Using hand signals, I indicated that we would open the door and give cross-fire cover as we exited. I’d use the shelter of the stairwell landing to provide cover while they ran out and went left and right. They nodded and Bunny stuffed the scope back into his pack. I finger counted down to zero, and then we went through into the cavern.
Gunfire shattered the silence around us and suddenly we were in one hell-storm of an ambush.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland
Saturday, August 28, 3:13 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 47 minutes
“How is the President?” asked Mr. Church.
“Unhappy, unwell, and unwilling to deal with this crap,” barked Linden Brierly.
“Tell him that he has my sympathies, but I need to speak with him.”
“I can probably set up a call later this—”
“Linden . . . I need to speak with him now.”
Silence washed like a cold tide back and forth between their phones.
“You’re killing me, Church,” said Brierly. “The doctors here already want me lynched, and if I ask the First Lady to let him take a call she will have my nuts for lunch.”
“Tell her that this concerns Joe Ledger,” said Church.
Brierly was quiet. Two months ago Joe Ledger and Echo Team had saved the First Lady and half of Congress from terrorists who wanted to release a deadly plague. The First Lady had seen Ledger in action, had seen his heroism and his absolute viciousness. It had changed her as a person, and Brierly had not yet put his finger on whether that change was good or bad. He’d been part of that fight, and it had been a step up for him.
But this was asking a lot.
“I’ll see what she says,” Brierly warned, “but don’t expect much.”
MR. CHURCH SAT in his office and waited. He did nothing else. He didn’t even eat a cookie, though he eyed the plate of vanilla wafers with interest. The wall clock ticked and the boats in the harbor sloshed noisily through the choppy water.
“Mr. Church?” The First Lady’s voice was soft, but it was like silk wrapped around a knife blade.
“Good afternoon—”
“Is Joe Ledger in trouble?”
Right to the point. Church admired that. “Yes, ma’am.” In a few short sentences he explained what was going on. He even told her about Joe’s mission to Deep Iron. Church was a good judge of character who was seldom let down by his expectations.
The First Lady said, “And you want my husband, who has just come out of surgery, to not only take back the reins of office but take on the stress of a major political upheaval in his own administration?”
“Yes,” said Church. She would have fried him for an attempt to sugarcoat things.
“Will this help Joe?”
“Because of the NSA, Joe has had to go into an exceedingly dangerous situation without proper backup and no hope at all of rescue if things go wrong. That should never have happened.”
“Can you tell me what this mission is about? Not the incidentals but the big picture?”
“I could,” he said, “but you’re not cleared for it.”
“Mr. Church,” she said quietly, “I’m speaking to you on a secure line and I will have the final say as to whether my husband takes back his office. Not the Vice President, not the doctors here at Walter Reed, not the AG or the Speaker of the House. Believe me when I tell you that you need to convince me of the importance of this or this conversation is going to end right here and now.”
“You do that well,” he said.
“What?”
“Play the big cards.”
“My God . . . is that a compliment from Mr. Church?”
“It is. Call it respect from one pro to another.”
“So you’ll tell me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think I’d damn well better.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Deep Iron Storage Facility
Saturday, August 28, 3:21 P.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 39 minutes E.S.T.
“Go! Go! Go!” I yelled, and laid down a stream of fire with my M4. Top dropped low and dove behind a parked golf cart, rolled, and came up into a shooter’s crouch. Bunny made a dive for cover behind a stack of boxes, but I saw his body pitch and twist in midair as he was hit by at least one round. He dropped out of sight.
I saw muzzle flashes from four points. A pair of shooters hidden behind the towers of boxes and two more on opposite sides of the row of golf carts. The stairwell was wider than the door, so I had a narrow concrete wall to stand behind, but every time I tried to lean out and fire, bullets slammed into the wall inches from my head. If it hadn’t been for the night-vision goggles the flying stone splinters would have blinded me and torn half my face off.
“Eyes!” Top yelled as he hurled a flash bang like a breaking ball. I closed my eyes and heard the dry bang! Then I dropped to one knee, leaned out, and looked for a target. I saw a dark figure staggering away from the point of explosion, and I gave him two three-round bursts. He spun away from me, hit a wall, and collapsed backward. To my left I saw Top edging along a wall of boxes toward the shooter on my far left. I laid down some cover fire and ducked back as the shooter returned fire, but then Top wheeled around the edge and put two in the guy’s throat.
I was running before the man had even dropped and I went fast and bent over along the row of carts knowing that the shooter on my right would be aiming in the direction of Top’s muzzle flashes. Suddenly there was movement in front of me and in a microsecond I realized that the shooter was running down the row of carts in my direction, but he had his head craned sideways as he tried to get an angle on Top.
The shooter never saw it coming. I closed to zero distance and put my barrel under his chin and blew his helmet off his head.
The last Russian must have seen me, because he opened up right away and I had to dive into a belly slide as bullets tore chunks out of the concrete floor behind me.
There was movement to my right and I saw Bunny, alive and crouched low, crabbing sideways toward me. When he caught my eye he pointed to a spot where a wall of stacked boxes stood between him and the remaining shooter. I nodded and he moved forward. The gunman kept me pinned down, but the carts were good cover. I had no idea where Top was, but I guessed he was closing on the shooter’s position from the far side.
