by Alex Ryan
“They’ve heard you,” squawked Jin over the wireless. “Three gunmen are heading your way. The other two stayed behind with Qing.”
Nick could make out three distant figures in the soft light streaming down from the ladder well. The gunmen were fanning out. Just five more seconds and he would take them all out.
“Help,” a female voice called out. “Help me, Qing!”
Nick did a double take at Dash, not believing what had just happened.
Lankford dropped an F-bomb.
Then the bullets began to fly.
Qing’s gunmen dropped to their knees and began to fire blindly down the tunnel. Had Nick not kept his team along the wall, they would all be dead as tracers screamed down the center of the tunnel.
Nick advanced in his crouch and fired, his first shot hitting the gunman on the far right in the neck. The man screamed and dropped his rifle. He reached for his neck but then collapsed. Nick’s second shot caught the middle gunman dead center in the middle of the chest. The man grasped his chest and then pitched forward face first onto the floor of the tunnel. Nick aimed farther down the tunnel for Qing next and squeezed the trigger, but the bastard was prescient and ducked just as cement fragments exploded from the tunnel wall where Qing’s head had been a half second earlier. Qing’s two bodyguards were hustling him deeper into the tunnel. They fired back over their shoulders blindly. Nick knew from combat that stray rounds kill just as quickly as targeted ones, so he stayed low, angling himself between the fleeing gunman and Dash to his right.
Lankford’s rifle barked fire and Nick watched the third gunman in the tunnel take a round in the hip, spinning him around. Nick finished the wounded man with a shot to the head as he fell.
Qing grabbed one of his protectors and spun the man around as a human shield. As they backpedaled, the bodyguard screamed something in Chinese and unleashed a prolonged burst of automatic fire, spraying the tunnel from wall to wall. Nick leapt backward and yanked Dash to the ground, shielding her with his body.
“Qing!” Dash screamed from beneath him. Then, she shouted something else in Chinese, and Qing straightened up behind the gunman. Nick raised his rifle and aimed for Qing’s forehead, but the shot went wide to the left, tearing through the top of the head of the man Qing held between himself and his enemy. The man crumpled to the ground and Qing spun around and ran.
“Shoot him, Lankford,” Nick shouted as he tried to get a better angle without crushing Dash.
Qing yelled at the lone remaining gunman as he fled to the motorbikes. The gunman unleashed a punishing volley. And then another.
Nick pushed up onto his right elbow, ready to fire, but before he could, he heard Lankford yell, “I’m hit!”
Nick glanced right and saw Lankford was down.
A motorbike engine growled to life and screamed with a high-RPM whine followed a half second later by another one.
Nick took aim and squeezed off a burst down the tunnel, but it was too late. They were gone. He rolled off Dash and felt a sudden surge of fury toward her.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he growled.
She glared at him, her jaw set defiantly. “I was trying to make him hesitate so you could shoot him before he got away.”
“Damn it.”
He scurried over to Lankford and found the CIA man with both hands clutching his right hip. “Let me take a look.”
Lankford grimaced. “It’s not bad. Clipped my hip and went out my ass cheek, I think.”
Nick was in full combat-medic mode now. He knew there was no way Lankford would know if the bullet had torn through his guts or not. Bullet trajectories through bodies were unpredictable. He’d seen some unbelievable injuries over the years. He took Lankford’s pulse at the wrist—strong and fast. Good.
“Go,” Lankford said. “We can’t lose him. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Stay down,” Nick said. The CIA operator would be more of a liability now. He checked the wound and Lankford’s initial assessment appeared to be right. The bullet clipped him in the meat just outside the hip and exited straight. Nick pulled a bandana from his pocket, rolled it in a tight ball, and pressed it onto the wound. His hands did not come back soaked in blood, which was usually a good sign—unless, of course, all the bleeding was inside. “Keep pressure here,” he said. Then he keyed his microphone and said, “Jin, we have a man down. We capped four bad guys, but Qing and one gunman escaped. Send the vehicles.”
