False Horizon - Alex Archer [84]
“I’ll do what I can,” said Tuk. “But you’ve got to hurry.”
He slapped the phone shut and paused on the floor of the cave. The last thing he wanted to do was go anywhere near Hsu Xiao or Vanya again. But Annja had given herself up so that Tuk could go free and reach Garin.
If she hadn’t done that, he thought, I never would have gotten this far in the first place.
He started back down the staircase. Behind him, he left the trapdoor open. He hoped Garin and his men would find it as soon as they got to the cave.
If there was enough time.
As he descended, Tuk knew what he needed. He crept back down the hallway toward his prison cell and then turned at the juncture where he and Annja had crept up to the control room.
The smell that assailed his nostrils made him want to vomit, but he choked the surging bile in his throat and forced himself to enter the room. He lifted another AK from one of the dead guards and then took three extra magazines of ammunition.
As he was about to leave, he saw the computer terminal flashing a message. Tuk frowned. He didn’t read or understand Chinese, but looked, anyway. Red flashing icons that made him wonder what was going on.
Were they simply alarms going off? Did they know that the trapdoor was now open to the other side?
Tuk used the mouse to try to navigate around and then started clicking just for the sake of it.
The screen changed to something that looked like a chart with varying levels fluctuating. He saw what he presumed were danger points and noticed the fluctuating levels all hovered close to those marks.
“What is this place?” His voice echoed around the room.
“You don’t want to know.”
Tuk spun around and saw himself staring down the barrel of a pistol.
“Mike?”
Mike didn’t look very friendly. “Already embracing your true identity, I see. What did Vanya promise you if you came over to her side?”
Tuk shook his head. “Mike, I’m not with them. I swear to you. I just escaped and called for some help. But Annja’s back there with Vanya and her assassin, Hsu Xiao. And she’s giving herself up to them.”
Mike looked shocked. “She’s what?”
“It’s true. They want the sword, so—”
“What sword?”
Tuk stopped. “Maybe I should let Annja explain that to you.”
Mike thumbed the hammer back on the pistol. “Maybe you’d better explain it to me right now.”
Tuk sighed. “Annja’s got some sword she can conjure out of thin air. I don’t know what it is or what it does but it makes her some kind of ferocious warrior. Vanya staged this entire thing as a trap to lure Annja here.”
Mike sneered. “This whole place is a trap.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Mike nodded at the terminal. “You see those graphics?”
“Yes. But what do they say? I don’t understand Chinese.”
“I do,” Mike said. “And this whole installation is going to blow if we don’t find a way to shut it down.”
“Installation?”
Mike nodded. “It’s a fraud. The whole thing. We’re in a nuclear waste holding plant. The Chinese government built this Shangri-La facility over the waste plant. The immense heat from the processing facility is the reason there’s a tropical landscape here when right on the other side of the mountain it’s arctic conditions.”
Tuk shook his head. “How could they hide a place like this?”
“I don’t know. We’ve heard rumors for years that they were doing this but we never knew how to find them. Even our satellites couldn’t pick them up. One theory is that the atmospheric conditions surrounding the Himalayas make it almost impossible to see everything in detail.”
Tuk looked at Mike. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. It just took me a while to discover what was really going on here. For a moment, I thought we might really have stumbled upon the actual Shangri-La. But this is most definitely not it.”
“So, what do we do now?” Tuk nodded at the pistol. “Is there any way you can put that thing down? It’s making me quite nervous.”
Mike smiled. “You sure I can trust you, Tuk? I wouldn’t want to have to kill you, but I will, if necessary.”
Tuk held up his hands. “My plan was to come here, grab a weapon and then find