Plague Ship (39 page)

Linc and Juan backed off into a room opposite and a little farther down the tunnel to wait.

If Juan had any difficulty with what they were about to do, he only had to think about the victims aboard the
Golden Dawn
to harden his resolve. The minutes trickled by, the luminous second hand of Cabrillo’s watch moving as if the battery was nearly spent. But he and Linc had lain in countless ambushes, and they remained perfectly still, their eyes open, although they could see nothing in the stygian tunnel. Each leaned against the stone wall with his head cocked, his ears straining to pick up the slightest sound.

After only twenty minutes, they heard them. Juan picked out two, then three distinct footfalls, as the Responsivist gunmen rushed headlong down the tunnel. There were no lights, so he reasoned they carried an infrared lamp and night vision goggles capable of seeing in that spectrum.

The gunmen slowed well before they came to the side cave, as if expecting an ambush. Although Juan couldn’t see the guards, he could tell by the sounds what they were doing. They had gone almost silent as they approached the entrance, advancing only when they knew they were covered by their teammates.

Metal clattered against stone, and almost immediately a voice called out.

“I see you there. Give yourselves up and you won’t be harmed.”

The sound had been one of the guards leaning his weapon against the cave entrance to steady his aim as he pointed his assault rifle at the bundles of mattresses at the far end of the chamber.

Standing behind Linc so the big man’s bulk shielded his voice, Juan triggered his cell phone and said, “Go to hell.”

With the volume of the phone left inside the medical ward set to maximum, it must have sounded like a defiant shout. Two guns opened fire at once, and, in the burst of the muzzle flashes, Juan could see all three figures. These men were no rank amateurs. Two were right outside the cave while the third held back, watching the tunnel for a flanking attack.

In such an enclosed space, the sound was an assault on all Cabrillo’s senses.

When the firing stopped, he waited to see what they would do. They had poured enough rounds into the chamber to kill a pair of men a dozen times over. The cover man snapped on a flashlight, as all three stripped off their goggles, their optics temporarily overwhelmed by the barrage. The two who had fired moved cautiously across the threshold while the third remained vigilant for a trap.

And Cabrillo didn’t let them down.

The trip wire he’d rigged was near the bedstead where he and Linc had supposedly made their last stand, and the lead guard was so intent on his victims he never saw it.

The electrical tape was tied to the bottles of chlorine and sodium bicarbonate, and when the gunman brushed against it they fell. The glass shattered in a pool of water from the canteen and one other chemical that Juan had poured on the floor.

At the sound of the bottle breaking, Juan and Linc fired. The third guard had reacted to the sound of the smashing glass, but he didn’t stand a chance. One bullet caught him under the arm and tore apart his internal organs while the second hit him squarely in the windpipe. His corpse spun to the ground, never relinquishing its grip on the flashlight or assault rifle. The beam came to rest on the cave entrance, where tendrils of a sickly greenish cloud were just beginning to emerge.

Inside the chamber, the chemical reaction had produced a small lake of hydrochloric and hypochlorous acids. In the seconds it took for the two men to realize something was wrong, their throats and lungs were burning. The fumes attacked the delicate tissues lining their airways, making even the shallowest breath a torture beyond pain.

Forced to cough from the irritant, they drew more of the toxin into their bodies, so that by the time they staggered out of the room they had gone into convulsions. They hacked blood mixed with sputum from deep inside their lungs.

The exposure had been brief, but without immediate medical attention the two gunmen were living corpses, and their deaths would be slow and agonizing. One of them must have realized it, and before Cabrillo could stop him he had pulled the pin on a hand grenade.

There was a split second to make a decision, but with the roof already so unstable there was only one thing to do. Cabrillo grabbed at Linc’s arm and took off running, not wasting a moment even to turn on his flashlight. He ran with his fingers brushing the tunnel wall. He could feel Linc’s towering presence behind him. They had both been counting the seconds and, at the same moment, threw themselves flat just as the grenade exploded.

