Callsign: King II- Underworld (14 page)

With brutal efficiency and indifference, Sokoloff hauled the bodies of his latest victims out of the truck and left them on the desert floor, just as he had done earlier with the two-man patrol back on the hiking trail—the real Sergeant De Bord and another young man whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn.

He then climbed back into the Humvee and started the engine. There was yet more killing to be done before the night was through.

29.

As they rounded a turn in the ravine, the incessant crack of 7.62 mm rounds on the truck’s frame ceased immediately, but King still had to shout to be heard over the roaring engine.

“Anyone hit?”

Pierce and Nina, crowded together in the footwell on the passenger side, both signaled that they were all right.

“Hang on!”

King drove like a man possessed. Another encounter with the Army was the last thing he had expected, and it added one more variable to an already complicated equation. He checked the side mirror, but with the hillside in the way, it was impossible to know if the soldiers were giving chase. He assumed they were.

Pierce, still panting from the burst of excitement, disentangled from Nina. “You guys aren’t going to believe the night I’ve had.”

“Try me,” Nina replied with a laugh.

King glanced over. As urgent as their present situation was, he couldn’t discount the possibility that Pierce might have gleaned some important bit of information. “Let’s hear it, George.”

In a rush, Pierce told of his escape from the camp and subsequent fall into the underground labyrinth. Nina questioned him about the behavior of the Mogollon Monsters—how they had initially ignored Pierce and De Bord, and then chased them out of the cave.

“It was like they were herding us,” Pierce confessed. “They could have caught us at any time, but they didn’t. It was like they were just trying to show us the door.”

“It makes sense,” Nina said. “They’re normally very shy. They don’t like getting close to people. The only reason they’ve been attacking is because of that Bluelight thing.”

“Bluelight?”

“I’ll tell you about that in a minute,” King said. “Finish your story.”

“Right. You aren’t going to believe this, but I think the caves we were in are connected to a much, much bigger network.”

Nina nodded. “There are a lot of people who think that’s the case. There have always been stories about a cave system under the Superstitions and stretching at least as far as the Grand Canyon, with entrances that periodically appear and then vanish. According to one legend, Geronimo escaped from a troop of cavalry scouts by seemingly stepping into the rocks—a cave entrance—but the soldiers couldn’t find it afterward.”

“I think these caves might connect a lot further than that. I found artifacts from civilizations all over the world. There might be an entire undiscovered world down there, a fully functioning ecosystem with its own evolutionary pathway. Maybe even civilizations. Those creatures are intelligent; they have a complex set of behaviors that are far more advanced than any animal species, except of course, humans. Particularly death rituals.

“There’s a researcher in Colorado, Jeff Long, who has proposed the theory that a global cave network might be the explanation for all our myths relating to the existence of an afterlife under the ground. Hell, Hades, Sheol, Xibalba…call it what you will, every civilization has a belief in an underworld.”

“That would also explain why reports of similar creatures show up in different parts of the world,” Nina said. “And why it’s been so hard to verify their existence. They come up for air once in a while, and then duck back down into their own world.”

“There could be thousands of them,” Pierce agreed. “Millions perhaps. And now for some reason, they’ve declared war on us.” He paused a beat. “So, what’s Bluelight?”

King was about to answer when he spied a pair of lights in the distance directly ahead. The beams were diffuse, and despite of the amplification from his PVS-7 they weren’t blindingly bright.

Blackout drive lights.

Because so many military operations were conducted under cover of darkness, all Humvees were equipped with a second set of lights, designed specifically to work with night vision, bright enough to illuminate the surroundings without rendering night vision devices useless, but practically invisible to the unaided eye, even at a distance of only a few feet. King hadn’t used the blackout lights in their vehicle because doing so would have betrayed their presence to the roving patrols.

He didn’t think it was the same group of soldiers that had caught Pierce. This vehicle—also a hard-shelled M1026 HMMWV configured as a gunship, with a crew-served machine gun—was directly ahead and moving toward them from a different position. He surmised that a call had gone out, warning of a renegade Humvee roaming the hills. That meant there was one still behind them.

