Immortal (42 page)

‘Grenades!’ he shouted.

He fired off another two rounds and then fled into the darkness of the cave. He hurled himself down behind some rocks as four deafening blasts rocked the cavern behind him.

‘Y’ git any of ’em?’ Copthorne asked from somewhere in the darkness.

‘Just the one,’ Ethan said, and reminded himself that he’d fired seven shots, which left eight in the pistol. ‘Mostly just kept their heads down. How’s
Kip?’

Ellison Thorne’s voice reached them from somewhere deeper in the cave.

‘He ain’t right. Bullet’s in his leg and it ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

Damn
. Right now they needed all the firepower and hands they could muster while they tried to figure out a way of escaping the assault. Ethan looked at the entrance to the cave, the low
crevice appearing brightly lit now compared to the depths in which they huddled. The cave behind descended gently, ragged walls and a low ceiling vanishing into impenetrable blackness from which
drifted a gentle breeze, as though the earth itself were breathing. There were potentially hundreds of miles of unexplored caverns within, plunging to depths of more than two thousand feet below
ground, some flooded, others prone to collapse. Ethan was suddenly acutely aware that they lacked even the most basic expeditionary gear required for a descent into such a complex underground maze.
Thousands of people over the years had ventured into such places never to return, hopelessly lost and doomed to starvation and a cold, lonely death far below ground in absolute blackness.

‘Heads up!’

John Cochrane’s voice startled Ethan as it echoed through the cavern, and he turned to see the shapes of men drop into view from the ladder and rush toward the cave entrance. Instantly,
three Springfield rifles blasted out a volley of shots that cut down three of the men. Ethan fired on a fourth, another double-tap that sliced through the attacker with a fine spray of blood that
spilled onto rocks at the cave entrance. The man fell to his knees before toppling over sideways.

‘They’re trying to overwhelm us!’ McQuire shouted as he struggled to reload his weapon in the eerie half-light.

John Cochrane and McQuire fired at the same time, dropping two more men who materialized at the entrance to the cave, firing their weapons as they searched for cover from which to continue their
assault. The Minie balls slammed into them as they ran and the two men cartwheeled into the dust.

Ethan’s ears began aching and ringing from the infernal blasts of the rifles, the terrible noise amplified in the narrow confines of the cave as several more mercenaries tumbled into view.
From behind Ethan, Ellison Thorne loomed, a pistol in each hand that spurted smoke and flame as he fired both weapons at once, cutting an attacker down in mid-stride to fall face first onto the
rocks.

‘Stand tall, lads!’ Ellison bellowed, his huge chest and the narrow cave amplifying his voice to thunder out above the gunfire. ‘Up an’ at ’em!’

With a sudden and unexpected war cry, Ellison led his men at a run toward the cave entrance, their bayonets and knives flashing, and for an instant Ethan’s vision blurred as he no longer
saw the mercenaries plunging toward them, or the antiquated rifles or the pistol in his hand. A flash-vision of other caves from years before filled his mind, the bitter peaks of
Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, the screams of the Taliban and United States Marines locked in hand-to-hand combat in the deadly warrens of the Tora Bora cave complex. Young men, far from
home, flashing long-knives and bayonets, the primeval grunts and cries of mortal combat as crazed terrorists with no fear of death fought idealistic soldiers struggling to preserve their way of
life.

Semper fi.

Ethan leapt up on impulse and rushed forward as Ellison’s men collided with six soldiers who had managed to breach the entrance to the cave. He saw Ellison Thorne grab the barrel of one
man’s M-16 and twist it aside before stepping in and head-butting him with a sickening crunch, the mercenary’s legs crumpling as he sagged onto the floor of the cave. Screams soared
through the darkness as bayonets plunged deep into unexpecting flesh, stubby machine guns batted aside by the long-barreled Springfields before they could be brought to bear.

