"Forty-eight hours, Major," Wittrock said. "Don't get too attached to him." The other scientists followed him out.
Stella cracked her knuckles, said, "Okay, now how about the rest of you get the hell out of here? This man is beat up." They left anyway, but it felt good to pretend she was in control of something.
29
Storch hunkered down behind a rusted-out row of file cabinets, willing his eyes and ears to open as wide as they could, and tried to stay calm. Sludge and stagnant water pooled around his ankles, the stink rising up and making his vision double. The rusty copper light from the shielded bulb in the center of the room's buckling concrete ceiling only gave jagged edges to the darkness. His left arm throbbed in its fiberglass cast where the stout, stubby barrel of his assault weapon rested on it, a pain so bright he felt sure they'd see it in the dark.
They were coming for him.
He could hear them in the corridor outside, perhaps three doors down. The smash of a door being kicked in, the whumph and sizzle of a flash grenade, stuttering assault-rifle fire, faint splashing, a single shout. The black rectangle of his doorway flared dimly for a moment in the grenade's glow, and he could see into the corridor, the algae-flecked brown river churned to a froth of bubbles as men ran up and down just out of sight. They'd run one of the others to ground, and regrouped to take him out. If he was going to move, it would have to be now.
Slowly, planting each foot toe-first into the slime to avoid the slightest sound, he edged around the file cabinets and crossed the room to press himself flat just inside the doorway. Another flash grenade went off, this time in the hall, and the bitter tang of teargas billowed out. Sneaking a quick peek round the corner, a staggering form surrounded by three hunters, all of whom trained their rifles on the blinded fugitive and shot him.
Storch leapt across the corridor in two bounds, fire on his tail chasing him through the opposite doorway. He whirled and stuck his gun out into the hall, blind-firing half the clip. "Shit! Shit! I'm hit! I'm hit! Goddamit, get that motherfucker!" Splashing growing louder, it was all he could do to focus on the new room. Little better than the other, but the file cabinets here were stacked against the wall. He backed up beside them and leaned against the outermost cabinet with his broken arm. It squealed in protest, but wrenched free of the scum on the floor and toppled over, crumbled into clods of reddish dust. A flurry of movement outside, Storch's gun bucked in his hand and they fell back. He shoved another file cabinet, which went over easier than the first, slumping against the skeleton of its neighbor. Behind them, what he'd hoped to find, a door, opening on the next room. It'd been painted over, so he had to brace himself against the cabinets and deliver a forceful kick to the door to get it open. The door split neatly in half, but neither half fell out of the frame. Outside, someone passed before the door, firing wild over his head. He responded in kind, but the force of the fire overbalanced him and he toppled into the sludge.
A flash grenade erupted into the room, turning the darkness inside out before he could cover his eyes. He aimed at where he remembered the corridor doorway having been and emptied his clip at it even as he burrowed behind the toppled cabinets and huddled against the broken, jammed door. Silence, punctuated by dripping water and mud sucking at shuffling boots. Out in the corridor, he could hear the rasp of their gasmasks.
Swapping out the unfamiliar clip one-handed would've been difficult, but with his eyes out of commission, it was next to impossible. He'd taped them together head to tail, so, in theory, it was a simple matter of yanking it out, turning it round, and popping it back in. He visualized the mechanism of the small weapon, but he'd had too little time with the gun before he'd had to use it. He jammed the clip again into the slot, but the gun slipped out of its cradle on his broken arm and splashed into the water.
He heard shots in the corridor and in the next room. There was only one other man left out there, so this was his last chance before they'd concentrate entirely on him. He took out his handkerchief and dipped it in the foul water on the floor, took a quick whiff, found it stank of organic, not chemical rot and, sucking in a last great breath, wrapped it tightly around his mouth and nose. He lunged for the jammed door, digging his heels in against the pile of file cabinets and pivoting so his left shoulder struck the heavy wooden door squarely in the center of the crack he'd made with his foot. The door flew apart under his weight, and he stumbled through it into a poison, glowing fog.
