Plague Ship (38 page)

He eased open the heavy door as quietly as he could. The hallway was empty. The industrial fluorescent fixtures bolted to the concrete ceiling cast stark pools of light interspersed with deep shadows, giving the cinder-block walls a dingy look despite their apparent newness.

Max balled the piece of paper into the lock so the door wouldn’t close, and, keeping in a low crouch because his muscles wouldn’t let him stand upright, he padded down the hallway, making certain he wasn’t leaving a telltale trail of blood.

At the first intersection, he heard faint muffled voices to his left, so he turned right, casting an eye backward every few seconds. He passed an occasional unlabeled door. Pressing an ear to the cool metal, he heard nothing beyond and moved on.

It was the dankness of the air and the fact he’d seen no windows that made him think he was underground. He had no direct proof but didn’t doubt his assessment.

Turning two more times in the monochromatic maze, he came to another door and could hear the whine of machinery inside. He tried the handle and it turned easily. He opened it a crack, and the level of noise rose in timbre and volume. He could see no light escaping from the room, so he assumed it was deserted. He ducked in quickly and closed the door behind him. Groping blindly, he found a light switch.

Arc lights snapped on, revealing a cavernous space sunk below the level of the floor he was standing on. He was in the control room overlooking the facility’s powerhouse. Behind thick insulated glass were four huge jet engines bolted to the floor, fed by a tangle of fuel lines and exhaust ducts. Mated to each was an electrical generator. The assemblies were slightly larger than a locomotive, and although only one of the turbines was in operation the room buzzed and crackled with undisguised power.

Either this place is massive, Max thought, casting an expert eye over the room again, because they can produce enough juice for a couple thousand people, or they have some other, unknown use for this much electricity.

He mentally filed away the incongruity and retreated back into the hallway.

With no visible cameras and no guards patrolling the corridors, Max had a sense that Kovac must feel pretty secure here. It was another fact that he tucked away as he sought an exit from the labyrinth.

He finally came to a door marked STAIRWELL, but, when he opened it, he discovered the stairs led only downward.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he muttered, and headed deeper into the facility.

The scissor-style stairs zigzagged four stories before coming to an end on a dimly lit landing. The only door led into an even-darker tunnel that ran perpendicular to the stairwell. Unlike the other areas Max had seen, the perfectly circular tunnel was of rough-hewn native rock and was just large enough for him to stand. He could see where some sort of machine, like a continuous miner or a tunnel borer, had left ragged toolmarks on the dark stone. There were no lights, so he had no way of knowing how long the tunnel was or what it was for. The only clues were thick copper wires strung along the ceiling from ceramic insulators. There had to have been a hundred of them, each carefully spaced from its neighbor. His engineering background told him they could easily take the electrical load of the generators he’d seen on the upper level.

“What are you supposed to do, my beauty?” he mused aloud. But, of course, there was no answer.

He considered following the wire, blindly hoping it led to an exit, but the stillness of the air made him think that the tunnel had no outlet. He also hadn’t forgotten he was at least fifty feet underground, possibly more.

Max set himself the arduous task of climbing the stairs. His body protested every step, and, as the exertion deepened his breathing, it felt like a vise was clamped around his chest. Even if his ribs weren’t fully broken, he laid a silent wager that a couple of them sported hairline cracks.

He was panting when he reached the upper landing and had to clamp his elbows to the sides of his chest to ease away some of the pain.

Pressing his ear to the door, he heard muffled voices, and, as they faded, he thought he heard one person say to another, "... sky two days from now, so we’ll need ...” He waited another few moments before opening the door. The hallway was deserted. He couldn’t even hear the echo of their footfalls.

Padding silently, he renewed his search for a way out. He was halfway down one long hallway when he heard people approaching. Their movements were swift and sure, making him think it might be Kovac and his goons heading back to his cell for another go at him, although only a half hour had passed since they had left him. Knowing he couldn’t run even if he wanted to, Max had no choice but to duck through one of the metal doors lining the corridor.

