Whipsaw (15 page)

"Marisa, you don't have to do this if you don't want to." Bolan watched her face closely, but she betrayed no hesitation.

"Of course not, but I want to."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes... I... I know what you thought of my husband, Mr. Belasko, but I still think he was right. He stood for something. I have to see that Harding pays for that. For Thomas. If you can make that happen."

Bolan nodded gravely. "All right, then, let's go. You know the tunnels. Where do you think Harding would be? Where would he feel the most secure?"

"I can only guess."

"That's all we've got, Marisa. And we don't have time to guess wrong."

She nodded. "I'm ready." Bolan waited while she took a deep breath.

She placed a hand on his forearm for a moment, and he moved toward the door. He stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and made sure his flashlight was working. He clicked it on and trained it into the darkness. The beam was steady and, unlike the smaller torch, its light was clear and white.

"You'd better not use that."

She was right, so he clicked the light off, tucked it into his pocket and stepped through the opening. Marisa squeezed past him to take the lead.

In the darkness he could hear her fingers brushing the wall, and her steps were measured and slow, as if she were counting paces. It was so unlike his first passage through the underground, the breakneck pace even more incredible now that she moved so deliberately.

In a hoarse whisper she said, "I'm sorry to be so slow, but I'm not as familiar with this tunnel as I am with some of the others. I don't quite know where we'll end up, but if Harding came this way, we'll find him. There are just so many tunnels, just so many places he could be." Her whisper died away, its echo drifting back from far down the tunnel like the shame of soft paper in small hands. Bolan felt blind in the darkness, but they couldn't run the risk of a light. It was up to Marisa, and they both knew it.

"Just do what you can," Bolan said softly. He didn't have high hopes for their success but didn't want to discourage her.

Every step seemed to take a century as they groped through the tunnel. Neither of them spoke, and Bolan found himself wondering about Marisa. In some way he couldn't quite explain, she seemed different, more like an automaton than the fiercely independent woman she had been before her husband's death. She had changed, as if part of her strength had come from him.

She seemed narrowed somehow, focused in a way he had seen before, had even sensed in himself on occasion. He recognized that part of Marisa had reduced the population of the planet to two people alone: herself and Charles Harding. To Bolan, it was a misplaced devotion to Thomas Colgan. But to Marisa, and he couldn't argue with her feelings, it was retribution mandated by a law she neither controlled nor understood. She was running on pure courage, with one thought in her mind: make the bastard pay.

Bolan sensed something of that same fierce concentration in himself. He had seen the handiwork of the man and thought Charles Harding had a price to pay, exacted in the only currency that mattered. For Bolan, as for Marisa, an eye required an eye, a tooth demanded a tooth.

Cordero, of course, was part of the mix, but Bolan considered him secondary, an implement more than a man, something that Harding would use and throw away. It was the age of disposables, in everything from paper plates to hypodermics. Why should an instrument of terror be any different?

Take Harding down, and Cordero would wither, an unpicked fruit in an abandoned garden.

Take Harding down, Bolan thought the only way to go. But first, he reminded himself, you had to find him.

"Wait a minute," Marisa whispered, her voice almost reverent, as if she were in the nave of some gloomy cathedral instead of a catacomb under a city on the brink of annihilation. "It should be here." She let go of Bolan's arm, and he heard her feet shuffle on the damp stone underfoot, the faint splash of her shoe in the shallow stream coursing through the tunnel. "It has to be here."

"What are you looking for?"

"There is supposed to be an outlet here, on the right. Let me go a little farther."

Her feet scraped on the stone again, scattering little splashing sounds as she moved. Her palm slapped against the damp stone, its sound swallowed after a single dull echo.

"Where is it?" She sounded almost petulant, as though someone had found something she had hidden and thought secure. The palm slapped harder against the stone. Her voice tightened and rose in pitch, just a notch, but Bolan caught it.

Don't lose it now, Marisa not now, he thought.

"Maybe the light..."

"No! I don't need light. It's here or it isn't." Bolan pulled the flashlight out of his pocket.