When Bunny was in position I tapped the commlink and whispered, “Top, we got a runner on third. Wait for the pitch.”
There were two short bursts of static in my earbud as Top broke squelch twice for affirmative.
I said, “Throw him out at the plate. Let’s hear some chatter from the dugout.”
Top and I opened up and the cavern echoed with thunder as Bunny spun around the wall and ran across five yards of open space to come up at the shooter from behind. When he was ten feet out he put two bursts into the man, and the impact slammed him into the wall. He slid down onto his knees like a supplicant and then fell backward in a limp sprawl.
“Clear!” he yelled.
“Clear!” echoed Top.
“Hold there!” I yelled.
I didn’t trust the situation and I hugged the shadows as I skirted the open spaces to close on Bunny’s position. Top was there a step behind me and we secured the spot. Top took up a shooting position behind a short stack of boxes.
“You hit?” I asked Bunny. He grinned and folded back a torn flap of his camo shirt to show a long furrow that had been plowed along the side of his armor vest.
“Hooray for glancing blows,” he said.
“Hooah,” I agreed.
I bent and examined the dead man. No ID, no nothing, but his face was almost classical Slavic and weapons and gear were Russian. Same with the other three.
“When I woke up this morning,” Top said, “I didn’t expect to be at war with Mother Russia.”
“If the opportunity presents itself,” I said, “giv
e me someone with a pulse so I can ask some questions.”
They nodded.
Before us was a sea of boxes. File boxes and crates of every description, stacked in neat rows that trailed away into the distance. Hundreds of thousands of boxes, millions of tons of paper records. There were hundreds of chambers in the natural limestone caverns, and thousands of rooms and vaults. Miles of cement walkways. I accessed the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it and made some decisions.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “We don’t know how many more of them there are, but we know these guys are smart and they’ve had time to get creative. We go slow and we look for booby traps. No assumptions, no undue risks.”
“Hooah,” they responded.
WE MOVED OUT, making no sound at all as we moved through an eternity of darkness. We found a few traps—mostly shape charges and rigged grenades—but they were crudely set. The way soldiers will do when they don’t have time to do it right. We disabled each trap and kept moving, the three of us spread out in case we missed one.
Then we almost walked into a cross fire they’d set up in a big vault stacked to the rafters with file boxes from Denver law firms. But Top stopped us before we stepped in it.
“What?” I whispered to him. “You see something?”
“No, Cap’n,” he murmured, “but if I was going to rig a shooting gallery it would be in there. How ’bout we get bright and noisy, see if we can flush some rabbits from the tall grass.”
I nodded and we tossed in a pair of our flash bangs. As soon as the starburst brightness faded, we rushed the room. There was a sniper on top of a stack of crates, but even as we rushed in he was rolling off onto the floor, hands clamped to his ears. He fell twenty feet and landed badly.
Top got to him first, kicked the rifle out of his hands, and was bending to restrain him when he slowed and gave it up. When I reached him I could see why. The sniper had landed headfirst, taking the full impact on the side of the head. His neck must have snapped like a twig.
“Balls,” I said.
We kept going. We could only move forward at a snail’s pace. We’d found a few more traps, but we were trail-wise now, inside their heads, and we spotted the next few before anyone else got hurt. We were one mile down and going deeper, creeping along miles of slanting corridors, breathing air that had never felt sunshine or smelled rain. This would be a dreary place to die, and I had a flicker of superstitious dread about my ghost getting lost down here in the endless dark.
There were phones mounted on walls, but the cords were cut and the boxes smashed. We moved on, passing through rooms where law firms kept records of cases from thirty years ago, where film studios kept tens of thousands of reels of film and people kept furs and art and who knows what else. We passed through rooms crowded with classic cars and fifty of those terra-cotta soldiers they’d dug up in China.
We found two more security guards and half a dozen record clerks. All tied, all executed. Thirteen innocent people murdered . . . for what?
“God damn,” swore Top, “I really want to catch up to these sons of bitches.”
“What the hell are they looking for?” asked Bunny. “They’re taking an incredible risk, and they’re taking a lot of frigging time. They have to know they’re not getting out of here.”
I said nothing.
“So, this is . . . what?” Bunny continued. “A suicide mission to get old records? In what world does that make sense?”
“Maybe they expected to get in and out faster than they did,” Top suggested. “Maybe they lost their window.”
“Must be something pretty damned important down here,” Bunny said, “for them to still be at it knowing that we’re on their ass.”
“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Top said. “They might have twenty guys down here, in which case they can make a pretty good run at getting past us. They might also be waiting on backup. There were no vehicles outside, so if they plan to get out they must have a ride coming. Could be extra guns in that.”
It was a sobering thought, and none of us were getting cocky just because we’d managed to fight past their first couple of traps.
We pushed on. I used the schematic to plan our route, and that took us through a series of smaller chambers with more modern equipment that looked like it was part of the facility’s records management system.
“Clear!” called Top Sims as he and Bunny checked the room ahead of us.
