Clive Cussler - Plague Ship

The gunmen slowed well before they came to the side cave, as if expecting an ambush. Although Juan couldn’t see the guards, he could tell by the sounds what they were doing. They had gone almost silent as they approached the entrance, advancing only when they knew they were covered by their teammates.

Metal clattered against stone, and almost immediately a voice called out.

“I see you there. Give yourselves up and you won’t be harmed.” The sound had been one of the guards leaning his weapon against the cave entrance to steady his aim as he pointed his assault rifle at the bundles of mattresses at the far end of the chamber.

Standing behind Linc so the big man’s bulk shielded his voice, Juan triggered his cell phone and said, “Go to hell.”

With the volume of the phone left inside the medical ward set to maximum, it must have sounded like a defiant shout. Two guns opened fire at once, and, in the burst of the muzzle flashes, Juan could see all three figures. These men were no rank amateurs. Two were right outside the cave while the third held back, watching the tunnel for a flanking attack.

In such an enclosed space, the sound was an assault on all Cabrillo’s senses.

When the firing stopped, he waited to see what they would do. They had poured enough rounds into the chamber to kill a pair of men a dozen times over. The cover man snapped on a flashlight, as all three stripped off their goggles, their optics temporarily overwhelmed by the barrage. The two who had fired moved cautiously across the threshold while the third remained vigilant for a trap.

And Cabrillo didn’t let them down.

The trip wire he’d rigged was near the bedstead where he and Linc had supposedly made their last stand, and the lead guard was so intent on his victims he never saw it.

The electrical tape was tied to the bottles of chlorine and sodium bicarbonate, and when the gunman brushed against it they fell. The glass shattered in a pool of water from the canteen and one other chemical that Juan had poured on the floor.

At the sound of the bottle breaking, Juan and Linc fired. The third guard had reacted to the sound of the smashing glass, but he didn’t stand a chance. One bullet caught him under the arm and tore apart his internal organs while the second hit him squarely in the windpipe. His corpse spun to the ground, never relinquishing its grip on the flashlight or assault rifle. The beam came to rest on the cave entrance, where tendrils of a sickly greenish cloud were just beginning to emerge.

Inside the chamber, the chemical reaction had produced a small lake of hydrochloric and hypochlorous acids. In the seconds it took for the two men to realize something was wrong, their throats and lungs were burning. The fumes attacked the delicate tissues lining their airways, making even the shallowest breath a torture beyond pain.

Forced to cough from the irritant, they drew more of the toxin into their bodies, so that by the time they staggered out of the room they had gone into convulsions. They hacked blood mixed with sputum from deep inside their lungs.

The exposure had been brief, but without immediate medical attention the two gunmen were living corpses, and their deaths would be slow and agonizing. One of them must have realized it, and before Cabrillo could stop him he had pulled the pin on a hand grenade.

There was a split second to make a decision, but with the roof already so unstable there was only one thing to do. Cabrillo grabbed at Linc’s arm and took off running, not wasting a moment even to turn on his flashlight. He ran with his fingers brushing the tunnel wall. He could feel Linc’s towering presence behind him. They had both been counting the seconds and, at the same moment, threw themselves flat just as the grenade exploded.

Shrapnel peppered the tunnel all around them, and the overpressure wave hit in a wall of light and sound that felt like a sledgehammer blow. They scrambled to their feet as a new sound grew, seeming to fill the tunnel. The roar became deafening, as slabs of rock dislodged by the blast crashed to the tunnel floor in a cascading avalanche that threatened to engulf them. Dust and bits of rock fell on their heads and shoulders as more of the ceiling gave way. Juan flicked on the flashlight just as a chunk of stone the size of a truck engine slammed into the ground in front of him. He leapt over it like a hurdler and kept running.

Overhead, cracks appeared in the roof, jagged lines that branched and forked like black lightning, while behind them the din of collapsing rock rose to a crescendo.

And then it began to subside. The roar petered out until only a few stones plinked and clattered. Juan finally slowed, his chest sucking in draughts of dust-laden air. He aimed the light toward the tunnel behind them. It was choked floor to ceiling with rubble.

“You okay?” he gasped.

Linc touched the back of his leg where a shard of stone had hit him. There was no blood when he looked at his fingers.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ll be better when we get out of all this dust. Come on.”

“Look on the bright side,” Linc said as they started walking again. “We don’t have to worry about them coming up behind us anymore.”

“I always had you pegged for a Pollyanna.”

They spent another two hours exploring the underground facility. They found bunks for one hundred and eighty prisoners, rooms that had once been laboratories, and a piece of equipment Linc recognized as an atmospheric chamber.

“Probably to test the effects of explosive decompression,” he’d remarked.

At last, they came to the end of the long tunnel. It didn’t peter out or pinch off. Rather, a section of the roof had collapsed, and both men recognized that it had been blasted free. Juan inhaled next to the mound of rubble, noting that a faint trace of explosive lingered.

“This was brought down recently.”

“When the Responsivists pulled out?”

Juan nodded, not giving in to his disappointment just yet. He scrambled up the sloping pile of loose rocks, his feet dislodging debris as he neared the top. He pressed himself flat, and ran the light along the seam where the shattered stone met the ceiling. He called down for Linc to join him.

“There was nothing in this catacomb that the Responsivists would care that we see. It’s all just old junk left by the Japanese Army.”

“So whatever they’re hiding is beyond this.”

“Stands to reason,” Juan said. “And since they risked coming down here after us, I bet that our exit is on the other side, too.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

With the water used up to improvise the gas attack, an hour of backbreaking work left Juan’s tongue a sticky swollen mass, as if some scaly reptile had curled up and gone to sleep in his mouth. His fingers were raw and bleeding from shifting the jagged stones, and his muscles ached from the cramped position.

At his side, Linc worked with the efficiency of an indefatigable machine. It looked as if nothing fazed him, but Juan knew even Lincoln’s vast reserves of strength weren’t inexhaustible.

Bit by bit, they burrowed their way into the rubble, moving carefully, testing the ceiling to ensure their actions didn’t bring down more of the shattered stone. They changed positions every thirty minutes. First Juan attacked the debris and passed stones back to Linc’s waiting hands, and then Linc would take point, loosening boulders and handing them back to the Chairman. Because Linc was so broad in the shoulders and chest, the passageway had to be expanded to almost twice Juan’s size.

Juan was back at the rock face and reached for a handhold on a particularly large stone, but, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t loosen it from the rest. It seemed to have been locked into place. He shifted some smaller, fist-sized stones, hoping to get leverage, and pulled with everything he had. The rock didn’t so much as wiggle.