Duty and Honor

38

With Jack in the lead, they sprinted onto the parapet.

“Keep an eye out for Klugmann,” Jack called to René.

“How will I know it’s him?”

“Whoever hasn’t got a gun doesn’t get shot.”

“Right!”

Jack glanced over his shoulder. Effrem was standing beside the Land Cruiser’s open driver’s door. Jack stopped, turned back.

“Get moving, damn it!” he shouted.

He waited until Effrem climbed into the Toyota and started backing down the access road before he started running again. René was fifty yards ahead. Two more men emerged from the control bunker’s door. Neither one was Möller, but Jack had no way of knowing whether one of them was Gerhard Klugmann. Both were carrying FAMAS assault rifles.

René opened fire. One of the men went down. His partner ducked back through the bunker’s door and swung it shut behind him. René peppered the door with his AK. The rounds sparked on the steel.

Jack caught up with René and jogged the remaining distance to the door. It suddenly opened and a FAMAS barrel emerged. Jack dodged right and René dropped flat. Jack dropped to one knee and sprayed the door’s gap. The FAMAS disappeared back through the door, which swung open to reveal a body lying across a steel catwalk landing. Jack sprinted toward the door. He called, “René, you good?”

He got no answer. He glanced over his shoulder. René was lying facedown on the concrete. He wasn’t moving. A pool of blood spread beneath his body.

I’m sorry, René, Jack thought, and kept running.

At the door he pressed himself against the bunker wall, took a breath, then peeked through the door in time to see two men rushing up the steps. Jack shot the first one twice in the chest, then dropped to one knee, and stitched the second man’s legs out from under him. The man tumbled back down the steps. Jack followed him. The man was stunned as much by the fall as by the damage to his legs. He had lost his rifle, but Jack frisked him anyway. Once he was sure the semiconscious man posed no further threat, Jack turned down the next set of steps to a concrete alcove. To his left and right were two royal-blue steel doors.

Jack flipped a mental coin and opened the door on the left, revealing a maintenance tunnel no wider than his shoulders and dimly lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs. Electrical conduits lined the concrete wall. The hum of machinery was thunderous and rhythmic; Jack could feel it in his belly.

He shut the door and tried the other one, which opened onto a catwalk lit by pendant lights. Jack stepped to the handrail and looked down. He saw nothing but blackness and billowing mist. He could hear the roar of gushing water. The air smelled of ozone.

To his right the catwalk ended, so Jack turned left and jogged fifty feet until he reached a set of steps that took him down to another catwalk. At its far end, a set of short steps led to a glass control booth. Through the windows Jack could see flashing red and orange lights.

He started down the catwalk.

In the control booth two figures rose up and began shattering the glass windows with the butts of their rifles. Moving at a sprint, Jack opened fire on the booth. The two men ducked out of sight. Jack reached the steps. He crouched so his head was below the door’s lower edge, then ejected the AK’s magazine and inserted another. He then reached forward, tapping the AK’s barrel against the door.

A horizontal line of bullet holes appeared in the steel.

Jack rolled back on his heels, then onto his back, and took aim on the control booth.

Wait, Jack. Wait…

A figure appeared in the window. Jack pulled the trigger. The man’s head disappeared in a halo of red mist.

There was at least one more man on the other side of this door, and unless Jack was willing to backtrack and look for another way into the control booth, his only option was to suck it up and go.

He stood up and pressed himself as tightly against the handrail as possible, then mounted the steps and grabbed the doorknob. Stop. He needed a little misdirection. He pointed the AK up at the control booth window, fired a short burst, then swung open the door and charged through. He found himself in a short passageway of white-painted cinder blocks. At the end was an open door. He headed for it. Halfway there, a figure dashed past the opening from right to left. Jack almost opened fire, but caught himself. The man hadn’t been armed. Klugmann, maybe?

At the door Jack peeked left, saw a set of steel steps that led to what he guessed was the control room. To his right was a yellow door with black lettering that read MAINTENANCE LADDER. Jack stepped left, crept up the steps to the control room door, where he paused.

