The Third Gate (34 page)

All of a sudden, he felt a strange thing. His free hand was not struggling as much to force its way through the thick medium of the swamp. He interlocked his fingers with Tina’s more tightly still, pulled her toward him, and then—with the last of his strength—wriggled upward in a sinuous motion, legs together, as if swimming a vertical butterfly stroke. And then his head felt the same freedom his hand had—it could move more easily, no longer encumbered by a surrounding matrix of mud. Sputtering, coughing, spitting mud, he pulled Tina up until she, too, broke through. They were encrusted with black mire—creatures more of the swamp than of the dry land—but they could once again breathe.

They had reached the surface.

Kowinsky was beyond desperate. It had been over ninety seconds now, maybe two minutes. He was in decent shape, he worked out regularly, but even so every atom in his body was now screaming out for oxygen. He struggled ever more furiously through the muck and mire. He must be near the surface—he
must
. His eyes were wide open now, heedless of the pain. Surely a little light must penetrate this goddamned hell. Surely, any moment, the intolerable blackness
around him would get a little lighter, and then a little lighter still, and then … air.

It was all he could do to keep his mouth closed. Air, he had to have air. Every movement sent little stabs of agony shooting through his lungs. He was no longer aware of the muck or the stench or the way the swamp sneaked into every orifice, every crevice, even those he hadn’t known he possessed. Air was what he needed.
Air
.

Oh, God, it was too terrible. Where was he? Why was it all so black? Why was he still beneath the surface?

In his frenzied thrashings, his hands encountered something. Eyes wide but sightless, his nose dribbling little oily bubbles out into the mud, he probed along it. A hand—an arm—a head. It was a human body, freshly dead. But in his agony, Kowinsky didn’t give it a second thought. He pushed it away and struggled forward.

Now his scrabbling hands hit something else—something hard this time, hard and smooth.
Metal
. This was it—at last, he’d reached the Station! Hope, almost gone, surged in him afresh. Another five seconds, maybe ten, and he’d have been a goner. That’s how close it had been. He reached out with his other hand, trying to orient himself in the blackness, preparing to heave himself up and out.…

And then he noticed something. The hard, smooth piece of metal dead-ended into another—this one curved, studded with heavy rivets. What part of the Station was this? The pontoons were all smooth, and the crawl spaces beneath the various wings had only …

And then he felt something else, something attached to one of the rivets. A heavy piece of fabric, slippery, rough at the edges as if it had been violently ripped away.

Reality came crashing down. This wasn’t the Station. This was the Lock. Somehow, maybe when he’d hit that chunk of wood, he’d become disoriented in the blackness. He’d turned himself around—and headed back down to the bottom. To the tomb.

No.
No
. It couldn’t be true. He had to be hallucinating. It was panic—panic, and lack of oxygen. He’d ignore this illusion, pull himself up, then take that breath of sweet, sweet air.

He grasped the metal spar, pulled himself upward, until it was
touching his chest. His movements were still slow, like a fly caught in gelatin, and his eyes were blind—but it didn’t matter. He was on the surface now. He
had
to be. He opened his mouth …

And in an instant it was filled with a mixture of mire, and silt, and particulate matter, and foul decay as old as the oldest tomb. And despite this most revolting of violations, Kowinsky—in extremis, as his last mortal act
—breathed it in
.

55

They broke free from the prison of mud only to find themselves in a world of fire. Keeping Tina close, Logan swam along the perimeter of the Station, sucking in air in great heaving gasps. Four of the Station’s wings—Red, Maroon, White, and apparently Yellow—were ablaze, gouts of flame licking out from below the heavy canvas tarps, eating away the mosquito netting covering the pontoon bridges as if it were strands of silk. The labs and medical facilities of Red seemed to be burning with special ferocity—the inflatable dome surrounding that wing was strangely aglow, lit from inside a hellish orange-red. As he watched, a huge fireball erupted from its dome, peeling back the canvas covering and rising in boiling clouds of black and crimson to engulf the Crow’s Nest. At least a half-dozen boats—tenders, one of the large airboats, other craft—were circling the Station, throwing tall arcs of water toward the flames. But the fire was too intense and
the supply of water too limited—the Sudd itself was far too viscous to pulse through the pressurized jets. Logan felt the heat of the blaze hot on his face, baking the already-drying muck of the Sudd, and he turned away.

