Power and Empire

39

Each Campus operator carried the same basic components for Everyday Carry — firearm, knife, flashlight, and cell phone. Some of them, like Clark, carried little else, relying on their pistol and badass experience to get the job done. Dominic Caruso, who’d been trained by the FBI, carried things like extra nylon restraints that looked like shoelaces and even flat rubber stoppers used to block interior doors when searching buildings. Ryan fell somewhere in the middle. In addition to his pistol and an extra eight-round magazine, he carried two knives, a small Streamlight ProTac flashlight, and a Zippo lighter. His cell phone would be useless for communication underground, but it did provide a backup source of lighting. Adara had issued each operator a small trauma packet containing an envelope of Celox hemostatic gauze and a SWAT-T soft rubber tourniquet. The kit was just one more thing to carry, and he’d be a happy camper if he never had to open the damn thing, but given the dark hole in the ground over which his feet now dangled, he was glad to have it.

Ryan thought seriously about ripping up a piece of his shirt and plugging his nose, the smell was so noxious.

“Talk to me, Jack,” Midas said. “Give me a description of where you’re going down.”

“I’m sending you my lat and long now.”

“Perfect,” Midas said. “That way we’ll know where to look for your body. How about you wait for me and I’ll come back you up?”

“Stay put,” Ryan said. “Somebody needs to keep an eyeball on the Chinese delegation. I’ll be fine. Just going down to have a little look.”

“Copy that,” Midas said, sounding unconvinced. “My training says to trust the guy on the ground… but watch yourself.”

“Will do,” Ryan said, and lowered himself into the blackness.

Ryan found a rusted iron ladder just inside the opening and hooked an arm through the top rung while he dragged the wooden cover back into place. He was hesitant to use his light, concerned that it would tip off the Asian woman that he was behind her, and he counted nine rungs before his feet splashed into something cold and oozing. The awful smell told him it probably wasn’t water. Though it was only ankle deep, his Rockports were going to be good for nothing but a short trip to the nearest dumpster when he made it back aboveground.

Pausing in the pitch blackness, he fought the urge to gag and strained to hear any sign of the departing woman. When he heard nothing, he drew his pistol and decided to take a chance with the flashlight. Ryan found himself completely alone at the bottom of a deep tube of red brick and mortar, approximately thirty feet in diameter. It looked like an old grain silo set in the ground. Four arched brick doorways — each about the same size as his six-foot wingspan — ran from the sides of the cavern with what was presumably sewage flowing out of the two doors to his left, and into the two to his right, toward the Río de la Plata. The bricks at the base of the arch to Jack’s immediate right had telltale splash marks on one side. Closer inspection revealed hairlike moss just below the surface. The color of unripe limes, the moss swayed and billowed with the current like some kind of primordial ooze. By holding the powerful beam of the Streamlight at a low angle, Jack could see an obvious trail of discoloration in the moss, made by the weight of recent footprints. Most of the moss was undisturbed. He followed, moving slowly, pistol held back near his waist and flashlight slightly away from his body. Every few seconds he stopped and listened, but he heard nothing except the gurgle of flowing water… or whatever this was.

Buenos Aires was old, first settled sometime in the late 1500s. It was already a thriving city by the time the thirteen American colonies north of the equator declared their independence from England. There were tunnels under cities all over the world, the Catacombs beneath Paris; waterworks of an old wool business under Bradford, England; and abandoned sewers crisscrossing subterranean New York City. Ryan remembered from his history classes at Georgetown that Jesuit priests used a series of hidden tunnels here to move secretly between their numerous churches — both in centuries past and in more recent times of bloodshed during the “Dirty War,” when the military junta ferreted out communist insurgents and anyone else they deemed to be a dissident. Some of the tunnels had been discovered and were now in the guidebooks. Some remained hidden. Others had been flooded by overflowing groundwater and sewer systems. This one was covered with a wooden door, obviously known to someone besides the Asian woman. Small niches, approximately a foot high and half as deep, were built into the brick walls, as if meant for statuary, leading Ryan to believe this tunnel wasn’t originally intended to be a sewer.

