Black Storm (32 page)

After fifty meters the corridor took a forty-five to the right. A hundred meters after that, still meeting no one, they reached an intersection. They'd heard machinery noise for a while. Now it was louder. The pipes were getting louder too, as if they were getting close to wherever the steam was coming from. The gunny went to his belly for the intersection, scoped it out from the corner, then waved them up. He pointed Blaisell to the right.

He edged cautiously around, then sprinted across to the far wall and went to cover behind one of the pipes. He could feel the heat coming off it, radiating off it like a Hummer that's been out in the Saudi sun all day. He reflected grimly that it wasn't much good as cover. If a bullet hit it instead of him, the steam would fucking boil him like a lobster. He adjusted the goggles and peered ahead, down another corridor, wider than the one they'd just come out of. The hum of machinery grew louder.

He dragged his sleeve across his forehead, wishing he could stop sweating.

 

GAULT CROUCHED,
looking to left and right. After a bend the corridor split. One branch led off to the right. The other led to the left, where it branched again some thirty meters down. All were dark except for a faint shine at the far end of the leftmost corridor. Very faint, just tickling the image intensifier. The right-hand corridor was wider, and the machinery sound was coming from that direction. Toward the light, or toward the sound? He decided for the sound, mainly because he figured that way led east, downriver, toward where the map had located the Defence Ministry. A subterranean facility, if there was any, would probably lie in that direction. He caught Blaze
and F.C.'s faces, cyclopean eyes turned back to his, and signaled them out to the right.

Now, moving on, he caught light ahead here as well. The air grew humid, and he heard the hiss of a steam leak. His goggles picked the hot steam up as a luminescent mist, glowing in the long wavelengths of infrared. He moved toward it, was briefly surrounded by a drifting, sparkling light; then it was past.

Beyond lay more doors, hasped and locked. He hesitated, then waved the team on. What he sought would not be guarded with a padlock but by armed men. The light grew closer.

Finally he made out a single low-wattage bulb glowing by a stairwell. Beneath it was a switch panel. Maybe that was the arrangement: the corridor lights down here stayed out until someone needed them. He bent and touched the concrete at the foot of the stairs. It was smooth, free of the old grit he'd felt crunching under his boots. So people used it; it was an active trail.

He was looking up the stair, wondering where it led, when down the corridor the fluorescents suddenly came on. Far enough away they didn't blank his goggles, but he turned them off and pushed them down anyway, flattening back into the stairwell. More lights came on, reaching along the passage toward them.

Someone was coming, walking rapidly and decisively toward them. As the figure advanced, light moved ahead of it. He heard the click of footsteps.

He motioned the others back into the stairwell, and moved them up a flight. The light moved toward them. Looking down, he saw legs go by. A woman's legs, in a tan pants suit and high heels, striding along at a brisk, confident pace. The roof of the stairwell cut off his view of the upper part of her body. Her steps clicked away into the echoes. Shortly after that the lights went off again.

He looked at his watch. Nearly midnight. He called Blaze and F.C. in. In terse sentences he told them to patrol out to the end of the corridor and report back. They
nodded and moved out. Gault took the center of the third corridor and started to jog, the MP5 at port arms, the world bouncing and rocking in a green and black glow.

 

MAUREEN LAY
in darkness for an interminable time, feeling heat on her face and the cold of the bare earth under her. Hearing nothing but the black thud and rush of her own blood. They waited in silence, and as time stretched on, the earth-cold crept inside her damp clothes until her limbs went stiff and numb. And her mind began spinning thoughts, images, and then fantasies, until she was halfway dreaming. But even in dream the terror still followed. Wherever she went she felt its inchoate, enveloping horror. Something stalked her, and she would not see its face until it was too late.

She fumbled out her flash and illuminated her watch face. Then flinched back as it was pushed into the dirt. “What the hell—”

“Anybody tell you to shine that in my eyes? Keep it the fuck off.”

“Look, Sergeant—”

“Shut up,”
Sarsten whispered, and his voice sounded so eager to kill her, or somebody, that she didn't say anything else at all.

