He leaned out farther, trying to find him—
Fire bloomed from the rifle’s muzzle. Chase jerked back as bullets pitted the stone beside his head. But he had seen enough to know that the third man was not coming along the walkway toward him—which meant he had crossed the junction to another bridge parallel to the one Sophia was traversing.
He rushed to the other doorway, seeing that Sophia was just past the halfway point. Poking his head out, he finally spotted the third man. He was on the other bridge, kneeling at the parapet with his rifle at the ready.
He wasn’t firing bullets. Chase recognized the attachment below the barrel, saw Hammerstein tilting the weapon upward to give the grenade a perfect firing arc …
“Sophia!” he yelled. “Grenade! Run!”
He jumped out from his cover, swinging his rifle toward Hammerstein as Sophia sprang forward like a sprinter off the blocks—
Hammerstein fired.
The grenade shot from the launcher—to explode against the bridge’s central support.
The ancient civilization had built its structures to survive the elements … but not high explosives. Pulverized rubble blew outward, debris scattering over the ice.
The bridge fell.
Chase started shooting—just as the floor dropped out from under him. Flying stones pummeled his body. He glimpsed Sophia falling into one of the channels in the ice before he tumbled into the other one, sliding helplessly down its curved side to splash through the steaming water at its bottom.
The remains of the bridge crashed down behind him, blocking the channel. He staggered to his feet. Hammerstein was watching him from the other bridge.
Gun moving—
Chase fired first. Hammerstein ducked. But he was already shouting to his comrades. Chase tried to climb out of the channel, but the walls of recently melted ice were too slick.
No way out, no way to retreat. He was boxed in.
Hammerstein reappeared, another man running up to him, rifle ready—
Chase slammed the spikes on his boots into the glossy ice—and hurled himself into a headlong dive down the channel, skidding along almost frictionlessly as if on a waterslide.
Bullets tore into the ice, water spraying up—but behind him as he shot under the bridge.
Arms outstretched, spray in his face, Chase skidded down the channel. A curve rose ahead; he hurtled around it, flying up the wall like a human bobsled before landing back in the water and zooming onward. More gunfire as the Covenant members ran to the other side of the bridge after him, but it quickly stopped as he swept out of sight behind the wall of ice.
Another channel shot past where a hot tributary had carved its own path. He was coming into a maze. Steam overhead, and shadows—the passage had taken him beneath one of the hypogeum’s roofed sections.
The ice suddenly dropped away, the hot water having melted all the way down to the stone. With a huge splash, Chase came to a stop in a foot-deep pool. Shaking water out of his rifle’s barrel, he stood, quickly taking in his surroundings. He was in a roughly circular bowl in the ice, the surface over ten feet above him, out of reach. As well as the channel that had brought him here, there were several others; the widest, stone at its bottom rather than ice, was carrying the flowing water away. Most of the others were feeding it, streams running from them into the pool.
One, though, had dried up, crystalline sparkles along its floor. As far as he could tell, it headed back in the general direction of the collapsed bridge—and Sophia.
He sloshed out of the pool and hurried into the frozen channel.
One of Hammerstein’s men ran back to him. “No good, sir—I lost sight of him.”
Hammerstein glowered at the wrecked bridge. He had seen Sophia Blackwood trying to jump from it as it fell—but she had landed on the far side of the rubble, out of sight. For the moment, she was unreachable.
But not for long. “Follow me,” he said, climbing over the wall and dropping onto the ice below, then climbing down into the nearest channel. “We’re going after them.”
Despite the cold, Chase was sweating, steam filling the darkened ice channel. The large building was, he guessed, where the volcanic vent emerged; the Veteres had presumably used it to supply this part of their city with hot water, an ancient form of central heating. Nina would be fascinated, he knew, but his concerns were more prosaic.
Foremost on his mind: how the hell was he going to get out of this maze?
