Deep Fire Rising

by Du Brul, Jack

  “Clear,” he shouted and slowly got to his feet.

  Sykes had to jump from what little remained of the fifth-floor landing. He hit the ground and rolled. The air here was clearer and both men stripped off the restrictive gas masks.

  “Which way?” Sykes asked.

  “Looks like they were protecting the hall to the right.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Dopey, it’s Doc. We’re on four now. Watch yourself. The fifth is burning and looks like the fire’s spreading.”

  “Roger, Doc. It’s already eaten through a few spots.”

  “Grumpy, what’s happening on one?”

  “Quiet, sir. A couple of old monks came down the main stairs five minutes ago. They didn’t see me and I let them leave the monastery through a side door.”

  “Stay there. We’re working our way down. Bash, you seen anything on the second floor?”

  “Negative, Doc, but that don’t mean much. There must be fifty staircases here. The target group could have gone through when Hap and I were checking another area.”

  “I know,” Doc acknowledged. “Do your best.”

  He and Mercer exchanged a worried look and took off at a dead sprint, smoke pouring off their uniforms like vaporous cloaks. Above them the fire raged unchecked.

  This floor was much more ornate than the one above. The carpets were thicker, the gilt more plentiful, the rooms better furnished. In one Mercer spied a collection of delicate vases near an open window. They were so thin that he could see the weak orange glow from the upstairs fire through them. He could only guess at their value. Another room was papered in incredible examples of calligraphy and ink and brush paintings.

  Tisa’s Order sat on a priceless horde of Chinese art, perhaps the greatest outside government control. The entire structure was a living museum and in an hour or two the centuries-old building, filled with untold treasures, would be nothing but a smoking ruin.

  “Doc?” It was Grumpy, whispering so softly that Mercer had to press the speaker deeper into his ear.

  “Go, Grump.”

  “I’ve got the target. They’re about fifty yards away, crossing the main foyer.”

  “How many with her?”

  “Twelve to fifteen. Tell Snow his Elvis look-alike has her in a hammerlock.”

  Mercer picked up his pace, shedding his heavy pack as he ran. He had enough ammo in the pouches attached to his harness to see this through. Sykes struggled to keep up. He ran blindly down the first staircase he came across. At the landing, a group of monks clustered fearfully near a full-sized statue of Buddha. The reclining figure was covered in gold, and the Enlightened One’s half-closed eyes were fathomless blue cabochon sapphires. It appeared the monks were trying to find a way to save the statue. Mercer was sure they’d debate the rescue until the fire killed them where they stood. He fired a burst from his M-4 into the ceiling above the men and they scattered like pigeons.

  Unbelievably, the third floor was more opulent than the fourth. What Mercer didn’t know was that the monastery was laid out so novitiates lived in splendor when they joined the Order, and only as they learned the mysteries and mastered their own desires would they move up the building, shedding luxuries and amenities as they progressed. Only after decades of service would they be allowed to occupy the stark topmost floor. It was the reverse of how the rest of the world worked, where those gaining success could accumulate and enjoy tangible fruits of their labor.

  A door just off the landing opened and someone tossed an object into the hallway. Mercer threw himself back, dropping and rolling behind the golden statue an instant before the grenade detonated. The concussion was a hammer slap to his ears. Part of the statue’s gold veneer melted, and drops were blown across the foyer to splattered against the wall like gilded Rorschach blotches. The statue itself, made from the aromatic wood of myrrh trees, had been shredded by the blast. One of Buddha’s jewel eyes was missing; the other had been turned to powder.

  The door opened again and a figure ducked his head out before retreating an instant later. Mercer searched for his rifle and saw it lying three yards beyond his reach. A young monk stepped through the door to check his work, a pistol in one hand, a second grenade in the other. He searched the area with his eyes, seemingly unconcerned with the destruction of the priceless statue. He spotted Mercer cowering behind the figure’s pedestal. His gun came up and he fired a snap shot that blew off the remainder of Buddha’s head.

  Before he could take better aim, Sykes dropped the monk with a shot from up the stairs. He joined Mercer on the third floor. “Are you okay?”