Now he could make out other figures, half swimming, half crawling through the swamp toward the burning Station. They were encrusted with the same brownish-black mud and impossible to distinguish, but Logan thought that one of them was Stone, another maybe Ethan Rush. They seemed to be making for Green, where Maintenance and the boat basin were located—the roaring inferno had not yet reached that wing. Still helping the exhausted Tina, Logan began to follow in their wake. A Jet Ski, circling the conflagration, spotted them and came over. The rider pulled first Tina, then Logan, onto the rear of his craft, turned, and headed back toward Green, under the protective tarp and into the shelter of the marina. Logan thanked the rider, then helped Tina off the Jet Ski and onto a jetty. He was clad only in his underwear, but with the coating of muck covering his body he could just as well have been dressed in a space suit.

The marina was a scene of barely controlled chaos. The din of shouted commands, shrieking alarms, and grinding engines was intolerable. The air was dense with acrid smoke. Technicians, lab assistants, roustabouts, and even cooks were rushing in from other areas of the Station, many with smoke-covered clothes and faces, carrying documents, foodstuffs, and as many of the precious artifacts from the tomb as could be salvaged. Logan saw at least a dozen evidence containers, piled willy-nilly against one wall. Even the coffinlike locker that held Narmer’s mummy—
Niethotep’s
mummy, he reminded himself—stood in a corner, listing slightly to one side. Other people were hurriedly carting objects onto the large airboat tied up to a nearby quay. Plowright, the senior pilot, stood beside the boat’s forward gangplank, barking orders.

Meanwhile, a few men and women in emergency gear were running out of the marina, back into the deeper sections of the Station, apparently in search of stragglers. A man in a lab coat carrying a blue
evidence container in his hands tripped over a coil of rope and fell to his knees, dropping the container. Its lid sprang open and countless gemstones, rings, trinkets, and tiny golden statuettes spilled out, each in a sealed baggie with a printed label attached. Out of nowhere, Porter Stone rushed forward, knelt, and began stuffing the baggies back into the container with fumbling, clumsy movements. He was still completely covered in mud. Sweat—or, more likely, tears—were coursing down his cheeks, leaving thin trails of white in an otherwise unbroken mask of black.

Glancing around, Logan made out Valentino. He was speaking animatedly to a knot of security guards. Instinctively, Logan stepped toward the group. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ethan Rush approaching as well. Rush, Stone, Valentino—at least three of the others had escaped the tomb.

“How many casualties?” Logan and Rush asked in unison as they came up to Valentino.

The chief engineer looked at them, mud dripping from his meaty face. “They can’t give me exact numbers. Fifteen, maybe twenty, trapped in the flames.”

Someone tossed a lab coat at Logan; he shrugged into it, tied it into place around his waist.

“The explosions happened so fast,” one of Valentino’s men was saying. “The methane built up in the crawl spaces beneath the wings—then it just combusted.”

“What happened to the methane system, exactly?” Logan asked.

“Compromised,” the man replied.

“Can’t the emergency vents be sealed?” Rush asked.

Valentino shook his head. “It’s past the point of no return. The only way to the manual overrides is through either Red or White—and they’re both infernos.
Impossible
. The firewall’s approaching the central converter and storage tank. We have four, maybe five minutes. Then we’d all better be the hell away from here.”

“How did this happen?” Logan asked—but even as he asked, he was afraid he already knew the answer.

“We don’t know for sure,” Valentino’s man said. “But we think it was Mrs. Rush.”

“Jennifer?” Rush said, going pale beneath his mud-streaked face.

“She showed up at the Staging Area while you all were in chamber three. Had two canisters of nitro. She threw one of them at the Umbilicus. She’s still got the other.”

“You mean, she’s still in there?” Logan asked. “At the Maw?”

“She’s been holding everyone at bay with the second canister of nitro,” the man said.

“That does it,” said Valentino. “I’m giving my last team an order to retreat now—we have to evacuate immediately. Crazy, crazy woman.” He turned toward Rush.
“Scusi!”

