Extinction, page 19
The cool air flowing through the tunnel suddenly turned colder, as if they’d passed through a thermal layer. Holder, ahead, paused as his beam illuminated a flat wall of rock: the tunnel had come to a T. Colcord, consulting his phone, pointed to the left. They turned the corner and came across an abandoned ore cart, lying on its side, and beyond that, a wooden platform on the ground with a square hole cut in it, with a rotting superstructure above made of wooden beams. Holder paused and stepped on the wood, which groaned ominously. He took another step and shined the light down into a void so deep, and so terrifying, that the bottom couldn’t be seen.
There was no way to proceed except across the wooden platform, which was sagging and rotten. It was also covered with a thick layer of dust, with no evidence of any recent passage.
Cash signaled to turn and go the other way.
A moment later, they had passed the T. The tunnel began sloping downward, and the ground was scattered with old mining trash—a rotting coil of rope, rusting chewing tobacco tins, a broken pick, an earthen whiskey jug. The air began to feel closer and stale, more humid, with less oxygen. And there was a swampy, gassy smell.
The shaft divided, and Cash signaled Colcord she wanted to look at the map. They consulted it together, staring at the little rectangle of light that was the cell phone. The tunnel divided again and then entered the former ore body, where it expanded greatly into a series of barnlike spaces, separated by narrow tunnels, with many deep shafts and lots of little tunnels going every which way.
Cash pointed to the right, and they continued, the tunnel ceiling lowering to the point where they had to stoop. They inched past another vertical shaft, with a stream of foul air rising from it, and then came to a large open area.
It was like a giant black void, so high that even the powerful beams of the TC1200s could barely reach the top. They paused at the threshold, sweeping the beams around. There had been a cave-in on the far wall, a pile of rock tumbled out from a gap in the roof. More trash lay about—old wooden packing cases, piles of rusted cans, broken bottles, several more ore carts and some warped ore rails, and an old boiler. Rocks lay strewn about, many evidently having fallen from the roof. Cash examined the floor but could still see no marks or signs of any recent occupation.
She gestured for them to keep going, pointing toward a small doorway, shored by heavy creosote-treated beams, at the far side, which the map indicated led to a complicated series of tunnels. They moved across the open area, picking their way among the detritus and rocks. Halfway across, Cash halted, her flashlight beam illuminating a small patch of sand. Imprinted on the sand was the clear impression of an athletic shoe sole—fresh. Nikes?
She pointed, and they gathered around it in silence. She took out her phone and snapped pictures from several angles. She would send them to Romanski; he could identify the brand. An unsettling feeling crept down her spine: they were finally on the right track; someone had recently been in the mine, most likely the killers. This was an important breakthrough in the case. She would come back in force and sweep the mines.
They passed through the doorway, and now the warren of tunnels began in earnest, as the miners of old had chiseled and blasted ore from wherever the seams went in the rock. She examined the ground closely, but she could see no indications of anyone passing through. She checked her watch—two o’clock. They would go only another half hour and then turn around.
She picked the most accessible tunnel, and they headed down it. It curved left and right. They had to edge around a terrifying deep shaft, covered with rotten wood platforms. At one point, Holder dislodged a piece of wood, and it fell into the void. There was a long period of silence and then the sound of the crash echoed up, eerie and distorted. There were so many branching corridors and so many turns that Cash became concerned about finding their way out. She touched Colcord and whispered, “You keeping track of where we are?”
He nodded and gave her a thumbs-up.
According to the map, they were approaching another large chamber. Abruptly, Holder halted and held up his hand. He made a signal for them to hood their flashlights.
In the sudden darkness, they listened. Amid the distant sound of dripping water and an intermittent creaking, Cash could hear something: the low, rhythmic beating of a drum at the edge of audibility.
She touched Colcord and leaned over to whisper, “We need to leave.”
