by Bryan Devore
John watched David look right past him, to Rebecca. “See you soon,” he said.
“See you soon,” she replied softly.
Then, without another word, he turned off his flashlight and started back, into the Stygian darkness.
59
ASGHAR AND TOMAS WORKED THEIR way slowly down a dark rock-walled corridor. Both held Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns across the chests. They also wore hip-holstered Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistols, and a military-grade tactical knife strapped above the ankle. They were ready to fire at anything that moved in the darkness ahead of them. To keep their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they used a slender red light stick to see their way around the many turns while reflecting as little light as possible off the stone surfaces.
The Merchants of Death had trained in southern Turkey, near the mountain region that Alexander the Great had conquered nearly three thousand years earlier. They had trained in a copper mine, using the same red chemical tube lights to practice moving in darkness. And they had practiced firing their weapons at targets in low light. And Maximilian, ever the cunning perfectionist in military planning and tactics, had drilled them until they were ready for armed combat in pitch blackness.
As they moved cautiously around each turn, creeping through the darkness while casting a faint red glow across the rock walls and low ceiling, they felt a calm that seemed almost strange after the thunderous bedlam of the past hour. Each of them had killed several Secret Service agents in the hotel, along with various civilians who had been caught in the attack. They had answered Maximilian’s call to battle with eagerness. Never before had they felt like part of something so important, so powerful. And they felt enormous pride serving their leader in this great campaign against the disease of powerful nations imposing their will on the less powerful. So each time they had seen an American Secret Service agent fall during the fast, chaotic fight, they had felt their excitement and jubilation grow. For these were the great, heroic actions that had been missing from their lives.
Rounding the next corner, they heard a faint noise. They knelt, staring into the darkness. Was something there? It was so hard to see anything in this blackness.
And then, as they peered into the black void, they saw two quick flashes of light, just before they fell.
60
AT THE SHARP, LOUD CRACK of two gunshots, John instinctively covered the president while drawing his gun. Shielding her against the limestone, he pointed his P229 out into the tunnel, prepared to fight whatever threat emerged.
After ten seconds of silence, he said to Rebecca, “Cover her while I check.”
Rebecca had also drawn her pistol and crowded beside him to help shield the president. “David’s down there,” she said.
“I know.”
“Two quick shots and silence. That’s how agents shoot, not terrorists.”
“I know. He’s probably fine, but those gunshots will have carried to anyone within a mile of us. If they aren’t already close by, they will be soon.”
Turning toward the dark path, he caught President Clarke’s terrified expression. The general rule was to conceal potential threats and dangers from the president, but his personal connection with her overrode the normal guidelines. So with as much confidence as he could muster, he said, “Ma’am, no matter what comes at us, we will protect you.”
She nodded, in what was no doubt her best attempt to conceal her concern for all of them. He knew that she could accept death as a possible cost of leading their country on the world’s stage, but it was his job to see that she never had to make that sacrifice.
Turning, he plunged into the darkness.
* * *
As Maximilian’s men split off in pairs into the various side tunnels, the numbers around him shrank from twenty-four to fourteen. The risk of friendly fire rose, and so did his fear that they might not find the president in time. Eventually, American and French response teams would figure out that she had escaped into the tunnels.
Fifteen minutes had passed since he and his men left the catacombs. Running ahead of his fighters down the narrow passageway, he felt a surge of frustration at the way the president’s team continued to evade defeat. The ancient tunnel system was too complex to guarantee him victory now, and even if he found the president, he would no longer enjoy an overwhelming advantage in a firefight against her protectors in these long, tight corridors.
Never mind the suicide mission he had promised his men; he had always planned to walk away from this night alive after the president was dead. He and Kazim had made special arrangements with a small elite group within their ranks to improve their odds of survival. But now, faced with the prospect of failing his mission, he found himself ignoring even the desire to live.
The muffled crack of a distant gunshot jolted him from his reverie. Immediately, a second shot followed. Then silence.
“That’s it!” he said excitedly after pausing, hoping to hear more shots. “They’re behind us. A branching tunnel we passed somewhere. Move! Hurry!”
As they ran back through the tunnels, Maximilian felt hope return. The president had failed to escape, and now she was trapped somewhere, completely surrounded by his men, waiting in terror until his little army descended on her and shot her to pieces.
61
MAXIMILIAN MET FOUR MORE OF his men as they came trotting out of two side tunnels. Because he had separated his fighters into pairs searching the many branching tunnels, he could now cross off those branches as the men returned, and thus narrow down the possibilities for where the shots came from.
The gunfire had been loud, confirming that he and his men would be closer to the source than Kazim, who may already have reached the tour section of the catacombs. If Kazim and his men were now close enough to have heard the shots, they would also be running back this way.
