Moon Mask (15 page)

The entire machine blew apart in a terrific ball of fire, shooting searing hot debris in all directions. The concussive boom slammed into her, knocking her and Sid off their feet and warping the mess tent. Other canvass structures caught alight, rippling heat into the storm drenched arena. Soldiers, taken off guard, collapsed to the ground, shielding their heads as flaming meteors slammed into the mud.

Staggering to her feet, her soaked clothes clinging to her lithe body, she glanced across to see Raine cautiously push himself up out of hiding.

She raised her voice and shouted over the din to him. “Much better than lifting my top, no?!”

Raine
shrugged, noncommittal. “Nah,” he replied.

Then he was all action again. King hadn’t anticipated the other man’s speed. Focussed and intent, his earlier warning came back to the archaeologist.
You just better keep up with me, Benny.

Raine dashed from cover and pulled a handgun from the back of his waistband. King remembered wondering about the weapon’s necessity yesterday. Now, he was grateful for it.

Raine fired at two of the soldiers as they struggled to their feet. A third charged at him, bringing his weapon up and around too slow. With expert precision, Raine doubled him over with a knee to the groin then dropped him with a chop to the neck. He snatched up his QBZ-95 assault rifle and fired at the other soldiers. Too slow in regaining their wits after the fiery destruction of their helicopter, they were scattered by Raine’s spray of bullets, scrambling for cover behind burning tents and chunks of smoking metal.

But it wouldn’t take long for them to mobilise again. “Benny, move it!”

King’s legs felt like jelly as he ordered them into motion, running up behind Raine as the other man cut a swath through the soldiers. He didn’t let up with the rifle, his eyes expertly locating any movement and putting down resistance before it arose. The storm continued to rage, rain lashing across the summit but King ignored the downpour, shadowing Raine all the way across the camp until they arrived at Nadia’s research tent. Raine threw aside the canvass door, checked the all clear.

“Get the mask,” he ordered.

King didn’t hesitate, darting out of the rain into the tent. His eyes scanned the work stations, his arms sweeping across them and scattering books and computers and microscopes. His body shook violently with an adrenaline overload. It felt as it his heart was going to burst out of his chest, his brain explode!

Think, Ben, damn it! Concentrate!

The sound of gunfire grew more intense and several bullets suddenly burst through the canvass of the tent, ricocheting off the equipment. Reflexively, he dropped to the ground and shielded his head.

Outside, Raine checked his magazine- nearly empty. He switched to single shot, aiming carefully at the ever increasing numbers of soldiers converging on their position.

“How’s it coming in there, Benny?” he called.

Lying on the ground as bullets flew above him, King’s eyes suddenly noticed an odd, rectangular shape in the ground sheet. He remembered what Nadia had said about hiding the mask in a lead lined container and burying it. That was what she had been doing before the soldiers had caught her.

“Almost there,” he shouted back to Raine. He crawled forward, pulling his pocket-knife from his trousers. He dug the blade into the ground sheet and tore the material before hastily yanking the suitcase-sized container out.

“Got it!” he announced, hefting the heavy case up just as Raine retreated backwards into the tent, discarding his stolen rifle.

“Great,” he grumbled. Pulling his handgun from his waistband again, his expertly slid the clip out. Two bullets left. He glanced at the container King tried to carry. “It’s too heavy. Take the mask out.”

King dropped the case and flicked the latches. He paused for a second before opening it, considering the danger the tachyons posed to him. Why he and Raine hadn’t been affected yet was a mystery, but there was no guarantee they wouldn’t be.

A resurgence of bullets punching through the fabric of the tent cast his doubts aside. He wrenched open the case and plucked the mask from within. He glanced at Raine, noticing him moving swiftly through the tent, unscrewing the caps on oxygen canisters used for cleaning objects.

“Come on,” he called. King ran forward, listening to the sounds of boots splashing through the mud outside. He snatched up a lady’s pink purse, one of the interns he supposed, discarded in the chaos, and slipped the mask into it.

“Suits you,” Raine commented as he ran to the back of the tent.