His eyes, already feeding him only a purple void after the flash grenade, instantly seemed to melt. He barreled across the small room and came up hard against the far wall, then went limp, ducking as low as he could without laying in the slime. Even with his eyes clamped shut, they burned. Shots popped off in the small room, echoes and rounds rebounding around the cell above Storch's head, but incredibly, none hit him. He must still be invisible because of the gas, or the hunters had blinded themselves with their flash grenades. Instinct screamed at him to cover his head and lie low until the shooting stopped, but he stretched out, feeling for the body he knew he'd find here, the last other fugitive. He was there, only inches from his feet, prone on its back with a rifle still slung loosely across his chest. Storch splashed some of the water into his eyes and blinked it away. Now the room was like a starfield, past and present muzzle flashes dotting the purple emptiness, and before him, the guttering red sun of a dying flare. Everything else was murk and rumors of form, though because of the gas or his temporary blindness, he couldn't tell.
Storch went on his right leg and hauled the limp fugitive up onto his knee. Scooping him up under the armpits, he grunted as he lifted the body up before him and charged the corridor.
"Bravo One-two, one-four, he's coming out." A hunter backed down the corridor, peppering his human shield as Storch bore down on him at a dead run. Storch slid into the hunter and dumped the body on him at as high an angle as he could manage, and the two went down in a tangle of limbs. Storch fell on them both and wrenched the hunter's gun from his hand, shot him in the head. Before he could press the advantage, he saw the other two hunters coming up the corridor firing. Storch pivoted to his left and ducked for the door back into his hiding place when three shots stitched up his right side. The air whoofed out of his lungs and his legs went limp under him, and he slumped against the doorframe, his eyes only vaguely perceiving the silhouettes of the masked hunters as they closed around him.
"Nailed 'im!" one of them shouted. "Time?"
"Eighty-five seconds, a new personal best," the other answered. "And only two casualties," he added, looking down at the bodies before them.
"Fucker cheated," complained the third hunter from under the fugitive's body. "If Lonnie was really cold meat, he wouldn't have been jerking around like that, and he wouldn't have got my gun."
"I wouldn't have been jerking, you wouldn't keep shooting, fuckwit," Lonnie answered. "You got done with your own gun, Draper."
The hunters disentangled the pair and propped them up against the wall, then checked on Storch.
He felt as if his whole body, everything below his arms, had simply gone to sleep, as if he'd passed out with a small passenger sedan resting on his chest. He slapped at his legs, but it was like slapping a side of beef. He ripped the shit-stinking handkerchief off his face and dropped it into the slime, then held out his arms to get lifted up.
"Goes away in a few minutes," the first hunter, a mulatto ex-SEAL named Seawood, told him. "We tried using paint, but all these fuckers cheat." They lifted him to his feet and propped him in the doorway, and Storch found he could stand if he locked his knees, which was the extent of his control over his lower body.
The second hunter offered him a flask of something that burned going down, but warmed him from the inside out. If there was alcohol in it, his body clearly wasn't going to fight it. Diebenkorn, the second hunter, took off his gasmask and unplugged the nightvision scope built into the eyepieces. He favored Storch with a half-smile, said, "I think you're ready to hunt us, next time, Sarge."
About a day after he woke up, they let him out to walk around, just up and down the corridor, still manacled, followed by two armed guards. In his time in the hole, Storch had gotten to know a little about each of them. They were brothers in the shadow services. Rich Diebenkorn was a Ranger. Major Bangs and he had worked together, and arranged for him to become Missing, Presumed Dead during Operation Just Cause in Panama. Otis Seawood was a SEAL for nine years, and retired from service in 1984, after the botched insertion of SEALS off the coast of Grenada drowned two of his closest friends. He signed on for private security work with a front company run by the Mission, and was gradually brought inside. Both were hardcore loyalists to Bangs and to the Mission, which seemed to be what they called themselves as well as what they were doing. They respected him enough to talk to him, but they spoke over his head, in frustrating vagaries that assumed he knew, or would know, soon enough. Or that he wasn't worth explaining to. Then, as if they'd been waiting for clearance, they took him down to the Kill-House.
