The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  “Kurds. Shia. Who else?” Walker asked, because he saw now that this really was heading somewhere. “ISIS?”

  “Do you even know what that means?” the lieutenant said, frowning at Dunlap as if he was to blame for the simplicity of Walker’s answer.

  “I know they’re unraveling.”

  “They were never that raveled to begin with,” Lieutenant Cobb explained. “Or not for long, anyway. Look, there are dozens of Salafi jihadist movements in the Middle East. I’m not going to give you a local history lesson, but when ISIS came together, it included a lot of smaller groups. One of the most popular in this neighborhood was Ansar al-Islam, or AAI, a Sunni Muslim jihadi group. Some of them fragmented off—they didn’t want to join ISIS—and our Turkish friends are telling us they’re coalescing a new alliance with some of the others that have fragmented from ISIS. In English, they call themselves New Caliphate, basically picking up ISIS’s dream but with even less rational behavior.”

  “Less rational than ISIS?” Dunlap said. Apparently, the lieutenant hadn’t shared that observation with him before.

  “Rumor has it we’ve got people embedded inside New Caliphate, and the word I’ve heard is that they watched what happened with ISIS. You’re talking about a jihadi group that looked, briefly, like they might be able to conquer the Middle East. They came together so fast and in such numbers and did so much damage that they scared the shit out of everyone, but then they fell apart. Apparently, the lesson New Caliphate took from that is that the old Al Queda model works better—hit hard, sharp, and nasty, strike vulnerable targets, terrorize and demoralize, murder people’s hope, don’t win hearts and minds—take them.”

  “And your Turkish twins?” Walker said. “They’re telling you New Caliphate’s interested in the dig?”

  “The twins say New Caliphate have been interested all along. Anything that comes out of there that emphasizes any history but the version they want to teach, they’ll want to destroy it.”

  Dunlap sniffed derisively. “So these spies that were following Dr. Durand … they claim they were trying to help her?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” the lieutenant replied. “They have their own angle here, but letting New Caliphate destroy artifacts is definitely not on their agenda. There’s one other thing the twins told me. According to the whispers they’ve heard, New Caliphate has someone inside the dig already. On Dr. Durand’s team.”

  Walker exhaled a quiet profanity, letting his thoughts flicker through images of the members of Sophie’s staff that he’d met, trying to figure out who among them might be on the payroll of jihadi terrorists.

  “What a mess,” he said, glancing back toward the entrance to the dig. “How much of this have you told Sophie?”

  Lieutenant Cobb stood straighter, emphasizing his true size. Walker thought of the Frankenstein monster.

  “I’m taking my own initiative to tell you,” the lieutenant said. “I figure someone underground ought to know. But Dr. Durand doesn’t work for the U.S. government, and neither does Ms. Kim. You do. If you want to lay it out for them, that’s up to you. I’ve done my part here. Everyone here knows Dr. Durand is wrapping this up quickly. If anyone’s going to make a move, it will have to be soon. So watch your ass.”

  Walker swore again. For the first time, he was grateful for the thumping rhythm of the hip-hop pumping out of the Humvee. Anyone who wanted to listen to their conversation would have had to get damned close to do so. It occurred to him that this might be why the lieutenant had the music up loud in the first place, and he looked at the stubble-scalped giant with new perspective.

  “Thanks, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Dunlap said.

  “Double from me,” Walker added.

  Lieutenant Cobb waved them off as if he’d nearly forgotten them already. He crawled back across the Humvee’s front seat and plumped his pillow, turned the volume up further, and adjusted his reading lamp. By the time he’d picked up his copy of Lonesome Dove, he seemed as if he hadn’t a care in the world, but Walker understood how far that was from the truth.

  He’s waiting, Walker thought. Not for orders to clear out but for the shit to hit the fan.

  TEN

  Walker and Dunlap strode back the way they’d come. The camp remained quiet save for Cobb’s music, but Walker could feel the tension in the air now. American and Kurdish soldiers alike were on edge, as if a fuse had already been lit but they didn’t know how much time they had until the boom.

