“The general?”
The man shrugged; he didn’t know where St. Cyr might have gone.
Captain Conorado motioned to Sergeant Hyakowa. “Take your squad and go up that way,” he said, pointing up the tunnel where the guards had gone. “Be careful. Meanwhile, we’ll look for the hostages.” He had little doubt they were already gone, but he had to be sure first. “How do we get into these rooms?” he asked the guard.
The guard held up a metal card. Bass snatched it from him. “I’ll handle this, Skipper,” he said.
Captain Conorado informed Brigadier Sturgeon that the hideout was secure but St. Cyr had apparently fled along with the remaining hostages. Company L had lost seven men killed and six wounded. He did not know how many of the guards had survived, but as soon as the headquarters area was searched, he would take the rest of Lima Company up the escape tunnel. Meanwhile, Mike Company was alerted to block any escape attempt at the surface.
A tremendous explosion roared down the tunnel into which Hyakowa and his men had just disappeared. Conorado swore and ran toward the billowing cloud of dust that rolled out into the gallery. Before he could get there, the Marines began stumbling back out, covered with rock dust and coughing.
“I’m okay, I’m okay!” Hyakowa gasped as he staggered back into the gallery. “We’re okay! The goddamned thing went off too far down to get us. I don’t think we’re going very far down there, though.” He wiped dust off his face with the back of his hand.
Bass ran up to where they stood. “They were being kept in cells down that tunnel.” He pointed behind him. “I found this in one.” He held up a soiled and torn dress uniform blouse. “It belonged to MacIlargie. There were two dead guards in the cell, all beat to hell, Skipper, and minus their own clothing.” Despite himself, Bass grinned.
For the first time that day, Captain Conorado smiled.
Then another explosion rumbled up from the tunnel where Bass had just emerged. This one came from much farther down in the mines, but still the passageway filled with dust. Cursing again, Captain Conorado muttered, “This is getting to be a bad habit with me,” and ran into the tunnel, followed by Bass and a dozen other Marines.
The light source inside was dim to begin with but worse now, with dust floating in the air. The tunnel sloped gradually downward. After a hundred meters the artificial light source that illuminated the rest of the complex ended and the party proceeded by the glimmer of glowballs. Warily, weapons at the ready, they went forward. Two hundred meters from the gallery they were stopped by a solid rockfall.
“Somebody doesn’t want us to go any farther. Hard Rocks?” The old miner had been by the captain’s side all the way.
“Captain, best I remember, this tunnel goes on for a long ways, but if you follow it down far enough, it ends in a geothermal pond just beside an underground river. I think it flows eventually into the Carnelian.”
“Can we get around this somehow?”
“I don’t know. Lemme see those charts again. I never spent much time down in that area.”
They stood there in the semidarkness. Captain Conorado thought for a moment. His instincts told him this was the way St. Cyr had escaped. “Goddamn it to hell,” Conorado swore. “Get some goddamned men down here with the equipment to move this shit.” He gestured at the rock fall blocking the tunnel in front of them. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit on my ass while that bastard gets away.”
The corridor outside their cell was empty when the two Marines emerged. MacIlargie carefully slid the door panel shut and it locked with a snap. He fingered the digitized metal card in the dead guard’s uniform pocket. “I wonder where else this thing can get us into?”
They were just down a side tunnel from a huge, brightly lighted gallery. Large groups of guards were running through it toward the sound of a violent firefight going on somewhere ahead. Dean’s pulse began to race. “We’re behind them,” he whispered, meaning the defenders.
“Yeah, but no weapons!” MacIlargie whispered back.
“Then let’s get some.”
A door panel slammed open behind them. Not ten meters away, farther back down the corridor where they stood, was Marston St. Cyr himself with the Ambassador. One of her eyes was almost swollen shut and a thin rivulet of blood seeped out a corner of her mouth. Her hands were secured behind her with plasticuffs.
“What are you two doing there?” St. Cyr shouted.
“We-we’re here to, uh, get the two enlisted Marines, sir,” MacIlargie said, suddenly inspired.