The channel twisted and coiled, others splitting off it to form a confusing labyrinth. Unable to get his bearings from the cavern’s ceiling, he was no longer sure if he was heading in the right direction to find Sophia—or even if the passage he was following joined up with hers. He had tried to climb out, but again the smooth, slippery walls had defeated him.
He moved on. In places, the walls between channels were thin enough to become almost transparent; in others, they were more like mirrors, his reflection rippling confusingly around him. The beam from his gun’s light bounced off the glittering walls, making it seem as though there were dozens of men prowling through the ice around him …
He stopped, still as a statue.
One of the lights was still moving.
Chase flicked off his spotlight. The passage plunged into near darkness, the all-pervading blue of the cavern coming faintly through the surrounding ice. The moving light paused, casting faint echoes of itself all around.
Chase took his best guess at the gunman’s true position, then crept into the gloom.
The trooper looked around cautiously. He was sure he had seen a light—which had then disappeared—but the distortion of the surrounding ice walls made it hard for him to be sure of its exact location. Gun raised, he lifted his radio. “This is Reiss,” he whispered. “I’m in the eastern part of the covered section—are either of you near me?”
Hammerstein responded quietly. “No—I’m at the south end, and Munk is north of me.”
“I just saw a light go out. He’s here, close by.”
“We’ll come to you. Be careful. Out.”
Reiss clipped the radio back onto his belt, then moved step by step along the passage, his gun’s spotlight illuminating the way. Steam curled past as he rounded a corner and entered an intersection, other channels twisting away in different directions.
He advanced, pointing the light down each passage in turn. Movement in one—he snapped the gun to it, before realizing it was just the glint of his own beam. Tensing, he continued his sweep, moving on to check a second channel, a third …
A shadowy figure behind a translucent wall—
Reiss fired—and the thin wall burst apart, shattered chunks cascading everywhere to reveal …
Nothing.
He aimed his spotlight at the ragged hole, seeing another shiny wall of ice beyond it. His radio crackled. “Reiss!” called Hammerstein. “Did you get him?”
Reiss unclipped the radio. “No, it was just a reflec—”
Chase stepped up behind him and snapped his neck with a brutal crack.
The soldier collapsed, head lolling horribly. “Ice to see you,” said Chase in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, immediately wishing he’d thought of something better. He took the magazine from the dying man’s TAR-21, then continued deeper into the maze.
“Reiss!” Hammerstein shouted. “Reiss, answer!”
No reply. But the abruptness with which he had been cut off told Hammerstein his subordinate was dead. “Man down,” he warned his remaining team member. “Munk, watch yourself. These tunnels are like a damn hall of mirrors—don’t fire unless you’re sure it’s him.”
“Roger,” replied Munk. He had increased his pace through the maze on hearing gunfire, but the sudden termination of Reiss’s message brought him to a sudden stop. The echoes made it hard to judge, but the loudness of the shots suggested they had been no more than twenty yards away, to the east.
The channel he was traversing curved in that direction. He peered around the corner.
No sign of anyone. He rounded the bend and moved warily along the frozen passage, his distorted reflections slithering along the glassy walls alongside him. The gun’s spotlight beam flickered back at him, diamond glints trapped within the ice. He stopped, listening.
A faint crunching. Boots on ice. Close by.
It couldn’t be Hammerstein; the noise was coming from the wrong direction. And there was no sign of another spotlight.
Chase.
Munk brought his gun up to his shoulder, the scope’s glowing dot a floating holographic point. Ahead, the channel he was in crisscrossed another. Another muffled crump, another step by his quarry. Getting closer …
He switched off the light, not wanting to give Chase any advantage. Reflections became sinister twisted shadows as he slowly advanced. He reached the intersection and looked around the first corner.
