And there was the whole story. It rang true, felt true, sounded true. And it had one particularly problematical side effect.
Maybe these soulless and evil people really did know the way to the Three Kings.
“There’s no way we could take them under those conditions he laid out,” Cromwell noted on the secure channel. “We’d wind up killing all of us, and destroying the full Mountain as well. I say we go with our original plan. Then we’ll see what sort of bargain can be struck at the point of our weapons!”
Woodward continued to finger the egg for a few moments, then he sighed and seemed to nod to himself. After a moment, he took out another cigar from his pocket and lit it. As he puffed, he stepped back a bit from the others.
“Okay, boy, this is it! On my count, it’s shoot and run! Three… two… one…” And then, shouted loudly, “Now!”
IX: THE DEVIL IN IRONS
It might have been that after all this time, Captain Sapenza was just too rusty, but he’d clearly made an amateur’s mistake and now he was going to pay for it. With the security team sweep having made certain that there were no unwelcome snipers about as had been planted the day before, the primary danger came from who and what they could see and from the single entrance/exit they already knew about.
From the moment Doctor Woodward had signalled the “Go ahead” with his cigar, things pretty much automatically happened. As the Doctor stepped back, Cromwell’s combat suit sent a strong stun charge straight into Ziggee, dropping him before the little man even was aware that anything was wrong. At the same moment, Robey tapped the small button just inside the sleeve of his robe and felt the pistol shoot into his hand. He didn’t have Cromwell’s computerized super accuracy but he didn’t need it; his job was to shoot Eve at maximum stun.
Even as she took the force of the blast and seemed to collapse like some kind of marionette whose strings were swiftly cut, Cromwell had swiveled and fired a series of strong blasts directly at the cave opening. Large rocks and part of the shattered door blew up and out with a bang.
Woodward now crouched and ran forward, picking up the limp Eve as if she were a rag doll and then running back towards the ship. By this point, he was under protective cover from three of Cromwell’s snipers and from Archangel orbiting above.
Neither Cromwell nor Robey stopped. They both went forward, Robey behind the armored Cromwell for protection, making as fast as they could for the opening to down below. Reaching the still smoking spot, Cromwell jumped into the hole as Robey undid the sash of his robe in order to remove the portable ferret monitor strapped to his chest, put it on the ground and activate it.
“Damn!” he heard Cromwell swear, and knew that not everything was according to plan.
“Problems, sir?”
“It’s Englar. Will Englar. The bastard was using him as a secondary remote! I’d hoped to see Sapenza, but he’s rusty, not dumb. All right, I’m going to bring the boy out. He’s probably under control, like your girl, but he’s also hurt bad here. Get him back to Olivet as fast as you can!”
“Sir? You don’t need me for the ferrets?”
“Come on, lad! Take him! My people are coming in to reinforce as we speak! Your job’s over!”
Even as Robey struggled with the big man’s limp body, he heard the sounds of explosions off in the distance. The other teams were in and probably ahead of them.
It was obvious to him that he just couldn’t get Englar back to the ship alone. The guy was bigger than he was, limp, and bleeding from several wounds. Eve was a lot easier to handle.
“Need help with a wounded man here!” he radioed on the general frequency. “Bleeding, time of the essence!”
Within a couple of minutes, even as the rest of Cromwell’s team was going in, two brown-robed Chief Ushers were at Robey’s side, one with a litter. With that, and a man on each end, Robey realized that he had nothing else to do.
Well, the black-clad security people didn’t have those fancy Cromwell-type suits on when they’d gone down that hole, he thought. Cromwell wanted the combat suits spread out among the different teams going in all over the area.
“Archangel, hook me into Secured Tactical,” he called. “I’m going in.”
“That’s not authorized, Brother,” the monitoring security officer responded.
“Look, I’ve just about had it with these people and the only one I’ve been able to shoot so far is my partner. I’m going in. If you don’t patch me in, they’ll probably shoot me thinking I’m a bad guy, but I’m going in!”
“Very well. We’ll patch you in, but this will be reported to the Doctor.”
“Fine. I’ve been with him the last day and a half. He may not approve but I think he’ll understand. Going in!”
He jumped down into the hole.
It was clear almost immediately that they’d jury-rigged some kind of comm link using the two captured and controlled Arms as the last links. That way, Sapenza was in no immediate danger from the kind of move they pulled, and their own people had taken the brunt of it. So be it.
Whatever the chemical was that they sprayed on these mostly natural caverns to illuminate them was effective. It wasn’t exactly daylight, but it was pretty easy to see and to navigate through the area.
Mostly, that meant seeing where Cromwell’s people had been. At various hollows, where “rooms” had been cut out or enlarged from natural expansion, there were signs of skirmishes and even a couple of bodies. Villagers from their looks, which meant Sapenza’s crew in this case.
There was no fooling around at this point, either. People with any sort of weapon in their possession or near them were stone cold dead; those without weapons were mostly out in heavy stun, to be collected by a mop-up team that was even now being deployed from Olivet and going into each of the openings.
The first time, Robey stared at the open, lifeless eyes and death expressions and tried to get a grip on himself. Stun, even heavy stun, he’d seen and done, but people deliberately killed was new to him. The fact that they appeared to have been almost surgically selected and almost certainly dispatched with incredible speed was a tribute to Cromwell’s skill, and a scary look inside the old soldier’s soul. There were all sorts of legends as to who and what Cromwell had been before joining The Mountain, but only here was Robey faced with the probability that some of them were true.
Robey snapped out of it and turned and started running down the cave as the noises of various light weapons could be heard echoing in the distance. No more looking in at each room or musing about life and death; what was happening was happening ahead, and if he didn’t get there soon he might wind up with the mop-up team.
“Archangel, how far ahead is the security team?” he called, then suddenly realized that the same coating and mineral structure that had protected Sapenza’s empire from being detected also had him cut off from anybody else. All of a sudden he was aware of how alone he really was.
This was brought home to him when he suddenly came out into a larger cave only to see a half dozen smaller tubular caves leading away in different directions. There were no signs, no “You Are Here” plaques, nothing. Like the cave where these people had hidden their arsenal, he and possibly the rest were in a Minoan maze without benefit of string to find their way out.