Immortal

62

Ethan ducked down low and dashed toward the dark maw of the cave behind them as bullets whipped the dust at his feet and sprayed wood chips from fallen branches around him. He followed Ellison Thorne as the big man hefted Kip Wren onto his shoulder and loped into the darkness of Lechuguilla Cave. Almost immediately they were engulfed in a billowing cloud of cordite smoke as Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane opened fire with their Springfield rifles straight up at the ladder above. As Ethan crouched he saw the shots hit their marks to the sound of dull thumps, the leaden Minie balls slamming mercilessly through clothes and flesh. Three of the attackers screamed and fell from the ladder to plunge with their limbs clawing the air.

Ethan and Lopez leapt aside as the bodies thumped down onto the floor of the cave in puffs of dust and the crackle of splintering bones. Ethan aimed his pistol at one of them as he lay screaming in agony and fired a rapid double-tap. The first round hit the man in his belly, the second high on his temple, silencing him instantly.

‘Keep them off that ladder!’ Ethan shouted.

Realizing that their quarry was armed and now veiled in wreaths of thick white smoke, the attackers suddenly scattered for cover, throwing themselves down behind rocks on the lip of Misery Hole seventy feet above them.

‘Three down!’ Cochrane shouted. ‘I’m reckonin’ about ninety-six to go!’

Ethan flinched as wild shots smacked into the solid bedrock nearby, stone chips and a fine powder of shocked rock spilling onto the air around them. Lopez crawled to Ethan’s side.

‘We’re outnumbered here,’ she shouted above the crackle of gunfire. ‘There’s no way out but up.’

Edward Copthorne reloaded his rifle and glanced across at her.

‘There’s no way to us but down!’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve got thousands of passages behind us. We go inside, they’ll never find us.’

‘We’ll stand a better chance against those guys inside the caves,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Out here, they could rush us at once and it’ll all be over and we can’t hold them off that ladder forever. Besides, they look like amateurs, missing more than they hit.’

Lopez didn’t reply, but she got to her feet and dashed off into the darkness behind them. Ethan looked at the old soldiers alongside him, and gestured with his pistol.

‘Let another volley off, then go. I’ll cover you with the pistol.’

Copthorne nodded, and along with the others he aimed his rifle straight up at the lip of Misery Hole.

‘Fire!’

A blast of gunfire smacked Ethan’s eardrums as thick smoke drifted across his field of view, stinging his eyes and burning in his throat. Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane leapt to their feet and dashed for the cave entrance, using the drifting smoke to conceal their flight. Ethan aimed at several black shapes moving amongst the bushes and rocks high above, firing at them randomly. He was about to turn and flee when a flash of white caught his eye, a man moving from left to right. Ethan squinted through the smoke, and saw the man’s awkward gait as he struggled from cover to cover, dragging someone else along behind him. Ethan recognized Jeb Oppenheimer immediately. At that moment, four small, round objects thumped down to land on the cavern floor around him. Ethan only needed one glance to see what they were.

‘Grenades!’ he shouted.

He fired off another two rounds and then fled into the darkness of the cave. He hurled himself down behind some rocks as four deafening blasts rocked the cavern behind him.

‘Y’ git any of ’em?’ Copthorne asked from somewhere in the darkness.

‘Just the one,’ Ethan said, and reminded himself that he’d fired seven shots, which left eight in the pistol. ‘Mostly just kept their heads down. How’s Kip?’

Ellison Thorne’s voice reached them from somewhere deeper in the cave.

‘He ain’t right. Bullet’s in his leg and it ain’t goin’ nowhere.’

Damn. Right now they needed all the firepower and hands they could muster while they tried to figure out a way of escaping the assault. Ethan looked at the entrance to the cave, the low crevice appearing brightly lit now compared to the depths in which they huddled. The cave behind descended gently, ragged walls and a low ceiling vanishing into impenetrable blackness from which drifted a gentle breeze, as though the earth itself were breathing. There were potentially hundreds of miles of unexplored caverns within, plunging to depths of more than two thousand feet below ground, some flooded, others prone to collapse. Ethan was suddenly acutely aware that they lacked even the most basic expeditionary gear required for a descent into such a complex underground maze. Thousands of people over the years had ventured into such places never to return, hopelessly lost and doomed to starvation and a cold, lonely death far below ground in absolute blackness.

‘Heads up!’

John Cochrane’s voice startled Ethan as it echoed through the cavern, and he turned to see the shapes of men drop into view from the ladder and rush toward the cave entrance. Instantly, three Springfield rifles blasted out a volley of shots that cut down three of the men. Ethan fired on a fourth, another double-tap that sliced through the attacker with a fine spray of blood that spilled onto rocks at the cave entrance. The man fell to his knees before toppling over sideways.

