The Manhattan Hunt Club (33 page)

Better to let them have their moment.

Putting the rifle aside, he reached into the backpack he’d taken from Vandenberg and took out the radio. Turning it on and putting the tiny headphone in his ear, he heard a voice.

Eve Harris’s voice.

“This is Control. Report, Viper.”

Keith raised the radio to his lips and spoke slowly and distinctly. “This isn’t Viper,” he said. “This is Keith Converse, Ms. Harris. Viper is dead. So are Mamba and Adder and Rattler. Maybe you can still save Cobra, whoever he is.”

Dropping the radio back into the backpack, Keith moved down the tunnel to join his son.

CHAPTER 39

E
ve Harris glared furiously at the radio in her hand. It wasn’t possible—Converse was trying to trick her! They couldn’t all be dead—there was no way he could have beaten five perfectly armed men.

No—not five.

Only four.

Cobra—Arch Cranston—was still alive out there somewhere. So the two of them would finish the job the other four had botched.

Her eyes shifted from the radio to Malcolm Baldridge, who stood near the door to his private workroom. He was so still, she could almost mistake him for one of the trophies to which he’d so expertly applied his skills. “Get me a pack and a rifle!” she snapped.

Baldridge made no move until she took a step toward him, radiating fury, her eyes flashing dangerously.

“You can’t—” Baldridge began, but she cut him off.

“Do what I tell you,” she commanded, her voice low, but carrying enough danger to send Baldridge scurrying into the next room. While he was gone, she stripped off her street clothes and changed into a black jumpsuit that was only slightly too large for her. By the time she was dressed, Baldridge was back, carrying a backpack in one hand, a Steyr SSG-PI in the other.

“It has an infrared sight and—” Baldridge began, but Eve Harris didn’t let him finish.

“I know what it has,” she hissed, snatching the rifle from his hands and quickly checking it over. “And I know how to use it.” She quickly rifled through the bag, replacing the radio with her own, setting its frequency to match Arch Cranston’s. Finally, she put on a pair of night vision goggles, opened the door to the tunnel, and stepped through. As Baldridge closed and locked the door behind her, she switched the goggles on, the blackness of the tunnel giving way to a greenish glow. She moved her head slowly around, studying the tunnel in both directions.

Except for a large rat creeping along the wall to the left, the tunnel was empty. She reached into her backpack, groped until her fingers closed on the radio, then turned it on, pressed the transmit button, and whispered into the microphone.

“Cobra, this is Control. Come in.”

When there was no response, she repeated her words, then swore under her breath as she dropped the radio into one of the pockets of her black jacket.

In her mind, she reviewed the maps of the tunnels the men had made over the years. The range of the radios was short, which meant that Converse was probably still closer to her than Arch Cranston, assuming Cranston was still alive. But could she assume that?

What if Converse was lying? What if Cranston was dead as well?

But Converse could just as easily have been lying about who was dead. Perhaps it was only Vandenberg! She picked up the radio again and quickly tried to reach the other members of the team.

Silence.

She swore again, then made up her mind. The last time he’d reported, Viper had been in Sector 3, on Level 2. Eve Harris visualized the map, and could picture Vandenberg’s favorite ambush as clearly as if she were looking at a page in the back of his notebook. The radio back in her pocket and holding the Steyr, she set out.

“W
hat’s going on?” Heather asked as one after another the radios in the backpack came alive.

“She’s trying to figure out if I was telling her the truth,” Keith replied. He pulled McGuire’s radio out just in time to hear Eve Harris’s voice demanding a response. The voice was clearer than it had been only a few moments ago, when he’d spoken to her himself over Vandenberg’s radio.

“I think she’s in the tunnels,” he said.

“Where?”

“Behind us,” Jeff replied, his eyes still fastened on the map in the back of Perry Randall’s notebook. “Look,” he said, as Heather peered over his shoulder at the page that was illuminated by a flashlight. He placed a finger on a mark on the thickest line on a page headed LEVEL 1, SECTION 1. “I think that’s where they come in.” He flipped a couple of pages, and placed his finger on another spot. “And this is where we are.”

“But how do we get out?” Heather asked.