Shrapnel peppered the tunnel all around them, and the overpressure wave hit in a wall of light and sound that felt like a sledgehammer blow. They scrambled to their feet as a new sound grew, seeming to fill the tunnel. The roar became deafening, as slabs of rock dislodged by the blast crashed to the tunnel floor in a cascading avalanche that threatened to engulf them. Dust and bits of rock fell on their heads and shoulders as more of the ceiling gave way. Juan flicked on the flashlight just as a chunk of stone the size of a truck engine slammed into the ground in front of him. He leapt over it like a hurdler and kept running. Overhead, cracks appeared in the roof, jagged lines that branched and forked like black lightning, while behind them the din of collapsing rock rose to a crescendo.

And then it began to subside. The roar petered out until only a few stones plinked and clattered. Juan finally slowed, his chest sucking in draughts of dust-laden air. He aimed the light toward the tunnel behind them. It was choked floor to ceiling with rubble.

“You okay?” he gasped.

Linc touched the back of his leg where a shard of stone had hit him. There was no blood when he looked at his fingers.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ll be better when we get out of all this dust. Come on.”

“Look on the bright side,” Linc said as they started walking again. “We don’t have to worry about them coming up behind us anymore.”

“I always had you pegged for a Pollyanna.”

They spent another two hours exploring the underground facility. They found bunks for one hundred and eighty prisoners, rooms that had once been laboratories, and a piece of equipment Linc recognized as an atmospheric chamber.

“Probably to test the effects of explosive decompression,” he’d remarked.

At last, they came to the end of the long tunnel. It didn’t peter out or pinch off. Rather, a section of the roof had collapsed, and both men recognized that it had been blasted free. Juan inhaled next to the mound of rubble, noting that a faint trace of explosive lingered.

“This was brought down recently.”

“When the Responsivists pulled out?”

Juan nodded, not giving in to his disappointment just yet. He scrambled up the sloping pile of loose rocks, his feet dislodging debris as he neared the top. He pressed himself flat, and ran the light along the seam where the shattered stone met the ceiling. He called down for Linc to join him.

“There was nothing in this catacomb that the Responsivists would care that we see. It’s all just old junk left by the Japanese Army.”

“So whatever they’re hiding is beyond this.”

“Stands to reason,” Juan said. “And since they risked coming down here after us, I bet that our exit is on the other side, too.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

With the water used up to improvise the gas attack, an hour of backbreaking work left Juan’s tongue a sticky swollen mass, as if some scaly reptile had curled up and gone to sleep in his mouth. His fingers were raw and bleeding from shifting the jagged stones, and his muscles ached from the cramped position. At his side, Linc worked with the efficiency of an indefatigable machine. It looked as if nothing fazed him, but Juan knew even Lincoln’s vast reserves of strength weren’t inexhaustible.

Bit by bit, they burrowed their way into the rubble, moving carefully, testing the ceiling to ensure their actions didn’t bring down more of the shattered stone. They changed positions every thirty minutes. First Juan attacked the debris and passed stones back to Linc’s waiting hands, and then Linc would take point, loosening boulders and handing them back to the Chairman. Because Linc was so broad in the shoulders and chest, the passageway had to be expanded to almost twice Juan’s size.

Juan was back at the rock face and reached for a handhold on a particularly large stone, but, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t loosen it from the rest. It seemed to have been locked into place. He shifted some smaller, fist-sized stones, hoping to get leverage, and pulled with everything he had. The rock didn’t so much as wiggle.

Above the lump of stone, the ceiling was rife with cracks and fissures, as unstable as the area the Responsivists brought down with their grenade. Miners called such a ceiling a bunch of hanging grapes, and Juan knew that a chunk could dislodge without warning. He’d never felt the chilling effects of claustrophobia before, but he could feel the icy fingers of panic trying to worm their way into his mind.

“What’s the problem?” Linc panted behind him.

Juan had to work his tongue around his mouth to loosen his jaw enough to speak. “There’s a stone here I can’t move.”

“Let me at it.”