He passed three smaller archways splitting off from the main tunnel as he sloshed along, one to the right and two more to the left. The trail of discolored moss told him to continue straight ahead. Twenty minutes after he’d first splashed down in the tunnels, Ryan came to another rusted iron ladder on the wall. The tunnel continued into the darkness, but the ladder was wet. Someone had recently climbed up.

Ryan felt like he’d been going generally east, and he suspected he was somewhere near the marina on the Río de la Plata, but it was impossible to know for sure without going up to peek out. When he stood completely still, he thought he could hear laughter.

He holstered his pistol and dropped the flashlight back into his pocket. Faint pinholes of light shone down from something at the top. Ryan hauled himself upward rung by rung, going slowly enough to let the sewage drain from his boots. He was careful not to slip. Walking through shit was one thing. Going for a swim in it was a whole other ballgame. He was reasonably certain he’d been vaccinated against hepatitis. Probably. Maybe. He began to mull over the idea of contracting cholera or jungle rot or whatever bug might swim up a person’s toenails from fetid water. A bath in Clorox was starting to sound inviting by the time he wrapped one arm around the top rung and put the flat of his hand against a metal grate.

Ryan pushed up slowly, peering under the edge at a pile of steaming donkey crap inches away. He knew very little about barnyard scatology, but the donkey that had manufactured the stuff happened to be standing right above it. A quick look around said he’d not been going east at all, but north. The dirt streets and broken block buildings could be nowhere else but Villa 31—the same place where the tall brunette had disappeared.

Frenzied Spanish voices, most male but at least one female, jerked Ryan’s attention to his left. His vantage point from under the donkey cart allowed him to see little but a set of scrambling feet. They were small and wet, and sliding under the donkey cart, directly for him.

Ryan barely had time to yank his head back into the tunnel before the Asian woman shoved the metal grating aside, pulling it shut behind her as she slid feet-first into the hole — landing squarely on Ryan’s knuckles where they curled around the pitted metal rung. Ryan was strong, but the impact of 120 pounds of fleeing woman knocked him off the ladder.

Customarily, Ryan would have tucked his head and rolled when falling from ten or twelve feet — but something told him he’d be better off with a broken leg than swimming in this slimy muck. The scant ten inches of water did little to break his fall, but he did his best to absorb much of the impact with bent knees. The floor of the tunnel was at a slight angle and he was just able to keep his feet, surfing on the snot-slick moss when he splashed down, wildly waving both arms in an effort to keep from falling face-first into the sewage. It was far from graceful, but it worked. He spun in time to see the shadow of the Asian woman slide to the bottom of the ladder behind him.

Floundering for just a moment, she wasted no time before sloshing off toward her original point of entry. Jack limped to go after her, but his right knee rebelled, slowing him down to a fast, hobbling limp. Lighter than Jack by nearly a hundred pounds — and a hell of a runner — the Asian woman looked over her shoulder, directly at Jack, her eyes wide.

“Nee-ge — rō!” she said. “Run!”

The way she spoke was full of urgency, and he felt certain it was Japanese. Ryan heard a splash behind him and turned to face a man with a machete who’d just come down the ladder.

The wiry man stood with his mouth hanging open and the machete raised above his head. He was alone and looked almost as surprised as Jack felt.

“Friend?” Ryan said, peering at the man in the scant light from above. “Amigo?”

The man shook his head and grinned, realizing he was the only one with a weapon in hand. Even in the shadows — hell, especially in the shadows — Ryan could see the vacantness in the man’s eyes.

“You can’t reason with evil,” Clark always said. So Jack didn’t try.

He could have tried to draw his pistol, but his hands were wet and slick. Even if he was able to get a shot off, the man would be on top of him in an instant with the heavy blade — making the odds too great that it would be a lose-lose endeavor. Instead, Ryan feinted right, causing the man to swing the blade across his own body. The slick footing made the man’s actions more exaggerated, allowing Ryan to shoot in and trap the arm against the other man’s chest and drive him backward into the ladder. The snotty moss worked both ways, making it all but impossible for Ryan to keep his opponent trapped. He followed up with a quick head-butt to the bridge of the man’s nose. The blow stunned him, but without proper grounding, there hadn’t been enough power in it to do much damage.

“¡Boludo!” Machete Man grunted, struggling to escape and bring the blade back into play.

