Siege of Stone

by Williamson, Chet

  In less than five minutes they were assembled, all fifteen men, including Mackay. "Most of us, two van loads, are going on a little midnight journey, about fifty miles northeast of here. We'll be taking two vans, and if we leave within the hour, I expect we'll get there around three in the morning."

  "And do you mind very much," Mackay asked, "if we might inquire where we're going and what you expect us to do?" His voice was dripping with sarcasm, as though he had no intention of allowing his men to participate in whatever it was Mulcifer was plotting.

  "Oh, you won't be going, Colin," Mulcifer said. "No, I'm afraid you're going to just have to stay here, guarded by some of your merry men. I figure you won't mind, as we're going to get several canisters of nerve gas, and I know you disapprove of its use."

  "Nerve gas . . ." Mackay said. "The hell you are. I said before that we're not using any of that shite."

  "And I say we are. Now . . ." He turned to the men. "I'll want you, you, you, you . . ." He pointed to them one by one, including Rob and Angus in the draw, until he had assigned all but three men to the vans. "James," he said, "I believe you and Peter and John will remain here. I want you to guard Colin here."

  "I've had enough of this," said Mackay. "All of you, back to your rooms. You're to take no more orders from him."

  "Excuse me, Colin, but they have no choice in the matter. Oh, a few of them might, but if they disobey, I'll simply have their comrades in arms shoot them. And that's not much of a choice at all, is it?"

  "Rob," Mackay said, turning to his friend, "put that gun away and go back to your room."

  Rob closed his eyes, as if willing his body to do what Mackay had said, but Mulcifer knew he couldn't. "I'm sorry, Colin," Rob said, opening his eyes and looking at his friend with pain on his face, a pain that Mulcifer drank in like a gardener delighting in the scent of hyacinth. "I don't think I can do that. I want to, but I just can't."

  "That's a good boy. Now—you lot—I want you to keep an eye on Colin here all the time we're gone. Don't let him out of your sight."

  "You filth," said Mackay. "Why don't you just drop me into the dungeon with Stein?"

  "Because Stein is no longer there, for one thing."

  "What?"

  "That's right—free as a bird. Free to go back and dispatch his two colleagues and then blow a hole in his own belly. Sorry I have to miss it, but duty calls, as it does for all of us. Let's be off. The weapons shouldn't be necessary, but we'll bring them along in case we run into the authorities. What we will need, however, is a decent flashlight for each man, extra batteries, shovels, crowbars, and some explosives.

  "Yes. We will definitely need explosives . . ."

  Angus drove the first van, the Prisoner seated next to him. Rob drove the second. Each van carried five men, and there was plenty of storage room for whatever it was they were getting. They had taken the vans down into the cellars on the big elevator, and then driven them onto the beach through the hidden exit that had been built centuries before to escape from the castle on horseback, then gone north on the beach to an access road.

  From there they had driven off the peninsula, then north to Gruinard Bay and east down the southern shore of Little Loch Broom, south through the Dundonnell Forest, and north again toward Ullapool when they reached the River Broom. The crow seldom flew straight in the highlands.

  From there they went northeast past the Cromalt Hills, then southeast on a one-lane road. It bore no other traffic at that time of the morning, so the passing places remained unused. Near Rosehall they turned north again, on a vile little road that Mulcifer promised was the end of their journey.

  Just past a sad pile that Mulcifer said was Glencassley Castle, they saw a sign that read, "GOVERNMENT BIRD SANCTUARY—GATE 1 KM." Mulcifer ordered Angus to pull off the road, and guided him over a slight rise that would hide the vans from the sight of anyone who might be driving past, though that possibility seemed about as likely to Angus as pissing beer.

  But as Angus got out of the car, he saw that there might be more to their location than simple concealment. Less than thirty yards away, hardly visible in the cloudy night, was a mound of earth barely four feet high. It didn't appear to be a natural formation, and Angus had seen enough of them to know that it was a barrow, a burial place that had been dug before Scotland had its own history.

