Dark Rising

TWENTY-THREE

Alex sensed something else in that dark tunnel, something more tangible than the tortured souls he’d imagined trapped there. There were people approaching – he could feel the vibrations of their footsteps.

He held up a flattened hand. The team stopped and crouched left and right behind the steel door. Alex silently pulled the door closed, leaving just a small gap.

He put his hand against the cold steel so he could read the vibrations from the other side. Three large men approaching – must be part of a Takavaran squad, he thought.

He looked at Sam and held up three fingers. Sam stared hard until he could make out the gesture in the dark and then nodded. Alex quickly glanced over his shoulder – there was no cover, nothing to provide some form of concealment or a defensive position. They had their backs to a pit that may have fallen to the very base of the Kouh-e Rahmat mountain.

They waited in silence until they saw torchlight shining through the slit of the doorframe. Now, the entire team could hear the sound of the men’s low conversation.

Adira moved close to Alex and whispered into his ear. ‘They’re coming in.’

Alex nodded and gave her and Sam a closed fist signal, followed by a chopping motion left and right. Both were expecting the command and immediately pressed themselves to the wall either side of the door. Adira grabbed Zach and pushed him down behind her. She drew one of her unsilenced Baraks but Alex waved it away, pointing at his ear. She shrugged, reholstered it and drew out one of her slim black blades instead. She adopted a fighting pose and waited.

The colossal steel door rolled back slowly and two men entered the black room, facing the pit and fanning to each side of the doorway. They were large and moved fluidly for their size. A third man stood in the doorway and shone a strong torch directly into Alex’s face. In a smooth motion, Alex grabbed the front of the man’s black fatigues and flung him out over the pit. The first his comrades knew of his fate was when his torch, still in his hands, flew over their heads. Their shouts as they entered the battle obscured the sound of the body hitting the bottom of the black abyss.

Two soundless bullets from Sam took one of the men in the eye and the chest. He fell dead before he could fire the gun he had drawn.

Adira threw one of her slim blades at the third man, but he avoided the killing strike, rolling sideways and taking it in the flesh of his shoulder. He was up quickly with a gun in his hand, swinging it smoothly around to aim at Adira. She delivered a vicious front snap-kick that should have knocked the gun from his grip, but the Takavaran were no ordinary soldiers; they were strong, well trained and very familiar with close-quarter combat. Instead of loosening his gun, all the kick did was cause it to misfire into the pit. The sound of the unsilenced discharge in the enclosed shell of the laboratory was excruciating, the echoes bouncing around like a giant’s stone drum being madly beaten.

The Takavaran regained his balance and threw out his arm, hitting Adira on the side of her head with an open-handed strike as he brought his gun back around to aim directly at her chest.

‘Harah,’ Adira cursed in Hebrew. She drew both her Barak pistols and fired four shots into the large Takavaran before he could loose another round. The force of the bullets pushed him backwards and he too disappeared over the rim into the black void.

Adira turned to Alex and shrugged. He shook his head and put his fingers in his ears.

‘Party’s over,’ he said. ‘Double-time it!’

Zach was still flattened on the ground. Sam pulled him to his feet as Alex leapt through the open steel door and began herding them all to the elevator shaft.

‘Sam, Ms Senesh, you two first,’ Alex said loudly. There was no need for silence anymore, and their ears were still ringing from the gunfire.

He looked at Zach and knew the slightly built young man was never going to make the rapid ascent straight up for half a mile. He told him to wait where he was and disappeared back through the steel door. In a moment he reappeared with a length of black material torn from the uniform of the Takavaran Sam had shot. He bound Zach’s hands together with it, then looped them over his own head.

‘This is just for insurance,’ he said. ‘I’ll climb you out, but you still have to hang on.’

Alex could feel the young man’s arms shaking with nerves against his shoulders. He sucked in a deep breath and reached for the first rung.

Zach thought about protesting. Even though he was tall and thin, he still weighed about 150 pounds and he doubted Alex could carry him all the way to the top. He looked up the dim shaft and could just make out Sam and Adira about seventy feet up, climbing quickly. As Alex began his climb, Zach felt as if he were flying. In no time they had caught up with Sam and Adira, and Zach glanced quickly at their glowing green faces as he flew past. Adira’s was astonished, while Sam was smiling.

Near the rim of the shaft, Alex stopped and tilted his head as if listening. All Zach could hear were the faint sounds of Adira and Sam climbing to join them. Then Alex spoke into his helmet comm: ‘Move it; we got company.’

The captain raced up the remaining fifty feet in a few seconds and threw Zach off his shoulders like a large bag of linen. The scientist lay gasping as if he had made the climb himself; his nerves shortening his breath. He untied the black fabric around his wrists and looked across to Alex to thank him. The HAWC had thrown himself flat on the ground at the shaft rim and was sighting down into the darkness with his gun.

