If Lukov had been lying, though, it meant someone had got to the bad Bulgarian first – someone who wanted to throw me off track. But for all his faults – which were legion – Lukov had been loyal to the deal. His deal. He owed me, and he’d known it; and despite his bravado he’d also known I could have – would have – killed him there and then if I’d thought he’d been trying to fuck me. He was good; but not that good. Nothing about his body language had suggested fear: if he’d been playing me, his eyes would have betrayed him. The same could not be said for Frank, always every bit the smiling executioner.
I blinked into the void.
I had no clear memory of this part of the tunnel, other than it ran with water and took a sharp bend to the right. After that the specifics of the route I’d trodden as a teenager faded from mind. As well as the unknown length of the tunnel ahead, there was another, logistical problem with pressing on: as soon as I submerged myself, I would also submerge my Greek passport and cash. They would dry, but the passport would be damaged. Using it was already dangerous enough. The more reason anyone had to check it, the more likely I was to fail check-in. I ran my hands through my pockets. No bags, no liner that would keep it dry. Then I found Lukov’s wallet.
I flicked the torch on again and combed through it. Cash; credit cards; French ID; a slip of paper with a woman’s name – Karolina – and a French cell phone number scrawled on it.
‘Lukov, you fucker,’ I whispered as I ran my fingers under the card inserts. ‘Help me out.’
And so he did: my fingers closed around a soft, square, pale blue plastic packet marked Soft RIDER. The horny old bastard never went anywhere without a condom. I tore open the wrapper, put the foil in my pocket and stuffed the wallet, passport and roll of cash into the French letter. I stowed it inside my jacket, checked that all the pockets were zipped shut, and that the Glock was firmly in my waistband. The fire selector of the M4 was set to semi-auto; there was a round in the breech; the laser was on. I took a last, deep, sulphurous breath, and then my head was under. I gave the tunnel one last look with the torch beam, and went dark again.
There was no question of actually swimming. Weighed down with sodden clothes, never mind the grenades and rifle, the best I could manage was an unsteady walk. I counted out the seconds. On a good day I could free dive for five minutes. This was not a good day. Injuries, exhaustion, kit and clothing all reduced the time I’d have under water. I gave myself four minutes maximum: two minutes out and, crucially, two minutes to get back if there was no exit at the other end – and that was pushing it to the absolute limit. Once I was underwater, the most important thing was to keep moving. If I pressed on, I’d have almost perfect visibility; turn back, and I’d be blinded by my own wake. God help me if I got stuck on the return trip. When I did get out, I’d be operating in soaking wet clothes. That wasn’t ideal – but the catacombs weren’t cold. In fact, it was warmer underground than it was at the surface. The entire complex maintained a steady fifteen degrees Celsius – the perfect temperature for storing wine and for swimming assassins.
Wet blackness engulfed me. The last pockets of air in my clothing bubbled out. I trod gingerly, left hand in constant contact with the wall, M4 braced into my right hip, barrel forward, describing the same hypnotic red cross on the passage ahead. Progress was painfully slow. I stubbed my toes on hidden rocks, scraped my skull on the invisible ceiling. One minute in and I’d covered less than ten metres. After a minute and a half I reached another T-junction. To the left the red beam vanished into the clear black water. To the right the route curved around. I followed it, left arm out, steadying myself in the weird weightlessness of the submerged passage. The route divided again. I kept right, completing a hundred-and-thirty-degree turn back on my original direction. If I’d worked it out correctly, I’d be facing south-west. I stood still in the blackness. My two minutes were up. I began to feel the tightness in my chest. The straining at my throat.
If I went back now, I’d have to risk going all the way back, and that risked a lot. There could have been five metres or fifty metres of flooded tunnel still left to navigate – all with unknown height and access. There was only one thing to do: go white again. The tactical LED on the M4 would illuminate the water like a floodlit swimming pool. I’d be able to see if there was a way out. But anyone on the other side would see me coming out of the dark long before I saw them.