  It was one of those ancient places in whose presence Angus always felt a trifle uncomfortable. When he thought about how old these things were, how they'd been built before Christ had walked the earth by men who'd left hardly any other record of their passing, it made him shiver. The stone circles were bad enough, but barrows were graves in which the dead had been placed, and in which their dust still lay.

  And those dead had been of a race, ancestors of his own, that was rich in magic and wizardry. Who was to say that those barrows weren't still guarded by the spirits the old Celts had placed there for that purpose? And who was to say that a worker of magic, like this goddamned Mulcifer surely was, couldn't accidentally or purposely bring those old bastards back to life, if they weren't already?

  The men fell in behind Mulcifer, who was facing the barrow. Angus couldn't see his expression, but guessed that he was smiling. The prick was always smiling, as if he had the most precious little secret but wasn't going to share it with you. Angus thought he acted like a ponce, but that he did it just to piss people off.

  "There, gentlemen, is our entryway," he said.

  Rob walked up and stood next to him. "You're not saying the canisters are buried in that barrow and left unguarded, are you?"

  "No, I merely said it is the entryway. Now, let's start digging."

  Mulcifer walked to the mound, and Angus followed with a shovel. Maybe he'd be haunted for disturbing the dead, but he had to have something to do to get his mind off their sacrilege. He and the others dug where Mulcifer directed, and at first he began to think that the barrow wasn't hollow, but was composed only of earth that they piled carefully for later replacement. At last, however, the shovels hit stone, and they scraped the dirt away from what appeared to be a stone vault over which the earth had been thrown.

  The ancient stones yielded easily enough to their crowbars, and the smell that burst from the sealed-up tomb was not that of recent death. Nothing organic had tenanted that chamber for many centuries. It was an odor of something older. Angus couldn't remember ever having smelled its like before. It was, he thought, the stink of primal secrets.

  Soon the entrance was large enough to step through, and Mulcifer entered first, beckoning the men in after him. Angus went in right after Rob. Only five of them fit within the chamber, whose floor was level with the ground. But in the center of that earthen floor was a flat sheet of dull black metal, three feet wide and four long, scarcely a half inch thick. At each of its four corners were heavy stones that nearly came up to Angus's waist.

  "Roll them off," Mulcifer ordered, and they did so, although it took four of them, panting and groaning, to roll or slide each of the boulders aside. "Now lift it up," said Mulcifer, "and lean it against the wall."

  Angus felt hesitant, as though if he did, something that didn't like its secrets revealed would rise up out of the earth and devour them all. But his feeling gave him no pause, and he joined the others in moving the metal sheet, so heavy that he suspected it was lead, and propping it against the stone wall.

  A chill wind blew up through the hole, smelling only of damp stone. They all shone their lights down into the opening at once, and saw a flight of steps leading into the earth. "Follow me, all of you," Mulcifer said, loudly enough so that the men still standing outside heard him as well. Then he walked down the stairs.

  Rob followed, then Angus. Angus didn't want to go, didn't want anything at all to do with this Mulcifer, who blew up children and took them to places that surely no one had seen for hundreds of years. But he had no choice. A hundred times before, he had wanted to take out his pistol and just fire point-blank into the shite's grinning face, but h
e had never been able. Maybe if he worked hard at it, he could put a bullet in the back of the bastard's head.

  Angus had heard the prisoners he'd freed babbling that they'd seen Mulcifer taking bullets like bug bites, and some swore they'd done the same thing when they were with him. But that didn't necessarily mean that those prisoners couldn't have died later. Hell, they blew up easily enough, didn't they?

  So maybe Mulcifer the Mighty wasn't like Superman all the time, either. Maybe Angus could catch him with his trousers down just long enough to finish him off.

  It was a thought that made him a little happy anyway, as the stairway ended and they passed into a low-ceilinged tunnel that led downward at a gentle angle. It seemed hewn out of the rock itself. At no point was the tunnel wider than four feet, or higher than six, so the taller men, Angus among them, had always to move at a slight crouch.

  Every hundred yards or so they came across other tunnels branching off into the darkness. Before they reached these junctures, Mulcifer's pace slowed, and he approached them cautiously. It made Angus curious. He had never seen Mulcifer cautious before.

