Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  to understand the situation. He had been having great difficulty maintaining contact with Reachdeep on the radio. Wirtz and Littleberry had reported that the team had become separated. Cope had disappeared in the Essex Street subway station. There had been much confusion and delay, with police officers running out onto the Williamsburg Bridge, stopping traffic, and sweeping the bridge. Now it appeared that Cope was still in the subway, still underground. He had apparently disappeared into an electrical service tunnel. Hopkins and Austen had followed him. After a delay, Wirtz and the ninjas had now also entered the service tunnel. As soon as they went in they dropped out of radio contact. Masaccio had lost contact with all elements of Reach­deep.

  'Where's Littleberry?' he said to an agent on the radio. 'Dr Littleberry has gone into the tunnel with Wirtz.' 'What? My whole goddamned Reachdeep team has gone down a rat hole!' Masaccio shouted. 'Go in there and find them!'

  Masaccio got on the telephone with engineers from Con Edison and with the subway system operators, demanding information. Where does that tunnel lead? People were telling him that it ended up in the Second Avenue subway line.

  'What Second Avenue subway?' Masaccio yelled. 'Do you take me for a fucking idiot? I've lived in New York all my life and you can't tell me there's a Second Avenue subway. There isn't!'

  But there is, the subway operators insisted. It's an empty tunnel.

  'Aw, shit, an empty tunnel!' He turned to his man­agers. 'Send in our Hostage Rescue people. Jesus! How did this happen?'

  The subway operators told Masaccio that the best

  access to the Second Avenue tunnel was a hatchway at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, in Chinatown.

  1

  Hopkins had to decide which of the empty doorways to choose. He tried to think the way Cope would think. Cope would be heading up for the street. He would want to get into the open air. Hopkins tried all the doors, and behind one he found a steel ladder leading upward. Hopkins climbed the ladder, with Austen following him. They reached another room. There was a dark open doorway on the far side. Then he heard a sound coming through the doorway - a metallic clink. A light blinked on and off.

  He dove for the ground, dragging Austen down with him, and turned off his flashlight. He squirmed forward in the darkness, on his belly. He heard a sharp clattering and a muttered curse. He moved across the floor, gun ready, light off, afraid of dying, if the truth be told, and afraid that Austen might die. He thought to himself. I will never, ever join a Hostage Rescue Team. I don't know how those people do this kind of thing.

  He had now arrived at the open, black doorway. He could hear and feel Austen moving behind him. He was so angry at her that he wanted to scream. It would serve her right if she took a gunshot, but he couldn't bear the thought of that happening to her.

  He lay behind the edge of the door, for cover, and briefly flicked on his light into the space where the sound had come from.

  The light revealed a deep chamber. The floor was twenty feet below the level of the doorway. It seemed to be some sort of air-circulation chamber. There was nobody in it. But on the floor of the chamber lay a flashlight. It was off.

  Cope had dropped his flashlight! That was the source of the clattering sound and the reason for the curse.

  On the inner faces of the chamber there were small openings, vent tunnels, reachable by ladders that ran vertically up the walls of the chamber. Cope had obviously been climbing on one of the ladders moments before - that was the metallic sound they'd heard, and then he'd dropped his flashlight. He must have gone into one of the vent holes. Which one? There were six holes. 'Dr Cope! Dr Cope! Give yourself up!' he shouted.

  I have to go down in there, I guess.

  He swung out into space and started climbing down a ladder into the chamber, holding his gun. He was going to try climbing up each of the ladders, looking into all the vent tunnels, one by one. What else could he do, except give up? But if Cope got away -. He reached the bottom of the chamber and stood looking up the ladders at the vent holes, pouring with sweat inside his space suit, getting ready to dive and shoot if Cope opened fire on him. He realized he was a vulnerable target, and he began to think that he had just done something stupid, something Wirtzy would never have done.

  He was moving to pick up Cope's flashlight when Austen's voice on the radio burst in his ears. 'Will! Heads up!'

  At the same moment he saw the plastic object. It flew past him. It had been thrown from one of the openings. It bounced at his feet, rolled a short distance, and came to a stop under a ladder. A red light was blinking on it.

