‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Tuscan hills. An old villa. A classy guy like the Scarecrow wouldn’t miss an opportunity like that.’
‘He told you he was going to ask, didn’t he?’ Gant said, eyes forward.
‘Yep.’
‘He’s such a chicken,’ Gant said as they rounded a bend and all of a sudden, heard gunfire. ‘To be continued,’ she said, giving Mother a look.
Up ahead in the darkness, they saw the beams of helmet-mounted flashlights and the shadows of running Allied soldiers, all moving behind a makeshift barricade constructed of old mining equipment—barrels, crates, empty steel mini-skips.
And beyond the barricade, Gant saw the all-important air vents.
In this tight, low-ceilinged, square-edged world, the air vent cavern was a welcome stretch of open space. Six storeys high and lit by brilliant white phosphorus flares, it shone like a glowing underground cathedral.
The two 10-metre-wide air vents disappeared up into the roof via a pair of identical cone-shaped recesses in the ceiling.
And underneath the air vents, one of the fiercest battles in history was underway.
The members of Al-Qaeda had prepared well.
They had built a blockade of their own in this high-ceilinged cavern—a barricade that was infinitely superior to the ad hoc creation of the Allied soldiers.
It was made of the larger mining equipment that had been left in the mine: big vehicles featuring gigantic hemispherical drill bits, front-end loaders, some old white Humvee-like trucks called ‘Driftrunners’, and tip-trays filled with bullet-absorbing coal.
As Gant reached the Allied barricade, she saw the terrorists on the other side of the cavern: over a hundred of them, all dressed in brown leather waistcoats, white shirts, and coiled black turbans.
They were also armed to the teeth. AK-47s, M-16s, RPGs. Bathed in the fresh air of the vents, gunfire was clearly safe inside this subterranean hall.
Gant linked up with the Allied soldiers on the scene.
There were about twenty of them, a mix of United States Marines and British SAS troops.
She arrived at the side of the Allied commander, an SAS major named Ashcroft, call-sign: Sphinx.
‘It’s a bloody nightmare!’ the English commando shouted. ‘They’re dug in around those vents for the long term! And then every few minutes, one of them—shit! Here comes another one! Shoot him! Shoot him!’
Gant snapped round to look over the Allied barricade.
With shocking suddenness, a bearded Arab terrorist had burst forth from a gap in the Al-Qaeda barricade on a motorcycle, firing an AK-47 one-handed and yelling to Allah.
Strapped to his chest were four wads of C4.
Three SAS soldiers nailed him with their automatic rifles, blasting the suicide bomber from his saddle, sending him crashing to the ground behind his speeding motorbike.
The Arab hit the ground in a clumsy puff of dust—
—and then he exploded.
One second he was there. The next he was simply gone.
Gant’s eyes widened.
Madness . . .
The SAS leader, Ashcroft, turned to her. ‘It’s absolute bedlam, darlin’! Every now and then, the bastards launch a suicide run and we have to cut them down before they reach our barricade! The problem is they must have a supply cave somewhere back there! Generators, gasoline and enough ammo, food and water to see them through to the year 3000! It’s a stand-off!’
‘What if we went around?’ Gant said, indicating the series of tunnels off to their right.
‘No. It’s booby-trapped! Trip-wires. Landmines. I’ve already lost two good men going that way! These rag-heads have been waiting for a fight in this place for a long time! This is going to take a frontal assault. What I need is more men!’
At that moment, as if on cue, a collection of about twenty more barrel-mounted flashlights appeared in the tunnel that led back to the mine’s entrance.
‘Ah, reinforcements,’ Ashcroft said, heading down the tunnel to meet them.
Gant watched him go, saw him meet the leader of this new squad and shake the man’s hand.
Funny, she thought. Colonel Walker had said that the next team wouldn’t be coming in for at least another twenty minutes. How did these guys get in so quickly—
She watched Ashcroft wave his hand toward the barricade, explaining the situation, turning his back on his new acquaintance for a split second, during which moment the leader of this new group of soldiers smoothly and fluidly drew something from his belt and swiped it hard across Ashcroft’s neck region.
