Code Breakers Complete Series: Books 1-4 (74 page)

Step by step, with a guard holding onto each of her arms, Sasha descended the stairs.
 

They led her across the floor of the plant, avoiding the puddles of oil and dripping water from the overhead pipes. She could feel a rumble beneath her feet, like an engine running somewhere in the facility. What they were building, she had no clue. Nothing good, she thought.
 

They came to an open door that led into a dark tunnel. Sasha caught a flash of something very briefly out of the corner of her eye as she passed one of the steel columns. Was that?

Two ‘pfft’ sounds came from behind her. Her guards jerked, then stumbled forward, dragging Sasha to the floor as they fell. Sasha’s face bounced off the rough metal. Pain exploded in her right eye and cheekbone.

“Motherfucker!” she screamed and kicked out her legs with the shock of the hit.
 

It didn’t take long for her to see the blood, or that it was coming from the back of her guards’ heads. The entry wounds left a wide circumference with torn edges.

A soft pair of footsteps from behind her made her spin onto her back. She looked up and released her arms from the guards’ dead hands.

A human form, silhouetted by the overhead lights, looked down at her.
 

“Sasha, are you okay?”
 

“Fuck,” Sasha whispered. “Malik, that you?”

She reached up a hand. He gripped it and pulled her to her feet.
 

“How the hell did you—?”

“Come on. We haven’t got much time. There’s a group of them coming this way. Help me hide the bodies.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and held him tight. “Thank you,” she said. He hugged her in turn.
 

“I couldn’t have just left you, could I?”

“Did you get help?”

“No. I’ve been stuck down here all night. The place is a bloody maze. Took me ages to find you.”

“You’re a freakin’ saint.”
 

“I told you I got your back. Come on. Let’s get on with it.”

Malik took a key from one of the bodies and released the metal cuffs, then, taking a knife from his belt, he cut away the EM-shielding bracers from her forearms. Her skin prickled in the open air. She rubbed her wrists and forearms, grateful for the flow of blood.

“Hmm,” Sasha said.

“What’s up?”

“Still no signal, even without the EM-bracers. They must have the place shielded or encrypted too.”

“Makes sense.”

As Malik reached down to help her up, she couldn’t stop herself from smiling at him. Partially with the relief of being saved, but also that it was him that came to help her. She couldn’t have imagined how difficult it must have been to stay hidden all this time, trying to find her. She felt terrible for even thinking he could have been complicit in her capture.

“Thanks, Mal, I mean it. I thought...”

Malik gave her a wink. “I couldn’t just leave you, could I? Come on. Let’s get these bodies hidden before we’re spotted.” He glanced around. Sasha looked past him and saw the shadows of people moving around on the upper levels. They wouldn’t be able to see their current position, but if the ronin were to come down the stairs, then it wouldn’t take long.

They dragged the bodies out of the open part of the ground floor and placed them into an abandoned room. They shifted the bodies beneath a series of rusted workbenches standing against the back wall of the room. They covered them over with a filthy tarp found on the floor. Sasha took a wakazashi from one of the ronin—a short-bladed weapon similar in style to a katana.
 

“Do you know the way out?” Sasha asked.
 

Malik’s face screwed up. “I have a vague idea. It was mostly dark when I was scouring the place for you. It’s easy to lose your way, but I came in from over there.” Malik pointed to a corridor on the far side of the open area. It looked like it led perpendicular to the corridor where the guards were taking her. Away from ‘the Engineer’ was a good thing.
 

Wasting no time, she grabbed Malik’s hand and rushed to the open door. Just as they passed through, she saw a group of workers, or whatever they were, come down the stairs. They were currently chatting amongst themselves and didn’t see them—or at least she hoped they didn’t.
 

They both sprinted into the darkness. Malik led her through a number of narrow access ways, turning this way and that. Sasha noted that Malik used a number of pipe formations and other engineering infrastructure as landmarks to navigate his way. He came to a stop when the corridor split off in two directions.
 

“Fuck, I don’t know which one I came through,” Malik said.
 

Sasha approached both entrances. She heard voices and footsteps coming from the one on the right. “We go left,” she whispered and beckoned him on.
 

A hundred or so metres through the tunnel, Malik suddenly stopped and fell onto his front. A snap of a metal mechanism. The wet sound of flesh. The crunch of bone. Malik bit on his fist, his eyes wide, and his face tensed with agony.
 

“What’s the matter?” Sasha whispered, thinking he twisted his ankle, but when she got closer, she saw that a heavy metal trap had bit into his calf, just below his knee. The damn trap was welded to the floor. Its steel jaws firmly clamped around the bone.
 

“Holy Christ, hold on, Mal... Just hold on.”

Malik wept with pain as he held back his screams.
 

The sound of voices echoed through the tunnel, bouncing off the metal of yet more pipes and service conduits. There were no lights on, but she could see the faint glimmer of a flashlight at the far end. She took her new blade, wedged it between the steel jaws of the trap and tried to prise it open, but the strength was too much and threatened to snap the blade.

“Shit, Mal, I can’t get it open. What do I do? What do I do?”

“The blood... Stop...” Malik’s face was awash with sweat, his eyes closed tight as his body tensed with the waves of pain. Sasha felt so useless, but she tried to focus, remembering her combat training: focus on the task at hand, be logical.
 

The voices were getting louder. They would be on them in minutes, if not sooner.
 

She couldn’t get the jaws open.

