The Cobra Event (43 page)

IN THE DARKNESS
, she could almost feel the heft of the gun swinging toward her as he focused on the sound coming from her blowers. She tensed herself, preparing to explode from the starting block. She sensed the fragility of her body, the delicacy of her mortal being, and felt the jelly of her mind surrounded by hard bone, that can splinter—

Suddenly, with a humming sound, banks of fluorescent lights clicked on up and down the tunnel, bathing the tunnel in a blue-white glow.

He was holding the gun in a police stance. His face was glistening wet. Fluid was running from his nose and coating his chin. His lips were bloody, his eyeglasses flecked with bloodspatter. He had started chewing. He fired. The bullet splashed on the concrete. She was running fast. The lights went out again.

In total darkness she ran at full speed straight up the tunnel toward the dead end. Suddenly everything exploded. She saw purple flashes and she sprawled on the ground, certain she had been hit. She had tripped over a piece of concrete and was lying behind it. She stayed there, afraid to move.

HOPKINS HAD BEEN
calling for help on his headset. When he got no answer, he concluded that his radio was broken. He was lying on his stomach in a low horizontal passage. The tunnel was not meant to fit a human body, especially someone wearing a space suit with chest armor. The tunnel went straight ahead into darkness. It was about eighteen inches high and two and a half feet wide. He could not possibly turn around in it. His feet were blocked by the chunk of concrete that had fallen. He had to go forward into the crawlway; he had no choice. He was now beginning to feel the first bad tremors of claustrophobia. If he stayed where he was, he might run out of breathable air. So he crawled forward, occasionally calling on his radio headset. Got to slip this armor off, somehow, that would give me more room in here. He tried. He found that he could undo the Velcro straps, but he couldn’t take his arms out of it.

He was coming to a dead end. “Oh, no,” he said. Now he would have to back up. But as he reached the end, his fingers felt a lip or corner of some kind. It was a shaft going down. The tunnel went straight downward into darkness. He pushed his face over the lip and pointed his light into a shaft that seemed to be about twenty feet deep. It ended with a flat dead end. A dead-end hole. Just looking at it made him feel sick. What now? I’m going to have to back up, get back to the blockage and wait for help.

He tried to back up. It was more difficult than pushing himself forward.

Then it occurred to him that there might be a way to turn his body around and reverse direction. Then I can maybe get more air, maybe shout around the blockage, and maybe someone will hear me.

It seemed that the vertical shaft, which joined the horizontal shaft at a right angle, might provide enough space in which to turn his body around. He squirmed and twisted and fought against the confinement. He tried every position he could think of, his face suspended over the hole, working his shoulders this way and that. “It’s a mathematical problem with no solution,” he muttered. The problem was the damned armor vest. Again he struggled to remove his armor. Then a terrible thing happened.

He slipped. He fell headfirst down the hole, a plunge of twenty feet. He whumped to a halt facedown in the bottom of the hole with a sudden wedging jerk. He had almost broken his neck. He was jammed vertically in the shaft, his arms pinned at his sides. And it had gone pitch-dark. He had lost his minilight. He was upside down, face-first in a dead-end hole, with no light and no air. There was no way he could back out.

The roaring in his ears was the sound of his own voice begging for mercy. The panic shook him like a series of electric shocks. He was screaming uncontrollably, howling from pure claustrophobic terror. He struggled, fighting the concrete walls, trying somehow to move up and backward again, but he was jammed face downward at the bottom of the tight, airless shaft. He could not get enough air in his lungs, and he could not force his body upward. He thrashed, moaning, screaming, kicking his feet.

Hopkins took a deep breath and held it. He held it for a while, then let all the breath out of his lungs.

He tried to hold his breath again. He wanted to make himself pass out. If he could pass out, then this would be ended.

He could not pass out, which meant that there was enough air in here to keep him alive.

For a week.

Don’t think about that.

I’ve got to relax. I’m dying. If I’m going to die, I’ve got to come to some kind of peace.