“More company,” he warned. Pierce and Nina both ducked, as if his observation had been accompanied by another volley of machine gun fire.

King sorted through his mental map of the terrain. He had a pretty good idea where he was in relation to the Bluelight facility, and that remained his primary objective. Evading the troops now searching for him wouldn’t count for much if the facility went active again. The problem was, the Humvee now approaching was directly between him and where he wanted to be.

Maybe not a problem after all
, he thought, punching the accelerator. The Humvee quickly picked up speed and began bouncing violently across the landscape, He knew it would take the soldiers in the other truck a few seconds to realize what he was doing, and hopefully a few seconds more to decide how best to respond.

He decided to give them exactly six seconds, and started counting “Mississippis” under his breath. When he got to six, with probably no more than seventy-five yards separating the two vehicles, he flipped his PVS-7 up, away from his eye, and switched on the headlights.

Twin halogen beams speared out across the dusty darkness and transfixed the second Humvee. He knew from experience what a bright light could do to a night vision device and to the person wearing it; the flash would have overloaded the electronics of a PVS-7 type device, rendering it useless for several hours thereafter, but in the instant before that happened, the wearer would feel like he’d stared directly at the sun. The wearer’s other, unaided eye wouldn’t fare much better; with pupils dilated for maximum natural night vision, any flash of light would be painful and would leave an imprint like fireworks on the retinas for at least several minutes thereafter.

The trick with the lights hadn’t done his own night vision any favors. King switched the headlights off right away, and lowered his PVS-7 into place.

The two Humvees were still on a collision course, separated by only a few yards. The only reason that they hadn’t already crashed was that the other driver, possibly blinded, had let his foot off the accelerator and tapped the brakes.

King swerved hard right. The Humvee skidded into the turn and the back driver’s side wheel banged off the front bumper of the other truck. There was a crunch as the fiberglass hood cover splintered but the damage was purely cosmetic. The impact knocked King’s Humvee back around and it scraped along the side of the gunship, but then they were past, and back on course.

There was a staccato eruption behind them, a sound like a car backfiring repeatedly, and King ducked. “Stay down.”

It didn’t sound like any of the rounds had hit. King hoped the gunner was literally firing blind, strafing the general area where he thought they were, using the “spray and pray” method. The problem was, sometimes that method worked.

He kept going, taking as much speed as the vehicle and terrain would let him have, following the descending flank of a hillside in hopes that it would take them out of the line of fire.

A glance at the side mirror revealed nothing—not the absence of pursuit, but rather the absence of the mirror itself. Evidently, it had been a casualty of the sideswipe. King risked poking his head out the window, and saw lights moving behind them. The crew of the M1026 had eschewed blackout mode and were now running with full lights.  They were also turning around.

King glanced at his watch. Thirty-six minutes had elapsed since he and Nina had left the Bluelight facility. In about ten more, it would activate again, summoning a fresh horde of Mogollon Monsters to assault anything that moved. He dug out his phone and brought up the GPS app. He’d marked the Bluelight facility as a waypoint earlier. According to the app, it was now about three miles dead ahead.

The Humvee bounced and slid, and King had to wrestle with the steering wheel to maintain a semblance of control as he climbed hills and shot straight down the slopes. Behind him, the lights of the pursuing vehicle blazed like tiny suns. The driver of the M1026 couldn’t close the gap; both Humvees were traveling well beyond the recommended off-road speed, and nearly at the limit of what was possible, but the pursuing truck had one significant advantage. They could reach out across the distance and ruin King’s day. The arc of tracer fire, sporadically ricocheting off the desert floor, sometimes too close for comfort, indicated that they were trying to do exactly that.

As King climbed a steep slope, he heard more bullets hammer against the metal deck of the rear cargo area. The gunner was dialing in on them and it was only a matter of time before rounds starting tearing through the fabric covering the cab.

