Twisted Path (16 page)

Bolan silently encouraged the hitter to keep shouting. It made it a lot easier for him to zero in on his target, and the lack of response would be making the assassin jittery.

Bolan held the weapon at arm's length, not wanting to take a chance on being surprised. In the dark he couldn't tell what type of gun he was holding, but it was light, like an Ingram or an Uzi machine pistol.

He held a small advantage, since the fallen light pointed slightly toward the hidden gunner, making it a little more difficult for Bolan to be seen as he silently crept forward for the showdown.

He didn't hear any other sounds and wondered briefly if he was the only one of the group still alive.

A muzzle poked around a corner ahead, swinging in Bolan's direction. The warrior squeezed off a burst, and the SMG went flying into the dark. Those were the last shots fired. Bolan's gun registered empty.

The hitter took to his heels. Bolan had apparently hit the gun but missed anything vital on the ambusher. The impact of Bolan's rounds on the terrorist's weapon must have numbed his hands at the very least. The guy certainly wasn't hanging around for a hand-to-hand encounter.

Bolan dropped the useless weapon and pursued, one hand on the wall for guidance as he ran in compare darkness, guided only by the ringing sound of footsteps leading him by a few feet.

For a moment, the warrior considered giving up the chase and allowing his quarry to escape but abandoned the thought. It was in his best interest to catch the guy and keep him alive, if possible. This shadowy fleeing figure might be the warrior's only way out of the maze if everyone else had been killed in the attack.

His hands told him that the pathway veered sharply to the right. He powered around the bend, listening for the footsteps. The cadence changed, as though the man in front did a dance step, followed by a slight pause, then a thump.

Even as the significance registered, Bolan jumped, arms outstretched. His legs came down on air, but his arms fell heavily on stone, scrambling madly for a purchase. He had almost fallen into a yawning chasm in the center of the passageway.

The man in front had guts, Bolan admitted grudgingly, even as his fingers scratched for a hold in the smooth rock floor. It took nerve to run the corridor in the dark and time a jump like that. He had to know the place the way his socks knew his shoes.

His adversary hadn't given up yet. Bolan could hear him breathing just inches away.

A fan of air brushed Bolan's right ear the killer was trying to kick Bolan off his precarious perch and send him for a long jump into nothingness.

The heavy boot sailed by Bolan's ear once more, but this time the warrior was ready. He shot his hand forward, gripping the ankle in a viselike grip, and yanked hard.

With an unintelligible curse, the overbalanced terrorist toppled into the pit. At the last second the guy made a desperate move, grabbing Bolan around the knees and holding on for dear life.

Bolan shook himself as hard as he dared. He rocked back and forth, trying to bang the guy into the wall or scrape him off against the side.

But the desperate man clung to Bolan like a barnacle attached to a ship. And the Executioner's arms were getting tired. Already his shoulders were screaming, the joints stretched by the double weight on the sockets. His ribs, injured only a few days ago, were sending jets of agony coursing through his body.

He couldn't swing a leg up as long as the terrified hitter below gripped them like a living rope. Carefully Bolan removed his right arm from the edge and powered a rocklike fist repeatedly onto the top of the Peruvian's head.

The gunner's death grip didn't loosen he completely ignored the hammer blows raining on him, too terrified to fight back or make any move to protect himself. Bolan's fist rocketed down once more.

One time too many. Bolan's arm slipped from the edge. His hands searched frantically for a crevice, for the smallest finger hold to halt his slide.

He fell into the pit.

Screeching, the Peruvian finally let go.

The two men tumbled through the blackness, heading for the bottom.

After he had listened to the pounding footsteps fade away in the distance, Libertad lifted himself carefully from the stone, assured that all danger was now passed.

"Up, you cowards," he shouted, moving to retrieve the fallen light.

Three men responded, two of his men and Stone, as he saw by shining the light in their faces.

Libertad began to examine the bodies crumpled on the red-pooled, sticky floor. Most of them were clearly dead, with massive injuries caused by the high-velocity rounds.

One was unconscious but still breathing, although with every breath bright red blood bubbled from a large hole in his right side, adding to the splotchy stain creeping over his shirt.

The terrorist leader called Stone over, but the American just shook his head and turned away.

Libertad grunted with frustration. This was hardly going to be the triumphant return that he had planned. Instead of bringing back a sizable force along with a useful Yankee, he would go creeping back with two men and Stone. What a plague of bad luck had befallen him.

He moved to where the assassin lay. He had heard the fight between Blanski and the hidden gunman, but had not interfered. What would have been the point? He would have only succeeded in getting himself shot.

Even now, either Blanski was alive, in which case he would be found wandering in the underground complex, or he was dead. Then he would be no further trouble. Either way, he wasn't worth worrying about right now. There were more pressing matters for Libertad's attention, such as figuring out who had planned to have him killed.

More specifically, what member of the Shining Path had sought to have him obliterated and left to be forgotten somewhere in the underground caverns?

