The Storm

CHAPTER 29

KURT AUSTIN HELD THE AWKWARD POSITION HE’D LANDED in as long as he possibly could. Even after the vehicles drove off, even after the rumbling of their engines had faded and he was left with only the sound of flies buzzing in the dark, he remained still.

They zipped here and there, settled for a moment and then buzzed around again. Even when they landed on him and crawled on his face, Kurt did all he could not to flinch in case someone was watching. But eventually he had to move.

With a glance up to the circular opening high above, he slid one arm to the side, rolled over slowly and then propped himself up. From there he managed a sitting position and eased back until he was leaning against the wall. Every movement brought new levels of pain, and once he’d settled against the wall he decided to stay there for a minute or two.

He checked his leg. Something hit it during the shooting, but he found no bullet hole and figured it was a piece of the wall blasted off when a shell ricocheted. His shoulder hurt like crazy, but it seemed to move okay.

He reached over and checked Joe, shaking him gently.

Joe opened his eyes halfway like a man coming out of a deep sleep. He moved a few inches, grunted and generally appeared confused. Looking around at their surroundings didn’t seem to bring any clarity.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“You don’t remember?”

“Last I remember, we were being dragged by a truck,” he said.

“That was the high point of our journey,” Kurt said, looking up. “Literally.”

Joe forced himself to sit up, an act that seemed to cause as much pain for him as it had for Kurt.

“Are we dead?” Joe asked. “’Cause if not, this is the worst I’ve ever felt while still alive.”

Kurt shook his head. “We’re alive all right, at least for now. We’re just stuck at the bottom of a well without a rope or a ladder or any other way out.”

“That’s good,” Joe said. “For a second I thought we were in trouble.”

Kurt looked around, taking note of the other bodies in the sand. Two of them seemed to have been there for a while. The stench emanating from them was horrendous, almost enough to make him gag. The third was the guy he’d shoved over the edge just prior to being tossed in himself. A large gash split the man’s forehead. His neck was bent at a grotesque angle. He wasn’t moving.

Kurt was surprised to be alive. “I guess the sloping pile of sand and dropping feet first helped. It looks like this guy hit his head.”

“Plus we dropped from a little lower,” Joe said. “Or, at least, I did. What about those other two?”

“No idea,” Kurt said, looking at the bodies half covered with flies. “Must have made the boss angry.”

“If we ever leave NUMA,” Joe said, “remind me not to work for an egomaniacal dictator, madman or other type of thug. They don’t seem to have adequate channels for working out grievances.”

Kurt laughed, and it felt like he was being stabbed. “Oh, that hurts,” he said, trying to stop. “No more jokes.”

He looked up at the narrow opening above. A small circle of blazing orange sky lay beyond.

“We’ve got to figure a way out of here or we’ll be next on the flies’ menu. Think you can stand?”

Joe stretched his legs. “My ankle is pretty stiff,” he said. “But I think I’ll be all right.”

Using the wall for balance, Kurt got to his feet. He felt light-headed for a second, but it cleared quickly. He offered a hand and helped Joe up. In the five-foot-wide circle of the well they stretched and flexed their legs.

It seemed like the well had been dug in sections. The top part was lined with adobe bricks to a depth of about twenty feet. Below that it was raw dirt all the way down.

“Think we can climb out?” Joe asked.

Kurt put his hand on a protruding stone and put some weight on it to test its strength. It crumbled in a disappointing shower of dust and rubble.

“Nope.”

“Maybe we can wedge ourselves up?” Joe said. “Use our hands and feet and sort of force ourselves upward.”

Kurt stretched his arms out. He could just barely touch both walls. “We’ll never generate enough force to go up like that.”

He looked around. In addition to the three bodies, the well seemed to be a repository of junk and trash. Tin cans, plastic bottles, even a thin bald tire sat piled and strewn about. Small bones were everywhere. Kurt guessed they were from animals that had fallen in or someone’s dinner tossed down here when they were finished with the edible parts.

Kurt looked at the tire, then at the walls, then at the dead men.

“I have an idea,” he said.

He searched the thug he’d shoved over the edge, pulling a knife, a Luger-style pistol and a set of compact binoculars from the man’s kit.

He found a canteen on his belt. It was three-quarters empty. He took a swig, no more than a mouthful really, and handed it to Joe.

“To your health.”

Joe drank the other mouthful as Kurt pushed the junk aside and dug the old tire out of the sand.

“Tidying up?” Joe asked.

“Very funny.”

He dropped down beside the other dead men, holding his breath and sending the flies swarming. He untied the rope that bound them together. “We’re gonna need this.”

“Don’t suppose they have a grappling hook on them?”

“No,” Kurt said. “But we don’t need one.”

He piled the bodies up in the center of the well, stacking them one on top of the other.

“Sit down,” Kurt said.

“On the dead guys?”

“I put the fresh guy on top,” Kurt said.

Joe hesitated.

“They’re dead,” Kurt said. “What do they care?”

