The Assault

13. THE TUNNEL



“MOVE!” CHISNALL YELLED. “MOVE!” HE GOT ONLY GROGGY stirrings from his team.

The round shape of the battle tank blocked all the light, turning the day into twilight. The barrel of the gun rotated as it rose toward him. He tried to will his legs to walk, to run. But there was no time.

The fifty-cal began to fire. Through the swirling clouds of dust, Chisnall saw Monster, sighting down the barrel, emptying his magazine at the Bzadian battle tank. An act of desperation. Machine-gun rounds would have no effect on a tank.

It all seemed to be in slow motion: the rising of the tank’s gun barrel, the fire from the fifty-cal, the sparks from the end of the barrel as the rounds impacted. Now Chisnall realized what Monster was doing: He was pouring his fire right down into the barrel. Huge fifty-cal machine-gun bullets were spitting directly into the small black circle that was the mouth of the gun.

There was a loud crack from the tank and the barrel of the tank’s gun bulged and then split as the shell detonated inside it. Fractured pieces of metal flew out into the air.

“Good effort, Monster!” Chisnall yelled in excitement and relief.

“Cheese and rice!” Monster said, looking more surprised than anyone.

The tank began to back away, its main armament destroyed. Then it lurched to a halt, dead in the water.

Wilton and Price were on their feet now, looking dazed.

“Are you okay?” Chisnall asked.

Price shook off dust like a dog shaking off water. “Just winded,” she gasped.

Wilton gave him the thumbs-up.

“Let’s move,” Chisnall said. “Relocate to the far end of the corridor.”

Chisnall slung his rifle and went to pick up one end of the fifty-cal. Monster grabbed his hands before Chisnall could touch it, spitting on the barrel as he did so. The spit sizzled and evaporated instantly.

Idiot! Chisnall thought. Burned hands were all he needed right now. He should have known that the barrel of the gun would be red-hot. Monster handed him a thick cloth and he wrapped it around the barrel.

Boot steps sounded in the shattered entranceway and enemy rounds sprayed up into the ceiling of the corridor as they ran. They set the fifty-cal on the floor at the end of the corridor and Monster lay behind it. Wilton kneeled at the doorway, his rifle propped on his knee. Price and Chisnall took opposite sides of the doorway. Anyone foolish enough to stick his head around the other end of that corridor was going to lose it, real fast.

They waited. They could hear sounds coming from the other end of the long corridor, but there was no sign of anyone.

“The tank shell took out the stairs,” Price said. “They’ll have to bring up some ladders.”

“That won’t take long,” Chisnall said.

“We’re done.” It was Fleming’s voice on the comm. “We’re Oscar Mike.”

Finally!

“Monster, stay here,” Chisnall said. “Keep their heads down. Price, Wilton, on me. I’m going to open up the doors to the tunnel.”

They ran for the control room with the others and had just reached it when he heard the heavy stutter of Monster’s fifty-cal in the corridor behind him.

Brogan was sitting up but looked dazed.

“Brogan!” Chisnall tried to keep the relief out of his voice. “Are you okay?”

“I … I think so,” she said. She seemed vacant.

“Can you walk?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice came from somewhere far away.

Chisnall hoped it was just the aftereffects of the concussion and not something more permanent.

“Price, Wilton, take her with you. Get her inside the tunnel when I open the doors.”

He found the controls for the inner bay doors and shoved them open. Through a long glass window that looked out on the monorail bay, he could see the two SAS men already in the bay and waiting. Behind the wreckage of the car and the Tomahawk, the doors began to open.

Price and Wilton appeared on the stairs, Brogan stumbling between them.

“Grenades!” Monster yelled from the passageway.

“Get out of there!” Chisnall yelled.

“Monster did this already,” Monster said, running at full speed past the door to the control room.

The grenades in the passageway exploded in a series of sharp cracks.

The inner tunnel doors were almost fully open now. Chisnall took a grenade and set the timer to the maximum: sixty seconds. He placed it on the control desk and pulled the pin, then shoved the bay door controls back into the closed position.

He sprinted out into the corridor, only to be greeted by a hail of fire from the entrance. He threw himself back into the control room as chips flew from the stone walls around him, peppering his body armor.

He had two grenades left. One was a flash-bang. He pulled the pin and watched the safety lever spin away into a corner of the room. He threw it, hard, on an angle against the wall of the corridor so that it bounced off and along toward his attackers. Almost immediately, there was a blast of light and a crack of thunder, and he was moving, diving through the doorway of the control room and rolling across to the corridor opposite. A hard left turn and another short corridor, and the monorail bay was ahead of him. He pulled out his sidearm as he emerged into the bay on the upper observation level. Below him, Monster was climbing over the wreckage toward the closing bay doors. More firing came from behind. He snapped off a couple of quick shots with his pistol, not aiming.

