The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (22 page)

Hollis didn’t even hesitate. He followed me to the back and stepped through the door as I opened it for him.

His head snapped right a split second later.

T
he butt of Elaine’s MP5 struck Hollis across the jaw as he stepped into the open. He crumpled to the ground against the back wall, clutching the side of his face, blood spilling past his lips.

“What the hell is—”

He never completed the question that would protest his treatment. As his gaze came up he saw Elaine, who had landed the blow, her MP5 no aimed squarely at his chest. Next to her stood Lorenzen, his M4 at the ready, but a seething look his weapon of choice for the moment. And, right beside them, Perkins stood. Staring down at the bleeding man.

“I have no idea who this man is,” Perkins said.

I crouched next to ‘Hollis’ and held out my notebook, open to what I’d written for Elaine to read.

‘Find Perkins. See if he knows Hollis. I’m bringing him out the back. Tell Schiavo.’

“Infiltrator,” Elaine said.

Hollis looked from her, to the notebook again, then to me.

“Your punctuation is impeccable,” he said, smiling with crimson teeth. “American.”

The Russian wasn’t even offering any pretense. Neither would I.

“How do you get in?” I asked.

The cocksure attitude he’d just expressed faded. He didn’t answer, looking past me as Enderson brought Schiavo around from the front side of the building.

“We have ourselves a live infiltrator,” Lorenzen told the lieutenant.

“Not for long if he doesn’t tell us how he gets in and out of that monstrosity,” I said. “Because he has to. Why else would they leave him out here? He has to report what’s going on. Just like he was going to report on our arrival. Our strength. Weapons. Isn’t that right,
Hollis
?”

He smiled now again, little bubbles of blood on his lips as he chuckled.

“Viktor Grishin,
Leytenánt
, six-five-nine—”

A fast slap of my gloved hand across Grishin’s face halted his recitation of the particulars required under the Geneva Convention concerning the treatment to be afforded to prisoners of war. He glared up at me, a spray of blood,
his
blood, now splashed across the back wall of the building. I wondered if I would hear any protest from Schiavo, but none came.

“I am a prisoner of war!” Grishin shouted wetly.

“What war?” Schiavo asked in response.

I tapped the Russian again on his cheek, lightly now, to bring his attention back to me.

“You see, I know you can get in, and not just because you’d have to report, but because of these.”

I brought a gloved finger to his chest and tapped the thick shirt there, its checkered pattern of reds and greens dotted with small, whitish objects.

Crumbs.

“Your comrades are passing you food,” I said.

Grishin turned his head away, tiring of me. He was about to feel much more than annoyance toward me. Much more.

I leaned close to him and spoke softly into his ear.

“I told myself there were things I would never do. Even to survive. I’m about to break one of those promises.”

The Russian turned slowly to face me from just inches away.

“Tie him up,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Schiavo asked.

I stood and faced her.

“What you can’t,” I told her.

Elaine jerked the man up and Perkins shoved him against the wall, pulling his arms behind. It took a minute to bind him with paracord. Tight. His hands hung limp and purple behind his back when we were finished.

“Last chance before the screaming starts,” I said.

Grishin said nothing, trying to maintain some stoic resolve. But I could feel his thudding heartbeat against my gloved hand where it lay on his back.

“Eric...”

I looked back to Schiavo.

“This won’t take long,” I said. “Why don’t you and your men discuss what you need to discuss.”

“HELP!” Grishin suddenly screamed. “HELP ME!”

I laughed, and the Russian quieted, his head angling back over his shoulders to look upon me.

“In English?” I said. “Really? Is that because you know your comrades would let you rot, if they could even hear you?”

Grishin’s breathing quickened and he drew his head back, then slammed it against the wall. A gash opened across his forehead, blood trickling from what looked like a sick, red grin carved upon his brow. I grabbed his collar and pulled him away from the building.

“Eric, this—”

“Lieutenant,” I said, laying a hard look upon her. “This is what it has to be.”

Schiavo stared at the Russian for a moment, a long moment, then she looked to her sergeant.