Zach rolled over and looked down into the pit. Sam and Adira were almost invisible, even with his light-enhancing equipment. He looked at Alex again and saw total calm. The HAWC’s eyes shone strangely as they stared unwaveringly down into depths of the elevator shaft.

Zach held his breath.

*

Alex watched Adira and Sam slowly ascend towards him. They still had another sixty-odd feet to go and he could tell they were tiring. He couldn’t climb down and carry them both – that would make them a bigger target. The best he could do was try to give them some cover.

Another Takavaran squad had arrived in the ruined lab. There was no telling how many of them had been waiting down there in the depths. One of them shone a torch up the shaft of the elevator. There wasn’t time for Alex to aim and fire before the man pulled his head back. Next came an arm and a pistol, and bullets buzzing rapidly up the shaft like a swarm of angry bees.

Alex fired as best he could, but even with his keen eyesight the target was too dark and small over the distance.

Adira was falling behind, and had let go with one of her arms to draw a Barak and shoot down into the darkness below her. Alex guessed the shots were intended to act more as a deterrent to buy them some time, rather than with any hope of actually taking down any of the Takavaran.

Sam was first over the edge. He was breathing heavily and his arms must have burned from the strain, but he lay down beside Alex and took aim into the shaft. Alex doubted Sam could see anything, but knew his second-in-command would fire a supporting volley if he did.

Alex waited for the pistol arm to reappear. In a few more seconds he saw movement, but this time it wasn’t a gun that was aimed at them, but the head of a sleek rocket-propelled grenade. Time had just run out.

Adira could see the rim of the shaft and the outline of Alex’s head still high above her. She was a strong woman, but after the long climb her arms wobbled with fatigue. The gunfire had given her a burst of adrenalin, but this too had been eaten up by the strain of the ascent. Stand and fight, a small voice said inside her head, but she knew that holding on one-handed like last time would be impossible now, and probably just result in a dropped weapon. And that was not going to happen to a captain in the Metsada.

Each new rung was agony, and the small shapes at the top of the shaft seemed just as far away as when she’d last looked up. Stand and fight, the voice said again. Just as her hand left the rung to reach down for her weapon, she saw a large figure leap headfirst into the shaft. Unbelievably, he caught the wall rails twenty feet down, right below her. She felt a strong arm wrap around her waist, pull her off the wall and sling her over his shoulder. Alex Hunter’s voice said in her ear, ‘Cover us.’

Adira felt a brief moment of unreality wash over her, then, with her front half hanging down into the shaft, she pulled both of her guns free and rained bullets down into the pit. As Alex was hauling her over the edge, she saw the flare of the initiation charge on the rocket-grenade booster. The flare pushed the grenade out of the launcher before the sustainer motor ignited to propel the small rocket at its target at nearly 600 feet per second. Adira yelled one of the most feared words in any battle: ‘Incoming!’

Sam turned and grabbed Zach, dragging him along suitcase-style. Alex didn’t bother putting Adira down; he just ran after Sam with her held across his chest. They had only covered about forty feet before their world turned orange and they were thrown forward by a molten percussion blow that flung ancient stone fragments at them at near-bullet velocity. Adira heard the storm of rock fragments whack into Alex’s back before he flew forward to land on top of her.

They were saved by the small rocket grenade hitting the granite roof of the tunnel; although dense, the material absorbed some of the initial fragmentation. The few feet of distance they’d covered and their armoured suits had stopped anything penetrating their bodies, but Adira knew they would be bruised and sore for days. They were lucky; it had been a simple fragmentation device. If it had of been one of the newer thermobaric explosives, it would have cooked everything in the tunnel – suits or no suits.

Adira and the others looked back into the boiling smoke. The stone tunnel would have collapsed over the elevator shaft, and the Takavaran would have known that when they fired the RPG.

‘Hmm, committed,’ said Alex as he got to his feet.

Adira nodded and looked up at him as she struggled to one knee. He wasn’t fatigued or hurt, and he hadn’t needed special equipment in the dark. She remembered the general’s order to seek out the Americans’ special weapon – the Arcadian. Could this be him?

Alex put out his hand to her. She ignored it and got to her feet, dusting herself down as she said, ‘Next time, I carry you.’

On the slight broken rise above the basin, Hex heard the muffled explosion and saw the tent covering the entrance to the ruins billow as the shock wave travelled out of the underground complex. He also saw the two teams of Takavaran outside fly to their feet, draw their weapons and close in on the doorway. Their movements were not panicked, but fluid and professional.

Hex spoke quietly into his comm unit. ‘Wolf packs closing.’

From within the ruins, Alex responded. ‘Engage.’