Her fist closed.
Sparks of red and yellow flashed across my vision. I roared with pain so deep and loud that blood vessels in my throat burst, and the taste of iron filled my mouth again. I clenched my jaw and swallowed the scream. Encouraged by the effect, she grabbed harder still, and I opened my eyes to look at her.
I saw her standing there, calm, professional, detached, monitoring her effect on me as a biologist might assess a frog before dissection—or how I might assess a target through a scope before termination. Barely a flicker of exertion showed in her face. I closed my eyes again, trying to breathe through the pain. And there she was, naked under the shower, pinching the water out of her eyes in the hotel bathroom. Proshunin’s voice brought me back to the torture chamber.
“Enough entertainment, Captain. The serum. Let us find out what kind of agent Major McLean really is.”
“Of course, Colonel. Of course.” The overhead lights flickered as she relaxed her grip. But the pain persisted. Through a wide-bore needle she drew a syringe of colorless liquid from a glass vial retrieved from the trolley. “Open your mouth.”
“Can I have it on a sugar cube?” I forced a weak smile.
“Open your mouth,” she repeated. “Or these men will open it for you.”
“Nice of you to offer me something to drink for a change. I don’t suppose you have any ice and lime, do you?” Her face remained impassive. Beautiful, but unmoved.
“No,” she said. “Just a little remedy to loosen the tongue. I am going to enjoy our conversation, Max.”
SP-117. No taste. No color. No side effects. The Russian Biological Weapons Department 12’s most effective truth serum. It had worked on Litvinenko. And it would work on me. She closed her free hand on my testes again. The pain was indescribable. “Or would you prefer me to inject you with it?” she said as she began to crush me again. “Here.”
I opened my mouth.
She leaned toward me again, serum in hand. As the feeding needle touched my lip, the room shook, rattling the torture tools on the metal trolley. The bright white lights flickered and died, and in their place security lamps lit the room in red. From vents in the ceiling a cloud of peppermint-scented vapor billowed into the room. Proshunin spoke, but his words were lost beneath the wail of an emergency alarm.
Ana María straightened up, the serum undelivered. The guards lowered their rifles and looked at each other and then to her for an explanation. An automated voice in Russian commanded all nonimmunized personnel to assemble on Level One immediately.
Proshunin shouted orders into his radio. The only words I could make out were “obshchiy vypusk”: general release. The door to the interrogation room opened, and the sounds of barely suppressed panic filled the air.
The charge had blown.
30
The wick held up.
Thousands of gallons of water from the Mong River were flooding the underground base from the bottom up. I struggled in vain against the restraints. Proshunin was already out the door, his voice fading as he barked more orders along the corridor. The four Spetsnaz guards followed him. I’d never seen Russian Special Forces operators so rattled. Perhaps they knew what was coming.
“Ana María!” I bellowed. “For God’s sake, please! Ana María!”
She’d stepped out of my limited arc of vision and left, I supposed, with Proshunin. I strained with all my might. It was pointless. The room was filling with peppermint vapor—huge swirls of it expanding under the dull red safety lights. Over and over the automated warning instructed everyone who was at risk from infection to congregate on Level One.
I closed my eyes and conjured the image of Roberts and Juliet sitting at their beach bar the first day I met them, the girl in the cave heading toward Bindi.
“I hope you make it,” I whispered to myself. That would be nice, I thought, if one decent person made it out of this. I didn’t number myself among them. “Don’t sleep too close to the edge,” I reminded the girl as she trod the moonlit savannah in my mind’s eye, “in case the little gray wolf bites you.”
The door to the interrogation room swung shut, muting the noise of pandemonium spreading outside. That was it, then. One way or another, it looked like I was already in my coffin. There were no great thoughts. No regrets. Nothing except for a calm resignation to the inevitability of it all. That, and a wonder at the stupidity of ever imagining the world could be different just because you wished it to be so. In my mind’s eye I saw my father don his mask and disappear into the hut that one last time. If only I’d had another chance to bring him round, I thought. If only I’d followed him. Maybe, just maybe, I might have saved him. Saved myself. No possibility of that now.
I relaxed and found the words came to me more easily than I would have imagined.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God . . .”
The door to the room opened and closed. For a moment echoes of alarm filled the space again. Like when you press a seashell to your ear and release it, the tide of panic outside flowed and ebbed around me.
“Pray for us sinners . . .”
Then I heard the unmistakable metal click-clack-snap of a Kalashnikov safety catch being released, and the breech charged.
“Now and at the hour . . .”
The barrel pressed into my skull at the base of my right ear.
“. . . of our death.”
I heard a spring release, metal freeing itself. My head vibrated from the shock, and I was free.
“Amen,” hissed Ana María into my ear. The metal restraints had sprung clear of my forehead, wrists, ankles. The AK barrel still bored into my head. “A life for a life.” She spoke in faultless English.
“Thank you,” I said. She withdrew the muzzle and threw me the rifle. I tried to sit up. It was excruciating.
“On your feet,” she ordered. Everything hurt: my ribs, my head, my ear, the wound on my neck and now my balls. “Get up!”
