Ahern, Jerry - The Quest

“What the hell is that?” Reed asked, suddenly beside Rourke, stooped slightly as Rourke was.

Rourke started to answer, but Fulsom, there too, said, “Bats I think.”

“Bats!”

“They’re small—not the vampire kind. If you were a peach or a pear you’d be in trouble.” Rourke added.

“Whew! That’s a relief,” Reed muttered.

“Yeah,” Rourke told him. “Just don’t let ‘em scratch you or bite. They carry rabies sometimes.” Rourke started forward, hearing the shuffling of feet behind him from the rest of the sixteen man commando force. Two of Reed’s men and some of Fulsom’s—including Darren Ball—were waiting with the boats.

“Bats! God, betcha there’re snakes, too,” Reed muttered.

“Most poisonous snakes won’t kill you, just make you damned sick—unless you have a reaction to the venom,” Rourke consoled Reed, flashing his light ahead across the reddish brown mud, swatting at cobwebs with his free right hand, the CAR-15 slung across his back, muzzle down.

The storm drain’s height was six feet, the diameter, and there was a simple choice Rourke decided—either walk through the deepest and slipperiest of the squishing mud and duck your head a little or walk to the side on angle and move half-stooped. He chose the muddy water and mire.

Shuffling along through the storm drain with Rourke’s flashlight and two others at intervals along the seventeen man single-file column the only illumination, Rourke paced himself, trying to judge the distance, not trusting wholly what Fulsom had described as a mile’s walk. A rat scurried across Rourke’s left foot as the tunnel the drain formed took a slight bend along an elbow of pipe then curved at a right angle, then started slightly upward.

Rourke stopped, his light hitting a swarm of bats hanging from the top of the drain, ducking as they whistled and whined overhead, one of the men screaming, Reed starting to bring his M-16 to bear and Rourke swatting it down, but saying nothing. They moved on, roaches everywhere on the floor of the drain near the edge of the mire, feeding on the bat droppings, perhaps, Rourke thought.

After several more minutes, Rourke stopped, flashing his light behind him, searching for Fulsom’s face, seeing the terror in the eyes. Abner Fulsom said, “I’m a little claustrophobic. Place gives me the creeps.” “I don’t think anybody exactly likes it,” Rourke almost whispered. “I make it we’ve done a mile—no end of the tunnel is in sight. How much further?” “My brother laid the drain, told me about it—said it was just about an even mile.”

“And it lets out in a small culvert at the edge of the parking lot, then dips back under the lot toward the shopping center itself?” “Yeah, that’s what he said,” Fulsom whispered.

“Where’s your brother now?” Rourke snapped.

“Dead. He was in Atlanta when the bombs or missiles or whatever hit it—”

Rourke exhaled hard. “I’m sorry.” He turned and shone his Kel-Lite back along the storm drain. Without saying anything else, he started walking again. If Fulsom’s memory were correct, Rourke judged, then the culvert should be coming up soon. He swung the CAR-15 from his back, slinging it under his right arm, suspended from his right shoulder, his fist wrapped around the pistol grip.

After another five minutes, Rourke stopped, cutting the light.

“Back flat against the wall,” he rasped, then started edging forward. There was light—dim—but light none the less, up ahead. He moved toward it. The smell in the drain had been bad, but here it was worse, the drain partially clogged and the water several inches deep. He edged up along the side and stooped as he went forward, grateful for the insect repellant he had used. There were swarms of small flies and mosquitoes, some of them, he wagered with himself, carried sleeping sickness.

The tunnel took a slight bend around a right-angle elbow joint, and Rourke stopped again at the mouth of the tunnel, a heavy-looking grillwork over the drain opening beyond and a V-shaped cement culvert visible in the moonlight ahead.

Rourke moved as silently as he could toward the grating, peering beyond it into the open, smelling the comparatively fresh night air, breathing it in deeply. The grille was set into the mouth of the drain, forming a grid of squares eight inches roughly on each side, a thin layer of cement holding it in place, a slightly wider opening at the top and bottom and each side where the grid of steel didn’t quite fit—an afterthought, he guessed.

Rourke heard no noise outside—nothing. The quiet seemed ominous to him. He edged back into the drain, taking a deep breath of the fresher air before he did. He stopped where Reed, Fulsom, and the others crouched along the side of the drain beyond the elbow.

“I need a couple of bayonets and a couple of good-sized rocks. Going to have to hammer our way out.” “Why don’t you use that bayonet you got,” Reed snapped.

“I paid for mine—yours is issue—we’ll use yours,” Rourke told him quietly. “And let’s get going. Time’s against us.” Rourke glanced at his watch. It was just past midnight, and they still hadn’t even penetrated the base.

Reed barked an order to one of his two men and after a moment, two bayonets and two paving bricks were handed up along the line. “Come on,” Rourke said, distributing one set of the tools to Reed.

With the Intelligence captain behind him, Rourke started forward again toward the elbow, through it and then, slowly, toward the grating at the end of the storm drain. Reed started to chisel at the cement and Rourke stopped him, raising a finger to his lips for silence and listening to the night sounds and listening for some sign of activity by the Russians. It was as if the place were deserted, Rourke thought, and that was all wrong. He was tempted to turn back, but realized then that any chance of the Resistance people or the Army Intelligence people helping to find Sarah and the children would be gone. Pausing for another moment, swinging the CAR-15 out of the way, Rourke set the point of one of the borrowed bayonets to the bead of cement and drew back the paving brick in his right hand.

“Watch your eyes for chips,” Rourke cautioned Reed, then smashed the paving brick down against the butt of the bayonet, a two-inch fragment of the cement bead breaking way and falling into the muddy water in which they stood. In an instant, Reed was chiseling away at the opposite side.

“Cheap construction,” Rourke thought, a six-or seven-inch piece of the cement bead chipping under the impact of his blow. It took both men some ten minutes to get a sufficient amount of the cement chipped away to try pushing at the grating. It budged, but didn’t give way. They resumed chiseling at the cement, then when the cement was nearly gone from both sides, threw their weight against the grating a second time. This time it moved and slipped too easily. Rourke and Reed frantically caught at it to avoid letting it fall and clang against the cement of the V-shaped channel in the culvert outside. They edged the grating along the side of the storm drain, conscious of every clang and scrape. Rourke sent Reed back to get Fulsom and the others, Rourke himself moving out of the storm drain, up the side of the channel and peered over the edge of the culvert and across. The parking lot was comparatively huge for a largely rural area, the yellow lines drawn for orderly parking meaningless now. A few rusted wrecks sat in the lot at the far side, but that was all. Closer in, toward the shopping center itself, Rourke could see Soviet-marked trucks—the Red Stars seeming to burn in the night, somehow, psychological he imagined.

“What’s up?”

Rourke turned toward the voice: it was Reed.