The Cain Conspiracy (Harvey Bennett Thrillers Book 8), page 28
He moved.
Julie realized then that the pressure wave had been exactly that — but it was the absence of pressure that had caused the effect. It was the feeling of sound, but it was actually sound leaving the space around her that had caused it.
The noise, the high-pitched whine that had once again driven them into their captive state, left. The sound had disappeared.
She had been straining against it, wiling it to move, to release its hold on her, and in the instant it did leave she had burst forward, pushing against the controls of her Exo and immediately causing it to lurch forward.
Ben and Reggie had apparently done the same thing. In the instant Garza had pulled the trigger, the noise had disappeared, and Ben had simultaneously fallen away, no doubt also trying to press against his noise-induced prison.
When Garza fired the pistol, Ben had jerked to the right, moving out of the way of the round and catching himself — and Garza — by surprise.
Reggie had reacted exactly as Julie had, by nearly falling on the front of his Exo and unknowingly pushing it forward. In the first second of their newfound freedom, Ben dodged the bullet while Reggie drove his Exo directly into Garza.
Garza stumbled backward and fell, his back to the stone floor, and he scrambled away from the marching Exo.
“Kill him!” Julie yelled. She was still finding her balance, working desperately to regain control of herself and her Exo.
She watched Garza regain his composure, wipe the sweat off his face with a sleeve of his shirt, then stand and begin running toward the open door.
“Kill him!” she yelled again.
She knew the others were feeling the same — a slightly drugged state consciousness that would wear off in a few more seconds.
But it wouldn’t be enough time.
Garza was nearly at the door. He would disappear into the base, once again slipping through their fingers.
She looked over at Ben and Reggie, her eyes seeing double as they tried to keep up with the motion of her head.
No…
She knew they wouldn’t make it. She knew they wouldn’t be fully freed in time, and it would be to Garza’s advantage.
This time, she did scream. Of all the physical manifestations of strength she was trying to regain, her ability to scream had been the first to return. She put everything she had into it, screaming and pushing against the controls and screaming more and finally —
Pulling the trigger.
She had him in her sights. The cannon fired.
The blast of it shook her to her core. The Exo nudged backward as the round exited the chamber and flew toward Garza’s back.
He was out the door now, turning…
And the round hit the wall next to him.
It blasted a chunk of stone off the wall, creating a crater of dusty rock and debris, but she saw Garza through the cloud of dust. Saw that he was unscathed.
She had missed.
She heard his boots, falling against the stone floor as he continued around the corner.
She felt the tears welling up, and knew that they would be falling freely in a few seconds.
Garza was now completely gone, completely free.
Julie let the tears come. Everything she had been feeling fell out through her eyes — the rage, the confusion, chaos, sadness — all of it.
She heard a gunshot. It echoed through the corridor and into the large room.
Julie craned her neck to see, just as the bits of dust and rock finally settled to the floor just beyond the doorway.
Garza was there.
Stumbling, walking backwards.
What the hell?
He had a hand out, palm-up, in front of him. Holding something off, trying to persuade it to stop.
He backed up a few more steps, now fully back in Julie’s sights.
She wiped her eyes. Placed her hands back on the controls. She had a clear shot. One press of the trigger, one flick of her wrist, and it would be over.
She wondered how many minutes were left before Sturdivant made his move.
Garza turned to face her. She gasped.
He had a long bloody line down the side of his face. His ear was in shambles, wrecked by a —
Another gunshot. This time Garza was hit in the side, puncturing a spot just between two ribs.
He made a strange gurgling noise, part high-pitched squeak and part groan. Julie watched on, mesmerized.
He stumbled again and fell, landing heavily on his shoulder and side. He spat a chunk of something, something red. More blood fell out behind it. He blinked twice, three times, staring at Julie and the others.
And then…
Victoria appeared. She was standing over him — standing over her father — holding a pistol. She stepped up next to him, right above his head, and aimed down.
She looked at Julie, met her eyes, then nodded.
And pulled the trigger.
This time the gunshot was deafening. Julie’s ears felt the pain of the searing blow as the wave concussed through the chamber. The pistol must have been Garza’s — the huge, 50-caliber Desert Eagle she’d seen him carry.
Julie opened her eyes and saw Victoria standing there, sobbing.
Suddenly Ben and Reggie were by her side. Ben reached out and jumped over to Julei’s Exo. He placed his hands on her shoulders, gently pressing against them.
“Jules,” he whispered. “Julie, we need to go.”
Julie nodded, then stepped backwards, allowing Ben to pull her along and guide her out of the Exo.
Reggie and Mrs. E, followed by the remainder of the villagers — eleven in all — were there. They were all standing nearby, just inside the doorway, staring.
Staring at the man who had started all of this.
Staring at the daughter who had finished it.
“Come on, Jules,” Ben whispered again. “We may not have much time before —”
The ground beneath Julie’s feet shook and buckled, and she felt herself thrown into Ben’s arms.
“It’s happening!” Reggie shouted. “Time’s up!”
