Hot Ice

by Cherry Adair

  She knew she wasn’t being fair. Hunt was quiet. Focused. He’d hardly so much as looked at her in the last hour. But then, he had a lot to worry about. She understood that. And the annoying, voiceless . . . dirge coming through hidden loudspeakers wasn’t helping any. The combination hymn/chant wasn’t particularly loud, just incredibly annoying.

  And that rushing water wasn’t helping her disposition any either. She’d had to say no when Hunt handed her the water bottle earlier.

  She stopped bothering to stand on tiptoe to look over the wall. River. Black mud. Been there. Done that. “What’s next?” she asked Hunt’s back. They were walking fast—practically jogging.

  “Heretics,” Hunt said shortly. “Iron walls. Burning tombs. Blood. The three infernal Furies with limbs of women and hair of snakes.”

  Allrighty, then. Another fun ride. She wondered if she should mention she’d never met a snake she liked. No point, she decided. Either they’d bypass this level or she’d have to suck it up and brave the slithery, slimy, little critters. She hoped they’d be able to bypass—

  Hunt reached back and thrust an arm across her chest. She was going to have to speak to him about that. She peered around him, trying to see what had stopped him, just as he turned off his flashlight.

  A thin beam of dusty light angled upward like a sword out of the solid rock wall on their left.

  Forty-six

  BLIKIESFONTEIN

  “Oh, José. Novio! Your poor back!” Maria hurried down the nave toward him.

  José turned his head to watch her. His Maria wasn’t as thin as the girl he’d married thirty-eight years ago. Her hair was graying instead of the glossy black of her youth, and her smooth pink cheeks had become lined with the years. But to him she was as beautiful today as the day she’d walked down the aisle of the cathedral in San Cristóbal all those years ago.

  His love for this woman was only second to his love for God.

  “My love.” José reached out his hand to take hers, and with some difficulty his Maria knelt beside him. Her lovely eyes were dark with concern, her powdered brow furrowed as she touched his face. Her skin smelled of cooking and the perfume he had custom-made exclusively for her every year for her birthday. The fabulously expensive Jasmin Absolute oil took over three million flower heads to produce one kilo. Ounce for ounce, the cost approached the price of pure gold. And she was worth every penny, his Maria.

  “Come up to the house,” she begged. “Allow me to put salve on your wounds.”

  “My wounds cannot be healed by salve, mi querido.” He placed his hand over hers where she had it pressed against his cheek and brought her fingers to his mouth. He kissed each one.

  “Constantine and your men are soiling all my good carpets with their big dirty feet,” Maria told him, eyes filled with tears. Not for her carpets, José knew, but for his pain. “Come and talk to them.”

  He used her hand to stroke his face. Her skin was so soft. “We will be gone soon.”

  Tears rolled down her cheeks and she closed her eyes. “God cannot want this, José,” she said passionately, then looked at him again, her voice soft, pleading, as she whispered, “God is not this vengeful.”

  His heart was heavy. Ah, my Maria. So foolish. “You have spoken with God today?”

  “No.” There was a hitch in her voice.

  Of course, God had not spoken to Maria. José hated to see her so torn. He stroked her soft hair. “It will be over soon, novia, over very soon.”

  “I beg you again, José. Do not do this terrible thing. Consider that there are hundreds of churches in Las Vegas. Churches filled with believers . . .” Her eyes widened. “What is it? Why do you look at me so?”

  “Who did you tell about my disks to the mine, Maria mi querida? Only two people in all the world knew the codes even existed, and that I had them in our safe in San Cristóbal. Me. And you, my most beloved wife.”

  She didn’t deny it. “I could not stop you, though I begged many times. I hoped—”

  “No one can stop God’s will, my love,” he told her softly, his heart filled with love and overwhelming pain for this woman who had betrayed him.

  He still held the thin, blood-soaked whip in his other hand. José coiled it around his beloved’s throat, where it left an obscene red stain on her white skin.

  Maria’s eyes went wide. “José, Madre de Dios!” She brought her hands up to grasp the braised leather as her flesh bulged around it.