The bottom level of the complex was sealed off from the rest, because the added weight of the refurbishments the Mission had installed further aggravated the cheaply built concrete structure and caused a sewage line to break through and slowly flood it. The soldiers had made it into an improvised kill-house, a training area for house-to-house combat. They trained hard, two sessions each day in rotating three-man teams, hunting two of their own, and Storch. After six hours of stalking him through darksome puddles of fetid sewage, they seemed ready to accept him.
"You ready to go again?" Diebenkorn asked him, after Draper and Lonnie had been rehabilitated.
"Not yet," Storch lied. "I still can't feel my legs. How long have you guys been here?" They'd refused to tell him where
here
was time and again.
"'Bout a year," Seawood said, his eyes flicking over the others' faces. Storch already had him pegged as the unit's resident mouth, and was relieved to see none of the others cared if he talked.
"Seems like a big place," he said. "Black budget money?"
"Shit no," said Seawood, hissing through his teeth in something like laughter. "This shit is all obtainium." An obscure military euphemism for stolen gear.
"Seems like you could make enough napalm down here in a year, you wouldn't have to steal it from the Navy," Storch fished. They'd filled him in on China Lake by way of idle gossip, but let him see none of the larger picture.
Storch could feel them looking at each other behind his back. "We had another plan," Diebenkorn answered, "but it fell through. We had to improvise." Storch's mind snapped him a shot; of Arabic canisters beneath the floor of his store.
"But don't you think it'll be hard to launch a tactical mission with the FBI and the Navy looking for you? They'll find you in a matter of days. You can't hide a place like this. I could've found it by myself."
"Nobody knows," Seawood said. "Those that know, don't ever want to tell."
Diebenkorn filled in. "On paper it's a junkyard. They set up a dummy company and sent a lobbyist over to the State Assembly to pay off the representative and the EPA. They think it's a toxic waste dump, and we've got them on tape taking money not to blow the whistle."
"Somebody's bound to blow it, anyway; you'll be found out."
"In a week, maybe. But four days is all we need. Then this place won't be here, anymore."
He knew better than to ask them about the Mission. They trusted him enough not to shoot real bullets at him just now, but they weren't training for pride or practice. They were training for their lives, against something that was coming in four days.
An intercom buzzed. Seawood answered it, watching Storch. He hung up and went over to the heavy blast door leading upstairs into the complex. "You're going to see the eggheads," Seawood said.
They led him to the elevator, and blindfolded him. He was turned around and around and mixed up by men who knew how well he'd been trained to maintain his sense of direction. He couldn't tell if the elevator they were in left from the kill house, or if they'd traveled up a ramp while they were disorienting him. He took it in good humor. They'd had plenty of chances to kill him that were at least as clean as this. They wanted him for something.
He could feel this entire place, with its small crew of zealots—no more than a dozen soldiers, eight or nine scientists, five or six technicians and two pilots—tensing like a muscle, straining not to burst under so many strains before they could deliver their climactic blow. The Mission, the capital tall and reverent in their voices when they whispered of it. He had a part in it, now. Once they'd discovered that he wasn't a spy, that he was just a dumb grunt, he'd begun to become one of them. He still had little to no idea what that meant, but he felt nigh invulnerable just belonging to an army, again.
They stopped him at a door; he waited while they worked whatever complicated ritual was required to open it. He listened to the air; it was louder here, moving more forcefully, so he knew he stood in a corridor, and the air was extremely damp, so he was still deep within the complex. A series of bolts slammed open and hot, bone-dry air gushed in his face. The desert? No, the air felt cooked, charged with positive ions. Storch felt the stubble on the back of his neck stiffen, and fight-or-flight scenarios flashed through the violet darkness behind the blindfold. The air sizzled with artificial anxiety, and knowing it did nothing to reduce its work on his nerves, which still hadn't settled down from the kill-house. He planted his feet, and again they had to shove him over the threshold. Someone whispered in his ear, "Remember. Wittrock's an egghead, and you're a stupid grunt. And maybe they won't kill you."