  As they moved downward, Angus began to wonder what had made these tunnels. At first he suspected underground streams, but then he realized that water would have smoothed the walls, and these walls were rough, top, bottom, and sides. At one of the cross tunnels, when they slowed, he ran his fingers over the walls, examining them more closely. He saw hundreds of small jagged marks in the stone.

  Nothing natural that he knew of could have created the marks. They looked more like chip marks, and a sudden shock went through him at the possibility that these tunnels had been carved by hand out of the solid rock.

  What was even more disturbing was the fact that all of the marks seemed to have been made from the descending side of the tunnel, as though the excavators had been working their way up from below. That thought made Mulcifer's caution all the more understandable.

  Chapter 37

  If Angus was any judge, they walked on through those claustrophobic passages for miles. There was no sound except for the scuffling of their shoes on the rock and their labored breathing. Angus's back and neck were getting sore from his constant slouching posture the low ceiling made necessary.

  At last Mulcifer stopped at a T-crossing. Angus, just behind him with Rob, could see that to the right the tunnel went steeply downward. They might have been able to walk down, but odds were they would have slid on their arses all the way to wherever it ended up. To the left, only a few feet away, was a cul-de-sac.

  "End of the line," Mulcifer said. He pointed to the stone wall of the cul-de-sac. "We'll blow through that. It's only a few inches thick, so plant your charges accordingly."

  "Now, wait a minute," Rob said. "You want us to set off charges down here? Christ, man, the whole place could collapse on us!"

  "It won't. These walls are very strong. They've been down here . . . well, a long time. Just set the charges straight so it will kick the stone backward, down that shaft, or forward, into what's on the other side. The men can retreat back down the way we came when the blast goes off."

  Angus and Rob did as they were told. Rob was good with explosives, and used a stone hammer to chip out small cavities in which to insert the C-4. After he had set three charges in a triangulation pattern and attached electronic fuses, he nodded to Mulcifer, and the three of them joined the other men who had already gone fifty yards back up the passage and around another corner. As Angus ran past the tunnel that went sharply downward, he thought he heard something, like a quick patter of claws on rock. He didn't stop to investigate.

  Once they reached safety, Rob pressed the electronic trigger, and the shock of the concussion down the tunnel pushed against them like a quick, strong wind. Even though Angus had placed his hands over his ears, the sound was deafening, and his ears rang with it for a long time after.

  The dust took several minutes to settle, and when they went back down the tunnel to the cul-de-sac, Angus saw that much of the stone that had been blown away had indeed rolled down into the steep declivity from which he had heard that odd sound. The cul-de-sac itself had been blown away, and a gaping hole six feet in diameter opened into darkness.

  Mulcifer walked up to it fearlessly and stepped through. Rob and Angus shone their lights inside, and saw Mulcifer walking over a pile of rubble down into a cave fifty feet across and another forty feet deep. Its ceiling was fifty feet high. At the far end, where the ceiling sloped downward, was a huge pile of rubble that it would have taken several trucks to haul away.

  But what drew Angus's attention most were the metal canisters on one side of the cave. There appeared to be a hundred or more, and they were stacked in four long rows on wide metal racks. Their light green color was not due to corrosion, for the metal still sparkled, and the only dust on them was what had settled from the explosion only minutes before.

  Mulcifer continued to beckon the men to come closer and make room for those still in the tunnel. "Come in, come in, gentlemen. Nothing to bite you here. And I don't think we need to be concerned about being disturbed by the authorities. There are the canisters I require. They weigh one hundred pounds each. I really don't want to overburden any of you, particularly on such an arduous journey, so I suggest that two men carry one canister. That will allow us to remove five of them, which should certainly be sufficient for my purposes. Shall we?"

  They paired off, Mulcifer and Rob taking the first canister and leaving through the opening. Angus and another man were next. Angus positioned the top of the six-foot-long canister under his left arm and followed Mulcifer and Rob, his partner behind him. Soon they were all winding their way up the gentle incline of the tunnel again.