  The breeze that kicked up in that moment felt strangely warm, as if the sun had not already vanished over the horizon. Walker tugged at the collar of his T-shirt. His skin prickled, and when his thoughts tried to flicker back through a slideshow of past dangers, he pushed the images away. Whatever bad intentions anyone might have, he had no reason to think that he and Kim and everyone else here wouldn’t be long gone before trouble could start.

  “Mask on,” Walker said, adjusting his filtration mask to cover the lower half of his face once more.

  “You all right?” Dunlap asked, following suit.

  “I don’t look all right?”

  “You want the truth? You look like you just found out your house is haunted.”

  Walker laughed quietly, nodding. “Feels a bit like that.”

  Just that bit of humor had worked out some of the tension in his back, cooled some of the heat inside his chest.

  “What are you going to tell Sophie?” Dunlap asked.

  “Aside from hurry the hell up, you mean?”

  A voice barked loudly, not far ahead. One word. “Hey!”

  Walker and Dunlap glanced at each other.

  Someone replied to the first voice in a stream of Arabic, and the two men picked up their pace, striding past the last of the tents. From there, they could make out the hole in the face of the hill, the entrance into Derveyî.

  “Look,” an American soldier snapped, moving in front of the entrance, blocking two men in civilian clothing. “I don’t care who you’re supposed to be. You don’t have the right credentials, you don’t get inside.”

  There were three other soldiers guarding Derveyî. Two Kurds and a second American. One of the Kurds muttered something to the two civilians, his lips twisted into a sneer that made his dismissal of the men clear.

  “I have the credentials!” the older of the two civilians said. He must have been around fifty, with thinning hair and at least a little black left in his gray beard. “You see this! I am a professor at Atatürk University. I have been sent as an advisor. Summoned here. If you men have only your clipboard for a brain, that is not my doing.”

  The second civilian was younger. Clean-shaven, fresh haircut, but when he glanced back and saw Walker and Dunlap approaching, there were dark bags under his eyes and he looked twitchy.

  “Professor, please,” he said, taking the older man by the elbow. “We must—”

  “No!” the professor shouted. “I will not endure such rudeness. I must see Sophie Durand, and I will see her. Now.”

  The professor wore an expensive-looking suit with a red tie and round spectacles that perched on the bridge of his nose. His assistant might have been a grad student, in a loose windbreaker, wrinkled khaki pants, and a canvas rucksack on his back. But Walker didn’t like the nervous glance the man had given them or the way his hands hung at his sides as if he might be about to bolt or throw a punch.

  But it was the boots that made Walker’s hackles rise. Dirty, battered, and scuffed—they weren’t the boots of anyone’s assistant, and they weren’t the boots of a student. The man’s right hand hovered, open, as if he might perform a magic trick for the soldiers around him. The professor kept arguing, kept insisting as Walker and Dunlap moved toward the entrance to Derveyî.

  “Dunlap,” Walker said quietly when they were forty feet away.

  “Yeah,” Dunlap replied as if that said it all.

  A voice shouted from the darkness at the edge of the camp. American. “Perimeter! Check the perimeter! I’ve got movem
ent—”

  The crack of a rifle silenced him. One shot, and for a heartbeat or two, all was quiet except for the damned music thumping from Lieutenant Cobb’s Humvee.

  Then the camp lit up with gunfire. Voices shouted. Soldiers burst from within tents as if they’d been on edge, crouched and ready to spring. A ripple of gunshots, automatic weapons fire, dropped three men in the moment before Walker tore his gaze away and turned back toward the entrance.

  The noise seemed to cancel itself out. Even the music receded. Walker saw the professor’s assistant draw his gun and shoot one of the Kurdish soldiers in the face. The professor hurled himself into the two American soldiers before they could raise their guns, slammed them both into the crack in the face of the hill, the entrance to the dig. One soldier stumbled and fell, and the professor grabbed the other by the face and smashed his skull against the stone, ripped his gun out of his hands, and killed them both.