At last she heard the slide and grate of footsteps, and stiffened. Pulled the Beretta out and aimed into the darkness. Beside her she heard Lenson and Sarsten bring their weapons up too. The sounds came closer.

“It's us,” Nichols muttered. She breathed out and holstered the pistol.

“Anything tasty?” Sarsten said in a low voice.

“Just these utility tunnels. We went through them. Not a thing.”

“You sure?”

“There's nothing here,” Gault said, and his voice had the ring of iron in the blackness. As if to underscore it, a white light flashed on.

She blinked in its glare, letting air out again, feeling taut muscles untense, loosen down to the tips of her toes. So it was all rumor, all part of the fog and loose talk of war. Or maybe something that had some root in reality, but it wasn't here. It wasn't here.

They could go home.

She was looking at her watch again, figuring how long it would take them to get back to the truck, when Lenson said, “There's one more place we ought to look, Gunnery Sergeant.”

 

DAN HAD
thought about this during the hour they'd lain in the dark. He'd been aware of something nagging him, but hadn't been able to grab it. But then, at last, he had.

The thin little cable, the new-looking one. He'd noticed it back in the first trunk. Noticed it again during the dead time in the conduit, waiting for the boots ahead of him to start moving again. Even reached out and tweaked it. A plastic-skinned, insubstantial bit of wire. Only it wasn't wire; its flexibility under his questioning fingers told him that. It was glass fiber.

Glass meant high-data-rate, broad band-width digital communications. He'd seen it used to link missile transporters with command vans. They were starting to install it in the States for commercial phone lines. So he hadn't thought twice about it. But later, lying in the dark, he'd suddenly asked himself, What's it doing
here
?

And where had it gone, after crossing the Tigris?

So that after a while, puzzling it over in his tired mind, he'd turned around, an awkward crab in the dark, and crawled back toward the river. Till Sarsten had hissed, “Where in bloody hell d'ye think you're going?”

“Checking out one of these cables, Sergeant.”

“You just sit tight. The way you were told.”

Dan hadn't bothered to answer, just kept crawling. For a moment he expected the Britisher to come after him, but he hadn't. And feeling his way through the dark back
to the trunk he'd located the cable again, followed it, on his belly in the damp dirt with one hand sliding along it, till he found where it turned right. And followed that, till the earth fell away and a deeper darkness opened ahead. Into which he'd peered; gotten his flashlight out; then paused, finger on the switch. And at last put it away again, and crawled back to where the others waited.

“Someplace else, huh? Where's that?” Gault said now.

Dan said, “Follow me.”

 

WHEN HE
pushed his boots through the hole, Gault smelled something funny. A chemical smell. The air was colder here, much colder. As cold as the winter earth.

He had to kick at the dirt, knock dried hard clods of it away. Whoever had run the cable—maybe not that long ago; the commander said this was new technology stuff—had simply dug a hole and pushed it through. The original opening hadn't been large enough for a human body. But on the other side the thin flexible glass snake joined a twisting bundle of larger wires, cable-tied together and running off into the dark.

All this he saw with his fingertips, not by eyes and light. He kicked a few more times, twisting and corkscrewing himself through the dirt. Then his boots hit solidity, and he pushed once more and dropped through, a fetus become infant, expelled from the Iraqi earth's icy womb.

He landed with a clatter of iron, and crouched, grimacing as echoes reverberated from the dark. Reached up to turn his NVGs on. Then something hard slammed him in the head, and he reached up to grab his weapon, pushed through behind him. He rubbed his sleeve over it, cleaning off the loose soil. Then stepped off the pile of loose metal as the goggles whined, powering up, and bleached the darkness into green-tinted black. But still not into sight, till he pressed the button and the IR beam shone out.

He was in a low, roughly cast concrete channel through the earth. It looked like a watercourse, curved at the bottom, almost like the sewer had been. The cables ran along its floor in thick bundles that looked relaxed and heavy. The floor slanted downward. He couldn't see where it ended.

But he heard something. Distant, muffled, not all that clear. It might be an animal. It might be the sound of a man in pain. Or even the squeal of unoiled machinery. It came from down the tunnel, from the darkness where his beam didn't reach.

