Black Storm (25 page)

“That what you wanted?” the SAS asked him.

He shook his head. The Finnish map showed a major new line here, built in the eighties. This was smaller, something that might serve to drain a block, and it had been here a long time. He called for the sledge, and when F.C. handed it down, tapped it on the pipe, swung back, and whanged it dead center.

It busted apart, and a putrid smell of cold water and ancient shit welled out where they crouched. He reached in and through and felt the far side of it, slick and wet. He fitted the broken pieces roughly back into place and hastily covered it back up with dirt. And was turning away when he thought, Okay, this isn't it; but where does it go? Sooner or later, it's got to drain into something.

Half an hour later, digging along it as it headed east, they struck the top of the new line. The old terra-cotta was crudely cemented into its roof. The new drain was
about eight feet down, of fresh gray concrete. He yelled to Nichols, who slapped a pound of Detasheet on it and scrambled out. The bang, muffled by the earth, was barely noticeable.

They dropped through the smoking hole, one after the other, into the hollow echoing darkness of the Baghdad sewers.

Maureen looked past her dangling boots into the black hole the others had vanished into. Her hands were numb. She felt dizzy. She knew she was hyperventilating, but knowing it didn't help. Gunny Gault was hurrying them in, using those laser-beam eyes like cattle prods. Listening to the Iraqi protest, watching him scrabble against the concrete as the men below him pulled on his legs, hadn't helped a bit. A clammy sweat broke under her arms, all over her body. She didn't want to go in there. She didn't want to. She took a deep breath and let it out. Another.

She let go, and slid down and in until her boots splashed. She crouched there, terrified, looking up at the tiny perforation of light far above.

Like the others, she carried her weapon—in her case, just the Beretta, in its nylon holster belted to her LBE—and the load-bearing belt itself. They'd stripped what they'd need out of their rucks when they weren't digging. Vertierra told them to eat, stick some PowerBars or gorp in their pockets, and drink as much water as they could hold. Take flashlights, NVGs, spare batteries, ammo, grenades, E-tools, chemical protective gear, and their weapons. She and Lenson were to take whatever gear they'd require at the objective. Sarsten had climbed up onto the water truck and they'd handed up the stripped rucks one by one. They'd remain behind, hidden from
prying eyes even if someone came into the garage. If they found the hole, the shattered concrete, they'd know
something
had been going on. But it would most likely be taken for a dud bomb, fallen through the overhead and burying itself, and given a wide berth.

A light ahead, an echoing voice. She slowly became aware of the smell. A humid, musty, old-detergent reek, mixed with a dead earthiness that made her think of pathology labs deep in ancient basements, the kind with stone slabs and cold water. And the smell of human shit, of course. She looked ahead, to where beams danced down a long lightless lumen. Then up again, her eyes unwilling to leave what little brightness dwelt above, what little fresh air touched her sweating face.

“Come on,” muttered Lenson. He touched her arm. “Let's go. We got to move out.”

Nichols's face appeared above her, then his footgear. They slid down toward her, kicking dirt into her face. Like being buried, she thought. She turned her head, with a physical effort that was like stepping through some invisible wall, and took a step into the dark. Then another. Her shaking fingers found her flashlight and switched it on. The light trembled as it bounced out ahead.

The drain was oval-shaped, a little lower than she was tall, so that she had to walk bent forward at the waist, and about six feet wide. The bottom was covered with a foot or two of viscous-looking sewage. It was flowing on ahead of her, eddying around her boots. It ran fairly fast; the current tugged at her ankles. It was icy cold. She could see her breath puffing out white in the beam of her light. Beneath the surface the concrete bottom was slick, coated with some sort of algal slime. Ahead came a splash and a muffled curse as someone went down. Her boots slipped too, and she flung out her arms instinctively. Her gloves scraped rough concrete and found no handhold, but she caught her balance. And a good thing, too, she thought, looking at the all-too-natural things that floated past her.

The air was breathable, though, and she sucked more of it in, trying to disregard the smell. A steady splash and rattle came from ahead, from the others, and the rasping echo of her own breathing. Too fast again, too ragged. She took another deep breath, trying to slow it down, and rubbed the back of her glove over her face and waded after them, sliding her feet along in the muck rather than lifting them from the bottom.

