Damage Control

Palma just happened to be looking right at the detonation when it happened. His first instinct on seeing the pulse of light was that it was a muzzle flash, but in the instant that it took him to flinch, he saw the eruption of debris, and he knew that it was a bomb. The chatter of automatic weapons fire followed almost immediately, followed by panicked reports from the guards at the Sandcats that they were under attack.

Within seconds, the police channels came alive with reports of the explosions and the gunfire.

To his left, Sergeant Nazario said, “Captain, sir, we have to go and help them.”

Did this make sense? Palma asked himself. Why would they choose to fight so far away when their true target was right here? Could this be a diversion?

“Help us!” cried a Sandcat crew member.

Palma pounded the hood of the car that shielded him. Somehow, they’d found out about the trap. Were they adapting, or were they merely being stupid?

“Sir, please,” Nazario said. “Let me go reinforce them.”

In his heart, Palma knew it was a mistake, just as splitting your forces is always a mistake. These terrorists had fooled him before, and he sensed that they were doing it again.

But men under his command needed help.

“Very well,” he said, finally. “Take second and third squads to reinforce the Sandcats. You are in charge. I want a full report. They’re panicking out there.”

Nazario threw off a quick salute and brought his portable radio to his lips.

The Sandcat crews started shooting even before Jonathan and his team were there to engage them. The first blast, triggered at the end of the block where they’d parked their vehicles, had incited blind panic, and they were firing randomly at the source of the explosion.

“I feel sorry for the poor schmucks who live on the other end of the block,” Boxers quipped over the radio. Bullets flew until they hit something. That meant hundreds of rounds were chewing up the properties downrange.

A minute thirty in, the plan was working perfectly.

Stealth no longer mattered. Jonathan and his team sprinted full out two blocks east, and then turned south for a block. When they turned west onto the street where the war was happening, the Mexicans were so outflanked that they actually had their backs turned to them.

It shouldn’t be this easy. There were six in total.

Jonathan and Boxers fired in unison, and two seconds later, the Sandcats were theirs.

Jonathan held his aim for a few seconds to verify that there was no movement, and then he turned to Tristan. “Almost home,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Something had changed behind the kid’s eyes. Jonathan didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t particularly care, but he got the distinct impression that he’d somehow crossed a line. For a second, he thought that maybe Tristan was going to pull back, but it only took a slight tug on his vest to bring him along.

Tristan’s mind screamed, They just murdered those men. Shot them in the back. They never had a chance.

“Fair fights are for dead fools, Tristan,” Scorpion said, somehow reading his thoughts. As he spoke, he hooked his foot under the belly of one of the dead men and rolled him to his back. The soldier’s cheek had erupted into a hideous blooming rose.

“Forget everything you’ve heard about honor in war,” Scorpion went on. “The winners are the guys who are still alive when the shooting stops.” As if by rote, he took the soldier’s rifle away and then moved on to the next corpse. “You’ve got to exploit every weakness.”

Scorpion made a point of establishing eye contact. “No matter how you cut it, it’s an ugly business.”

The engine on the closest Sandcat turned and caught. Tristan jumped at the sound and whirled to see the Big Guy in the front seat, smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up through the window. He said something, but the words were lost in the crisp thump of another explosion.

Scorpion checked his watch and gave a quick, satisfied nod. “Mount up,” he said.

With the second explosion, Palma knew that his worst fears had been realized. The timing had been brilliant. If his mental calculations were correct, Nazario and his men would have been very near the blast.

The debris had barely stopped falling when the screaming erupted on the radio. At first, all he heard was noise, irrational unintelligible yelling that overpowered the radio mike.

“Calm down, soldier,” Palma said, but he knew they’d stepped on his transmission.

He was about to try again when he heard the worst of the worst: “Sergeant Nazario is dead!”

Maria felt the first explosion more than she heard it. She assumed it was the first explosion. More a pulse than a boom, it launched waves through the knee-deep water that rolled to her waist and slapped against the concrete walls.

Stuff fell from the ceiling, too, though in the darkness she didn’t know what it was. It fell in chunks and it filled the air with dust that smelled like mold. Without light, and without knowledge of the truth, her mind screamed that the falling objects were spiders. And crickets. All the insects that most terrified her.

In that flash of fear, the possibility of capture or torture or death mattered less than battling the insects. Maria’s hands moved in spasms to brush whatever they were from her shoulders and hair.

Her hair! In her mind, her head was infested now, crawling with bugs. With pregnant bugs, determined to lay their eggs on her scalp.

It was all preposterous, of course-the ridiculous ramblings of a frightened little girl who’d never fully overcome her fear of the dark.

She told herself that none of it was true-insisted that none of it was true-but it did little to settle her racing heart and trembling hands.

This will be over soon, she told herself. What was it that Mother Hen had said? Three explosions in the space of five minutes, and she was to wait until-

There was nothing subtle about the next detonation.

It must have been much closer, because a pressure wave rolled like an earthquake through the storm sewer. She felt the walls move as the wave swept past her, and a tsunami of water smacked her like a liquid wall. It broke over her head and knocked her to the floor, where she tumbled under the assault of secondary and tertiary waves.

After a somersault, Maria came up sputtering and coughing, desperate to recover the air that had been pushed from her lungs. As she struggled to breathe, she also tried to find stability for her feet in the slippery muck that lined the concrete floor of the sewer.

By pressing her hands against the walls and digging in with her knees, she was finally able to stabilize herself. She tried to stand, but when she was barely above a squat, her head hit the top of the tunnel and a new wave of panic swept over her. She’d been washed to a new part of the sewer, but she’d been turned and jostled so much that she no longer could tell left from right, upstream from downstream.

She was stranded now on hands and knees, and the water was chin-high. If it started to rain, she would drown.

This new terror eclipsed any horrors of the past. She was blind and she was trapped and she was going to drown. If her remains were ever found at all, they would be tangled among weeds and bushes along the banks of the river, downstream from the outfall of this terrible place.

“Stop it!” she commanded herself aloud.

Nothing was done until it was done. She needed clear thought, not panicked ramblings. The cliche said that panic killed people, and now she knew what the cliche meant. If you’re panicking, you’re not thinking, and if you’re not thinking, you’re just giving yourself up to death.

She smelled smoke. The stench of burning rubber. It wasn’t very strong, but it was definitely there. How was it possible to set a sewer on fire?

She needed to find the dim light from the manhole cover. If she could-

Light! Of course! Her flashlight!