Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  The tunnel walls disappeared without notice. One instant her feet were pressed up against the earthen sides, and the next they were splayed wide, and she was falling. She didn’t even have time to dig her fingers deeper into the walls before she was airborne for just a millisecond, and then she landed hard and with a splash against the smooth concrete of the storm sewer.

  She landed on her back and slid, her face slipping below the surface of the water before her hands and feet found a purchase and she was able to rise to her knees. Thoroughly drenched, she fought the urge to cough as her hand shot to the waistband of her pants, where she found the .44 Magnum still tucked where it was supposed to be.

  She kept her right hand on the pistol grip as she extended her left hand over her head to see how close the ceiling was. When she felt nothing, she dared to stand, ever so slowly, and she was shocked to find that she could rise to her feet and stand to her full height.

  That’s when she realized that she was casting a dim shadow, despite the pitch darkness. Only it wasn’t pitch dark right here. There was no detail to be seen, but when she waved her hand in front of her face, she could definitely see a silhouette.

  To her right, she could see the silhouette of a ladder.

  When she looked up, she saw two pinholes of gray light peering down at her like ghostly cat’s eyes through the manhole cover.

  She’d found her way out. Now all she had to do was wait.

  It all took longer than Jonathan had anticipated. Planting of the second charge had been complicated by the presence of occupied buildings. The last thing he wanted was to blast some kid out of his crib. By the time he’d found a suitable vehicle to booby-trap, he’d already lost an extra ninety seconds off the timing of the first charge.

  Thus, when he planted the third bomb, he could allow only forty-five seconds on the fuse.

  He pressed the button to activate the countdown and then he ran like a bunny rabbit across the street and down one block to join the rest of his team. With his NVGs in place, there were no obstacles that he couldn’t see, and as he closed the distance, he saw Boxers with his rifle up and ready to shoot anyone who might threaten Jonathan’s retreat.

  Jonathan slowed and backpedaled and dropped to his knees as he joined the others.

  “Jesus, Boss, if I knew you were going to stroll, I’d’ve come along.”

  “Stuff it and take cover,” Jonathan said, pressing the NVGs out of the way. “The first one’s going to be close and it’s going to be soon.” As he spoke, he cupped the nape of Tristan’s neck and pulled him forward and down to the grass. With the PC pressed into the dirt, Jonathan lay down on top of him.

  “Oh, shit,” Tristan grunted. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry, kid, it’s just part of the job.”

  “But you’re—”

  The camera strobe of the detonation silenced him, and an instant later, the ground shook as if struck with a massive bass drum mallet.

  Boxers laughed. “Well, shit, Scorpion. At least you gave us a show worth waiting for.”

  They all held their positions on the ground for the better part of ten seconds to allow whatever debris was launched to land wherever it was going.

  When there was no impact, he rose from on top of Tristan and helped the kid rise to his knees.

  “Well, the overture’s over,” Jonathan said. “Time for the first act.” He stood, and pulled Tristan with him. “Ready to run again?”

  Palma just happened to be looking right at the detonation when it happened. His first instinct on seeing the pulse of light was that it was a muzzle flash, but in the instant that it took him to flinch, he saw the eruption of debris, and he knew that it was a bomb. The chatter of automatic weapons fire followed almost immediately, followed by panicked reports from the guards at the Sandcats that they were under attack.

  Within seconds, the police channels came alive with reports of the explosions and the gunfire.

  To his left, Sergeant Nazario said, “Captain, sir, we have to go and help them.”

  Did this make sense? Palma asked himself. Why would they choose to fight so far away when their true target was right here? Could this be a diversion?

  “Help us!” cried a Sandcat crew member.

  Palma pounded the hood of the car that shielded him. Somehow, they’d found out about the trap. Were they adapting, or were they merely being stupid?

  “Sir, please,” Nazario said. “Let me go reinforce them.”

  In his heart, Palma knew it was a mistake, just as splitting your forces is always a mistake. These terrorists had fooled him before, and he sensed that they were doing it again.

  But men under his command needed help.

  “Very well,” he said, finally. “Take second and third squads to reinforce the Sandcats. You are in charge. I want a full report. They’re panicking out there.”

  Nazario threw off a quick salute and brought his portable radio to his lips.

  The Sandcat crews started shooting even before Jonathan and his team were there to engage them. The first blast, triggered at the end of the block where they’d parked their vehicles, had incited blind panic, and they were firing randomly at the source of the explosion.

  “I feel sorry for the poor schmucks who live on the other end of the block,” Boxers quipped over the radio. Bullets flew until they hit something. That meant hundreds of rounds were chewing up the properties downrange.

  A minute thirty in, the plan was working perfectly.

  Stealth no longer mattered. Jonathan and his team sprinted full out two blocks east, and then turned south for a block. When they turned west onto the street where the war was happening, the Mexicans were so outflanked that they actually had their backs turned to them.

  It shouldn’t be this easy. There were six in total.

  Jonathan and Boxers fired in unison, and two seconds later, the Sandcats were theirs.