Think of something. What is that Zen saying?
A wise man can live comfortably in hell
. Forget hell. Think of California. Think of the best beach in California. It might be Malibu Beach. No—those little sculpted coves at Laguna Beach. Yes. He tried to imagine himself lying on his back on the warm sand at Laguna, the smell of the salt air, the cries of the seagulls, the
whush-haaa
of the surf, the sun falling into the Pacific Ocean…. So many lost opportunities…you geek, if you get out of this alive, you really should ask her out. Strike a blow for geekdom. The air really is depleted in here, it’s making me slightly demented.

He realized that something was pressed against his cheek. It felt like—the Mini Maglite. But it was dead. He moved his hand. He got one hand around it, and twisted it, and it came on.

Light. This was progress.

He moved his neck left and right. He saw bare concrete a few inches from his eyes. His face was flushed and sweating, engorged with blood from hanging upside down.

That was when he got a shock. There was something dark and open behind his head. An opening!

Twisting his head as far around as possible, he saw that it was a tight passage that went off into darkness. Wedging his flashlight around, he managed to get a view into the tunnel.

Then he got another shock.

He saw a large glass tube standing upright on the floor of the tunnel at the foot of a ladder. It was packed full of hexagons of viral glass. It was Cope’s biological bomb.

It was several feet from his head, and it contained enough viral glass to render areas of New York City and downwind lethally hot.

He would have to try to disarm it. It must have a timer of some kind.

This was going to be difficult, because he was hanging upside down in the shaft. He turned his body and jerked it, and twisted and hunched and struggled. He managed to slowly rotate his body. He was still hanging upside down, but he was facing the bomb. By wrenching his shoulders, he managed to get one hand through the opening. He would try to grab the bomb with his fingers and drag it toward him, where he could work on it. He reached his fingers out for the glass tube…it was too far away. It was three feet away from his extended fingertips.

He moved his hand up to his waist, found his Leatherman Super Tool, and unfolded it to the pliers. Tried to grab the thing with his pliers.

Nope. Totally hopeless. I need almost three feet.

Three feet might as well be three light-years.

At his waist he wore a pouch—he had used it to hold his minilight and his pocket protector. He got one hand up to it and unzipped it. The pocket protector fell out, scattering things. He said to himself: Think.
A wise man can build gadgets in hell
.

He looked down at the stuff that had fallen from his pocket protector and he tapped his fingers around, taking inventory, and speaking out loud: “Mechanical pencil. Small box of pencil leads. Goober or Raisinet, not sure which. My Fisher space pen, writes in zero gravity. Swab. Another swab. Another swab. Length of duct tape wrapped around a pencil stub. Ticket stub from a Red-skins game. Half an Oreo cookie.”

Nobody but a fool goes into a federal counterterrorism operation without duct tape. “To build a sticky probe,” he said out loud.

With his head twisted to see what he was doing, and working with one hand only, he pulled a strip of tape from the pencil stub, and he began taping the objects together, trying to make a long stick. He debated trying to remove his glove for better coordination but decided against it; too much virus around here.

With one hand he began stripping small pieces of duct tape off the pencil. He taped the mechanical pencil to the Fisher space pen and the pencil stub, end to end, using strips of duct tape, making a kind of extended stick. A probe. Then he stripped the swabs from their wrapping paper, and taped them together, end to end. That made another stick. Next, he taped the swabs to the pencil-and-pen stick. What he had now was a long probe. The light, flexible, delicate end of the probe consisted of the three medical swabs, taped end to end. They flopped around, but they added length to his probe. He packed a small ball of tape to the soft tip of the leading swab, attaching it firmly to the swab with extra strips of tape. He was running desperately low on tape.

He had built a sticky probe of the classical Caltech design, approximately two feet long, using junk from his pocket protector. Such probes are commonly used to remove nuts and washers and other parts that have gotten loose deep inside tangles of high-tech equipment. He gripped the probe with his Leatherman pliers—that lengthened the probe somewhat more. He reached out toward the bomb. Nope. It wasn’t long enough by about five inches.

“Damn, damn!” he said.

Think. Use your God-given brain.

“Jackass—your flashlight!” he blurted. Now he taped his Mini Maglite to the sticky probe, and then held
that
in the Leatherman pliers. He reached out. The tape ball touched the bomb. He let it sit for a moment, to allow the adhesive to bind to the glass of the cylinder. Then he pulled it toward him. The cylinder shifted and toppled over.

