Authors: Jack Heath
Her paralysis broke and she ran, heart in her mouth, back down into the darkness towards the cavern.
As someone who existed outside the law – no, that was a cheap rationalization, she existed
against
the law – Ash was always living in the shadows of injury, prison and death.
These things sometimes happened to normal people, but they were a lot more likely to happen to her. She was a criminal. A thief. She used to steal from good people to keep her family above the
poverty line, now she stole from other thieves to atone – but it was still stealing.
Whenever she returned priceless artefacts to their owners, and saw their smiles and tears and gratitude, she had no regrets. But every time she was on a job and danger slinked out of the gloom,
teeth bared, claws protracted, she wondered if the price was too high.
Part of her mind was reflecting on this now, as she sprinted down a pitch-black tunnel with a troop of snipers behind her and the stench of blood still in her nostrils. But most of her
brainpower was consumed by other, more pressing questions: Have they seen me? Do they know I’m here? Who are they?
And most of all: How am I going to get out?
“Benjamin,” she panted. “Can you hear me?”
Nothing but static. And suddenly she realized why – any group who could afford twelve snipers and a rifle for each would probably have radio-jamming equipment. She wouldn’t be able
to contact Benjamin until she was far away from the mine.
The cavern was just up ahead. She couldn’t see it – the lights were still off, and the snipers behind might see her if she switched on her headlamp. But she could hear the echoes of
her footsteps changing, getting quieter, going further before they bounced back. Sometimes at home Ash practised echolocation, moving around her house in the dark, clicking her fingers every few
seconds, listening to the echoes to determine how far away the walls were. This was how bats saw the insides of their caves, how dolphins observed nearby predators, and how submarines detected
incoming torpedoes.
When she felt the metal walkway under her feet, she turned left and clattered down the steps. She wanted to cut directly across the cavern floor to the south tunnel, instead of having to go the
long way around along the scaffolding.
She could hear the snipers in the tunnel, but they didn’t sound like they were running any more. Just walking quickly, and muttering to one another. They must not have seen me, Ash
thought. Yet.
Sprinting across the blackness of the cavern floor was nerve-racking. Ash couldn’t help wondering if she’d misjudged her path, if she was about to trip over the pile of helmets or
pitch head first into the pit where the box had been buried. But she didn’t dare slow down. Any moment now the snipers might hear her, put on their night-vision goggles, and then a bullet
would be erupting through her forehead.
BANG!
Ash squealed, then clapped a hand over her mouth. That wasn’t a gunshot. What could—
With a gargantuan crash, a stone block the size of a minivan slammed into the ground in front of her, spraying chips of rock that cut her face and palms. It had fallen from the ceiling of the
cavern.
Cave-in! Ash whirled around and started to run back towards the north tunnel. She’d rather be shot than buried alive or crushed to pulp.
Then she heard the fizzing of climbing ropes, and looked up.
The cavern wasn’t collapsing. Someone had blown a hole through the ceiling, and now they were abseiling down. She could see the beam of a headlamp swaying high above.
She couldn’t go back to the north tunnel – she’d be shot. She couldn’t keep running to the south tunnel – the fallen stone was in the way, and even if she went
around it she’d never get there before the snipers or the abseilers arrived on the cavern floor. So she dashed into the space under the walkway, where she dropped to the ground and tried to
look like a pile of rocks.
The first abseiler hit the ground as the snipers reached the walkway. He was shouting something. Ash couldn’t hear the words, but she was a pretty good lip-reader: “Someone shut that
goddamn alarm off!”
Seconds later, the klaxon choked mid-wail. The silence was so immediate that it took Ash’s ears a moment to adjust.
“Thanks,” the abseiler said. He was big – not tall, but broad-shouldered and thick-necked. There was something weird about his face, something alien. But it seemed less strange
when Ash realized what it was: he had no eyebrows. They’d been shaved or burned off.
A second man landed beside him. Then a woman. They each unhooked the carabiners from their climbing harnesses, leaving them hanging a metre from the ground.
“What set it off?” the woman asked.
“Don’t know, Sarge,” the browless man said, drawing a pistol. “But I don’t think it was us.”