  He’d spent many years with this whip. He knew its strengths and its weaknesses. He tightened it inexorably around his wife’s throat. Her eyes went wild and her body started to thrash. He pulled tighter, cutting off her air. “Nobody betrays José Adalbaro Pabil Morales. No one. Not even you, beloved wife.”

  When he was sure there was no breath left in his Maria’s lifeless body, José gathered her close and sobbed his despair and pain against her soft, jasmine-scented hair.

  Forty-seven

  The spear of light moved up and down through the chink in the solid rock wall. “St. John? Come through,” a disembodied voice said.

  “Who is that?” Taylor asked, crowding behind Hunt.

  Her hair tickled his neck. “Daklin.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Fisk. Check it out.”

  Fisk slid sideways through the incredibly narrow opening in the rock and disappeared.

  Bloody hell. He should have gone through first. But he wasn’t leaving Taylor behind alone, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to send her through without him.

  “Just the entrance is tight, St. John,” Fisk yelled, his voice faint. The man hadn’t been gone long enough for him to be any distance. Hunt frowned. “—ost . . . team . . . here . . . side.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Taylor demanded from inches away.

  “A trap?”

  “That’s Francis!”

  With everything else they’d encountered since arriving in Morales’s bizarre Dantesque tribute, this fissure in the rock could lead them straight down to hell. “Here. Take my hand. And don’t let go unless I tell you to.”

  “Ditto,” Taylor told him, taking his right hand with her left in a viselike grip. “Want me to go first?”

  “No.” He exhaled, going in sideways. Jesus, it was a tight fit. But for the protection of his suit, he’d be ripped to pieces by the rough stone.

  “Holding up?”

  “Of course,” she said, a lilt of her typical good humor in her voice. Her hand felt small in his. Small, but incredibly competent.

  “Fisk?” he shouted.

  No answer.

  “Fisk? Tate?”

  Nothing.

  “Bloody hell.”

  “Why don’t you save your breath until we get to where we— Ow! Damn! That’s going to leave a mark.”

  His fingers tightened around hers. “What happened?”

  “Knee. Keep moving, would you? I’m not claustrophobic, but I could start to be any minute now.” Even though she was an arm’s length away, the rock absorbed the sound of her voice. He gripped her hand even tighter.

  “Think there are snakes in here?”

  He had no fucking idea. “For all I know, pterodactyls could morph out of this wall. Morales seems to have thought of everything else.”

  “Hmm. That could be interesting . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then, “Don’t you think?”

  “Scared, love?”

  “Well . . . yeah,” she said with disarming honesty. “We are kind of a human-sandwich filling with this wall, and there doesn’t seem to be an end. Makes me think of all those creepy black-and-white movies they show late at night. Maybe we’ll be absorbed into the walls, and years from now people will excavate and find our images embedded—”

  “You have a very active imagination,” he said dryly, amused, but also impressed that she was going to such lengths to focus herself on the task at hand. That natural ability was one of the traits screened for by T-FLAC.

  Whoa! Hang on! his brain screamed. Had he really listene
d to Fisk’s inane suggestion that she was T-FLAC material? Not possible. Not her. Not when he— “I see a light at the end.”

  “Either the Angel of Death,” she said gloomily, “or a high-speed train.”

  Hunt chuckled. He was still smiling as he pulled her out of the crevasse on the other side. This tunnel was considerably larger, better ventilated, and reasonably well lit. His team looked at him with varying expressions of amazement.

  “What was in there?” Navarro asked Fisk. “Laughing gas?”

  “Wasn’t funny for me,” Fisk assured them. “Check out what it did to my suit.” He paused and looked around. “All our suits,” he corrected.

  “We’ve been grated,” Taylor decided, looking down at the front of her suit. While it hadn’t torn, even over her left knee, which had taken the brunt of a scrape, it was . . . ruffled, as though it had been rubbed against a cheese grater. This was some miracle fabric. If none of them had been wearing it, the rock would have sliced their skin to pieces.

