Blown Circuit Read online

  “Dive around,” I whispered.

  I dived, Meryem beside me. A bullet spit into the water, three feet away. They were getting closer. I surfaced at the rear of the column and hung off it with one hand, catching my breath. Meryem joined me.

  “How far can you swim underwater?” I whispered.

  “Far enough, I hope.”

  I could see nothing in the darkness. But I could keep a relatively straight line. And I remembered the lay of the land from the flashlight beam. So I swam. I figured a hundred feet would do it. Keep underwater, conserve our breath, swim slowly but efficiently, and when we surfaced we’d be far enough away that they couldn’t get a bead on us. At least that was my thinking until I saw a dim glow in the water beside me. It was Meryem. She had switched on her light stick. It was probably an accident and she quickly shut it off again, but it was enough. A powerful beam of light raked across the black water above me. Then the water was awash in gunfire. But not single bullets. Automatic gunfire.

  We couldn’t swim into it. We needed to swim away. I dived deeper and resurfaced several feet away. The flashlight beam scoured the water where I had been previously. But I couldn’t see Meryem. I could only hope that she was following. A few feet in front of me, the flashlight beam danced off another column standing in the water. This column had a head carved into its base. It was the head of a wolf exactly like the drawing in the journal. I figured it might have been a tribute to Romulus and Remus—the founders of Rome who were raised by a wolf. I was unsure of the history but what was different was that this column wasn’t simply sitting there isolated in the middle of the cistern. It was sitting on an underwater ledge.

  The ledge made it impossible for me to swim any farther because the water wasn’t more than a foot deep. Walking would be noisy, I needed a better way. Luckily, a low wall running laterally along the ledge provided a solution. Just a few inches below the water, it gave me a narrow path to the side of the cistern. I pulled myself up on top of the narrow submerged wall and put one foot in front of the other, inching forward into the darkness as silently as possible. I had to assume that Meryem was still following me. It was the only thing that made sense.

  Then I saw the headlight—two bright headlights bearing down on me from the side of the cistern. And that didn’t make any sense at all. A second after the headlights lit me up, an engine roared to life. After that, the bullets really began to fly.

  Chapter 48

  I RAN LIKE the wind, one foot in front of the other on the narrow ledge, lead spraying the water on either side of me. So much for invisibility, I was lit up like a Christmas tree. As I sprinted forward, I willed the headlights off me with one-half of my concentration, silently praying that the bullets wouldn’t find their mark with the other half. But the headlights didn’t shut off and the bullets didn’t stop firing. Worse still, I didn't know what I was running toward. Not that it mattered. There was only one way to go.

  It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards, but it felt like a thousand. I had lost sight of Meryem. I had no idea where she was, and beyond that, I wished I was still in the water. A bullet rapidly loses its energy traveling through water, but out in the air, I was exposed. One…two…three. I counted the seconds off in my head as I ran, bullets flying on either side of me. They were still missing. Why were they missing? Four…five…six… I’d never been shot, but I was pretty sure it was coming. It had to be. It would feel like a stinging burn, like something had clamped on to me. Seven…eight…nine… I leapt off the sunken wall as it joined with a marble floor. Ten…eleven…twelve…

  Bam! The inevitable happened. I was hit. The funny thing was, I was so pumped up on adrenaline that I barely knew it. The bullet felt more like a peck at my arm than anything else. Chips of stone flew as I sprinted the final twenty feet and rolled under the vehicle.

  “Michael!”

  I heard the driver’s door open above. It was some kind of military vehicle and it was definitely Meryem's voice. Somehow she had gotten there ahead of me.

  “Get in!”

  She shut off the lights and I continued my roll under the vehicle to the passenger door. Enough light leaked from the cab through what looked like a hole in the floor that I could just make out where I had to go. I did one more complete roll and hopped up to the passenger door that swung open above me. Meryem backed up in a tight quarter turn as I swung my body into the cab.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I saw the truck. I swam.”

  “Why did you leave the lights on?”

  “So you could see!” She quickly looked me over. “Your arm,” she said. “You are bleeding.”