Three abseilers, Ash thought, plus five, no, six snipers. Nine against one. No fair.
“Hurry,” the sergeant said. “The ghost’s coming.”
Ash tried to breathe as silently as possible. Had that woman said
ghost
?
The snipers clattered down the steps as the climbers approached the hole. The browless man’s handgun had a torch under the barrel. He pointed it in front of his feet as he walked. Now that
he was closer, Ash could read the letters on the side of the gun: HK USP 45 CT.
Ash had never fired a gun, but she’d seen plenty of them. Too many. So she knew HK was the manufacturer, Heckler & Koch. USP stood for universal self-loading pistol, although she
wasn’t sure what the “universal” bit meant. The number 45 would be the diameter of the bullets, 0.45 inches, and CT stood for either counter-terrorist or compact tactical, she
couldn’t remember which.
These guys didn’t act like a counter-terrorist unit. Ash didn’t doubt that the government would be willing to slaughter fifty innocent people to get them out of the way – she
had personal experience in that area. But why not just arrest the miners, steal from the dig site, then release them again with an apology? Terrorism Risk Assessment did that kind of thing all the
time, and no one asked any questions.
So, not government. Heckler & Koch was a German company, but Ash couldn’t detect accents in the abseilers’ voices. No surprise – guns got transported all over the world,
sometimes legally, sometimes not. Just because a pistol was manufactured in the Neckar Valley didn’t mean the shooter had ever even been to Europe.
This group of murderers could be from anywhere, working for anyone. And the letters on the side of the browless man’s gun meant only that it could punch holes in Ash 0.45 inches wide.
“We’re too late,” the sergeant said. She was staring at the hole where Ash had dug up the box.
“I see that,” the browless man replied. The other man said nothing.
“Could the miners have known?”
“No. But maybe they found it by accident.”
The sergeant turned to the snipers. “Get back up to the entrance,” she called. “Search the bodies. Get back down here when you’re done.”
They left wordlessly. No salutes, no “Sir, yes sir”. They don’t act military, Ash thought, despite the woman’s rank. Ex-military, maybe? Private Military Corporation? The
object in the box was worth millions of dollars – she could imagine someone hiring a corrupt PMC to retrieve it.
“Maybe the ghost got here before us?”
“Maybe,” said the sergeant. “But I don’t think so.” She stared suspiciously into the darkness of the cavern. She seemed to look right at Ash.
There was no way out. Ash willed her body to stop trembling. If they saw her, she was dead.
“There’s another tunnel,” the browless man said. “Over there. We’ll have to search it.”
The sergeant said, “Harvey, you stay here, check this area. If you find anybody, kill them.”
The silent man nodded. The browless man and the sergeant jogged towards the tunnel at the south end of the cavern and disappeared.
Ash had been worried that the deaths of the miners were her fault – she had driven them up to the surface, where they were exposed. But it looked like the soldiers or ex-soldiers or
whatever they were would have killed them anyway. The only death she was responsible for was her own.
There wasn’t much comfort in the realization.
Harvey turned away from Ash, and walked slowly towards the far side of the cavern.
Okay, she thought. Can’t take the north tunnel – snipers between me and the exit. Can’t take the south tunnel, because it’s a dead end. And I can’t stay here.
Harvey will find me, or the others will when when they come back.
She had no weapons. She’d thought she would be dealing with harmless miners, not gun-toting sociopaths. She couldn’t even rely on Benjamin – his boat was half a kilometre away,
and there was no way to contact him without disabling the radio-jamming equipment. Which must be on the surface, probably near where they’d drilled the hole, because they hadn’t brought
it with—
The hole. Ash stared up at the bright circle cut into the cavern’s ceiling. Then her eyes traced down the climbing ropes to the carabiners hanging in a pool of light near the floor.
Could she climb one of them? All the way to the top, barehanded, quick, silent, without Harvey noticing and shooting her down?
There was only one way to find out. As a plan, it sure beat pretending to be a rock until the snipers came back.
Ash rose to her feet, hoping the camouflage dirt was still stuck to her face. As long as Harvey didn’t point his torch directly at her, she would look like nothing more than softly
shifting darkness.