They laboriously swapped places, with Linc moving feet first into the tight space. He braced his boots against the rock and his back against Cabrillo’s outstretched legs and brought his strength to bear. In the gym, he was able to leg-press a thousand pounds. The boulder weighed half that, but it was wedged tightly, and Linc was in the beginning stages of dehydration. Cabrillo could feel the intense strain in every fiber and tendon of Linc’s body as he pushed. Linc let out a growl, and the rock slid up and out of its socket of loose stones and packed dirt like a rotten tooth.

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” he whooped.

“Nicely done, big man.”

Linc was able to wriggle forward, and as Juan followed him he realized he was gaining headroom. They had crossed the highest point of the debris pile and were making their way down the back side. Soon, he and Linc could crawl over the remaining stones on their hands and knees and then they could stand upright, so they walked down the last of the rubble and onto the cave floor. When Juan pointed the light back at the pile, the gap near the top seemed impossibly small.

He and Linc rested for a few minutes, with the flashlight off to conserve its batteries.

“Smell that?” Juan asked.

“If you’re talking about a mug of ice-cold beer, you and I are having the same hallucination.”

“No. I smell seawater.” Juan got to his feet and turned on the light again.

They proceeded down the tunnel for another hundred yards, until it opened into a natural sea cave. The grotto was at least fifty feet high and four times as broad. The Japanese had constructed a concrete pier on one side of the subterranean lagoon. There was a set of narrow-gauge iron train tracks embedded in the cement for a mobile crane that had once been on the dock for unloading supplies.

“They brought ships in here?” Linc said incredulously.

“I don’t think so,” Juan replied. “I noticed when the ferry docked that the tide had just crested. That was seven hours ago, which puts us near low tide.” He played the light along the side of the quay where a thick carpet of mussels clinging to the cement indicated that high tide almost swamped the dock. “I think they supplied the base using submarines.”

He killed the light, and, together, they peered into the dark waters for any indication of sunlight penetrating this far into the cavern. There was a spot opposite the pier that glowed so faintly that it looked as if the waters weren’t exactly blue, only less black.

“What do you think?” Juan asked when he turned on the light.

“Sun’s at its zenith. For it to be so dark in here, the tunnel has to be a quarter mile long or more.”

He didn’t add that it was too far to swim on a single breath. Both men knew it.

“All right, let’s look around and see if there’s anything left down here we can use.”

There was only a single side chamber off the main cavern. Inside, they discovered a trickle of freshwater that seeped from a tiny crevasse high up the wall. The water had eroded a small bowl in the floor before meandering to the ocean.

“It’s not cold beer,” Linc said, cupping his hands in the bowl, “but nothing’s ever looked so refreshing.”

Juan, aiming the flashlight around the room, indicated that Linc should drink his fill. Propped against one wall was a row of strange stone tablets. All thoughts of thirst vanished as Juan studied the artifacts. They were roughly four feet tall and two wide, made of baked clay that was less than an inch thick. It wasn’t the stones themselves that held him rapt. It was the writing. An awl or stick had been used to etch the clay before it had been fired, and despite the tablets’ obvious antiquity there was absolutely no sign of weathering. It was as if they had spent their entire existence in a temperature-controlled museum.

Then he spotted the wires. Thin lines arced from the back of one tablet to the next. Juan shone the light in the gap between the tablets and the cave wall. Blocks of plastic explosives had been stuck to the backs of all four ancient texts and rigged to one another. He followed the wire and realized it went out toward the main tunnel. He figured it had been set to blow when they took down the ceiling, but the wire must have been cut before the signal reached this chamber. Judging by the amount of plastique, the Responsivists wanted to leave nothing of the tablets but dust.

“What have you got?” Linc asked. He had washed the grime from his face, and water had cut runnels through the dust on his neck.

“Cuneiform tablets rigged with enough SEMTEX to send them into orbit.”

Linc studied the explosives and shrugged. They knew well enough not to touch it. If it had decided not to go off when it was supposed to, they weren’t going to give it any reason to do so now.

“It’s cuniflower?”

“Cuneiform. Perhaps the oldest written language on earth. It was used by the Sumerians, dating back five thousand years.”