Red Templar (18 page)

31

“His name was Count Peter Alekseyevich Pahlen, and the princess who spent her summers in the palace next door was named Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt,” said Father Ivanov as they climbed down the rusty iron rungs of the ladder. “The tunnel facilitated their affair and kept them from being discovered by the princess’s husband. Not a nice man, by all accounts.”

Above them Genrikhovich slid the paving stone over the opening. The only light now came from the big flashlight Ivanov was carrying in his free hand as they went down the ladder.

“Is any of this important?” Holliday asked, directly above the priest.

“Not really.”

“Then let’s forget about them; I’ve got enough Russian names floating around in my head.”

“I thought you were a historian,” answered Ivanov.

“I am,” said Holliday. “But not a historian of
everything
.”

They reached the bottom of the ladder. Eddie came down the ladder next, followed by Genrikhovich. Ivanov turned on several large portable lanterns and the chamber was flooded with light. Holliday found himself in a low-ceilinged room a little larger than a jail cell. At the far end of the oversize cell there was a very narrow arched brick passageway. The smell emanating from beyond the archway was indescribably foul.

In the chamber there was a bench with a box of leather workman’s utility belts, each equipped with a large climber’s hammer, coiled rope and a short pry bar. A pile of hip waders stood in one corner, and spikes in a brick wall were hung with a number of Tyvek biological suits, complete with hoods. Each suit had a half-mask respirator with it.

There was a box of hard hats fitted with miner’s lamps in a rotting cardboard box on the floor beneath the bench, and several folding spades and small pickaxes.

“You seem well equipped,” commented Holliday.

“I have been doing this for six years, on and off.” Ivanov shrugged. “I have accumulated some experience.” He slipped off the knapsack full of bottled water and food and then began to strip off his outer clothes. “A few of the Diggers have helped me from time to time; that is why I have the extra equipment.”

“Diggers?” Holliday asked.

“That is what they call themselves,” said the priest fondly. “Diggers of the Underground Planet. Their leader is a man named Vadim Mikhailov; he has been exploring underneath the streets of Moscow for twenty years. He is a devout Orthodox and has helped me greatly, teaching me the ‘tricks of the trade,’ as he calls them, and warning me of the things to watch out for.

“You might be surprised.” Ivanov smiled. He picked up the folding shovel and clipped it to his utility belt, then handed Holliday the short-handled pickax. “Last month the FSB discovered an underground mosque and three hundred illegal aliens in an underground bunker where the Rossiya Hotel used to be.”

The priest took a very up-to-date Magellan eXplorist 610 GPS unit out of his knapsack, slung the bag over his shoulder, then took one of the hard hats out of the box.

“Father Stelletskii’s maps?” Holliday asked.

“On microchips.” Ivanov nodded.

“For an Orthodox priest you have some unorthodox methods.”

“Even the Church must keep up with the times, Colonel.”

A few moments later, when everyone else was ready, Ivanov flipped on the miner’s light, adjusted his respirator mask so that it covered his nose and mouth, and led the way into the narrow, arched brick passageway.

Holliday stayed close behind Ivanov with Eddie and Genrikhovich. Even with the respirator masks the stink of rotting waste was almost overpowering, and Holliday’s eyes began to water at the sting of ammonia seeping from the walls. The corridor was barely wide enough to allow a man passage, and every few yards the light on Holliday’s hard hat caught ominous bulges in the bricks, as though some terrible pressure were building up behind them.

The bricks making up the wall were covered with a gray-green, mucuslike substance, and thin icicles of dripping lime hung from above them like the brittle bones of gigantic spiders. The floor beneath their feet seemed made of some soft, almost spongy gravel, and where the floor met the walls there was a ridge of brownish, tarry goo.

“It is just
un poco claustrofóbico
in this place, no?”

“Just a little,” agreed Holliday.

The passage went straight for what seemed like about two hundred yards and then suddenly dropped down a long slope and narrowed so much they had to turn sideways, their faces no more than a few inches away from the slime on the walls. The spongy footing had gone, replaced now by a gruesomely warm, thick brown semiliquid the consistency of porridge.

