercy. I put the next round through his back, the one that followed it in his ribs, racking the charging handle of the broken M4 to recock it after every shot, like an old movie cowboy fanning a six-gun. The light on his dropped rifle fell away from me, illuminating an inverted skull by the foot of the door in a blazing halo. Despite the glare from the torch I could make out only shapes, not details, in the shadows it raked up around the door. The ossuary was entirely f
illed with gas. If they decided to play rough and lobbed in a hand grenade, the first I’d know about it would be when it went off.

  I threw myself headlong down the pile of bones, landing hard on the floor three meters in front of the stone arch entrance. The M4’s laser reached through it, probing the shins, boots, thighs of the men on the other side. There could have been a hundred men in that tunnel; a thousand. So narrow was the doorway that, as long as there were bullets to shoot, it didn’t matter: they could fight me only one-to-one. So fought the Spartans at Thermopylae.

  I opened up before they could get into position. Bone shattered; muscle tore; ligaments sheered and snapped. I fired until first one and then another of the rounds from the M4 streaked out strontium red. The shooter in the bar had loaded tracer for his last three rounds. It was an old trick, and I wasn’t a fan: as well as telling you when you were about to run out of ammunition, it let the people you were shooting at know it, too. It also let them know exactly where you were—although that was currently the least of my problems. I pulled the trigger for the last time on the M4 and sent a final crimson-glowing slug into the solid black mass of the nearest fallen man.

  In the silence following the shots, the deep, tearing screams of the wounded rang out.

  And then orders shouted in Russian: “Vyrubite svet!”—Kill the light!

  They were down, but most—maybe even all—of them would still be alive. I’ve seen a man lose his leg at the knee and keep engaging the enemy until a medic pried the weapon from his hands. It was too dangerous to retrieve the rifle by the door. I still had the Glock and one grenade left—but an explosion in the tunnel risked another cave-in. I dropped the spent carbine, drew the pistol and flicked on my own torch with my left thumb, covering the lens with my thigh. I got to my feet and stayed low, sending the lit LED arcing out through the entrance, above and beyond the bodies of the men I’d cut down: shots followed the swooping, spinning beam as it sailed past like an erratic lighthouse. Rifle reports thundered along the passage, their muzzle flashes giving their positions away as surely as the tracer had done mine. The torch landed on the floor, pointing down the tunnel. Its flight had distracted them for a second.

  And a second was all I needed.

  I came through the archway, firing. The fallen torch cut the gloom enough to see to kill. I aimed shots into the outlines of the three men from whom points of light had flared a moment before. I worked smoothly, accurately, enjoying the feeling of the Glock, the precision of it. All the time Colonel Ellard’s words in my mind.

  If you want to win a gunfight, take your time.

  Some of the rounds connected with a dull, wet thud. Others crunched as copper clipped bone. Up close, bursts of light from the Glock illuminated faces on the floor, hands clutching wounds, mouths open, screaming, in split-second freeze-frame. Movement to the left. I dropped on my haunches as a bullet licked the air above me, scoring the stone wall behind. I fired two shots in return. The rifle fell silent.

  The four men I’d shot lay facedown, unmoving—lower limbs wrecked, chests opened up with copper-coated lead. Among them, three wounded shuffled on the ground. Dying among the dying, they snaked around their wounds, darkening the chalk slime of the passage floor with thick clots of blood. The taste of iron mingled with the bitter tang of cordite.

  I leaned over and shot the nearest survivor in the head. I stepped over him and moved to the next, shooting him in the same way. The third man was farther off. He lay on his back, hands up and out toward me. There was enough light from the discarded torch to see that his face was bloodied, neck lacerated. His leg lay at right angles to his body—torn out of place by the M4. I aimed into his one, dying eye. His hands came together as if in prayer.

  “Ne ubivai menya!” he begged, choking on the blood collecting in his throat. Don’t kill me. But when the killing starts, it doesn’t stop until the job is done.

  No one moved. I checked the magazine in the Glock. Empty. One round left in the breech. I looked around for a weapon to take—and then, at the far end of the tunnel, a long shadow spread across the tunnel ceiling. I straightened, raised the pistol and brought my left hand across to steady the grip. Picked out by the beam of the torch at my feet, a slight man in a long black coat emerged into the tunnel. He took a step toward me, head back, hands raised and empty. One shot, one kill. The crease beneath the pad of my index finger flattened across the trigger.

  “McLean,” he shouted. I steadied my breathing. “You are a very hard man to help.”