Muffling the switch, he clicked it on and trained it on the wall. And it stared him in the face. She was right, there should have been an opening. There was, in fact a new section of wall, the mortar still bright, the surface of the stone almost free of lichens.

"Forget about it. We'll have to find some other way." She shook her head angrily.

"What do we do now?" Bolan asked.

"We have to go out of our way, that's all."

Bolan clicked the light off again. "Lead the way," he said.

He heard Marisa move away. She no longer reached back for him; it was as though she was trying to separate herself from him, perhaps to prove something to him, or to herself. She was setting a faster pace, either because she knew they had some distance to cover or because she wanted to show that she, too, was aware of the urgency of their purpose.

Bolan was glad to see that independent streak, an awareness of herself, an awareness that there was still more to her life than simple vengeance.

The bricked-up wall bothered him. It gave Harding an elusive edge. By changing the ground rules, he was taking charge of the situation. It also meant that Harding might be leading them on, funneling them to some place where that advantage would do him the most good. But that awareness did not change anything. Bolan had no choice, and Harding knew it.

It was a goading kind of challenge. It amounted to saying try to beat me with a stacked deck, big guy. I dare you.

Every step brought them closer to the last hand, and Bolan only had a single edge: he knew Harding wasn't bluffing.

Marisa had settled into a steady rhythm, and they were making good time. Bolan was relieved, at least, that the uncertainty was gone. He had been boarding the lion in his den, and the lion had finally been heard from. With that out of the way, there was simply the matter of staying alive. And he thought of the camp, the high-tech defences, and his blood went cold.

"Marisa, stop!" he said urgently, then clicked on the light and aimed it far down the tunnel. Marisa flinched at the sudden glare, but said nothing. Bolan chewed on his lower lip, trying to sort things out. "I want you to stay here," he said at last.

"But you need me to guide you..."

"I'll do without."

"You're crazy!"

"Maybe. But I don't think so. I've just gotten a little insight into Harding."

"What're you thinking?"

"I'm thinking Harding has set this up so there's only one way we can go. Because he wants us some place in particular. I'm also thinking that he's counting on our using the darkness to cover our approach. Which means..."

"Which means he may have boobytrapped the tunnels, right?"

"Right. He's assuming we won't use the light. Just like at the camp he didn't post sentries because he assumed the electronics were enough. He was wrong and he knows it. But this time he's set us loose in a maze, there's only one way out, and that's over him. If we get that far, and he's betting we won't."

"How can you be sure?"

"I can't, not completely. But it's typical of his arrogance. It's the kind of thing he would do. Sit back and smile while the rats walk right into the meat grinder."

"Only we're not rats."

"He doesn't see that difference."

"And if you're wrong?"

"Then at least you'll be able to help Carlos explain what's going on. Disarming whatever bombs have been planted is treating the symptom. But Harding's the disease. He has to be cut out, like a cancer."

"And you're the surgeon, eh, Mr. Belasko?"

"In a way."

"I think you're wrong. Dead wrong."

"No arguments, Marisa. Just do what I tell you."

"Which is?"

"Turn back..."

"And if I say no?"

Bolan didn't answer, only looked at her steadily. Marisa swayed on her feet a moment, as if her balance had been thrown momentarily out of kilter.

Then, without a word she turned and started back the way they'd come. Bolan watched her go for a minute, her left hand lightly tracing the wall, her feet splashing softly in the water.

Turning away, Bolan played the light down the tunnel until it fell away in a gloom too deep for it to plumb. The rippling water underfoot caught the light and splashed little slivers of white and silver on the wall.

He started off quickly, but using the light to good advantage. He hadn't gone more than twenty yards before he found the first booby trap. A tiny strand of nylon, almost invisible even with the light, ran across the tunnel. He tracked it up the wall to a pair of claymores barely concealed in crevices in the tunnel roof. Either one would have been enough to kill him and bury him at the same time. The pair of them would have reduced his body to ground beef, then pressed the last drop of blood out of every ounce under the crushing weight of the collapsed ceiling.