“Roger,” Jin said, then issued orders in Chinese to his men with the ATVs.
Nick squeezed Lankford’s wrist. “You okay?”
“Go kill that son of a bitch,” he answered.
Nick nodded and got to his feet. With Dash standing at his side, he watched and waited as the two ATVs roared up the tunnel to their position. “Go with Lankford in the Argo,” he said to her, making a beeline for the four-by-four.
“Like hell,” she said, running beside him. “I’m going with you.”
“Like hell you are,” he shouted at her. “Not after that stunt you just pulled.”
“We started this together. We’re going to finish it together. Do you understand me, Nick Foley? This is the way it must be.”
He whirled to face her and clutched her by her shoulders. His intention was tell her no and shove her away, but then he met her gaze. She was right. This was the way it was supposed to be.
They would kill Chen Qing together.
Chapter 40
Dash leapt onto the ATV’s tandem seat behind Nick and wrapped her arms around his waist.
“Go!” she shouted into his ear, and go he did.
The acceleration nearly sent her flying off the back of the vehicle, but her nails found purchase in the Velcro straps of his bulletproof vest. She clamped her knees against the frame and held him tight as they flew through the Underground City. The roar of the ATV’s engine was deafening—amplified and reverberating off the concrete tunnel around them. If Nick was cursing her for what she’d just done, she could not hear it. She would not blame him. She had not shared that part of her plan with him.
Turbulent wind whipped her hair about, stinging her cheeks and the nape of her neck. She peered over Nick’s shoulder down the darkened tunnel ahead. Two red taillights—the dirt bikes they were pursuing—glowed faintly in the distance. Ventilation ducts and metal pipes materialized from the darkness, snaking overhead and along the walls, and then disappeared in a blur. The effect was hypnotic and disorienting, so she tried to ignore her peripheral vision and focus on the ground ahead.
The ATV’s anemic headlights illuminated only twenty meters of the upcoming passage, if that. Nick was driving at a lunatic pace, yet he couldn’t see what was coming at them. She yelled at him to slow down, but at the same instant, the ATV hit a puddle, hydroplaned, and started to slide toward the concrete wall. She felt Nick ease off the throttle and watched him try to steer into the slide, but the wall just kept coming. Her stomach went queasy and she screamed. With collision imminent, the tires regained traction and the ATV lurched onto a new vector. Her right knee kissed the wall and the concrete chewed through the fabric of her jeans. Nick got them off the wall a heartbeat later, and she felt the burn on the side of her knee where the skin had been sanded off.
She resisted the urge to look at her knee to check the damage and instead focused on the scene ahead. The two red taillights were growing dimmer.
“They’re getting away,” she yelled over his shoulder.
“I know,” he hollered back.
The motor whined and she felt the wind pick up as Nick accelerated to pursuit speed. She repositioned her grip, digging her fingertips deeper into his straps. If the tunnel were illuminated, maybe the ride would be exhilarating, but this—this was terrifying.
She squinted in the wind, trying to back Nick up by watching for hazards ahead. Suddenly, the taillights ahead disappeared. She leaned left to look over Nick’s other shoulder, hoping for a different angle, but the lights were definitely gone.
“We lost them,” she yelled.
“Not likely,” he yelled back. “I think they turned.”
She nodded.
“Hang on,” Nick yelled, his voice ripe with panic. “Stairs!”
He braked hard, but it was too late. They took the stairs head on. She screamed as the ATV pitched forward and headed down the steep incline. The angle felt all wrong, much too steep, and she was certain the vehicle was going to topple end over end . . . but somehow, it didn’t. Instinctively, she leaned back, reclining almost fully until her shoulder blades were bouncing against the tubular steel cargo deck behind her. Nick shifted his hips forward and leaned back also, while keeping his hands on the controls. The ATV shuddered and bounced down the stairs, bucking like a wild bull trying to jettison its tandem riders, but they did not fall off. Just when she was beginning to get in synch with the bone-jarring rhythm, the ATV hit the bottom with a gut-shaking thud, which sent her pitching forward. Her forehead smashed into the middle of Nick’s back, and she heard him grunt.
