He took a moment to get his bearings. The origin of the “creek” was a jagged, ten-foot-long crack in the ceiling through which a thin sheet of rainwater was pouring. In the night vision he could see this wasn’t an unusual feature of the bunker: Water sluiced down the walls, gushed from holes in the ceiling, and ran in rivulets across the concrete floor, in some places pooling in corners and depressions, in others finding yet more cracks in the floor. From somewhere below, Fisher could hear the splattering of water.
The bunker was laid out along a center alley roughly thirty feet wide and who knew how long. Branching off from both sides of the alley were concrete stairwells, one leading up to pillboxes and machine-gun emplacements, the other leading downward into what Fisher assumed had once served as living quarters and storage areas. Fisher walked to the nearest stairwell and peered down. There was nothing. The concrete had long ago collapsed, filling the shaft halfway to the top. He mounted the steps leading up to a pillbox and, careful to stay below the horizontal firing slit, climbed up. He crawled to the wall and peeked up. Beyond the slit lay a field of high grass. To the right and below his perch he saw movement. He adjusted position until he could see down. Twelve feet below, a pair of figures in tac-suits was creeping along the bunker’s exterior wall. As if on cue, he heard a meaty thud on the entrance door as though a shoulder had given it a test shove. A vertical line of light appeared at the doorjamb. Fisher descended back to the alley.
Once again he was dealing with expectations. What did Hansen and company expect him to do? Most often, doing the unexpected was the best course, but in this case that meant going deeper into the bunker complex and using the labyrinth to lose his pursuers. However, his discovery of the collapsed stairwell had changed his mind. Even if he managed to reach the lower levels without injury, there was no guarantee of finding a safe exit. He could, by being too clever for his own good, find himself trapped. So, he would go up. Somewhere there had to be escape ladders. Ceiling hatches.
Behind him the door groaned again, steel scraping on concrete. Walking on flat feet, Fisher crept up to the door just in time to see a double-edge knife slip between the gap. Like a probing finger, the knife touched the paracord, retreated, then reappeared again. The blade began sawing.
Time to go.
Fisher turned and started down the alley and had taken a dozen steps when he felt the floor shift beneath his feet. He backpedaled. As he did, a crack in the concrete spread, following him like a snake. He sidestepped toward a stanchion and watched as the crack slowed, then stopped.
An idea popped into his head. He switched the Tridents from night vision to infrared. Down the alley as far as he could see were pulsating columns of blue and green. The image that flashed in Fisher’s mind was that of a field of psychedelic mushrooms like something from a bad 1960s movie.
The plumes were in fact air from the cooler lower levels rising through gaps and weak spots in the floor. The deeper the blue of the plume, the cooler the air and the more easily it was passing through the floor. These would be holes and wider cracks; the greenish blue plumes indicated slightly warmer air that had been stalled below the floor before seeping up through weak spots. The air nearer the ceiling, having been warmed by sunlight conducted through the concrete, was a yellowish orange.
He heard a soft twang and turned around. He switched back to night vision. Two loops of paracord dangled from the door handle. They were making fast progress.
He switched back to infrared and headed out, moving quickly but carefully between the plumes and sticking to the darker patches of what he hoped was in fact solid concrete. If his reading of the IR scan was mistaken, he might have only a split second to react before plunging through a hole. Two minutes passed. He’d covered a hundred yards. He stopped, unslung the SC-20, and aimed it at the far door, zooming until the door handle filled his vision. The knife was still sawing, having parted all but one loop of paracord. Fisher crouched down, curled his finger on the trigger, then took a breath and let it out. He fired. The 5.56mm round thudded into the concrete beside the doorjamb. The knife jerked back. He waited for five beats, then fired a second round in the same spot. He slung the rifle back over his shoulder and kept going.
After another hundred yards he reached an intersection. The alleyway continued straight and branched to the left and right; each of these branches ended at a large garage-style steel door set into an outward sloping wall, and beside each large door was a pedestrian entrance like the one through which he’d entered. Fisher unslung the SC-20 and checked each door. The one down the left-hand alley looked closed; the one to the right was open a few inches.
Fisher switched his Tridents back to infrared and started jogging, following a serpentine pattern between the colored plumes. Ahead a dark rectangular shape appeared in the center of the alley, rising toward the ceiling. As Fisher drew nearer he switched to night vision and could see it was a stanchion, but wider, measuring nearly three feet across. Fisher stopped beside it, circled it. In one of the sides was a waist-high opening. Fisher stooped down and peered inside. A ladder.
Where there was a ladder, there had to be an exit.
From down the alley came an all-too-familiar sound — the grating of a steel door being forced open.
He crab-walked into the shaft, grabbed a rung, and gave the ladder a few tugs. The lag bolts affixing the ladder to the concrete were loose in their sockets but appeared solid enough for his purposes. He craned his neck upward and saw nothing but blackness. The night vision illuminated only a few rungs.
Distantly there came the echo of footsteps — soft but moving quickly.
Fisher peeked out and around the corner of the stanchion. He switched the Tridents to infrared. Down the alley, in the middle of the intersection, was a pair of figures in red, blue, green, and yellow. In unison, the figures crouched down. Hands went up to unseen Trident goggles, flipping through NV, IR, and EM as heads swiveled this way and that.
So close, Fisher thought, but not close enough.
He ducked back into the shaft, turned around, and started climbing.
Passing the tenth rung, Fisher estimated he was twelve feet off the ground — the approximate height of the ceiling. He was now “outside” the bunker itself and moving into an exterior battlement or bulwark he hadn’t been able to see from the ravine entrance.
The ladder shifted. Fisher froze. Then, accompanied by what sounded like a brick being scraped over a layer of sand, the lag bolt before his eyes wriggled free of the concrete. Another one, somewhere below his feet, let go with a pop and dropped down the shaft, pinging off rungs until it clattered to the floor below.
Fisher turned himself sideways and, without unslinging the SC-20, flipped the selector to STICKY CAM, glanced into the scope, then fired. He took the OPSAT off standby and panned the Sticky Cam so it was aimed through the opening at the bottom of the shaft. He closed his eyes and listened, and after a few seconds heard the scuff of footsteps; they’d heard the falling bolt and were looking for the source.
He kept climbing. He ignored the grating of the lag bolts as one after another began to tear free of the concrete. His right hand, reaching for the next rung, slammed into something solid. Fisher stopped, looked up, saw a circular hatch equipped with a dogging wheel. Knees jammed against the ladder uprights for support, he reached and gave the wheel a test turn. It didn’t budge. He set his teeth, took a breath, tried again. The wheel moved an inch, then two, then let loose and spun freely. He pushed open the hatch.