She didn’t know what to do, but it didn’t matter.
Above her, the ceiling cracked and boulders of stone began tumbling a hundred feet straight down.
Onto their heads.
72
Ben
Ben lunged forward, taking Julie with him.
Get to the door.
He didn’t know why that direction seemed necessary, seemed correct. He just knew.
He pushed his wife toward the exit and into the hallway. Reggie was at his side, Mrs. E shortly behind. They ran, taking the final ten feet of space on the demonstration floor before the doorway in three huge strides.
Pieces of rock were already hitting them, and they were growing bigger. He had seen the ceiling give, seemingly cracking in half and immediately pouring thousands of missiles of rock chips down onto them.
A head-sized rock caught Reggie’s shoulder, but he hardly flinched. It looked like it had been moving fast enough to break a bone, but Ben hoped the strap holding Reggie’s prosthetic had taken some of the impact. Still, it was likely to have dislocated it.
They made it to the edge of the doorway, and then into the hallway. They collapsed onto the floor, each laying out on the stone next to the disfigured, bleeding corpse of Vicente Garza.
The boulders continued tumbling down, and Ben pushed them farther into the hallway. One especially massive one crushed the others in the entrance, effectively closing down access to the demonstration floor. A final volley of rocks and boulders sealed the shaft, a few of the smaller ones spilling out and nearly reaching the CSO group.
But it didn’t matter. They were safe.
For now. Ben didn’t know what Sturdivant had done, but his best guess was that he’d somehow sealed off the entrances and exits to the mountain base using explosives.
“Saddamizers,” Reggie said. “Bunker Busters. We developed them in the 90s for Desert Storm. We called them Saddamizers.”
“Sturdivant hit us with those?”
“The exits, sure. They’re not nuclear, so they’ll be impossible to detect more than a few miles away, but they’ll be more than big enough to smash the doorways and shafts that lead out of here.”
“So, we’re hosed?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, we’ve been hosed since we got here,” Reggie answered. “So the way I see it, we’re actually lucky we’re still alive.”
“Well, don’t count your blessings,” Julie said. “There are still Ravenshadow goons around here somewhere, unless they all ran out when things in there got heated.”
Things in there… Ben couldn’t believe what they had just been through. He looked up to find Victoria staring at him.
“Thank you,” he said.
She nodded, then wiped a tear. Her hands were shaking. She had placed the weapon down next to her dead father.
“You saved our lives,” Ben said. He turned to the villagers — only half had made it through the doorway before the entire thing collapsed. “Most of us, anyway.”
“I — I had to do it,” she said. “After what he did. What he made me do. I… I couldn’t help but —”
She began to sob uncontrollably, and Julie stood and walked over to the woman. She consoled her, wrapped her arm around her. She whispered to her as Ben and the others watched on.
They stood there for a moment, silently taking in the devastation, loss, and annihilation that one man had ravaged upon the world. They were stuck here, stuck inside a small mountain base with all of their possible exits destroyed.
Unless…
Ben looked up at the others. “You think Sturdivant knew about the drainage tunnel?”
Reggie smiled. Mrs. E answered him. “I believe it is worth checking. It could be an easy way out.”
Ben had, over time, come to adopt the mantra of there is no easy way out, but he decided to keep that to himself this time.
“I’m in,” Julie said. She looked from Victoria to Ben and then back again, as if questioning.
Victoria nodded as she spoke. “If… if you’ll have me, you’re my best shot at getting out of here alive. I know — I know I caused all of this, and —”
“Nonsense,” Reggie said. “You know Ben causes more trouble for us than anyone else.” He winked at Ben, who just shook his head. “Anyway, yeah — I think all of us should stick together. There still may be some of those Ravenshadow guys around.”
“Agreed,” Mrs. E said. “They will be looking for their commander. But until they find him dead, they will treat us as enemies.”
Reggie sighed. “Too bad we don’t have any of those Exos left over. We wouldn’t have any trouble getting through here with them.”
Ben looked at the rubble spilling into the hallway from the demonstration floor. The Exos and half of their operators were lost forever, sealed beneath a tomb of stone. There was nothing to do for them now except get out, get free, and tell the world what had happened here.
They could easily get the attention of the world press — Ben and his group had already been in the headlines a few times, for small adventures and takedowns of criminals around the world. Their status was far from celebrity, but they had enough clout to at least bring Garza’s estate to justice.
He just hoped none of it would fall to Victoria. Ben wanted nothing more than to smear Garza’s name, point to him alone for the abduction and murder of at least one entire Peruvian village, as well as the international war crimes, including killing Sturdivant’s Green Berets.
But first, of course, they had to get out.
The drainage tunnel was their best bet, but even then it would be a long shot — the missiles that had taken out the main entrances and exits had caused enough destruction to lead to a complete cave-in of the largest central room, the demonstration floor. What would be the chances that the water-filled tunnel had been left undamaged?
They were about to find out. But first, they needed a bit more protection.
