The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [82]
Still, the call was interesting. No kid or nomadic hillbilly behind the voice. It was refined, hectoring, its message succinctly put. He wouldn’t have referred to the cloak-and-dagger intrigues of the oil industry as nihilistic, an adjective better reserved for revolutionaries and other pests favored by intellectuals the world over. Raze it to the ground. A little melodramatic, but then, the caller had a weakness for theater, obviously. Attila the Hun: the Scourge of God who left destruction in his wake, riding a horse under whose shoes the grass withered. The infamous khan would be proud of the caller’s use of his moniker.
Nikola resumed poring over Laurel’s dossier. “Let me know if anything develops.”
Thirty minutes after leaving from the station camp, the group split up. They had divided the 280 pounds of high explosives into four heavy loads of seventy pounds each, yet Susan and Jim, the smallest-framed of the quartet, didn’t seem to struggle. When they reached a fork in the tunnel, they stopped to say good-bye. After the men exchanged backslaps and good-luck wishes, Laurel sought Barandus. “Can I ask you something?”
Barandus nodded.
She lowered her voice further. “What’s your name?”
He darted a sideways glance, as if priming to run away, blinked, and his eyes deepened. Then he licked his lower lip. “James … James Marshall.”
She stood on tiptoe and pecked him on a patch of skin devoid of hair and close to his nose. “Thank you, James,” she whispered.
Charlie huffed. “What has he got?”
Laurel neared Charlie and Jim. “Jeez, but you’re a jealous bunch.” After pecking both of them, she turned to Susan and hugged her. “You take care, hear?” Then she joined Henry to set off through the right tunnel of the fork while the group with the explosives followed along the other passageway.
Her lips tingled but not from recent activity. Laurel had sent Shepherd another two messages since their return to warn him of their impending trek to the meeting point and to update him on Russo’s status. “Stable” was all that Floyd had said, but that had been after engulfing her in a bear hug and kissing her neck, cheek, and lips. She drew her fingers to her mouth, letting her gaze stray to Floyd, just a few feet ahead and holding on to the rear end of Russo’s stretcher, and felt heat creep up her neck.
They trudged along an abandoned sewer tunnel as quickly as they could. Henry led with an unerring sense of direction and urged them on without pausing to take bearings; this ghastly place obviously was familiar to him. Laurel plodded next to Lukas, closing the rear. The section of the tunnel had been excavated through schist: bedrock formed millions of years before. No tunneling machine had bored the passage. Laurel sensed ghosts filling the hollow space—the spirits of the workers who’d toiled to dig it a century and a half before, the countless homeless people who must have lived there, and the graffiti artists who had once ventured through with their spray cans.
“There’s a passageway close to the surface,” Henry’s voice boomed from the front, “but it’s terrible to negotiate. Too much yellow rain, metal gratings dogs like to pee on.”
Raul huffed. “Great.”
After a few hundred yards, they branched sideways into a narrower tunnel—damp, the air thick with constant sounds of dripping water. Laurel stepped around little pools of liquid collecting in hollows along the floor.
Henry stopped, motioning to Raul and Floyd to rest the stretcher on a dry patch. “We go through there.” He pointed to a narrow round opening, perhaps three feet across. “It’s the only way up. It narrows a little farther on and it will mean dragging the stretcher, but it can’t be helped.”
A few minutes later, Laurel marveled at Henry’s understatement. Reaching the upper gallery involved a rugged crawl facefirst through an opening no wider than two feet and two high, but mercifully