“Esto es repugnante.”
Eddie groaned.

“It’s even worse than the sewers in St. Petersburg.”

Suddenly something big, muscular and brown struck Holliday on the shoulder, skittered across his back and dropped down into the stagnant filth at Eddie’s feet. The Cuban lashed out hard, bellowing in horror, connecting with the creature and sending it spinning against the wall. It recovered and raced off the way they had come. Holliday shuddered; he could still feel the harsh, bristled fur of the rodent against his face and see the gray, whipping tail lashing as it leaped onto his shoulder. From the feel as it hit him Holliday figured it must have weighed close to ten pounds.

“¡Carajo!”
Eddie moaned.
“¡Odio las ratas de mierda!”

“They become very large beneath the streets,” called back Ivanov, his voice muffled by the respirator. “Down here there is a great deal to eat.”

“Which is why there are no
ratas
in Habana anymore,” said Eddie. “There is
nothing
for them to eat.”

They continued slipping through the cracklike passageway for another hundred yards or so and then the terrain changed again. The passage widened and the roof above their heads was stone instead of brick. The muck beneath their feet deepened, and every few steps Holliday felt something give beneath his feet. Throughout his career he’d gone through every kind of terrain, from deserts to jungles and rain forests, but he’d never traveled over ground like this before.

The passage ended in a brick wall thickly covered by a hardened carapace of slime that had turned into a greenish yellow solid and dripped down into the swampy sewage muck at their feet like candle wax. There was a narrow hole in the wall, barely large enough for a small man like Ivanov to wriggle through.

“We’ll have to make it bigger,” said the priest. He unlimbered the spade from his belt, unfolded it and began to strike the wall. Holliday stepped up and hammered the pickax into a spot on the wall where the mortar had long since disappeared and pulled.

“Just so long as there are no more
ratas,
” said Eddie, taking the climber’s hammer off his belt.

Genrikhovich laughed hollowly behind his mask. “You’re standing up to your knees in a thousand years of Russian piss, shit and vomit and you’re worried about a few rats?”

It took them twenty minutes. The straw in the bricks had rotted away years before, and the bricks themselves crumbled like old cheese. With each brick the stench became more intense. Pausing for a moment, Holliday heard a faint skittering, whispering sound, like the distant hard patter of raindrops on an iron roof.

“What the hell is that?” Holliday whispered, turning his ear toward the barely discernible sound. It was not only growing louder by the second, but there was something else about the noise—it was getting stronger, a summer shower growing first to a rolling thunderstorm and then to a hurricane of sound; whispering voices raised to chattering conversations and finally to the screams of hell-racked banshees. Something terrible was coming.

“Moi dorogoi Hrista!”
Ivanov whispered.

“I do not like this,
compadre,
” said Eddie. “Whatever it is, it is very, very bad for us, I think, no?”

“Yes,” agreed Holliday. Some sudden intuition of horror shuddered through him. He dropped the pickax. “Get back from the hole!” he ordered. “Keep away from the walls; stand in the center of the crap on the floor! Now!”

Within seconds all four men were gathered in a small, tight group, back-to-back in the muck. Ahead of the sound came a grotesque wave of odor, a filthy, poisonous attar of oily stench.

Horrified, Holliday trained his miner’s lamp on the newly enlarged hole in the brick wall and suddenly he saw a foaming, roiling mass of gray and white come pouring through it. The wave began to thicken and spread, a thickening tongue lolling from the hole, then spreading upward as well, slipping up the walls and the roof of the passageway but staying away from the liquefied stream in the middle.

Individually each member of the terrible army was at least four inches long, six legged, with long antennae and pale, almost transparent almond-shaped bodies that pulsed obscenely as they scrambled around beside and even over their fellow warriors. Huge albino cockroaches, their brown color bred out of them over millennia of generations in the dark bowels of the great city.

Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of the wretched creatures poured through the ragged hole. They became so thick on the ceiling above them that the outer layers began to slip and slide and then rain down on them, landing on their hooded heads and Tyvek-covered shoulders, sliding into and then out of their hip waders in clicking hordes, filling the air and then flailing on the sea of ooze covering the floor, all struggling in the same direction, pushing the weaker beneath them to provide a solid raft for the mindless mass to move over.

