72 Hours (A Thriller) (30 page)

Simeon glanced through the eyepiece of the riflescope.
 
His target had taken cover.
 
Simeon sat still for a long moment, waiting.
 
He held his breath as rain and darkness loomed in the scope’s field of view.
 
He blinked once.
 
Twice.
 
Held steady.
 
But the mercenary remained out of sight behind the mound at the tunnel’s opening.

Simeon closed his eyes, dropped his chin away from the rifle stock and hissed the breath out between his wet lips.

What the hell is she doing? he thought.

“Please answer if you’re there,” she continued.

Simeon shook his head.
 
Raised his walkie.

“Lindsay, what do you want?”

“Someone called your satellite phone.”

An intricate webwork of lightening spread out across the distant skyline, branching out and expanding into an awesome display of bluish-white electricity.

Simeon’s attention momentarily snapped away from the mercenary hiding four hundred yards away.
 
Rain sizzled on the plastic face of the radio in his hand.

“Say again,” he replied.

“The satellite phone in the camera monitoring room, it’s been ringing.
 
I finally answered it and spoke to two different women.
 
I don’t know who was who.
 
Neither gave a name.
 
But they both mentioned you and Raj and Archer by name.”

“Hmm.
 
What else did they say?”

“The first voice asked who I was, and then asked for you and Raj.
 
The second woman asked if I was Lindsay Hammond.
 
She wanted to know if Archer was here.
 
And she told me to relay a message to you.”

Simeon blinked away rain from his eyes.

“What was the message?”

“That your sister is in danger.”

CHAPTER 93

There’d been no ID of any kind on either the second or third of the dead mercenaries.
 
Archer had scoured the corpses.
 
Investigated quickly but thoroughly.
 
He still wanted answers, but getting answers was still not his top priority.
 

He reached a narrow slot canyon.
 
Perhaps twenty feet high and six or seven feet wide at its widest point.
 
It looked like just a crude split in the earth’s crust.
 
The limestone had been eroded almost smooth.
 
A shallow tributary of rainwater snaked down the canyon floor, gurgling between his legs.

Following the slot through the ridge instead of going over or around would save him valuable time.
 
He simply didn’t want to get boxed in.
 
He pushed through the canyon, struggling against the surprisingly strong current.
 

Archer listened to the radio contact between Lindsay and Simeon.
 
Something was very wrong.

Thunder boomed, amplified by the strange acoustics of the shaped and textured walls of the slot canyon.

He couldn’t see a thing in front of him but kept moving.
 
Surely sooner or later the groove in the limestone would have to open up.
 
He navigated by touch, keeping one hand against the canyon wall and the other hand on the Beretta.
 
There were still seven of them out there by his count.
 
He needed to hurry up and even out the numbers.

*
   
*
   
*

Bravo had taken a shot to the throat and Sierra had died from a single bullet in the forehead.
 
Both had clearly perished quickly and without putting up much of a fight.
 
Alpha crouched down between the bodies, his assault rifle resting across his thighs.
 
He studied the bodies through the green field of view of his goggles.
 
They had been ambushed.
 
The battle had been brief.

Foxtrot was thrashing and crunching through the nearby brush.
 
Looking down, shining a flashlight into the scrub and mud, he paused and squatted beside a mangled desert plant.

“The incoming shots were fired from over here,” he said, gesturing with the beam of light.
 
He plucked a spent shell casing from the gray muck between his boots.
 
“Looks like nine-millimeter rounds.
 
All of them.”

Alpha nodded, grimaced.

“Never saw him coming,” he said.

“Who do you think did this?
 
Who’re we dealing with?”

Alpha stood.

“Someone who knows what he’s doing,” he said.

“How many of them?”

“One man did this.
 
Only one set of prints leading in and leading out.
 
But there are at least two of them out there.”

“They don’t stand a chance,” Foxtrot said.

“Kill anything that moves.”

Foxtrot nodded.

“Whoever did this has used up all his good luck,” Alpha said.
 
“We are closing in on him now.
 
He’s in way over his head.”

*
   
*
   
*

By the time Simeon got his riflescope back up and had pressed his eye to the lens, it was too late.
 
In that instant he managed to catch just a flash of movement, followed by a brilliant flash of light through the gloom.
 
The sound of the explosion reached him seconds later.

*
   
*
   
*

The explosion peeled the steel doors slightly inward at the seam, like a knife stabbed through an aluminum soda can.
 
The sound of the explosion against the steel was enormous.
 
Tango had thrown himself clear, covering his head with his arms.
 
The ground beneath him shook.
 
Smoke billowed up into the rain and gloom.
 
When the blast was over, he raised his head and turned to inspect the damage.
 

The door panels were pocked from shrapnel, but the split in the doors was minimal.
 
The detonation had rent the steel barely enough for him to fit a leg through, at best.
 
He’d have to detonate a second charge.
 
He waved away the smoke, gagging on the toxic tang.
 