Bolan nodded grimly.

Strike one, Charlie-boy, he thought.

The tunnel made a sharp left, and Bolan realized he was heading toward the waterfront. The character of the passage changed, and the smooth stone gave way to rough brick. Water trickled down the walls from the storm drains above him, and there was a scurrying that preceded him, always just out of reach of the flashlight.

He found the second trap about a hundred feet after the turn. Again it was a simple contrivance of nylon trip wire and a pair of claymores. He snipped the wire and left the mines in place.

Disarming them was a problem for someone else.

Bolan shut off the light for a minute and paused to listen. The gurgle of running water sounded almost peaceful. But another sound, one he couldn't identify, whispered out of the darkness far ahead of him.

Faint, and echoing slightly in the tight confines of the passage, it was a hum with a rough edge, as if a million bees lurked at the end of the tunnel.

He flipped the light back on and moved more swiftly. A slap behind him spun him around, and he swept the light around but could find nothing.

With a shrug he turned back and pushed on. The floor of the passage canted slightly downhill to carry the runoff from Manila's heavy tropical rains.

Judging by the walls, which were relatively clean almost halfway up, but then more thickly overgrown with pale green and grey lichens, the surge at flood must be fairly powerful. It seemed to have scoured the lower half and kept the floor almost free of litter. Without really thinking about it, he wondered for a moment when the rainy season started.

He almost missed the third trap. His gaze was drawn a few paces ahead. Something about the floor that didn't look quite right. He approached it cautiously, dropping into a crouch and training the flashlight on a metal plate running the width of the floor.

From ten feet away, the encrusted metal looked as if it had been there forever. A closer look revealed a few shiny scratches, bright metal where none should have been, that reflected the light, winking as the half inch of water ran over it, rippling a little as it passed over the thick lip of rusty steel. With a combat knife, he worked the plate up, taking care not to let it slip back. Obviously designed to respond to pressure, the device would be harmless unless he lost his grip and dropped the plate back into place.

It was almost six feet long and eighteen inches wide. When it swung open, Bolan jerked it by one end, twisting the other back away from the crevice it concealed. Training the light into the smooth pool of water, he spotted a slab of C-4 plastique in a clear plastic container sealed with waterproof tape. The bomb nestled comfortably down among a cluster of pipes that ran through the floor and disappeared under the wall on either side. Three pressure detonators, sprouting wires running to the plastique, were held in place by a twist of copper wire bound to the topmost pipe.

Around each, a tight spring, resistant enough to support only the plate, waited for a careless foot to spurt electricity into the small detonator clearly visible through the transparent plastic. Had Bolan stepped on the plate in the dark, he'd have been quivering jelly oozing down the wall in nanoseconds.

Cordero's handiwork, Bolan thought.

He wondered what kind of nerve it took for a man to hunch down over that lethal package, knowing that a single mistake would blow him to pieces. But it was a peculiar courage that enabled one to take such risks, only to slaughter innocent people by the hundreds.

Carefully Bolan severed the gleaming copper holding each spring trigger in place and let all three sink into the water and out of sight. He stepped over the trench, looking back at it for a moment, then shaking his head. That one had been too close.

Harding had upped the ante. I must be getting close, Bolan thought.

Bolan knew he'd been lucky that time. And he knew a man had only so much luck. He'd long since exhausted his allotment, but at the moment it was his only ally.

The tunnel started a gentle curve to the right and sloped more sharply downward. His feet started to slip on the damp stone underfoot, and he braced himself against the wall with one hand. Holding the torch in his injured hand, he tried to keep his balance without losing the slender security of the light. The floor levered out after fifty yards or so, and he was grateful for the reprieve.

Carlos had given him his M-16, and he slipped it off his shoulder, carrying it with his finger through the trigger guard and the safety off. Every now and then the spare magazines in his pocket clicked together with a sharp snap, and he shifted one to the other side. He knew only too well that his situation was too precarious to let something like that make the difference between living and dying.