St. Cyr nodded. “Drag them out and kill them. Then join the others. I have business with this woman here.” Yanking her roughly by one arm, he started down the corridor, away from the gallery and into the shadows. As Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys turned to stagger after her captor she took in the Marines at a glance and an expression of recognition came over her face, but she said nothing. The pair disappeared rapidly out of sight down the tunnel.
“What the hell are you two doing down there?” a voice yelled suddenly from the gallery. A big man stood at the tunnel entrance framed in the light from the gallery, one arm akimbo on his right hip, the other cradling his weapon.
“We’re escorting General St. Cyr and his prisoner, sir!” Dean answered.
“What?” the figure’s arm fell to his side and he lowered his weapon.
“We’re going after the general,” MacIlargie said, pointing on down the corridor into the dark shadows. MacIlargie thought to himself, If the bastard comes five meters closer, I can get that weapon away from him.
“What!” the man shouted again. He swore violently and looked over his shoulder. Then he muttered something that sounded like “running out on us,” turned and ran out into the gallery.
“Now what?” Dean asked. MacIlargie didn’t answer. They were fugitives surrounded by heavily armed soldiers who would not hesitate to shoot them. And those soldiers stood between them and the Marines who were coming to their rescue. If they stayed right where they were, they would survive.
“Well...” MacIlargie shrugged and nodded down the dark corridor in the direction St. Cyr had disappeared. “We were told to be her shadow.”
“Right,” Dean replied, and unarmed, with no idea where they were headed, the two started off after St. Cyr and Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys.
Chapter 32
Holding a glowball in his left hand, St. Cyr shoved Wellington-Humphreys, her wrists bound tightly behind her back, along with his right, catching her every few steps as she stumbled in the near darkness.
“Pick up your feet,” he ordered. Then, abruptly, he stopped. Wellington-Humphreys gasped for breath, grateful for the chance to rest. She was also grateful now that one of the guards had given her a battle dress uniform to replace the formal dinner dress she’d had on when abducted. “Quiet,” St. Cyr ordered. “Breathe through your goddamned nose.” He shook her violently, then stood there listening. Aside from their own breathing, total silence enveloped the tunnel around them. “Good, good,” he whispered. “Now to make sure we’re not being followed.” He let go of her for a moment, fished in a cargo pocket and took out a tiny black object. “Detonator,” he said with pride, holding up the little black square.
Wellington-Humphreys gasped. Those two Marines! Somehow they’d managed to escape, and she felt sure they must be following. She couldn’t let St. Cyr detonate that charge. Suddenly energized, she lunged at him. Caught off guard, St. Cyr lost his balance when the woman smashed into him, and they both fell to the floor with a crash. The detonator flew out of his hand and skidded off into the darkness. Recovering quickly, St. Cyr delivered several hard blows to the side of the Ambassador’s head. Hands fastened behind her, she could not defend herself. She lay on the floor, dazed, as St. Cyr scrambled on his knees after the detonator. He retrieved it and pressed the firing switch. A dull thud sounded up the tunnel from where they’d just come, and then the concussion buffeted them as it passed down the tunnel. A thick cloud of pulverized rock dust
engulfed them, temporarily reducing the light from the glowball to a tiny dull spark. They both coughed in the dust.
“You bitch!” St. Cyr gasped. Wellington-Humphreys lay on the floor, all hope gone now, the fight completely taken out of her. In her long and successful career as a diplomat, she had never really cared about the people she represented in her negotiations. Now she could only think of those two Marines, buried under the tons of rock behind them. They had sacrificed their lives for her.
Gradually the dust settled. “That, my dear, is insurance we won’t be followed.” St. Cyr tossed the tiny black box aside. He held the glowball close to Wellington-Humphreys’s face. It was streaked with tears. “You are not a bad specimen,” he said, bending close and running his tongue along her jawline. A terrible rage suddenly welled up inside her and she turned and bit him on the neck.