  So this was the gas, Angus thought, the shite that Colin hadn't ever wanted to use. And here he was, disobeying his leader, not his clan chief, perhaps, but someone far more important to him. He felt like Benedict Arnold, another Judas for England. They had lost their purpose now, maybe their entire goal, and it was all the fault of this preening, poncy bastard who called himself Mulcifer, like he was some actual demon from the bowels of hell.

  Well, he wasn't a demon, whatever he was. He was alive, and anything that lived could be killed, if only someone had the will to do it.

  Maybe now was the time. Mulcifer seemed to be straining a wee bit under his load. It could be that he was concentrating so much on the physical that his guard was down. It would be so easy just to take out his gun and shoot the prick. He could at least try it.

  With his free right arm he reached into his jacket where his pistol nestled in its shoulder holster. It was one sweet gun, a Glock 21, capable of spitting out ten .45 slugs as fast as he could pull the trigger, which was pretty damned fast. He tentatively wrapped his fingers around the butt and was surprised to find that he could do it, especially with the thought so strong in his mind of killing Mulcifer. Now, if he could only take it out . . .

  He gave it a sharp tug, and it left the holster and rested in his hand, the metal warming to his touch. Then he brought it out and held it in front of him, against his chest. He'd have to be careful to avoid hitting Rob, but if Angus moved slightly to the side, he thought he could shoot past his friend easily enough.

  Angus had no doubt that he could do it now. The bastard's guard was down, he was sure of it. He could pull the trigger, and he would. He raised the gun, gritted his teeth, put pressure on the trigger . . .

  And the gun fired, slamming a slug into the back of Mulcifer's head, pushing him forward so that he dropped the canister with a ringing clatter. Rob dropped to the ground, and Angus kept firing, the bullets hitting Mulcifer in the neck, the head, the back, pushing him forward like a puppet, the bullets holding him up like strings as screams burst from him with each shot.

  Then the magazine was empty, and Mulcifer, with one final agonized wail, fell straight down onto his face, and Angus heard his skull crack against the stone floor. Mulcifer's fingers and feet twitched spastically, then stiffened, and he
was still.

  "I'll be damned," Angus whispered in the sudden stillness, slowly lowering his end of the canister to the ground. Not one of the men had drawn his own gun to defend Mulcifer, and now they just stood there, all holding their canisters except for Rob. He still lay where he had dropped, but he was looking from Mulcifer's riddled body to Angus's emptied pistol and back again, hope slowly growing on his face.

  "I'll be goddamned," Angus said, a smile starting to crease his broad face as he walked slowly toward the creature lying on the stone floor of the tunnel. He stood above him, looking down at the back of his ruined head, the white shirt shredded by bullets. Then he crouched down next to him. "You go to hell, you bastard," he said softly.

  Mulcifer turned over and smiled. "You first, you chubby Scottish bitch."

  Angus felt bathed in ice. For a moment he could not move. Then he scuttled away from Mulcifer until he came up against the stone wall, still holding his doubly useless pistol in his hand. Mulcifer was getting to his feet now, and the damage that the bullets had done to his head and body seemed to be healing as Angus watched, the flesh knitting itself back together again seamlessly. Although the shirt remained torn, the blood that had stained it was vanishing, fading from crimson to pink to peach to the transparency of water.

  "What did you think, Angus?" asked Mulcifer clearly and flawlessly from a throat that the bullets had torn apart. "That you could kill me? That somehow your bullets could succeed where all others had failed? That you were Wallace or the Bruce or some other dead Scottish hero whose magic could slay the evil prince? And did you think that I would not be aware of your feelings, your hatred? I knew what you intended, you fat fool—I allowed you to draw that gun, to shoot me down. Because I wanted them all to see that doing so causes me no harm, no, not even discomfort. And one thing more—I want them to see what happens to those who disobey."

  "You . . ." Angus felt his words choke in his throat, but he would not let this vile thing know how afraid he was of it. He pushed the words out, broad and burred and Scottish. "You go and fook yoursel'."