He nodded and they turned around. She gestured for them to dim down to five lumens on their flashlights. Her heart was pounding. She wanted to get out of there. They had definitely found them. Now was the time to retreat and come back in force.
Colcord led the way, consulting his phone, the glow from it illuminating his face in a bluish wash. Johnson, taking up the rear, suddenly stopped and made a sign, pointing back, and then indicated they were to extinguish their lights.
They did so and were enveloped in darkness.
Cash strained to listen, but the sound of the beating drum had either stopped or they were now too far away. The absolute darkness frightened her, and she struggled to stay calm.
Suddenly, in the blackness, a light flared, moving swiftly, and then disappeared. No one reacted; no one said a word. Cash blinked, seeing a streak left in her retina from the moving light. She heard a rustle of fabric and the faint clink of metal, and she realized Holder was unshouldering his weapon.
They needed to get out as fast as possible. But even as she thought that, there was another flare of light, like a firefly streaking in the darkness, and it came not from behind them but from in front.
37
This was the part of moviemaking that Doyle loved the most: the explosions. As a kid growing up in County Clare, Ireland, he’d learned how to make gunpowder using common household ingredients: potassium nitrate from a product called Stump Remover, charcoal from charcoal briquettes, and sulfur sold in garden stores as a fertilizer. He’d grind the three ingredients separately into fine power using a mortar and pestle, mix them together with water, dry the mixture, and corn it, or break it up into kernels of gunpowder. He made explosive sticks by packing it into tubes, sticking in a fuse, and capping it with plaster.
And then he would hike far out into the Burren and blow something up. He started with discarded crates and barrels but then quickly graduated to such things as a derelict chicken coop, an icebox, an abandoned car. There were ruins out there in those desolate lands, old failed farms, that offered lots of good things to blow up. He financed his pyrotechnics habit by charging kids in the neighborhood a shilling to watch. Before he was caught and punished, he’d earned over fifty pounds.
Now, he made millions blowing things up. Doyle took great pride in the gigantic explosions in his films; it was his directorial signature. The critics called it puerile and fatuous, but they didn’t get how much young audiences loved a big bang—and the proof was in the box office receipts. CGI just didn’t cut it—it was too fake, too fluttery, too goosed, and it lacked the authenticity of an actual, fiery, incredibly loud and gloriously destructive blast.
He admired once again the train they were going to blow up tomorrow. It was life-size—no sissy scale model. It was a work of art, sculpted from giant blocks of Styrofoam that had been shaped and rasped, painted and fauxed, to reproduce, in incredible detail, a classic Old West narrow-gauge steam locomotive with a funnel and cowcatcher, four cars, and a caboose. It had cost over a million dollars to build, and he would have one shot at blowing it up. That was one of the challenges of real pyrotechnics—you didn’t get a second take.
For two days, they had been setting up the gigantic pyrotechnics scene, the linchpin of act 3, in which the bad guys blow up a train. Doyle had hired the most expensive pyrotechnics guy in Hollywood, Jack Adair, to do it. The train had been built on a section of track outside the movie town, against a breathtaking backdrop of mountains. Adair was busy wiring it with real dynamite, to get the concussive effect Doyle wanted, which would be enhanced with spectacular incendiaries and squibs, including large hidden balloons filled with propane that would create giant balls of fire upon ignition. It had taken a ton of testing and all kinds of safety reviews and standby firefighting and safety equipment to get to this point. One of the things about explosive F/X in films is that once they’re set up, they have to be blown up as soon as possible. You can’t keep an explosively wired set hanging around for days—once it’s ready to go, you’ve got twenty-four hours at most to detonate it, or you have to start all over again.
In this case, the detonation was scheduled for two p.m. tomorrow.
Doyle loved the challenge. He’d worked with Adair on half a dozen films, and together, they’d blown up everything from castles to spaceships to intricate models of entire cities and even planets. He watched approvingly as Adair and his crew moved about the fake train, measuring things, marking out areas with stakes, laying down wires, and setting up secondaries. It was a science, with every little thing planned in advance so that when the explosion occurred, there were no surprises, nothing unrealistic or fake-looking.