Lenson turned as she came up to him. He pointed his light at the overhead, and she saw something sticking down from the roof. A roughly sawn, jagged edge. Water was pissing down from it. She nodded and ducked under it, weaving her head out of the way. Already she was losing the smells, or her olfactory sense was burning out. Her boot toe felt a joint between the pipe sections and she saw, running her light up the side, that each section was about twenty feet long. She couldn't image how they'd gotten this thing down here, underneath buildings and so forth. Unless they'd built the buildings—poured the foundation of the garage, for example—after they'd laid this pipe.

A blue-gray radiance ahead…reaching it, she straightened for a moment and found herself at the bottom of a shaft that came down from shadowy recesses above. Like looking up in a cathedral. Far away at the very top, light shone through two small holes, rimmed the outline of a circle. She felt a little better, realizing there were other ways of escape. They couldn't use them, she knew that—couldn't climb out in the middle of a street, or whatever lay above—but it was nice to know they were there.

 

GAULT WADED
along, bent over till his neck brushed the roof. He'd expected low, and he'd expected shit; the engineer had said the storm drains were sewers too here, like they used to be in the States years ago. What he liked was the steady flow of air on his face. Airflow meant he didn't
have to worry about gas buildup, methane and the other nasties you could run into underground. They had masks, but you still needed oxygen.

He'd expected turds, but it actually wasn't as bad as he'd expected. He guessed it was because the air war had knocked out the power supply. No electricity, no pumps; and in a flat land like Iraq, no water pressure. No water pressure, no flush toilets, and no flushing, no shit. Or at least, less of it. The rain that had fallen over the last few days had washed this narrow passage as clean probably as it had been since it was installed. Judging by the slime underfoot, and the brown discoloration along the sides, most of the time it was three feet deep in crap.

He was counting steps, but now his attention moved from
eighty-nine, ninety
and what his boots were splashing through to where they were headed. He had them back in column order, with Blaze at point. He could hear Ted muttering to himself behind him. After the Iraqi, Vertierra, looking shrunken without the bulky radio gear he'd toted all the way from the LZ; Sarsten; Lenson; Maddox; and then Nichols taking the rear. Eight people, strung out along a long narrow hollowness here beneath the ground.

He wondered what was above them, what they were burrowing beneath, and recalled the map, the visual image he'd impressed on his mind like taking a photograph. Between the airfield and the Tigris lay a mosque and a bus garage, then a scattering of the green crosses that meant orchard. That was strange, an orchard in the heart of the city. Then would come the river. Just about a straight kilometer…maybe he should have put Tony as tail end. There were pros and cons both ways. He checked his compass again. The needle was meandering first one way, then the other. A lot of metal around them. Probably, in the concrete itself. But so far it ran straight as a stretched cord. Be nice if it took them all the way to the river. Once he got there, he'd have to think of something
else. They couldn't swim the river in daylight. He'd just have to recon in and see.

The dark ahead was utter dark, utter cold, and he heard things moving up ahead. He didn't like it down here, but there were worse places to be. Ten or fifteen feet straight up above them, for instance. In the streets of a capital under siege from the air.

Another jolt, the kind they'd felt in the garage, rocked the drain around them. He halted, startled, then forced himself into motion again. Down here it felt closer, stronger, a whipcrack that shook scabs of dried crap down into the beams of their lights. If a bomb collapsed the drain, they'd be buried. He felt sweat break on his forehead at the same time he was freezing.

The wind blew in his face. He went on until he counted a hundred and fifty paces, three hundred meters, then called softly to the point man and went down on one knee. The sloshing behind him slowed. Then came faint splashes as one after the other they took knees too. He turned his head and whispered, “Step count?”

Vertierra tilted his head forward. He breathed into his ear, “A little short of three hundred meters.”

Behind him Ted said loudly, “I go back now, please.”

Gault turned instantly and reached. Grabbed the front of the Iraqi's shirt before he could evade. He shook him, hard, and hissed, “Keep quiet! They can hear us under here.”

“I don't think—”

But the protest cut off with a wheeze, and Gault saw Sarsten had taken over. With a knee in the back and a hand over his mouth, the Iraqi's eyes shone terrified in the light of his flashlight. Gault blinked it twice and the SAS's hand removed itself. “Keep quiet,” he mouthed to the Iraqi again. The guy had to shut up. They had no idea how close a basement or another tunnel might be above them. There were also such things as geophones.