As he kept moving back through the tunnels, the dark, curving path seemed strange and unfamiliar. He almost couldn’t believe he had just come from this way only ten minutes earlier. The intertwined passages, dark and featureless in his headlamp, were like the ocean, with no memorable marks to navigate by. He felt as if he were in a forest blanketed in thick fog, or wandering through a desert of bright, vast nothingness.
He moved fast down the winding, narrow passages.
After he had heard from all but Tomas and Asghar, he motioned for the others to move into the branch where the missing Merchants of Death had gone. He was almost relieved when he realized just how close to the catacombs the president had turned off the main path. It showed how desperate she must be. How close he must have already come to catching her! And he knew from his study of the maps that all these branching tunnels were dead ends.
Maximilian had half his men race into the side tunnel, and the other half wait just outside it. He listened once more in the direction of the distant Catacomb breach that his demolition team had made earlier in the night. The closest Kazim could be was somewhere inside the Empire of the Dead, heading toward him. He could not be less than five minutes away.
And Maximilian couldn’t risk waiting.
So he checked his pistol and tactical knife and adjusted his headlamp to cast a wider beam. Then, with his dozen best remaining men, he set off after the others, into the last refuge of his prey.
62
JOHN MOVED WITH QUICK, SILENT steps. After losing his suit jacket and tie in the elevator shaft, he had rolled up the sleeves of his once-white shirt at the gate to the Empire of the Dead. He held his pistol out and forward with a two-hand grip, elbows close to the ribs. Two shots had come from this tunnel, and he had no idea where David was. He moved cautiously. David could be dead, and an army of attackers could be creeping toward him, only yards away. The full magazine of hollow-point .357 SIG rounds gave him twelve quick shots, which could do serious damage, but he would have given his pension for an SR-16 assault rifle. Even a laser dazzler, one of the Secret Service’s newer toys, would come in handy, allowing him to blind
any attackers, stopping them in their tracks and disorienting them while he followed up with lethal force.
Moving around another turn, he smelled the warm discharge of gunfire. He must be only feet away from where the shots had gone off. He wouldn’t normally have been able to smell burned powder so easily, but the scent hung in the close, still air. Flashlight off, he moved as silently as a cat, listening for any sound that might reveal another person. After creeping another ten feet through the darkness, he saw a faint glow coming from the wall of the next turn and heard a soft shuffling. Moving closer, he felt along the wall with his left hand while the right kept the pistol trained forward.
Then the sound stopped, and the light went out. Whoever it was had also heard something. Perhaps someone else was coming, or perhaps they had heard him despite his stealthy movements. He steadied his aim and remained motionless. The silence made him anxious. It was as if each party were hunting the other, waiting for the other guy to make the fatal first mistake by moving. For ten excruciating seconds, he waited, gun leveled at the darkness before him.
Then, just when he feared that his mind was playing tricks on him in the silence, he heard a voice whisper, “It’s me.”
John relaxed. David had held the tunnel against whatever threat entered it.
“What happened?” he said, flipping his flashlight back on. “Your shots?”
“Yeah,” David answered, coming around the bend and into the light, gun down in ready position. “Two men. They were making their way down the tunnel.”
John moved forward and saw two bodies on the floor of the tunnel. Their guns had been removed, and it looked as if David had been rifling their pockets for anything else of tactical use. He was holding the men’s headlamps.
“Just these two,” John muttered. “They must have split up their men to scour the branching tunnels. It’s a good strategy. Down here, even one gunshot may as well be a signal flare to the others.”
“I couldn’t do it quietly,” David said. “Not two of them.”
“I know,” John said. “But the others will be here soon.”
“Do we fight them here?” David asked.
“No. Back closer to the president. We need to buy as much time and space as possible, and we’ll be stronger if we’re all together.”
“We’ll be trapped back there.”
“We’re trapped no matter what,” John said. The words had a bitter taste.
Then he squeezed David’s shoulder. “Son, we have nowhere else to go. But no matter what happens, we won’t let these bastards get to the president. I don’t care how bad it gets.”
David nodded. Picking up the two submachine guns from the dead attackers, he crossed the slings over his head so the weapons would rest comfortably against his back.
Turning from the bodies, John motioned for David to follow as he ran back down the tunnel toward the president. Soon the enemy would find them, but his team was better armed now, and they had the favorable terrain of curved rock walls to hide behind.
63
MAXIMILIAN HADN’T MADE IT FAR down the side tunnel when his light caught the cluster of men stopped at the bodies of Tomas and Asghar. A jolt of concern shot through him to see how easily the president’s protectors had killed two of his most skilled fighters.
“The president must be very close,” he said to the dozen soldiers crammed in front of him. More were rushing up from behind.
“Two shots and two bodies,” he continued. “They didn’t even get off a shot. They were taken out by surprise. At least one of her men must have waited in ambush. It means they don’t think they can outrun us.” He looked down at Tomas’s body, coiled unnaturally after falling against the rock wall of the ancient quarry, his face pushed up against the hard limestone.
