“Ten seconds,” Dourado said. “Hard left, now!”
Lazarus adjusted course, pouring on the speed. Their objective, the far end of the ravine, lay straight ahead, hidden by the terrain. If all went according to plan, they would arrive directly above where Fiona now stood, attempting to unlock a portal to the Underworld.
“Five…four…three…two…one…”
There was a flash on the western horizon. A pillar of dust and smoke arose to mark the spot, and an instant later, Pierce both heard and felt the shock wave of the improvised explosive device Lazarus had placed two hundred yards away from the entrance to the ravine.
“That got their attention,” Dourado said.
Lazarus stopped short and motioned for Pierce and Carter to get down, then began belly-crawling across the hot ground toward the edge of the drop. Pierce hit the dirt, getting a face-full of sulfur dust in the process. Blinking the stinging substance away, he crawled alongside Lazarus and got his first look at the mayhem unfolding fifty feet below.
Some of Tyndareus’s men had taken the bait, though not enough for Pierce’s liking. Eight of them were moving away, toward the site of the explosion, their assault rifles shouldered. The others had pulled back to form a defensive perimeter around Tyndareus. Pierce picked out Rohn in the latter group, shouting orders and waving to his men. Tyndareus, safely inside his armored suit, paid little heed to the disturbance, keeping his attention fixed on Fiona.
“Cintia,” Lazarus said, his voice taut but strangely calm given the circumstances. “Now.”
“They aren’t in range—”
“Do it.”
There was another flash, closer this time. The noise of the explosion was incredibly loud as it was funneled down the ravine. Lazarus had placed the second IED as close to the mouth of the depression as he dared get. The advancing front of Tyndareus’s men fell down like bowling pins, but none were within the explosion’s kill radius.
Then something extraordinary happened. The ground all around the explosion split apart like thin ice on a lake. Jagged cracks, spewing steam, radiated out from beneath the debris cloud. Three of the stunned gunmen vanished, as the earth upon which they lay collapsed and transformed into liquid. The others scrambled to their feet, retreating from the roiling wave of steam and destruction. Not all of them made it.
Although he had been primed to charge into battle only a moment before, Pierce was frozen in place by the spectacle. “Did you know that would happen?”
“No,” Lazarus admitted, sounding a little awed. “Sometimes, you just get lucky. Let’s go.”
The big man sprang to his feet and hurtled over the edge, bounding down the side of the ravine toward Tyndareus and the remainder of his forces. Pierce followed with Carter.
Instead of trying to run down the steep incline, he fell against the slope and slid on his backside, dragging his feet in front of him to slow his descent, even as he tried to acquire a target in the mayhem below. He managed to squeeze off a few shots, though it was impossible to tell whether he was hitting anything. He was still sliding when the earth beside him erupted from the impact of high-velocity rounds, and he heard the harsh reports from enemy rifles.
Shit!
Remembering Lazarus’s common sense advice—‘don’t make it easy for them to shoot you’—Pierce rolled to the right, heaving himself out of the path of another fusillade, then launched himself the rest of the way down the slope.
In the instant before he landed, he saw Gallo, huddled into a protective ball less than thirty feet away. Just past her, Fiona stood, her back turned to the chaos, her hands still pressed against the wall.
“Fiona! Don’t—”
She recoiled as if from an electric shock, and for a fleeting instant, Pierce dared to believe that his shout had reached her through the din. Then he saw the look of elation on her face, and he knew that his warning had come too late.
The door was already open.
Something was coming through.
51
The explosions were the signal to run. Pierce and Lazarus had told her to be ready, warned her that their diversion would be unmistakable. But when the moment came, when the first explosion drew half of Tyndareus’s men away, and then a second, much closer blast, triggered a localized geothermal event, Gallo did not flee. She was not going to leave without Fiona.
Even as she heard the young woman speaking the strange words, chanting a language that sounded like it might be a Native American dialect, she knew that she should grab Fiona by the arm and drag her away, but she did not.