  Grenade. There was no way he could climb the ladder out of the chamber in time, It was going to explode in the chamber with him.

  He heard Austen screaming.

  He picked up the grenade and threw it on a hard, flat trajectory into one of the vent openings in the chamber. It disappeared into the opening. He heard it bouncing in there.

  That wasn't good enough. He still had to get out of

  here. The explosion was going to come out of the vent hole.

  He leaped for a ladder and climbed it like a chimpanzee being chased by a cloud of hornets from hell, dropping his gun in the process. He was trying to reach another vent hole, to get inside it for cover. He reached the opening and hurled himself in on his stomach.

  There was a yellow-red boom. A thudding shock wave rolled down the tunnel and tugged at his biohazard suit. This was followed by a crunching, creaking sound, and a piece of concrete fell off the roof of his tunnel, trapping him.

  He was left lying in total darkness, wedged face-first into a small vent tunnel. There was a whining, pinging sound in his ears, like a jet engine.

  'Hello?' he called. There was no answer. 'Alice?'

  He assumed that the grenade had had virus material in it, Cobra crystals.

  He shouted, 'We're hot! I think we've gone hot in here!'

  There was no answer.

  He wondered if his suit had been breached. He wondered especially about his air filters, and if his head­bubble had been' ripped. The lungs were the most vulnerable part of the body. Struggling against the tight walls of the tunnel, he put his hands up to his soft helmet and pushed on it and felt around. It seemed to be okay. The blowers were still humming. Good.

  It was almost totally dark, but not completely. Where was the fight coming from? He realized that he was lying on his Mini Maglite. He got a hand under his chest and pulled it out. The light revealed his radio headset lying in front of his face, inside his helmet. He spoke into the

  mike. 'Alice? Are you there?' He waited. 'Hello, come in.' Nothing but a hiss of dead radio noise.

  Alice Austen saw Hopkins throw the grenade up into the vent hole and then begin to climb a ladder, heading for another vent hole, trying to get away from the blast. Then she rolled back behind the doorway, to protect herself from the coming explosion. She saw the light, but heard no sound.

  The flash died instantly, and now she was lying in total darkness. Hopkins had been carrying the only flashlight.

  'Will? Will, are you there?' she called on her headset. She received an answer of white noise. Nothing but the sound of blood rushing in her head and her breath panting.

  She did not want Hopkins to be in trouble. She really did not want him to be in trouble.

  'Will!' she screamed. 'Please talk to me, Will! Will!' Nothing.

  Then she thought: I'm making a lot of noise. If Cope is around here, he'll hear me.

  She would climb down into the chamber, to help him if she could. She felt around in the darkness. She grasped the ladder that went down into the chamber. It came away in her hand, and leaned crazily away from the wall, or so it seemed from the way it felt in the darkness. The blast had done a number on the ladder, had broken it. There was no way to get down in there. No way to see if Cope's flashlight still worked, which was unlikely anyway.

  Now what? She could either stay where she was, lying on the floor, waiting for help to arrive, or she could try t
o get back to the main tunnel. Soon there would be people and lights in that main tunnel. That was where she wanted to go.

  She stood up in pitch darkness. Trying to remember which way she had come, she retraced their route, waving her hands back and forth in the blackness in front of her. She reached a ladder. Yes, we climbed up this ladder to get here. She called softly on her radio again: 'Will? Are you all right? Please answer me, Will. Can you hear me?' She inched down the ladder, working by sense of touch. Now she was standing in a room. Which way to go now? Ariadne had had a thread; she had her memory. She began feeling her way along the walls in pitch darkness.

  Austen was playing her hand along the wall when it came into contact with some fabric. Then she felt his arm. It was Cope, and they were inches apart. He had been waiting against the wall.

  He fired his gun twice. The muzzle flashes illuminated the two of them, frozen in the fight like nocturnal creatures caught in the flash of a naturalist's camera. Both shots went under her arm, missing her by inches.