Movement. His heart thumped. A figure was creeping along the passage. But it rippled as it moved, merely a reflection. The channel twisted sharply; Chase was around the corner …
Munk stepped out, taking aim at where he would emerge, the red dot hovering at head height as the reflection turned—
Shots tore through the ice, ripping into Munk’s head and chest. He fell, his dying thought the realization that the reflection hadn’t been a reflection at all—it had been Chase’s silhouette, the Englishman on the other side of the thin wall of ice …
Hammerstein heard the shots. Not far away. But had it been Munk firing or …
“Munk,” he said into the radio. “Munk, respond.” Silence. “Munk!”
It had been Chase. Hammerstein spat a Hebrew curse and reloaded the grenade launcher. If it took overkill to bring him down, so be it.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Two down, one to go, but even with the improved odds Chase didn’t feel like celebrating. The man he had just killed wasn’t the leader, Hammerstein—which meant he still had to face the most dangerous member of the unit.
He moved on through the ice tunnels. The steam grew steadily thicker; the icy walls started to drip, water building up on the floor. Ahead, Chase saw the corner of a stone wall protruding through the ice; he had reached the building’s entrance. From inside came an irregular rushing hiss that reminded him of a steam locomotive. Whatever it was, it was violent and loud.
Water dripped onto him as he went through the entrance, feet splashing in puddles. The heat was rising to sauna-like levels.
There was only one other way out that he could see. He followed it, steam swirling as the hissing noise grew louder. The stench of sulfur hit his nose and he realized the cause: heat from the volcanic vent was melting the ice, which was draining into the fumarole, flashing into steam and blasting back out again in angry spurts.
He heard another hiss to one side. The builders had apparently channeled the heat to different places; more steam huffed forcefully from a vent in the floor. Clambering over a slushy mound, Chase saw two more exits from the underground room. Both seemed equally dense with drifting vapor. “Eeny, meeny, miney … mo,” he muttered, pointing at the right-hand opening. Hefting the gun, he entered the billowing steam.
Hammerstein wiped his forehead. Being too hot in the Antarctic was the last thing he had expected, but the steam was getting thicker, corroding the maze around him. He saw he was approaching a wall, the clammy ice passage leading into a structure.
He switched off his gun’s light in case it gave Chase advance warning, then moved inside.
The room Chase entered was already dark enough without the steam further obscuring his vision—but a diffuse blue glow told him there was an opening above. A chimney for the fumarole?
The noise was coming from below, loud enough to make the room tremble with each enraged blast. There was obviously some kind of larger vent in the floor, through which the steam was escaping; he decided to give it a wide berth, free hand outstretched to grope for the wall.
Despite the heat, there was still plenty of ice in the room; his fingers brushed over icicles, water dripping from their tips. Something loomed out of the mist, a bench rising to waist height, more icicles dangling from its overhanging top. He sidestepped it, moving on—
He wasn’t sure what made him stop—maybe some sixth sense, the hairs on his neck rising as he got the feeling he had just passed uncomfortably close to something unseen. He looked around, another gusting jet of steam dissipating to reveal …
Hammerstein, barely two feet away, looking back at Chase with the same expression of jangled combat awareness.
They both whirled—
Their rifles clashed against each other like swords, the men too close to bring them to bear. Both men fired anyway, the shots forcing each to flinch back.
Chase swept up his gun, trying to yank Hammerstein’s weapon out of his hands by using the magazine as a makeshift hook. He succeeded—but the rifle’s strap snagged on Chase’s sights.
And by raising his arms, he had opened himself up to a different kind of attack.
Hammerstein punched Chase in the stomach, hard enough for the blow to hurt even through his coat. He lurched backward, fumbling to keep his hold on the TAR-21—but slammed into the jutting bench, the gun slipping from his hand. Both rifles clattered to the floor.
Hammerstein ducked to grab them. Chase swept out one foot, sending the guns spinning away into the humid fog. Snarling, the Israeli pulled back and clawed at his holster. Chase grabbed for his own pistol—but it was stuffed into a pocket and would take too long to pull out and aim.
Instead he whipped his hand back and snapped an icicle off the bench, flinging it at Hammerstein’s face like a glass knife. The pointed end stabbed across his eye—but it had been blunted, rounded off by dripping meltwater.