Lungs pulling in my chest, I weighed up the pros and cons and decided to go white. Sometimes you doubt if you’re making the right decision. But whenever there’s doubt, there is no doubt. I let a little air out of my lungs, and found the on switch for the torch with my left thumb. As I felt the pad begin to depress, the water ahead of me glowed with a stream of bright white light.
I could see, immediately, that I was standing in a tangle of femurs and cracked skulls, washed into the passage with the floodwater. Their jagged shadows leapt towards me. But my thumb hadn’t made full contact with the switch. The light wasn’t coming from me. It was coming at me. I could see, too, that the floor of the still completely submerged passage ahead began to rise, ending in a pool only a few metres away, where the tunnel climbed up sharply over a rockfall out of the water. I resisted the strong urge to exhale and sank down into the bones, trying to make out what was happening beyond the waterline.
First one, then two beams of light arced across the width of the passage above and in front of me. They moved erratically, in different directions, lighting the walls, roof, water as if at random. And then one of the shafts of light silhouetted the outlines of three people in the dry part of the tunnel, juddering, shimmering through the distorting optic of the water. They were moving closer, much closer, and fast.
I killed the laser immediately and moved, crab-like, to the side of the flooded passageway. The bullet wounds in my thigh and shoulder throbbed. I was in bad shape for diving. I had overestimated the length of time I could stay submerged and had much less than a minute of air left. It was too late to turn back. I edged forward, disturbing the ancient human remains. My chest was screaming. My ears rang. My throat pulled down hard, desperately seeking oxygen that wasn’t there. As I moved closer to the surface of the pool, the lights and shadows cast by the people in the tunnel loomed above me. I kept my head down, so that my pale face would be both the first and last thing they saw. Between two thick, torch-wielding shadows on either side, a smaller, slighter figure was squirming, fighting, struggling to break free.
I steadied myself at the edge of the rockfall and prepared to surface into the dry tunnel. And then the water exploded above me, erupting in a whoosh of air bubbles and swirling current. Finger on the trigger, I lifted the muzzle of the M4, and looked up into the bulging eyes of a frantic, drowning boy.
Our faces nearly touched. The oblique sweep of a torch beam lit the water long enough for him to see me while blocking my face from whoever was holding him under. Then the light arced away from us and we were both plunged back into darkness. His head was held under long enough for him to take in water. He screamed, filling the tunnel with a strange, muted howl, drawing water in through his nose. He was hoisted out again, coughing and spluttering in silhouette. Mud kicked up off the tunnel floor billowed around me, masking my outline, clouding my vision. Down the boy came again, held by a single hand to the back of his head. Bubbles leached from his mouth, and then from mine. He stopped struggling.
We were both out of air. Out of time.
16
I came up fast.
Left hand open wide, fingers spread across the boy’s chest. I lifted him clear of the water. His torso slipped sideways, caught in a push-me-pull-you with his faceless attacker. Breath roared in the boy’s lungs and mine, as if we were breathing as one. My chest heaved. Adrenaline surged.
Head-lamped and silhouetted, rifle hanging by his side, the boy’s assailant reared up as I emerged from the water. I thrust the barrel of the carbine past the boy’s head and into the man’s throat. I fired. The first round blew h
is windpipe out. The second emptied his brainpan into the void of the tunnel. The boy hit the floor to my left with a thud, rasping.
I turned. The dry tunnel was less than two metres wide. A torch blinded me. Then two rifle reports deafened me. The first round skimmed my chest. The second ricocheted off the brickwork behind me, bouncing back to clip the upper receiver of the M4. I dropped into the water. I swept the suppressor across the attacker; he moved his barrel across me. We aligned. I fired first. His head jerked back. His rifle went down. I got up and out of the water. He was braced against the wall, left hand on his stomach, screeching through gritted teeth. I crouched. Gun up, breathing hard. I’d gut-shot him. I tensed on the trigger again, but wanted – needed – to get something, anything, from him before he died.
I switched the LED torch on next to my forward grip and blinked the water out of my eyes. He wasn’t feeling his stomach for an entry wound; he was struggling to free the cotter pin on a grenade hanging from his webbing.
