Damage Control (39 page)

Scorpion made a point of establishing eye contact. “No matter how you cut it, it’s an ugly business.”

The engine on the closest Sandcat turned and caught. Tristan jumped at the sound and whirled to see the Big Guy in the front seat, smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up through the window. He said something, but the words were lost in the crisp
thump
of another explosion.

Scorpion checked his watch and gave a quick, satisfied nod. “Mount up,” he said.

With the second explosion, Palma knew that his worst fears had been realized. The timing had been brilliant. If his mental calculations were correct, Nazario and his men would have been very near the blast.

The debris had barely stopped falling when the screaming erupted on the radio. At first, all he heard was noise, irrational unintelligible yelling that overpowered the radio mike.

“Calm down, soldier,” Palma said, but he knew they’d stepped on his transmission.

He was about to try again when he heard the worst of the worst: “Sergeant Nazario is dead!”

Maria felt the first explosion more than she heard it. She assumed it was the first explosion. More a pulse than a boom, it launched waves through the knee-deep water that rolled to her waist and slapped against the concrete walls.

Stuff fell from the ceiling, too, though in the darkness she didn’t know what it was. It fell in chunks and it filled the air with dust that smelled like mold. Without light, and without knowledge of the truth, her mind screamed that the falling objects were spiders. And crickets. All the insects that most terrified her.

In that flash of fear, the possibility of capture or torture or death mattered less than battling the insects. Maria’s hands moved in spasms to brush whatever they were from her shoulders and hair.

Her
hair
! In her mind, her head was infested now, crawling with bugs. With pregnant bugs, determined to lay their eggs on her scalp.

It was all preposterous, of course—the ridiculous ramblings of a frightened little girl who’d never fully overcome her fear of the dark.

She told herself that none of it was true—
insisted
that none of it was true—but it did little to settle her racing heart and trembling hands.

This will be over soon,
she told herself. What was it that Mother Hen had said? Three explosions in the space of five minutes, and she was to wait until—

There was nothing subtle about the next detonation.

It must have been much closer, because a pressure wave rolled like an earthquake through the storm sewer. She felt the walls move as the wave swept past her, and a tsunami of water smacked her like a liquid wall. It broke over her head and knocked her to the floor, where she tumbled under the assault of secondary and tertiary waves.

After a somersault, Maria came up sputtering and coughing, desperate to recover the air that had been pushed from her lungs. As she struggled to breathe, she also tried to find stability for her feet in the slippery muck that lined the concrete floor of the sewer.

By pressing her hands against the walls and digging in with her knees, she was finally able to stabilize herself. She tried to stand, but when she was barely above a squat, her head hit the top of the tunnel and a new wave of panic swept over her. She’d been washed to a new part of the sewer, but she’d been turned and jostled so much that she no longer could tell left from right, upstream from downstream.

She was stranded now on hands and knees, and the water was chin-high. If it started to rain, she would drown.

This new terror eclipsed any horrors of the past. She was blind and she was trapped and she was going to drown. If her remains were ever found at all, they would be tangled among weeds and bushes along the banks of the river, downstream from the outfall of this terrible place.

“Stop it!” she commanded herself aloud.

Nothing was done until it was done. She needed clear thought, not panicked ramblings. The cliché said that panic killed people, and now she knew what the cliché meant. If you’re panicking, you’re not thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re just giving yourself up to death.

She smelled smoke. The stench of burning rubber. It wasn’t very strong, but it was definitely there. How was it possible to set a sewer on fire?

She needed to find the dim light from the manhole cover. If she could—

Light! Of course! Her flashlight!

Holding herself out of the water by planting her left hand in the slimy muck, she explored her pants pocket with her right. Miraculously, the pistol was still there—as if she had any use for it right now. When her fingers found the outline of the three-inch tube that could only be the flashlight, she nearly cried.

“Please, please, please work,” she moaned.

The company that sold these things marketed them as waterproof, but how factual was their claim? She didn’t even know if the batteries worked anymore. More than that, she wasn’t sure she’d even turned it on before.

The fabric of her pants fought her efforts to remove the light, and once it was clear, she nearly dropped it. In the slipperiness of her grip, the light squirted out of her grasp, but somehow, through instinct and divine intervention, she didn’t lose it in the black water.

Somehow, Maria knew to twist it. She laughed aloud when the blinding white light appeared.

When she pointed the beam to her right, it revealed nothing but an endless tube of concrete that extended eight or ten meters before curving curved sharply to the right. Intuitively, she knew that that was the wrong way.

She pivoted the other way, where her beam revealed a wall of smoke rolling toward her. It was probably just an optical illusion, but the leading edge of the cloud appeared light in color, followed behind by a much darker, thicker cloud. It started to sting her eyes, but she wondered if that would be the case if she was still blind. Could it be that mere awareness brought discomfort?

But there was something else, something in the water, a ripple of movement that raced toward her, as if chased by the cloud.

Maria understood what it was when the first wave of rats swarmed around her.

She screamed.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
ONE

E
ven two blocks away, the explosion was huge, launching a roiling ball of orange fire that momentarily turned night to day. As the original burst of light faded—not nearly as quickly as it had erupted—a dimmer glow remained, the beginnings of secondary fires.

Boxers gave a wild look as Jonathan dumped his ruck on the floor of the Sandcat’s shotgun seat and climbed in after it. “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Big Guy quipped, stealing a line from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“Jesus, what did you blow up?” If the second charge had been the first—the closest—it might have killed them all.

“I knew that one was for effect, so I daisy-chained three GPCs on the gas tank.”

Boxers laughed. “Holy shit.”

