If the section had given up on him and left, it would be a long trek back to Gries, particularly on foot. And he’d be lucky if the villagers didn’t take him out in the fields and shoot him when he got there.
He tapped the butt of the pistol against the right wall. It thumped against solid wood. Then he moved on another half metre, and tapped the left with his hand. More wood. Another half-metre. Surely they wouldn’t have built a tunnel to nowhere? It had to come out of the ground eventually, or it would become his coffin.
He swung the pistol grip toward the wall again, but his arm twisted past where he’d expected it to stop when the butt hit the wall. He slid that way along the tunnel, holstered the pistol, and ran his hand across the dirt. He reached out as far as his arm would go, but there was no obstruction even as he strained his shoulder until his tendons complained. He slid his hand back around toward his side, and it stopped part-way as it slapped into wood. The side wall of a cross tunnel.
He crawled into the side-tunnel to the right. After a few seconds of crawling, his hands found the wooden wall at the end of the tunnel. He rose to a crouch, and slid his hands up the walls. The left hand stopped as it reached the wooden roof of the tunnel. The right continued up a shaft, until it found the wooden hatch over the tunnel mouth.
He pushed it up. The hatch moved easily, and a thin rain of dirt poured down onto his face and shoulders. He coughed and flicked his face to shake the dirt away, but kept pushing. Then squinted as the near-blinding glow of the sun burned into his eyes. He closed them, then blinked a few times as pain stabbed his eyeballs. Then opened them only far enough to see a faint bright band between his eyelids as he pushed the hatch aside. It slid a few centimetres, then stopped.
He stood as well as he could, and peered out through the gap between the hatch and floor. A twisted, cracked, wooden plank leaned against the wall of the building above the hatch. The wall on that side had collapsed inward in a mess of broken planks, and they now lay on top of the hatch. The sun had risen just above the edge of the plateau, and now cast long, dark shadows across the floor of the building as it shone through the gaps between the planks, and into his eyes.
He pushed up on the hatch, until the broken planks that were pressing down on it creaked above him. He twisted his head sideways as he pushed it out through the gap between the hatch and the ground, and his shoulders followed. The back of his body armour scraped against the hatch, and the wood creaked again as he squeezed out and pushed it higher. He dug his fingers into the dirt and heaved until his body slid through the gap, and his legs followed.
Then he lay panting for a moment as he filled his lungs with enough air to sustain himself. He grabbed a plank that leaned against the remains of the wooden frame of the house, and used it for support as he pulled himself to his feet. Then he shaded his eyes from the dazzling light of the morning sun as he crept out toward the street. The last thing he needed now was to surprise one of the others, and get himself shot.
“Sir, I’m back,” he said into the helmet mike.
“Damn, McCoy,” Bairamov’s voice answered. “LeFavre thought he’d just won the dead pool. You got the girl?”
“No, sir. But I don’t think anyone else will be coming up out of those tunnels.”
“Was that you who blew the shit out of this place?”
“Please tell Mme Poulin that it wasn’t intentional, sir.”
Logan reached the doorway at the end of the building. It opened out onto the street, where the door had fallen onto the ground outside.
He peered out. The sunlight burned his eyes. He pulled down the helmet visor, and it darkened until it blocked out the glare. The centre of the street had become a crater at least five metres across, and a couple of metres deep. The explosion his grenade set off had blown the dirt up into a ridge a metre high, and the centre had collapsed into the tunnel shaft. No-one was going back down there in a hurry.
Not without a dozen miners to dig their way in.
A transport sat on the open plateau at the end of the street, with engines whirring and the rear ramp down. Two men in suits carefully carried a third up the ramp, with one leg of his suit hanging limply down, mangled and twisted.
A familiar suit stood at the edge of the crater, with a Russian flag on the shoulder. Bairamov. More of the men of the section crouched in defensive positions around the street, or near the transport.
Logan stepped out of the doorway, feeling almost naked in just his fatigues, helmet and body armour.
Even if all the insurgents were out of action, a solar storm right now would give him only a short time to dive back into a tunnel before the radiation killed him.
Bairamov turned toward him.
“You made a hell of a mess.”
“Shouldn’t you be in the barn, sir?” With Logan’s suit. And weapons. Not the kind of thing they should be leaving lying out in the open, even though the suit was soft-locked to their Legion IDs.
“We came out to see what the noise was about. You shook the whole damn building, and the dirt from the explosion went so high that most of it ended up on the roof. What the heck was that?”
“IED factory, maybe? Ammo dump? I don’ t know, sir. I just tossed a grenade down a shaft in the tunnels. I didn’t see what was down there before it blew up.”
“Remind me to stay away from you in combat, kid.”
Poulin was crouched over a pile of bodies on the far side of the crater. Volkov stood beside her, his rifle raised, and turned his head slowly as he scanned the street.
Sunlight reflected from three long gouges across the back of Poulin’s suit. Something had hit her during the firefight. Maybe she’d smarten up a little, now she had some real experience of life in the Legion.
But probably not.
Logan strode around the crater toward them. If Volkov had expected him to die down in those tunnels, Logan was going to stand in front of the man and show him his plan failed.
Two suits strolled along the street toward the pile, dragging the limp, blood-soaked bodies of two men in civilian clothes behind them.
One of the suits carried a bloodstained head, dangling below the suit’s metal hand on the end of its dark hair, and swinging as he walked. The men tossed the bodies on to the pile, then dropped the head on top.
“That’s eight insurgent KIAs, sir,” one of the suits said. “At least, we figure it’s enough pieces to make eight.”
Poulin leaned over the new bodies, and held out her suit’s hands toward them. “Intel says they’re all fake IDs. They’re in the colony database, good enough to pass everyday checks, but a deep scan shows enough inconsistencies in the data to flag them as suspicious.”
“So they could search the database, and maybe find more of the insurgents?” Logan said.
“They already are. But it takes time to scan that deep. And, by then, they’ll probably have created new IDs.”
“Someone must have entered them into the database,” Volkov said. “I’d like to talk to that person.”
“So would I.”
“Any other use for the bodies?” Volkov said.
“I’ve scanned whatever’s left of them, sir,” Bairamov said. “If Intel need any info, I should have it.”
“Good. Let the rats have them.” Volkov’s suit whirred as his helmet turned until the visor pointed at Logan’s face. “So, Mr McCoy. We thought you were dead.”
“Sorry to have disappointed you, sir.”
“What the hell have you been up to for the last couple of hours down there?”
“Scouting the tunnels, sir.”
“Any of the bastards still alive?”
“Not that I saw, sir. But five or six KIAs.”
“And the girl?”