Doyle saw Ballou come out of his honey wagon, and he hoped he wouldn’t come over to chat—but of course he did.
“Going to be quite a show tomorrow, hey?” Ballou said. He was all duded up in his hat and leather pants, wearing six-guns no less, even though he had no scene that day. Method acting.
“Yes, it’ll be a big one,” said Doyle pleasantly. “I hope you’ll be here to see it.” He actually hoped not.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Ballou, lighting up a cigarette and blowing out a long stream of smoke. “Not for the world. And that’s a beautiful train—you’d hardly know it was just a pile of cheap Styrofoam.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I almost hate to see it blown up.”
“When it goes up, it’ll be spectacular.”
Ballou nodded. “I’ve got a good feeling about this film, Slavomir. I think it’s going to be a terrific hit.”
Doyle flushed at the praise. Ballou was a pain in the ass, but he could also be charming when he wanted to. “Thank you, Brock,” he said. “And I’m delighted you’re starring in this film. It’s going to make all the difference. Your name is going to hoover in the audiences.”
Ballou nodded, taking another drag. “Yes, that’s true. Too bad the script is so weak.”
Okay, thought Doyle, segue back to asshole Ballou. What he meant by a weak script was that he wasn’t in every. single. scene, something he’d been complaining about since the beginning. They’d worked on it, written him into a couple of scenes where it made no sense—his appearances would end up on the cutting room floor anyway—but Ballou never seemed to be satisfied.
“Two o’clock tomorrow, right?” said Ballou. “It go boom.”
“Right.”
Ballou winked and turned, heading back to his trailer. Doyle watched him saunter off with his John Wayne swagger. He was basically just an insecure, overgrown kid, a lucky bastard born with killer looks, a gorgeous deep voice, and a modicum of acting talent.
It go boom. It certainly would. Adair was utilizing a hundred pounds of real dynamite to create a shock wave and percussive effect that would literally shake the ground and the cameras, no need to Foley anything. This was going to be the best explosion of his moviemaking career. He could hardly wait for tomorrow at two p.m.
38
After the flash of light vanished, they were again enveloped in blackness. Cash carefully felt down to her holster, unsnapped the keeper, and eased out the Glock. She waited in the tense darkness with her hand on the slide, ready to rack in a round. The killers were playing with them, trying to spook them. Well, they wouldn’t be spooked.
The silence engulfed them as they waited—waiting for her to lead, she realized. It was clear they needed to get the hell out; they were in an unknown environment, facing an unknown number of enemies who were carrying unknown weapons.
“Okay,” said Cash in a low murmur. “We’re gonna move fast. Colcord, you navigate, calling directions to Holder in front. Johnson, you cover us from the rear. Stop, look, and clear every turn. Fire at will. No point in silence—they know where we are. On my signal, flashlights on full lumens and we move.” She paused, listening and waiting. She had a terrible feeling that they were being set up and that the longer they waited, the more time the other side had to surround them.
“Now,” she said.
The flashlights sprang on, and ahead she saw the scramble of dark shapes, vanishing from the beam.
“Straight ahead, and then left at the T,” said Colcord, phone in hand.
They started forward at a jog, the flashlight beams bobbing as they moved. At the T, Holder paused at the corner and then spun around, flashlight and rifle pointing ahead.
“Clear,” he said.
They continued, moving fast, Colcord calling out the directions and Holder pausing at each turn and fork to check the way ahead. Cash wondered where the figures shadowing them had gone—had they retreated? If they only had hand weapons, it would be madness to engage in a firefight with two guards carrying assault rifles. Or so she hoped.
“At the branch, take the middle passage,” Colcord said as they made progress retracing the crazy warren of tunnels, passageways, holes, and channels.
