The Shadow Project

by Scott Mariani

  Ben glanced at Jeff. He peeled himself silently off the wall as his fingers moved down to the hilt of the killing knife that was strapped to his thigh and drew it out of its sheath. Jeff was right at his side as they crept noiselessly but quickly up behind the men. The bald guy was Ben’s. Ponytail belonged to Jeff.

  Then they struck. Hard and fast. Ben clamped his hand over the bald guy’s mouth and jerked his head back and stabbed the knife into his throat. In the movies, it zipped as easily through flesh as a hot knife through butter and left a clean, straight red line from ear to ear. In real life, to cut through the tough gristle and cartilage of a man’s windpipe you had to saw brutally. Close your mind to what you were doing and keep sawing like crazy through the horrific mess until the blood was spraying out over your hand and the air was hissing out of the guy’s lungs with that eerie gurgling sigh that you knew was going to haunt your dreams forever. Hold on tight until the victim’s death struggles diminished and you could wipe the bloody knife clean on his clothes and move on and hope you never had to do anything like that again. Till the next time.

  Ben and Jeff dragged the bodies into the shadows. They were in, and they were committed now. It was starting.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Irina Dragojević stood back from the cell door as she watched her tall companion turn the key in the lock. Pelham hadn’t said much on the radio, but he hadn’t needed to. She had a very clear idea of what he wanted, because they’d already discussed the contingency plans. They were very persuasive, but the truth was she had no interest whatsoever in the outcome. The slim knife in the sheath on her belt was whetted and honed past razor-sharpness. When she thought about what she was going to do with it, and how nobody was going to stop her this time, her breath caught. The feeling was almost sexual. It dulled the throbbing ache in her arm where the bullet had creased it that day in Ireland. It made her feel whole and serene.

  As she watched the cell door swing open, she heard that small, distant voice in her mind again.

  Why do you do the things you do, Irina? Why?

  There’d been a time, years ago, when she’d heard those voices often, and had been greatly troubled by them. But that had been before she’d come to see things clearly, to appreciate how beautifully simple it all was. The voice had no power any more. The power was all hers.

  The tall man stepped inside the boy’s cell. Irina went in behind him. She stopped. Narrowed her eyes as her colleague turned to stare at her in bewilderment.

  The cell was empty. Rory O’Connor was gone. Irina grabbed the radio.

  Ivan’s fingers were painfully tight around Rory’s wrist as he led him quickly through the stone corridors. The man had barely said a word since he’d come bursting into his cell two minutes before, seemingly in a desperate hurry to get him out of there.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Rory asked.

  ‘Somewhere safe,’ Ivan told him. ‘Things are beginning to happen.’ He was frowning as he kept an ear open for fresh activity on the crackling radio handset in his jacket pocket. ‘Come, we must go faster.’

  ‘They’ve come for me? The other agents?’

  Ivan nodded. Tugged on his wrist. ‘Move faster.’

  ‘Please, Ivan. Tell me what’s happening.’

  ‘Pelham sent Irina to fetch you, to hurt you again. I heard it on the radio. You are lucky. I was closer. I got there first.’

  Rory shuddered and felt the colour drain from his face. He looked at Ivan and realised he’d never felt such a bond with anyone before. Except for one. ‘Where’s my dad?’ he asked.

  ‘Waiting for you on the outside,’ Ivan said. ‘Keep moving.’

  Rory gulped air. He was going to get out of here. He was going to see his father. It would soon be over.

  The radio fizzed into life. Through the spit and hiss of static, Rory listened to the exchange between the man called Pelham and the woman and his heart began to thump faster.

  ‘I want him found!’ Pelham yelled from the tinny speaker, and then the voices dissolved back into white noise.

  ‘I won’t let them find you,’ Ivan reassured him. ‘You are with me now. We are friends, no?’

  ‘Yes, Ivan.’