  Jonathan held his aim for a few seconds to verify that there was no movement, and then he turned to Tristan. “Almost home,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Something had changed behind the kid’s eyes. Jonathan didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t particularly care, but he got the distinct impression that he’d somehow crossed a line. For a second, he thought that maybe Tristan was going to pull back, but it only took a slight tug on his vest to bring him along.

  Tristan’s mind screamed, They just murdered those men. Shot them in the back. They never had a chance.

  “Fair fights are for dead fools, Tristan,” Scorpion said, somehow reading his thoughts. As he spoke, he hooked his foot under the belly of one of the dead men and rolled him to his back. The soldier’s cheek had erupted into a hideous blooming rose.

  “Forget everything you’ve heard about honor in war,” Scorpion went on. “The winners are the guys who are still alive when the shooting stops.” As if by rote, he took the soldier’s rifle away and then moved on to the next corpse. “You’ve got to exploit every weakness.”

  Scorpion made a point of establishing eye contact. “No matter how you cut it, it’s an ugly business.”

  The engine on the closest Sandcat turned and caught. Tristan jumped at the sound and whirled to see the Big Guy in the front seat, smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up through the window. He said something, but the words were lost in the crisp thump of another explosion.

  Scorpion checked his watch and gave a quick, satisfied nod. “Mount up,” he said.

  With the second explosion, Palma knew that his worst fears had been realized. The timing had been brilliant. If his mental calculations were correct, Nazario and his men would have been very near the blast.

  The debris had barely stopped falling when the screaming erupted on the radio. At first, all he heard was noise, irrational unintelligible yelling that overpowered the radio mike.

  “Calm down, soldier,” Palma said, but he knew they’d stepped on his transmission.

  He was about to try again when he heard the worst of the worst: “Serge
ant Nazario is dead!”

  Maria felt the first explosion more than she heard it. She assumed it was the first explosion. More a pulse than a boom, it launched waves through the knee-deep water that rolled to her waist and slapped against the concrete walls.

  Stuff fell from the ceiling, too, though in the darkness she didn’t know what it was. It fell in chunks and it filled the air with dust that smelled like mold. Without light, and without knowledge of the truth, her mind screamed that the falling objects were spiders. And crickets. All the insects that most terrified her.

  In that flash of fear, the possibility of capture or torture or death mattered less than battling the insects. Maria’s hands moved in spasms to brush whatever they were from her shoulders and hair.

  Her hair! In her mind, her head was infested now, crawling with bugs. With pregnant bugs, determined to lay their eggs on her scalp.

  It was all preposterous, of course—the ridiculous ramblings of a frightened little girl who’d never fully overcome her fear of the dark.

  She told herself that none of it was true—insisted that none of it was true—but it did little to settle her racing heart and trembling hands.

  This will be over soon, she told herself. What was it that Mother Hen had said? Three explosions in the space of five minutes, and she was to wait until—

  There was nothing subtle about the next detonation.

  It must have been much closer, because a pressure wave rolled like an earthquake through the storm sewer. She felt the walls move as the wave swept past her, and a tsunami of water smacked her like a liquid wall. It broke over her head and knocked her to the floor, where she tumbled under the assault of secondary and tertiary waves.

  After a somersault, Maria came up sputtering and coughing, desperate to recover the air that had been pushed from her lungs. As she struggled to breathe, she also tried to find stability for her feet in the slippery muck that lined the concrete floor of the sewer.

  By pressing her hands against the walls and digging in with her knees, she was finally able to stabilize herself. She tried to stand, but when she was barely above a squat, her head hit the top of the tunnel and a new wave of panic swept over her. She’d been washed to a new part of the sewer, but she’d been turned and jostled so much that she no longer could tell left from right, upstream from downstream.

  She was stranded now on hands and knees, and the water was chin-high. If it started to rain, she would drown.

  This new terror eclipsed any horrors of the past. She was blind and she was trapped and she was going to drown. If her remains were ever found at all, they would be tangled among weeds and bushes along the banks of the river, downstream from the outfall of this terrible place.

  “Stop it!” she commanded herself aloud.

  Nothing was done until it was done. She needed clear thought, not panicked ramblings. The cliché said that panic killed people, and now she knew what the cliché meant. If you’re panicking, you’re not thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re just giving yourself up to death.

  She smelled smoke. The stench of burning rubber. It wasn’t very strong, but it was definitely there. How was it possible to set a sewer on fire?

  She needed to find the dim light from the manhole cover. If she could—

  Light! Of course! Her flashlight!

  Holding herself out of the water by planting her left hand in the slimy muck, she explored her pants pocket with her right. Miraculously, the pistol was still there—as if she had any use for it right now. When her fingers found the outline of the three-inch tube that could only be the flashlight, she nearly cried.

  “Please, please, please work,” she moaned.

  The company that sold these things marketed them as waterproof, but how factual was their claim? She didn’t even know if the batteries worked anymore. More than that, she wasn’t sure she’d even turned it on before.

  The fabric of her pants fought her efforts to remove the light, and once it was clear, she nearly dropped it. In the slipperiness of her grip, the light squirted out of her grasp, but somehow, through instinct and divine intervention, she didn’t lose it in the black water.