He directed the light onto the twisted face of the assassin. The neck jutted at an odd angle, and the mouth was open in a final snarl, the tongue sticking out of one side. Libertad wasn't bothered by the sight; he had had too much combat experience to be disturbed by death.

He kicked the body in the side several times, the dead man sliding along the smooth stones with every impact. He stopped when his foot became sore, some of his anger vented on the unresisting corpse.

"Does anyone recognise him?" he demanded of his men.

Each shook his head in denial. "He looks slightly familiar, but I couldn't tell you his name," commented one man.

Useless offal, Libertad thought. There was only one way to find out who this creature had been. He reached for his knife.

The terrorists prepared to leave, gathering the weapons scattered among the bodies. At least now they had three lights, since each of the assassins had brought a powerful flashlight.

"What about the wounded man?" Stone asked as they prepared to leave.

"What about him?" Libertad answered.

"You're not going to leave him here, are you? He's still alive, you know."

"Yes, he's alive. But he will be dead soon, and we both know it. Should we carry him along? For what purpose should we tire ourselves, since he will either die as we travel or at our camp? When we arrive at our base, we would not expend any of our few and precious medicines on someone who will not recover. As it is, he is a brave martyour for our cause and will die a happy man."

Stone was astonished at the cold-blooded analysis of the value of the fallen man. "But... he is still alive!" Stone couldn't think of an argument to use, although he knew that Libertad must be wrong.

Libertad didn't answer immediately and appeared to be thinking. Abruptly he took two long steps to the injured man. With a swift motion, he unsheathed his knife and plunged it into the prone man's ribs below the heart. The body shuddered once and lay still.

Libertad wiped his knife on the dead man's pants and leathered the knife. "Now he's not. Are you satisfied? Let's go." Stone followed, casting a backward glance at the fallen men, already vanished in the shadows.

In a few minutes they came to a pit in the corridor floor. One of the men pointed to some drying red streaks at the edge of the hole.

The four men gathered at the edge of the vertical shaft, shining the lights far down the rock walls.

No bottom appeared in the beams.

"I don't think we will be seeing Blanski again," Libertad commented as each mentally reconstructed what must have happened here the unseen pit, a frantic last effort and a final fall. Very final.

"Why don't we throw this other American after him?" suggested one of the terrorists. "Let all Yankees rot in the darkness, I say."

Libertad shook his head, although the prospect was attractive. He was in a black mood, having lost the major prize, the reason why they had been brought from Lurigancho. He felt like killing something, and Stone would be a satisfying sacrifice.

But duty was more important than pleasure. And anyway, he might still have an opportunity to cut out Stone's heart at some later date.

"No. He may still have some value to us as a healer, untrained though he is. He does have some small skill with plants and herbs. We will keep him alive until we are told otherwise."

"And I hope that it is soon," said one, a dull-looking squat lump of a man, waving his knife under Stone's chin.

Stone suddenly felt a wave of nostalgia for Lurigancho.

That's when he realized how much he missed Blanski.

Bolan awoke. At least he thought he was awake. He couldn't see, even though his eyes were open.

Gradually, as though he were waking from a long and horrible dream, the past few hours came back to him. He remembered the fall, the Peruvian shrieking, the helpless fear of falling washing over him as he dropped in the absolute blackness.

Then he hit, landing directly onto the Peruvian's chest before rolling to the granite floor.

He must have smashed his head, for the hair on the left side of his scalp was matted and caked with dried blood.

As awareness returned, he felt racked with pain: his head hurt, his muscles ached as though he had had a close encounter with a steamroller, and his throat felt as if he had swallowed a sandbox.

And to top it off, he was stuck in the middle of a stone Chinese puzzle, left to himself to wander around in the dark without any food or water until he somehow found his way out of this trap. Or died of thirst or starvation first.

He was beginning to hate Peru.

Well, no point in putting it off. It was time to get moving. He began by feeling around on all fours for the Peruvian, ignoring the insistent protests of bruised muscles. At least nothing felt cracked or broken, so he had better consider himself fortunate.

He found the body after a few moments of groping.

The chest was a funny concave shape; Bolan could almost discern the impression his knees had made when he had dropped on the already smashed corpse of the gunner. Lucky for Bolan that they hadn't fallen in the opposite order.

What a run of tremendously good luck he was having, he thought ironically.

The body was warm but cooling. He didn't know how to estimate the time of death, but guessed that it had been no more than an hour ago.

He continued to explore the body by touch, not knowing what to expect. He discovered a pouch, the string wrapped around the dead man's neck.

Bolan reached in to see if there was anything edible and found several smaller pouches inside. By the smell, one contained tobacco. He couldn't identify the contents of the rest of the pouches. He opened one of them, placed a small amount of its contents on his right forefinger and tasted it. A ball of fire formed on his tongue and burned a trail down his throat. It was some fierce spice, like chili pepper or hot curry, and it seared his mouth like a branding iron.

He threw the small pouch somewhere into the darkness, and decided not to experiment anymore.