“Get the men together and we’ll hash out what we’ve got to do,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lorenzen said, flashing me a look before he walked away.

I was almost certain there was a wink embedded in it.

“Now,” I said, spinning Grishin to face me, and Elaine, and Perkins. “We have some questions for you.”

Elaine reached to her belt and took a knife from its sheath.

“I’m not going to tell you—”

The solid crunch of Perkins’ fist connecting with Grishin’s nose ended his pointless bravado before he could finish. Elaine handed me her knife and I whipped it fast up to the Russian’s face.

“You’re going to,” I said, sliding the tip of the knife under his upper lip. “Understand?”

He tried to say ‘no’, and I jerked the blade up and through the soft flesh of his lip, leaving two bleeding flaps dangling beneath his nose.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

His scream was wet and came from a place I doubted he knew existed within him just a few seconds earlier.

“My friend’s little girl is down there,” I said. “And I will do anything to see that she comes out alive and unhurt. Because if that does not come to pass, let me remind you that what I just did to you is not fatal. You’ll still be here, tied up, and I’ll be coming back to you. And I won’t be alone. My friend will be with me. And if you think what I just did to you was unpleasant, let me assure you that what he will inflict upon you will make you wish that I’d just gone ahead and slit your throat. So, tell me now, do you want me to remove one of your eyelids?”

At first, Grishin did not react to my question. He simply stared at me with blackened eyes, the garish hole that was his mouth trembling with stinging agony. Then, before I could say anything more, he shook his head. Just barely. Like a meek mouse.

The next question I asked he answered fully. And the next. And the next.

By the time Grishin finished telling us all that he knew, Elaine and I realized that there was another option to free the children. One whose window of opportunity was rapidly closing.

I reached to the Russian’s wrist and removed his watch, then shoved him to the ground at Perkins’ feet.

“Lock him up somewhere,” I told the angry little man from Yuma. “If he tries anything, end him.”

For the first time, I saw Perkins smile, a disturbing curl arcing his thin lips.

“Gladly,” Perkins said, hauling Grishin to his feet and strong arming him away from the building.

“We have to tell Schiavo,” Elaine said.

I shook my head. That would come, and, if the timing of this was to work, it would have to happen with haste. But something else would have to come first.

“We need to talk to the foreman,” I said.

C
ranston was no longer in his office. It took twenty minutes to find him, Elaine finally tracking him down on the road to the cemetery. She brought him back to the tavern and led him to the pool table where the plans were still spread out.

“We need some information,” I said, Elaine standing with me.

The feeble man looked to me, his gaze distant, a sheen of tears upon it.

“I just wanted to visit Joe,” Cranston said. “We buried him.”

Whatever remained of his faculties was fading quickly. We had to get some straight and precise answers out of him. And fast.

“Earl, look here,” I said. “On the plan. What’s this?”

His eyes tracked slowly to where I was pointing to a section of the plans deeper into the complex. Maybe a hundred feet beyond where the children were thought to be.

“Earl, what is it?” I repeated. “This square marking? Is that ductwork of some kind?”

He looked to me, confused, and shook his head.

“No. No.”

“What is it, Mr. Cranston?” Elaine prodded him with gentle respect.

Cranston leaned forward, closer to the plan, his own bony finger tracing along the paper until it rested next to mine.

“Dump shaft,” he said.

“Dump shaft,” I repeated. “To dispose of garbage? Things like that?”

He nodded.

“Just climb up the ladder in it and pop the hatch and toss out anything you don’t want,” he explained with a momentary flash of lucidity.

I looked to the plans again.

“About two feet square?” I asked him.

“Twenty four by twenty four,” he confirmed.

“And it only opens from the inside?”

“That’s right,” Cranston told me.

His fingers spread out upon the plan, both hands splayed wide, as if trying to hide what he saw before him. What he’d helped create.

“I think his name was Joe,” Cranston said, slipping back into some guilt-ridden fugue state.

Elaine looked to me.

“It can work,” she said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Let’s tell Schiavo.”

“Y
ou want to what?”

