Douglas Preston - White Fire

Pendergast rose and — with a sudden explosion of movement — stove in the door with a massive kick. He grasped the broken pieces and ripped them out by main force with his hands, throwing them aside. As quickly as it had come, the furious violence passed. He knelt, shining the light inside. The beam revealed an empty dewatering tunnel running straight into the mountain.

He turned the light to the ground. There were fresh scuffs and various confused marks in the dust, both coming and going. A moment of stasis…and then he was suddenly in motion, trotting alongside the pipe as smoothly as a cat, his coat billowing behind him, the Colt in his hand gleaming faintly in the dimness.

The pipe ended in a low stream of water that interrupted the tracks. Moving forward, Pendergast came to an intersection; continued on; reached another, and then — trying to think like his quarry — took a right, where the tunnel abruptly changed slope and ascended steeply to a higher level.

The tunnel continued for a quarter mile, deep into the mountain, until it struck what had once been a complex mineral seam, perhaps a dozen feet wide. This seam almost immediately divided the tunnel into a warren of shafts, crawl spaces, and alcoves, the spaces that remained after the ancient mining operation had cleared out every vein and pocket of a complex ore body that had once threaded this way and that through the heart of the mountain.

Pendergast paused. He understood that his quarry would have anticipated pursuit, and as a result had led his presumed pursuer to this very place: this maze of tunnels, where he, with his undoubtedly superior knowledge of the mine complex, would have the advantage. Pendergast sensed it was very likely his presence had already been noted. The prudent course of action would be to retreat and return with additional manpower.

But that would not do. Not at all. His quarry might use such a delay to escape. And besides, it would deprive Pendergast of what he needed to do so very badly that he could taste the bile of it in his mouth.

He doused the light and listened. His preternaturally acute sense of hearing picked up many sounds — the steady drip of water, the faint movement of air, the occasional tick-tick of settling rock and wooden cribbing.

But there was no light, no telltale sound or scent. And yet he sensed, he knew , that his quarry — Ted Roman — was near and well aware of his presence.

He turned the light back on and examined the surrounding area. Much of the rock in this section of the mine was rotten, shot through with cracks and seams, and extra cribbing had been placed to hold it up. He stepped over to a vertical member, removed a knife from his pocket, and pushed it into the wood. It sank into the cribbing like butter, all the way to the hilt. He pulled it out and pried away at the wood, pulling off big, dusty pieces.

The wood was thoroughly weakened by dry rot. It might not be hard to bring it down…but that would lead to unpredictable consequences.

He ceased moving and paused, frozen in place, listening. He heard a faint sound, the tiny drop of a pebble. It was impossible, in the echoing spaces, to tell whence it came. It almost seemed to him deliberate, a tease. He waited. Another ping of rock against rock. And now he knew for certain that Ted Roman was playing with him.

A fatal mistake.

With the light on, acting as if he had heard nothing, unsuspecting, Pendergast chose a tunnel at random and passed down it. After a few steps he halted to discard his bulky coat, gloves, and hat, and stuff them into an out-of-the-way alcove. It was much warmer here, deep in the mine — and the coat was too constricting for the work that lay ahead of him.

The tunnel twisted and turned, dipped and rose, dividing and redividing. Many small tunnels, stopes, and shafts branched off in odd directions. Old mining equipment, pulleys, cages, cables, buckets, carts, and rotting ropes were strewn about in various stages of decay. At several points, vertical shafts sank down into darkness. Pendergast examined each one of these carefully, shining his light on the descending walls and testing the depths with a dropped pebble.

At one shaft, he lingered somewhat longer. It took two seconds for the pebble to hit bottom; a quick mental calculation indicated the distance would be twenty meters, or about sixty feet. Sufficient. He examined the rock making up the wall of the shaft and found it rough, solid, with enough adequate footholds: suitable for the purpose he had in mind.

Now, making a detour around the shaft, he stumbled and fell hard, the flashlight dropping to the ground with a clatter and going out. With a curse, Pendergast lit a match and tried to edge around the shaft, but the match went out, burning his fingers, and he dropped it with another muttered deprecation. He got up and tried to light another match. It sputtered to life and he took several steps, but he was moving too fast now and the light went out again, right at the edge of the deep pit; he slipped and, in the process, swept a loose rock off the edge, giving a loud cry as he himself went over. His powerful fingers grasped a fissure just below the edge of the shaft, and he swung his body down so that he was dangling into the dark void, out of sight of the tunnel above. He abruptly cut off his cry when the rock he had dislodged crashed into the bottom.

Silence. Dangling, he found a purchase for his toes, his knees well flexed, giving him the leverage he needed. He waited, clinging to the edge of the shaft, listening intently.

Soon he could hear Roman cautiously making his way down the tunnel. The beam of a flashlight flickered over the lip of the shaft as the sound of movement paused. Then, ever so slowly, he heard the man advance toward the pit. Pendergast’s muscles tensed as he sensed the man creeping toward the edge he hid beneath. A moment later, Roman’s face appeared, bloodshot eyes wild, flashlight in one hand, handgun in the other.

Uncoiling like a snake, Pendergast leapt up and grabbed Roman’s wrist, yanking him forward and pulling him toward the void. With a scream of surprise and dismay, Roman reared back, his gun and flashlight skittering off across the rocky ground as he used both hands to fend off the attack and counteract the pull. He was immensely strong and quick, surprisingly so, and he managed to correct the sudden imbalance and dig in his heels, striking at Pendergast’s forearm with a bear-like roar of rage. But Pendergast was up and over the edge in a flash, Roman scrabbling backward. Pendergast raised his own gun to fire, but it was now black and Roman, anticipating the shot, threw himself sideways. The bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the rock floor, but the flash of the discharge betrayed Roman’s position. Pendergast fired again, but now the muzzle flash revealed nothing: Roman had vanished.

Pendergast dug into his suit and pulled out his backup light: a handheld LED. Roman had apparently launched himself into a narrow, low-ceilinged seam that angled down steeply from the main tunnel. Dropping to his knees, Pendergast crawled into the seam and followed. Ahead, he could hear Roman in panicked flight, scrabbling along the low passage, gasping in fear. He, too, it seemed, had a second light: Pendergast could make out a jerky glow in the darkness of the seam ahead.

Relentlessly, Pendergast pursued his quarry. But as hard as he pushed, Roman stayed well ahead. The young man was in peak physical condition and had the advantage of knowing the tunnels, their fantastic complexity only adding to his edge. Pendergast was doing little more than moving blind, following the sound, the light, and — occasionally — the tracks.

Now Pendergast entered an area of large tunnels, cracks, and yawning, vertical chimneys. Still he pursued with monomaniacal intensity. Roman, Pendergast knew, had lost his weapon and was in a state of panic; Pendergast retained his weapon and his wits. To heighten Roman’s terror and keep him off balance, now and then Pendergast would fire a round in the direction of the fleeing man, the bullet cracking and zinging as it tore through the tunnels ahead. There was little chance he would hit Roman, but that was not his intention: the deafening roar of the gun, and the terrifying ricochet of the rounds, was having the desired psychological effect.