But Rush was no longer standing there. He had taken off down the gangway, heading in the direction of Yellow.

“Ethan!” Logan called after him. The doctor, forcing his way through the crowds streaming into the marina, did not look back.

Now the second huge airboat—as if admitting defeat in its fight against the firestorm—was approaching the marina, announcing its arrival with an earsplitting blast of its horn. Knots of people began lining up along the quay, carrying as many of the priceless antiquities as they could hold. Some of the smaller watercraft had already begun to evacuate the Station, heading north, not even waiting for the big airboats to cut them a path, riding low in the water and mud, overburdened with people and artifacts. Logan turned back, found Tina standing at his side. She, too, had covered herself in a lab coat.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, then wheeled away again—only to feel her seize his hand desperately.

“
No!”
she cried, wide-eyed.

He took her shoulders in his hands. The shock of the ordeal was just now beginning to take hold of her. “Get in one of the airboats,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Then he turned, grabbed the radio from Valentino’s man, and raced up the gangway in the direction Rush had gone.

56

He tore past the deserted offices, cubicles, and equipment bays of Green. Most of the evacuation seemed to be wrapping up; the labyrinth of hallways was almost completely deserted. It was a matter of two minutes to get through the wing to the barrier at the far end. Ducking through the strips of plastic sheeting, he ran across the covered pontoon bridge to Yellow. The air was worse here, the heat growing increasingly intense. Another moment and he was through the far barrier and at the Staging Area.

He stopped. The vast space looked as if it had been struck by a tornado. Racks of instrumentation had been overturned, spewing high-tech equipment across the concrete. The leads and power cables that snaked across the floor were blackened and charred, several spitting and arcing sparks. The rows of monitoring equipment were all dark. And the Maw itself, the centerpiece of the room, was a smoking
ruin, huge curls of metal peeled back upon themselves, the torn and blackened shreds of the top ring of the Umbilicus testament to the explosion that had doomed the final expedition into chamber three.

And there—before the Maw—was Jennifer Rush. Her hospital gown was torn, and her normally perfectly coiffed hair wild. In one hand, she held up a small red canister that, Logan realized, must contain nitroglycerin.

Ethan Rush was standing about five feet away from her. His hands were reaching out in supplication. “Jennifer,” he was saying. “Please. It’s Ethan.”

Jennifer Rush looked at him, red-rimmed eyes cloudy.

Logan came up behind him, but Rush gave him a signal to keep back. “Jennifer, it’s okay. Put down the container and come with me.”

She blinked. “Infidel,” she said.

As he stood there, Logan felt a chill course through him. He recognized the voice—it was the gravelly, dry, distant voice he’d heard in the two crossings he had witnessed. His impression of a malign presence—which he had first felt at the accident by the generator, and sensed all too frequently since—spiked sharply, and he felt his heart start to hammer in his chest.

“Honey,” Rush was saying, “just come with me. Please. Everything’s going to be all right.” He took another step forward, then stopped again as Jennifer raised the container threateningly.

“Thou hast passed the third gate,” she said in that same terrible voice. “Now thou shalt burn in unquenchable fire. And my tomb will be sealed anew—
and for all time
.” She retreated toward the Maw, hand outstretched, as if to drop the canister into its depths.

The radio in Logan’s hand squawked. He retreated toward the doorway, lifted the radio to his lips. “Logan here.”

“Logan!” came the thin, scratchy voice of Valentino. “Get back here. Get back here
now
! I’ve recalled all search and rescue teams. The fires have reached the central converter, the main storage tank is about to blow!”

Logan put down the radio. “Ethan,” he said in as calm a voice as he could manage. “Ethan, we have to go.”

“No!” the doctor said, not turning to look at him. “I’m not leaving her. I’m
not
going to let her die—not a second time!”

“Logan!” came Valentino’s urgent voice. “That tank won’t last another sixty seconds! The final boats are leaving—!”

Logan snapped off the radio. Now he turned toward Jennifer Rush.

“Your highness,” he said. “Come with us.”

She turned, red-rimmed eyes swiveling his way as if seeing him for the first time.