  Good point. I’d almost forgotten I’d been shot. When I examined the wound on my upper right arm, though, I discovered that it wasn’t much more than a graze. I could tell right off that I wasn’t losing much blood. I reached down for the leg of my shorts and pulled off the strip of duct tape I’d stuck there back in Vietnam. The tape was wet, but it was the good stuff, and if I discounted the blood, my arm was fairly dry. I wrapped the tape over the wound like a big Band Aid and mercifully, it stuck. Field dressing of champions, or so they had told me back in training.

  After that, I glanced around the cab. The truck was an old army-green Mercedes Benz Unimog. Early fifties vintage if I had to guess. It was a high-clearance, stalwart old four-wheel-drive, and by the way Meryem was working the gears, I imagined it was about to get a hell of a workout. She shifted on the lights again, just in time to avoid a fallen marble column. Bullets flew, strafing the hood. She shut off the lights and continued on, leaping out of first gear and into second.

  “There was a crank,” Meryem said. “On the engine. But no key, only a switch,” she said.

  The words had barely left her mouth before I was heaved suddenly forward. I managed to put my hand out to avoid hitting the windshield with my head, but my shoulder impacted anyhow. The whole vehicle lurched up before our momentum carried us up and over whatever we had hit. Meryem must have braked, because the taillights went on and I could see behind us. We had driven over some kind of fallen sculpture, a forlorn marble head staring right back at me in the mirror.

  Several more bullets flew, but there were too many obstructions in the way for Meryem to turn the lights off.

  “Where do I go?” Meryem asked.

  “That way,” I pointed.

  There really was only one place to go—the tunnel that was now visible at the end of the huge cistern. We raced along the uneven marble floor which bordered the deep watery pool. The place was huge, at least two football fields long.

  “Do you know what this place is?” I asked.

  “For water, I think,” Meryem said. “I think it was used by the Romans to store water.”

  She turned the wheel hard, narrowly avoiding another fallen marble sculpture. The old truck heaved onto two wheels, letting out a rubbery yelp before settling back down. Meryem turned the wheel again, and brought the truck back up to speed. The bullets were still flying, but they were getting scarcer. We were a long way away from the opening in the ceiling now. The cistern was absolutely enormous. It may have begun its life as an underground Roman reservoir, but it had been expanded since then. It had to have been. It was simply too big.

  “It doesn’t look like anybody’s been down here for ages,” I said.

  She braked as I said it. We had reached the far wall, the tunnel to the left of us. But there was something else there. Wooden crates. Lots of them. More gunfire erupted from behind us. I was hoping that we would be hard to hit in the dark, but I wasn’t counting on it.

  “What do you think?” Meryem asked.

  “I think if this thing is anywhere, it’s here.”

  I jumped out of the truck. Meryem shut off the headlights, but left the engine running. My wet clothing clung to my skin, but I wasn’t cold; the temperature was surprisingly moderate underground. I risked shining my light into the Unimog’s shallow truck bed and found a tire iron next to a collap
sible shovel and some kind of portable firefighting kit. But almost as soon as I turned the light on, gunfire erupted from the ceiling. I was drawing their fire again. I was going to have to be more careful.

  I used the faint glow of my watch’s nightlight to guide me as I took cover in front of the Unimog. The crates were unpainted pine. I jimmied the tire iron into the top of one, nails creaking out of place to reveal a bed of wood shavings. I pawed the shavings aside to find something a little less esoteric than the triggers for Tesla’s Device. World War II-era grenades. A whole case of them.

  “What is it?” Meryem said.

  “Things that go boom.”

  I pried open the next crate. I was expecting the same thing, but I didn’t get it. Instead, I pulled a factory-new AK-47 from the box. It was an antique now, but it didn’t look like it had ever been fired. I searched for ammunition, but only found more guns. More gunfire erupted from behind us. I didn’t know whether Kate’s people were still firing the H&Ks, but at two hundred yards they were still within their effective range. Eventually, they would get lucky.

