Step On A Crack

Chapter 63

THERE WERE METAL flicks of weapon safeties being released and then a slightly louder one as Oakley turned the lock.

The door made a loud creaking groan as it swung in. We stared over the barrels of our weapons into an unlit concrete-lined corridor.

“Mom always said if I played my cards right, I’d make it to Fifth Avenue,” Oakley whispered as he flipped down his night goggles and stepped into darkness behind his MP5.

When I turned down my goggles, the lightless tunnel went to an eerie lime green. Twenty feet in, we had to duck under a thick bank of rusting iron cable ducts. Another thirty feet after that, we passed along a teakettle-hot steam pipe that was as big as the side of a gasoline truck.

The grade of the tunnel took a sharp pitch downward, and we arrived at a long set of spiraling iron stairs also heading down.

“I always wondered what they spent the second collection on,” Oakley said as he descended. “Anybody who spots a dude with horns and a pitchfork has standing orders to squeeze until he hears a click.”

At the bottom of the two-story staircase was a riveted metal door with what looked like a steering wheel in its exact center. If I didn’t know better, I would have said we had somehow arrived at the engine room of a ship.

The door moved inward as if it were on oiled hinges when Oakley put his hand to it. Suddenly, we were in a small, odd concrete room. It was a church, with painful-looking concrete pews and a cement altar. The only thing not made of concrete was the crucifix that had been fashioned of a dull gray metal that might have been lead. To the right of the crucifix was an iron ladder heading up into a kind of chimney in the ceiling.

Oakley motioned for silence as we moved toward the ladder.

The vertical passage was about two stories high, like some strange silo built underground. I don’t know if they trained in ladder racing at the FBI, but if there was an Olympic event, the Hostage Rescue guys would have gotten the gold.

From the bottom of the ladder, I could make out another steering wheel opener at the roof of the chimney above the commandos’ heads.

Then I saw it spin with a screech.

A few seconds later, I couldn’t see anything because a circle of light burned down from above, and I was blinded-blind and then deaf as the world around me shattered with the crackle of gunfire.

Jack was onto us.