“Where are you going? There’s no way out back there.”

Raine ignored him, running fast for the canvass on the tent’s rear. He plucked a scalpel off one of the examination tables and slashed it in a straight line through the fabric. Before he could protest, King felt the other man shove him through the newly created door just as Chinese troops poured into the tent.

Then Raine was through, grabbing his elbow and dragging him into the dense jungle beyond the camp.

“Here,” he said, swinging King around the trunk of a large tree. King watched as he spun on the spot, took aim at the tent and fired his last two rounds.

The tent erupted like the maw of a volcano, the bullets igniting the build-up of gas which he had released. A fireball plumed high into the clouds, blinding against the storm-dark sky.

King had no idea how many soldiers had been taken out in the trap, but he knew it wouldn’t hold them off for long.

“We’ve got to get into the tunnels,” Raine said and pulled him to his feet. They both turned and dashed into the thick jungle, crashing through the vegetation. King heard his own heart pounding in his ears; his legs began to burn from the exertion and the branches stung his flesh as they whipped back at him, admonishing him for his intrusion.

The two men leapfrogged low bushes and fallen trunks, limboed beneath thicker branches and batted aside those that they could. The mud churned beneath their boots and rain seemed to twist in a vortex before the archaeologist’s eyes.

With a meaty slap, a bullet slammed through the underbrush to embed itself in a moss encrusted trunk. King staggered, shocked. Another bullet slammed into the tree in front of him, peppering him with flecks of bark. He hesitated, stepped back, turned-

A black-clad soldier levelled his weapon at his chest.

A spinning streak of silver whirled past his ear and dug deep into the soldier’s throat. The scalpel Raine had taken from the tent.

The man took a step back, throwing his arms wide in surprise, his trigger finger clenching to release a hailstorm of bullets into the jungle. He hit the muddy ground with a squelch, the thunder of gun fire ceasing to be replaced by voices shouting in Mandarin. Dark figures, little more than wraith-like shadows, shot between the trees, circling on the pair.

“Hurry up!” Raine grasped his forearm, snapping him out of his daze. They ran forward another few steps but then the ground in front of them erupted, spraying them with hot mud and charred vegetation.

“Mortars!” Raine yelled to be heard over the din.

We’re never going to make it,
King thought.

Another mortar shell whistled through the air and exploded on impact with the ground thirty feet away. The concussive boom slammed into King’s chest, driving the air out of his lungs.

“We’re close to the sinkhole,” Raine urged him on. “We’ve got to keep going!”

They set off again through the hellish realm of Sarisariñama’s summit. A barrage of gunfire chased them while a bombardment of mortars hounded their every step, exploding to the left, then the right; in front, then behind. King’s world receded to a tunnel. He focussed all his energy into driving himself forward through the pounding rain-

They broke out of the dense jungle and King’s eyes absorbed the familiar scene of the yawning sinkhole stretching away from him. Its sides were coated in thick green plant life which was today awash with numerous torrents of water as streams created by the storm cascaded down into the sinkhole’s black depths.

Directly in front of King was the winch station, a jury-rigged contraption of metal scaffolding clinging to the cliff face, housing giant reams of metal cables. The science teams used the system to be lowered into the tunnels and out each day.

Right now, however, two men in black NBC suits were rising out of the hole, dangling in their harnesses.

They saw Raine and King and raised their weapons.

From behind, dozens of soldiers swarmed towards them.

All around them, mortars pounded the drenched earth.

Trapped.

King’s footsteps faltered, ready to surrender, but Raine dragged him on. Another mortar shell smashed into the ground at their heels. The blast slammed into them, intense and agonising. King heard himself scream as the heat wave threw both men forward.

But Raine had been ready for it. He used the explosion to help propel them both out over the gaping sinkhole. They cried out as the momentum of the blast died away and gravity took hold, dragging them into the yawning maw of the gateway into the earth.

King saw the black abyss below spread out to encompass him, to drag him to hell, but then, with jarring suddenness, they jerked to a halt and swung painfully into the cliff face.

