Читать книгу Shadow Box - James Axler - Страница 10

Pulled down by the weight around his ankle, Grant held his breath as he sank beneath the waves. He opened his eyes, feeling the salty sting of the ocean press against them as he plummeted from the surface. Beneath him, the rider and the motorcycle were sinking rapidly, and the rider still clung to the length of chain that was wrapped around Grant’s ankle. The ex-Mag fought for a moment, trying to swim away from his sinking adversary, but the chain was cinched tight and he would have to disentangle himself before he could escape.

Grant looked back down the length of his body, watching the darkness of the ocean envelop the bike and its rider. He discarded the Heckler & Koch, letting it drift away from him on the current as he twisted his body in an effort to reach for his trapped ankle.

The darkness was closing around him now, and his chest was starting to yearn to take its next breath. Soon it would be hard to see the chain.

As he scrambled over himself, plunging his arms toward his weighted foot, Grant felt something slam his body beneath the water, as though he had hit a solid wall. He was thrown about in the ocean depths, spun and shunted, as the wall of pressure hit him. Light followed by darkness, then light again, his breath blurting from his mouth in a rush of bubbles, and suddenly Grant could no longer tell which way was up.

Beneath him, or at least at the end of his foot, the rider clung to the chain as his motorcycle was wrenched from under him, and Grant watched in astonishment as the heavy two-wheeler seemed to dance around then disappear over his head.

Suddenly another wall of pressure collided with Grant’s body, and he seemed to pirouette in the dark waters of the Pacific. He felt something pull at his foot as he was tossed around, and suddenly his assailant’s face rushed before his eyes before spinning away.

THE MAN IN THE bandanna and goggles was about to pull the trigger of his Beretta when the first tremor hit, shaking the ground violently and throwing Brigid and her prisoner into a staggering, graceless dance.

Brigid heard the gun blast, watched the bullet speed over her head as she toppled over, releasing her headlock grip on Tom Carnack. A moment later, the dirt track of the ground was rushing toward her face and she thrust her hands forward, still clutching the TP-9, and braced for impact.

When Brigid let go, Tom Carnack found his feet wrenched from under him and suddenly he was in the air, sailing across the width of the street. His brief flight was cut short as his frame slammed against the side of one of the makeshift huts, knocking a thin, plywood wall into splinters before he caught the structure’s metal support pole in midstomach. His breath spluttered out of him as the brigand leader sank to the floor inside the ruined little hut.

The gunman, meanwhile, found his bike and rider, Señor Smarts, dragged away beneath him, and the handlebars clapped into his pelvis, sending a wave of sudden agony through the top of both legs before flipping him to the ground. His jaw hit the dirt road with a resounding thud, making his ears ring once more.

The motorcycle still beneath him, Señor Smarts became tangled with the vehicle as it flipped over itself, again and again, sliding along the street as though at the top of a sharp incline. Smarts’s head cracked repeatedly into the ground as he was dragged backward.

Close by, at the entrance to the pier, Kane and the sword-wielding dancing girl were brought to their knees by the sudden shock. Kane reached forward, his left palm slapping into the wooden slats of the pier as he tried to halt his fall. Beside him, the dancing girl rolled forward, taking the brunt of the fall on her shoulder before turning to face him, still kneeling.

Kane saw the startled look in her eyes, and he was about to question her when a second tremor ran through the pier and he felt the ground shake where it touched his legs and steadying hand. Before his eyes, the dark-haired swordswoman toppled over and rolled down the pier. All around, people and loose items were being tossed about, and Kane heard the crash as several of the poorly constructed buildings collapsed.

Kane clawed the ground as it rumbled beneath him, throwing him onto his side. He lay there, facing the pier as the shock wave thundered through the ground. Abruptly, the pier beneath him disintegrated, and Kane reached frantically behind him to secure a grip on the ground as the whole structure crashed into the ocean, the dancing girl and a handful of fishermen dropping with it. As the pier fell, Kane saw the rising wave behind it, growing from twenty to a monstrous forty feet as he watched, rolling toward him with unstoppable force.