  I pried open a third box, pulling aside the layer of wood shavings. Bingo. There were bandoliers and full clips of ammunition. Whoever had put the stuff there had been planning a little more than target practice—they were stockpiling for a war. I shoved a clip into the nearest AK. They were old guns. They hadn’t been oiled recently, but it didn’t change what I needed to do. I switched the selector switch to multiple shots.

  “What are you doing?” Meryem asked.

  “Give me your flashlight,” I whispered.

  Meryem handed me her light stick. I fumbled my way to the left of the crates. I couldn’t see anything in the darkness. My foot hit something big, but I kept going until I judged I was about eighty feet away from the crates. Then I held the gun above my head and fired a burst toward our assailants. The cistern lit up with muzzle flashes, the shots echoing off the high ceiling like a brutal drum. Then I switched on Meryem's light stick and tossed it to the side of me. After that, I scrabbled out of there about as fast as I could. It took less than a second before I drew their fire, but I was already fifteen feet from where I had been. The light stick would give them an alternate target, but the ruse wouldn’t last for long.

  I crawled the rest of the way back. There was more gunfire, but it was aimed higher, at where I had held the gun.

  “Michael, over here,” Meryem whispered.

  I moved toward her voice, back to the cover of the front of the vehicle, risking a brief glow of light from my watch. Once I saw the lay of the land, I ignored the low-lying crates and fumbled up the stack to the rear of the pile, making a mental note to requisition night-vision gear the next time around. Then I tapped the light on my watch again and that’s when I saw it. There was a trailer hidden among the crates. It was army green, like the Unimog. I saw only the green tongue and part of a wheel, but I felt my heart race all the same. The crates so far had been small and what we were looking for was, if I were to guess, quite large. Large enough that it couldn’t have been carried in. But it could have been towed.

  I pulled away one of the crates boxing in the trailer. Then another. And another. I worked in the dark as much as possible. I didn’t want to draw any more fire. And as I pulled the crates away, a lurking shadow took form. I flashed my light, careful to keep behind the Unimog. The pale glow revealed a huge silver crate with a lone hammer and sickle stenciled into it, Cyrillic script stenciled across its base.

  I hopped up on a smaller crate, and then on the top of the large one, taking the tire iron with me. This was it, the focusing array. It had to be. It was large, it was in a dungeon, and it was Russian. I took the tire iron to the top of the crate, carefully prying open a panel. I worked mostly by feel, the old nails inching out with a cloying squeak revealing the familiar wood shavings below. I brushed them aside and hit my watch light to see two fat copper wires with rubber-insulated leads poking out of the wood shavings.

  I pushed aside more shavings until I was looking at a metallic surface. Not flat, but gently rounded. Rounded enough that I was certain that I was staring down at the surface of a sphere, probably ten feet in diameter and, if the journal was to be believed, definitely the final component to the Tesla Device. I ran my fingers over the finely etched latitudinal lines around its circumference, admiring them in the glimmer of my watch light. As I pushed aside still more shavings, I felt the metal case of my watch being drawn down to the surface of the sphere. The sphere was obviously highly magnetized.

  “Meryem,” I whispered. “Back up the truck.”

  I knew that putting the Unimog into gear was going to be noisy, but what choice did we have? I watched her place a crate of grenades in the back of the Unimog before she got inside, carefully pushing the transmission into gear. Then I dived off the crate as the night erupted into gunfire.

  Chapter 49

  THE MUZZLE FLASH was closer this time. It wasn’t coming from the ceiling anymore. Our pursuers had clearly managed to rappel to the water below and now they were coming to finish us off. More bullets flew. I jumped down, taking cover behind the Unimog as Meryem backed it into position. I could see that it had a pintle hook style trailer hitch; the kind they use in the military. The trailer itself had a lunette loop on the towing arm. Now I needed to connect the two without getting shot.

