The Assault

15. DARKNESS AND DUST



[1245 hours]

[Uluru Secure Facility, New Bzadia]

DARKNESS AND DUST. DUST AND DARKNESS.

Chisnall was heaving great clogging balls of dust out of his lungs in gut-wrenching coughs, interspersed with dry heaves. The darkness was absolute. The strip lighting in the tunnel had vanished in the blast. He tried to move his arms. The right one responded, but there was no movement from his left, if it even still existed. He eased his right arm forward and found his combat visor, flipping it up.

He remembered the rag that Monster had given him to hold the hot gun barrel. He found it in a pocket and pulled it out, holding it over his mouth and nose and breathing through it.

For the first time, he got air. Harsh, acrid, smoke-laden air that smelled of gun oil, but it was air. He hawked and spat, clearing some of the grit from his throat. His water canteen was on his right rear hip. He found it and took a small swig, rinsing it around his mouth and spitting it out before putting the cloth back over his face and drawing another breath.

He was lying mostly on his left side, down in the channel in the monorail track. He rolled onto his stomach, and his left arm suddenly started working again. He must have been lying on it. Pushing himself up onto his elbows and then back onto his knees, he could see absolutely nothing. Nor could he feel anything, but that was a good thing. No pain, at least nothing excruciating, so hopefully no major injuries. Lucky again.

He had a flashlight. He should know which pocket it was in, but his brain felt as thick and heavy as the air in the tunnel. Thoughts and facts tumbled over and swirled around in random patterns. He fumbled until he found the light, and switched it on. Dust particles immediately made a flowing curtain in front of his face. It did not seem as thick now, and somehow he got it into his brain that the dust would be gradually settling. That the higher he got, the less dust there would be.

He stood up, and the air cleared a little more. He stepped up out of the channel onto the monorail track and found that he could breathe without the rag. He shone his flashlight through the swirling dust to the smooth rock walls of the tunnel. There was no sign of his team.

He had been the only one down in the channel, he remembered, and hoped that didn’t mean he was the only one who had survived.

Chisnall turned back toward the tunnel entrance, but that was completely gone. All that he could see was a massive pile of rock. The flesh of Uluru.

The smooth walls and ceiling had been replaced by a myriad of cracks and deep fissures. Overhead, a web of fractured rock extended almost to the curve in the tunnel ahead. It looked unstable, an avalanche waiting for a trigger to start its headlong rush down a mountainside.

Still he could see no one.

Had he killed his entire team?

The shock of the explosion was gradually wearing off, and a few connections were starting to flicker together into some sort of reasoning inside his brain.

“Angel Team, response check,” he called, fighting off the icy grip of panic that clutched at him.

Silence.

“Angel Team? Angel Team!”

He frantically dived back down into the thick soup of settling dust and scrabbled around with his hands. He could feel only the rubble-coated floor.

“Angel Team!”

He stood and moved forward, sliding his feet across the ground to avoid stepping on anyone.

Still nothing. No one.

Trying not to panic, he took a deep breath, dropped back to his hands and knees, and felt around through the dust. His hands closed on an ankle.

Chisnall felt his way up the body to the arms and thrust his hands under the shoulders, lifting the person up out of the thick dust. It was Wilton, and he was alive, although breathing shallowly, lips coated with rock dust. Pushing Wilton up against the wall of the tunnel, Chisnall held him there with an arm across his chest. He pulled Wilton’s visor back and splashed water over his face. It ran down his chin and neck in gray rivulets. He squeezed Wilton’s cheeks together and poured water into his pursed lips. Wilton gagged, choked, and spat, and his eyes opened. He looked weak and groggy.

“Can you stand?” Chisnall asked.

Wilton said nothing, but his eyes turned toward Chisnall.

“Can you stand?”

A weak nod.

“Stay here, stay upright. The dust is thicker down low.”

Another weak nod.

Chisnall took another deep breath and plunged back down into the swirling currents of dust. His hand touched body armor, and he hauled Brogan up and repeated the water routine. Once more, and Price was sitting with the others. He heard a cough from behind and found Fleming farther down the tunnel, toward the entrance. He was sitting up, leaning against the tunnel wall.

“Are you okay?” Chisnall asked.

“I’m not sure,” Fleming said. “I can’t move my legs.”

He couldn’t move them, Chisnall could see, because a huge boulder covered them, almost sitting in Fleming’s lap. He didn’t want to guess what they were going to find underneath that boulder.

The warhead was on the floor, just in front of Fleming. Chisnall checked it quickly. The casing looked intact, so he left it and went back to his search.

Bennett was not far from Fleming, but there was no good news there. He was gone. The dust mixed with a pool of blood around his head to create a red sludge.

The dust was settling more each moment, and although Chisnall was still wading through it, he could see the floor and anyone on it. But there was nobody.

Monster seemed to have completely disappeared.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, and Wilton was there, gray-faced but recovered enough to help. They took opposite sides of the track and trudged forward, feeling with their boots for any obstruction bigger than a loose rock but found nothing.