Holliday felt his gorge rise with burning acid bile and his recent dinner rising in his throat. He clenched his teeth, knowing that if he began to vomit he would either have to take off the mask or fill it and choke to death. He bent his head down, closed his eyes tight and waited for the nightmare to end.

It seemed to go on for an eternity, but eventually the noise passed and only the reeking stink of their passage was left behind. If not for the filters on their masks the four men would almost certainly have passed out from the fumes. Finally Holliday lifted up his head and opened his eyes. Tens of thousands of the creatures were floating on the surface of the muck, their legs fluttering weakly, but the main army had passed. There was a long silence.

“I have never seen a thing like this before,” said Eddie, finally lifting his head and looking around, awestruck and revolted.

“I don’t think anyone has ever seen something like this before,” said Genrikhovich.

“The bugs are gone, but they left
el olor de cucarachas
behind them,” said Eddie. “
Dios mío,
what a smell!”

“The smell is a combination of their feces and an oily waste of regurgitated food they vomit when they are stressed,” said Ivanov. “When you consider the number of creatures that went past, you can only imagine what they left behind.”

“Just what I needed, a lecture on cockroach puke,” muttered Holliday.

“We should go,” urged the priest. “The hole is big enough and the batteries on the lamps will not last forever.”

“I’m ready,” said Holliday. The thought of being in the dark down here made him suddenly nervous. Ivanov went through the gap in the bricks first, followed by Holliday, Eddie and Genrikhovich. On the other side of the brick wall there was a river of shit; there was no other way of describing it.

A high-arched tunnel of brick rose overhead, while below it the broad stream flowed, at least a hundred and fifty feet wide, thick and brownish yellow, with lumps in it, some recognizable, others not. The bloated corpses of dogs, cats and rats, of slaughtered pigs and sheep, plastic bags, their contents weighty enough to pull them halfway into the impenetrable flow. The body of a man drifted by, so bloated and corrupt it was little more than a floating island for the writhing swarms of maggots industriously eating their way to adulthood on its purple decomposing flesh.

The “banks” of the river were two-foot-wide concrete walkways, dangerously slick with a layer of mucuslike slime that seemed to work its way down off the walls like slow-moving lava from a volcano. A climber’s piton had been hammered into the concrete, and tied to it was a twelve-foot-long, five-foot-wide inflatable boat, complete with a pair of plastic oars and a five-horsepower Hidea outboard engine screwed onto the transom at the back.

“It really is worse than St. Petersburg,” said Holliday, looking out at the broad flow of waste, foaming eddies and pinwheels of gray-yellow muck making slow-motion patterns on the lumpy surface.

“Your black friend in the front, since he is the heaviest, you and Victor in the center, and I will take the controls,” said Ivanov.

“We are supposed to go out there in this little boat?” Eddie asked, looking out at the sluggishly moving flow, the light on his hard hat glinting off a bobbing empty bottle of Kubanskaya vodka, its red-and-black label still clearly visible.

“Afraid so,
compañero
,” said Holliday, grinning behind his mask. “You first.”

“Coño,”
grumbled the Cuban, but he stepped down into the boat, dropping instantly into a crouch, then making his way carefully forward. Genrikhovich followed, then Holliday, who sat down beside him, and finally Ivanov took his place at the throttle of the outboard. Holliday reached out and undid the line tying them to the concrete, then used one of the plastic oars to push them out into the current.

“Everyone turn off your lamps except your black friend, Colonel Holliday. We must conserve the batteries.”

“His name is Eddie,” said Holliday, his tone curt.

“Gracias, amigo,”
muttered Eddie softly. The rest of them turned off their lamps, leaving only the beam of Eddie’s lamp to light the way.

Ivanov turned on the electric starter and there was a gruesome burbling sound as the propeller chewed into the muck. The boat headed out into the center of the current, and then Ivanov steered straight ahead and turned the throttle of the outboard. The horrible burbling increased and they moved slowly off down the ghastly river.