At first Gant didn’t know what had happened.
Ashcroft didn’t move.
Then, to her absolute horror, Gant saw Ashcroft’s head tilt at an impossible angle and just drop off his body.
Her eyes went wide with disbelief.
What—?
But she didn’t have time for shock, for no sooner was Ashcroft down than the submachine-guns of this new force of men burst to life, raining fire on the Allied troops gathered behind their barricade.
Quick as a flash, Gant dived over and into one of the steel mini-skips that formed her barricade, just as bullets impacted all around her. She was joined a second later by Mother and her other two Marines.
The rest of the Allied troops weren’t so lucky.
Most of them were caught out in the open . . . and they were pummelled mercilessly by this unexpected storm of bullets from behind. Their bodies exploded with bloody holes, convulsed horribly.
‘Goddamnit! What the hell is this!’ Gant pressed herself close to a mini-skip’s rusty steel walls.
Now they were caught between two sets of enemies: one in front of their barricade, one behind.
A lethal sandwich.
‘What do we do, Chickadee?’ Mother yelled.
Gant’s face set into a determined expression. ‘We stay alive. Come on, this way!’
And with that, Gant led her team in the only direction they could go—she leapt over the forward side of the mini-skip and landed, cat-like, on the dusty section of open ground in between the two facing barricades.
At that very same moment, Schofield and Book’s Light Strike Vehicle skidded to a halt in the upper entrance cave of the mine.
Schofield saw the roller-coaster-like tracks of the drift diving down into the mine, took a step toward them, just as two figures burst out from a nearby side-tunnel.
Schofield and Book whipped around together, MP-7s up. The two dark figures did the same and—
‘Pokey?’ Schofield said, squinting. ‘Pokey de Villiers?’
‘Scarecrow?’ one of the figures lowered his gun. ‘Man, I almost shot you dead.’
It was Corporal Paul ‘Pokey’ de Villiers, just returned from cleaning out the Al-Qaeda sniper holes on the mountainside with his partner, a lance-corporal nicknamed Freddy.
‘I need to find Gant,’ Schofield said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Down there,’ Pokey said.
Thirty seconds later, Schofield was sliding down the steep drift tunnel at the wheel of the Light Strike Vehicle with Book II riding shotgun and the two extra Marines, Pokey and Freddy, sharing the rear gunner’s seat.
The LSV’s headlights blazed as it rocketed down the 30-degree slope, straddling the train tracks that ran down the centre of the tunnel.
Nearing the bottom, Schofield jammed the LSV into reverse, causing its wheels to spin wildly backwards as the speeding car skidded forwards down the tunnel.
The strategy worked: they slowed, if only slightly. But it was enough and with a few yards to go, Schofield slipped the dune buggy out of reverse and the LSV blasted out of the bottom of the drift tunnel and shot into the maze, swinging left past the dead body of the SAS messenger who had been stationed there.
Gant was completely exposed.
Out on the forward side of the Allied barricade—with only thirty yards of open ground between her and about 200 murderous holy warriors.
If the terrori
st forces wanted to kill her and her three Marines, then this was their chance. Gant waited for the hail of bullets that would end her life.
But it never came.
Instead she heard gunfire—from somewhere behind the Al-Qaeda blockade.
Gant frowned. It was a type of gunfire that she had never heard before. It sounded too fast, way too fast, like the whirring of a six-barrelled mini-gun . . .
And then she saw something that took her completely by surprise.
She saw the Al-Qaeda blockade get absolutely raked with internal gunfire—its walls blew out, assaulted by a million hypervelocity bullets—and suddenly a whole crowd of terrorists were leaping over their own barricade out into no-man’s-land, fleeing some unseen force behind their own blockade . . . exactly as Gant had done herself.
Another thing was clear.
The terrorists were fleeing something far worse than Gant was.
As they leapt desperately over their barricade, they were shot in mid-air—from behind—and all but ripped apart, their limbs exploding from their bodies.