“What about one of the subway stations?” Keith asked.

Jeff shook his head. “They’ve got guards at all of them.”

“And we’ve got guns,” Keith replied, his voice hard.

Jeff looked up at his father. “And if we start shooting in a subway station . . .” His voice trailed off, but there was no need to complete the thought. The rest of them knew as well as he did what would happen if they started firing automatic rifles in a subway station. In a couple of seconds a dozen people could be dead, and twice as many wounded. Jeff’s finger moved to another spot on the map. “Here,” he said. “I think we can get out here, if we can just make it that far.”

The three people huddled around him stared at the spot he was indicating, and it was finally Jinx who said what everyone else was thinking. “There’s nothing there—it doesn’t show any shafts or passages or anything.”

“Exactly,” Jeff said. “That’s just what we need—a place where there’s nothing at all.”

Closing the notebook, he picked up one of the guns and bags and headed west, picturing what he’d seen only a week before he’d been arrested.

Maybe, if they were lucky, it was still there. . . .

I
t’s all right,
Eve Harris told herself.
I’m just imagining it.

But she wasn’t imagining it—she wasn’t imagining it at all. The green light in the night vision goggles was definitely getting dimmer.

Not a problem, at least not yet—there would be a flashlight in the backpack! Slipping it off her shoulders, she zipped it open and plunged her hands into its depth.

No flashlight!

But there had to be!

Now she opened the bag wide, searching it thoroughly, peering into its depths with the goggles.

No flashlight, not in the main compartment or any of the auxiliary pockets, either. Damn Baldridge! Why hadn’t he checked the pack?

Then she’d just have to do without light for a while. Slinging the pack and rifle back on her shoulders, she switched the goggles off and pulled them away from her head. She waited for her eyes to get used to the dark, but it was far blacker than she’d thought it would be, and as the darkness closed around her and her irises opened as wide as they would go, she felt the first tendrils of fear reach out toward her.

It’s all right,
she repeated to herself.
I know exactly where I am, and if I have to, I can get back without the goggles.
But even as she silently reassured herself, she knew it wasn’t quite true. She knew the turns well enough—there had been only three of them, and she hadn’t changed levels at all. But as the smothering darkness wrapped more tightly around her, those first tendrils of fear began to coalesce into terror, and she quickly replaced the goggles over her eyes and switched them on.

For a moment the green fog seemed brilliant, and her fear backed away. But a few seconds later, as her eyes reacted to the sudden light, the green faded again, and her fear came rushing back.

Cranston, she thought. Call Cranston.

Groping in her pocket, she found the radio, pressed the transmitter, and whispered into the mike: “This is Control. Come in, Cobra! This is Control!” Three times more she tried calling; three times more she got no response.

Dropping the radio back in her pocket, she turned around and started quickly back the way she’d come. She hurried her step as the green light began to fade.

After what seemed an eon, she came to the last turn she’d made. She remembered clearly that she’d turned right, so now she turned left and gazed into the distance.

The tunnel seemed to stretch on forever, disappearing into the green haze.

But that was wrong—it hadn’t been that long; she was sure of it. Had she turned the wrong way?

Spinning around, she looked in the other direction.

Again the tunnel seemed to stretch away into the fog.

The green glow was dimmer now, and she wasn’t as certain of her bearings as she’d been only a moment ago. She turned again, searching for some clue as to which was the right direction, then turned once more.

But which way was she facing?

As the batteries continued to lose their strength, the green light faded, and Eve tore the goggles from her head in frustration. Losing her grip on them, she heard them clatter away into the darkness as once again the blackness closed around her.

But the men had always talked about light! Utility lights that gave them enough illumination so they didn’t need the goggles most of the time.

Most of the time.

But not all of the time.

The goggles!

She had to find the goggles!

Dropping to her hands and knees, she felt around in the slime that covered the floor, searching. They couldn’t have fallen far away—surely they weren’t more than a few feet from her! She reached out, groping in the darkness, and a piece of broken glass slashed through the palm of her hand. Reflexively jerking her hand back, she automatically put it to her lips.

The taste of blood filled her mouth.

With the other hand, she groped at the wound, trying to determine how bad it was. She could feel blood running across her palm and down her wrist, and then her filthy fingers found the cut.

