“When did they leave?”
“You just missed them by a few minutes, I’m afraid. Their truck was damaged in an insurgent attack on the way here. It required repairs before it could return to you.”
“Thank you. I’ll expect them soon.”
“The truck is heavily loaded, and travel will be slow at night. I wouldn’t expect them too soon.”
“Perhaps I should send a team to meet them en route.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. I doubt the insurgents will want to tangle with the Legion a second time so soon.”
Logan crept to the doorway, and peered around the corner, into the room. A tall, muscular man, maybe thirty years old, leaned over a console at the far side of the room. Volkov’s face filled the console screen in front of him.
Volkov said nothing for a few seconds, then spoke. “Thank you for your time.”
“Thank you for sending your men. We will now be able to reopen the mine, to send the motherland the supplies it needs.”
Logan could see the other man’s face side-on as he looked at the console. Logan almost recognized that scarred face.
The insurgent attack the previous day had been too intense to take a good look at the attackers, but he was sure Scar-Face had been one of them. That face was hard to miss, or mistake. No wonder they’d been trying to stop trucks getting to the mine. They owned it.
The screen faded to black as Volkov closed the connection.
Why would Scar-Face even tell Volkov that?
Volkov would find out it was a lie very soon. If the team and the truck weren’t back in a few hours, he’d be sure that something had happened, and would certainly send out more men or a drone to look for the truck. The lies were just buying a little time.
Logan tightened his grip on the butt of his pistol. He could try to capture the man, or just kill him. But what good would that do? There must be at least another dozen insurgents here. He’d get himself killed, and no-one would be able to tell the Legion what was going on here.
Scar-Face tapped the console screen. A few seconds later, another familiar face appeared.
Chaput. The department Governor.
Logan triggered his helmet camera to start recording.
“Your friends are getting antsy,” Scar-Face said. “You should never have sent them up here.”
“I did my best to convince them to stay away. And I told you to stop their truck before they reached the mine. But their political officer is determined to open the route.”
“They won’t be when they see what comes next.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re staging a little distraction with the Montagnards. The Legion will soon have more important things to worry about than this mine.”
“I need more than a distraction. You said you could beat the Legion and free this planet.”
“And we will. In time.”
Chaput’s face grew red, and glistened with sweat. “I don’t have time. I’ll be recalled to France at the end of this year. You know that.”
“This planet will be free of France before then. Just relax and let us do our job.”
Chaput opened his mouth, but Scar-Face reached out to the console screen, and it went black. A light flashed beside it.
Logan ducked away from the doorway as Scar-Face stood.
Logan locked the helmet recording. So Governor Chaput was part of the insurgency. He probably expected to be in charge when the planet broke free of France and they sent Porcher packing.
But he didn’t look like the kind of man who could keep Scar-Face or the Montagnards in check if the insurgents gained their freedom. Chaput was more likely to find himself staring up at his bloodstained neck from the bottom of a bucket as soon as the Legion left.
And how did Scar-Face plan to beat the Legion, anyway? Once they heard about his base here, they’d obliterate it. He couldn’t fight them off for long, with just rifles, RPGs and body armour. The Marine LePen could sanitize the mine from orbit, or just drop a nuke on top. Scar-Face and his Montagnard friends had already eliminated any civilians in the area. So it would hardly matter any more if the Legion turned the whole mountaintop to glass.
Footsteps moved away from Logan. He peered around the doorway again. Scar-Face was disappearing into the shadows of a tunnel on the far side of the room, shining a flashlight ahead of him. Logan waited a moment, listening to the footsteps and their echoes fade away, then crept toward the console.
He touched the screen, but it remained black. If must be locked to Scar-Face’s fingerprints or DNA. He should have guessed it wouldn’t be that easy. His helmet wasn’t finding any kind of open comms network it could connect to, either.
More voices mumbled from the tunnel where Scar-Face had gone, the words lost to the echoes from the rock walls. Not just male voices this time, but another voice, more high-pitched, and definitely female.
A voice he was sure he recognized.
Oh, crap. Why couldn’t she just do what she was told?
Logan moved that way, staying in the shadows again as he left the light of the communications room.
The voices grew louder as he moved, and he followed them past two side-tunnels. Then his tunnel came to an abrupt end at a ledge about two metres across, where the floor dropped away just beyond a wooden railing at waist height on the far side of the ledge.
The ledge rose in a spiral around a central shaft, maybe ten metres in diameter. No wonder they had those huge rubble piles outside the mine, if they’d had to dig this out.
A drop of water splashed on his helmet, and another on his shoulder. Over the mumble of voices from up above, he could hear the faint echoes of more water splashing down below. It must be dripping from the roof of the shaft, like the caves on the Channel coast back home.
He peered over the narrow wooden railing. The joints creaked as he leaned on it and looked down. The shaft became a black hole at the limit of what the IR illuminators could light.
Thick brown ropes hung down the centre of the shaft, from pulleys in the roof. Big pulleys, almost the size of Logan’s chest, that must be designed to lift heavy loads. A narrow wooden platform protruded from the ledge near the pulleys, and the ends of the ropes were tied to the wall beside it. Some cables ran across the roof, but the illumination was too dim to see much detail that far away.