Kane braced himself as the wave crashed over him, the weight of water blocking out the sunlight for a moment before the surge of water crashed down and smothered the seafront buildings.

Kane’s grip was broken as the wave swelled all around him, and he found himself being shunted along the street before being pulled backward toward the ocean along with several dozen locals and their belongings as they were caught up in its ferocious torrent.

GRANT FOUND HIMSELF caught up in the immense wave as it crashed down on the buildings that lined the beach. It was like flying, the water streaming all around him, pushing him unstoppably onward as it tossed him high in the air. He gasped, gulping in air and seawater as he hurtled ever onward, and he saw the motorcycle and, separately, its rider, race away as they were caught up in other parts of the colossal wave.

Suddenly, the wave lost integrity and the ground was rushing beneath him, fifteen feet below. Grant looked ahead and saw sunlight glint off of the corrugated tin roof of one of the huts, and, quicker than he could acknowledge it, he was shoved into the roof and sent rolling over and over until the whole single-story structure collapsed in on itself.

BRIGID WATCHED AS, caught up in the huge wave, Grant’s familiar form sailed overhead and crashed into a wide hut a little way along the street. She held herself low to the ground as the tremor subsided, remaining there for a few seconds until she was certain that the shock wave had passed.

When she looked up again, she saw that the structure that Grant had hit had collapsed in on itself, and a number of the ramshackle buildings along the street were in a similar state of disrepair. Whatever had hit them had hit hard, like a heavy stone being dropped in a pond, the ripples spreading across its surface until its energy was finally spent.

Carefully, Brigid got back on her feet and, steadying her grip on the pistol with her free hand, checked the street. The motorcyclist who had pointed the gun at her head was nowhere to be seen, nor were his bike and passenger. Tom Carnack lay amid the rubble of a building that now stood on the beachfront, where a minute earlier it had been three buildings back. His eyes were closed, and blood was oozing from a wound around his hairline above the right eye.

The street itself was three inches deep in clear water, swells of foam bobbing along here and there as it ran back toward the ocean.

The pier was gone, and Brigid checked the faces of the shocked and wounded who were recovering all around, trying to locate Kane. Neither he nor his lithe opponent were to be seen, and Brigid tamped down the urge to rush to look for him. Grant was just down the street, and she needed to ensure that he was okay first. Plus, assuming he was all right, the two of them could cover more ground in the search for their teammate.

Still clutching the TP-9, Brigid jogged along the street, her boots splashing in the carpet of flowing water, until she reached the collapsed building that she had seen Grant thrown through. Her hearing was coming back now, after the colossal crashing of the huge wave had briefly deafened her, and she could hear screaming and crying coming from all around. The burned beggar was gone; he and his bowl had presumably been washed away. Children were running around in the street, a naked toddler wailing as he stumbled through the road, looking for a friendly face.

Brigid leaned down and scooped up the unclothed toddler, lifting him to shoulder height and looking to make sure that he wasn’t wounded. “There, there,” she told him quietly, “it’s okay now. It’s okay. Hush now.”

Carrying the child over one shoulder, Brigid kicked rubble aside and made her way into the remains of the collapsed hut. “Grant?” she called, raising her voice. “It’s Brigid. Are you here?”

She listened for a moment, watching the rubble for signs of her partner. Grant’s familiar voice came rumbling from across to the right, and Brigid saw the wreckage move and his hand appear above the mess. She rushed across the rubble, taking care not to trip as she balanced the toddler close to her chest, and leaned down to help shift the debris.

A moment later, Grant was struggling out of the shattered remains of the building, water pouring from his coat and his skin caked with pale dust. He wiped a hand over his face and smiled at Brigid. “What the freak just happened?” he asked her, a snarl replacing his smile.