Ethan charged at the nearest attacker, glimpsing a wiry-looking man with scars that spread from the corners of his mouth and back toward his ears, the victim of a mugging or maybe some kind of
gang ritual. Either way he didn’t look like a soldier, more like one of the heartless bastards Ethan had fought in those terrible caves in Afghanistan, the kind of men who stoned women to
death, the kind of men who might have abducted his fiancée, Joanna, in Gaza City. The ugly barrel of the soldier’s M-16 swiveled toward Ethan, who rushed in with almost suicidal rage
and grabbed the gun’s stock and smashed it aside before driving his thumb in behind the trigger. A jab of pain lanced his thumb as the man squeezed the trigger desperately, only for nothing
to happen. In the light of the cave entrance Ethan saw the soldier’s features dissolve into panic, just as Ethan hopped violently and drove his right knee up into the man’s groin with
as much force as he could muster.

The mercenary gagged, his tongue quivering in his gaping mouth and his eyes wide and sightless as exquisite pain wracked his body. Ethan yanked the M-16 from his grasp and stepped one pace back,
spinning the weapon into his grip and then whipping the butt up to crack the man under his jaw. The mercenary’s teeth cracked together and crunched through his tongue, the useless muscle
spilling sideways out of his mouth in a torrent of thick blood as he collapsed to his knees in agony. Ethan aimed at the kneeling man’s head and fired a single shot. The round hit the man
square in his right temple and neatly blew off the left side of his face in a spray of blood and bone chips. Ethan blinked as the body wavered for a moment and then seemed to collapse in slow
motion onto its side.

A deep silence filled the cave, Ethan’s world suddenly filled with a ringing in his ears and the deep, rapid rhythm of his own breathing. His heart thundered in his chest and his eyelids
fluttered erratically as adrenaline surged through his synapses.

‘Sweet mother of Jesus,’ McQuire’s voice uttered in the humming silence as he looked at Ethan’s victim. ‘You sure know how to pain a man.’

Ethan blinked as his hearing returned and he saw half a dozen bodies lying in the entrance to the cave, some groaning, some weeping and clasping gunshot wounds and savagely mauled stomachs,
others staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the cave. He looked down at the ruined body of the man he had slain and felt a sudden chill of shame.

‘This ain’t over,’ Ellison Thorne said, wiping the bloodied blade of his knife on his pants. ‘Let’s fall back afore they try again.’

Ethan was about to follow him when from somewhere outside a voice shouted down to them.

‘Give up the cave, or this woman dies!’

Ethan edged forward and squinted up into the bright light to see two men standing either side of Jeb Oppenheimer far above, whose hands were cupped around his mouth.

Kneeling beside them was Lillian Cruz. As he watched, Oppenheimer’s mercenaries began descending the rope ladder, prodding and pushing Lillian before them as a human shield.

Donald Wolfe stood to one side of the speakers’ podium and stared out across the huge blue, green and gold General Assembly Hall beneath the towering, domed,
seventy-five-foot ceiling. Representatives of member states sat behind tables that faced the raised speaker’s rostrum. At the podium sat the president of the General Assembly, with the
secretary-general of the United Nations to his right and the under-secretary-general for General Assembly Affairs and Conference Services to his left.

The secretary-general moved to the rostrum as he addressed the leaders of the majority of the world’s nations arrayed before him in the enormous amphitheater. Behind him, two massive
screens flanked an eight-foot-diameter United Nations emblem, each screen showing his face as he spoke. Heads of state and their translators occupied hundreds of chairs rising up and away before
him, listening intently to the man often considered to be the true leader of the free world.

‘Our purpose, today, is to deal with the debate on our population: its growth, health and future over the next fifty to one hundred years. There have been a number of studies conducted by
official bodies both within and outside of government, each attempting to provide a solution to the growing problem of supply and demand, in real terms, across the globe and, now, the situation is
reaching crisis point.’

Donald Wolfe sat amongst the audience, trying to ignore the prickly heat irritating the collar of his shirt. He was nervous, he realized, more so than he had expected to be as he listened to the
secretary-general.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, to lead the discussion on this most serious of topics and the implications for the spread of infectious disease, please welcome Colonel Donald Wolfe of the United
States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases.’