Finally Joe sat down. Kurt lifted the narrow tire and set it vertically against Joe’s back like he was hanging a wreath. Next he sat down with his back to the tire and to Joe.

“Put your feet on the wall and push.”

As Joe complied, Kurt felt the rubber tire pressing into his back. He put his own feet against the wall on his side and pushed. He felt the tire between them compress slightly. He felt plenty of pressure on his back and feet, pressure that would allow them to wedge themselves up the shaft of the well, and he still had six to eight inches of flex in his knees.

“Flex those abs, and let’s see if we can do this,” he said.

As Joe flexed and pressed harder, Kurt did the same. He felt the pressure in his back, both upper and lower, where the tire was being pressed into him. With a minimum of effort, they rose up off the pile of dead men.

“This might actually work,” Joe said.

“You, then me,” Kurt told him. “One foot at a time.”

The first time Joe moved his foot they almost fell, tipping to one side. They steadied themselves, and Kurt pressed hard with his left foot and forced them upward about nine inches. He quickly moved his right foot to a new position.

Joe’s next move was steadier, and soon they were inching their way up, making steady if unspectacular progress.

“I forgot to tell you,” Joe said, grunting with the effort but apparently unable to keep himself from talking, “before we got bounced in that drafting room I saw a chart with currents and such. It covered the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and half of the Indian Ocean.”

He and Kurt pushed off in unison, raised themselves six inches and repositioned their feet one at a time.

“Anything unusual on it?” Kurt asked, his own words sounding strained as they came out through a clenched diaphragm.

“Didn’t … exactly … have time to study it,” Joe said. “But it makes me … wonder about something.”

They moved again.

“What?” Kurt asked, keeping his responses short.

“If Jinn’s using his little beasties … to erode some dam … why did we … find them in the Indian Ocean … a thousand miles from land?”

Kurt allowed a portion of his mind to consider the question, keeping most of his concentration on the task at hand. “Good question,” he said. “Dams block rivers … Rivers run to the sea … Maybe the little bots were swept down to the ocean accidentally, after all.”

He tried to think of dams that emptied into the Indian Ocean or the Persian Gulf, but nothing major came to mind.

They paused with their legs in a semilocked position.

“Either way,” Kurt added, “we’ve got to get out of here. Whatever this lunatic’s goals are, they’re not good for anyone but him.”

By this point they’d reached the second section. The joking and laughing stopped because the climb was getting harder.

Kurt felt his back and abs and legs beginning to burn. He gritted his teeth and kept moving.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Joe grunted. “Wouldn’t want to start over, though.”

Kurt looked down. His foot slipped a fraction, but he caught it by locking his knee and wedging his heal. He could see his leg quivering and feel his calf cramping up.

“Five more feet,” he said, breathing hard. “Then part two of the plan … can be activated.”

“What if the bad guys are still up there?” Joe asked.

“I haven’t heard a sound since the cars drove off.”

“And if they left a guard?”

“That’s what the gun is for.”

They pushed up another foot, and Kurt’s face was bathed in the late-afternoon sunlight.

A foot from the top the well’s mouth caught a strange sound: a high-pitched whistling that echoed off the adobe walls.

“Do you hear that?” Joe asked.

“Trying to place it,” Kurt said.

The whistling grew louder with each passing second, and then, directly above them, a giant shadow passed. Kurt saw the belly of a large gray-and-white aircraft race overhead, flaps and slats fanned out like feathers, its six-wheeled main undercarriage stretched forth like an eagle’s claws grasping for a branch to land on.

“What was that?” Joe said.

“Jet of some kind,” Kurt said.

It couldn’t have been at more than a hundred feet as it flashed above the mouth of the well. The view lasted only a second or two, but in that brief instant Kurt realized there was something odd about its shape.

“Didn’t realize we were at the end of the runway,” Joe said. “I’d hate to pop out at the wrong moment and get run over by a 747.”

Stifling the laughter that tried to bubble up, Kurt pushed harder until they were just below the lip of the well.

He could feel the buildup of lactic acid growing in his calves and thighs, and though he was in little danger of having them cramp or give out, he felt they needed to hurry. His abs burned from keeping his back pressed hard into the tire. It felt like he’d done a hundred crunches with a fifteen-pound medicine ball clutched to his chest.

He pulled the 9mm pistol from his pocket and switched off the safety.

“Easy, now,” he whispered.

Joe adjusted his feet. Kurt went next, and they slowly moved up through the last six inches. Kurt raised the gun and stretched his neck so he could just peer over the edge. He saw no one guarding the well.

“Clear,” he said.

“Clear on this side,” Joe said. “Now what?”

Kurt tossed the gun over the edge and drew the rope out from beneath his shirt. He passed it through his hands until he had the length he needed.

With one hand on each end of the rope he let out a half loop approximately four feet in length. With a flip of the wrist and an extension of his arms he sent a wave of energy through the rope. The middle sailed out away from him in a big U shape and dropped over the top of one A-frame neat as could be.

