by Bryan Devore
They entered another chamber similar to the one where they had broken through the wall. She shined her light on the far wall and saw that it was another of the IGC walls built centuries ago. It had taken all four of them to knock down the last one, but this one had large cracks running between the stones and looked less sturdy.
“You still have your flash-bang?” she asked David.
“Yeah.”
“If you throw it at the base of that wall in the center, I bet the concussion wave will loosen the wall for us. It might even make it collapse.”
“Okay,” he said.
But then, instead of removing the crowd control grenade and tossing it at the wall, he had pointed his headlamp away from the wall, as if noticing something else. “Wait,” he said. “My God, look at that!”
She followed his light with her own, and there, in the corner of the cul-de-sac, was a steel ladder, mounted in the limestone and stretching from the floor up into a hole in the chamber's ceiling.
“Yes!” she said, lugging the president over and shining her light upward. The ladder rose up through a small roundish section cutting through the bedrock as far up as her light allowed her to see. “It’s one of the IGC shafts used by the workers to get in and out of the tunnel system. This is what we’ve been looking for. It should go all the way up to the Paris streets—maybe eighty feet up.”
She looked back at him. “This is our way out! It’s our only hope! Can you climb?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think I can make it with my leg,” he said. “And I’ll be useless at helping carry the president. We’ll never make it up together. They must be close by now.”
“I can’t carry the president alone—not up the ladder,” she said.
“You don’t have a choice.”
She could scarcely believe what he was suggesting. Her light beam froze on him. His face was contorted in pain, and he leaned against the side of the chamber, looking as if he might topple over at any moment.
“She’s too heavy,” she said.
“You’re strong. Keep her close to your body. Just like when you saved that drowning guy when you were a lifeguard.”
She knelt by the base of the ladder and carefully slid the president off one shoulder before gently lowering her to the rock floor.
“I’ll drop her,” she said.
“You won’t. Use the ladder to take the weight off. Take short breaks. The shaft is small—you can use the sides to help prop her up.”
With two fingers, she checked the president’s pulse at the left wrist. It was strong enough.
“They’ll kill you,” she said without looking at him.
“Give me your gun,” he said. “I’ll hold them off while you get the president to safety.”
“No.”
“It’s our best chance. It’s what John would want us to do.”
David stumbled and collapsed onto the rocky floor. Hearing him fall, she rushed over to him.
“You have to make it,” she pleaded, her voice cracking.
“I can’t,” he rasped. In his momentarily lost stare, she could see that he was accepting in his mind the near certainty of approaching death. “I’m sorry, Becky.”
“Please,” she murmured.
But even as she said this, she knew he was right. The assassins were surely very close, and while climbing the ladder, she and the president would be sitting ducks. The smart move was for David to stay here and protect her as long as possible while she hauled the president to safety. But it was a devastating realization. It was hard to let go of him, to let go of everything they might have had together.
“I can hold them off for a while,” he said. “Give you some extra time to make it up the ladder. There has to be an opening to the street up there somewhere. The ladder will take you there.”
“I’m terrified . . . What if I drop her?”
“This is the only way. Keep the headlamp, but give me your flashlight. I can use it to confuse the attackers.”
Rebecca felt an ache in her chest. The past few hours had been an adrenaline-fueled dream where half of what she had done and felt was conditioned in her from training. But nothing had prepared her for what was happening in this moment. David was ready to give his life, but she wasn’t sure she could let him go.
“Becky, please. Now, or it’ll be too late.”
He was right. Throwing her arms around his neck, she gave him the most impassioned one-second kiss of her life.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “It’s up to you now. I’ll hold them off as long as I can. You’re the last one left—protect the president!”
She pulled her Mini Maglite off her belt and handed it to him, then jumped up and hurried back to where President Clarke still lay unconscious.
Reaching under the uninjured arm, she tried to pin the president between her and the ladder. It was awkward trying to lift the body past the first few rungs with her. The president weighed 120 not counting clothes and Kevlar, and her dead weight felt like twice that.
The ladder went up through a dark hole in the eight-foot ceiling, and she couldn’t gauge how much higher it went. She could only pray that it led up to another passageway or—she scarcely dared hope—up to a Paris street. She tried to slide the president’s bottom against the ladder. By sandwiching the unconscious woman between her and the ladder, with her arms reaching under each arm to hold the rungs, she wriggled her knees in under the president’s thighs and worked first one foot and then the other up to the next rung, then pushed till she could ease the president’s buttocks back onto the next rung. It was awkward and difficult, and after struggling to climb up the first five rungs, she realized it was more than she could do.
“This isn’t working,” she said.
“You have to make it work,” David said.
She tried something else—something she hadn’t done in years. Sidling her body next to the president’s, she reached her right arm across the neck and under the left arm, hooking her hand under the armpit and pulling her tightly to her side. It was the way she had been taught in lifesaving class when swimming in a sidestroke with an unconscious swimmer—the same stroke she had used when saving the drowning swimmer before she left for college. The lifeguard hold now kept her left arm completely free, but instead of swimming with an unconscious body buoyed up by the water, she had to haul it up a ladder.