  She dove across the room, howling with terror, and leaped through a doorway into total darkness. Suddenly she was tumbling and falling. She fell down the metal stairs into the main tunnel, gasping with pain. She picked herself up and ran, and collided with something.

  She found herself lying on her back in pitch darkness, weeping with terror. Everything hurt. She wondered if she had broken any bones. Stop it. Stop crying. She rolled over and stood up. Have to move away from here.

  It was pitch dark again, but she knew she must be standing in the main tunnel. She moved off to one side, then crouched by what felt like a wall. She tried desperately to get her breathing under control. Her body ached from falling down the stairs. She could not make a sound. He would target his gun on any sounds. But maybe he was trying to get away. Maybe he was gone. He doesn't have a light. She listened. Heard nothing. She

  could not hear well, because her head was shrouded in the protective helmet, and her blowers were making a gentle hum.

  She waited, straining her ears, in total darkness. She saw sparkles in her eyes - her optic nerves were firing with nothing to see. She heard something - a metallic rattle. Then nothing. Then a faint scraping sound. She waited, absolutely still, trying to avoid the slightest rustle of her suit, but she could not do anything about the hum of the Racal blowers. A great deal of time seemed to pass. Her muscles became stiff and sore. Trapped inside her space suit, she couldn't hear the sounds around her. She was tempted to rip open her hood so that she could hear better. But that grenade he had set off might have been full of Cobra.

  Suddenly she noticed a tiny fight, a red spot on the wall. She did not know what it was. It moved rapidly, seeming to bounce over coffers and columns. It moved and jumped like a red firefly. She couldn't tell where it came from. It had a life of its own, unconnected to anything else.

  It was seeking her.

  It was a laser pointer.

  She almost screamed. She hunched down.

  The red light went bouncing around. She couldn't see Cope, but she realized he was standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, aiming the laser out into the tunnel, over her.

  The dot went down the tunnel. It came back. It went down the tunnel in the other direction.

  'I can hear your suit humming,' he said. He had a calm voice, rather mild and high-pitched but strangely blurred, as if his mouth were full. 'I can't quite locate it. My ears are ringing.' The red dot hopped across the floor. 'Eventually this will find you,' he said.

  The red dot hopped across some columns and turned and moved up the floor toward her. It touched her suit. She screamed and dove sideways. The gun roared, a flat deafening smack in the tunnel, with a bright flash. She found an opening between two columns, rolled through it, picked herself up, and ran in total darkness. The red dot hopped around, looking for her. She stopped running and crouched down low. She put her fingertips on the floor, in the stance of a runner at a starting block, trying to ready herself to jump in any direction.

  His voice came sharply out of the blackness, echoing on the concrete around them. 'I am not wearing a mask.' The voice was about forty feet away, to her right. 'I can hear you better than you can hear me.'

  On her radio headset she heard Hopkins say: 'Hey! Anyone there?' He's alive, she thought.

  'Ah, your radio,' Cope said.

  She reached for her belt and ripped the headset out of the jack, then tried to keep herself still.

  'The gun is loaded with hollow-point bullets. Each bullet has a viral glass bead in the tip. BioArk is selling this technology, too. I have acquired a great deal of technology from the Concern.' His feet clanked down the metal stairs. 'You don't understand what I'm doing. I'm not trying to kill too many people. Just some of them.' In the F.B.I. Command Center in the Federal Building, Masaccio was talking with the subway system operators. 'You've got a lighting system in that tunnel complex? Well, turn on the goddamned lights! I've got people in there! What? What power transformer? Why is it a problem?'

  In the darkness, she could almost feel the heft of the gun swinging toward her as he focused on the sound coming from her blowers. She tensed herself, preparing to

  explode from the starting block. She sensed the fragility of her body, the delicacy of her mortal being, and felt the jelly of her mind surrounded by hard bone, that can splinter -

  Suddenly, with a humming sound, banks of fluores­cent lights clicked on up and down the tunnel, bathing the tunnel in a blue-white glow.