It wasn’t until Chisnall thought of searching the channel that they discovered him, facedown and unmoving in a tumbled pile of rock and a slurry of dust.

“No, not Monster,” Wilton breathed from behind Chisnall, echoing his own thoughts.

There was something about Monster that had seemed indestructible, that would just smile in the face of hell and destruction and keep on going. It was shattering to see his cold, still body lying awkwardly in the monorail trench.

“Check his pulse,” he said.

Wilton stepped forward but stopped when a dull boom came from behind them, followed by a series of crashes. The pile of rocks at the entrance was shaking.

“They don’t waste any time,” Wilton said.

The Bzadians were already blasting their way through the rubble.

“We’ve got to get moving,” Chisnall said.

Brogan looked dazed but was standing by herself now, no longer needing the support of the wall.

“Wilton, give me a hand with Fleming,” Chisnall said.

They raced back to the SAS man, who was still sandwiched between the rock and the tunnel wall.

“We’ve got to move that boulder,” Chisnall said. He looked around for anything they could use as a lever, but there was nothing but rocks and rubble.

A little reluctantly, he hit the release button for his coil-gun and it appeared in his hands. He unhooked it from the holster spring.

Another explosion sounded from the caved-in entrance to the tunnel, and a fractured slab of stone crashed from the ceiling, not far from them. It showered them with more dust and debris.

“You have to leave me here,” Fleming said.

“No,” Chisnall said.

“You can’t jeopardize the mission for one person,” Fleming said.

Brogan shook her head, agreeing with Fleming.

“Watch me,” was Chisnall’s reply.

Wilton helped him move a smaller boulder into place to use as a fulcrum, then used the barrel of the coil-gun as a lever. He leaned on the stock of the gun while Wilton put his shoulder to the rock.

Fleming grunted a little as the weight of the boulder shifted. He must have been in excruciating pain, but the only sound that escaped his lips was that grunt, little more than a whisper of air.

The rock shifted slightly, and the end of the lever slipped a little deeper underneath. Chisnall kicked at the fulcrum stone, shifting it into a better position, then pressed on the lever again. He put the full weight of his body onto it. The coil-gun was tough; it didn’t break, although Chisnall doubted that it would ever fire again. Price joined him pushing down on the lever while Wilton braced himself against the tunnel wall. The rock rolled up a bit more, held there for a second by their combined strength, then slowly rolled back to where it had been.

A third explosion came from the tunnel entrance and a low rumble shook the whole tunnel. A large rock, blasted from the pile, hit the ground near them. It tumbled past, so close that Chisnall felt its passage, before it crashed into the channel. A meter to the right and it would have smeared them all down the tunnel wall.

Brogan watched, but made no attempt to help as Chisnall repositioned the rock and the lever and leaned back on the stock of the coil-gun. He looked grimly at Wilton, but Wilton wasn’t paying attention; he was looking up the tunnel. Chisnall followed the beam of his flashlight and saw a ghost.

It was a barrel-chested, broad-shouldered, tree-trunk-legged ghost that strode steadily down the tunnel, shedding layers of dust as it came. Monster Panyoczki had somehow taken on Bzadian bullets and the crushing rock of Uluru and won.

“Monster!” It was intended to be a shout, but it came out as a small breath. “Cheese and rice!”

Monster marched up to the boulder without a word, lay down on the floor of the cavern, and put those huge, ham-like legs on the rock. Blood was pouring from a gash in one of his calves, but he didn’t seem to notice. He began to push. Chisnall and Wilton leaned back on the lever, and Price positioned herself behind Fleming, ready to slide him out from between the boulder and the wall as soon as the boulder lifted.

The muscles in Monster’s legs rippled. The rock moved up the wall, and this time it kept moving. Price pulled Fleming out and was at his legs immediately, probing them with her fingers.

Chisnall examined his weapon. The barrel no longer looked straight, and the shot-counter on the side was cracked. It was now just a dead weight. He tossed it into the dust of the channel, wincing as he did so. If his drill sergeant back at Fort Carson saw how he had treated his weapon, he would have torn strips off him.

“Monster!” Wilton yelled, grabbing one of the handles of the warhead.

Chisnall couldn’t resist looking at Monster’s back as he lifted one side of the warhead. He had seen him get shot! His body armor showed evidence of three rounds. All of them had hit Monster’s coil-gun, which was still holstered across his back. Two of them had ricocheted off into his body armor. It had cracked but held.

Price looked up. “Fleming’s going to be okay. His legs were pinned between the rock and the wall, not crushed. I’m no medic, but as far as I can tell, the bones aren’t broken.”

Chisnall breathed out slowly. He’d had visions of Fleming’s legs being flattened like a pancake under the weight of the huge boulder.

“Can you move?”

Fleming nodded.

A series of explosions rumbled from the rockfall behind them as they moved down the tunnel, deeper into Uluru.