“Enough of this shit,” King rasped. He tore off his borrowed helmet and the PVS-7 with it, and turned the headlights on again. There was no sense in trying to do what he had to do next in near total darkness.

He kept the accelerator to the floor, ignoring the deafening roar of the overburdened diesel engine, until the truck crested the hill. For an instant, the Humvee’s tires lost contact and it sailed through air, traveling almost thirty feet before finally crunching onto the downslope. Pierce and Nina were pitched about the interior like bits of popcorn, but King ignored their curses. His attention was focused on the glistening mirror-like surface that stretched out directly in front of him.

King hadn’t forgotten about the sludge pond, but as the Humvee bounced twice more, traveling another fifty feet down the hill even though he now had the brake pedal pressed to the floor, he realized that he might have been a little too eager to reach it. After the third bounce, the wheels remained in contact with the ground and the truck slid forward several more yards before finally coming to rest with its front end jutting out over the toxic pool.

There wasn’t even a second to waste on a sigh of relief. King threw the gear selector into ‘reverse,’ cranked the wheel forty-five degrees, and brought the truck around so that it was facing up hill at an angle. He had just shifted back into ‘drive’ when the chasing Humvee erupted off the crest of the hill.

He caught a glimpse of the other vehicle’s headlights, shining out through the dust cloud like spotlights searching the sky, but then the beams dipped down to illuminate the sludge pond. King’s Humvee rolled forward, traversing the slope diagonally, as the pursuing vehicle bounced and skidded straight into the sulfur dioxide tainted pool. King didn’t hear the splash, but knew that the truck had failed to stop in time when the headlights vanished.

As he sped along the edge of the bowl, King half expected to see more Humvees taking up the chase, but that was the least of his worries. He kept one eye on the GPS display, watching as the dots moved closer to each other, but he stopped checking his watch. He didn’t need it to tell him that he had probably made the wrong decision by going to retrieve Pierce. He wasn’t going to make it back to Bluelight in time.

Then, as if in answer to his prayers, the cinder block building appeared in the distance as he crested a hill. The beam of his headlights revealed a lot more than he had glimpsed earlier. Just beyond the structure, a ragged edge cut across the landscape in either direction, further than the eye could see. The Bluelight facility was perched on the edge of the abandoned open-pit mine.

Beyond that hill, the remaining distance was relatively flat, and after about two hundred yards, the Humvee crossed the rutted dirt that led directly to the fenced compound. The moment the tires transitioned onto the road, the ride instantly smoothed out, allowing Nina and Pierce to emerge from their huddle.

King looked over at them. They both looked like they had been trapped in a tumble dryer. “Still with me?”

Pierce gave a half-hearted laugh. “Let’s not do that again.”

“No more off-road,” King promised. “You have my word on that. We’re almost there.”

“How much time do we have?” Nina asked.

King glanced at his watch, knowing that he wouldn’t like what he saw there. The chronometer had just ticked past 46:15. “Not enough.”

Maybe not enough to stop Bluelight from activating, but if he could get to Copeland and convince the physicist to shut it down…

The thought slipped away as the headlights lit up the building, and he saw that they had another problem. Arrayed in a semi-circle, just beyond the fenced area, were half a dozen M1026s, bristling with M240B and Browning M2 .50-caliber machine guns.

The Army had come to protect Bluelight.

King kept driving forward, but his foot eased off the accelerator. Fancy driving wasn’t going to get him past this obstacle. At about a hundred yards, he braked to a stop and shut down the vehicle. As if waiting for that cue, a team of soldiers, advanced on foot, keeping their carbines trained on the new arrivals.

“Shit,” Nina whispered. “What do we do now?”

King didn’t have an answer. After all they had gone through to get back, he wasn’t about to be stopped at the finish line, but he had no idea how they were going to overcome this last hurdle. He was still trying to think of something inspiring to say when the area just behind the cinder block structure lit up with a blue glow.