Bolan ran his hands over the corpse again, searching for a water flask. No sign of one, although he did find a knife in a sheath, which he added to the pouch of foodstuffs.

He searched around the body with fading hope, but at last his hands encountered a tough hide pouch that sloshed faintly.

He found the top and drank deeply before he caught control of himself. There was no way of telling how long this tiny water supply might have to last, so he decided to drink no more now.

He had no reason to remain where he was any longer. He began to walk, going right because it rhymed with light there was no rational basis for choosing a direction, since he had no way of judging even where north or south were.

Bolan proceeded cautiously. With one hand on a wall, he slid his feet forward slowly in case he came upon another pit in the floor. It was a tiring and slow way to cover ground. Whenever he came to a side tunnel, he bypassed it, preferring to keep going in a straight line, if possible. He had no idea where he would end up, but he figured if he went far enough in one direction, he would finally arrive somewhere. At least he hoped so.

The experience was disorienting, like being placed in a sensory deprivation tank. Bolan could move and hear the sound of his own voice and steps, but there was no stimulus apart from what he produced for himself. When he stopped, there was complete silence other than the sounds of his own body.

His eyes were sore, strained from the effort of trying to see when vision was impossible. His legs were tired, his arms protesting from reaching out to the wall. He couldn't tell if his limbs were revolting because he had been walking for hours or because he ached from the combination of falls, fights and fevers he had endured over the past few days.

He tried counting paces, but found his mind drifting. He lost the numbers so often that he gave up the effort. He was too weary to keep on walking. It was obvious that he needed rest.

The big man lay down on the cold stone and slept.

Libertad was angry as he approached the base camp, a righteous feeling directed at whoever had tried to kill him. He was more than a little nervous, too, since it could have been anyone in the complex who had known that he was coming. Who would want him dead? And why?

He was going to get the answers, for leaving the puzzle unsolved might mean his eventual death.

It wasn't a pleasant feeling, returning to a place he had always thought of as a refuge and finding a worm in the apple. Actually the feeling was more like finding a poisonous snake in one's bed. If there was a traitor to the organization planning his demise, he must be found and eliminated before he could do any more damage.

But only after he had been made to tell everything he knew.

A minor commissar greeted Libertad when he arrived, and tried to send him off to the dormitory for rest. Libertad would have none of it.

"I demand a meeting with the Revolutionary Council," he stormed, refusing to be placated.

"That is impossible," the other man answered coldly. "If they wish to see you, they will send for you. Something that I very much doubt will happen." The commissar glared at Libertad as though he were some lower form of life.

Libertad kept his temper in check, telling himself that it was not for the likes of this headquarters parasite that he had killed and risked being killed.

However, at this moment he would gladly have added the sniveling bureaucrat to his list of victims.

"Tell the council that I have evidence of treason, of a counterrevolutionary plot within these very walls. If I must break up their meeting myself, I will do so. Then I will be forced to name you among those I suspect of obstructionism, revisionism and sentiments contrary to the well-being of the party."

Libertad sneered as the functionary ran off to pass along his message. He knew it took very little suspicion to make the council decide someone was a liability to the movement. The next step was a Revolutionary Tribunal, followed by execution by the People's Justice Squad. And inevitably, a cold, lonely grave.

Libertad sat on a rough bench, prepared to wait. It wouldn't be a long stay.

Bolan awoke refreshed although stiff from sleeping on the rough and unyielding stone, the details of the past events flooding his mind. His plan was clear: get the hell out of here. It was the "how" that was kind of hazy.

He drank a little water before moving off, ignoring the rumblings of his stomach. He could live for a long time without food, but without water he would have lasted only a day or two before he collapsed, able only to wait for an unpleasant death.

He must move slowly, conserve his strength and, above all, ration his water rigidly. Then he might have a chance.

He had taken the precaution of placing his food sack a few feet farther down the corridor in the direction that he had been traveling before he went to sleep. That way he could be sure not to retrace his steps.

Bolan began to walk, continuing the monotonous trek straight ahead. This time he counted the paces, stepping off the distance at as rapid a tempo as he could maintain without beginning to sweat.

He had almost reached twelve thousand paces when the corridor ended. Feeling in front of him, Bolan touched raw earth. Apparently the Incas hadn't advanced any farther along this route.

He had marched down a dead end.

The big man fought off a wave of depression.

Instead of resting, he drank a little water from his dwindling supply and started back the way he had come, turning at the first left he came to.

Bolan walked on along the smooth-walled passageway, skipping over occasional breaks in the regular stonework. He was curious about the purpose of the underground maze. Surely some of these openings must be for quarters, armories, treasure houses, kitchens or stairways, any of the thousands of kinds of activities that took place in an ancient fortress. But he knew that if he began to explore, the chances were great that he would never find his way out.

As he walked, nagging doubts began to come to mind.

Maybe the whole lower level was only air ducts or for flood control. Maybe it was a punishment, a sadistic torture chamber for enemies who were thrown down here to starve to death. What if there really was no way out?