  The clipped vowels of his perfect English echoed off the stone corridor. It was the doctor from the ship. And he’d been reading the newspapers. Once upon a time no one knew my name unless I told them. Now it was on everyone’s lips. I settled the sight post of the Glock in the center of his chest and exhaled slowly. But I wanted to talk to him. Not kill him. At thirty meters I could put him down. But I couldn’t guarantee he’d survive. A hairsbreadth of steel stopped the hammer from dropping, kept his heart beating.

  “I don’t need your kind of help.”

  “I think you do, Mr. McLean. Look around you. Your own side has betrayed you.”

  “Keep walking,” I said, louder than I expected. “And keep talking.” He took another step forward. I lowered my aim a fraction, into his stomach. Whoever he was, he had guts.

  “General King hasn’t just left you out in the cold. He’s buried you.” He’d most likely got King’s name from Lukov. But he was right. It was open season on Max McLean.

  “Step closer,” I said. He did.

  “You have something that belongs to me,” he said. “I’d like it back.”

  “Sure. Come and get it.”

  I might have been disowned. But I hadn’t been disarmed. The trigger crept a fraction of a millimeter. And then movement to my right. One of the gunmen was still alive. In his hand the hard lines of a Grach 9mm. The shot went wide of my leg. I returned fire reflexively. He dropped the pistol and breathed out a long death rattle. I looked up again as the shadow cast by the doctor slipped from sight along the passage.

  I dropped the Glock and took the pistol from the dead man’s hand, checking the magazine. Then I removed the remaining grenade from my jacket pocket and waited for the onslaught.

  But none came.

  So I picked up my torch and ducked back into the ancient ossuary, leaving the assault squad’s carbines where they’d fallen. They were too visible, their ammunition too hard to come by. But NATO 9mm—which the Grach’s magazine was loaded with—could be scavenged from any policeman’s belt. Why it wasn’t charged with the Russian armor-piercing rounds it was designed for could have been due to operational security or expediency—or because they weren’t serving military.

  I crouched and listened but my hearing was shot. There was nothing to do but get out while I still could. I stretched out on my back and craned my head into the bone pipe. I flicked on the flashlight, checked the integrity of the boot-damaged walls and started the ascent, forcing myself up, clinging to the crumbling foot- and handholds that I’d already half destroyed in my first attempted surge to safety. I pushed and braced and squeezed and kicked, and emerged back into the world choking on bone dust, spitting out fragments of femur onto the damp cemetery ground at the base of an elaborate stone tomb. I rolled clear and lay flat, swallowing deep breaths of clean, crisp night air.

  The remaining grenade was the last thing that went down the chute after I came out—ensuring I’d be the last person to use it. Going off five meters underground, the blast hardly registered between the densely packed gravestones and mausoleums around me. But I felt the vibration of bones and earth collapsing beneath me, and I knew that the entrance would be sealed.

  I sat up and got my bearings. Low cloud. No moon. And no movement. The soft sodium light thrown by the streetlamps that ringed the graveyard settled on the ancient stonework like an orange blanket. It made everything look unreal, i
nsubstantial. But at least I could see. I needed to head south. How, exactly, I’d be able to keep moving, and where, exactly, I’d go—I just didn’t know. But then, as I got to my feet, one of the alabaster angels presiding over the tomb I’d emerged next to lurched forward, arms thrust out at me. I jumped back and raised the Grach reflexively, not knowing whether I was under attack or whether the grenade had caused a cave-in. Then I saw. Smeared with tunnel slime, clothes torn, eyes bright in the darkness, the figure reaching out for me wasn’t an angel—but it was a savior nonetheless.

  I lowered the pistol and reached out, too, and clasped the muddy hand of Bhavneet Singh.

  18

  Zero eight thirty.

  I parted the blinds a fraction. The wind was picking up. Gray clouds piled up on the horizon. There would be rain later. I pressed the backs of my fingers to the window glass. It was cold, too. Not far off freezing. The sun hadn’t yet risen but the city was already seething. Monday morning and everyone was back to work. Me included. I’d been awake for hours. Waiting. Listening. Just because I couldn’t see them didn’t mean I wasn’t surrounded. The French army and the police, Russian hit men and random gunmen, snipers and bike riders, and, of course, the Russian doctor: they were all out there. Somewhere.

  I withdrew my hand and let the slats snick shut.

  The room was spacious and well heated, with high white walls that rose to a lofty, corniced ceiling. At either end stood a tall window covered with blinds. Beneath each window sat an iron radiator, adorned with my drip-drying socks, gloves and jacket. In between them, pushed up against the front wall, was a massive wooden table laden with three large flat-panel displays, a wireless keyboard, two laptop computers and sheaves of paper printed with what looked like equations and calculations.

  I picked up the nearest set of notes. They’d been crossed out with deep slashes of a blue ballpoint. At the top of the page, written in the same blue ink:

  Shor is God.