There was a polite ripple of applause as Wolfe got to his feet and walked across to the dais, shaking the secretary-general’s hand before clearing his throat and looking up at the massed
ranks of world leaders.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by warning you that what I have to say to you today will not be palatable. It will not be considered politically correct, perhaps not even morally
correct, but in the light of the threat we face from an unspoken truth that is becoming more dangerous to human survival than climate change and nuclear proliferation I believe that somebody must
speak out, and I take this opportunity to do so.’

Three hundred faces were fixed upon his, an absolute silence as every man and woman listened to the sound of his voice. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Wolfe realized why people fought
their way to the top of the political sphere: for the power. The knowledge that what you were saying could change the lives of millions, perhaps even billions, was intoxicating. He took a breath
before continuing.

‘Today, the population of our planet stands at approximately seven billion. Of those, just over one billion live in the developed Western world. We are the consumers, the guzzlers of gas.
But daily we are being joined by millions more from the developing world, as emerging powerhouse economies like China, India and a resurgent Russia seek to emulate our success, our prowess, our
prodigious consumption of energy and resources.’ Wolfe paused for a moment, before hitting them with a big one. ‘It has been estimated that by 2006, we were consuming resources forty
percent faster than the earth could replace them. When those resources are gone, we will see the utter collapse of modern society into something approximating medieval Europe.’

A ripple of whispers fluttered through the audience, and Wolfe capitalized on the energy among them as he continued.

‘It has been calculated by scientists that due to technologies improving such things as farming, humans are now ten thousand times more populous on our planet than nature would normally
allow any predator to be. Your own United Nations Environment Program, involving fourteen hundred scientists over five years, concluded that human consumption now far outstrips available
resources.’ Wolfe smiled, and gestured outside. ‘New York City consumes as much electricity in one day as the island of Crete consumes in one year.’

Wolfe scanned his audience with eagle eyes, saw that they were waiting for his next revelation.

‘Our planet has what’s known as a carrying capacity: an ability to support a finite volume of flora and fauna. Since the middle of the last century, our bloated consumption of the
most crucial substance to the survival of life – fresh water – has caused a chain reaction that now threatens to be the catalyst for the fall of mankind. Without sufficient water,
agriculture, the very thing that has allowed our species to spread across the globe, is being undermined. A global decline in world agricultural capacity began in the 1990s and continues to this
day, growing exponentially. Groundwater aquifers around the world are failing, producing a grain deficit. Despite all of our efforts and all of our charities, the number of people malnourished in
the world has grown by one hundred million per decade, not because we haven’t exported grain to those countries who need it, but because their populations have swollen to such gargantuan
proportions as to be unsustainable even with our agricultural technology.’

Wolfe looked around at the various individual countries’ heads of state.

‘Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Mexico and Pakistan are all importing grain due to internal deficits or are on the verge of doing so. Northern China’s food production is forecast to decline
by almost forty percent by the end of this century. Here in America, the Los Angeles basin, an area reckoned to be naturally able to support a maximum of one million people, is home to a mega-city
of thirty million people, and our population is the only one in the developed world still growing, predicted to rise to four hundred thirty million by the year 2030. By that time, we may no longer
have enough resources to export the grain that keeps so many other countries from starving, because we’ll barely have enough water to produce enough grain to feed ourselves.’

Wolfe subtly changed his tone to a more hopeful oratory.

‘We have talked, endlessly, of reducing our carbon footprints, of recycling and carbon capture, of alternative energy sources and radical economic strategies to reduce our consumption of
both the electrical energy and resources available to us on our planet. We have passed laws to drill into pristine environments in the pursuit of oil, gone as far as the Antarctic to assuage our
thirst for energy, and yet all of this time we have ignored the fact that as fast as we seek solutions to our crises, they are made irrelevant by the increased demands of our growing population. It
is estimated that global human population could exceed twelve billion people in the next fifty years.’ Wolfe paused. ‘Just think about that number for a moment. Twelve billion people,
almost twice as many as are alive today.’