  Mercer barely heard Sykes’s voice over the ringing in his ears. He nodded anyway. With Tisa only two floors below, nothing else mattered. He gathered up his fallen rifle as two more robed men fired at them from down the hall. They were well protected behind a massive cabinet covered in ornate scrollwork. Mercer unclipped one of the concussion grenades he’d been issued. He pulled the pin and held it for a moment before lobbing it down the hall. He and Sykes covered their ears and screwed their eyes closed. In the confined space, the flash/bang had nearly the same effect as a fragmentation grenade.

  One of the men staggered from around the tall bureau and collapsed. Mercer charged forward, firing three-round bursts to keep the other pinned. He stopped just short of the cabinet, held his gun around the corner and fired blind. When he looked, the second monk lay in a pool of blood, his woolen robe holed a dozen times.

  “Clear,” he shouted back at Sykes and continued on, looking for a stairwell to get him to the ground floor.

  Two stories above them, the fire had weakened a secondary support column for the building’s pagoda roof. The massive timber failed under the load of the baked tiles. The result was as if that part of the monastery had been dynamited. Tons of wood and barrel tiles fell inward in an implosion that pulled more material into the crater. The sloping roof lost the counterweight of its own construction and the entire eastern side of the temple sagged. A flood of loosened barrel tiles went crashing into the courtyard in an avalanche that quickly formed twenty-foot mounds of rubble.

  The other three sides of the roof swayed, shedding tiles like a fish being scaled as wind tore through the burning structure. Lances of flame climbed seventy feet into the air, fueled by the ancient wood and bellowslike gusts funneling down the valley. As the building shifted, windows exploded from their frames in staccato pulses, first north, then south, until the glass from two thousand panes littered the ground.

  Inside, Mercer was thrown against a wall as the floors above began to pancake. One wing of the monastery collapsed entirely, dragging more sections with it. Dust billowed from the heap of wreckage in waves of ash and debris that engulfed the length of the valley. It was so heavy that even the ferocious Alpine winds couldn’t clear it. Mercer ran blindly, feeling the building tearing itself apart.

  “Sit rep,” he heard Sykes shouting over the radio.

  “Doc, it’s Grumpy. The target’s past me. I couldn’t risk a shot. They went through a door about fifty feet off the main foyer. It’s not an exterior door so I think they went underground.”

  “Shit,” Mercer cursed as the others reported their position and progress. Tracking her in the enormous monastery was hard enough. Trying to find her in the warren of tunnels he was sure was under the building would be next to impossible.

  As more of the building came down, he expected the defenders to give up the fight and try to save themselves, but as he came to a staircase, someone down on the second floor fired up at him.

  Mercer pulled the pins from a pair of flash/bangs and let them roll down the steps. The explosion blew apart the bottom of the stairs and the whole structure nearly collapsed. He loosed a short burst from the M-4, tentatively stepped on the top stair and leapt back as the staircase caved in.

  He and Sykes abandoned the ruined stairs in search of another.

  “This is Bash, me and Happy are on the first floor. Grump, give me your position.
”

  Mercer tuned out the radio chatter. The third floor was burning freely now. The air was full of smoke and sparks that singed his skin and burned away tufts of hair. After what seemed like an endless search, the confining hallways opened up to a long balcony overlooking a mezzanine. This wasn’t the main foyer where the team was assembling, but a secondary space that was still larger than the lobby of most hotels. A set of stairs spiraled down along three walls, descending past the second floor and ending at the first. Standing at the railing, Mercer and Sykes swept the area through their rifle sights. It appeared deserted. They were about to descend when the wall behind them disintegrated and a torrent of flame exploded across the landing. They were both lifted from their feet and launched down the stairs.

  Mercer tucked himself into a ball as the scalding pressure wave blew him over the steps. Rolling as he fell, he was hit repeatedly by Sykes tumbling right behind him. He caught a boot to the mouth that split his lip and another to the lower back that felt like it had gouged out a kidney. He smashed into a wall hard enough to arrest his headlong plunge and managed to get a hand on Sykes to stop him too. They climbed to their feet.