The tunnel ahead was pitch dark—no sign of the red taillights.
After a beat, she heard Nick’s voice over her headset: “Jin, this is Nick. I think we’ve lost them. I could use a little help.”
“I don’t have any cameras in that sector,” came Jin’s voice over the wireless. “But I can try to plot you on the map if you give me landmark details.”
“We just drove down a big-ass flight of stairs.”
“Okay, I know where you are. In one kilometer, the tunnel will split. One passage goes southeast and one passage goes southwest.”
“Please tell me you have a camera there,” Nick said.
“No, I’m afraid not,” Jin replied. “If you can’t see which path they took, you will have to guess.”
“I don’t guess,” Nick said, twisting the throttle. The ATV’s tires squealed and they were off again. This time, Nick brought the vehicle up to its maximum speed. Dash shut her eyes and pressed her forehead against his back. She didn’t want to look. She couldn’t. If they crashed at this speed, they would die, and she’d rather not see it coming.
She listened to the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh as they passed ventilation duct after ventilation duct. Just as she began to wonder if Nick had somehow missed the junction where the tunnel split, the high-pitched whine of the ATV’s engine began to fade into a throaty growl. She felt the ATV slow as Nick backed off the throttle. She looked up and over his shoulder and saw the fork in the passage ahead. He turned off the ATV’s headlights and killed the engine.
All went dark and quiet.
“Did you see which way they went?” she whispered.
“No.” He climbed off the ATV, machine gun raised. “Get behind the ATV,” he instructed. “This could be a trap.”
She did as she was told.
Squatting behind the rear fender, she watched him duck into a crouch and move toward the tunnel on the right. After a few meters, he disappeared completely into the darkness. She waited anxiously, certain that the next thing she would hear would be a barrage of automatic weapon fire.
It never came.
“They went right,” a voice out of nowhere said, making her jump.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“The echo is louder that way,” he said. “Let’s go.”
They climbed on the ATV and took off down the right tunnel. Gripping him tight, she settled in for the ride. She noticed that now, instead of driving down the center of the tunnel, Nick was hugging the left wall, staying on the inside radius of a gradual bend to the left. She didn’t understand why until two minutes later, when a volley of bullets and tracers ripped down the center of the passage, barely missing them. Nick killed the headlights on the ATV and immediately returned fire. The staccato pop, pop, pop of gunfire in the dark shredded her nerves. She made herself small behind him and wondered why he hadn’t stopped moving. Then she realized that Nick had gained the advantage of timing over their unseen adversary. Somehow, he seemed to time his volleys a split second before the other gunman, dominating and controlling the tunnel.
“Give me your rifle and get off,” he yelled at her between bursts. “Stay against the wall until I call you.”
She handed him the machine gun slung across her back and slid off the left side of the ATV. Then, to her surprise, Nick twisted the accelerator, the ATV engine roared, and he was gone—a torrent of bullets and malice. She pressed her back against the wall and waited. The gunfire intensified and she pressed her hands over her ears. The racket was so loud it hurt. Then there was a blinding light and a boom. She heard someone scream in agony and then another volley of gunfire before silence fell once again.
She waited for Nick’s call, but it did not come.
She waited in the dark, frozen and silent . . .
Footsteps.
Someone was running in her direction, and deep in her gut she knew it was not Nick. She reached for the subcompact pistol in the small-of-the-back holster Gang Jin had given her. Despite the darkness, her fingers found the grip and the trigger. She had never shot a gun before, but Nick had assured her that all she had to do was point the barrel at the target and squeeze the trigger—the bullet would do the rest. She extended the weapon in the darkness, aiming at the footsteps, which were getting louder and closer. And louder and closer.
Her arms began to tremble.
She wanted to call out Nick’s name, just to be sure. What if she shot him? What if she shot and killed Nick just when he was coming back to her? But the person running toward her was not Nick, she was certain of it.
