The Siege (5 page)

     “And these bad people, well, they got jealous. So they didn’t ask us if we would share with them. Instead they just decided to take everything away from us.”

     “That wasn’t very nice, was it?”

     “No, sir, it wasn’t. Especially when they used guns and shot at us, and shot
Sami in the shoulder.”

     “I love
Sami. She’s nice and she always lets me win at checkers.”

     “Yes, honey. We all like Sami. She is a wonderful woman. That’s why we’re so mad at the people who shot her.”

     He seemed to sense that she was carefully selecting her words, and gave her time.

     “These bad people, Markie, they won’t just leave on their own.”

     “Not even if we tell them we don’t like them, and they have to go away?”

     “No. Not even then. We tried asking them nicely to leave, but they won’t.”

     “So how do we get them to leave?”

     A tear formed in her eye, but she tried to hide it.

     “We have to make them leave, honey. We have to use guns and other things, just like they did, to make them go away.”

     “Are we going to shoot them, like they did to Sami? That wasn’t very nice, when they shot Sami.”

     “Well, we might have to, honey. Sometimes, with some bad people… well, you have to be mean to them back.”

     “Will they shoot Sami again?”

     “Oh, honey, I hope not. But… well, it’s possible that some more people we love will get hurt too.”

     Markie pondered the thought.

     “I hope not, Mommy. I love Sami and everybody else here. But especially you and Daddy. You and Daddy won’t get hurt, will you?”

     “I hope not, little sailor. We’ll try our best not to.”

     “Mommy, can I ask you a question?”

     “Sure thing.”

     She braced herself for what she was sure was going to be a question about death, or dying, or angry men. But he surprised her.

     “How come you call me little sailor? I mean, I read books, and sailors have boats. I don’t have a boat. I’ve never even been on a boat, or seen the ocean or even a lake. So how come you call me little sailor?”

     She smiled, glad for the break in the tension.

     “Well, a long
time ago, right after your Daddy and I first met, I was very much in love with him, but he didn’t know because I kept it a secret.

     “But he was trying so hard to make me fall in love with him. So this one time, not long after we met, he asked me if I wanted to go sailing. He was trying to pretend that he was a great sailor, but he really wasn’t. He was just trying to impress me.

     “When we were in the middle of a big lake, he stood up in the middle of the sail boat, just as the wind changed direction. The sail swung around and knocked your Daddy right off the boat and into the water.”

     Markie smiled.

     “And I laughed so hard, and I helped him back in the boat and he laughed so hard too. And then he looked at me with his beautiful blue eyes and said ‘I guess you can tell I’m not much of a sailor after all, huh?’

     “And I told him, ‘ya think?’

     “And we just laughed and laughed. And ever since then I’ve called your Daddy my sailor. And you, little sir, are just like your Daddy in every way. So you’re my little sailor.”

     “Daddy is pretty silly sometimes, isn’t he?”

     “You’ve got that right.”

     “Do you think I can ever ride on a boat someday?”

     “Oh, yes. Your Daddy and I will make sure of that.”

     “But I don’t want to fall in the water. I don’t know how to swim.”

     “Well, we’ll make sure to teach you how to swim too. As soon as we can find a lake and a boat, we’ll do both.”

     Markie was satisfied with that and went off to play.

     Hannah stayed behind, in deep thought, with a wry smile upon her lips.

     She was remembering that day on the lake, and the part of the story she hadn’t told little Markie. She hadn’t told Markie that once Mark was out of the water, he was chilled by the late afternoon breeze, and began to shiver.

     She didn’t tell Markie that his father’s apartment was many miles away, but that hers was close by. And that she offered to take him back to her apartment so she could wash and dry his clothes.

     Or that he walked around in her ratty old pink housecoat while the laundry was being done. The housecoat had once belonged to her grandmother, and she couldn’t bear to part with it.

     But she had to admit that it looked good on Mark that night.

     That was the night she and Mark had made love for the first time, and he didn’t go home until late the next morning.

     But that was a part of the story that little Markie didn’t need to know.

Chapter 8

     It was the
third day since the assault on the mine. Hannah hadn’t been back to the security console and still had mixed feelings about letting the men in the tunnel die. But she resolved to herself that she would not interfere. As guilty as she felt about men dying such a horrible death, she’d accepted the fact that they as a group were safer for it.

     And she owed her allegiance to her friends and family. Not to a gang of
criminals who’d have done them harm.

     At the bank of monitors, Mark stood shoulder to shoulder with Sarah and
Bryan, watching the camera feeds from the tunnel.

     There were only two patches of heat now. The others had died, and their bodies had cooled to the point that they simply vanished from the screen.

     They were unsure which two of the men were left. They knew none of their names, of course, nor their positions within their group.

     “We think the one on the left was one of the diggers, but we’re not sure. They kind of got mixed up when they started crawling around together at the end of the first day.”

     Bryan observed, “Well, whether he was a digger or not, he’s not digging any more.”

     It was a true
statement.

     The two remaining men alive in the tunnel had given up and abandoned all efforts to escape what would
soon be their tomb. Now they just sat in the silent darkness and waited their turn to die.