  They kept walking. Ivan was glancing furtively around him all the time, keeping an even tighter grip on Rory’s wrist as he led the boy down passages he’d never seen before. ‘Quickly,’ Ivan kept saying. ‘Quickly.’ They came to a flight of steps leading downwards into murky shadows. Ivan turned on a flashlight and lit the way ahead. Down and down through a shaft that was carved out of the rock. It was echoey, and Rory could hear the steady plop of dripping water.

  ‘Is this where we’re meeting the other agents?’ he asked breathlessly, and heard his voice reverberate off the walls.

  Ivan didn’t reply.

  Then the staircase ended abruptly, terminating in an unfinished cul de sac. In the torchlight, Rory could see the pickaxe marks that scarred the rock face. The floor was littered with debris and old tools that had lain there so long, they’d rusted away to almost nothing. It was as though whoever had been digging the tunnel out of the solid rock had just stopped working one day, put down their tools and gone. He wondered what had happened. But more than that, he wondered why Ivan had brought him here. He turned and frowned up at his friend.

  Ivan smiled in the beam of the flashlight. ‘We are safe down here,’ he said as he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘It is just you and me now.’ Then he moved closer. His lips parted.

  Rory stared for a second, and then he realised Ivan was trying to kiss him.

  Chapter Sixty

  Adam O’Connor was cackling like a lunatic as Pelham paced the vault with the radio in his fist.

  ‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’ The man’s composure had slipped away completely, and he was shouting in rage.

  ‘He isn’t here,’ said the woman’s voice through the spitting static.

  ‘How could he have got out?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  Pelham yelled into the radio, ‘I want him found!’

  ‘Go for it, son,’ Adam giggled to himself. ‘We’ll show these bastards.’

  Pelham threw the radio down and stormed over to him. ‘Oh, you think this is funny, do you, Adam?’

  ‘The look on your face,’ Adam laughed at him. ‘You should see yourself right now. Your little world is just falling down around you. How’re you going to explain this to your boss, asshole?’

  ‘Laugh at this,’ Pelham said. He reached his hand across his chest, pulled out the pistol that he wore under his jacket and cocked the action with a sound that rang around the stone walls. He aimed it in Adam’s face. His jaw tightened.

  ‘Shoot me then, jerkoff,’ Adam taunted him. ‘Let’s see you make the machine work after I’m dead.’

  The gun wavered.

  ‘I’m all you’ve got,’ Adam went on, waving his arms like a wild man. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’

  ‘Wrong,’ Pelham said. He dropped his arm eighteen inches and squeezed the trigger. The pistol flashed and boomed in his hand.

  Adam felt his leg get kicked out from under him and collapsed to the concrete floor, clutching his thigh. The blood began to pump out through his fingers. He pressed hard, desperately trying to stem the flow. He felt no pain, not yet. But he knew it would come. ‘You shot me,’ he mumbled in shock.

  Pelham stood over him with the smoking pistol dangling loose at his side. ‘I could have shattered the femur or split the artery and made you bleed to death,’ he said calmly over Adam’s screams. ‘Next time I will. Get on your feet. Let’s try this again.’

  Rory twisted frantically away as Ivan’s mouth sought his. He felt the material of his sweater rip in the man’s fingers. Backed away against the wall, bewildered and hurt. He’d thought until this moment that Ivan was his friend. Suddenly he was alone again.

  Ivan came at him, and Rory lashed blindly out with his foot. The kick caught Ivan squarely in the groin. R
ory stood rooted in horror for a second as Ivan dropped the torch and fell to his knees with both hands clapped over his testicles and his eyes rolling back in agony. The boy grabbed up the fallen flashlight, turned and ran as hard as he could back up the winding staircase. He could hear Ivan’s cries of pain and rage echoing up the carved-out shaft. Rory kept running like the wind. After what seemed like just a few seconds he could hear Ivan giving chase. He burst out of the mouth of the stairway and out into the lamplit corridor. He was lost now, his breath rasping in his ears, his heart in his mouth, no idea where to turn. The sole was flapping off his right trainer from where the kick to Ivan’s groin had torn it half away from the shoe’s upper. He pulled the shoe off and tossed it aside.