I inhaled, stood and rolled my shoulders back. She shook her head dismissively as if to say, Pathetic. I checked the magazine in the AK. It was fully charged.
“OK, let’s do it.” I exhaled hard. I moved to the door and peered out the observation window. The main lights had failed in the corridor outside, too. Everything was lit by the eerie glow of red security lights. In their ruddy hue the ordered military veneer of the underground base dissolved into what it was: an abandoned mine that promised to become a tomb.
The main generator, or at least the relay, must have failed. I guessed that was also in the lower level.
“What have you done, Max? What’s happening?”
I ignored her and stepped away from the window glass, looking around the room for anything that might help get us out.
Fuck, I thought, it’s “us” now, is it?
I slung the AK over my shoulder, scooped up a handful of ampoules from the table and zipped them into the cargo pocket of my fatigues—except the one marked морфин, whose thin glass neck I cracked. I drew a few mils of the clear fluid out into an empty syringe that Ana María had laid out on the trolley and injected myself in the thigh.
“What are you doing?” she shouted above the constant automated order for anyone at risk of infection to assemble on the level above us.
“Treating your handiwork,” I replied. The effect of the morphine was, fortunately, almost instantaneous. It was a low dose and went to work on the pain just enough that I could function, without knocking me out. I clicked the fire selector on the Kalashnikov down to single shot and looked out into the corridor again. Uniformed soldiers, nurses and a ragged collection of “rebels” ran left to right, heading for the exit to Level One. A lone figure stood out among them, head down, radio in hand, battling his way against the tide. It was Proshunin, heading in the opposite direction. I jerked clear of the window as he passed.
“Can they get out?” I asked Ana María. “Th
e creatures in the cells below?”
“The Sleepers? No. Only if they are released.”
“OK. How are they released?”
“The professor,” she replied. “Only the professor can release them.” We were speaking in English now. “That’s what Proshunin was ordering. A general release.” There was a subtle change in the room. She looked around, and then up. “Shit!” Her face tightened. She looked suddenly scared.
“What? What is it?’”
“The neutralizer. It’s stopped.” I looked up, too. There was nothing to see. I shrugged. “The vapor. The peppermint gas,” she shouted, exasperated by my lack of understanding. “It neutralizes them, makes them docile, easier to control. The pumps must have failed.” She looked at me, eyes wide with fear. “Max,” she asked again, “what have you done?”
“I blew the main gen set.” There was something I needed to know. “Ana María, the Sleepers . . .” She looked at me, horrified.
“Yes?”
“Can they swim?”
The penny dropped.
“You flooded the base? Mudak! But that won’t stop the professor. His lab’s airtight, because of the experiments. The Sleeper cells, too. But if we don’t get out before the emergency power fails, we’ll be trapped.” She swiped her pass against the lock and opened the door, and we stepped out together. The noise of the announcement was louder. Distant shouts in Russian added to the cacophony, but the stream of people had eased off to a trickle of individual stragglers. She made to go right, toward the exit, but the stairs were jammed with evacuees. I caught her wrist.
“The professor,” I said. “I need him alive.”
As she looked at me, the faintest glimmer of a smile played at the edges of her mouth.
“Professor Mac Ghill’ean,” she said. “He’s your father, isn’t he?” I nodded. “The hut where you came in—there’s a blast door there. If it’s sealed, we’ll be trapped. And so will the Sleepers.” I gave her back the AK. She hesitated, and then gave me her pass.
“OK. Give me ten minutes and then seal it,” I told her. “First sign of the Sleepers, lock it and run.”
“The first sign of them is already too late,” she said.
I put my hand to her cheek for a moment and then turned to face the emptied corridor. I didn’t think it mattered if she sealed the door or not; if she was on my side, theirs or just hers; or whether she’d known who I was in Venezuela or not. I was already on borrowed time; unraveling who she was, or wasn’t, was a luxury I couldn’t afford. As I broke into a jog, I heard her shout after me.
“Good luck, Max McLean.” And I felt something then, the same connection I’d felt in Caracas and the same shock at losing it.
I kept moving toward the lift at the far end of the level. I glanced into the rooms as I ran: all empty. No sign of Proshunin, and no sign of how he’d got out. But if I was risking my life to reach my father, then I bet the colonel was, too.
At the end of the corridor, the doors to the personnel lift were shut, and the floor indicator lights above them were dead. Then the Tannoy system gave out, and the bunker was plunged into an unsettling silence. I swiped Ana María’s pass over the scanner beneath the call button.
Nothing. The main system had lost power, and the emergency backup wasn’t enough to run the lifts.
I put my fingers against the lips of the doors and tried to prize them apart, but to no avail. Wherever Proshunin had gone, he hadn’t used the lift.
Beside me the last door along the corridor opened. A soldier in battle dress appeared, panicked, buttoning his trousers. He turned to look at me as my right fist caught his windpipe. He collapsed and I caught his head, twisting it under the weight of his own body. His neck snapped easily. I took the 9mm pistol from his belt, cocked it and tucked it into the waistband at the small of my back. I took two hand grenades from his webbing, too—but right then it was his bayonet I needed most.