  Somehow, Maria knew to twist it. She laughed aloud when the blinding white light appeared.

  When she pointed the beam to her right, it revealed nothing but an endless tube of concrete that extended eight or ten meters before curving curved sharply to the right. Intuitively, she knew that that was the wrong way.

  She pivoted the other way, where her beam revealed a wall of smoke rolling toward her. It was probably just an optical illusion, but the leading edge of the cloud appeared light in color, followed behind by a much darker, thicker cloud. It started to sting her eyes, but she wondered if that would be the case if she was still blind. Could it be that mere awareness brought discomfort?

  But there was something else, something in the water, a ripple of movement that raced toward her, as if chased by the cloud.

  Maria understood what it was when the first wave of rats swarmed around her.

  She screamed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Even two blocks away, the explosion was huge, launching a roiling ball of orange fire that momentarily turned night to day. As the original burst of light faded—not nearly as quickly as it had erupted—a dimmer glow remained, the beginnings of secondary fires.

  Boxers gave a wild look as Jonathan dumped his ruck on the floor of the Sandcat’s shotgun seat and climbed in after it. “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Big Guy quipped, stealing a line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “Jesus, what did you blow up?” If the second charge had been the first—the closest—it might have killed them all.

  “I knew that one was for effect, so I daisy-chained three GPCs on the gas tank.”

  Boxers laughed. “Holy shit.”

  Jonathan ignored him and turned in his seat to make sure that Tristan was aboard and secured. When the doors were all closed, he said, “Go,” and they were moving.

  Jonathan tried not to look at the conflagration he’d ignited. The thought of the lives that he had just ruined sickened him. Even if everyone got out of their homes safely, their possessions—lifetimes of memories—would all be destroyed. And the destruction was all his responsibility. If only there’d been another way.

  The first blast had been designed to draw the OPFOR closer, and the second blast had been all about killing as many of them as possible. Because such things were an inexact science, it made sense to use more explosives and to capitalize on the accelerant effect of the gasoline.

  If there’d been a propane tanker parked at the curb, he’d have set the bomb on that.

  He needed to tweak every advantage he could find to make sure that his PC would rest his head on his own pillow again. Everything else was secondary to that.

  If theory evolved into fact, the explosion would have culled the OPFOR herd significantly, and demoralized the hell out of them. That last part was important. A force that can’t focus on an objective can’t fight effectively.

  These Mexican soldiers and the local emergency response agency would all be reeling from the explosive attacks when Jonathan and his team rolled in to take Maria Elizondo to safety. With any luck, he would pluck their new PC without incident, and they’d skip back to America unmolested.

  Right. And then pigs would fly.

  Hundreds of rats—thousands of them—raced toward Maria, churning the water, presenting as a malignant gray blanket across the surface. They hit her head-on, then flowed around her as if she weren’t there. Poised as she was on her hands and knees, her face inches above the surface of the water, the rats swam through her arms and scampered over her shoulders and down her neck.

  Fleeing the advancing and thickening cloud of smoke, they seemed entirely unmoved by her screams.

  For long seconds, Maria just kneeled there, allowing herself to be overtaken by the smoke and the fear and the vermin. She felt paralyzed. In her worst nightmares, she ha
d never considered this kind of horror. Part of her reasoned that if she turned off the light, the fear would go away—or at least lessen.

  No, she thought with a shiver. This is not how I am going to die. But if she locked down, dying was the only possible outcome for her.

  Maria had to settle herself down and think the problem through.

  The explosion had to have come from upstream of the flow of vermin and smoke. She had a direction to travel. She told herself to ignore everything but the goal. Rats were just more of God’s creatures trying to survive just as she was. They had no interest in her.

  She forced herself to ignore the smoke that gouged at her eyes and tore at her throat. As long as she felt the pain, at least she knew that she was still alive.

  With the light clasped in her teeth like a metal cigar, she crawled upstream through her terror, her face wet and slimy with tears and snot and fetid water. The ladder had to be here somewhere, and with the ladder would come options.

  At least she’d be able to—

  Stand! In the gathering and thickening smoke, she’d nearly missed the ladder, but there it was, along with the vestibule that allowed her to get her feet under her and rise to her full height. The sudden change startled the rats, and two of them clung to her as she rose above the water, their little rat nails digging into the fabric of her shirt at her shoulders, one on each side.

  She swiped at them in hacking, spasmodic movements that sent them tumbling back into the disgusting flow of their fleeing cousins. Spitting out the flashlight, she grabbed the metal rungs of the ladder and started to climb.

  Maria decided to ignore Mother Hen’s instructions. When she’d issued them, she couldn’t possibly have known about these complications. If this was the result of the first two explosions, then God only knew—

  The third blast sounded like it might have been directly overhead. The opaque smoke over her head flashed orange with it, and the rungs of the ladder pulsed violently enough to throw her off if she hadn’t been holding on so tightly. Below her, the water surged, but she didn’t care. Her future lay above.