  He could hear Ivan’s running footsteps behind him, but a quick glance over his shoulder told him the man was out of sight down the twisty passages. Rory came to another junction in the corridor. Big signs on the wall that he couldn’t understand. He turned right and kept going, hobbling on just one shoe for a few more yards until he knew he had to lose that one, too, or risk stumbling and twisting his ankle. He bent down and gripped the toe and heel of the shoe and yanked it off. The floor was cold and hard through his thin socks.

  Rory stopped. Backed up a few steps to where he’d passed a round hole in the wall to his right. It was some kind of shaft, big enough for him to crawl into and hide. He shone the torch into the curving tunnel, put his hand to it and felt a breath of air caress his fingers. Maybe it led somewhere, and anywhere was better than here. He quickly climbed into it and started crawling as fast as he could down its length. Rusty metal under his hands and knees, not rock. It was a pipe of some kind, like an air vent, he thought.

  And now he could really feel the breeze on his face. Cool, fresh, sweet air.

  Air coming in from the outside.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Ben worked the rusted iron bolt loose, creaked open the iron door and peered inside at the long, low, dark chamber. It was a primitive dormitory – row upon row of rudimentary bunks with open latrines just a few feet away. Skeletons littered the floor. Scores of them, gnawed apart by rats, covered in dust and cobwebs.

  ‘Slave workers,’ he said to Jeff. ‘They must have starved to death down here when the Nazis abandoned the place.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Jeff’s voice said in Ben’s earpiece.

  They shut the door of the dormitory, and Ben grimly closed the bolt. He took the folded plan from his pocket, and studied it again. The gruesome discovery meant they were still in the lower levels, where the labourers had been housed. The next level up from there had been mainly for storage of equipment and provisions; then above that was the upper level with its complexes of operations rooms and offices, together with the barrack accommodation and shower blocks for the SS soldiers stationed at the facility. He and Jeff had agreed on the plane that it would be the most likely place to improvise a holding cell for a young hostage. As for Adam, it was Ben’s guess that the kidnappers would have put him to work in the strange vault-like chamber which, as far as he could tell from the faded drawings, was the location of the mysterious Kammler invention. Deep inside the mountain, the chamber was only accessible from a lift shaft on the upper level.

  ‘That’s where we need to head for,’ Ben said.

  They moved stealthily onwards, using the map to find a crude service lift that rumbled up to the next level. They emerged cautiously into what looked like an underground car park, a broad arched concrete roadway leading off into the darkness. There was nobody about as they paused to get their bearings.

  Jeff tapped the map with his gloved finger. ‘Judging by the layout, I’d say we were just about here. So we need to follow this road. Looks to me like there’s another service lift along there.’

  Snick-snack. The sound of an automatic weapon’s cocking bolt being worked, just a few feet behind them.

  They turned. Bright torchlight blinded them. From behind it, the vague shapes of two men stepped out of the shadows.

  A harsh voice said, ‘Guns on floor.’

  Very slowly and warily, Ben and Jeff put down their MP5s, then straightened up.

  ‘Drop grenade launcher,’ said the voice.

  Jeff cursed under his breath as he unslung the weapon and tossed it down with a clatter.

  ‘Also shotgun,’ said the voice. Ben shrugged the cut-down Ithaca from his shoulder and dropped it on the pile.

  ‘Remove head gear.’

  Ben forced himself to peer through the blinding torch-beam as they dumped their precious night-vision goggles on the floor. The two guards were holding pistols. The one without a torch was clamping a walkie-talkie to his mouth. ‘This is Dovzhenko,’ he said into it. ‘I have intruders on Level Two, Sector Twelve-B.’

  ‘Hands on head,’ the other one commanded, shining the light in Ben’s eyes.

  Ben laced his fingers together on top of his head, and Jeff did the same.

  ‘Step away from weapons.’

  Ben heard the triumphant smile in the guy’s voice. He didn’t have to glance sideways at Jeff to know that they were both waiting for the exact same thing.