But it seemed to work. She moved up one rung on the ladder. Then another. President Clarke’s body felt heavy, but she had to tense up and lift up for only a few seconds, one rung at a time, then pause twice that time before lifting again. During the pauses, Rebecca could shove the president’s backside onto the rung to take much of the weight off her arm. These brief pauses gave her arm just enough rest before she hauled them both up to the next rung.
She had just reached the ceiling and was about to continue up through the tunnel. During her final pause before rising up into the dark vertical shaft above the roof, she looked back at David. Through a panting breath, she said, “You find a way to stay alive, you hear me?”
He nodded but said nothing.
Then she continued the slow, painful slog upward. Pushing into the darkness above, she feared she would never see David again. Leaving him was the most painful thing she had ever done, but she had to bury her emotions and focus on the job.
And with each pull up to a new rung, she relived the agony of each desperate stroke from ten years ago on Lake Dillon. Back then, she had wanted so badly to give up, to let the heavy burden go so that she wouldn’t also drown. But even back then she had sensed the responsibility to save a life. And no matter how heavy the victim or how tired she felt or how much the water tried to pull her under, she couldn’t let them go.
She had been half delirious when fresh arms had grabbed her near the shore and lifted her and the swimmer from the cold water.
The dark, moist tunnel well was quiet except for the sound of dripping water and the soft t
hunk of her shoes hitting each rung. The president’s legs and arms dangled free, gently bouncing against the ladder as she climbed. Her mind was a blur. Her burning muscles begged for relief. She had pulled the president up maybe twenty feet now, with no end in sight and no real hope of ever getting there. But she kept going. No matter how long this agony lasted, she couldn’t let go.
71
DAVID WATCHED AS REBECCA’S FEET vanished up into the dark shaft. He felt the tears well in his eyes, knowing they would never see each other again.
He stood slowly up on his good leg and hobbled to the right corner of the chamber. Turning on one of the Mini Maglites, he set it on the ground and pointed it toward the entrance. Then he hobbled to the wall just inside the entrance, and placed Rebecca’s Mini Mag on the ground, also pointing at the spot where the men would enter the chamber. Then he hopped back to the far side of the chamber, sat down on the ground with his guns around him, and turned off his headlamp.
There he waited for the enemy horde to enter the small chamber. The room gave no cover but that of the darkness. Sitting up with his legs stretched out in front of him on the rock floor, he awaited his death. He could hear it coming, its many voices now echoing down the stone passageway. It dawned on him that he was far from home, in a single giant tomb built by people long dead. He couldn’t image a lonelier place to meet his end. His thoughts flashed briefly to his grandfather on his deathbed, weakened and dying and surrounded by family and friends until the very end, saying good-bye to everyone who arrived in time, before slipping peacefully into eternity. Eight-year-old David, unable to understand death, had cried for days after his grandfather was gone. But now, sitting injured and alone near the catacombs, somewhere far below the City of Lights and waiting for his enemy to rush out of the dark passageways and tear him to pieces, he realized that his grandfather had had the best possible death that anyone could hope for in this life.
He laid his pistol flat between his knees, then set Rebecca’s gun next to it. She had given him her last three magazines, and he stacked them next to his remaining two. He turned his headlight on briefly to check the assault rifle and found that it had fewer rounds remaining than a single pistol magazine. He set it beside him. Two P229 pistols, fully loaded with .357 SIG hollow points, and five extra magazines. Eighty-six rounds, against an unknown number of men with fully automatic weapons. He would be lucky if he lasted ten seconds and killed more than a few.
He turned his headlight off again. Strangely, at this moment it felt supremely natural to do what he was about to do. He prayed—for speed and accuracy in his shots, and for a quick death after he was overrun. Then, opening his eyes, he focused on the spotlighted entrance and began preparing to kill as many as he possibly could. Nothing was going to make it through the chamber entrance as long as he had bullets to fire.
He would need to fire quickly and accurately, and he would need to load new magazines fast. It wouldn’t be easy. His legs were stretched straight out in front of him, and he could feel his injured foot going numb. He was cold and tired and light-headed. But he had enough adrenaline firing through him to do what he soon must do.
The clomping and clattering was growing louder, and he could tell that the terrorists were only seconds away from reaching the chamber. His chest heaved from the anticipation. Everything that had happened to him in his life, it seemed, had been fate’s way of preparing him for what was about to happen. This was his moment, the true purpose of his entire life, and he would give it all he had.
Two men rushed into the room. He fired two shots, dropping them both. Then five more rushed in right behind them. He fired the remaining eleven shots, killing all of them, then picked up the second pistol. The next man paused in the shadows of the entrance, peeked around the corner, and fired a shot, breaking one of the flashlights. David fired two shots. One hit the man’s hand, the other the brain stem. The dead man spun around and fell out into the open.
David ejected the spent magazine and slapped a new one into the first pistol. Then he waited. Nearly a minute passed.