“Garza took all our rifles,” Ben said. “We’ve got the Desert Eagle — Reggie, take that.”
“Should we look for weapons?”
“No,” Ben said. “Our best bet is to let Reggie take point —”
“— human bait,” Reggie said. “Got it.”
“—let him take point so he can kill anyone we come across.”
“So we can steal their weapons,” Julie said.
“Right,” Reggie added. “Human bait. Whatever man, I thought we were friends.”
Ben smiled, but still shook his head. How one man could remain so resilient and nonchalant in times of stress was beyond him, but he vowed to become more like his best friend.
“Okay,” Ben said. “Let’s roll. Reggie, lead the way.”
73
Julie
They ran for ten minutes without interruption, all without seeing another living soul.
Ravenshadow must have cleared out before the first bomb hit, Julie thought. While they were getting blasted in the observation room.
When the team had reached the stairs, Julie paused.
“Wait,” she said. “There’s… water. Coming from near the door.”
They all looked down. In the dim light the water sparkled as it sloshed through the tiny gap between the door and the stone frame around it. She wondered where it was coming from, and — more importantly — if there was more of it.
Reggie opened the door, and the trickle of water turned into a slightly larger stream. Still not much, but it worried her.
“Let’s hope that’s just from a broken pipe or something from a higher floor,” Ben said.
No one spoke as they ascended the stairs. The water continued pouring down, and Julie saw that it was originating from somewhere high above. They climbed the stairs to the second of the three floors — the floor they came in through — and when they reached the doorway Reggie paused once again.
“It’s picking up,” he said. “The water level.”
Julie saw that he was right. The water coming from above them was now pouring down in a single sheet against the wall. Drips were hitting her face, the humidity in the stairwell was already starting to rise.
Ben turend to Victoria. “Did your father show you around this place?”
She shook her head. “He barely spoke to me,” she said. Her voice was still shaking, still full of trepidation. “The only thing I heard about this place was that they didn’t think it was a mine at all. None of them saw any mining equipment, and my father could never find any official blueprints or area maps that mention it.”
Julie knew why — this place wasn’t a mine, nor had it ever been one.
“There obviously weren’t staircases here before,” Victoria said. “My father added them when they moved in. But the shafts were already here.”
Julie was surprised to hear that. The shafts were large, perfectly sized for the metal staircases that now filled them, so it was strange that they hadn’t been originally meant for staircases. It was all further proof that this place had once been a sort of underground city rather than a mine, inhabited by the descendants of the Atlanteans.
But what were these shafts for? she wondered. If this was a city at one point, how did they get from one level to the next? Ropes?
It seemed like having stairs or ladders would have been ideal, but it was clear that there had never been any stairs in these shafts.
The water came in more heavily as Reggie opened the door to the second floor. The stairwells on each level were lit with a single, dim light fixture mounted above each door, and Julie looked up to the floor above them. It was obvious now that the water was pouring in from the top level, from somewhere beyond the door that led to the third floor. It seemed as though the only thing keeping a solid wall of water from falling over them now was the door itself.
“We need to get out quick,” Reggie said, stepping through the doorway.
He didn’t bother to look for any opponents — it was clear now that the Ravenshadow base had been cleared, or the men were dead. Julie hadn’t seen much more evidence of Sturdivant’s earthquake that had caused the ceiling to collapse in the demonstration floor, but it was also true that they had stayed along the southern side of the base. The entrances Sturdivant would have targeted were on the north and west sides, according to Beale’s reconnaissance.
It was very possible that they were in fact sealed inside a tomb of stone. Julie ignored the feeling, pushing it away as a problem to be dealt with later.
They ran along the same hallway they’d run through before, this time heading toward the smaller offshoot shaft that would lead to the drainage tunnel. But even before they got to the entrance to the shaft Julie could see there was a problem.
“It’s blocked,” Ben said.
The tunnel had collapsed in on itself, and bits of stone had tumbled out into the hallway. Water was gushing around it, heading down the hallway in the opposite direction, pooling in the corners. And even from here, Julie could see that it was getting higher.
“Shit,” Reggie said. “Our scuba gear is on the other side of that shaft.”
“Even without the gear, our way out is on the other side of that shaft,” Julie said.
“We must find another way,” Mrs. E said. “But we would have seen any other obvious exits.”
Julie turned to find Victoria speaking in hushed tones with some of the Peruvian villagers. They conversed for a moment then looked back at the CSO group.
“They say there are other ways out,” Victoria said. “But none of them know where.”
“Great,” Reggie said. “So… there aren’t any ways out of here that we know about. Any of them want to take a guess?”
“They say there are air shafts, for ventilation, that locals have found accidentally over the years. Many are blocked by debris and stones, but some may be accessible.”
“Ask them if they’re large enough for us to fit in,” Julie asked.
Victoria asked, and the Peruvian man she was speaking with eyed Ben.
“He says they can fit into the shafts.”
Julie stepped toward him. “It’s better than nothing,” she said. “Let’s find one of them, see if someone can fit into it, and they can call for help once they’re out.”
