Black Storm (29 page)

It was a cable run, some sort of utility conduit. The steel interior of the pipe, that was what it was, a steel pipe just wide enough to let a worker wriggle in for repairs, shone with moisture. The cables were rubber-coated in shades of black and dull brown. Some were thick as his wrist. Others, newer-looking, were pencil-thin. They looked like communications, maybe some power; he didn't know and didn't care. All he needed to know was that they emerged on the other side of the river, and that there was no block or barrier along the way.

Unfortunately, the only way to find that out was to crawl it.

Quickly, because his thighs were already trembling, his balls shrunken by cold and fear till they burrowed into his crotch, he bent and shoved himself headfirst into the tunnel. His weapon caught crosswise across the entrance and he reoriented it, pulled it in, laid it on his chest as he stretched out on his back. The curved steel was cold and hard under him. Water dripped off one of the cables onto his face.

The dread congealed inside his gut, sucking warmth out of him. His arms were shaking. He'd never been this afraid.

Then he remembered, and with remembering came a sardonic humor. Why should Sid Gault be afraid to die? He'd killed his son. He'd destroyed his wife's life, and his own. What reason did he have to live?

Smiling grimly, bracing his boots, he shoved himself backward into the darkness.

NEXT BEHIND
him, Blaisell watched the gunny's legs disappear with open-mouthed disbelief. The guy couldn't be serious. There wasn't enough room in there to sit up. But he'd just lain down on his back and braced his boots against the bottom and shoved himself in. He was either cold as ice or crazy as shit. He bent down and shone his light in after him. “What the hell's this?” he called.

“This is how we get across the river. You coming?” said Gault hollowly. Not very loud, or maybe the confinement of the pipe muffled his voice. He added, “Marine?”

That jibe at the end pissed him off. He grunted, “Yeah, fuck, does a fat lady fart?” and contorted himself around and slid in.

But once he was in it the tube was even tighter than he'd thought. Lying on his back, he could lift his head up and practically kiss the cables above his face. This must be how they got their comms across the river, he thought.

He braced his boots and shoved himself a couple of feet in. He had a bad thought then, and wondered if it had occurred to the gunny. What if there wasn't any way out at the other end? They couldn't turn around. They'd have to squirm back boots first. That could take a long time. Seven of them, strung out like ants going through a straw. If somebody passed out or went apeshit, there was no way back.

A hollow grunt came back. The gunny, pushing himself along. Cloth scraped. Metal banged. Blaze heard a harsh confined roar of breathing. He heard the river rushing past on the other side of the steel, above him.

He braced his boots and pushed himself another couple of feet into the tunnel. Working himself along with his elbows too, but mainly pushing with his feet. Staring at the overhead, black cables stencilled with numbers and letters. His breath sawed at his throat. Time to hang tough, cowboy. Recon marines didn't lose it. Only three hundred meters. He could do three hundred meters, pushing along on his back. Then they'd be out of here.

He took a breath, braced his boots, and pushed himself another foot downward, into the cold.

 

VERTIERRA WATCHED
the boots disappear with a dull stare. He felt himself shivering. They had to cross the river. He'd waited for it with dull apprehension. Why hadn't Gunny just swam it? It looked dangerous, but at least you could breathe. He'd hated the sewer, especially the chute; the moments when the plunging water filled his mouth, when he couldn't breathe.

He shuddered. He also hadn't liked seeing Sarsten twist the Iraqi's head, suddenly, from behind.

The guy was loop the loop. Certifiable.
Demente.
First the little boy. Then everybody at the Mukhabarat post. Sure, they were the enemy. But he'd seen the guy's face while he was doing it. Sarsten had been enjoying himself. And now, their contact, their only link to the resistance. He wasn't going to let this crazy asshole behind him.

“You're next,” Sarsten said, behind him.

He flinched. “No, you.”

“You sure?”

“Sure, sure. You go ahead.”

The SAS's shoulders were so wide it looked for a minute as though he wasn't going to fit. He hunched them up and crawled in. On his belly, rather than on his back the way Blaze had. Tony wondered which way the gunny had gone in. He'd been above, he hadn't seen. They were working their way down the ladder one by one as those below crawled into the pipe.

The doctor was hanging back above him. He looked up to see that her face was white. She said, “Where did everybody go?”

“In there.” He pointed.

“My God, what…they went in there? Where does it go?”

“I don't know,” he said. It was the truth. “I guess the gunny figures under the river, to the other side.”

“Under the river…. Oh my God. I can't do this.”

“Sure you can,” he said, though he was afraid himself. But somehow seeing a woman's fear made it easier for him to be brave. Or at least to act brave, because he didn't feel it at all. He bent down and looked in again. At least he was small. He'd have more room in there than the big crazy Brit. He tucked his light into his shirt, clutched his weapon to his chest, and crawled in.

 

HIS BOOTS
kicked in the water, against the concrete, and then were out of sight. Maureen stood looking down where they'd been, at the faint flashes of light that reflected back out, arced as if reflected off a curved mirror. Her fist dug into her mouth.

“You okay?” Lenson said, above her. She barely heard.

“I can't do this,” she said again.

She knew without any doubt it was true. This was the end. The sewer had been bad enough. She'd barely been able to hang on inside the trunk, which was so narrow one person could only slide past another by pressing himself lover-close into her. That was what Sarsten had done, after whatever had happened as he got in; she hadn't seen it. But he'd pressed against her as he climbed down, and she didn't think it had been an accident because she'd felt his erection, hard, poking into her belly.