It thudded on the concrete with a loud sound, and the glass broke, dumping out hexagons of virus. They poured out in a heap, skittered here and there, gleaming like fire opal in the light of the flashlight.

“Excellent!” he said. The warhead material had spilled out, giving him access to the detonator.

He could see a chunk of explosive in the center of the pile of virus. There was a blasting cap stuck in it, and what looked like a chip timer. He couldn’t see the timer. Boy, this was crude. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to make a virus bomb, as long as you had the virus material.

Then he saw movement and heard a sound. It was a rat, crouched and approaching the viral glass. It appeared to be about to eat some of the glass.

“Get away! Stupid rat!”

The rat looked at him, unafraid.

He found the piece of Oreo cookie. Pushed it at the rat. “Eat that.”

The rat took it and waddled away.

Now to disarm the explosive. He could see the chip timer. It was a laboratory timer, not unlike an electronic kitchen timer. He touched the sticky end of the probe to the timer, and it stuck there. Good. He dragged the sticky probe toward him gently, and slowly the timer came along, pulling the blasting cap and the chunk of detonator with it.

He got the chip timer in his hand. Ahh! He sighed. He turned it over and looked at the numbers.

They were running. Currently they said: 00.00.02.

“Yaaaaahhh!” he yelled, and he pulled the blasting cap out of the explosive and flung the cap away, down the tunnel.

Whank!

The cap had gone off somewhere down there.

I wonder if it killed the rat, he thought.

There was still a heap of viral glass lying by his face. But it was underground. It could be dealt with. There would be a biohazard cleanup. It would be a mess, but it might be manageable.

Now I have to get my living body out of here.

He had to rotate his body in the shaft. So he shifted his hips, jamming himself tighter in the shaft, twisting himself, and trying to crunch his body down. He got his head around enough to see into the angle more clearly. Then he got his head into the angle, into the tunnel full of hexagons of viral glass. He took a deep breath and let it out, his blowers still humming, still protecting him, he hoped—and got himself a little farther around the corner. By exhaling and pushing, he could slide along on his back.

“Yes!”

He propelled himself on his back out of the hole, and he stood up, his feet in viral glass. He checked his suit with the minilight. There didn’t seem to be any holes or tears, though he wasn’t sure. His Racal hood was still pressurized, and his filters were working, it seemed. He hoped he did not have any rips in the suit or cuts in his skin. I may be a walking dead man, he thought.

There was a ladder. Cope had climbed down the ladder and left the bomb here. There was also a tunnel leading off horizontally. He had no idea where it led.

Just then he heard gunfire—two shots. Faint. Coming down the tunnel. What was going on? It was a low tunnel. He hurried along it, hunched over, and came to a sheet of plywood across the tunnel. He pushed on it, and it popped and fell away into a large, dark, open space. “Anybody there?” he said. He shone his light around and caught a glimpse of columns, a figure moving. “Alice?” Suddenly a red light appeared on his chest. What was this?

Then he heard Austen scream, “No!”

There was a roar in his ears and something slammed into his chest, driving him backward, with a sensation the likes of which he had never felt before. It was a bullet in his heart, and that was when it came to him that he had been shot and was dying.

AUSTEN HAD HEARD
Hopkins say “Anybody there?” as she was lying in darkness. At the same moment she saw the gleam of his flashlight. He was waving it around, trying to determine where he was, and she saw Cope, fixed, bent, writhing slowly, taking aim at the light. The laser touched Hopkins.

When Cope fired into Hopkins she heard a smacking
oof!
The minilight flew away and rolled across the floor, throwing its beam around crazily. Cope fired again, and again, and again, using the laser to aim.

Shrieking, she got to her feet and raced across the space and fell on Cope, knocking him off balance. She tore at him. She had a glimpse of Cope’s eyes glittering in the light of the minilight. Then she had his gun, and she aimed it at his face, and she shoved the barrel into his mouth. A red laser light reflected out of his mouth, and she saw the blisters. Their faces were inches apart.