The Chimera Secret

64

Ethan eased his way to the ventilation gratings of the living quarters and peered through the gaps. The dim light in the room and the awkward angle made it hard to see much, but he was almost certain that the room was empty.

He checked his watch. Three minutes. And then he heard the gunshots start.

Even in the confined spaces of the facility he still recognized the sound of M-16s and the shouts of men at war. Suddenly he realized why Proctor, Dana and Lopez had been taken out of the room.

Ethan crawled over the false ceiling, careful to stay on the girders until he reached a panel roughly over the center of the room. He reached down and prised the panel upward enough to get his fingers underneath it before hauling it to one side and dropping down into the room.

For a brief moment he considered the possibility that Lopez had figured a way out of the room much as he had, but then he saw the door sitting slightly ajar, a thin strip of light from the corridor beyond slicing into the darkness.

Ethan sprinted toward the control center and almost immediately ran into Jenkins. The soldier was down on one knee, firing wildly at the mine entrance. Ethan rushed up behind him just as Jenkins heard his approach and whirled in shock.

‘Warner, no!’

Ethan grabbed the barrel of the M-16 with one hand as he drove his left boot with tremendous force into Jenkins’s face. The soldier’s head snapped backward with a savage motion as his hands went into spasm and released his rifle. Jenkins sprawled onto his back on the floor as Ethan yanked the M16 from his weakened grasp and aimed down at him.

‘Where’s Lopez and the others?’ he demanded.

‘Proctor’s dead and so is Dana!’ Jenkins spat from his bloodied mouth. ‘Lopez stole the hard drive from Klein and then locked herself in the crematorium!’

Ethan felt a sudden chill flush through him and looked instinctively again at his watch.

Thirty seconds.

‘Oh no.’

Jenkins looked up at him and then his face went pale. ‘What have you done?’

Ethan turned away to run back toward the living quarters, but Jenkins leapt to his feet and grabbed Ethan by the throat and hauled him sideways into the wall.

‘How did you get out of the store room?’ Jenkins screamed, wrapping his arms around Ethan’s throat and squeezing hard.

Ethan felt his throat collapse and his eyes bulge as Jenkins locked his arms into place and strained with the effort of trying to kill him. He reached up and grabbed the soldier’s arms but he had too good a hold of Ethan’s neck, locked rigidly into place and driven by what Ethan could only guess was an insanity of panic: Ethan could hardly tell him how to escape when he was being throttled to death.

Ethan leaned forward, forcing Jenkins’s feet off the ground. His vision began to star as his brain was starved of oxygen but Ethan kept his panic under control. Instead, balancing with Jenkins locked around his throat, Ethan moved his right leg and hooked it behind Jenkins’s own flailing leg, pinning it in place.

In that instant, as the shift in weight proved too much for Ethan to hold and he felt himself topple to the right beneath Jenkins’s weight, Ethan twisted to his right and hurled himself off the ground as though leaping backward out of an aircraft, just as he had done many times before in the corps.

Ethan rolled in midair with Jenkins on his back as they fell, and then they hit the ground hard. Ethan’s full body-weight smashed down on top of Jenkins, the back of his head cracking across the younger man’s jaw and smashing it sideways. The massive impact crunched down on the soldier’s chest and ribs, crushing his lungs and forcing the air from them in a blast that puffed past Ethan’s ears.

Jenkins’s arms fell aside from Ethan’s throat as the winded, injured man sagged beneath him. Ethan rolled off to one side and scrambled to his feet. He had made a single pace when he heard the voice behind him.

‘Stay where you are.’

Ethan turned, and saw that Klein had managed to force the mine entrance door closed once more. Kurt Agry stood with a pistol pointed at Ethan’s chest.