She heard him breathing now, the runner, and the footsteps were almost on top of her.
With her index finger, she put tension on the trigger, ready to shoot, and . . .
The footsteps ran past her.
She followed the sound with the barrel of her gun, confused and uncertain what to do.
“Qing!” she yelled, taking herself by surprise.
The footsteps stopped for a beat but then resumed anew at a harder, faster pace. She chased after him into the darkness. A volley of gunfire erupted in the tunnel behind her, but it sounded farther away than before. She didn’t look back; she just kept running after the footsteps, holding the pistol in her right hand.
A flashlight flicked on ahead of her, and she saw the shadow of a man running. It was Qing; she knew his shape, his gait, his form.
The light flicked off.
They kept running.
“Qing, wait!” she yelled.
The light flicked on again, but Qing did not stop. This time she noticed a darkened cutout in the tunnel wall ahead and a sign overhead.
The light flicked off.
After a few more seconds, the sound of Qing’s footsteps changed direction and took on a new quality.
He turned.
She had not had time to read the writing on the sign, but she knew what it said: EXIT. She veered left and extended her left arm until her outstretched fingertips brushed against the concrete tunnel wall. After five meters, the wall disappeared. She stopped, breathless now, and turned left into the darkened exit tunnel. She could hear Qing’s footfalls directly ahead as he climbed the concrete steps. She followed, slowly at first, feeling for the first step. When the toe of her left shoe hit the bottom step, she almost tripped, but she managed to catch herself and not discharge the pistol. She felt for a railing, found one, and began the long ascent. Pretty soon, her lungs were burning, and she realized what terrible shape she must be in. Her only solace was the fact that she knew Qing’s fitness was no better.
Light flooded the stairwell from above, and she looked up to see Qing, a silhouette in an open doorway. He was looking down at her, but she could not see the expression on his darkened face.
“Qing, wait!” she called, between gasps.
The door slammed shut, and she was once again in the dark. She stowed the pistol in her holster and took the steps two at a time. When she reached the top, she felt her body slowing
with fatigue. She pushed against the exit door and it didn’t move.
“No!” she screamed and drove her shoulder into the metal door. This time, the door pushed open a couple of centimeters.
The bastard blocked the door with something.
She hit it again, and again, and again—shifting the heavy mass on the other side—until at last she could squeeze through the gap. On the other side, the light was blinding. She squinted, surveying her surroundings, and realized this entrance to the Underground City was in an alley protected by a metal cage with an iron gate. She stepped around the metal trash receptacle Qing had used to block the door. A chain and a cut padlock lay on ground beside the open gate. She ran through the open gate and sprinted down the alley. When she reached the intersection, she scanned the crowd, frantically looking for Qing. The hair on the nape of her neck stood up when she saw him, standing directly across the one-way street, staring at her.
She heard a crash in the alley behind her. She whirled around and saw Nick emerging from the Underground City, rifle in hand. He looked at her, then past her at Qing, then back at her. He shook his head: Don’t do it.
She mouthed the words I’m sorry and then pulled one of the nanobot vaccine canisters from her vest pocket. She raised it to her mouth, depressed the lever, and inhaled the fog. She dropped the canister, smiled wanly at Nick, and turned to face Qing.
“Don’t leave me,” she called out to Qing and took a step into the street toward him. Then, placing both her hands on her abdomen, she met Qing’s gaze. “Take me with you. I’m pregnant.”
She watched Qing’s face contort through a series of emotions: confusion, joy, and then doubt. A black SUV rounded the corner and screeched to a halt at the curb in front of Qing, blocking her view of him. She checked traffic, which was stopped a half block away, waiting for the light to change. She began walking toward the SUV.
“Please,” she begged. “Take me with you.”
For a moment, nothing happened. In her peripheral vision, she could see the cars to her left beginning to move. Just when she thought he would leave her, the rear passenger door opened. Qing extended his hand and beckoned her. She smiled at him and dashed across the street just ahead of an oncoming wave of vehicles.
