James Rollins - The Eye of God - A Sigma Force Novel

A loud crack raised her head, echoing away. It sounded like a loose shutter banging in the wind. More blasts followed.

Gunfire.

She stopped, confused—when an arm closed around her neck from behind, clamping over her throat.

She felt the cold muzzle of a gun at her temple.

8:10 A.M.

Seichan only had a moment to react.

Attuned to her surroundings, she had felt something was wrong . Over the course of the morning, up in her room, she had learned the rhythms of the quiet inn: the murmur of the husband and wife below, the clank of pans, the whistle of wind through the eaves. She had heard the door open off and on, either one of the owners taking out the garbage, or the last time, Rachel leaving to explore the village.

When the door had opened a half minute ago, she had thought it was Rachel returning, but the noises below grew hushed, except for the clatter of a plate to the wooden floor.

She had tensed, muscles going hard, every sense straining. Even the dust in the air seemed to hold motionless in anticipation.

Then a creak on the stair—

She bolted, stopping only long enough to grab her SIG Sauer, still in its holster on her nightstand. She burst out the door, shaking the semiautomatic pistol free. She fled away from the stairs, toward the window at the end of the landing. With her weapon pointed behind her, she saw a shadow rise by the stairs, too furtive. Then a shape appeared, dressed all in winter camouflage.

She fired backward twice, while leaping and striking the window with her shoulder. A cry rose behind her. She had only winged the man, but it offered her enough of a delay to fly out the window in a shower of glass and splintered wood. She landed on the overhanging eave of the first-story roof below and rolled down its side and over the edge.

She fell through the air, twisting around to land on her legs, falling to one arm. She kept the other up, pointing the pistol all around. She had come out behind the house. A patch of forest beckoned across a small yard. She fled toward it—only to see a group of armed men, also in camouflage, appear out of the tree line.

She veered to the right, where she knew a deep culvert ran along the neighboring road. She needed cover and a way to break through the cordon that had clearly been set up around the inn.

She sprinted as gunfire tore the frozen turf around her, blindly firing back toward the woods. She might still be able to make it to safety.

Then a familiar voice rang out past the gunfire.

“STOP OR I WILL KILL HER!”

She didn’t. She leaped the last distance and slid on her belly into the culvert. Ice cracked under her as she swung to face the man who had shouted. Keeping hidden in the deep gutter, she trained her pistol.

Across the yard, by the barn, she spotted a large, powerful-looking man gripping Rachel around the throat.

Ju-long Delgado stood to one side of her.

On the other, Hwan Pak.

The North Korean scientist held a pistol to Rachel’s ear.

“Come out now! Or I will blow her head off!”

Seichan struggled to make sense of the situation. How could they be here? She noted the facial features of the team in camouflage, all North Korean, likely their country’s elite special forces. But how had Pak found her?

Rachel yelled to her, “Run! Just run!”

Her captor cuffed her roughly in the head. Still, she struggled, strangling in his grip.

Knowing they would certainly kill Rachel if she attempted to flee—a course that looked less and less likely to succeed anyway—she finally raised her arms in the air, showing herself.

“Don’t shoot!” she called back.

More soldiers came up from behind her, appearing like ghosts from hiding spots. She scanned their numbers. It seemed Pak had brought an entire assault team with him.

Why?

She was stripped of her weapon and marched over to Pak.

As Seichan approached, Rachel met her eyes. Rachel looked more angry than scared, apologetic for putting Seichan into this situation.

But Seichan could not hold the woman at fault. This was all her own responsibility, a danger she had dragged to this icy doorstep.

The brute holding Rachel must be the military team leader. He wore mirrored sunglasses with a hood pulled low, showing little of his face—what did show looked mean, displaying a cross-hatching of scars. She could smell the threat off the man. He was no new recruit, but a battle-hardened warrior.

Pak turned to her when she arrived. He smiled coldly, promising pain and sorrow.

“Now you will tell us where the Americans are.”

28

November 20, 8:12 A.M. IRKST

Olkhon Island, Russia

Back on the ATVs, Gray led the way with the shaman’s apprentice, Temur, riding behind him. They headed north from the crags of Burkhan Cape, driving atop the thick shore ice, following the coastline.

Kowalski and Vigor kept close behind on their own vehicles.

The morning brightened rapidly, turning the ice into glass, some places so clear it looked like open water. A dusting of dry snow and ice skirted in streams across the surface, pushed by the wind like the crowns of whitecaps.

“Around that tumble of rock ahead!” Temur called. “Another mile or so.”

Using that landmark, they continued along a deserted section of the island, where sheer cliffs rose straight out of the water, topped by dense fir forests. Temur urged them closer to the shore, shadowing his eyes with his hand and studying the coastline.

“There!” he finally called. “That opening. We go in there!”

Gray spotted the mouth of a sea cave. It looked large enough to drive a minivan inside, except rows of massive icicles speared down from the upper edge, like a set of fanged jaws closing down to take a bite out of the ice shelf below. The remaining opening was only large enough to allow their ATVs to enter, if they went single file.

Gray angled toward it, slowing their speed to a crawl. He flicked his headlamp on and cast its light into the dark cave. White frost reflected off every surface, revealing a tunnel leading deeper. Stalactites of ice covered the arched ceiling in a solid mass. Streams of water froze in place on the walls, forming sheets of rippling crystal.

“We’re not going in there, are we?” Kowalski asked, plainly leery. “Caves are one thing, but ice caves . . .”

As answer, Gray ducked his head below the first row of icicles and crawled his ATV inside, following the beam of his headlamp.

Inside, the space was even more wondrous. The ice under the tires was so clear he could see the mossy rocks far below, spot fish in the flowing water under the ice.

“Looks like it continues a ways!” Gray called back.

He headed deeper upon Temur’s instructions. The tunnel grew larger, the walls sweeping to the sides, the ceiling rising higher. About thirty yards in, the sea tunnel ended at a large cavern, a cathedral of ice. Glistening blue-crystal chandeliers filled the domed roof, while diamond columns rose all around.

As they entered, the pressure of their passage made the ice beneath them groan and pop, the sound amplified and echoed by the sheltering walls. A few fragile branches of the chandeliers broke free and shattered to the ice, tinkling away with a dance of shards.

Across the room, a thick curtain of ice flowed in heavy ripples down the far wall, where a spring-fed waterfall had frozen over. A few trickles still ran down its surface, polishing the ice to a quartz shine, before freezing below.

Closer at hand, in the middle of the floor, a darker stain marred the pristine surface, marking a hole through the ice to the open water below. The steeply sloped sides were stained, worn in some places to form small chutes.