I squeezed the trigger, but it would not pull.
Stoppage.
His legs went out from under him. As he fell, the grenade rolled clear, the ring hooked in the crook of his finger. I dropped the rifle and twisted right. I hit the half-drowned boy in the lower back as he struggled to stand, wrapping my arms around him, rolling us into the depths of the flood. I pushed us under. My ears rang from the shots. I felt my heartbeat.
And then: boom.
The blast wave pulsed through the water, through us, as we spun thrashing in the darkness. The expanse of the tunnel absorbed the force of the explosion, but still I felt it. I held the boy fast, getting his head above the water and then levering us both over the lip of the pool we’d tumbled back down into.
I sat up on the floor, coughing, while the boy crawled on all fours over the body of the first man I’d shot seconds earlier. He vomited water, and then whatever else was in his stomach. I retrieved my M4, its torch still on, and travelled the beam around the tunnel. I saw the boy properly for the first time. He wasn’t a teenager but a young man. Five-ten; a hundred and thirty-five pounds; hair covered completely by tightly wound black cloth. He was wearing blue jeans tucked into wellington boots, and a green T-shirt. He tried to stand, but collapsed back to his knees.
The air hung heavy with dust from the blast, so thick in parts that the light from the LED whited out the passage, like car headlamps shining into dense fog. The assailant I’d shot in the stomach lay lifeless on the ground, torn by shrapnel. I looked ahead.
No lights; no lasers – at least none that I could see.
I listened as hard as I could, but above the gunshot-whine in my ears nothing registered. I moved towards the shredded body. A piece of brick fell beside me, narrowly missing my shoulder. And then another. And another. I covered my head and dodged, looking up as I skirted first a handful and then a rush of rubble from above. The grenade had weakened further the already unsound tunnel.
‘Cave-in!’ I yelled. ‘Run!’ And then in French, ‘Cours!’
Clothes steaming, I rushed forward, rifle in my right hand, and gripped the young man by the scruff of the neck as he clambered to his feet. I pushed him, screaming at him to move, as the sickening rumble-roar of tumbling masonry thundered around us. He staggered, slipped, but did not fall. Propelled as much by terror as by me, he lit off down the tunnel, both of us sprinting to outpace the brick and limestone avalanche that lapped at our boot heels. Ten metres. Twenty. A small boulder struck me between the shoulder blades. And then a larger one, which sent me sprawling. I let go of the young man and found my feet, pushing myself off the walls, dodging the limestone downpour. Dust billowed in front of us. The air thickened. The light on the rifle barrel barely lit the way. Thirty metres. I ploughed on. Massive slabs of ceiling rock shattered with terrific crashes only inches behind me. In the torchlight I saw the roof ahead open in a sickening, black crack.
And then the young man, sprinting despite his awkward boots, dived left mid-stride … and vanished. It was as if he’d ducked behind an invisible wall and slipped out of the rubble-strewn tunnel. The LED beam found only a featureless void where he’d disappeared.
You can’t outrun the Reaper.
Fuck it.
I shouldered left into the black hole that had swallowed the young man and found myself falling, spinning in infinity. I thrust my arm out into nothing. Saw only the crazy arc of the white rifle light whirling around me. The roar of the cave-in muted. The dust dissipated. And I hit the ground hard, landing straight on top of the disappearing man.
We disentangled ourselves, cursing, and sat facing each other, slumped against opposite walls of the new tunnel we’d ended up in. I aimed the torch up and saw the edges of the hole we’d dived through, and then looked around us. We’d fallen another three metres deeper into the catacombs, tumbling into a short linking passage no more than a dozen metres long. I crawled to the far end of it. Back in the direction we’d come from – beneath our old tunnel – was a seventy-metre straight section that ended in a T-junction. To the right the passageway carried on for what looked like more than two hundred metres. There was no sign in either direction of the collapse on the level above. Once I was sure that we were alone, I turned the torch on the young man. He put his hands up to shield his face from the brightness and I adjusted the barrel of the M4 so that the muzzle wasn’t pointing at him or the torch blinding him.