  Mercer cleared his mouth of blood. “You all right?”

  Sykes grabbed his trigger finger and winced as he straightened the misshapen digit. It had broken when it got caught in the trigger guard of his assault rifle. “Fine.”

  A startled shout from below gave them a second’s warning to fall flat before auto-fire raked the staircase. Tufts of carpet and wood splinters filled the air as rounds tore through the steps. They were pinned. Above them the balcony was an inferno; the newel posts burned like roman candles, and banks of smoke poured over the landing. Below, the unseen gunmen were getting more accurate. Bullet holes appeared in the wall a foot from where Mercer lay.

  “Bash—Snow and I are pinned,” Sykes radioed. “I don’t know where the hell we are, but we need help.” He fired over the railing, drawing redoubled counterfire.

  “I hear you,” Happy replied. “Hold one.”

  “We don’t have one, Hap.”

  Down below, one of the fanatical Order members cocked an RPG-7 under his arm and fired the rocket-propelled grenade at the stairs. The explosive-tipped shell impacted well above Mercer and Sykes, but the charge blew the cantilevered stairs from the wall. The entire structure began to tilt, wood pulling from the wall with a sound like an agonized moan. The staircase had been pegged to the wall with two-inch-thick dowels that remained in place as the steps collapsed. Mercer reached across the widening gap between the stairs and the wall and took hold of one of these pegs just as the section he was lying on fell free.

  Sykes just managed to grab his own dowel.

  The staircase crashed to the first floor, leaving both men hanging on the wall twenty feet above the ground, exposed and unable to defend themselves. The killing shots were a moment away.

  But the gunfire came from outside the foyer. Bashful and Happy had engaged.

  Mercer didn’t waste a second. If not for the debris of the collapsed staircase he could have let go, but the pile of shattered wood was unstable and even a drop from a few feet invited a broken leg. The dowel projecting from the wall was easily two feet long. He shifted his grip and began to pendulum his body, arcing across the void to reach the next peg in line, about three feet in front of him and two feet farther down the curved wall. He snagged it with his left hand and let momentum swing him down to the third. Like a child on the monkey bars, he looped his way down the wall as bullets sliced crisscrossing tracks through the smoke.

  At the bottom he found cover amid the demolished staircase, but he did not shoot at the robed gunmen across the foyer. Sykes was barely halfway down and Mercer couldn’t risk drawing fire until the commando was safe. The instant Sykes dropped next to him, Mercer sighted in on one of the gunmen and put a bullet into his chest. His partner fumbled with another RPG-7. Mercer fired again, catching him in the hip as he pulled the rocket launcher’s trigger. The missile went errant, climbing straight up on a column of flame until it impacted on the burning ceiling three floors above. The explosion seemed to shake the monastery to its foundation. More of the roof came down. One chunk landed on the gunman, crushing him flat.

  The shooting suddenly ceased as Bashful and Happy dispatched the last of the killer monks. “I think we’re clear, Doc.”

  “Roger.” Sykes stood.

  Mercer and he teamed up with the other two and together they ran to the main mezzanine, where Grumpy, Sleepy and Dopey waited to continue the search. The first floor was ablaze now. The floor was littered with smashed tiles and soot lay thick on every surface. If not for the wind howling through the building, the monastery’s interior would have been hotter than a furnace.

  “Where’d they go?” Sykes panted. He wiped grime from his face.

  Grumpy nodded down a hallway. “There’s a door down there. I saw them as they went through. On the other side it looks like a cave or something.”

  Mercer nodded. “This place was built on top of a geologic hot spot, like Yellowstone Park. That must be one of the old lava tubes they went down. I was afraid of this.”

  “Why?”

  “A typical building only has four sides and so many exits. You can’t get too lost. But down there you take one wrong turn and we could end up miles from where they’ve got Tisa.”

  A tremendous crash on the far side of the monastery ended the rest of the discussion. The building was coming down. Either they had to get out now or follow Tisa’s captors into the subterranean labyrinth.