Don’t stop, don’t think, he told himself. Giving himself a chance to weigh the odds and rethink tactics would consume time he didn’t have.

He swung himself through the door. The room was empty.

The wall to the left of the windows was dominated by a long control console, its buttons and built-in screens a sea of flashing warning lights.

Too late, Jack thought.

Whatever was happening was beyond his abilities to control. Clearly the dam’s flow control systems had already fallen prey to Klugmann’s virus. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water were already gushing down the Omatako River toward the farms and villages downstream.

If he couldn’t stop it, he needed to at least be able to prove who started it.

Jack left. As he turned onto the stairs, he saw a rifle butt plunging toward his face. He jerked his head to the side, and the butt slammed into his cheekbone, then slid down the side of his head and clipped his ear. He heard rather than felt the tearing of cartilage. Blood gushed down his neck. He stumbled sideways. His AK fell through the railing and crashed to the floor below. Blind in his right eye, Jack reached up, bear-hugged the figure standing there, then pushed off, sending them both down the stairs with the man’s rifle sandwiched between them. As they fell Jack caught a glimpse of the yellow maintenance door swinging shut.

Still entwined, he and his attacker smashed into the floor, with Jack on top. He raised himself, gaining some maneuvering room, and slashed the point of his elbow across the man’s nose, breaking it, then into the side of his neck, and continued punching until the man went still. His face was a mask of blood.

Jack got up, grabbed his AK, and headed toward the yellow door. On the other side was a ladder leading up to a fluorescent-lighted opening. He was at the opposite end of the tunnel he’d found on his way in.

At the top of the ladder he crawled into the tunnel. He stood up and started running. Ahead of him, two figures disappeared around a curve in the tunnel. Jack was there a few seconds later, just as the second man stepped left through a door. He was unarmed.

Jack lifted the AK, took aim, fired. The bullet punched into the back of the man’s right thigh. He collapsed through the door and out of sight. Jack sprinted ahead and peeked around the corner. A stocky, bald man with a pasty face lay on his back, both hands clutched around his bleeding hamstring.

The man was wearing a black T-shirt. Emblazoned across the chest in red German Fraktur-style letters were the words Game of Thrones. Winter Is Coming.

“Gerhard Klugmann,” Jack said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Half dragging, half carrying Klugmann, Jack hurried up the steps to the parapet.

René’s body was gone.

“Over here,” Jack heard.

He turned to see René sitting with his back against the bunker. His left arm was bloody and bent backward at the elbow. Jack dumped Klugmann onto the parapet and asked René, “Möller?”

“That way, toward the Hilux.”

Jack walked to the center of the parapet. Stephan Möller, still bearing the limp from Jack’s bullet at the Alexandria nature preserve, had only gotten a hundred yards toward the Hilux.

“Möller, stop!” Jack shouted.

Möller kept going.

Jack lifted the AK to his shoulder and fired. The bullet smacked into the concrete to the left of Möller’s feet. The German glanced over his shoulder, shouted something at Jack, and then tried to pick up the pace, his limp now a penguinlike hobble.

“Last chance,” Jack yelled.

René said, “Just kill him already.”

“We can use him. He can hand us Rostock.”

Jack laid the AK’s front post over Möller’s legs and fired a short burst. Möller went down. He writhed, then rolled onto his belly. Jack started walking down the parapet toward him.

He’d covered half the distance when he heard the roar of an engine. A horn began blaring. Jack turned, raised the AK. He lowered it.

With Effrem behind the wheel, the Toyota Land Cruiser swerved around Jack, straightened out, and sped toward Möller, who’d managed to get to his knees.

“Effrem!” Jack shouted. “Don’t. We need him!”

The Toyota eased left as Effrem aimed the hood at Möller, then began picking up speed. Möller, apparently hearing the approaching engine, looked over his shoulder.

Effrem never hit the brakes.