‘Ça va?’ I asked him, though he didn’t look OK. His clothes were sodden; the fine dust from the crumbling cave had stuck to him and turned into a milky white paste that coated his face, jacket, boots; and his hands were trembling and bloodied, his elbows and knees grazed and bleeding. But his breathing was calm, and his eyes were focused. I’d been clobbered myself, but neither of us had been badly injured.
‘Oui,’ he replied. ‘Qu’est ce …’ His French faltered. ‘What happened?’ he tried again in English. His accent was soft, educated, the vowels stretched and flattened in turn. Indian, maybe. Or Pakistani. Via England.
‘Two men tried to drown you,’ I replied. ‘I killed them and then the roof collapsed.’
He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, but then asked, anyway.
‘Are you a cop?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’ He stared involuntarily at the rifle in my hand. ‘It’s complicated,’ I said. Which was true. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. But we’re in deep shit.’
‘Really?’ he said, closing his eyes as he rubbed at the grime covering his face. His tone was sarcastic. But his hands were still shaking.
‘“Really” I’m not going to hurt you, or “really” we’re in deep shit?’
‘Really …’ He screwed up his eyes harder, trying not to cry. ‘Really, just … who are you?’ His tone was plaintive now. The self-defence of sarcasm was too much effort to maintain.
‘I’m Max,’ I said. I reached out to shake his hand. He pinched the tears out of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger across the bridge of his nose and looked up at me. He hesitated for a moment, and then we clasped our palms together. He was beautiful, and by the look of him hardly out of his teens. His chin was fuzzed over with straggly, grimy bumfluff that looked like it had never seen a razor. He was lucky to be alive. We both were.
‘Bhavneet,’ he said. And then, awkwardly formal, ‘Bhavneet Singh.’ He took his hand back, but didn’t stop staring at me. ‘People call me “Baaz”, though,’ he added.
‘OK, Baaz,’ I said; and then, half-laughing at his earnestness, ‘How d’y’do?’
He lifted his palms and breathed out through his nose as if to say: How does it look as if I’m doing?
‘Before they tried to …’ I thought better of the question and cleared my throat, shifting up on to my haunches. ‘You’re Punjabi, right?’
‘Right.’
‘From India?’
He nodded. ‘From Chandigarh. I …’ He stared at me. ‘Those men,’ he said. ‘They were looking for you, weren’t they?’
It was my turn to nod. ‘What were they asking you?’
‘I don’t know. They weren’t speaking English.’ He tentatively touched the black cotton binding his hair, making sure it was still tied securely. I wondered if he’d lost his turban in the water. ‘Maybe they were asking which way you’d gone?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Try to remember. What did it sound like, what they said? The words?’
‘I don’t know. Kuda-something, maybe. I think they were Russian.’ The sarcasm flared up. ‘I wasn’t, you know, really paying attention.’
‘Could have been Kuda on devalsya,’ I replied. ‘It’s Russian for “Where did he disappear to?”’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Are you Russian? You sound Irish.’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Irish, I mean. Well, mostly. That’s complicated, too.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, I tried to get free, and, ah …’ He paused for a moment. The adrenaline of a succession of near-misses had begun to abate and tears welled in his eyes again. ‘And then the bastards tried to do me in.’
‘OK, that’s good,’ I said.
‘Good?’ He wiped his eyes again. ‘How is any of this bullshit good?’
‘Because if they asked you where I was, it meant they weren’t tracking me. At least not down here. Which means now they’re not tracking you. And believe me,’ I added, ‘that’s good.’
I supposed that once they’d realized he couldn’t help them, they’d tried to drown him. When – if – his body had been found, he’d have looked like just another unlucky explorer fallen foul of the catacombs. He breathed out hard. He was trying to keep himself together. For a kid who’d just survived his first firefight, he was doing well.
Arkhangel : A Novel (2020) Page 14