A split-second before one such Al-Qaeda warrior was ripped to pieces as he clambered over the barricade, Gant caught a glimpse of a green targeting laser zeroing in on him.
A green laser . . .
‘Er, Lieutenant!’ Mother yelled from beside her. ‘What the hell happened to this fight! I thought wars were supposed to be fought between two competing forces!’
‘I know!’ Gant called. ‘There are more than two forces down here! Come on, follow me!’
‘Where!’
‘There’s only one way to solve this problem, and that’s to do what we came here to do!’
With that, Gant made a break across no-man’s-land, ducking underneath the overhead conveyor belt that ran up its left-hand side, and headed towards the left-hand air vent.
Gant came to the northern end of the elevated conveyor belt just as four Al-Qaeda terrorists came running out from behind their barricade, chased by gunfire.
The first three holy warriors scrambled up some boxes that had been arranged like stairs and jumped up onto the conveyor belt while the fourth hit a fat green button on a console.
The conveyor belt roared to life—
—and the three men on it were instantly whisked out of sight at tremendous speed, heading towards the Allied barricade. The fourth man jumped onto the belt after them and—whoosh—he was swept southward as well.
‘Whoa. Fast belt . . .’ Mother said.
‘Come on!’ Gant yelled as she dashed behind the Al-Qaeda barricade.
She burst into open space—the high-ceilinged area underneath the air vents. It did look like a cathedral here. Dim white light from electric lamps partially illuminated the area.
She also saw the reason why the Al-Qaeda terrorists had bolted from the safety of their barricade.
A team of maybe 15 black-clad commandos—dark wraiths wearing green-eyed night-vision goggles and motorcross-style Oakley anti-flash glasses—was fanning out from a small tunnel located behind the Al-Qaeda barricade, tucked into the north-eastern corner of the cavern.
It was, however, the weapons in their hands that seized Gant’s attention. The weapons which had unleashed hell on the Al-Qaeda troops.
These new soldiers were equipped with MetalStorm M100 assault rifles. A variety of rail gun, the MetalStorm range of weapons do not use conventional moving parts to fire their bullets. Rather, they employ rapid-sequential electric shocks to trigger each round, and as such, are able to fire at the unbelievable rate of 10,000 rounds per minute. It amounts to a literal storm of metal, hence the name.
The MetalStorm guns of this new force of men were equipped with ghostly green laser-sighting devices—so in her mind, until she found out their real name, Gant just labelled them ‘the Black-Green Force’.
One thing about them was truly odd. This Black-Green Force didn’t seem to care about her at all. They were pursuing the fleeing terrorists.
In the midst of all this confusion, Gant slid to the dusty ground underneath the left-hand air vent and started erecting a vertical mortar launcher.
When the launcher was ready, she yelled, ‘Clear!’ and hit the trigger. With an explosive whump!, a mortar round shot up into the air vent, disappearing up it at rocket speed before . . .
. . . BOOM!!!!
Six hundred metres above them, the mortar round hit the camouflaged lid that capped the air vent, blasting it to smithereens. Debris rained down the vent, smacking to the ground, at the same time as a shaft of natural grey light flooded into the cavern from above.
When the rain of debris had cleared, Gant stepped forward again, and surrounded by her team, erected a new device, a much smaller one: a compact laser-emitting diode.
She flicked a switch.
Immediately, a brilliant red laser beam shot up into the vent from the diode, disappearing up the chimney, shooting into the sky.
‘All units, this is Fox,’ Gant said into her radio mike. ‘If you’re still alive, pay attention. The laser is set. Repeat, the laser is set. According to mission parameters, the bombers will be here in ten minutes! I don’t care what else is happening in here, let’s clear out of this mine, people!’
At the Marine compound outside the mine, a communications officer abruptly sat up straight at his console.
‘Colonel! We just picked up a targeting laser coming from inside the mine! It’s Gant’s beam. They did it.’
Colonel Walker stepped forward. ‘Call the C-130s, tell them they have a laser. And get evac crews to that mine entrance to pick up our people as they come out. In ten minutes that mine is going to be history and we can’t wait for any stragglers.’