Jack wasted no effort on words, instead driving his knee into the man’s unprotected groin. It worked to dislodge the blade, but unfortunately it also dislodged Ryan, and both men fell, splashing into the flowing filthy water.

Ryan’s feet had grown used to the temperature, but the cold liquid hitting his knees took the breath out of him. The other man took the worst of it, landing on his back and slamming his head against the mossy stone floor. Fighting blind, Ryan straddled him, clawed for the face now, feeling and then losing a grip on his chin. Ryan heard him gurgle and then felt a sharp blow to his side. The son of a bitch had gotten a hand free and now proceeded to pummel him in the ribs. A shot went low and took him over the liver, sending waves of pain and nausea through Ryan’s gut. He redoubled his efforts, sinking a thumb into the man’s eye and forcing his face sideways and into the muck. The man bucked and thrashed, sputtering, trying anything to get his nose above the surface. Ryan braced himself against the slick moss with his free hand as best he could, coming up on his toes and pressing down with all the weight of his body on the other man’s chest. He heard a sickening gurgle as the man aspirated a lungful of fetid sewage, and then the struggling ceased. Ryan waited a few more seconds to be sure and then pushed himself upward, chancing a quick look with his flashlight once he got to his feet.

Panting, filth dripping from his nose, he stood with a hand on one knee and vomited. Jack wiped his mouth with the sleeve over his biceps — the only relatively clean portion of his shirt. He spat and opened and shut his eyes several times to clear them, knowing this image would stay with him for a very long time. The silhouette of the other man was barely visible in the shadows as the river of sewage carried him away. That, he thought, was a hell of a way to die.

The pain in Jack’s knee and ribs had subsided to a dull ache by the time he limped back to the stone building. A quick peek out the cracked door revealed only a young couple feeding some ducks and a uniformed groundskeeper on a riding lawn mower. Ryan knew he was likely to cause an international incident — or at the very least commit aggravated assault to the noses of every Argentine he passed — if he didn’t get out of his sewage-soaked clothing.

Chavez was grouchy about it, but he told Midas to break away from Foreign Minister Li’s hotel and grab Jack a pair of sweats and his Brooks runners from his room at the Panamericano, along with a half-dozen bottles of water and the biggest container of hand sanitizer Midas could find — which turned out to be not nearly as big as Jack had hoped for.

Ryan rinsed off the best he could inside the stone building while Midas stood guard outside. Beyond salvation, everything from his skin out, including the Rockports, went into a dumpster. The fresh clothes and relatively disinfected feet allowed Ryan to make it back to the hotel without drawing too much attention. People who passed him smelled something amiss, but Jack looked clean and tidy. Such an awful stench couldn’t be coming from him. Midas led the way and called the elevator while Jack waited by himself in a deserted corner beyond the baby-grand piano in the Panamericano’s lobby until he was sure they would have the elevator to themselves.

He cleaned his gun and other equipment first. Some scrubbing and a few minutes under the blow dryer took care of the Thunderwear holster. It was made of textile, but thankfully it had been semiprotected by his slacks. The radio equipment was waterproof, so it was a fairly straightforward process to get it clean. His watchband, on the other hand, was toast. His cell phone had survived unscathed but for a cracked screen. Twenty minutes in a near scalding shower and two more bottles of hand sanitizer later, Ryan finally felt almost clean again.

He briefly considered calling his mother to see if there was some kind of prophylactic medication he should take, but there was no good way to explain his situation to her. “Hey, Mom, I was just tromping around in some South American sewers today. Wondering if I should be worried…”

He decided he’d ask Adara if he got the chance.

Ryan had to will himself to take it easy on the aftershave, knowing too much would draw as much attention as the phantom odor he hoped to conceal. Finally scrubbed and wearing a pressed button-down shirt, fresh khaki slacks, and a pair of Crockett & Jones dark brown oxfords he’d be able to run in if the need arose, he headed to meet Midas in the lobby.

The former Delta commander’s nose curled as soon as Ryan walked up.

“Like my granny used to say, you got something Bab-O won’t wash off!”

“Damn it!” Jack grimaced and started to turn around and head back to his hotel room. “Seriously? You can still smell it?”

Midas’s wide shoulders bounced as he chuckled, already walking toward the valet with the keys. “You’re fine,” he said. “I think my nose hairs are still melted from when I picked you up.”