Russell Blake - The Goddess Legacy

Reynolds nodded and was reaching for his weapon when Roland’s voice called from behind them.

“Drop the guns,” he ordered, his pistol pointed at them.

“Roland! What the—” Reynolds exclaimed.

“You heard me. Drop them or I’ll shoot.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Reynolds demanded.

Spencer slowly set the rifle down and raised his hands. “No, he hasn’t. You set us up, didn’t you? That’s why the gunmen were waiting for us, isn’t it?”

Roland spat to the side, his eyes never straying from them. “Very good, genius,” he said dismissively. “Your pistol, too. And you as well,” he warned Reynolds.

Spencer slowly reached for his holstered weapon and withdrew it with two fingers. He tossed it aside as Reynolds’s face clouded with anger.

“You filthy bastard,” Reynolds snarled. “It was you all along!”

“Shut up and lose the gun. Last warning,” Roland called out over the chatter of gunfire from the assault rifles hammering at Drake and Allie’s position.

Reynolds flipped his holster up and made to comply, and then threw himself to the side and fired at Roland, narrowly missing him. Roland’s aim was better, and his round caught Reynolds in the shoulder, sending his pistol flying.

Roland’s smile of triumph turned to one of confused pain as he looked down at where blood was spreading from the center of his chest. He coughed pink foam and tried to raise his gun, but Spencer fired again, Helms’s Beretta barking in his hand, still warm from its hiding place at the small of his back. Spencer’s second shot sent the Frenchman spinning, but he still gripped his weapon, and Spencer fired again, this time vaporizing part of Roland’s head.

Roland dropped like a sack of rocks, and Spencer scrambled to retrieve his rifle and the other pistol as Reynolds gasped in pain. When Spencer had rearmed himself, he crouched down by Reynolds’s side.

“How bad is it?” Reynolds asked. Spencer did a quick inspection of the damage.

“Bad enough. I can do a pressure bandage that should stop the worst of the bleeding. Looks like it missed your lung, so you got lucky, but it shattered your shoulder blade on the exit.”

“I can’t believe he sold me out.”

“Hard way to learn that lesson. Did he know your operative was headed into this area?”

“Yes.”

“Another mystery solved.”

“But who are they? And why is a private army ambushing us?”

“Beats me.” Spencer looked over the rocks, but it was now too dark to make much out. “So much for flanking the shooters.”

“You still going to try?”

“One against, what, six or eight, maybe more on their way? Sounds like a great way to get killed.” Spencer paused. “You have your sat phone?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s retreat back to the cave and you can call your headquarters. I’d say we’ve got enough for them to mobilize some people, wouldn’t you?”

“What about Drake and Allie?”

Spencer peered down to where the gunfire was slowing. “Nothing we can do to help them now, other than call in the cavalry and pray.” He checked the time and then helped Reynolds to his feet. “Let’s get moving. I’ll do the triage in the cave. We’re sitting ducks out here if more of them come to the party.”

A lull in the shooting gave Drake the opportunity he had been waiting for. He could see that they were far outgunned, a pair of pistols no match for a half dozen assault rifles, and when there were no more gunshots, he called out at the top of his lungs, “Don’t shoot. We give up.”

Another couple of shots answered his cry, and then silence returned to the area and a male voice called to him from the trees, heavily accented but intelligible.

“Throw out your weapons.”

He and Allie had discussed their options and she’d agreed that their best choice was to surrender and live rather than be cut to pieces by automatic rifle rounds, which was a guarantee given the number of gunmen and the intensity of the inbound fire. Drake nodded to her and tossed his pistol onto the rocks on the other side of the rubble, and Allie followed suit.

“That’s it. Two pistols,” Drake yelled.

“Stand with your hands up,” the voice answered, and Drake took a deep breath and rose, Allie by his side.

Robed figures surrounded them in the dark, rifles trained on them as one of the gunmen looked them up and down. He snapped at the fighter next to him, and the man searched them for hidden weapons. Finding none, he stepped away and nodded to the leader.

“Where are the others?” the leader demanded.

Drake shook his head. “I don’t know. We split up. They probably took off when the shooting started. That would be the smart move.”

The leader had a hushed discussion with his men that Allie and Drake didn’t understand, and then he raised a small two-way radio to his lips and spoke into it. A terse response crackled from the device and he turned to face them. “Come,” he said, and barked an order. Two of the gunmen sauntered over to Drake and Allie and lashed their hands behind their backs, and then led them up a trail toward the top of a small ridge.

“Where are you taking us?” Allie asked. The man next to her pushed her roughly in the small of the back, and she almost tumbled face forward. The leader laughed, the sound ugly and mean.

“To pay the devil his due.”

Drake and Allie stumbled along a rocky trail that twisted through a ravine. The gunmen lit the way using torches they’d left at the base of the trail, and as they descended the slope into a valley adjacent to the clearing, barbed wire strung along the edge of the valley glinted orange from the reflected flames. A dull thrumming met their ears once they were on flat terrain, and they realized it was a motor — a generator in a soundproof enclosure beneath camouflage netting that formed a canopy over a small utility building to their left. Nearby, at the base of a mountain, a cave yawned wide, and they could make out more torches at its mouth as the column of gunmen led them toward it.

“What is this?” Drake asked, and earned a stony stare from the leader of the gunmen.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” the man growled.

They marched through the nocturnal landscape, past plots of vegetables in ragged rows, the putrid waft of human waste used as fertilizer tainting the air. A guard sat behind a heap of sandbags, manning a .50-caliber machine gun on a turret with a darkened spotlight beside it, the arrival of the gunmen apparently expected. The leader offered a nod to the guard, who returned the signal and resumed his cleaning of the weapon’s breech with an oil-soaked rag.

Once inside the cavern, they continued deeper into the mountainside, and it was obvious that the passage had been widened by human hands. Wooden beams supported the ceiling, and the marks of tools on the soft stone were plain to see in the dim illumination from low-wattage bulbs strung every dozen yards. They marched alongside a hand-laid railway track that stretched into nothingness, and when they reached a fork where it veered left, they bore right, where three armed sentries waited.

The leader exchanged a greeting with the gunmen and the group continued into a large cavern, easily several hundred yards across. Allie and Drake gasped at the sight of at least a thousand near-naked slumbering youths and children pressed together like sardines on the floor, the stink of unwashed bodies overpowering. Allie’s eyes narrowed as they walked along the edge of the nightmarish scene; the sleeping figures were malnourished and so pale that their skin was translucent, even the toddlers old before their time.