Not that it mattered. They'd have to leave her here. She just couldn't lie down and shove herself headfirst into a pipe under a river. Just could not. She heard a strange high sound, and put her fist to her teeth again. It had been the start of a sob, the whimper of a terrified child.

And maybe it was that, the sob, that made her suddenly realize
she had no choice
. She couldn't stay here, not when the rest were going on. If they didn't come back, she'd be in the middle of the city, alone. She'd
never get out. All around them, at the top of the trunk, soldiers. She could imagine what the Iraqis would do to a woman, one in the most forbidden dress of all: an enemy uniform. Gang rape would be only the beginning.

But this terror felt like death. She could tell herself it was psychological, only a phobic attack, but that didn't help. There was more terror in the idea of being trapped in the pipe than there was in the idea of being at the mercy of the Iraqis above her.

Above her Lenson said, “It's only a couple hundred yards. Then we'll be out.”

“I can't. I can't.”

“How about if we go next? F.C. and I? Then you'll be last. There won't be anybody behind you. If things get too tight in there, you can work your way back out first. How's that sound?” He looked up and whispered, “That all right with you, Corporal?” She didn't hear the answer but it must have been yes, because Lenson looked down again. “That'd be better, wouldn't it?”

“Maybe a little,” she whispered through dry lips, though she still had no intention of doing it. And pressed herself back, into the cables and wires, as Lenson clambered quickly down and swung himself in.

 

DAN FOUND
himself on his back, looking over his head toward a very small pair of boots—Vertierra's boots—that were scraping and pushing into the dark. The pipe
was
very narrow. It had machined-looking rings in it, probably where it had been polished prior to shipping. The marks were just above his eyes as he too began shoving himself along, trying not to think about where he was and how close he was hemmed in. His breath rasped shallowly and he slowed it.

It was like scuba diving. The same constriction, the same sense of confining space. He wasn't wearing a mask, but the closeness of the pipe was like the inside of a mask. He tried to think of the river water above him,
leaving out the half inch, or however thick the pipe was, of steel. Gather his legs up, till his knees hit the cables. Place his heels, then straighten his legs. Each time he did this he gained six inches, inchworming along head downward. If he could have bent his legs all the way he could have gotten more thrust, but there wasn't room.

The cables traveled slowly past his upward-staring eyes. They looked like telephone cables, or data cables of some sort. One of them was new, pencil-thin; he figured it for fiber-optic, cored with a strand of glass you could push megabytes of computer data through. He shoved and straightened and shoved again. Some yards in, he realized he should have been counting each shove, instead of thinking about the cables. Then he'd have some idea how far there was yet to go. However, he didn't mind this too much. He could do this. It was better than sitting in a chair, looking at Major Yaqoub Al-Qadi.

Yeah. It was a lot better than that.

Behind him, he heard a ripping sound, and a low mutter of “Shee-it.”

 

F.C. PULLED
again with mild annoyance at where his mag pouch had hung up on the cable holder, a metal bracket that fixed the cables to a curved metal rib that ran around the top of the pipe every meter and a half. They had sharp edges that somebody had bent back in order to wire in a new cable, and each one tried to snag you. He got free and shoved himself a few feet farther in, rested, shoved. His Colt was a weight on his chest. He felt water under his back, seeping up to wash cold around his neck. This was a bummer. He could think of lots of things he'd enjoy doing more. The upside was that whatever you earned in a combat zone was totally tax free. So on top of hostile fire pay and jump pay, which almost everybody in the recon community qualified for, it was like another twenty percent raise. Not bad! But what would really light his stogie right now would be just enough Skoal
Wintergreen to stuff a mosquito's ass. His mouth started to water. He gathered up his legs and shoved again, not too fast, not too slow, just keeping up with Lenson.

 

TWENTY YARDS
ahead, folding himself along like an inverted inchworm, Gault was thinking about the water.

He'd first noticed it a few yards back, as a coldness at the small of his ass. Then it licked the back of his neck. As he moved steadily on, it kept rising, slowly lapping up toward his ears when he relaxed his neck between thrusts, laying his skull back against the curved hard bottom of the tube.

He wasn't sure, but figuring a foot each time he pushed, he was about a hundred meters in by now. A third of the way across. Thinking of it as a third done helped. Or had, until he started wondering where the water was coming from. He didn't think it was from the river. He hadn't seen any leaks or drips, or rather, just an occasional drip of what seemed to be condensation. The steel interior wasn't new. The metal was rusty here and there where it had been gouged by workers adding cables, or perhaps splicing in new. But it looked in good shape, or he wouldn't have started this thing.

He figured it was leakage from the access trunks. They were concrete, and there had to be a gap where the steel and concrete met. It wasn't much of a leak. But it didn't have to be much. Just a little bit. As long as the power was on, and the pump was working, pumping whatever accumulated out of the bottom of the U, it would be all right.

Only now the pumps weren't working. Probably not since the air war had started, knocking out the city's power. Four weeks, a trickle of water running in, sliding downhill. Slowly pooling, here at the bottom of the tube. Or maybe just the condensation would be enough, given all that time.

He pushed again, and the water rolled ahead of him and then rolled back, rising to cover his ears. He lifted his
head out of it, trying to shine his light ahead as he craned his skull back to look ahead. The beam reflected away, off water, off the interior of the pipe, till it was swallowed by a blackness he couldn't see the end of.

The question was: did it, at any point, fill the tube completely?

If it did, how far did that zone of total fill extend? Far enough for him to push through underwater? And not just him, for all of them to get through? He was particularly worried about the doc. She had problems with confined spaces. Being in here on his back, underwater, was bad enough for him. If she freaked, she'd drown.