Staunch the flow of blood! Ripping the leg material from her suit, she tied it around the wound. With each turn, Malik yelped into his fist, which bled under the pressure of his bite.
 

“I’m so sorry,” Sasha kept whispering.
 

Worried that it wouldn’t be enough, she ripped another strip of fabric off and created a tourniquet, tying it tightly around his thigh, just above the knee.

The flashlights were getting brighter, and she could make out the forms of three figures. They were laughing and joking to themselves. She needed to use this situation to her advantage.
 

Dragging the silenced rifle from underneath Malik, she knelt down in front of him, placed the butt of the rifle into the crook of her shoulder, and stared down the scope. The internal HUD told her she had five rounds. The rangefinder read the group as less than fifty metres away.
 

A beam of light washed over her. The laughing stopped. She pulled the trigger once, twice, three times. Two bodies hit the ground; the third shot ricocheted off the pipework, creating a spark. The third person pulled a gun from inside his jacket and aimed it at Sasha. She shot for the fourth time, the body fell to its knees, and the fifth shot blew the top of his head off. The body slumped forward with a wet thud.
 

High with fear and shock, she turned to Malik.
 

He lay on his back, his right leg held out at an awkward angle within the trap. His eyes were shut, unconscious.
 

Sasha felt so alone then with no one else to defer to: no General Vickers to scream orders or Jimmy to calmly give her a procedure. She didn’t know the way out, had three corpses at one end, and Malik trapped at the other, and no ammo left in the rifle. She wanted to scream and let out all her rage and frustration.
 

Kneeling over Malik’s body, she placed her head on his chest, listening to his heart. It still beat regular and strong. She knew he was resilient, given the wounds he suffered at the hands of the Red Widows. They should have killed him, yet he still managed to cling to life.
 

She just hoped he could do the same until she figured a way out.
 

***

It may have been the shock kicking in, but eventually Sasha bolted up from Malik’s prone body. There must be something she could do. Couldn’t just leave him there bleeding out.
 

She moved back down the tunnel to the bodies and checked them for anything useful. Other than a couple of pistols and various personal detritus, they carried nothing of use. She considered the option of taking their clothes and a mask and sneaking out, but that would be no use to Malik. He wouldn’t have long unless she could get him out of the trap.

Moving past the bodies until she came to the door that led into the wide-open area of the plant, she peered round.
 

Someone yelled from the door that led to the room where they had stashed the other two bodies. The alarm was raised. A young man came rushing out yelling, “They’re dead! That bitch’s gone missing!”
 

“Fuck!” Sasha said under her breath as the railing on the second level filled with workers and guards alike. They streamed down the stairs to surround the young man as he pointed to the room. It wouldn’t be long before someone came looking.
 

While their attention was on the boy, she slowly closed the iron door, sliding across the huge metal latch. She dragged the bodies in front of it, piling them up as a barricade. That would buy her some time. She grabbed a flashlight from one of them and sprinted off.
 

Three more traps, similar to the one Malik hit, were embedded into the floor, hidden by the shadows of the infrastructure on the walls. The ronin must have put them there to dissuade other escapees, which gave her confidence that this was actually a way out. You wouldn’t bother trapping a route that didn’t lead anywhere.
 

The rest of the tunnel twisted and turned with the flow of the pipes and ducting. She finally came to another door. A glass panel was inset within its iron mass. Inside was a circular five-metre-wide room.
 

With a feeling of great relief, she saw beams of sunlight bounce off the steel grill floor. A ladder rose up the far wall, the surface of which was covered with scorch marks. She realised it was a chimney of sorts—a way out.

She tried the door; it opened. The sound of whirring fans and machinery came to her, and her skin prickled at the blast of heat. The chimney stretched at least fifty metres up through the plant. At the top was another grill. A kind of filter, she supposed.
 

After less than a minute, sweat poured out of every inch of her skin. The grill beneath her feet shook and rumbled. From somewhere in the depths, a great beast of a machine belched forth a huge billowing flame.
 

Sasha leapt back through the open door as the fire rushed upwards, burning the edges of the chimney, filling it with smoke. She scrambled backwards and slammed the door with her feet before turning over on to her stomach and coughing out the smoke.
 

That couldn’t be the only way!
 

But she knew it was. Even if the trap could be removed from Malik’s leg, there’s no way they could get through the plant the way they came. Especially now everyone was on alert and looking for her. She considered the possibility of going back the way the guards were taking her. Back towards ‘the Engineer’. If he were the head honcho, he’d have some form of communication outside of the plant. He had to have means of sending information to the ronin and the assassins.
 

She formulated the plan in her head: dress like them, find the Engineer, and call for help. But it was risking Malik’s life. All that could take time, even if she did manage to pull it off before she got caught.

Malik’s scream came down the tunnel like an injured wild animal.

Sasha got to her feet and sprinted back to him. It was at least a good sign he had regained consciousness.
 

He was writhing on his side when she got to him. His fist was still bleeding from earlier, and his face was pale, glossy, covered in sweat and tears. He clawed at the metallic floor, doing anything to distract from the pain. He reminded her of a trapped rabbit she saw on the surface of Wake Island. Caught in their traps, the rabbit had screamed and thrashed until it ran out of energy and life.
 

“Malik, I’m here,” she said, feeling lame and useless. What was the point of her being there if she couldn’t get him free? Still, she thought that she could at least reassure him. “I think I’ve found a potential way out... but it’s not very safe.” That was a huge understatement.