  Meryem had already backed up to within a few inches of the lunette loop, but I needed her closer. I motioned her back another couple of inches with the light stick. Stopped her. She was an excellent driver. The pintle hook was bang on with the lunette loop which I spun down onto the barb, before locking the hook like a carabiner. Then I ran forward and dived through the passenger door.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Meryem popped the Unimog into gear and pulled out in a wide turn. More muzzle flashes erupted from the darkness, the rounds echoing like thunder claps in the vast emptiness of the cistern. I shoved the wooden stock of the Kalashnikov into the crook of my shoulder and leaned out the window, laying down an arc of cover fire behind us in the darkness.

  We were almost at the tunnel, but the cistern flared to life again, this time with at least four shooters. Then one of them fired a volley of red tracer rounds that lit the place up like the Fourth of July. Meryem stepped on it, double-clutching into second gear, but she missed and went all the way to fourth. The Unimog bogged down, gunfire flaring behind us. She recovered quickly, however, and found second gear and we lurched forward again.

  Once again, it was pitch black behind us. Then, at least one of the wooden crates back at the stockpile began to burn, smoldering in a halo of orange smoke. It looked like the packing material was on fire or fizzling. One of the tracer rounds had probably ignited it. After that I heard bullets, a lot of bullets, all of them popping like supersonic corn. Regardless of why they had ignited, I knew what was coming next.

  “Hang on!”

  I grabbed the steering wheel and pushed Meryem's head down, below the dash, ducking along with her. We had distance on our side. We had already entered the tunnel. But it didn’t make the explosion any less loud. Or bright. A fireball erupted behind us, flame and fury propelling us forward.

  I DIDN’T KNOW whether the trailer had lifted off its wheels. It felt like it had as hot flame licked the inside of the tunnel. That was one of the advantages of the pintle-hook trailer-hitch system—it was more secure. The hot flame seared the air, sucking the oxygen out of the space. I could feel the backdraft and I hoped, no, I prayed, that the grenades in the back of the Unimog didn’t suffer a similar fate. I counted one second…two seconds...three seconds as the bright flare of the explosion turned dull, leaving only a ringing in my ears. I looked over at Meryem in the driver’s seat, the glow of the primitive instrument panel on her face.

  “Are you all right?” I yelled.

  She didn’t answer me, but she was driving, so I knew she was conscious. The tunnel we were driving through was maybe fifteen feet high and just as wide. There were wood
support members here and there, but for the most part, it was unreinforced earth, dirt and rocks tumbling down as we motored ahead. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that the explosion had destabilized the structure. But there wasn’t much we could do about it.

  The good news was that we were no longer traveling down. No, we were traveling up a steady grade. We drove on for what must have been a mile, then two, and then the incline increased to the point that we were laboring up a significant grade. Then we rounded a bend, and an instant later we ran out of road. A pile of rubble filled the tunnel, blocking what looked like an old barnyard gate.

  Meryem stomped on the brakes hard. We had a lot of weight behind us, and I wasn’t sure we would stop in time, but we did, more or less, the front bumper of the Unimog nosing into the pile of dirt and rubble. I hopped out immediately and popped a rock behind the Unimog’s back tire, pulling the shovel out of the truck bed. I could see that we had been lucky. The trailer was still hot from the blast, scorch marks running up the green metal.

  I walked up to the pile of rubble in front of the Unimog. Obviously, there had been a tunnel collapse, but only a partial one. Behind the dirt and rock was the wooden gate, huge and arched and old. It was big enough to allow a vehicle through, but I had no idea where it would bring us, because though the Unimog’s headlights revealed gaps in the wood, there was no daylight shining through. Whatever was on the other side of the gate, it wasn’t necessarily any better than what was on our side.

  Only one way to find out. I climbed the dirt pile, and started to dig. It was the only way to free the crossbar that held the door in place. I threw the shovel into the dirt, moving it aside as quickly as I could. The first few shovelfuls of dirt were unremarkable. Then I hit something. Something hard. I thought it was just a rock at first, so I levered under it with the blade of my shovel to toss it aside. Except it wasn’t a rock. It was a skull. A human skull, bleached white and picked clean. I had no idea what it was doing there, but I could tell that it had been buried for a long time. I set it aside. I was as respectful as I could be, under the circumstances, but I was also quick. I didn’t want to end up dead too.