The asset didn't say anything else, just looked scared
and pissed, which was okay by Gault, as long as he kept the noise down. He directed the beam farther back; glimpsed Lenson's and Maddox's faces like mud-smeared moons. Nichols he couldn't see, but as tail end he'd be lagging back, turning and listening behind them to make sure of their six.

Vertierra, a hoarse whisper behind him: “We've got to keep a serious eye on this knucklehead.”

“If he keeps making noise, I'll fucking kill him,” Gault muttered back. Then he glanced at his watch, and got up again off his knee. Checked the safety on his weapon. And a moment more they were all moving forward again, filling the narrow tube with the rapid
slosh, slosh
of eight people walking into the darkness.

 

UP IN
front, Blaze waded steadily ahead. He felt Gault like a pressure behind him, pushing him along. He moved without light, navigating by feel and by the faint back-gleams of the flashlights behind him. He had his NVGs on, and in their tiny whine the green and black patterns shifted and fell into recurrent patterns that over and over again showed him the same thing: the tube, too low to stand erect in, continually narrowing ahead; the black dots of roaches, scurrying away as they sensed light, motion, sound, threat; the slowly roiling surface of the sewage, with bits of paper, sticks, turds, and once the limp soggy body of a dead kitten all hurrying on past and ahead of him as if eager to reach some fated destination. The twin burdens of the night vision goggles, poking out ahead of his face, and the awkward bent posture sent an ache corkscrewing into his back. He fingered his weapon, starting every time the scratching, scuttling sound came from ahead. Rats? Crabs? As long as it was going the other way, who cared?

He didn't like this, but it was probably the safest way of getting across town. As long as nobody figured out they were down here. Covert in the culvert, he thought,
and grinned. Have to tell Vic that one. He hadn't seen any graffiti, anything to show anybody ever came down here. It'd be a bad place to get ambushed, though. You wouldn't even need to send troops down. Just seal off both ends, pour in some gas, and drop in a match. He shivered. Christ!

His goggles picked out the black side oval of an intersection ahead. He signaled back to hold up, and heard the splashing stop as the team halted. Weapon to his shoulder, he rocked slowly from side to side as he went forward, placing his boots on alternate sides of the centerline. The slow swish of water echoed out ahead of him. It came steadily nearer, eerily, as if it were flowing along a moving tunnel toward him, and he himself was standing still. He leaned out to the right and toggled his infrared, tried to shine it in, but couldn't see much.

Corner drill. Just like Combat Town. He angled out, hugging the wall, keeping the muzzle of the suppressed MP5 as close to the axis of the new tunnel as he could. But when he came abreast it was empty, just another sewer, slanting in and slightly down, filled with darkness and the rush of more water, a lot more. This one wasn't oval prefab, like the one they were in, but more like a big corrugated-steel pipe, the bottom half reinforced with concrete.

Past it, the joined streams were faster and much deeper. Another flash of his IR illuminator showed him white water over rocks and tree branches and what looked like an overturned shopping cart. The flood surged out, creamed halfway up the side of their drain, then turned and hurtled downward.

Blaze shivered, imagining what it must be like down here during a storm. There'd be fucking tons of water tearing along, loaded with debris. He wished he'd taken a closer look at the sky when they were back in the garage, looking out at the minarets. How much warning would they have, if it started to rain again?

He lifted his head, peering under the green seethe of
the screens, and looked ahead, into darkness. Only darkness, and when he bent forward again, the moving shadows of the cockroaches—black in the luminescent green—fleeing endlessly away down the dark tunnel ahead.

Come on, he motioned, and the splashes behind him resumed.

 

F.C. SPAT
his cleaning patch into the sewage. Then grabbed for it, splashing in the murky stuff he waded through. Too late. The current whirled it away, toward the others, and passed out of sight down the tunnel. He didn't think a chewed-up wad of gauze was going to give them away. But it wasn't recon style. He wiped a sleeve over his mouth, wishing for about the millionth time that he had just a thumbnail of Copie to tuck under his lip.

It wasn't an easy way to move, crouched over, bent forward but looking back. He'd tried to walk backward, but slipped twice, going down on his ass in the slimy shit-water. He'd kept his weapon and his face out of it, but still. Forget that maneuver. Now he just crab-shuffled along, keeping his head turned back as much of the time as he could. He kept his light off, figuring anybody behind them would be using lights and he'd rather see them first than the other way around. This whole drain-crawling thing was new, and he was almost enjoying himself. It'd be a good story to tell when they got back.