Raine had snagged the harness of both the enemy climbers, momentarily halting their death-dive. The sudden weight ripped both soldiers from their perches and now all four men fell, arms and legs cart-wheeling. They dropped like stones, bouncing off the sheer sides of the sinkhole, a tangle of limbs and a mêlée of petrified screams.

Above them, the winches spun freely, unspooling meters of cable until, at last, the safety mechanism bit the brake into the line.

The cables snapped taught, jarring them all to a halt.

King’s back smashed into the cliff face, winding him. During his fall, he had reflexively grabbed hold of one of the cables and he struggled now to keep his grip on the slippery line. He glanced down. The base of the sinkhole was still hundreds of feet below him. Vertigo sent a wave of dizziness to his skull.

The two soldiers hung limply, dazed, but secured in their harnesses, they quickly re-gathered their wits and went for their guns.

Too slow.

Somehow, King noticed, Raine had manoeuvred himself into position above one of the soldiers. He dangled from one arm, muscles flexing, and merely plucked the rifle from the stunned Chinaman’s hand, turned and fired point blank at his face.

A spray of blood and brains rained down into the sinkhole.

In one fluid movement, he twisted again, planted the muzzle of the weapon under the chin of the second man and fired. A starburst of blood splashed across the vertical walls of the hole.

King felt bile rise up his throat. His eyes were wide, locked on the two dangling cadavers.

“Benny,” Raine called to him, his voice hard, devoid of emotion despite his actions. “Grab his controls. We’ve got to keep moving.”

King didn’t move. He simply dangled above the hole, his arm muscles burning yet his fist clenched tight.

Raine reached and released the control unit from the belt of the soldier whom he shared a cable with. Pressing the red ‘down’ arrow, he and the corpse began to descend but he halted when he realised King wasn’t following.

“Benny,” he called. But when he didn’t answer he barked more sharply. “King! Move your goddamn ass!”

King shook himself into action and struggled, one handed, to release the dead man’s controls. Together, they allowed the winch to lower them further into the sinkhole until they reached the familiar metal platform that had been affixed outside of the entrance to the underground labyrinth.

King jumped onto it, the clanging metal feeling good and solid beneath his feet. His eyes focussed on his companion. Raine’s face was hard, the lines of his rugged features set straight and steady. There was no shaking of adrenaline, no overly laboured breathing. There was no emotion in those icy blue eyes.

Who are you?
He wondered. “You killed those men,” he accused.

“We’ve got to keep moving.” Raine relieved one of the dead men of his rifle then turned to head inside the tunnel. King remained fixed on the platform. Above, Chinese troops began to gather and lower themselves over the ledge. The storm continued its torrential downpour.

“You just . . . shot them.”

“Yeah, well,” Raine shrugged. “They were gonna shoot us.”

“How can you be so flippant about killing?” King snarled. “Like it was easy or something.”

Raine whirled on him, face twisted into an angry snarl. But it wasn’t anger in his eyes, King saw. It was something else.

A cold emptiness.

“It gets easier every time,” he lied, then turned and vanished into the gloom of the tunnel.

King hesitated a fraction of a second longer, and then followed him into Hell.

11:

Death Above . . .

The Labyrinth,

Sarisariñama Tepui,

Venezuela,

Raine
and King ran through the impenetrable darkness of the tunnels. Water had found its way into the labyrinth, draining down walls and collecting on the floor. Jungle vines clung to the perfectly cut jigsaw-puzzle walls as King led the way, groping through the blackness. He directed them solely by touch and memory and he desperately tried to picture in his head where they were and where they were going.

“We’ve got to move faster,” Raine whispered. He could hear movement behind them, sloshing through water and ripping through vines. The soldiers would move faster, he knew, aided no doubt by night-vision goggles and bristling with weapons.

“I can’t see anything,” King hissed back, bumping bodily against a very-solid wall. The darkness was choking now and King felt claustrophobia pressing against him. “We’ll be sitting ducks in here,” he pointed out.

“Reckon you can get us to the hidden passage you found?”