  Ben knew that there were only two types of mercenary soldier. There was the type who wore the army tattoos and told all the stories, but who’d never done half the things they boasted of and therefore didn’t have the training to go with it. Then there was the type who maybe had done those things, maybe had seen a lot of action and been useful enough soldiers in their day – but they were all washed up now, worn out, cynical, living job to job, and too used to scrapping with tin-pot militia groups across weary, minefield-ridden Third World and Eastern European war zones to have any respect for the enemy. Either way, what the two types had in common was that they were sloppy soldiers and liable to make mistakes.

  Ben also knew that tactics were a game. And in any game, winning was often just a question of riding it out until the opponent made that vital mistake. In armed confrontation, one of the rules was never to push your luck. Not even if all the odds seemed in your favour, not even if everything seemed to be going your way, not even if the other guy was completely at your mercy.

  But to the sloppy soldier there was a huge kick, a supreme power-rush, to be gained from shoving the muzzle of a pistol right in the face of an unarmed enemy and yelling commands at them. And that sloppiness was exactly what Ben had been banking on. As though they just couldn’t help themselves, the guards came right up close, pistols extended full-arm, the muzzles almost kissing his and Jeff’s heads.

  Much, much too close to get away from what happened next. The man called Dovzhenko let out a scream as Ben twisted his Glock out of his fist and felt the trapped trigger finger snap. As he was ramming the butt of the gun hard and fast into the man’s teeth, Jeff had slapped the other pistol aside, wrestled it out of its owner’s grip and clubbed him round the side of the head with it. It was all over in under two seconds.

  But now things were about to get a little hotter. Ben pushed Dovzhenko down to the floor with his knee pressed into the back of his neck and the Glock to his temple.

  ‘Where are the hostages?’ he asked. It was a question he was only going to ask once.

  The man never had the chance to respond. The arched roadway suddenly blazed bright with truck headlights and the growl of the diesel engine boomed through the echoey tunnel.

  ‘Time to go,’ Jeff said.

  The big truck burst around the corner thirty yards away and came bearing down on them. There was no chance to pick up their discarded weapons as gunfire crackled out from the vehicle and strafed the concrete. Ben and Jeff sprinted away down the tunnel, returning fire from the pistols they’d taken from the guards.

  No way they could outrun a truck.

  As they ran, the headlights behind them cast long shadows on the curving tunnel wall up ahead and picked out a tall side doorway covered by a rusted steel shutter. There was a gap at the bottom, just big enough to squeeze through. Ben threw himself down and roll
ed under the bottom lip of the steel into darkness. Bullets hammered into the shutter as Jeff scrambled in behind him. The truck screeched to a halt outside, and they heard doors opening, voices shouting commands. Another burst of gunfire, and a line of dents punched into the shutter. Shadows appeared in the strip of light underneath. Ben fired at the gap, and they skipped away in retreat.

  The two of them were safe in here – but they wouldn’t be for long. Someone would be quick to figure out how to raise the shutter, or how to flush them out using gas or fire.

  Stumbling around in the dark, Ben found an antiquated wall panel with a row of big switches, and threw them all. Dusty yellow lamps flickered into life, and he saw they were in an old vehicle workshop. Rusty fuel drums were stacked up against the wall next to a partially-dismantled BMW motorcycle and sidecar. In the middle of the concrete floor, a dusty tarpaulin was draped over a strangely-shaped object the size of a small van. Ben whipped the tarp away and clouds of dust billowed in the dim light.

  ‘It’s a Kettenkrad,’ he said. He’d only ever seen pictures of the strange Wehrmacht all-terrain vehicle. It was a hybrid of a miniature tank and a military motorcycle. The six wheels per side were linked by caterpillar tracks, and the machine was steered by a bike front end with broad handlebars. He knew enough about them to know that they’d normally been used as tractors to haul trailers and light artillery. But someone had equipped this one with a pair of forward-facing German MG-34 belt-fed heavy machine guns, turning it into a formidable assault craft.

  Outside in the tunnel, the truck gave a roar as it accelerated forward to ram the shutter. The metal buckled violently inwards, but held. The truck crunched into reverse and started backing away for another hit.