It still had an effect, though, the Covenant leader roaring and instinctively bringing up a hand to protect his sight. The gun was only halfway out of its holster. Chase saw his chance and sprang at Hammerstein. He grabbed his right hand, trying to get the gun as they grappled. The metal was already slick with condensation, his fingers slithering over it. A punch to Hammerstein’s jaw to encourage him to loosen his grip—
It worked. Chase got the pistol—and immediately lost it again as it slipped from his grasp. “Shit!” It bounced across the floor, metal clattering on stone—then the clank of metal on metal as it dropped through the grating over the vent into the fumarole below.
Hammerstein recovered, two savage punches driving into Chase’s stomach. Chase lashed out again, hearing a satisfyingly toothy crunch as blood spurted from the other man’s mouth, but it didn’t stop a steel-capped toe from smashing into his shin. Though he stumbled back, a second, harder kick lashed across his knee, spikes tearing his trousers and the skin beneath.
Pain slicing up his leg, Chase fell, landing on his back. The impact blew away the surrounding steam for a moment, revealing that he was very close to the edge of the vent. Another ferocious roar of hot vapor blasted past him.
He tried to roll away from the volcanic furnace—but Hammerstein drew a knife and dived at him.
Chase caught his hand just before the blade plunged into his throat, but the Covenant member was on top of him, pushing down with all his weight. The knife wavered, then descended, its razor-sharp tip two inches from Chase’s neck, one. Hammerstein leered bloodily, sensing triumph—
Chase spat into his scratched eye.
The Israeli flinched, just the slightest involuntary response—but the blink of distraction was enough for Chase to break his hold and ram the knife down pointfirst toward the stone floor. It stabbed between two paving slabs, sticking out of the ground like a miniature Excalibur. Not the result Chase had expected—he had hoped either to jar the weapon from Hammerstein’s hand or to break the blade—but it would do. He headbutted the Covenant man, knocking him back, then grabbed Hammerstein’s jaw and throat to push his head over the edge of the vent.
Another vicious hiss surged from below—
Hammerstein shrieked as a blast of searing vapor hit his
face, his exposed skin instantly blistering and reddening. But Chase couldn’t hold him—the heat was biting at his hands and wrists, forcing him to let go. Thrashing and screeching, Hammerstein rolled away, half his face a mottled patchwork of scabrous red and white, one eye clenched tightly shut.
But the other was still open, glinting with rage as it locked onto Chase.
Hammerstein kicked, one spiked boot landing squarely on target. Chase was flung backward, grasping painfully at his chest. He landed hard near the wall, catching a glimpse of another exit through the swirling fog.
Hammerstein saw something else: one of the fallen rifles. He scrambled toward it as Chase groped in his pocket for the handgun.
The Israeli reached the rifle. His rifle. No thought of mere bullets as he snatched it up and twisted to face his enemy; instead, his hand went straight to the grenade launcher.
Chase spotted the tubular maw swinging toward him and flung himself desperately toward the half-seen exit as Hammerstein fired. He barely made it through the opening as the grenade smacked against the wall behind him. At such a short range the explosive hadn’t even had time to arm itself, ricocheting off the stone and spinning past the doorway before detonating.
The explosion ripped apart a supporting pillar, a section of the floor above crashing down into the vent chamber, blocking the opening with tons of stone and shattered ice. Even around the corner, shielded from the direct effects of the blast, Chase felt as though a giant had flung him against a wall. He protected his head with his arms as chunks of broken stone pounded him.
The echoes of the detonation faded. Ears aching, Chase looked around. He was at the end of another frozen channel, stone walls giving way to glossy white ice. The channel led outside the building; he could see the cold blue light of the cavern.
He didn’t have to worry about Hammerstein coming after him—the collapsed ceiling had sealed the entrance. But after the maiming of his face, the Covenant leader would more than ever want him dead. And Chase was still no nearer to finding Sophia—or rescuing Nina.