“Goddamn!” he shouted, and punched her in the head with his balled fist. She staggered back into the wall and collapsed. As she fell hard on her side, at last she understood how someone could kill another person with a knife. The glowball rolled on the floor, eerily illuminating St. Cyr’s legs. “Try that again, and I’ll break your arm,” he shouted
“Put your filthy tongue on me again, you bastard, and I’ll bite your fucking throat out!” Wellington-Humphreys screamed back.
St. Cyr reached down with one arm and hauled her upright. “Any more biting around here, and I’ll do it,” he hissed. “When I get you to where we’re going, Madame Ambassador, I’ll have my way with you until I’m done with you.” With a nasty laugh he shoved her hard on down the tunnel.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“To my bower.” St. Cyr laughed. He felt expansive and confident now. He was still ahead of the wave. “There is an underground river about a kilometer farther down this tunnel. Its channel runs in an old shaft the miners dug two hundred years ago. It flows into the Carnelian Sea. I have a small watercraft just ahead that will take us to the river’s delta. From there it’s a short walk to where I have hidden a 36 V spacecraft. You figure out the rest of the plot.”
A brilliant flash followed immediately by a rush of hot air threw the two Marines head first along the tunnel they’d been trying to negotiate in the almost total darkness. From far ahead they could just make out the tiny speck of light that was St. Cyr’s glowball. Now they lay stunned on the rocky floor as tons of debris crashed down upon the spot where they’d been shuffling along only minutes before.
“Mac!” Dean shouted. His ears were ringing loudly from the blast. At first he was afraid he’d lost his hearing completely.
“Here,” MacIlargie answered from somewhere in front. They had both been picked up by the force of the explosion and hurled down the tunnel. Dean felt wetness on one side of his face. He wiped at it and then put his fingers to his lips. Blood. He began crawling in the direction of MacIlargie’s voice and found him by touch. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Stunned, is all. Well, Shadow, we’re really in the shit now, aren’t we?”
“Yeah—” Suddenly Dean screamed. “Something’s in here with us! It touched me!”
A small, blue-green light began to glow beside Dean’s leg. Quickly it formed the outline of a Woo.
“Ee, gods,” Dean whispered, “one o’ them whatchamacallits!”
“Yeah, yeah!” MacIlargie exclaimed. “Never seen one before. But it must be a Woo. They’re harmless,” he added. “And look, it can generate light!” With that, the Woo glowed even more intensely, as if showing the Marines what it could do. “Stop it, you idiot! He’ll see us!” MacIlargie whispered, and the Woo suddenly stopped glowing. “It understands English,” he exclaimed.
Dean did not believe that, but grateful for the source of light, he decided not to chance insulting the creature, so he kept quiet.
The huge eyes mounted on either side of the Woo’s long narrow head gazed silently at the pair. Then it nodded down the tunnel in the direction St. Cyr had departed. When they did not respond, it nodded again. Then it scuttled down the tunnel a short distance, and beckoned them on with its one armlike appendage.
“It’s gonna guide us, Deano, the little bugger is going to guide us!”
Cautiously, they picked their way along behind the creature, which now scurried down the tunnel in short dashes, emitting just enough light to guide them but not enough to give their presence away.
St. Cyr pushed Wellington-Humphreys into a small gallery out of which led several passages. He put an infra device to his eye and shoved her across the gallery into a branching tunnel. “Half a kilometer down this tunnel we will skirt a geothermal spring that bubbles up through a fissure. It is boiling, so don’t fall in. The path around is negotiable even with your arms tied behind you. Once on the other side, we crawl up a steep slope and we are there.” He smiled voraciously and pushed her onward.
A minute later the Woo, followed closely by the two Marines, skittered through the gallery and unerringly picked the tunnel down which St. Cyr had just disappeared. The Woo increased its pace and the Marines scrambled to keep up with it.
Suddenly, the tunnel began to broaden, and just ahead they could see the faint glow of light and hear voices, one of them clearly that of a woman. The temperature had gradually increased and the air inside the tunnel had turned humid. The Woo had stopped generating light and now squatted at the mouth of the tunnel. The three crouched in the darkness and peered out across a steaming pool of water at St. Cyr, clearly silhouetted by the glowball in his hand as he inched carefully along a rock ledge just above the steamy surface of the water. The sound of running water came to them clearly on the humid air.