Schiavo’s doubting question came just as I began explaining the plan that had coalesced after Grishin’s coerced revelations.

“I go in alone,” I repeated. “Through a dump shaft that only opens from the inside. It’s past the location where the kids are.”

“Where we
think
they are,” the lieutenant reminded me.

“Right,” I said.

She stood alone, facing me and Elaine in the front room of a souvenir store her unit had taken over to prep for the mission ahead. The rest of her men were out gathering the explosives we’d need, and readying a small group of civilians to provide some armed cover of the main access door.

“The infiltrator told you about this shaft?” Schiavo asked.

“He did,” Elaine answered. “And Cranston confirmed it.”

“It has to be opened from within?” Schiavo asked. “Won’t blasting it alert Kuratov the same as when we breach the skylight?”

I shook my head.

“At six-thirty this evening, one member of Kuratov’s unit will open the hatch,” I said. “He’ll have an MRE to pass up to Grishin, who is supposed to relay any intel on what’s happening above.”

Schiavo began to smile, the warm expression almost stark against her still pale complexion.

“Only Grishin won’t be there,” Schiavo said. “You will.”

“Right,” I said, tapping the suppressor attached to the muzzle of my AR. “I pop the Russian quietly, get inside, and get close to where the children should be. That should take five minutes. Make it six to be safe. At that moment your team breaches a skylight away from the one where the children are shown.”

“You draw Kuratov’s force even further away from the kids,” Elaine said.

“Then I eliminate whoever’s guarding the children, blow that weakened corridor to block any interference, and lead them to the dump shaft.”

“That has a lot of moving parts,” Schiavo said.

“So does a Lamborghini,” I countered. “But they still work.”

Schiavo thought on the plan for a moment.

“Why you?” she asked. “And why not more than one? I could slip my guys down there just as easily as you.”

“No,” I said. “A good number of those children know me. I’m not some stranger coming for them. That will make getting them out a quicker process. Besides, the more shooters we take down there, the more likely it is that someone makes a sound, and then we’ve got a firefight and all of Kuratov’s men coming down on us. This has to be a stealth operation on that end. You can make as much noise as you want blowing Kuratov to hell.”

“I’ll be there to help you do just that,” Elaine said.

She’d said she was going in. Insisted upon it. When I’d told her that I needed to handle my end alone, to be as quiet as possible, she’d shifted her focus to being part of Schiavo’s entry team.

As she informed the lieutenant of her intention here, I felt that pang of fear stab at my insides. But I had to force it down. I had to.

“What about the main supplies down there?” Schiavo asked. “And the radio?”

“The children come first,” I said, knowing that she would not dispute that.

Schiavo nodded. Then, she shook her head slightly, some realization rising.

“He’s the boogeyman we’ve never seen,” Schiavo said. “Kuratov. Just some legend who leaves a trail of death behind.”

Not unlike Borgier. The American turned rogue French Legionnaire. Some days earlier I’d shared with Schiavo what we’d been told about the man believed to have unleashed the blight. She’d confirmed that tale as fact. Now, we had another rogue. Or a madman. Whichever turned out to be the case, it seemed plain to me that either he would die, or we would.

All of us.

“Lieutenant...”

It was Hart. He was smiling as he entered the store. An expression incongruous with the moment and what was soon to come.

Or so I thought.

“What is it?” Schiavo asked.

Hart reached into the bag slung over his left shoulder. It was from his med kit. I’d seen him pull bags of plasma from it when he still had those in his inventory. This time, though, when he eased his hand out he held a plasma bag that did not contain that life-saving liquid. Instead the contents were a dark crimson. Identical to what he’d had in a similar bag after tapping Elaine for a transfusion.

“I found another AB Neg,” Hart said. “So we’re going to top you off, ma’am.”

Schiavo reacted blandly. As if annoyed that any consideration for her well-being was even necessary.

“Things have changed, Trey,” Schiavo said to her medic, the informality she was affording him in our presence not surprising after all we’d been through together. “We’re on a clock now to make this op happen.”