He crouched into a tactical stance and followed his weapon. The trough under his feet flattened and leveled. The sound grew louder, but no clearer. He ducked under an overhang, placing his boots carefully. Making no noise at all. He was in complete darkness, able to see nothing but random speckles in the screens unless he let go of his weapon to press the illuminator.

At last he reached the source of the noise. He pressed the illuminator and examined it carefully, covering it with his weapon. Then retreated, step by step, still noiselessly, until he reached the upper entrance again. Where Nichols waited. His put his mouth to the corporal's ear and whispered, “Send down the doc. And tell her to wear her NVGs.”

 

SHE FUMBLED
awkwardly with the goggles. They were heavy and kept sliding down her face. But she could see again, a relief after so long in darkness.

But now she saw in two dimensions, not three, by an eerie wash of bright green light. It came from where Gunny Gault was down on one knee. The team leader's head was a blaze of light, throwing utterly black shadows away down the tunnel.

She looked again at the man in the blankets.

He lay comma-curled against the concrete, occupying a folded blanket on the floor of the tunnel. Another blan
ket had been laid over him, but he'd kicked it off. He spoke rapidly, in a slurred, high-pitched mumble; then convulsed in a spasm of coughing that lasted for several seconds. After which he lay for a time quiet, save for a panting breath; then the murmuring started again. His eyes were open but didn't seem to see her.

Of course they didn't, she reminded herself. To him, without the sorcerer's vision, the darkness was complete. She looked down the tunnel again but saw only the moving shadows of her team members, slipping past her.

Two other blanket-wrapped bundles, a few yards down the tunnel, would be motionless forever. She'd checked them already and confirmed that this soldier was the only one still alive.

She knelt, fumbled with the focus knob on the goggles until she had as sharp a picture as she'd get. She took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and slipped them on, feeling the dirt and crud gritty against the smooth rubber skin. Then turned back the blanket. He must have felt it, but he didn't respond. That was consistent with the weak steady murmur.

He was youngish—early twenties, she guessed—with several days' stubble and the omnipresent mustache. Dark bits of gravel or dirt stuck to his cheeks and forehead. His cheeks were hollow and his prominent lips were blistered. Dark, sweat-damp hair, longer than a US soldier would sport, stuck to his forehead. A dark fluid had trickled from his nose across his cheek and down into the blanket. He coughed again, face turned upward, and she sat back on her heels, thinking.

She laid her palm on his face, then to the side of his neck, feeling for a pulse. It was weak and rapid. He felt hot, yet he was shivering. She noticed the gravel on his skin again and tried to brush it away. It felt strange, soft, and clung to his face. She brushed at it again, puzzled, before she realized it wasn't small stones, or dirt, sticking to the damp of his sweating flesh, as she'd thought.

Her hand stopped and she blinked rapidly. A chill
caterpillared up her shoulder blades and over her neck. She removed her hand slowly, holding it away from her, holding her breath.

Coughing; elevated temperature; delirium. Flat, soft, dark skin lesions. Extensive petechiae. Mucosal hemorrhage.

“Stand back from us,” she said aloud. “Move away. Down the tunnel.”

“Keep your voice down!”

She said in a fierce whisper, “All right. But get away! And don't go near those bodies either.”

She heard mutters, then the scuffle as the remainder of the team moved past. She stayed on her knees, taking shallow, slow breaths, keeping her face turned away.

She waited till the others had passed, till they were shuffles receding down the tunnel. Then, with a quick motion, pulled the blanket down to the soldier's feet. He still had his boots on, she noted. She unbuttoned his uniform, trousers and shirt, and pushed them apart to reveal his trunk. Nothing. Or only a few of the dark, slightly raised specks.

She wondered what color they'd be in visible light.

His hands. She lifted one lightly, feeling the fever through her gloves. Then she unbuttoned his cuff and slipped one of his sleeves up to reveal the forearm. It was as heavily dotted as his face. The small, soft, flat-looking bumps ran from the backs of the hands up the forearms, disappearing into the sleeves. All the bumps looked more or less the same.