“Keep going!”
Hansen reappeared on the ramp. “Your foot.”
“Fell asleep.”
The water lapped over his ankles. Fisher stopped and looked down. His toes were almost pointing backward. The pain thundered in his head. He squeezed his eyes shut, then forced them open again.
Hansen started back down toward him.
“Ben.”
The tone of Fisher’s voice stopped Hansen in his tracks. “I can help you, Sam.”
“Get everybody topside. I’m right behind you.”
“Your foot’s broken.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. Go now, or the next time I see you I’m going to shoot you.”
Hansen held his gaze for a few moments, then nodded, turned around, and disappeared.
The water was shockingly cold. Fisher stood perfectly still, letting it surge over his calves, then his knees. The throbbing in his ankle tapered off. From the level above came the sound of Grozas firing. It went on for fifteen more seconds; then there was silence.
Fisher radioed: “Ben, where are you?”
“First level. Bad guys are either gone or dead. Elevator’s out of commission. We’re heading back the way we came in.”
“Good.”
“As soon as everyone’s out, I’ll—”
“No need. I’m coming up on the first-level ramp,” Fisher lied. “I’m a minute behind you. Leave the rope for me.”
Silence.
Fisher hobbled forward a few feet until the water level retreated to his knees
“Leave the rope for me,” Fisher repeated.
“Roger.”
He felt a wave of relief. Hansen and the others would make it. Knowing that, he steeled himself for what he had to do. He had no intention of standing on this ramp and waiting for the water to overtake him.
He took a deep breath, then a step forward. Pain burst behind his eyes. Another breath, another step forward. Each one got easier until he was clear of the water and twenty feet from the top of the ramp. He paused and patted his sides, looking for his Groza. It was gone. At the top of the ramp he saw a discarded AK-47. He fixed his eyes on it and kept going. Ten feet… five feet…
Pause. Breathe. Go.
Behind him the water had gained some ground, now lapping at his heels.
Five feet… He stopped, leaned down, and snagged the AK’s sling with his fingertip and lifted it up. As a cane it was too short, but it took a portion of the weight off his ankle. He walked into the next level’s intersection.
One more to go.
Hansen’s voice: “We’re out, Sam. Where are you?”
“Almost there.”
Fisher pulled off his headset and tossed it away and kept walking.
The last ramp seemed to take hours. Hundreds of steps, but Fisher knew it couldn’t have been more than minutes. The water dogged him, surging and retreating as it filled the level behind him, then finally rolling over his legs and staying there.
He reached the top of the ramp. Level 1. He took another minibreak, then turned right and started down across the intersection toward the utility-room corridor. He was twenty feet away when the floor trembled, then heaved upward. A crack shot threw the floor, splitting the corridor down the middle. Fisher started backpedaling. A geyser of water burst from the floor, and the concrete began falling away into the chasm.
Fisher turned around, looked around. Directly ahead of him lay the elevator. Out of service, he thought numbly. He turned back. The utility corridor was gone; in its place a ravine filled with white water. It boiled up the walls and started rushing into the intersection.
No choice, Sam.
He started hobbling toward the elevator. He heard the wall of water approaching and could feel on his back the rush of cool air being pushed ahead of the surge, but he ignored it and kept his eyes fixed on the elevator.
He was ten feet from the door when the wave slammed into him.
EPILOGUE
He felt a vague pang of guilt for not being excited at the prospect of having company, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that if he told them the truth, they would probably understand and even forgive him for it. They were friends, certainly, but not in the pure sense of the word. Of course, that predicament wasn’t uncommon in a business where friendships were usually forged in the fire of hardship and tragedy. It was a strong, almost instantaneous bond, one that most people rarely took time to examine. The proverbial elephant in every room. He was cynical, that much he could admit, but whether that was his permanent mind-set or simply a bad habit that would fade with time, he didn’t know. He would find out.
Fisher stepped away from the sunlit floor-to-ceiling windows and walked to his nearby leather armchair. He propped the cane against the arm and took a test lap around the room. The limp was almost gone and would eventually disappear altogether. Thanks to pins and screws and plates, the bones in his ankle were almost as good as new. His only reminder of the injury would be an uncanny knack for predicting rain. Given the alternatives, he considered it a fair trade.
The wave that had slammed into his back drove him headfirst into the side of the elevator-shaft wall, momentarily stunning him. When he opened his eyes, a second or half second later, he saw the partially open elevator doors sweeping past him. Acting on instinct, he shoved his arm into the gap, then made a fist and did a bicep curl until his shoulder was wedged between the doors. Having had no time to take a breath before the wave hit, Fisher found himself under five feet of water without an ounce of air in his lungs. He squirmed deeper into the elevator, his one good leg crabbing at the floor until he popped through the gap and he was able to stand. The water boiled at his chin. He looked up. His headlamp illuminated the ceiling escape hatch. He reached up. It was just out of reach, so he steadied himself, breathing deeply, oxygenating his blood as the water rose over his mouth, his nose, his eyes, and then he was submerged.
His headlamp flickered and went dark.
His fingertips touched the escape hatch, then his palms. He drew his knife and stabbed around the edge of the hatch, hacking away at the thin metal until it fell away and disappeared in the swirling water. He stuck both arms through the hatch, braced his elbows on the roof, and levered himself up and out. Water bubbled up behind him and began flowing over the elevator car’s roof.
He tested the cable: It was thick with grease and grit. Half-a-decade old or not, the lubricant made the cable unclimbable. He looked around for a maintenance ladder. There wasn’t one. Fisher knew what this meant: a ride up the shaft like a piece of flotsam. The trip took only a few minutes, but in the narrow confines of the shaft the water roiled and whooshed as air from the complex below sought escape through one of the few exits left.
When he drew level with the door, he found it closed, but ten seconds of levering with his knife opened a gap wide enough for him to squeeze both hands through; another twenty seconds and he was lying on the concrete floor of the hut. Water gushed after him and sloshed across the floor.
Bad to worse, Fisher thought. The hut was made of cinder block, the door of thick steel secured by a virtually indestructible lock. Fisher looked around. The inside was barren, just a floor, four walls, and a roof. Fisher caught himself. Not just walls — five-decade-old walls. He didn’t need to find an exit; he needed to let the water make him an exit.
As the water rose past his ankles and then his knees, he hobbled from wall to wall, using the tip of his knife to test the grout between the cinder blocks. It wasn’t until the water had reached his waist that he found the spot he wanted. He began chiseling at it, concentrating the knife’s point on a quarter-sized spot. He stopped, stuck his finger into the hole. Halfway there. He jammed the knife back into the hole and hammered at it with his fist until his skin split and blood ran down his forearm. He switched hands and kept pounding.