“Calm down, soldier,” Palma said, but he knew they’d stepped on his transmission.
He was about to try again when he heard the worst of the worst: “Sergeant Nazario is dead!”
Maria felt the first explosion more than she heard it. She assumed it was the first explosion. More a pulse than a boom, it launched waves through the knee-deep water that rolled to her waist and slapped against the concrete walls.
Stuff fell from the ceiling, too, though in the darkness she didn’t know what it was. It fell in chunks and it filled the air with dust that smelled like mold. Without light, and without knowledge of the truth, her mind screamed that the falling objects were spiders. And crickets. All the insects that most terrified her.
In that flash of fear, the possibility of capture or torture or death mattered less than battling the insects. Maria’s hands moved in spasms to brush whatever they were from her shoulders and hair.
Her hair! In her mind, her head was infested now, crawling with bugs. With pregnant bugs, determined to lay their eggs on her scalp.
It was all preposterous, of course-the ridiculous ramblings of a frightened little girl who’d never fully overcome her fear of the dark.
She told herself that none of it was true-insisted that none of it was true-but it did little to settle her racing heart and trembling hands.
This will be over soon, she told herself. What was it that Mother Hen had said? Three explosions in the space of five minutes, and she was to wait until-
There was nothing subtle about the next detonation.
It must have been much closer, because a pressure wave rolled like an earthquake through the storm sewer. She felt the walls move as the wave swept past her, and a tsunami of water smacked her like a liquid wall. It broke over her head and knocked her to the floor, where she tumbled under the assault of secondary and tertiary waves.
After a somersault, Maria came up sputtering and coughing, desperate to recover the air that had been pushed from her lungs. As she struggled to breathe, she also tried to find stability for her feet in the slippery muck that lined the concrete floor of the sewer.
By pressing her hands against the walls and digging in with her knees, she was finally able to stabilize herself. She tried to stand, but when she was barely above a squat, her head hit the top of the tunnel and a new wave of panic swept over her. She’d been washed to a new part of the sewer, but she’d been turned and jostled so much that she no longer could tell left from right, upstream from downstream.
She was stranded now on hands and knees, and the water was chin-high. If it started to rain, she would drown.
This new terror eclipsed any horrors of the past. She was blind and she was trapped and she was going to drown. If her remains were ever found at all, they would be tangled among weeds and bushes along the banks of the river, downstream from the outfall of this terrible place.
“Stop it!” she commanded herself aloud.
Nothing was done until it was done. She needed clear thought, not panicked ramblings. The cliché said that panic killed people, and now she knew what the cliché meant. If you’re panicking, you’re not thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re just giving yourself up to death.
She smelled smoke. The stench of burning rubber. It wasn’t very strong, but it was definitely there. How was it possible to set a sewer on fire?
She needed to find the dim light from the manhole cover. If she could-
Light! Of course! Her flashlight!
Holding herself out of the water by planting her left hand in the slimy muck, she explored her pants pocket with her right. Miraculously, the pistol was still there-as if she had any use for it right now. When her fingers found the outline of the three-inch tube that could only be the flashlight, she nearly cried.
“Please, please, please work,” she moaned.
The company that sold these things marketed them as waterproof, but how factual was their claim? She didn’t even know if the batteries worked anymore. More than that, she wasn’t sure she’d even turned it on before.
The fabric of her pants fought her efforts to remove the light, and once it was clear, she nearly dropped it. In the slipperiness of her grip, the light squirted out of her grasp, but somehow, through instinct and divine intervention, she didn’t lose it in the black water.
Somehow, Maria knew to twist it. She laughed aloud when the blinding white light appeared.
When she pointed the beam to her right, it revealed nothing but an endless tube of concrete that extended eight or ten meters before curving curved sharply to the right. Intuitively, she knew that that was the wrong way.
She pivoted the other way, where her beam revealed a wall of smoke rolling toward her. It was probably just an optical illusion, but the leading edge of the cloud appeared light in color, followed behind by a much darker, thicker cloud. It started to sting her eyes, but she wondered if that would be the case if she was still blind. Could it be that mere awareness brought discomfort?
But there was something else, something in the water, a ripple of movement that raced toward her, as if chased by the cloud.
Maria understood what it was when the first wave of rats swarmed around her.
She screamed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Even two blocks away, the explosion was huge, launching a roiling ball of orange fire that momentarily turned night to day. As the original burst of light faded-not nearly as quickly as it had erupted-a dimmer glow remained, the beginnings of secondary fires.
Boxers gave a wild look as Jonathan dumped his ruck on the floor of the Sandcat’s shotgun seat and climbed in after it. “Think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?” Big Guy quipped, stealing a line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “Jesus, what did you blow up?” If the second charge had been the first-the closest-it might have killed them all.
“I knew that one was for effect, so I daisy-chained three GPCs on the gas tank.”
Boxers laughed. “Holy shit.”
Jonathan ignored him and turned in his seat to make sure that Tristan was aboard and secured. When the doors were all closed, he said, “Go,” and they were moving.
Jonathan tried not to look at the conflagration he’d ignited. The thought of the lives that he had just ruined sickened him. Even if everyone got out of their homes safely, their possessions-lifetimes of memories-would all be destroyed. And the destruction was all his responsibility. If only there’d been another way.
The first blast had been designed to draw the OPFOR closer, and the second blast had been all about killing as many of them as possible. Because such things were an inexact science, it made sense to use more explosives and to capitalize on the accelerant effect of the gasoline.
If there’d been a propane tanker parked at the curb, he’d have set the bomb on that.
He needed to tweak every advantage he could find to make sure that his PC would rest his head on his own pillow again. Everything else was secondary to that.
If theory evolved into fact, the explosion would have culled the OPFOR herd significantly, and demoralized the hell out of them. That last part was important. A force that can’t focus on an objective can’t fight effectively.
These Mexican soldiers and the local emergency response agency would all be reeling from the explosive attacks when Jonathan and his team rolled in to take Maria Elizondo to safety. With any luck, he would pluck their new PC without incident, and they’d skip back to America unmolested.
Right. And then pigs would fly.
Hundreds of rats-thousands of them-raced toward Maria, churning the water, presenting as a malignant gray blanket across the surface. They hit her head-on, then flowed around her as if she weren’t there. Poised as she was on her hands and knees, her face inches above the surface of the water, the rats swam through her arms and scampered over her shoulders and down her neck.