Brigid shook her head, rocking the toddler in her arms. “I don’t know,” she told Grant. “Felt like maybe a bomb blast, but I didn’t hear the explosion. Earthquake maybe?”

“You think?” Grant asked.

Brigid shrugged. “The San Andreas Fault runs through here,” she speculated. “If you look at the old maps, you’ll see that it pretty much wiped out most of the West Coast a couple of centuries back, after the nukes fell.”

Grant nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll see if I can raise Lakesh and get some intel,” he told her. Then the huge ex-Mag looked around. “Where’s Kane?” he asked.

“He was on the pier when it dropped into the sea,” Brigid said, clambering over the rubble and back onto the waterlogged street.

Grant shook his head angrily as he followed her. “This day just keeps getting worse,” he growled. With that, he activated the Commtact that was embedded subcutaneously behind his right ear and patched through to Cerberus headquarters.

“This is Grant in the field, Lakesh, Donald? Are you guys receiving me?”

There was a brief pause and then Donald Bry’s friendly voice came to Grant, uplinked to a satellite from the operations room in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. “Hey, Grant, how are things? Mission accomplished?”

The Commtact units were top-of-the-line communication devices that had been discovered in a military installation called Redoubt Yankee several years before, and they had become standard equipment for the Cerberus field operatives. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded against the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the user’s skull casing. Theoretically, if a wearer went completely deaf he or she would still be capable of hearing, after a fashion, by using the Commtact.

Permanent usage of the Commtact would involve a minor surgical procedure, something many of the Cerberus staff were understandably reticent to submit to, and so their use had stalled, for the moment, at field-test stage. Besides radio communications, the Commtacts could be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of spoken foreign language on the proviso that sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks.

The Commtacts could be uplinked to the Keyhole satellite, allowing communication with the field teams, which was a considerable improvement on the original design parameters of the communications technology.

“Mission parameters may have changed,” Grant responded. “We think we were just hit by an earthquake. At least, we’re hoping it was an earthquake. You have any info at your end?”

“I’m bringing up the feed data now, Grant,” Bry’s voice came back crisply over the Commtact.

At the Cerberus redoubt in Montana, Donald Bry had access to a wealth of scrolling data from satellites and ground sensors. In his mind’s eye, Grant could almost see the man working to bring up all the available data and extrapolate a logical conclusion.

“No evidence of any aerial bombing raid, Grant, but it might be an underground test, of course,” Bry suggested after a moment’s thought.

“Of course,” Grant replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

Ahead of him, Brigid was standing at the edge of the damaged pier, looking over the side at the roiling waters below. People were rushing about, their clothes soaked through, desperately searching for their friends and families.

Bry’s voice piped over the Commtact once more. “Grant? I’m going to speak with Lakesh and Dr. Falk, see if they have any insights into the data we’re receiving. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Cool,” Grant replied laconically as the transmission ended.

Brigid was scanning the water, the toddler clambering over her shoulder, his face still red where he had been crying. “What did Cerberus say?” she asked, not bothering to turn to Grant.

“They’re not sure yet,” Grant told her as he took in the mass of frightened faces that bobbed in the water. “Bry says there’s no evidence of aerial bombing. Beyond that he’s as in the dark as we are.”

“Earthquake,” Brigid said. “I’ll bet you.”

The water poured between their feet as the Cerberus teammates scanned the water for their missing colleague. Parts of the pier bobbed about amid the people that had been caught up in the enormous wave; almost the whole structure had been reduced to worthless driftwood in the space of five seconds. A strut of the pier still stood at an angle, no longer connected to the shore. As Grant’s eyes brushed over it he spotted the familiar lean figure of Kane clambering up its leg and securing himself against it with one arm before reaching with his free hand into the water and pulling a woman up by the arm. He was fifty yards from them, surrounded by water.

Grant tapped Brigid on the shoulder and pointed to the figure. “Kane,” he stated.

“Got him.” She smiled. There was a special bond between Brigid Baptiste and Kane, something more fundamental than a mere emotional connection. They were anam-charas, soul friends destined to be together no matter what configuration they found themselves in, friends throughout eternity.

