the air here on the river was damp and chill, but the shudder was for some other reason he couldn’t quite define. He glanced skyward at the haloed moon. The shudder came again and he knew why.
The water of the river made tiny, wavelike lapping sounds against the hull of the rubber boat as in silence and darkness Rourke’s boat and three more similar to it stayed to the middle of the river, searching the blackness and shadow on the right bank for. the outlet of the storm drain. In the darkness, he felt the safety on the CAR-15, checked the security of the twin stainless Detonics pistols in their shoulder holsters, checked the security of the flap on the Ranger rig holding the Metalifed Government .45 on his hip. He forced himself to slow his breathing. He was nervous; the mission held something that smelled bad to him, tasted foul. There was something very wrong with it, and it wasn’t just the poor planning or the inexperienced people. He half-wished Paul Rubenstein had been well enough to come along. At least he trusted Paul, and for what Paul lacked in experience, he compensated well in intelligence and initiative.
Rourke pulled up the collar of his leather jacket, snapping closed the second highest button on the off-white cowboy shirt he wore beneath it. He snatched off the sunglasses, securing them in his shirt pocket, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the difference in light. He almost laughed aloud; if he hadn’t been so sensitive to light all through his life, he would have thought it symptomatic of radiation sickness. He checked the closure on the canvas musette bag hanging from his left side over the M-16 Bayonet, the closure on the Bushnell Armored 8 x 30s hanging from his right side. The bottoms of his jeans were rolled in with blousing garters over the tops of his combat boots—stuffing the pants in the boots had always been uncomfortable to him. He remembered once, years earlier, having fought his way five miles in subfreezing temperatures through more than two feet of fresh snow on foot—the drifts had been as high as his thighs and he had fallen several times—then the pants had been tucked into the boots to keep the snow out. He had made it then and he thought that somehow he’d make it tonight. He had to. He had come to think of it as a quest—no less important than a search for the Grail, for any treasure ancient or modern—more important because it was a human quest, to find the three surviving humans who meant the most to him in all the world, the woman he had always loved, the son, the daughter—each child part of him and part of her.
“Over there, past those rocks and weeds,” Rourke heard Fulsom rasp. Rourke shook his head, searching out Fulsom in the darkness, finding his silhouette, and then seeing in what direction the man pointed.
Rourke, his night vision better than most because of light sensitivity, could see the outline of the upper right quarter of the storm drain’s circular entrance clearly. Rats, snakes, wolf spiders possibly—he set his jaw, staring at the entrance as two of Reed’s men, doing the rowing on Rourke’s boat, changed course from the center of the river toward the marshy, muddy bank.
As the rubber boat skidded into the mud, Rourke was already on his feet and going over the gunwales, the sounds of critters on the land and things in the water something he listened intently for.
Rourke approached the storm drain entrance, Reed beside him and Fulsom behind Reed. Rourke glanced back toward the entrance.
“What the hell is that?” Reed whispered, pointing toward a silver glinting sphere from something reminiscent of thread.
“It’s a spider nest. See ‘em in trees and branches a lot.”
“Hell,” Reed rasped, starting to take the bayonet from his belt and hack at the nest.
Rourke caught his wrist, looking at him hard in the moonlight. “If it were blocking the entrance, fine, if it were in our way, fine—never kill anything unless you have to—there’re enough things you have to kill these days.” Rourke sidestepped in front of Reed and glanced around him, then took his Zippo and flicked it lit, lighting one of his small, dark cigars, and glanced at the luminous face of the Rolex on his wrist in the light of the flame, then moved the blue-yellow fire toward the entrance, up and down and from side to side, inspecting the tunnel beyond the lip of the storm drain.
“What do you think, Mr. Rourke?” Fulsom asked, his voice low beside Rourke.
“My first name is John. What do I think about the storm drain? Maybe a nice place to visit, but ...” Rourke let the sentence hang, his gloved left hand pushing away cobwebs at the top of the storm drain as he ducked his head to step inside.
He could feel his feet squishing the mud in the darkness. He closed the Zippo and reached into his belt under his leather jacket, snatching the Safariland Kel-Lite and pushing the switch forward with his thumb. As the light filled the storm drain, he could see it glinting on what looked to him like eyes beyond the light and in the shadow ahead, he could hear scurrying and the high-pitched scratchiness of bats.
“What the hell is that?” Reed asked, suddenly beside Rourke, stooped slightly as Rourke was.
Rourke started to answer, but Fulsom, there too, said, “Bats I think.”
“Bats!”
“They’re small—not the vampire kind. If you were a peach or a pear you’d be in trouble.” Rourke added.
“Whew! That’s a relief,” Reed muttered.
“Yeah,” Rourke told him. “Just don’t let ‘em scratch you or bite. They carry rabies sometimes.” Rourke started forward, hearing the shuffling of feet behind him from the rest of the sixteen man commando force. Two of Reed’s men and some of Fulsom’s—including Darren Ball—were waiting with the boats.
“Bats! God, betcha there’re snakes, too,” Reed muttered.
“Most poisonous snakes won’t kill you, just make you damned sick—unless you have a reaction to the venom,” Rourke consoled Reed, flashing his light ahead across the reddish brown mud, swatting at cobwebs with his free right hand, the CAR-15 slung across his back, muzzle down.
The storm drain’s height was six feet, the diameter, and there was a simple choice Rourke decided—either walk through the deepest and slipperiest of the squishing mud and duck your head a little or walk to the side on angle and move half-stooped. He chose the muddy water and mire.
Shuffling along through the storm drain with Rourke’s flashlight and two others at intervals along the seventeen man single-file column the only illumination, Rourke paced himself, trying to judge the distance, not trusting wholly what Fulsom had described as a mile’s walk. A rat scurried across Rourke’s left foot as the tunnel the drain formed took a slight bend along an elbow of pipe then curved at a right angle, then started slightly upward.
Rourke stopped, his light hitting a swarm of bats hanging from the top of the drain, ducking as they whistled and whined overhead, one of the men screaming, Reed starting to bring his M-16 to bear and Rourke swatting it down, but saying nothing. They moved on, roaches everywhere on the floor of the drain near the edge of the mire, feeding on the bat droppings, perhaps, Rourke thought.