No-one seemed to be moving or talking down below. The dirt on the ledge showed the boot prints of hundreds of feet moving up and down them, and the recent prints of Scar-Face’s boots heading up. Logan just added a new trail on top of the others as he followed the ledge to the top, and crouched beside the ropes, peering around them into the entrance tunnel.
A slow wind blew past him, as air circulated between the shaft and the mine entrance. A yellow light glowed near the entrance, as Scar-Face and two other men stood in the circle of light from a lantern.
The girl stood between them, holding her lantern high up, near her face.
Dammit. She must have got out of that rope and followed him. Whoever she was, she was certainly determined to cause trouble for him.
“Thank you for your time, mademoiselle,” Scar-Face said. “But I think you can see that we’re all fine, and no-one is here who shouldn’t be.”
“Then he’s still outside, trying to find a way in.”
“In that case, my men will find him. Thank you for your help, and you can now go home.”
“I came to Saint Jean to look for my aunt. She lives there. But the village is empty. What happened to everyone?”
“They all left one day. I’ve no idea where they are now.”
“The Legionnaire told me that they’re all dead. That the Montagnards killed them.”
The men with rifles tightened their grip on their weapons at her words. They glanced toward Scar-Face, as he put his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Like I said, I have no idea what happened to them. You should probably go back there and wait for her.”
“You d
id it, didn’t you? Why?”
Scar-Face stared at her for a few seconds, as though deciding what to do. Then he pressed his hand against her shoulder, pushing her into the mine. She swung around and slapped his arm, trying to push it away from her. Scar-Face grabbed her arms, and the men around her swung their guns toward her.
Logan backed away from the tunnel as Scar-Face dragged the girl toward the shaft. She shrieked and squealed as she tried to dig her feet into the floor of the tunnel, but it provided little resistance to Scar-Face’s strength as he pulled her along.
Logan found a spot in the shadows beside the ropes, where the wall of the shaft curved into a shallow alcove that would hide him from view, and crouched there.
Scar-Face pushed the girl out onto the ledge. Then stopped.
The girl twisted in his grip, and stamped her feet. One of her boots stomped down on Scar-Face’s. He just ignored the blow, and pushed her closer to the edge.
The girl twisted her head toward him. “Let me go.”
“You had your chance to walk away,” Scar-Face said. “Now you can say hello to your friends down there.”
Then he pushed against the girl’s back. She twisted around as her feet slipped on the edge of the ledge, then flew out into the air. Her legs kicked beneath her as she fell, and her arms swung around her head, as though trying to grab thin air.
Then they caught something.
The girl shrieked and grabbed the rope that hung down the centre of the shaft. She swung wildly as she clung to it, trying to get a good grip, and her hands slid slowly down. One of the men raised his rifle, and swung the muzzle toward her.
Crap. Logan couldn’t just let them kill her.
Volkov and Poulin would be pissed.
He leaned out, and fired three times. Blood spurted from the rifleman’s legs as the pistol rounds smacked into them, below his body armour. His rifle clattered to the rock as he fell to his knees, then tumbled over the ledge.
The other men swung their rifles toward Logan, and he ducked back as rifle rounds blew rock splinters from the walls around him. He grabbed the smoke grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and pushed his hand out just far enough to fire a few unaimed shots along the ledge to keep the insurgents’ heads down. He waited a few seconds as the grenade heated up and smoke erupted from the case, then tossed it along the ledge.
The men yelled, but Logan couldn’t hear their words over the ringing in his ears from the gunshots. The shooting stopped. The girl screamed below the ledge as the smoke spread. By now, she probably couldn’t see anything except a thick cloud of smoke up above, and a rope dangling below her into a black, bottomless pit. Logan kept his head down as the insurgents fired into the smoke again, blowing splinters of rock from the walls all around the shaft. The rope twitched as a rifle round hit it, and tore one of the rope strands away.
The girl shrieked, lost her grip for a second, and fell another metre before she grabbed the rope again. She clung to it with one hand. Logan holstered the pistol, and stayed low as he raced across the ledge, then leaped out into the shaft.
He grabbed the rope, wrapped his legs around it, then slid down, moving hand-over-hand. The insurgents yelled behind him, and fired into the rock walls above his head until Scar-Face yelled for them to stop.
The girl was hanging on to the rope below him. She swung her free arm around, and tried to grab the rope with it, but that just made her body swing more.
She squealed as Logan swung out around her, then he grabbed her waist as she let go of the rope. She struggled in his grip as he slid down, deeper into the darkness, and away from the insurgents shouting and shooting up above. More rounds struck the spiral ledge around the pit. One tore into the rope above them, ripping through more strands, and it creaked as the remaining strands strained under their weight.
He slid down faster. Something glittered a few metres below them. And rock splinters filled the air as the insurgents fired past them, tearing up the shaft walls.
Logan relaxed his grip on the rope, and slid until the next burst of gunfire came their way.