Still holding the TP-9, Brigid rubbed a reassuring hand over the toddler she was cradling over her left shoulder before she turned to face Grant. “Whatever happened, there’s a lot of hurt and frightened people out here, Grant,” she told him. “We need to start helping them, set up some kind of program for medical treatment.”

“What about the mission?” he asked, and then he checked himself. “No, skip it—you’re right. Let’s take the slope down to the beach and start hauling people out of the water.”

Brigid agreed and together they made their way to the waterfront, which was now littered with the debris that had just recently been a ville called Hope.

WITH ONE ARM stretched around the strut of the pier and his feet resting on the little ledge that surrounded its foot, Kane inhaled deep lungfuls of air before reaching back into the water. The dancing girl was bobbing a little way over from him, eyes closed, floating on her back. He stretched out and guided her to him, lifting her up onto the small sill of the strut. “You okay?” he asked as her eyes fluttered open and she spluttered for breath.

Her sword was long gone, but as soon as she saw him, her mouth broke into a snarl and she spun around, reaching for his face with hands formed into claws. As she did so, she began slipping from the ledge and Kane reached out to steady her. “Take it easy.” he told her. “Fight’s over.”

“What are you talking about, Magistrate man?” she spit as he held her firmly by the shoulder.

“Something hit us, I think,” he explained. “Whatever it was it’s done plenty of damage. Look.” He pointed to the coastal ville stretched out before them.

The dancing girl followed where he had indicated, and Kane heard her sharp intake of breath. The makeshift shanty structures of the settlement had been ripped apart by the tidal wave, and at least seventy percent of the ville had been reduced to rubble. From their vantage point they could see people running about like ants, desperately searching for missing loved ones.

“What happened?” the dark-haired woman asked, be wildered.

“I have no idea,” Kane admitted. “Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter right now. Some of these people will need help getting out of the water. Can you swim?”

“What?” she responded. “Saving people and their shit? Is this, like, the Magistrate code?”

“No,” Kane declared, fixing her with his no-nonsense stare. “It’s called being a fucking human being. Now, can you swim?”

She nodded, chastised.

Kane looked out at the people struggling all around them in the water. “You’re young and fit,” Kane told the dancing girl. “You get in there and you save some lives, you understand?”

She nodded once more and followed Kane as he dived into the churning waters.

TOM CARNACK WATCHED as the redhead and the dark-skinned Magistrate—or whatever he was—disappeared down the slope leading to the beach. He felt cold and nervous, on edge, and there was a pain below his ribs where he had collided with the metal strut.

Slowly, carefully he grasped the pole that had winded him and he pulled himself up to a standing position, albeit bent over like an elderly man. Teeth gritted, he winced as pain ran through his gut. He had to have taken quite a hit, though the memory was abating, already vague and insubstantial.

Carnack looked around, taking in his surroundings. He remembered that there had been a loud noise, and the world had turned upside down as he was tossed through the air before…He shook his head, trying to piece the episode together. He was standing in the collapsed ruin of a hut. He could make out the square of the floor plan, what looked like a two-room dwelling constructed of the flimsiest of materials. Sheets of plywood were split and splintered. They had doubtless formed the walls of the habitation before whatever it was had knocked them over. Was it him? Had he done this?

I have to get out of here, Carnack realized, his thoughts slow and fuzzy. His head ached, a low-level buzzing, like when he hadn’t had enough sleep, or sometimes when he’d had too much. He stood there, doubled over himself, his hand clinging to the metal pole that had once supported the roof of the hut, and he drew in a long, slow breath, feeling the clawing pain as his diaphragm moved. Whatever had just happened had given him an opportunity for escape, and Tom Carnack was one man who knew when to exploit an opportunity.

In a stumbling, lurching walk, Carnack made his way back into the ruins of Hope, disappearing among the frightened crowds.