  Dunlap had drawn his sidearm by then, the filtration mask making him look like some kind of bandit. He paused and took two shots at the professor, but both went wide, taking chips out of the hole in the wall. Walker ran harder. Weaponless, he sprinted toward the assistant even as the younger man struggled with the remaining Kurdish soldier. The two of them shouted at each other in words Walker didn’t understand, but the meaning was clear, especially when the assistant wrested his gun hand free, kicked the Kurd backward, and shot him three times in the chest.

  Behind him, the whole camp had come alive with gunfire and emergency lights that flared. Alarms blared. The sounds had receded in his mind for a few seconds, but now they came roaring back, drowning out even Lieutenant Cobb’s hip-hop. Under attack, bullets flying, jihadi militants invading the camp, there was no way anyone would have noticed the gunfire at the entrance to Derveyî. Even if some of the gathered forces had seen the skirmish, they were busy defending the camp from dozens of attackers. Two fuckers with guns were not a large enough threat to distract from that, even when those two fuckers with guns were headed inside a subterranean city where dozens of civilians were gathered and where a potentially deadly biohazard might be waiting.

  Walker twisted around, saw Dunlap catching up. “We’ve got to keep them away from the jar. No matter what!”

  “I’m on it!”

  Walker didn’t waste time on more words. He had the jar on his mind, but the people inside were closer than the jar, and they were his first priority. One in particular. Kim would have been furious at him for thinking of her safety. Once upon a time, he would have been furious with himself for the same reason, but experience had changed him. There was no route out of Derveyî except through this door, which meant he could try to save the lives of the people below before he worried about what the jar might do.

  “Go!” Walker barked, and Dunlap raced through the entrance.

  Walker stopped to snatch up a pair of guns the Kurdish soldier had dropped. One was a sidearm, an M17, but the other was an HK416 assault rifle issued by Joint Special Operations Command.

  He didn’t care how the Kurds had gotten them, only that he had them in his hands. But three steps into the tunnel, he turned and threw the HK416 back outside. There were two jihadis inside and dozens of civilians. The assault rifle was not the right tool for this job.

  M17 gripped tightly in his right hand, Walker hustled after Dunlap. He heard the sergeant’s footfalls ahead, heard the grunts as Dunlap rushed down the entry ramp and then the curving staircase that would take them into the grand foyer atrium.

  They heard the screaming a moment later.

  Gunshots echoed up from below.

  Walker felt his heart go cold, and that was for the best. He needed that coldness right now. Up ahead, the stairs ended in a narrow corridor, only fifteen feet long. Dunlap raced headlong for the atrium, and Walker swore and called his name. The so-called professor might not have seen them coming, but the assistant knew they were there. He had to be ready.

  He was.

  Walker could see the mouth of the corridor, where it opened into the brighter light of the atrium. He saw the assistant appear there, silhouetted, backlit by that yellow illumination. The man raised his weapon, aimed it at Dunlap’s chest. Walker threw himself to the left, steadied himself against the corridor wall, and pulled the trigger. The angle was shit, but he caught the assistant in the shoulder. The bullet backed the man up, buying Dunlap’s life and a few precious seconds during which the sergeant tackled the asshole to the ground.

  The two men struggled. The assistant’s windbreaker had a bloodstain spreading on the shoulder, and Dunlap punched the wound. The jihadi cried out, and Dunlap wrested the gun from his hand. The guy tried to reach back and dig into his rucksack, but Dunlap denied him that as well.

  More gunfire erupted ahead. People screamed. Walker barely heard any of it as he raced past Dunlap and the jihadi and darted into the atrium. He scanned faces, saw the terror in them. People up on the balconies had crouched to hide themselves, but here in the main area, the sloping ramp at the center of the atrium, he spotted Sophie Durand immediately. No sign of Kim or Dr. Tang, and maybe that was for the best. He recognized a few other faces, but they weren’t his focus.