I put the point between the lift doors, banged the blade home repeatedly with the heel of my palm and then pulled hard to the left. The door opened enough to get my fingers into. I pulled again and felt the strain on my broken ribs as the doors inched apart. The gap was just enough to squeeze past.
I put my head through first and looked down. Dim red lights lit the shaft that fell away beneath me. Electrical and steel cables vanished into the gloom. Down the right-hand wall, handgrips had been set into the concrete to form a ladder. It looked like the Russians had just refitted the old mine lift.
I looked up.
The car was suspended above me, abandoned on Level One. That meant there was clear passage all the way down. The lift could take at least twenty people and the chasm was vast. I listened hard. From far below, the sound of gushing water echoed up the vertical chamber. The complex was flooding, but slowly. Either the charge had opened only a small fissure, or the tunnels and caves underground were sucking up too much water.
I forced myself into the gap I’d made between the doors and pushed. They opened enough to attempt a standing jump to the ladder from the lip inside. I made the distance easily, but the sudden jolt of grasping the handgrip tore hard at my ribs. My fingers slipped on the metal. My knee bounced off a lower grip and spun me into the wall. My right shoulder grazed concrete. I was falling fast. My head smacked against another grip. I flailed with my right hand, desperately searching for a hold. My fingertips found purchase, but under the speed of the fall, my own deadweight snapped them free.
I was dropping too close to the wall and risked knocking myself out and drowning. Skin friction-burned off my upper arm. I pushed out hard with both hands, grazing palm flesh. Spinning out into the middle of the shaft, I folded my arms across my chest and pressed my ankles together.
A rush of red-tinged air. I relaxed for impact, and the soles of my boots hit the flood. The boom of exploding water cracked in my ears and then bubbled under with me, transmuted into a torrential rush-roar as the river water swallowed me.
I brought my knees up and spread my arms to slow the descent, and my feet found the floor. The water was dark but not opaque. The security lights persisted even underwater, making the outflow of the Mong River look like a stream of thin, transparent blood. I kicked my way to the surface.
The floodwater had reached the bottom of the lift doors for Level Four, where the cave tunnel had first led me into the bunker. From behind the doors came a pounding rush of water. I held on to the lift cables to steady myself for a moment and then dived back under.
It was five meters down to the bottom and Level Five. The weight of the pistol and the grenades helped sink me into the well. The lift door had already been partly opened. Through the gap a pale arm waved in the current. I fed it back through to the other side and braced against the doors as I had at the top of the shaft. They were stuck fast. I tried again. The doors were rigid.
Snipers have an unfair advantage holding their breath. Lowering our metabolic rate and slowing the heart is a trick of the trade that steadies the shot and means we can go for longer than some underwater, too. I could manage five minutes at the outside. I breathed out a little air to relax my diaphragm and pushed again. The doors opened another hand width. Just enough. In the dark water of the corridor beyond hung the limp cadaver of the Ukrainian ward sister. Somewhere down there would be the body of Nurse Kuznetsova, too. Any pang I may have had for killing her dissipated into the water around me. They were all dead now anyway.
I surfaced and drew breath. From above, the timbre of the shaft had changed. Over the rushing of water came the rapid thumping of what sounded like distant drums. It was a crazy, offbeat rhythm, and its depth was different from that of the drummers who kept time at my father’s nighttime ceremonies. The echoing patter rippled up and down the height of the complex like an endless loop of hands thudding against metal.
Shit, I thought, the Sleepers.
With nothing to neutralize
them in their cells, they’d come to.
I dived again and swam out of the lift well and into the passage. I pushed past the ward sister, and stared into the red hue of the abyss ahead. Bodies emerged from the gloom. Patients still hooked up to bags of intravenous fluids, soldiers weighed down by weapons, doctors with the billowing white wings of their lab coats spread out behind them: all were lifeless.
I oriented myself, and tried not to think about the people I’d killed in the flood. That kind of pressure can crush a man.
One minute.
The hospital level was flooded to the ceiling. Making two-minute forays into the tunnels before coming back up for air in the well wouldn’t give me anything like enough range to search properly. There may have been air pockets here and there, but finding them in the dingy glow of the security lights was impossible. I had an idea of how to do it, how to keep breathing underwater, but it was a gamble. I kicked my way along the submerged hallway.
Two minutes.
Crunch time: turn back, and live, at least for the moment; or continue—and if the gamble failed, I’d be dead in a couple of minutes.
I pressed on.
Three minutes.
The layout of the level was unfamiliar. Last time around, I’d come in from the other end, by the stairs. Even more confusing was that the layout was different down there. Whereas the upper levels were all laid out following the same pattern, the hospital was cut up into isolated wards and labs. I could feel the flow of water, the river current, dragging me along. I swam into a dead end and doubled back on myself, cursing the lost seconds.
Four minutes.
My chest was tight, my neck strained. I breathed out a little and pushed through a fire exit into a junction between two wards. It was packed with bodies, the people who’d worked on that level having taken refuge there en masse, maybe hoping that the heavy metal door would save them. It hadn’t.
I forced my way through them. Dead hands stroked my face. Tresses of hair unloosed from a nurse’s missing cap snagged in my fingers.
The Break Line Page 25