‘They’re trying to overwhelm us!’ McQuire shouted as he struggled to reload his weapon in the eerie half-light.

John Cochrane and McQuire fired at the same time, dropping two more men who materialized at the entrance to the cave, firing their weapons as they searched for cover from which to continue their assault. The Minie balls slammed into them as they ran and the two men cartwheeled into the dust.

Ethan’s ears began aching and ringing from the infernal blasts of the rifles, the terrible noise amplified in the narrow confines of the cave as several more mercenaries tumbled into view. From behind Ethan, Ellison Thorne loomed, a pistol in each hand that spurted smoke and flame as he fired both weapons at once, cutting an attacker down in mid-stride to fall face first onto the rocks.

‘Stand tall, lads!’ Ellison bellowed, his huge chest and the narrow cave amplifying his voice to thunder out above the gunfire. ‘Up an’ at ’em!’

With a sudden and unexpected war cry, Ellison led his men at a run toward the cave entrance, their bayonets and knives flashing, and for an instant Ethan’s vision blurred as he no longer saw the mercenaries plunging toward them, or the antiquated rifles or the pistol in his hand. A flash-vision of other caves from years before filled his mind, the bitter peaks of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, the screams of the Taliban and United States Marines locked in hand-to-hand combat in the deadly warrens of the Tora Bora cave complex. Young men, far from home, flashing long-knives and bayonets, the primeval grunts and cries of mortal combat as crazed terrorists with no fear of death fought idealistic soldiers struggling to preserve their way of life.

Semper fi.

Ethan leapt up on impulse and rushed forward as Ellison’s men collided with six soldiers who had managed to breach the entrance to the cave. He saw Ellison Thorne grab the barrel of one man’s M-16 and twist it aside before stepping in and head-butting him with a sickening crunch, the mercenary’s legs crumpling as he sagged onto the floor of the cave. Screams soared through the darkness as bayonets plunged deep into unexpecting flesh, stubby machine guns batted aside by the long-barreled Springfields before they could be brought to bear.

Ethan charged at the nearest attacker, glimpsing a wiry-looking man with scars that spread from the corners of his mouth and back toward his ears, the victim of a mugging or maybe some kind of gang ritual. Either way he didn’t look like a soldier, more like one of the heartless bastards Ethan had fought in those terrible caves in Afghanistan, the kind of men who stoned women to death, the kind of men who might have abducted his fiancée, Joanna, in Gaza City. The ugly barrel of the soldier’s M-16 swiveled toward Ethan, who rushed in with almost suicidal rage and grabbed the gun’s stock and smashed it aside before driving his thumb in behind the trigger. A jab of pain lanced his thumb as the man squeezed the trigger desperately, only for nothing to happen. In the light of the cave entrance Ethan saw the soldier’s features dissolve into panic, just as Ethan hopped violently and drove his right knee up into the man’s groin with as much force as he could muster.

The mercenary gagged, his tongue quivering in his gaping mouth and his eyes wide and sightless as exquisite pain wracked his body. Ethan yanked the M-16 from his grasp and stepped one pace back, spinning the weapon into his grip and then whipping the butt up to crack the man under his jaw. The mercenary’s teeth cracked together and crunched through his tongue, the useless muscle spilling sideways out of his mouth in a torrent of thick blood as he collapsed to his knees in agony. Ethan aimed at the kneeling man’s head and fired a single shot. The round hit the man square in his right temple and neatly blew off the left side of his face in a spray of blood and bone chips. Ethan blinked as the body wavered for a moment and then seemed to collapse in slow motion onto its side.

A deep silence filled the cave, Ethan’s world suddenly filled with a ringing in his ears and the deep, rapid rhythm of his own breathing. His heart thundered in his chest and his eyelids fluttered erratically as adrenaline surged through his synapses.

‘Sweet mother of Jesus,’ McQuire’s voice uttered in the humming silence as he looked at Ethan’s victim. ‘You sure know how to pain a man.’

Ethan blinked as his hearing returned and he saw half a dozen bodies lying in the entrance to the cave, some groaning, some weeping and clasping gunshot wounds and savagely mauled stomachs, others staring sightlessly at the ceiling of the cave. He looked down at the ruined body of the man he had slain and felt a sudden chill of shame.

‘This ain’t over,’ Ellison Thorne said, wiping the bloodied blade of his knife on his pants. ‘Let’s fall back afore they try again.’

Ethan was about to follow him when from somewhere outside a voice shouted down to them.

‘Give up the cave, or this woman dies!’

Ethan edged forward and squinted up into the bright light to see two men standing either side of Jeb Oppenheimer far above, whose hands were cupped around his mouth.

Kneeling beside them was Lillian Cruz. As he watched, Oppenheimer’s mercenaries began descending the rope ladder, prodding and pushing Lillian before them as a human shield.