He heard the rumbling of many more men on the edge of darkness, just beyond the eight bodies that lay in a staggered pile near the chamber entrance. Then, with a sudden scream, a small crowd of men rushed into the room, spraying bullets everywhere as if they expected to encounter a half-dozen men. David’s eyes widened. His odds of living another thirty seconds were slim. There were simply too many fighters, coming too fast. He felt neither terrified nor especially brave, as if his awareness had no room for emotions. Even thoughts of dying were gone from his mind except in the most abstract sense. All that existed for him were individual threats, to be neutralized as fast and economically as possible. Target—pop. New target—pop. Threat to the president—pop. He was dropping the men as fast as they rushed around the corner, each shot a kill.
But it didn’t seem to matter how many men he killed. More kept coming.
The onslaught came faster now, as if each new man rushing into the chamber recognized the urgency required to avoid adding himself to the growing pile of corpses by the entrance. And each man was getting closer before dying.
Then a bullet hit David’s left shoulder and knocked him back against the ground. His left arm no longer worked, and it hurt like hell. Sitting halfway up, he emptied the magazine, and more attackers went down, including the one who had shot him. And on they came. Unable to use his left arm, he released the empty magazine, set the pistol down, and reached for a fresh magazine. But with more men rushing around the corner, he had no time to reload. So he fell to his back, grabbed up the submachine gun beside him, and held the trigger, ripping the air with a jackhammer sound and hitting two more men before killing a third, who came at him from only ten feet away. Then it, too, clicked empty.
Sitting up, he put Rebecca’s loaded pistol and the last magazine in his lap and, leaving his empty gun, scooted backward along the rock floor, toward the far wall of the ancient chamber. He was halfway there when two more men burst into the chamber. Forced to stop, he fired, killing both, but not before a bullet hit him in the side. Wheezing and blinking, he was determined to give Rebecca as much extra time as he could before he died.
He fired a few more shots at the next two men rushing through the opening, but then the pistol clicked empty. Ejecting the magazine, he wedged the gun upside down between his knees to slap in the last magazine. It slid into place as four more men rushed around the corner, firing. A bullet clipped his ear, another sliced into the side of his neck, and another shattered his left collarbone. Wincing from the sudden confusion of pain all over his body, he fell back to the dirt. The room felt smaller and louder as more men rushed in. Unable to look up and see them right away, he blindly fired the last magazine toward the sound.
He knew he had little time left. He had done everything possible to delay the men’s entrance into the room, to give Rebecca more time to get the president to safety. He tried to squeeze the trigger again, but it wouldn’t budge. The action was open, ready to chamber a round that he didn’t have. All his magazines were empty. He was finished.
A half-dozen men were now rushing into the room, coming at him like a horde of barbarians, eager to tear him to pieces. They were close now. He had only seconds left.
Then Rebecca’s last words before leaving him here seemed to echo in his ears: “You find a way to stay alive, you hear me?”
And so, as the enemy force came on, their bullets pinging and whining off the rock floor and ceiling and the weak wall right behind him, David dropped the empty gun, pulled the flash grenade off his belt, and flicked it against the bullet-pocked wall behind him. Wrapping his good arm over his head to cover his right ear with the shoulder, and his left ear with his fingertip, he pushed with his good leg and rolled toward the wall just before the device went off.
A dazzling flash and deafening explosion blasted through the chamber. The weak wall beside him, its mortar pierced by bullets and eroded over the centuries, cracked
and buckled and fell in on David.
As the stones from the wall fell, burying him in rubble, his world went from brighter than the sun to black silence.
His last thought, his last prayer, was that he had given Rebecca enough time.
72
WHEN THE SHOOTING STARTED IN the darkness far below, Rebecca never paused. By turns pushing and hauling her unconscious burden up the ladder, she hooked one leg between the president’s legs and onto a lower rung to momentarily take the weight off her right arm. After taking a few deep breaths to gather her strength, she reached up with her left hand, grabbed the next rung, tightened her grip across the president’s chest and underarm, and pulled up with her right arm while pushing up with her right knee.
Using this technique, she managed to lift the president up the ladder another two feet, just as she had done for perhaps forty feet so far. And as with each of the past dozen lifts, this one, too, ended with her desperately pinning the president to the ladder so she could grab a few seconds’ respite. In her exhaustion, her head jerked forward and her headlamp hit the steel rung and went out. She tried to turn it back on, but it was useless. Now she was in utter darkness, her muscles weakening. Even holding the president against the ladder was draining what little strength she had left. She was terrified of how this might end.
The sound of gunfire filled the vertical shaft. It sounded as though David was giving them hell, but she knew there were too many for him to hold off very long. The ladder rose higher into seemingly infinite darkness. Thoughts of hopelessness wormed their way into her mind, and she fought them off. The streets of Paris were somewhere up there, just beyond her sight.
So she climbed on.
There was no part of her body that didn’t scream in pain. She let out a whimper but immediately gathered her thoughts to move just one more rung upward. And then one more.