Gant and Mother and the two Marines with them turned together.
They were still behind the Al-Qaeda barricade and now they had to get back to the Allied one and then beyond it to the sloping entry shaft.
They didn’t get more than a few yards.
No sooner had they started moving than they saw a stand-off taking place just in front of the Al-Qaeda barricade, at the edge of no-man’s-land.
Four Al-Qaeda holy warriors stood surrounded by a six-man squad of the Black-Green Force, caught in the beams of their MetalStorm rifles.
Gant watched from behind the barricade.
The Black-Green Force’s squad leader stepped forward, pulled down his ski-mask to reveal a male model’s square jaw and handsome blue-eyed features. He addressed the terrorists. ‘You’re Zawahiri? Hassan Zawahiri . . .’
One of the Al-Qaeda men raised his chin defiantly.
‘I am Zawahiri,’ he said. ‘And you cannot kill me.’
‘Why not?’ the Black-Green squad leader said.
‘Because Allah is my protector,’ Zawahiri said evenly. ‘Do you not know? I am His chosen warrior. I am His Chosen One.’ The terrorist’s voice began to rise. ‘Ask the Russians. Of the captured mujahideen, I alone survived the Soviets’ experiments in the dungeons of their Tajik gulag. Ask the Americans! I alone survived their cruise missile attacks after the African embassy bombings!’ Now he started shouting. ‘Ask the Mossad! They know! I alone have survived over a dozen of their assassination attempts! No man born of this earth can kill me! I am the One. I am God’s messenger. I am invincible!’
‘You,’ the squad leader said, ‘are wrong.’
He fired a burst from his MetalStorm rifle into Zawahiri’s chest. The terrorist was hurled backwards, his torso torn to mush, his body all but cut in half.
Then the handsome squad leader stepped forward and did the most gruesome thing of all.
He stood over Zawahiri’s corpse, drew a machete from behind his back, and with one clean blow, sliced Zawahiri’s head from his shoulders.
Gant’s eyes went wide.
Mother’s mouth opened.
They watched in horror as the Black-Green commando then grabbed Zawahiri’s severed head and casually placed it in a white medical box.
Mother breathed: ‘What kind of fucked-up s
hit is going on here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gant said. ‘But we’re not gonna find out now. We have to get out of this place.’
They turned—
—just in time to see a crowd of about thirty Al-Qaeda terrorists stampeding toward them—toward the conveyor belt, screaming, shouting, their empty machine-guns useless—pursued by more Black-Green commandos.
Gant opened fire—smacked down four terrorists.
Mother did too—took down four more.
The other two Marines in Gant’s team were crash-tackled where they stood, trampled by the stampeding crowd.
‘There are too many of them!’ Gant yelled to Mother. She dived left, out of the way.
For her part, Mother stepped back onto the boxes leading up to the conveyor belt, firing hard, before she was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the terrorists and was herself flung backwards onto the speeding conveyor belt in their midst.
The Black-Green men who had killed Zawahiri seemed amused by the sight of the Al-Qaeda warriors fleeing desperately onto the conveyor belt.
One of them strode over to the conveyor belt’s control console and hit a fat yellow button.
A mechanical roar filled the cavern, and from her position on the dusty floor, Gant spun to see its source.
Over by the Allied barricade, at the far end of the conveyor belt, a giant rock crusher had been turned on. It was composed simply of a pair of massive rollers that were each covered in hundreds of conical rock-crushing ‘teeth’.
Gant gasped as she saw the Al-Qaeda terrorists now jumping for their lives off the speeding conveyor belt. She watched for Mother to jump, too, but it never happened.
Gant didn’t see anyone resembling Mother leap off.
Shit.
Mother was still on the conveyor belt, rushing headlong toward the rock crusher.
Mother was indeed still on the belt—shooting down its length toward the rotating jaws of the rock crusher sixty yards away.
The problem was she was wrestling with two Al-Qaeda terrorists as she went.