  The professor had his gun aimed at Sophie’s face. He shouted angrily, demanding she take him to the Pandora Room. Walker absorbed the words but paid them little attention. All he saw was the gun, and the fear, and the back of the man’s head. The dignified man in his shiny gray suit and round spectacles and red tie. That too-expensive suit. Walker chided himself for not noticing immediately that the suit was too nice to be the wardrobe of a college professor, but at least he’d noticed the assistant’s boots.

  Sophie noticed Walker then.

  The professor saw her notice. He had to. When a man aimed a gun at someone’s face and that person abruptly stopped focusing on the imminent threat of death, the gunman was bound to notice.

  He started to turn, to see what had diverted Sophie’s attention.

  From twenty yards away, with dozens of people around him on their knees or with their hands laced behind their heads, shouting for mercy, Walker shot the professor through the left eye, shattering his little round spectacles. Blood and brain matter spattered Sophie’s face and clothes as the man twisted and crumpled to the stone floor.

  Someone screamed, and then silence enveloped the atrium, leaving only the echo of the gunshot.

  “Oh, my God,” Sophie whispered, staring at the professor.

  Walker glanced back at Dunlap, who sat astride the assistant. The man might have been dead or unconscious, but either way, Dunlap’s fists were the reason.

  “Well, now, Dr. Walker,” Dunlap said. “I’m going to guess that’s not the first time you’ve fired a gun.”

  Walker glanced around at the many faces now giving him a much closer look than they had before. Very curious faces, all of them wondering the same thing. Who the hell was this guy?

  It was going to be hard to convince them he was just a scientist.

  * * *

  The first artillery shell destroyed one of the housing trailers and blew another one off its moorings. Screaming came from within the one that had suffered a direct hit, but Lieutenant Cobb did not stop to listen or to help. He heard the whistle of another artillery shell and felt the momentary urge to throw his arms wide and try to catch it. Then it hit the northern perimeter of the camp and snapped him out of that flicker of madness.

  Soldiers were in motion, men and women flying past him as fast as their feet could carry them. Cobb began barking orders, no idea where Major Bernstein might have been in that moment. His unit wouldn’t need much encouragement. Nearly all of them had been under fire before—hard to spend time in this part of the world, and in this uniform, and avoid it for very long. They knew their jobs.

  A drone soared overhead, paused a moment, and then it zeroed in on him and began to zip toward him out of the night sky, nothing but a blinking red light and the buzz of its rotors to indicate its presence in the dark.r />
  “Lieutenant!” a voice shouted.

  A woman came barreling out from between two tents, took aim, and blasted the drone. It exploded, the makeshift bomb it carried going off in the air instead of on impact as planned.

  Corporal McHugh had the best marksmanship in his unit, and Cobb was grateful to her, but there would be time for thanks later—if they were lucky.

  “Get some elevation, McHugh,” he said. “Watch the skies. Take out anything you see.”

  Even as she barked a “yes, sir,” the soldier was in motion. Cobb left her to her work and wove through the tents as another artillery shell exploded, this one missing the camp by fifty yards, still to the north, away from the strangely shaped hills of the Beneath Project. New Caliphate had been coalescing for a while, but not long enough to have amassed the kind of weaponry ISIS had used in the field. Most of the so-called Islamic state’s tanks, aircraft, and artillery had been stolen, bought, or captured in Syria and Iraq, a hodgepodge of armaments from the American, Russian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Turkish armies. In dismantling ISIS, coalition forces had destroyed or recaptured most of those weapons, so the question of what arms New Caliphate had at its disposal had been lingering.

  Now the forces around Derveyî were getting an answer.

  Mobile artillery, probably on the back of a flatbed truck, civilian drones repurposed with bombs, as well as handheld rocket launchers from the sound of things. They would never commit all their resources to this one attack, this one location, for fear of losing them, so Cobb hoped what they were seeing now would be the extent of what New Caliphate could throw at them.

  We can survive this, he told himself as he burst from among the tents and ran for a trench they had dug at the perimeter of the camp. Bullets erupted from the darkness, tore up the dirt around him, and punched through a Humvee behind him and shattered its windows, but he leaped into the trench, shouldered his weapon, and began returning fire.

  We can survive this.