  “Thanks.” Hunt accepted a weapon from Daklin. “What do we have?”

  “For one thing,” Daklin told him, pointing to the hard-packed dirt of the floor, “serious tracks.”

  “I see that.” Hunt scanned the tunnel on either side of them. Thirty feet wide and at least fifteen feet high, the tunnel had a double track running down the center and was well lit. The track was in excellent condition and looked well used.

  “How did you guys get in?” Hunt asked, glancing from man to man. “Which way? This?”

  “Ja.” Viljoen walked beside Hunt. “Once you go through those passageways, you can’t get back into the Dante areas, you know?” Viljoen told him. “No loss to my mind, mind you.”

  “We went through,” Tate added. “Couldn’t get back to you, and decided to split up. I followed this and ended up on the other side of the village about three miles.”

  “It certainly appears to speed things along,” Hunt agreed as they walked. The smiling man was gone. “Anyone go on ahead?”

  “Just got here ourselves,” Savage said, joining them.

  “Are you telling me,” Hunt said tightly to Navarro, Daklin, and the others, “we went through all those fucking gyrations for nothing? That you simply walked in?”

  “Now wouldn’t that’ve been nice?” Daklin said darkly. “We did a little flying, a little wading, a little zigging and fucking zagging. There’s no damn way Morales uses that same route.”

  “We suspect he has some sort of remote-control device,” Hunt told him. “Do we have him yet?” They were expecting Morales’s people to be right on their tails, and had left access for just that reason. The thought didn’t faze Hunt one iota. He looked forward to it.

  More important than getting the Mano del Dios people, Hunt wanted Morales on-site. Not off somewhere watching the liftoff from a control room.

  If T-FLAC inadvertently screwed up and didn’t deactivate the missile in time, then José Morales could damn well die down here like the rest of them.

  Maybe Morales wouldn’t be quite so eager to put his own ass on the line.

  “No Morales at the moment, and apparently no City of Dis,” Hunt stated flatly.

  “City of Dis?” Savage said over Taylor’s left shoulder.

  Navarro answered by rote. “Level Six, ‘You approach Satan’s wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Before you are fields full of distress and torment terrible. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics, failing to believe in God and the afterlife, who make themselves audible by doleful sighs. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite. The three infernal Furies stained with blood, with limbs of women and hair of serpents, dwell in this circle of hell.’ Pretty much snakes, blood, and burning,” he summarized with a faint smile. “No,” he answered Hunt, “this track bypasses all that. It should be a straight shot to hell.”

  Yay, Taylor thought. She had absolutely no desire to see snakes, blood, or burning. She glanced at Hunt. “This must be saving us hours. Will we make it in time?”

  “Depends on how much time Daklin and Navarro need.”

  Taylor glanced from one man to the other. “How much—”

  “It’ll take as long as it takes, ma’am,” Daklin told her politely.

  Hunt paused, listening to someone on his earpiece. “Good man.” He looked at his group. “The ‘natives’ are in custody, and en route to Jo’burg for extradition. Let’s do it, people. En masse, they sped up, jogging down the tunnel, eerily silent in their black LockOut suits, weapons drawn.

  Taylor found herself—she wasn’t sure how—maneuvered right into the middle of the group. Protected on all sides by Hunt’s guys. It was no problem for her to keep up with them. They weren’t running flat out, just moving at a steady jog that didn’t utilize too much energy before they’d need it. She was grateful that she kept herself in peak physical fitness for her job, because they didn’t stop or slow down for more than ninety minutes.

  Only to come to a solid wall of rock.

  The narrow-gauge track they’d been following ran straight into the wall.

  They spent precious minutes stroking the surface, looking for a way through to the other side.

  “Here,” Taylor called softly, finding an opening near the floor and going down on her stomach. She could see clear to the other side, some thirty feet away. She gulped at the sheer magnitude of where they were. That was a lot of rock.

  “Stop right there,” Hunt told her. She wiggled backward, looking at him over her shoulder.

  “I think you’d better all follow me,” she said, but she waited for him to give her the okay.