He didn’t have enough time. He could see that now. The big metal doors were already half closed and he still had to get down to the platform and past the wreckage. If those doors shut, he would be trapped on the wrong side of them, and the grenade in the control room would make sure that he remained trapped.

Monster was already ducking through the rapidly diminishing gap. Chisnall ran a few meters along the upper level and then hurdled the guardrail. He landed on his back on top of the wreckage and twisted around, sliding down the crumpled top of the car.

At the bottom of the car, a jagged piece of metal snagged his body armor at the elbow, jolting him to a stop. He wrenched it free and hurled himself at the gap in the doors. He managed to get his upper body through the opening and then snatched his legs inside as the gates clanged shut. A clamor of rounds struck the doors with staccato metallic clangs. Then came a dull, distant thump that was almost certainly the frag grenade in the control room.

The Bzadians would have to blow these doors open now.

“What kept you?” Price asked.

“I had to check my e-mail,” Chisnall managed, sucking in air. “Status updates, that kind of thing.”

Price smiled.

They were inside, Chisnall realized. Inside Uluru. As far as he knew, they were the only humans ever to go there.

A circular tunnel stretched away inside the rock. The tunnel was perfectly round and perfectly straight. Whatever tools the Pukes had used for their tunnel digging, they were very powerful and very accurate. Strip lighting ran the length of the tunnel, fixed to the ceiling at the highest point. It was bright but faded as the tunnel disappeared around a corner. He looked at the walls. Not just perfectly round, but perfectly polished as well. They gleamed like marble.

“It’s all gray in here,” Wilton said. “Why isn’t it red?”

“Uluru is only red on the outside,” Chisnall said. “It’s rusty.”

Wilton clearly didn’t believe him, but Chisnall couldn’t be bothered explaining.

The monorail line extended out along the floor of the tunnel in front of them. There was no time to wait and admire the view. A banging on the big metal doors sounded behind them.

“Let’s go,” Chisnall said.

Fleming and Bennett each had one end of the warhead. It was a cylindrical object that, to Chisnall, looked like an oversized waste-disposal unit. Thick black wires emerged from dark gray rectangular boxes on the underside of the device and plugged into the end of it. At the top were two silver tubes, protected by thick metal plates. Metal handles attached to the plates allowed the two of them to share the weight of the warhead, although Bennett was clearly struggling.

“Monster, give them a hand with that,” Chisnall said, and Monster took Bennett’s side.

“Blow the C4,” Wilton said. “Blow it now.”

“I can’t risk it,” Chisnall said. “There’s enough explosive up there to bring down the whole tunnel.”

Even as he spoke, a series of explosions sounded behind them and a lip of smoke curled through the narrow gap between the doors.

“Sounds like grenades,” Price said. “They haven’t had time to bring up any demo charges.”

“Let’s move it,” Chisnall said.

The curve in the tunnel was about a hundred meters away. If they could reach that, he would feel safer about blowing the tunnel entrance. They had plenty of time before the aliens could bring up some heavy demo and blow the doors.

He was wrong.

They were barely fifty meters into the tunnel when a booming crash sounded behind them and the big metal doors shuddered.

Chisnall had just enough time to look back in a state of shocked confusion when a second explosion shattered the doors, sending them flying off their hinges into the walls of the tunnel. With the team trapped in the narrow confines of the smooth tunnel walls, the shock wave blasted them off their feet, and Chisnall saw the other Angels go flying, scattered like tenpins.

The rotorcraft. They must have evacuated the area, then used the gunship, hovering outside to blow the outer doors, to fire right through the opening into the bay. There was no need to wait for demo charges when you had a gunship to use instead.

“Blow the entrance!” Price yelled.

Chisnall, in a daze, reached for the detonator at his waist.

It wasn’t there.

Shadowy figures were emerging through the smoke and haze behind them, and the air was alive with the crackle of bullets. The walls were exploding in puffs of rock around them.

He saw Bennett go down, hands clutched to his neck, a dark liquid bubbling up between his fingers. He saw Monster start to rise and get hit, flung forward on his face like a rag doll. And then he saw the detonator. It had been knocked from his belt and had fallen into the channel in the middle of the monorail track. Rounds flew around him, punching holes in the dust that filled the air of the tunnel. He tumbled over into the channel, his fingers closing over the detonator. He flicked off the safety.

“Good night,” he said, and pressed the trigger.

And then everything was gone.