THE SUN HAD SET and risen and set once more, and a half moon was rising in the clear sky at the end of their second day in Hope. Kane, Grant and Brigid had worked solidly through that first afternoon, organizing a temporary camp for the survivors of the quake and providing what little medical attention they could for the wounded. A lot of people had been shaken up quite badly by the massive earth tremor, but there were only nine reported deaths, mostly where the makeshift buildings had collapsed on people, although two more had drowned in the savage tidal wave that had followed the quake.

Kane had watched with growing admiration as the swordswoman, whose name was Rosalia, had turned her attention to first rescuing those people stuck in the water who had either never learned or were too panicked to swim, and then helping to entertain the lost children by teaching them the flowing movements that came naturally to her as a dancer.

“You have quite a way with children,” he remarked as they sat eating breakfast together after that first, long night.

“Children are the same as men,” she told him with a malicious gleam in her eyes, “easily captivated by simple movements.”

Kane laughed at that. “Well, I suppose it depends on who’s doing the movements,” he admitted.

The dozen or so lost and unclaimed children had slept in a storeroom behind the main hall. Kane watched the roll of her hips as Rosalia walked to the room to wake them up. As he watched, the dark-eyed woman looked back at him over her shoulder, and her hair fell over her face, adding to her exotic allure as she offered him a warm smile before leaving the hall.

Señor Smarts had offered to help, too, once he had recovered from the pounding his body had taken when he had been thrown down the street astride the motorcycle. Initially, he had wandered the now brackish streets in a daze, but when he had heard that people were getting organized at the robust church buildings, he had arrived at the door and asked how he might assist. Along with Brigid, Smarts had helped organize a reception system at the church hall where lost family members might be found.

The steady stream of lost and weary people seemed never-ending, but finally, as the sun disappeared over the horizon for the second time since the quake, their numbers started to dwindle as people began making their way back to their ruined dwellings and thinking about picking up their lives again.

While the church hall was quiet, Brigid peeled back the bandage that was wrapped around Smarts’s head and took a proper look at the wound there. “You took quite a beating,” she said, dabbing at the dried blood with a damp cloth while Grant looked on.

Across the hall, Kane was busy with the onerous task of helping frightened relatives identify the handful of dead bodies. Rosalia was sitting with five children, telling them an old story she recalled from her own childhood. There were other locals there, too, officials and selfless do-gooders who had stepped in to man the recovery operation with no thought of their own concerns. It was remarkable how well the locals and the refugees had pulled together, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in adverse circumstances.

Señor Smarts shot a fierce look at Grant as he addressed Brigid. “I think your friend shot me,” he told her.

Grant looked apologetic. “Well,” he said, shrugging.

Smarts held his gaze a moment longer before his expression mellowed a little. “What’s done is done, señor,” he admitted, “and I’m sure I was intending to do the same given the circumstances of our meeting.”

Kane joined them as Brigid sterilized and dressed Smarts’s head wound from the church’s meager supplies. “Yeah, about that,” Kane said, “what made you think that we were Magistrates?”

“It’s obvious.” The olive-skinned Mexican smiled. “You and Señor Grant here have a certain manner about you, a way of walking, your heads held high. An air of authority, arrogance that comes only with the badge of office.”

Kane smiled bitterly, shaking his head as Rosalia walked over to join the group, having finally found a family to take care of the last of her young charges. “I’m not a Mag,” Kane told Señor Smarts. “We’re not Mags.”

The man smiled again in a display of yellowing teeth. “The way that the three of you took command here, organizing and taking care of the local people, tells me different, señor. If you are not Magistrates, then you almost certainly trained to be, at some point in your past.”

Grant flicked a warning look at Kane, as if to tell him it wasn’t a topic of conversation worth pursuing.

After a moment, Kane spoke again. “Any idea what happened to the rest of your crew? Where Carnack disappeared to?”

“I’m sorry, Señor Kane.” Smarts sighed. “I was unconscious for quite a while. When I realized what had happened I felt it my duty to help out. That’s all I can tell you.”