  He was holding the gun in a police stance. His face was glistening wet. Fluid was running from his nose and coating his chin. His lips were bloody, his eyeglasses flecked with bloodspatter. He had started chewing. He fired. The bullet splashed on the concrete. She was running fast. The lights went out again.

  In total darkness she ran at full speed straight up the tunnel toward the dead end. Suddenly everything exploded. She saw purple flashes and she sprawled on the ground, certain she had been hit. She had tripped over a piece of concrete and was lying behind it. She stayed there, afraid to move.

  Hopkins had been calling for help on his headset. When he got no answer, he concluded that his radio was broken. He was lying on his stomach in a low horizontal passage. The tunnel was not meant to fit a human body, especially someone wearing a space suit with chest armor. The tunnel went straight ahead into darkness. It was about eighteen inches high and two and a half feet wide. He could not possibly turn around in it. His feet were blocked by the chunk of concrete that had fallen. He had to go forward into the crawlway; he had no choice. He was now beginning to feel the first bad tremors of claustrophobia. If he stayed where he was, he might run out of breathable air. So he crawled forward, occasionally calling on his radio headset. Got to slip this armor off, somehow, that would give me more room in

  here. He tried. He found that he could undo the Velcro straps, but he couldn't take his arms out of it.

  He was coming to a dead end. 'Oh, no,' he said. Now he would have to back up. But as he reached the end, his fingers felt a lip or corner of some kind. It was a shaft going down. The tunnel went straight downward into darkness. He pushed his face over the lip and pointed his light into a shaft that seemed to be about twenty feet deep. It ended with a flat dead end. A dead-end hole. Just looking at it made him feel sick. What now? I'm going to have to back up, get back to the blockage and wait for help.

  He tried to back up. It was more diffIcult than pushing himself forward.

  Then it occurred to him that there might be a way to turn his body around and reverse direction. Then I can maybe get more air, maybe shout around the blockage, and maybe someone will hear me.

  It seemed that the vertical shaft, which joined the horizontal shaft at a right angle, might provide enough space in which to turn his body around. He squirmed and twisted and fought against the confinement. He tried every position he could think of, his face suspended over the hole, working his shoulders this way and that. 'It's a mathematical problem with no solution,'
he muttered. The problem was-the damned armor vest. Again he struggled to remove his armor. Then a terrible thing happened.

  He slipped. He fell headfirst down the hole, a plunge of twenty feet. He whumped to a halt facedown in the bottom of the hole with a sudden wedging jerk. He had almost broken his neck. He was jammed vertically in the shaft, his arms pinned at his sides. And it had gone pitch­dark. He had lost his minilight. He was upside down, face-first in a dead-end hole, with no light and no air. There was no way he could back out.

  The roaring in his ears was the sound of his own voice begging for mercy. The panic shook him like a series of electric shocks. He was screaming uncontrollably, howl­ing from pure claustrophobic terror. He struggled, fighting the concrete walls, trying somehow to move up and backward again, but he was jammed face downward at the bottom of the tight, airless shaft. He could not get enough air in his lungs, and he could not force his body upward. He thrashed, moaning, screaming, kicking his feet.

  Hopkins took a deep breath and held it. He held it for a while, then let all the breath out of his lungs.

  He tried to hold his breath again. He wanted to make himself pass out. If he could pass out, then this would be ended.

  He could not pass out, which meant that there was enough air in here to keep him alive.

  For a week.

  Don't think about that.

  I've got to relax. I'm dying. If I'm going to die, I've got to come to some kind of peace.

  Think of something. What is that Zen saying? A wise man can live comfortably in hell. Forget hell. Think of California. Think of the best beach in California. It might be Malibu Beach. No - those little sculpted coves at Laguna Beach. Yes. He tried to imagine himself lying on his back on the warm sand at Laguna, the smell of the salt air, the cries of the seagulls, the whush-haaa of the surf, the sun falling into the Pacific Ocean. ... So many lost opportunities ... you geek, if you get out of this alive, you really should ask her out. Strike a blow for geekdom. The air really is depleted in here, it's making me slightly demented.

  He realized that something was pressed against his cheek. It felt like - the Mini Maglite. But it was dead. He