     Inside the tunnel, Alvarez leaned up against the side of the tunnel and dozed off and on. He’d scratched at the pile of rock and dirt and salt for twenty straight hours. He ignored the fact that he quite literally wore his fingers to the bone. The pain was inconsequential in his desperation to get out, and the dirt packed tightly against his fingertips helped deaden the nerves and slow the bleeding. When it was finally apparent to him that he was getting nowhere, he’d taken a deep breath, cursed as loud as he could, and passed out.

     He came to some time later to find himself face down in the dirt pile. His nostrils were full of dirt, and of the dried blood rendered when he fell face first after passing out and broke his nose.

     Now the nerves in his fingers were wide awake and screaming. He knew his fingers were still there, though he dared not touch them to see how much was left. He was in agony, every muscle in his upper body stiff and sore and crying out in pain.

     His nose throbbed, and his head pounded.

     But what he wanted most wasn’t for the pain to go away.

     What he wanted most was a drink of water.

     Now, many hours
after the explosions, he no longer felt his comrades bumping against him as they moved about in the tunnel.

     Blind, deaf, and in agony,
he just wanted it to be over. His throat was so parched it hurt to swallow. The saliva in his mouth had become thick and sticky.

     He could no longer open his eyes. His eyelids were so dry they just stuck to his eyeballs now. So he just kept them closed. There was nothing to see but blackness anyway.

     He went in and out of consciousness. Each time he awoke he briefly wondered if he was dead yet, then quickly had his answer as the pain struck him anew.

     He just wanted it to end. He knew he was going to hell. He’d raped and robbed and killed. Men like him didn’t get to heaven. Oh, sure, preachers liked to preach forgiveness and second chances. But they just wanted suckers like Alvarez to come to their services. To fill their pews, and their
collection plates. To help buy the preacher a new suit. To buy their way into heaven.

     But Alvarez wasn’t having any of that. He’d accepted long ago that he was hell-bound. In fact, he wore it as a badge of honor, telling the others that he feared no one. Not even the devil.

    Now he just wanted it to be over. In his mind, hell couldn’t be worse than what he was going through his last hours on earth.

     A few feet away from him, Rob Linkes was taking a vastly different approach to his impending death.

     He didn’t dig, like Alvarez and Casarez had done. He’d done nothing but lay on the tunnel floor since the first blast.

     The dynamite had obliterated
one of the wooden railroad ties that lined both walls of the mine, and held the ceiling braces up. A huge splinter of wood, two inches thick and eight inches long, had pierced Linkes’ abdomen and shredded his stomach and one of his kidneys. He’d gone down immediately and hadn’t moved since.

     He was suffering the same agony as Alvarez, and he too wanted it to be over.

     But Linkes wasn’t a badass by nature. Sure, he’d gotten hooked up with a bad lot, and had been dragged into a killing mission. But he’d gone along partly because he was terrified of Skully and Alvarez, and partly because he was highly susceptible to peer pressure.

     On the outside, he was a mousy accountant. He was in prison for white collar crime- cooking the books of his clients to make a better life for himself.

     When his crimes caught up with him and he went to prison, Linkes was scared to death. For the first few weeks he refused to come out of his cell except for chow. And then he quite literally trembled with fear.

     In time, though, he slowly began to venture out. Prison was a brutal place and he wasn’t well liked among the other inmates. He was forced to do things that no man should ever do. And when he tried to rebel he was beaten into submission.

     Linkes finally decided that the only way to survive his ten year term was to go along with the others. To become one of the gang so he no longer stood out. And it worked to some degree. But it also meant he’d get caught up in their schemes even when he didn’t want to.

     Now, his decision to play ball was
going to get him killed.

     But Rob Linkes knew he had a place in heaven, even after all he’d been through and done. He’d prayed every single night he was in prison, and every single night
since. Often silently and to himself. But he never missed a night.

     He didn’t know Alvarez was still alive. He thought he was the last one left. The bodies on either side of him were cold now. He somehow realized that it would be up to him now to finally deplete what was left of the oxygen. It was the only thing he could do to hasten
his departure from life for better things beyond it.

     And it occurred to him that by singing, he’d use up more of the thinning air around him.

     Alvarez didn’t know it, but just a few feet away from him, Rob Linkes lay on the tunnel’s floor, singing
Shall We Gather at the River
over and over again, in a cracked and dry voice.

     And he was smiling.

Chapter 9

     In the compound, Hance was fit to be tied.

     First, that scumbag Skully had to go and get himself killed. But that was okay. Nobody liked Skully much anyway. Everybody just pretended to because they’d seen his wrath and they were afraid to challenge him.

     But now, Alvarez and his crew disappeared without a trace. It had been four days now, and it was obvious the
y weren’t coming back.

     Hance himself braved the entrance to the tunnel, taking a fully automatic AK-47 he’d taken off a dead drug dealer, and a flashlight. The other men had balked at going into the tunnel. After all, that was the last place Alvarez went, and he never came back. And Alvarez was a lot tougher than they were.

     Sure, Hance could have bullied and threatened them into going. But he considered himself in charge now. And it was important to show the others that he had the guts to do what they wouldn’t.

     It only took a couple of minutes for him to figure out what happened. The pile of debris blocking the tunnel from floor to ceiling was hard to miss, even in the dimness of the flashlight.