He held the knob open as he closed the door so the lock couldn’t engage and stood pressed against it as the footfalls drew nearer. It was only after they strode past that Max glanced over his shoulder at the darkened room. By the glow of a small light plugged into an outlet, he saw six cots laid out in rows and the obvious outline of six people asleep on top of them. One person must have been the lightest sleeper in the world because he suddenly grunted and shot bolt upright, peering myopically into the gloom.

“Steve?” he called out.

“Yes,” Max answered at once. “Go back to sleep.”

The youngish man fell back onto his cot and rolled away from Max, his breathing relaxing in an instant.

Max couldn’t say the same about his own breathing. He felt certain his heart was going to hammer through his ribs at any moment, although he was grateful for the anesthetic effects of the adrenaline jolt his near discovery had sent into his veins. He gave it a few more moments before sliding back out of the dormitory room.

In all, Max skulked around for nearly an hour before finding a stairwell that led upward, confirming his suspicions that this was a subterranean base of some kind. Depending on the sizes of the rooms he hadn’t explored, he estimated the facility was at least a hundred thousand square feet. As to its purpose, he could only guess.

He climbed two stories before coming to yet another door. He waited with his ear pressed to the metal. He heard sounds from the other side but was unable to identify anything. He eased the door open a crack, pressing his eye to the narrow slit. He saw a wedge of what looked like a garage. The metal trestle roof lofted twenty feet or more, and there was a ramp that led to a pair of industrial-sized garage doors. Embedded in the rock walls next to them were thick steel blast doors that could be swung closed. They looked impregnable to nothing less than a nuclear bomb. Max heard a radio playing some music that, to him, sounded like cats fighting in a burlap bag but was doubtlessly something Mark Murphy had on his iPod.

He saw nobody, so he quickly dashed through the door and found shelter under a wooden workbench littered with greasy tools. Just as the door snicked closed, he realized with horror that it had a sophisticated electronic lock mechanism activated by a palm reader as well as a numeric keypad. There was no returning to his cell and hoping he could talk his way out of another beating.

Although the garage was dimly lit, there was a pool of light on the far side where two mechanics were working on a four-wheel-drive pickup. From the looks of it, they were replacing the radiator and doing some welding near the front of the vehicle. He could see the blue glow of an oxyacetylene torch and smelled the tang of seared metal. There were other vehicles parked in the garage. He spotted two larger trucks and several four-wheelers, like the one Juan had used to escape the Responsivists in Greece.

Max felt time slipping by and wished Cabrillo was with him now. Juan had an innate ability to form and execute a plan with the barest glance at the situation. Max, on the other hand, was more of a plodder, attacking a problem with brute force and dogged determination.

Kovac would be returning to the interrogation chamber shortly, and Hanley needed to get as far away from this place as he possibly could.

Moving cautiously, he realized the garage doors were the only exit and was certain the radio wouldn’t mask the sound of one of them rattling open. There was really only one avenue open to him.

Brute force it is, he thought.

The wrench he grabbed was at least eighteen inches long and weighed ten pounds. He hefted it like a surgeon taking up a scalpel, fully knowing his capabilities with the instrument. He had gotten into his first real fight as a teenager when a strung-out junky brandishing a knife had tried to rob his uncle’s gas station. Max had knocked out eight of the would-be thief’s teeth with a wrench identical to the one he carried now.

He moved cautiously across the garage, finding cover where he could and stalking slowly because the human eye’s peripheral vision is adept at picking up movement. Any sound he made was drowned out by the radio.

One of the mechanics had his face covered by a darkened welder’s shield to protect his eyes, so Max concentrated on the second, a tall, lanky man in his thirties with a bushy beard and greasy hair tied in a ponytail. He was bent over the engine compartment, running his hands over a bundle of hoses, so he never felt Max’s presence behind him until Max brought the wrench down with a measured swing.

The blow dropped the mechanic as if he’d been poleaxed, and the egg it left on his skull would last him weeks.

