"Stay back!" Michelle hissed, a few inches from my ear. "Stay back, or…"
The door opened without warning, and the beam of a flashlight cut into the room.
"General!" a man's harsh voice cried out. "Are you all right? There's been…"
I squeezed the trigger of the forty-five. There was an echoing blast, and the flashlight tumbled to the floor. I scooped it up and flicked its beam toward the hallway. Michelle was already through the door and running. I raised the.45 and was sighting when a deafening rattle of automatic rifle fire broke out from the other end of the hall. Bullets smashed into the cement-block near my face. I pulled back into the room, kicked the body of the soldier I had just killed out of the way, and closed and locked the door.
"Duroche!" T snapped. "Are you there?"
"He's here," came Li Chin's voice. "He's okay. I knocked the knife out of her hand."
I swung the beam of the flashlight onto the figures of Li Chin and Duroche. Duroche was trembling; his narrow face was white, but his eyes were alert.
"Can you tell us where the computer storage room is?" I asked.
"Of course," he said. "But have you noticed that the air in here is already becoming bad? The ventilator system is off. Someone must have cut the main power switch. If we don't leave the building complex soon…"
He was right. The room was already stuffy. It was becoming close, stifling.
"Not yet," I said. "Which way to the computer storage room?"
"There is a direct passage from here to the laboratories, and beyond that, the storage rooms," Duroche said, pointing to a door at the far end of the room. "It is used only by the general and his top staff."
I bent down and took the dead soldier's.45, handing it to Li Chin.
"Let's go," I said.
Cautiously, I opened the door that Duroche had indicated. The passageway beyond it was as pitch black as the room and the outer hall. I aimed the beam of the flashlight down its length. It was deserted.
"Carter!" said Li Chin. "Listen!"
A series of loud thumps from the other hallway. They were trying to break down the door to the room. At the same time, another blast came from the direction of the computer storage room. Sweets was still at it. I motioned Li Chin and Duroche to follow me, and we set out along the passageway at a trot, flashlight in one hand, 45 in the other. I could hear shouts, gunshots, and running feet from nearby halls and rooms.
"Your friend must stop the explosions!" I heard Duroche shout behind me. "The danger is increasing with every one!"
Another blast. I thought I could feel the building tremble this time. And the air was worse: thick, close. It was harder to breathe.
"How much further?" I shouted back to Duroche.
"There! At the end of the hallway!"
Almost as he said it, a door at the end of the hallway opened and a tall figure dove through it. He had an automatic rifle, and was firing rapidly in the direction from which he had come. The.45 in my hand came up automatically, and then dropped.
"Sweets!" I shouted.
The figure's head turned briefly in our direction.
"Hey, man," I heard Sweets' shout, even as he resumed firing, "welcome to the party!"
We ran the rest of the passageway and flopped down beside Sweets. He had overturned a heavy lab table in front of him and was shooting at a group of soldiers huddled behind another table at the far end of the laboratory.
"The computers," I said, panting, struggling to breathe.
"Smashed to hell and gone," said Sweets, pausing to eject an empty clip and insert a full one. "That last blast you heard finished them off. I managed to get the main power switch with this handy little BAR I borrowed from somebody who didn't need it anymore anyway. Being dead, I mean. Then I got tired of being cooped up in that storage room and decided to split."
Duroche tugged at my shoulder, pointing to the room at the end of the passageway, the room we had come from. Two flashlight beams were slicing through the darkness. The door must have given way.
"I think," I said grimly, "it's time for all of us to split."
Sweets fired off another blast into the laboratory.
"You got any ideas as to how?" he asked, almost casually.
Flashlight beams cut down the passageway. I wrenched one of Sweets' mini-grenades from his necklace, and lobbed it directly down the hall. It rolled into the room, and, an instant later, the building was rocked by another blast, almost knocking us over. There were no more flashlight beams.
"Mon Dieu!" gasped Duroche. "The volcano…"
I ignored him, pointing upward with my flashlight.
"That shaft there," I said. "What is it? Where does it lead?"
"Ventilator shaft," said Duroche. "It leads to the roof. If we could…"
"We're going to," I snapped. "Li Chin?"
"Acrobatics time again, hunh?" She was panting now, like the rest of us.
Wordlessly, I positioned myself beneath the ventilator shaft opening. An instant later Li Chin was standing on my shoulders, removing the grill to the shaft. I handed her my flashlight and could see her shine it upward. A few feet away, Sweets continued to fire blasts into the laboratory.
"It's not a bad level of incline," said Li Chin. "I think we can make it."
"Can you close the grill after we get inside?" I asked.
"Sure."
"Then let's go."
I gave her another boost with my hands, and Li Chin disappeared into the shaft.
"All right, Duroche," I said, struggling for breath, "now you."
With difficulty, Duroche climbed first onto my clasped hands, then onto my shoulders. Li Chin's arm reached down out of the shaft, and slowly, Duroche grunting with effort, was helped up inside.
"Sweets," I said, gulping for air, "you ready?"
"Why not?" he said.
He fired one final blast into the laboratory, rolled rapidly out of the doorway, and dashed toward me, flipping me the BAR as he came. I braced myself. He sprang onto my shoulders like a big cat, then swiftly up into the shaft. I leveled the BAR at the laboratory door and squeezed the trigger just as two men came through it. Their bodies were smashed back into the laboratory. I could hear one of them screaming. I glanced upward and flipped the BAR into Sweets' waiting hands just as a flashlight beam cut down the passageway from the room we had been in.
"Now!" Sweets urged. "Come on, man!"
I bent at the knees, gasping for air, my head beginning to reel, and sprang upward with all my strength. I felt Sweets' two hands clasp mine and pull, just as the flashlight beam lit on my legs. I hauled myself up, struggling, every muscle in my body screaming with effort. There was a deadly chatter of BAR fire, and I felt metal slice through my pants legs. Then I was up, inside the shaft.
"The grill," I gasped immediately. "Give it to me!"
Someone's hands put the grill into mine. I slid it down into its frame, leaving one side open, fumbling to unbuckle my belt.
"Start climbing!" I told the others.
"What's that you got there?" asked Sweets, as he turned.
I pulled Pierre out from his hiding place and triggered the five-second fuse.
"Just a little parting gift for our friends below," I said, and dropped Pierre down into the passageway, immediately slamming the grill down into place, and flipping its shutters closed tight. And let's hope they are tight, I thought grimly as I turned and began to scramble up the shaft after the others.
I had gotten about five feet when Pierre went off. The blast wasn't as powerful as Sweets' mini-grenades, but an instant later I could hear screams that were choked into strangled coughs, the gargled, horrible death-sounds of man after man being felled by Pierre's lethal gas.
The shutters on the grill must have been just as tight as I had hoped they would be, because the air in the shaft got ever better as we climbed upward, with none of the gasses from Hugo entering it.