“Two minutes’ rest,” I said. I tapped the PDA. “We’re half a klick from the target.” The tiny display screen showed a zigzag trail leading to the Haeckel bin. It crooked through twenty-three turns and a dozen doorways. It was an ambusher’s wet dream.
Top asked, “We getting anything from Brick?”
I shook my head. “We got about a billion tons of rock and steel between us and a signal.”
We moved out once more, and now we were down to it. Nerves were on hair triggers, and if my virgin aunt had stepped out from behind those crates with a puppy in one hand and a baby in the other my guys would have capped her.
Those Spetsnaz nimrods had fired first, no questions asked. It seemed only right to extend the same courtesy, but the Russians had no new surprises for us. We did find one spot where there were expended shell casings—all Russian—and a lot of blood but no bodies. No drag marks, either, so the wounded must have walked out or been carried.
I used the interteam communication channel on my commlink to try to raise someone on Jigsaw. Got nothing but white noise. I took another look at the PDA. “Two lefts and then fifty feet straight in,” I murmured.
At the first left we paused while Top quick-looked around the corner. He had started to say, “Clear,” when the whole world exploded in a firestorm of automatic gunfire.
“Down!” I yelled, and everyone got low and went wide, gun barrels swinging around to find targets, but there were no muzzle flashes. The rock walls amped up the sound of the chattering guns, but we hadn’t stepped into anything. At least not at the moment.
“It’s not in the next room, Cap’n. This is from around the second corner,” Top said as he slithered like a snake back from his observation post and wriggled behind a stack of wooden crates.
“Hey . . . Jigsaw’s come to the party!” Bunny yelled; then he frowned and cupped a hand to his ear. “No . . . no, wait, all I hear are AKs.”
Top nodded, crouched down next to me. “Farmboy’s right. That’s a one-sided gunfight.”
“Unless,” Bunny began, and then bit down on what he was going to say.
So I said it.
“Unless it’s an execution.”
Jigsaw. Christ, don’t let it be so.
“Saddle up!” I bellowed, but as we clustered by the door to make our run something changed. The gunfire had been hot and heavy for nearly half a minute, with dips in the din as magazines fired dry and were replaced, but during one freak gap in the noise just as I was reaching for the doorknob there was a new sound.
It was a roar.
Nothing else describes it. The sound was deep and rough and charged with incredible power. It slammed into the walls and bounced through the shadows and came howling through the crack in the door.
It sounded like an animal. A really big and really pissed-off animal.
“What the hell was that?” Top yelled.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to find out,” said Bunny.
“I do,” I said, and opened the door.
The hallway was empty and I could hear another roar and more shouts coming from down the hall. I crept along, keeping close to the wall and low, barrel ready to pop a cap in anyone who stepped out of the next chamber. I knew Top and Bunny were behind me, but they moved as silently as I did.
We stopped outside of Haeckel’s bin. The metal door was still closed, but there were dozens of jagged bullet holes in it, all of them chest high.
Top leaned his head toward me. “We going in, Cap’n?”
Just then the gunfire started up a
gain. We dropped down and got wide. None of the rounds had penetrated the block-stone walls of the bin.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and waited for a lull.
“Jigsaw!” I yelled as loud as I could.
The gunfire flattened out for a moment and then there was a second roar. Not a response to my call. Not a human voice. Definitely an animal of great size and immense power.
“JIGSAW!” I yelled again. “ECHO! ECHO! ECHO!”
Then a man’s voice cried out in response. It said, “Help!”
But he said it in Russian. Pomogite!
Not Jigsaw.
I yelled back using Hack Peterson’s combat code name: “Big Dog! Big Dog . . . this is Cowboy!”
The voice cried out, “Nyet! Nyet! Bozhe moi!”
No! No! Oh, my God!
Then, “Perekroi dveri!”
Block the doors!
There was another roar, this one slightly different in pitch, not as deep but just as feral, and a new flurry of gunfire.
Top looked at me for orders. I leaned close to the bullet-pocked door and tried it in Russian. I called for Hack. I called a general question asking what was going on.
No one answered my question. There were more roars, more gunshots, more men yelling in hysterical Russian. “On moyrtv!”
He’s dead! I heard that twice. And then a single voice crying, “Othodi!”
Fall back! Over and over again.
“Are we joining this party?” Top asked, but I shook my head.
The flurry of gunfire thinned.
“Fewer guns in play,” Bunny observed. “Still no return fire that I can make out unless everyone’s using AKs.”
The last gun cleared its mag and then we heard something that froze the hearts in our chests. Another throat-ripping scream tore through the darkness, but this one was definitely a human voice: high and filled with pain and choked with a dreadful wetness. It rose to a piercing shriek and then suddenly cut off, leaving behind a terminal silence.
Then nothing.
I pushed the door open and crept out, low to the cold concrete floor, my .45 pointed at the bend in the hall, finger ready to slip inside the trigger guard. A moment later there was another scream, but this wasn’t the cry of a man in pain—no, this was an ear-rending howl of bloody animal triumph. Even after the thunder of gunfire it was impossibly loud; the echo of it slammed off the walls and assaulted our ears like fists.