“Very admirable,” Grant muttered before he stood up and took Kane to one side. They stood together, looking at the devastation outside the open church hall doors for a few moments, and then he spoke to Kane in a low voice. “This doesn’t change anything. That hybrid DNA is still in the hands of their extended clan. We can’t ignore that just because these two helped out.”

Kane nodded, a haunted look in his gray-blue eyes. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said quietly.

“You reckon the girl knows anything?” Grant asked.

“I’d guess Smarts is Carnack’s majordomo,” Kane reasoned. “If anyone knows the location of the gang and the DNA, it’s him. But Rosalia is more than she seems. I’d dismissed her as a—” he shrugged “—companion when I first saw her, but the way she came at me with that sword yesterday afternoon—she’s trained and she’s deadly.”

“We’ll take both of them back to Cerberus,” Grant suggested. “We can interrogate them there, see what we turn up.” He glanced back at the Mexican in the loud shirt and stained velvet coat, and at the dark-haired enchantress who stood beside him. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be more forthcoming after all that’s happened.”

Kane chewed at his lip thoughtfully for a moment. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he told Grant.

As the two ex-Mags were striding back to where Brigid taped gauze to Señor Smarts’s head, their Commtacts came to life and the three Cerberus teammates heard the voice of Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh inside their heads.

Lakesh was the nominal leader of the Cerberus exiles, although his suitability to that role was somewhat contentious. Their early meetings with Lakesh had shown Kane, Grant and Brigid that the accomplished cyberneticist had orchestrated a Machiavellian plan to destroy their lives in Cobaltville, albeit for the greater good, and his methods had often proved to be supremely devious. However reluctantly, Lakesh had conceded his single-minded control of Cerberus and its exiles undermined the united front necessary to battle the Annunaki and the threat they posed to humankind.

Lakesh’s mellifluous voice piped directly to their ear canals with crystal clarity. “It seems that we may have an additional problem, and I wondered how the three of you would feel about taking a little detour to look into it?”

Kane held up his index finger to let his companions know that he would deal with the transmission. “Kane here,” he said. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Decard has just got in touch with us from over in Aten,” Lakesh explained. “He’s stumbled across something on one of his regular patrols, and he thinks we might want to take a look.”

Decard, like Kane and Grant, was also an ex-Magistrate. He had been adopted into the strange culture of the hidden city-kingdom of Aten, out in the wilderness of the California desert. His path had crossed that of the Cerberus crew on several occasions. Initially hostile, the people of Aten had come to respect the Cerberus exiles, and Decard had proved himself to be a faithful friend and valuable ally.

“Did Decard say what it was?” Kane asked, aware that the ex-Mag wasn’t one to jump at shadows.

“He seemed mystified,” Lakesh explained, “but the report he gave describes a group of people who apparently have no independent will. He called them ‘mindless, soulless wretches.’”

Kane considered this for a moment before responding. “Don’t want to be callous here, but is that such a big deal?” he asked.

“It is when the same people were vibrant and very much alive just three days earlier,” Lakesh told him, “or so Decard indicates.”

“Okay,” Kane agreed. “We’ll arrange transportation and get over there before dawn. Warn Decard that we’re bringing a couple of stragglers with us, and we might need to use his hoosegow.”

“I’m sending Domi over there now via mat-trans,” Lakesh replied. “She’ll pass on the message and meet you close to Aten. Take care.”

“Will do.” Kane signed off. He turned to the others, who had been able to hear the whole conversation on their own Commtact. “Well, troops, looks like we’re moving out.”

Señor Smarts, who had only heard Kane’s half of the conversation, smiled tightly. “Leaving so soon?” he said in a patronizing tone.

“Yeah,” Grant growled, reaching for the man’s elbow and helping him up, “and you’re coming with us, Charlie.”

Kane looked across at Rosalia the dancing girl and smiled. “You, too, Princess.”