Kurt slid it taut and pulled it downward so it wouldn’t ride up the metal bars.

Making sure not to twist, he passed one end of the rope back to Joe. “Hold on to that with both hands and hold on tight.”

Kurt pulled his section taut and wrapped a loop under his arm, around his triceps and then around his hand twice. Joe followed suit.

“You holding that rope tight?”

“Like it’s a winning lottery ticket,” Joe said.

“Good,” Kurt replied, “because you know what’s going to happen once we give our poor legs a rest, right?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Like everything else connected with you, it’s going to be painful.”

“No pain, no gain,” Kurt said. “This time the gain is our freedom. Ready?”

“Ready.”

Kurt tensed his arms, locking them in place.

“Three … two … one … go!”

At almost the same instant both men pulled on the rope and relaxed their legs and abs. The rope snapped taut around the A-frame. The tire fell from between them and they swung forward, slamming into the wall and dangling there a few feet below the top.

The tire hit bottom with a noisy clunk, but Kurt and Joe held on tight high above it.

“We have to do this part at the same time,” Kurt said, “otherwise someone’s going back down.”

They pulled themselves up side by side, arm over arm, until they were able to grasp the metal of the A-frame. It burned their hands as it had Kurt’s earlier, but they held on, pulled themselves up and clambered over the low wall.

Kurt hit the sand face-first and was damn glad of it. Joe crashed down beside him.

Breathing hard and resting for a moment, Kurt could feel his legs shaking. It seemed like they’d been in that well for days. He looked to his wrist. His watch was still with the guard in Malé.

He held a hand toward the setting sun.

“What are you doing?” Joe asked.

“Trying to make a sundial.” He gave up. “What time do you have?”

“Six forty-five,” Joe announced. “It must be a new record. Left for dead and back to the action in less than an hour.”

Another jet approaching began to whistle across the desert as they sat there, catching their breath. It came in on the same path, dropping closer and growing louder as it neared.

Out of natural fugitive instinct, both men hunkered down and pressed themselves against the low wall of the well.

They needn’t have bothered. A jet aircraft on final approach at one hundred and fifty knots required the pilot’s eyes to be well ahead of the plane and focused on the landing zone. The chances of a pilot allowing his attention to be drawn to irrelevant objects on the ground was slim to none.

Then again, there was no accounting for passengers.

The jet roared over the top of them just as the first one had, a little higher this time. Kurt noticed the same odd features: a weirdly shaped underbelly, two big engines set high above the fuselage near the tail, a thick boxy wing section. It looked something like a DC-9 or a Super 80 or a Gulfstream G5 on steroids and put together with the wrong instruction booklet and a bunch of extra parts.

“Same type,” Kurt said. “Looks Russian to me.”

“It does,” Joe agreed. “Might even be the same plane making another pass.”

The gray-and-white jet dropped lower and lower, sinking toward the ground as if it were headed in for a landing. They lost it behind a sand dune before they heard it touch down.

The sound of its engines faded for a moment and then a deep howl rose up, booming across the desert for fifteen seconds or so before dissipating.

“Sound like thrust reversers to you?”

“Yep,” Joe said. “I guess the eagle has landed.”

“I think we just found our escape route,” Kurt said.

Joe looked at him sideways.

“None of the satellite photos showed any aircraft parked out here,” Kurt explained, “which means that plane isn’t going to sit around baking in the desert sun all day. It’s going to drop off whatever cargo it’s bringing in and then turn and burn at some point before sunup.”

“Sure,” Joe said. “But that’s not Terminal One at Dulles over there. We can’t just walk up to the counter and buy a ticket.”

“No,” Kurt said, “but we can sneak in under cover of darkness. They can’t possibly be expecting us.”

“That’s because we’d be crazy to attempt what you’re suggesting.”

“We have no water,” Kurt said. “No GPS. And no idea how to find the VV without it. So unless you want to go wandering through the desert trusting in dumb luck, we have to go back into the lion’s den.”

Joe appeared conflicted, though he seemed to be coming around. “You’re confusing me with these animal metaphors,” he said. “I thought it was a rabbit hole?”

“It changed when we got caught,” Kurt said. “These guys are a lot tougher than any rabbit.”

“Except for the one in that Monty Python movie,” Joe said.

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

“That’s the one.”

“Right,” Kurt said, remembering the movie and trying not to laugh since it hurt his ribs and parched throat.

“The way I see it, we have a choice,” he said. “We can either run away like Sir Robin. Or we can sneak back into their base and tuck ourselves into a hidden corner on one of those jets and depart this land before we dehydrate to nothing more than dust and bone.”

Joe cleared his throat. “I am kind of thirsty.”

“So am I,” Kurt said.

Joe took a deep breath. He reached over, plucked the gun out of the sand and handed it to Kurt. “Lead on, Sir Knight,” he said. “Doubt we’re going to find the Holy Grail down there, but I’ll settle for a way out of here, or at least a well-stocked beverage stand.”