She started to creep towards the carabiners, step by silent step.
She could see Harvey pacing parallel to the far wall, quickly and methodically. Methodical was good for her – predictable, easy to evade. Quick was bad; Ash wanted to be as far up that
rope as possible by the time he worked his way in towards the centre. She changed her trajectory slightly to keep the block of stone that had fallen from the ceiling between him and her.
As she walked, she slowly unzipped her suit, wincing at the clinking of each tooth in the zip. She tucked the box inside its folds and zipped it back up so the wood was pressed against her
belly. It wasn’t too comfortable, but she’d need both hands free to climb the rope.
She was almost there now. The carabiner dangled a couple of metres in front of her. Ash had no harness, but it wouldn’t have been very useful. Abseiling only works in one direction: down.
Just the same, Ash clipped the carabiner onto her belt. At least if she fell, she would stop just above the ground – before Harvey saw her and shot her to bits.
Which is the worse way to die? she wondered. A broken neck or a bullet in the brain?
Now wasn’t the time to think about it. She gripped the rope above her head, wrapped it around her hand twice, and pulled. The rope burned her knuckles, but held. She wound it around her
other hand a little higher, and lifted herself up.
Only now did she realize how tough this was going to be.
Ash thought of herself as very fit. She cycled to school every day, and played no-rules soccer at lunchtimes. On Saturdays she’d jog to the pool, lifting rubber-coated three-kilogram hand
weights as she ran, uncomfortably aware of how middle-aged they made her look. When she got to the pool, she’d swim a kilometre before jogging home. Exercise helped her think.
But now she was in a situation where her strong legs were useless. Worse than useless, because they weighed her down – muscle is eighteen per cent heavier than fat. Ash weighed almost
sixty kilograms, which was much more than her hand weights. A lot to lift with just her arms.
She let go with one hand, reached higher, ignoring the burning of her triceps. Grabbed again, pulled again. You can do this, she told herself.
She’d learned that she could do amazing things when her life depended on it. The fastest she’d ever run was when a sociopathic hit man, Michael Peachey, had been aiming a gun at her
back. Maybe, she thought, athletes would break more world records at the Olympics if they were being chased by tigers, or something. Someone should suggest it to the committee.
Grip, pull. Grip, pull. She was seven metres up now. Less than a third of the way.
The trick, she knew, was not to think about the aching muscles. Pain was not the same as injury – injury was physical, pain was mental. It could be controlled by focusing on other things.
Like the gunman below. Like being silent so he didn’t spot her.
She could feel the blood draining into her feet, making them swollen and heavy. She gritted her teeth, willing her legs to be lighter.
Ten metres up. Almost halfway. Five-elevenths, maybe. But it was only going to get harder from—
Click
. Ash knew that sound. A safety catch.
She looked down.
Harvey was staring up at her, HK raised. His expression revealed no surprise, as though it was completely normal to see a dirt-covered teenage girl in a camouflage suit climbing a rope with her
bare hands in a mine that was supposed to be empty. Ash might have been offended if she weren’t so terrified.
“Wait,” she said.
Harvey’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“You fire that, we both die,” Ash said.
Harvey said nothing.
“You want to know what that alarm was for?” Ash said. “It was gas. The miners hit a vein of methane. Colourless, odourless, explosive. That’s why they were
evacuating.”
Harvey said nothing.
“It’s filled this whole cavern. The smallest spark could set it off. Why do you think they shut off the generator?”
Harvey said nothing.
“You pull that trigger, the propellant in the cartridge could ignite it. The explosion would vaporize us, and probably cause a cave-in.”
Harvey said nothing.
Is he buying this? Ash wondered. I’m sure I look frightened enough for it to be true.
Harvey lowered the gun. Then he walked over to the mine cart, which was still filled with rocks. He picked one up. Hefted it.
Oh no, Ash thought. Get climbing! Now!
She started scrambling up the rope, faster than before, faster than she would have believed was possible. She heard Harvey grunt down below, and the rock whipped past her ear, so close she
thought she felt the dust cascading off it. It sailed into the darkness and disappeared.