  “Let Fisk reconnoiter first,” Hunt told her gruffly.

  She sat up, letting Fisk take the lead. When Fisk yelled, she slithered after him as quickly as a greased eel.

  By the time the tunnel opened up into the vast cavern of Level Seven, she was slightly out of breath, and more than happy to stop. They all stopped at the entrance. It was a hell of a sight.

  The vast cavern seemed to go on endlessly. A warehouse for Morales’s madness. The space was piled high with wooden crates. Ceiling to floor. Row upon row. All neatly labeled and stacked in precise rows. Thousands of them.

  Weapons. Ammunition. Explosives. Chemicals.

  Both Morales’s and Dante’s Level Seven were reserved for assassins, tyrants, and warmongers.

  And in the center of the man-made cavern, rising from an opening in the floor and continuing through the ceiling high above their heads, the Mano del Dios pièce de résistance.

  The missile.

  Taylor had known it was there. Hell, she knew what a missile looked like. She’d seen the old Cape Canaveral launches on TV dozens of times. She’d never imagined she’d have the opportunity to stand less than a hundred feet from one.

  Her eyes followed the sides of the gleaming red and white cylinder as it soared high above their heads and disappeared into a hole in the rock ceiling. This . . . thing was enormous.

  “Phallic-looking, isn’t it?” Savage asked, coming to stand beside her.

  Completely bereft of speech, Taylor could only nod. Fear, vast and immediate, had grabbed her by the throat the second she’d seen it. She wanted to dash over to Hunt, grab his wrist, activate whatever it was, and see how many more minutes they had before this monster blasted out of the mine and left them all behind as bits of charcoal dust.

  “Snap out of it, cupcake,” Savage said.

  Mouth dry, Taylor licked her lips. “How—” Did they get that thing in here?

  Savage smiled. “Long to liftoff?” Another excellent question. The operative tilted her wrist, activated the watch, then looked at the missile. “Three hours, six minutes.”

  That didn’t seem long enough to Taylor. She looked for Hunt. He was talking intently to a group of men, all of whom looked dead serious.

  “You do realize,” Savage said conversationally, jerkin
g her chin toward the warehouse of boxes, “that just that shit over there could feasibly blow the African continent out of existence? The rocket is pretty much overkill.”

  Taylor shook her head. “TMI!” Too much information.

  Savage patted her shoulder. “Keep out of the way, cupcake. I see a nice vantage point up there with my name on it. Feel free to join me.”

  The woman was way too chipper for Taylor right now. She looked where the T-FLAC operative was pointing. “Up there” was the first row of wooden crates with a direct visual line to the entrance to the cavern. Hunt had told her that Catherine Seymour, Savage, was one of the T-FLAC’s top sharpshooters. She was going to climb twenty feet above the floor and sit and wait to pick off the bad guys as they came in.

  Taylor knew she wasn’t going to be anywhere near flying bullets if she could possibly help it. “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.”

  “Suit yourself, but keep an eye out for the bad guys.” Savage jogged off.

  “I’ll do that,” Taylor told empty air. “I most certainly will do that.” She wondered where the safest place to do that might be.

  Argentina?

  Forty-eight

  12:30 P.M.

  DANTE’S INFERNO

  LEVEL SEVEN

  “We’re going to need at least a hundred more men in here to transpo this topside,” Hunt told Viljoen. Daklin and Navarro had each taken their teams and gone to see what they could do about disabling the missile. They’d send one of their people back to him with exactly what they were dealing with—as soon as they knew themselves.

  “Ja,” Viljoen told Hunt. “I thought so. I have them on standby. ETA thirty minutes by chopper. Having them flown in, so we can start getting this shit moved outside. By then, the lorries will be here.”

  “Good. Let’s see what we have to deal with here.” Aware of exactly where Taylor stood, Hunt mobilized his team. Nobody needed instruction. And though he’d not worked with many of them, T-FLAC operatives were well trained and resourceful. They knew their business and immediately got to work in pairs, IDing contents of crates and sorting them for transportation to the surface.