He fetched a second grenade from his pouch and leaned against the slightly twisted surface of the doors, squinting through the smoke and rain to see what he was doing.
 

Tango pulled the pin, extended his arm through the narrow gap between the door panels up to his elbow, and tossed it inside.

*
   
*
   
*

Simeon couldn’t see anything through the smoke.
 
He held the reticle steady.
 
If he got the opportunity for a third shot, he was going to make it count.

*
   
*
   
*

Lindsay jumped.
 
She dropped the walkie and nearly fell on her face, tripping over her own feet.
 
She didn’t know what she’d heard.
 
The sound reverberated through the walls of the camera monitoring room.
 
The light fixtures vibrated.
 
Equipment rattled on the table.
 
A few things fell from metal shelving on the walls.
 
The power waned for a fraction of a second, the lights briefly dimming.

Lindsay scrambled to retrieve the radio.

*
   
*
   
*

The smoke dissipated enough for Simeon to see that damage had been inflicted upon the doors to the tunnel.

Good God, he thought.
 
They’re going to blow it open.

*
   
*
   
*

“What just happened?” Lindsay said into the radio to no one in particular.

Simeon answered immediately.

“Lindsay, did you feel that?”

“Yes, of course!
 
What was it?”

“Get inside the room where I put you and shut the blast door!
 
Do it now!”

“Why?
 
What’s going on out there?”
 
A shiver stalked up her spine.

“Lindsay, just run!”

And then the second grenade exploded.

CHAPTER 94

The force of the detonation rocked the underground bunker.
 
It sent tremors through the concrete walls.
 
Smoke and debris from the explosion funneled down the tunnel in a swirling plume.
 
The shockwave again disrupted the primary power, and the auxiliary unit failed.
 
The lights flickered, waned, and then winked out entirely.

The entire underground bunker was cast into darkness.

The exterior door panels bubbled outward.
 
Smoke from inside plumed up and out.
 
The doors bucked against their hinges.
 
The pneumatic arms held, but the three-inch steel of the panels was fatally weakened by the blast and had peeled apart several feet.
 
The rain poured in.

Tango clicked on the tactical light beneath the barrel of his rifle and dropped into smoky blackness.
 
He landed on blast-charred concrete and aimed the light through the swirl of smoke and dust.
 
He intuitively followed the slope of the ramp deep into the tunnel and moved fast, charging through the darkness.

*
   
*
   
*

The second blast shook the walls of the camera monitoring room, shelving collapsing, equipment crashing to the floor.
 
Lindsay was struck hard several times by falling objects as she tried to dodge out of the way.
 
An overhead fixture holding several fluorescent tubes broke loose at one end and swung down from the ceiling, catching her on the back of the neck.
 
In the next instant, the power failed.

Lindsay crashed to the floor.
 
Pain spiked at the back of her head.
 
It felt like she’d been struck with a hammer.
 
Her eyes were shut tight, but sparks of light danced in the blackness behind her eyelids.
 
She blinked them open and found she couldn’t see an inch in front of her face.
 
The walkie-talkie radio had skittered out of reach into the pitch-blackness.
 
Her ears were ringing from the blow to the head, and equipment was rattling around on the floor and the table, still settling after the abrupt spill, but she thought she could hear voices coming over the radio from an unseen direction.

“Lindsay!”

The sparks of light danced and swirled.

“Lindsay!”

She could feel blood oozing in her hair.

“Are you okay?” a voice crackled over the radio.

She attempted to sit upright.
 
It felt like the world was spinning sideways.
 
She was dazed.
 

“Please talk to me, Lindsay!”

She scooted on her bottom until she found a wall.
 
She used it as a navigational tool and pushed herself up on her rubbery legs as she felt the blood creeping down the back of her neck.

She heard the radio squawking but couldn’t pinpoint its location.
 
She staggered one way and was halted by an obstruction.
 
She blindly navigated around something with sharp corners, probing her hand through the darkness in search of the door.

“Close the blast door!” Simeon bellowed.

“I can’t,” she whimpered, trembling.

She kicked something on the floor as she groped along.
 
Something metallic spun across the smooth concrete away from her foot.
 
She eased to her knees, investigating.
 
Groped blindly.
 
Patted the floor in a semicircle pattern, feeling, touching with her open palms.
 
Then she found it.
 
Wrapped it in her hands.
 
Identified the object purely by her sense of touch.

It was the gun.

Lindsay held it by the grip and rose to her feet.

She heard voices calling from a separate area of the underground bunker.
 
Her children’s voices.
 
Shouting her name.
 
Screaming for help.

*
   
*
   
*

The tactical light was mostly useless until the barrier of black smoke thinned as he traveled away from the actual blast site.
 
Tango’s heavy footfalls pounded off the walls of the tunnel.
 
He ran with both hands on his rifle.
 
The pain in his chest was brilliant, like he was pressed between the jaws of a vice.