“They’ve trapped themselves,” he mused. “And I think they know it.”
“Then let’s keep going and kill them,” said a young soldier next to him.
Maximilian looked at the kid, whose name was Abdali. In those eager eyes, he saw the same passion for simple victory that he himself had felt long ago. It was a time in his youth when he had fought for Israel, before all his struggles and sacrifices had driven him to the edge of madness after Rabin’s assassination. That madness had led him to revenge against the fanatic nationalists who had ultimately turned Israel against him, labeling him a criminal and forcing him to flee the country he had once loved. But that love had died with his past life, replaced by the hatred he now carried for the country that had turned its back to him. They were not his people anymore, but the world would see only the simple labels of his past without understanding the complexity of his journey. After the president was killed and they discovered the false evidence linked to Israel—which was planted in their starting warehouse and tied to the young man who had martyred himself in the hotel room fire earlier this night—Americans would be enraged, and their diplomatic ties with Israel would be severely damaged, if not ruptured beyond repair. The Middle East would become even more unstable, and the world would be without any strong support from Western powers to mobilize in the region. Hannibal had not invaded Italy to destroy the Roman army and sack the great city. He had known that Rome was too powerful to be conquered thus. Through all his maneuvering and battling across Italy, Hannibal’s true goal had always been to weaken and break the alliances that Rome had made—usually by duress—with the various tribes scattered across the Mediterranean peninsula of antiquity. And so, too, would Maximilian use the American president’s assassination, and the false evidence against Israel, to help break up the Western world’s many alliances with the Middle East and northern Africa. And then his leader, Dominik Kalmár, could further advance their organization’s initiatives against Western governments.
His mind returned to the young soldier’s face in front of him. Abdali had a few scruffy hairs growing on his chin and cheeks, as if he was trying desperately to become a man like all the bearded warriors on their team.
“We must proceed carefully,” Maximilian said. “They could be waiting in ambush to kill more of us.”
“But if we don’t hurry, they might escape.”
Maximilian smiled at Abdali. None of his other men would have spoken to him like this, but this inexperienced kid was more fired up from the chase than the others.
“Yes, but I can’t risk so many lives only to discover we’ve all been led into a trap. I could send one man as a scout, though, and the rest could follow a little ways behind him. Only the bravest of the brave could take on such a task.”
“I could do it,” Abdali offered. “I’m fast and quiet. They will not ambush me.”
Maximilian glanced at the other dark, bearded faces arrayed in the wide beam of his headlamp.
“Let him go,” suggested a man with a patchwork of scars near his left eye.
A few others grunted in approval.
Maximilian looked back at the youth and nodded. “You are brave. A true warrior—like I was at your age.”
The kid grinned.
“Remember,” Maximilian continued, “I think they are trapped. Move fast. And make sure you fire your weapon when you encounter them. Do not let them take you by surprise. We will be right behind you, and we must know exactly when you reach them, so we can be ready. Now, go!”
Abdali turned and sprinted down the passageway.
Maximilian admired the kid’s loyalty, but this was the same youthful fervor that got so many young men killed in battles throughout history. It was the same type of loyalty that he had held for his motherland for so long before his country’s government had made him a criminal and an outcast—a betrayal that Israel was soon to regret.
The kid would die, he was sure of it. But it was a life he was willing to sacrifice to discover how far in front of them the president’s men were hiding. He couldn’t risk sending a large force into an ambush, as Caius Flaminius had foolishly done against Hannibal at Lake Trasimene. But he could tactically send
one brave youth to his death. And to do so, he had been more than willing to use the same wiles, manipulating loyalty for his own ends—the same trick that had been used so successfully on him during his own vulnerable, idealistic youth.
But as his men began jogging carefully behind the kid, it occurred to Maximilian that he may have miscalculated. Abdali was much faster than he had imagined—perhaps from his eagerness to prove himself as a soldier. The courage of youth knew no bounds. And in just twenty seconds, the faded rim of light from the kid’s headlamp had vanished into the dark, serpentine tunnel.
There was danger if Abdali should reach the president too far ahead of the main force, for it would damage the timing of his men’s attack.
Yelling for his men to move faster, he cursed himself for neglecting to caution the boy not to get too far ahead of the group. It was the one thing that might give the Americans enough warning of his movement—a mistake that Hannibal would never have made. It was the one thing that could ruin his tactical surprise.
Desperate to maintain the element of surprise, he raced as fast as he could without stumbling. The president’s death would set geopolitical events in motion and show all bullying nationalists what happened to people when their government placed its own interests above the basic needs of the rest of humanity.
His vision was only moments away from realization. One death to change the world, succeeding where even Hannibal had failed. He ran so hard that his light jounced this way and that, giving the illusion of shaking tunnel walls, as if he were at the epicenter of a great earthquake that would soon rattle the globe.
64