Suddenly, a sound filled the tunnel, loud and distorted: mocking laughter, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Holder halted, shining the light up and down, back and forth, evidently searching for the source of the sound.
“Ignore it,” said Cash sharply. “Just keep going.”
Another burst of laughter erupted around them, freakishly close, and it continued to echo and roll about through the spaces after it ceased.
“What the fuck?” Holder crouched instinctively, swinging his rifle around with the light. They were in a space with a dozen or more cracks and channels going off in different directions, and it seemed to Cash their pursuers were using these channels for sound propagation.
“Keep going,” said Cash. “It’s just a cheap trick.”
A sudden, deafening burst of gunfire erupted from Johnson, in the rear, as he fired his weapon on full automatic, the rounds stitching across the roof of the tunnel, triggering a shower of rock. They all instinctively dropped to the ground. For a moment, Cash wondered what the hell had gotten into Johnson—until she saw, as he fell backward, that a small spear had gone right through his neck, from one side to the other. His rifle ceased firing and clattered to the ground as he landed on his back and writhed, silently clutching and scrabbling at the imbedded spear, blood gushing out.
Holder rushed back to his fallen partner and knelt in front of him, firing three-round bursts into every dark hole and crack from which the spear might have come—resulting in more mocking laughter surrounding them. A second spear came flashing out of the darkness, striking off Holder’s body armor. He pivoted and fired in the direction it came from.
They had been ambushed in a really tight place. “Holder!” she yelled. “Help me grab Johnson—take his other arm. Colcord, get his weapon and cover us as you lead us out.”
Colcord shoved his Beretta back in its holster and grabbed the AR-15, sliding the strap off the body and over his shoulder, holding his smartphone in his left hand.
Cash wrapped her arm around Johnson’s shoulder and Holder took the other, and they began dragging him down the tunnel. She could see he was a goner, nobody could survive a wound like that, but no way was she going to leave his body to these monsters if she could help it. Johnson was heavy, weighed down by his body armor and pack.
Now the air was filled with a kind of chanting, like what she’d heard on the tape. It was strange, distorted, resonant.
“Left up ahead,” said Colcord.
Dragging the body, she and Holder took the left. Holder held his flashlight in one hand, aiming it behind them, the beam wobbling. Cash saw several flashes of torches among the side tunnels and channels, and she could smell burning grass and moss.
Holder gave a yell and dropped Johnson’s arm, lowering his weapon and firing into the darkness behind. He’d been hit with a spear, which flew out of the darkness and struck his shoulder just above the body armor with a loud smacking sound and penetrating right through the clavicle and shoulder blade, coming out the other side.
Colcord fired a short burst in the direction from which the spear had come, and Cash fired several rounds into the darkness behind them. But it was stupid to be shooting into the dark, without even muzzle flashes to aim for.
There was no way Holder could continue pulling Johnson’s body with the wound he had just received. Colcord had to navigate and cover them. She alone was left to pull Johnson along, struggling to drag his body, but the man was heavy. She took out her knife and cut off his pack and tried hauling him again, but still it was not going to work. Holder tried to help, grabbing an arm with his other one, took a few steps, and fell to his knees.
“Leave the body,” said Colcord. “We gotta keep going.”
“No,” Holder said, staggering with his hand on the end of the spear sticking from the top of his shoulder, blood pouring down. “You go on. I’m gonna make a stand.”
“That’s flat-out suicide,” said Cash. “Johnson’s gone.”
Holder tried to stand and managed to get to his feet but was having trouble remaining upright. Blood was pouring out of his shoulder, more than she ever thought possible from a shoulder wound, and she realized the spear, in going through the clavicle, must have struck an artery.
“Press your hand to the wound,” said Cash. “I’ll support you. Don’t pull that thing out.”
He followed her instructions, pressing on the wound with the spear sticking out between his fingers. She wrapped her arm around his good shoulder, keeping him steady. “Okay, let’s go.”