Then he let go.
CHAPTER 25
After falling for what felt like minutes, but must have been only a few seconds, they splashed down into the water at the bottom of the shaft. The sudden shock of slamming into the freezing water shook Logan’s body, then his head went under, and he swung his arms madly all around him, trying to pull himself back to the surface.
His feet swung below his body, searching for the bottom of the pit, but found nothing to support him in the depths. The world faded as he descended two or three metres beneath the surface, but his arms began to pull him back up. He kicked with as much power as he could, and his right hand slammed against something hard. He clasped it with his fingers and pulled. His face broke the surface of the water beside the spiral ramp, and he clung to it as he turned to look for the girl.
She was splashing and spluttering in the water a metre away. He held onto the ramp as tightly as he could, and reached out his hand toward her. Her face went under again, and he lunged forward until his tendons strained and his hand began to slip on the wet rock. His fingers found hers, and clasped around her palm. He heaved her toward him, and pushed her up onto the ramp. She lay on it, gasping for breath, and coughing up water.
“I told you you’d be safer back in the barn,” he said.
“I didn’t think they’d try to kill me,” she gasped.
Logan pulled himself onto the ramp beside her. His sodden fatigues squelched as he slid his knees and elbows onto the rock.
“Now do you believe me that your Montagnard friends killed everyone in Saint Jean?”
“They’re not my friends.”
Water sprayed into the air behind them as the insurgents fired more rounds down the shaft at random. Logan grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her toward a dark opening in the wall. A tunnel entrance, half-submerged further down the spiral ramp, where the water was about waist high.
He pushed her in, and followed close behind her, with his hand on the butt of his pistol in case she tried anything.
The water slapped against the rocky wall as their legs and hips sent waves careering away from their bodies, and the smell of damp mould filled his nose.
Her hands slapped against the wall as she moved ahead of him. “I can’t see anything.”
Logan turned the goggles’ illuminators back on, and the dark tunnel lit up for him.
“Don’t worry. I can. Just keep going.”
“I can’t walk if I can’t see.”
“If you stop walking, they’re going to kill you, too.”
Logan could hear voices behind them in the shaft, and the clatter of boots striding down the spiral ramp.
The insurgents were coming their way.
One Legionnaire, one pistol and a few grenades against who knows how many men. He’d fought rival gangs in the ZUS at odds of five to one or more, but they didn’t have guns or RPGs. He couldn’t fight off that many here.
They had to be out of sight before the insurgents reached the water. If they couldn’t find him or the girl, maybe they’d think they’d drowned at the bottom of the shaft. No-one was likely to go diving in to check for bodies.
The tunnel forked just ahead. “Turn right,” he said.
It was as good a direction as any.
They turned just as the sound of the insurgents’ boots reached the other end of the tunnel.
Logan grabbed her shoulder and pulled on it to slow her down, so they’d make less noise as they waded through the waist-deep water. He glanced back around the corner, but the goggles couldn’t even see as far back as the shaft. Hopefully the insurgents wouldn’t be able to see that far, either.
They waded on.
The girl was shivering as the water soaked through her thin clothes. Not that Logan was much better, but at least the thick cloth of the fatigues kept water near his skin, where his body could warm it up. They’d had to get out of these waterlogged tunnels
before they froze.
As they approached a crossroads in the tunnel, he tried to build a mental map of the mine, and the maze of tunnels they were progressing through.
“Turn left.”
That would take them further away from the shaft, rather than turning back toward it. Either way, they needed to keep turning in different directions, to confuse any insurgents who might be following them.
The tunnel opened into a cavern ahead of them. The ceiling and walls faded into dark shadows at the limit of the goggles’ range, but it was probably four or five metres high, and perhaps twice that wide. The mould smell was just as strong as it had been since they entered the tunnel, but something else joined it. A smell he recognized.
Dark shapes floated in the water across the cavern. Bloated bodies, limp arms and legs. One of the dead men slowly turned as the waves from Logan and the girl’s steps smacked against its side. Bone showed through the man’s cheeks where a rat sat on its face, slowly chewing through the flesh. It raised its bloody nose and squeaked at Logan as he strode past.
“What is it?” the girl said. “What’s that smell?”
“You don’t want to know. Head to the left.”
The mouth of another tunnel showed as a dark rectangle in the wall on that side. He couldn’t see any tunnels on the other walls. And didn’t want to spend a moment more than he had to in the cavern with a dozen dead men.
“Where are we going? It’s like a maze.”
“Right now, we’re going anywhere those assholes aren’t. Once we’ve lost them, we can figure out how to stop them.”
“I can’t hear them any more.”
“They’ll be coming soon. They can’t afford to let us run around loose in the mines. There’s got to be some way to move between the mine levels other than that shaft. They need a way out in emergencies. We just have to find it.”
They pushed on through the tunnel. It twisted slowly to the right, then ended as it opened out into another cavern.
Logan grabbed the girl’s shoulder, and pulled her to a stop.
“Wait here,” he whispered.
She grabbed his arm. “Don’t leave me.”
Rebellion Page 23