Two inches long at least, running across her palm. She had to bite back a scream of agony as her fingers traced the open wound, grinding the filth from the floor deep into the open gash.

Clenching her fist to stanch the flow of blood, she reached out in the darkness once more, this time with her left hand. But then she jerked it back before she could touch anything, terrified of what might happen to her if she slashed her other hand, too.

Getting unsteadily to her feet, Eve Harris took a tentative step, and bumped into a wall.

Panic welled in her, but she fought against it, bracing herself against the wall, willing her heart to stop pounding, battling against the panic that seemed to be strangling her and made it almost as impossible for her to breathe as it was for her to see.

Light,
she thought.
I have to find light.

But everywhere she looked, there was only the blackness.

The blackness, and the creatures that she could suddenly hear creeping through it.

Creeping toward her.

J
eff froze.

“What is it?” Heather asked from behind him. “What’s wrong?”

He reached back, his fingers finding her wrist and closing on it. “Listen,” he said.

A silence fell over the four of them, unbroken for a moment by anything except the dripping of water. Then they heard it. A great whumping sound, as if something heavy had been dropped from a great height.

Less than a minute later they heard it again:
whump!

They were still in the utility tunnel, but they’d come to a cross passage, and it sounded like the noise was coming from straight ahead. But before they heard the sound again, another sound intruded on the quiet; this time, though, it was the familiar sound of a subway train.

The sound grew steadily louder, and they could feel the draft of the air being pushed ahead of the train coming down the cross passage. A moment later they saw the beam of the headlight cross ahead of them, and then the train itself thundered past the end of the passage, its lighted cars flashing like a strobe, the couplings rattling, the brakes squealing as it began to slow for a station.

Then the train was gone and silence once again descended. Just as he was about to start into the passage, a glimmer of red caught Jeff’s eye, gone so quickly he wasn’t certain it had been there at all. Yet every nerve in his body now seemed to be sending him a tingle of warning, and he stopped short, putting his hand back to block Heather. They were so close to their goal, but someone, he was sure, still lay between them and the one place where they might be able to escape the tunnels with no resistance from either the hunters, the herders, or the gamekeepers.

As the other three clustered close behind him, he whispered a warning so softly it was almost inaudible, but to his own ears he might as well have bellowed it into the darkness. “Someone’s there. One of the hunters.”

“We’ll go,” Keith replied as quietly as Jeff. “Heather and Jinx, stay here.”

Both the girls opened their mouths as if to argue, but when Jeff shook his head and held a finger to his lips, they said nothing. “Stay here until we signal you,” he told them.

While Heather and Jinx crouched in the darkness, Jeff and Keith crept noiselessly forward, edging closer and closer to the intersection with the subway tunnel ahead. Each of them carried a rifle, along with one of the backpacks taken from the fallen hunters. As they came to the junction, Jeff pressed against one of the walls, Keith against the opposite.

They waited, listening.

Nothing.

The seconds stretched into a minute, then two.

Still nothing.

Jeff was about to edge out into the subway tunnel when his father shook his head. Then, as Jeff watched, Keith shouted into the darkness:

“I’m coming for you, you bastard!” And as he shouted, he hurled the backpack he was carrying into the subway tunnel, dimly lit by the wide-spaced bulbs mounted high on the walls.

A
rch Cranston—code name “Cobra”—had already snapped at the bait by the time he realized it was a trap. At the sound of the angry words, he raised his rifle to his shoulder, and he’d already locked the sight onto the object hurtling from the side tunnel and squeezed the trigger before he realized it wasn’t the man he’d expected at all.

But it was too late, he was already committed. As he realized what was happening, the trap closed.

B
efore Keith’s words had died away, they heard the chattering of a rifle, and the backpack was torn to shreds by the rain of lead slashing through it. The rifle was still chattering when Keith, holding the Steyr at waist level, stepped into the tunnel, pointing the rifle in the direction from which the other gun was firing and squeezing the trigger, spraying the tunnel with slugs.

As his bullets ricocheted off the walls and whined away into the distance, the other gun fell silent, followed by a small, gurgling groan.