Max turned. The welder had sensed motion and was just straightening, reaching to pull off his mask, when Hanley stepped forward and, like a batter in the all-star game, swung the wrench. At the perfect moment in his swing, Max let the wrench fly. The case-hardened tool smashed the plastic visor, which saved the welder from having his face torn off, while the power of the throw tossed the man bodily into a nearby rolling toolbox. The blowtorch, on its long rubber lines, dropped at Max’s feet, the blue jet flame making him step back when he felt the heat on his bare feet.

A third mechanic who had been hidden on the far side of the truck suddenly appeared around the front bumper, drawn by the commotion. He stared at the unconscious welder sprawled against the toolbox before turning toward Max.

Max watched as confusion became understanding and then anger, but before the man could give in to his flight-or-fight reflex Max scooped up the still-burning torch and tossed it in an easy underarm throw. Another instinct took over, and the mechanic automatically grabbed for it as it came at him.

At over six thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the tongue of burning oxygen and acetylene needed the briefest contact to char flesh. The mechanic caught the torch with the nozzle pointed directly at his chest. A smoldering hole opened in his overalls instantly, and skin and muscle sizzled away to reveal the white of his rib cage. The bones blackened before the massive load of shock made him drop the brass torch.

His expression didn’t change in the seconds it took his brain to realize his heart had stopped beating. He collapsed slowly to the concrete floor. The smell made Max want to retch. He hadn’t intended to kill the hapless mechanic, but he steeled himself. He had to save his son, and, unfortunately, this man stood in his way.

The welder was the closest to his size, so he took a moment to strip him out of his coveralls. He had to take the third mechanic’s boots because the others were hopelessly small. He did so without looking up from the man’s feet.

With a pair of wire cutters, he moved to the two trucks and opened the hoods, cutting the wires that sprouted from the distributor caps like black tentacles. As he started for the quad bikes, he saw a coffee machine set up on a workbench. Apart from filters, mugs, and a plastic container of creamer powder, there was a box of sugar. Max grabbed it, and, rather than waste time messing with the Kawasakis’ electronics, he unscrewed their fuel caps and dumped sugar into their tanks. The bikes wouldn’t run for more than a quarter mile, and it would take hours to clean out their fuel lines and cylinders.

A minute later, he was astride the one idling four-wheeler he hadn’t tampered with and pressed the button that opened the garage door. It was night, and wind-ripped rain lashed through the opening. Max couldn’t have asked for better conditions. There was no point closing the door. Kovac would know he was gone and how he was making his escape.

Slitting his eyes against the rain, he twisted the throttle and shot out into the unknown.

CHAPTER 24

KOVAC’S ORDERS HAD BEEN SPECIFIC TO THE FIVE men he’d dispatched to watch over the dismantled Responsivist facility in the Philippines. They weren’t to interfere with people investigating the building unless it became apparent that they were going to breach the underground sections. In the weeks they had observed the site, the only interest shown had been a couple of Filipinos on a well-used motorcycle. They had remained only a few minutes, looking over the building to see if there was anything worth looting. When they realized everything had been stripped, they had roared off down the road in a cloud of blue exhaust.

The way the two approached today had put the guards on immediate alert, and when the blast echoed across the open field they knew their caution had been well founded.

AMID THE TUMULT of crashing cement, Juan fell through the hole Linc had created, landing solidly on his feet on a flight of steep stairs. The air was an impenetrable wall of dust, forcing Cabrillo to run blindly down the steps, trusting that Linc had cleared out of the way. A piece of cement the size of his head hit his shoulder with a glancing blow, but it was enough to throw him off his feet. He tumbled the last few steps and lay dazed on the landing, as more debris rained down all around him.

A powerful hand groped for the back of his bush shirt and drew him into an antechamber and out of what was becoming an avalanche.

“Thanks,” Juan panted as Linc helped him to his feet.

Both men’s faces and clothes were a uniform shade of pale gray from the dust.