  Sykes gestured Grumpy to take point. They ran to the doorway, fanning out as Dopey, their demolitions expert, checked it for booby traps. Finding nothing around the jamb, he stood aside to use the butt of his M-4 to ease the door slightly. It creaked on its hinges, swung open a foot and exploded in a blinding flash.

  Dopey remained silhouetted against the blast for a fraction of a second before his body was blown ten feet down the hallway. He tumbled against a column. Much of his uniform had been stripped from his body, as well as most of his skin.

  The blast wave rolled over the rest of the men, covering them in powdered stone and wood shavings. Behind them a stone column collapsed and a section of the second floor smashed into the foyer. Flames rose from the debris.

  “Goddamn it,” someone screamed as they raced from their cover positions. Sykes was the first one at Dopey’s side. Grumpy and Mercer stayed back, covering the tunnel entrance with the M-4s in case the explosion brought an ambush. The rest of the men clustered around their fallen comrade. Their movements were purely reflex. There was nothing any of them could do. Dopey had been killed instantly.

  “That’s two the fuckers got,” Sykes hissed. “I want them. So help me God I want them.”

  They approached the still-smoking cave entrance. The men carried their rifles high, shoulders hunched, fingers curled around triggers. The barrels were in constant motion, sweeping corners and shadows.

  Beyond the ruined doorway, the tunnel was a circular fissure that ran down into the earth. A few lamps bolted to the ceiling provided dingy light. It was deserted. The men stayed in a tight group as they inched into the shaft. In the tight confines, staying together reduced the risk of friendly fire and allowed them a denser barrage of counterfire if they were attacked.

  The passage corkscrewed and twisted as they went, providing blind corners that needed to be scouted and slowed their progress. Mercer could feel Tisa slipping further and further away. How long ago had she come this way? How far ahead was she?

  Sykes was leading the party and dropped down on his haunches, holding up a gloved fist. The men stopped and lowered themselves. From around the next bend a bright glow crept up the tunnel. Sykes moved forward cautiously, his boots making a bare whisper on the stone floor.

  He paused at the corner. “Jesus. Come on.”

  The men ran up. The chamber had once been richly appointed with antiques, desks, lamps, and tall bureaus. Two walls w
ere dominated by bookshelves. Mercer recognized the texts from the single journal Tisa had stolen from Rinpoche-La. These were the watchers’ archives, the books on which scribes had written the oracle’s predictions that people had gone out to verify.

  Everything was burning. The shelves, the furniture, and the books. There wasn’t enough air in the room for the flames to grow high, but enough remained for the priceless artifacts to smolder and blacken before their eyes. Mercer was certain that Donny Randall had set the fire to delay them.

  As Sykes and his team searched through the growing smoke for an exit, Mercer tried to approach one of the shelves. The heat was intense, as if the room was an oven. He made a grab for one of the books, only to have it disintegrate in a burst of flame and ash. He tried for two more with the same results. At his fingertips was the knowledge to save millions of people and yet it was out of reach.

  He unbuckled his combat harness and let it drop to the floor, then stripped off his battle jacket.

  “Mercer, what are you doing? We gotta go!” Sykes had found the door out of the chamber.

  “I have to save them!” Mercer shouted over the crackle of burning wood and parchment. He scanned the rows, hoping to find how the chronicles were arranged, but couldn’t make out the titles through the smoke. He made a guess that the last books were the most recent. Using his jacket, he swept the last three books from the shelf and bundled them as quickly as he could.

  They were as hot as bricks from a kiln and his hands blistered. He ignored the pain, clamping the jacket tightly around the books, trying to smother the embers. He was too slow. Curls of smoke grew from the fabric and it began to blacken. He tried to beat at those spots with his hands, but it did no good. The entire bundle caught fire. Mercer jumped back, momentarily blinded by the flash. The precious collection burned like a torch—lost for all time.

  “Mercer, let’s go!”

  He turned reluctantly from the chronicles. The remainder of the shelves were sheeted in flames. Centuries of painstaking work was gone. He snatched up his harness and rifle and followed Sykes deeper into the ground.