Dean put his ear close to MacIlargie’s. “That must be how he’s going to get away. There’s a river somewhere nearby. We’ve gotta stop him now, before it’s too late!”
“How? We don’t have any weapons!”
The Woo reached up to Dean, and between the fingerlike talons that served it as a hand, it clutched a large rock. Dean’s expression changed as he got the idea. MacIlargie caught on almost as fast and groped on the floor of the tunnel for rocks of his own. When the Woo saw that each Marine was ready with a rock in each hand, it began to generate a brilliant orange light that rapidly swelled to illuminate the entire chamber like daylight.
Dean threw his rock with all his might. It narrowly missed St. Cyr’s head and bounced off the wall and into the pool, where it disappeared with a splash and a cloud of steam. MacIlargie’s rock hit St. Cyr on the shoulder and caused him to wince. He pulled the Ambassador closer to him to use her as a shield, and stepped off the ledge onto a gradual rock-strewn slope. Holding her tightly with one arm, he drew his blaster and leveled it at the two Marines, who were now clearly visible on the other side of the bubbling pool. At the last instant, Wellington-Humphreys shoved him, and the bolt spattered harmlessly into the rock vault above the pool. St. Cyr smashed the blaster barrel across the bridge of her nose and shoved her away from him, up the slope. Then, turning back toward the Marines and using two hands to hold the blaster, he planted his legs firmly about ten centimeters apart and took careful aim.
The Woo’s light went out and everything plunged back into darkness. St. Cyr hesitated to shoot, and at that instant Wellington-Humphreys smashed into him with all her weight behind her shoulder. St. Cyr staggered forward and plunged head first into the pool. He went fully under, popped quickly to the surface, screaming. The Woo’s light came back on, and Dean stepped onto the ledge and began inching his way toward where Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys lay dazed, her head only a few inches from the bubbling pool.
St. Cyr screamed and thrashed about in the boiling water. He reached for the ledge on which Dean stood and tried to pull himself up. Dean stamped hard on his fingers. The nails and flesh shredded off under the boot, but still screaming, St. Cyr clung to the rock. Dean stamped on his head and a large patch of his hair sloughed off. Balancing himself precariously on the slippery rock, Dean ground his heel on St. Cyr’s finger
s and then kicked him again in the head, and this time he slipped back into the water. Afraid that St. Cyr would come back and get a grip on one of his legs, Dean dashed the rest of the way across.
Meanwhile, MacIlargie stood on the other side of the pool and tossed rocks at St. Cyr as he splashed about in the pool, his screams increasing in intensity as the boiling water cooked him alive. MacIlargie tried to silence him with a blow to the head, but the rocks just thudded into his swelling flesh without effect.
Dean crouched beside Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys. “Are you all right, ma’am?” He helped her to her feet. She nodded that she was, although blood still flowed freely from her broken nose. “I can’t get this damned fastening off your wrist,” Dean complained as he tried to loosen it. “I’m afraid we’ll have to go back along that ledge. Can you make it?”
“Yes. Can you shut him up?” she asked, nodding at St. Cyr, who now had drifted to the middle of the pool and floated there with only his head and shoulders above the water, trying to keep the burning liquid out of his nose and mouth.
Once on the other side, the two Marines gathered rocks and began pelting St. Cyr with all their strength, not for revenge or punishment, but in an effort to silence his terrible screaming, which gradually weakened into a high-pitched keening. The man who had fancied himself a greater conqueror than Napoleon Bonaparte, the man who had conquered a whole world, was reduced to a screaming mound of stewed flesh twisting in the boiling water. The rocks bounced off his head and face, crushing his bones and teeth, but still he kept up the keening. At last he sank beneath the water and the grotto became silent, except for the Marines’ heavy breathing and Wellington-Humphreys’s retching.
With a forearm, Dean wiped perspiration off his brow and sat down inside the mouth of the tunnel. MacIlargie and Ambassador Wellington-Humphreys joined him.
Steel Gauntlet Page 33