Jonathan ignored him and turned in his seat to make sure that Tristan was aboard and secured. When the doors were all closed, he said, “Go,” and they were moving.

Jonathan tried not to look at the conflagration he’d ignited. The thought of the lives that he had just ruined sickened him. Even if everyone got out of their homes safely, their possessions—lifetimes of memories—would all be destroyed. And the destruction was all his responsibility. If only there’d been another way.

The first blast had been designed to draw the OPFOR closer, and the second blast had been all about killing as many of them as possible. Because such things were an inexact science, it made sense to use more explosives and to capitalize on the accelerant effect of the gasoline.

If there’d been a propane tanker parked at the curb, he’d have set the bomb on that.

He needed to tweak every advantage he could find to make sure that his PC would rest his head on his own pillow again. Everything else was secondary to that.

If theory evolved into fact, the explosion would have culled the OPFOR herd significantly, and demoralized the hell out of them. That last part was important. A force that can’t focus on an objective can’t fight effectively.

These Mexican soldiers and the local emergency response agency would all be reeling from the explosive attacks when Jonathan and his team rolled in to take Maria Elizondo to safety. With any luck, he would pluck their new PC without incident, and they’d skip back to America unmolested.

Right. And then pigs would fly.

Hundreds of rats—thousands of them—raced toward Maria, churning the water, presenting as a malignant gray blanket across the surface. They hit her head-on, then flowed around her as if she weren’t there. Poised as she was on her hands and knees, her face inches above the surface of the water, the rats swam through her arms and scampered over her shoulders and down her neck.

Fleeing the advancing and thickening cloud of smoke, they seemed entirely unmoved by her screams.

For long seconds, Maria just kneeled there, allowing herself to be overtaken by the smoke and the fear and the vermin. She felt paralyzed. In her worst nightmares, she had never considered this kind of horror. Part of her reasoned that if she turned off the light, the fear would go away—or at least lessen.

No
, she thought with a shiver.
This is not how I am going to die.
But if she locked down, dying was the only possible outcome for her.

Maria had to settle herself down and think the problem through.

The explosion had to have come from upstream of the flow of vermin and smoke. She had a direction to travel. She told herself to ignore everything but the goal. Rats were just more of God’s creatures trying to survive just as she was. They had no interest in her.

She forced herself to ignore the smoke that gouged at her eyes and tore at her throat. As long as she felt the pain, at least she knew that she was still alive.

With the light clasped in her teeth like a metal cigar, she crawled upstream through her terror, her face wet and slimy with tears and snot and fetid water. The ladder had to be here somewhere, and with the ladder would come options.

At least she’d be able to—

Stand! In the gathering and thickening smoke, she’d nearly missed the ladder, but there it was, along with the vestibule that allowed her to get her feet under her and rise to her full height. The sudden change startled the rats, and two of them clung to her as she rose above the water, their little rat nails digging into the fabric of her shirt at her shoulders, one on each side.

She swiped at them in hacking, spasmodic movements that sent them tumbling back into the disgusting flow of their fleeing cousins. Spitting out the flashlight, she grabbed the metal rungs of the ladder and started to climb.

Maria decided to ignore Mother Hen’s instructions. When she’d issued them, she couldn’t possibly have known about these complications. If this was the result of the first two explosions, then God only knew—

The third blast sounded like it might have been directly overhead. The opaque smoke over her head flashed orange with it, and the rungs of the ladder pulsed violently enough to throw her off if she hadn’t been holding on so tightly. Below her, the water surged, but she didn’t care. Her future lay above.

She climbed the ladder blindly, and with each rung, the atmosphere became less breathable.

When her head hit hard metal, she knew that freedom had arrived. Locking the heels of her shoes against one ladder rung, and gripping the top rung tightly in her left hand, she leaned away for added leverage and used her right hand to push upward with all her strength.

The metal disk moved more easily than she’d anticipated. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or maybe manhole covers just weren’t that heavy. Either way, it slid to the side. When the opening was big enough for her head and shoulders to pass, she climbed the rest of the way into the night. In her mind, as she rose through the plume of smoke that gushed from the opening in the street, she looked like a ghost emerging from the mist.

With her waist clear, she bent until she was flat with the street and she dragged her legs out. Soaked to the skin and disgusted by what she’d endured, she shivered in the hot night air. Soon it would be over.

Maria crouched on the ground, looking first to the left and then to the right for signs of danger. She nearly jumped out of her skin when two men approached her from behind with weapons trained on her.

These must be her rescuers, she thought, but why were they pointing guns?

“You must be Maria Elizondo,” one of them said. “Felix Hernandez is anxious to chat with you.”

In his heart, Palma had known that a third explosion was coming. It only made sense. The first blast was designed to draw his people in. The second was designed to kill those responders—a well-calculated move as it turned out. If he had been planning these diversions—and he knew now that that’s what they were—he would have planted a third bomb to invoke utter confusion.

He hadn’t expected it to be so close, however—only fifty meters away. That his adversary could get so close without being detected was at once impressive and frightening. Palma had put a man very near that location to watch the oncoming street. He couldn’t remember the soldier’s name, but that probably didn’t matter. The fact that the charge had been planted in the first place probably meant that he was dead. And if he wasn’t killed before, then the blast had most certainly taken care of it.

Palma’s radio broke squelch. “Captain, we have Maria Elizondo,” a voice said.

He smiled. A diversion was only as effective as its ability to divert attention. Once he’d figured out what his adversary’s plan had been, Palma had told his remaining forces to hold fast in their current positions.

And now his decision had paid off. With the world around him on fire, he brought his radio to his lip. “Bring her to me,” he said.