“Forget him. He’ll be dead in a minute anyway. Go! Go! Your sister is in danger!”
This was enough to spur Bart into action. He took one final glance down at the thrashing, drowning figure, and then charged through the iron door. The robed men and women followed him, along the short passage where part of the ceiling had come down and back through the curtain into the larger round room. He led them underneath one of the arches leading to the catacombs. Here was a small wooden door set into the old stone wall, and he pulled this open and darted into the storage room beyond. This was their arsenal, rack after rack of modern assault rifles, semi-automatics, Uzi snub-nosed machine guns, grenades, RPG’s and SA-7 Grail shoulder-launched missiles, Russian-made RPK light machine guns, plastic explosives, handguns of numerous kind, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Bart went to the nearest gun rack and started handing them out. Other robed figures went over to the locked cases and filled their pockets with grenades and magazines of ammunition, whatever they could grab their hands on. The building was large, a veritable rabbit-warren of corridors and annexes and staircases and hidden alcoves, and they each knew the place like the back of their hands. Anybody assaulting the place would find themselves heading into a death trap. They may have breached the entrances, but after that, they would pay for every inch of ground they gained in blood.
Weapons arsenal
◆◆◆
Pieter was aware that something was going on. He’d felt the concrete beneath him shudder, and the water in the pit had washed violently from side to side, some of it splashing out onto the floor of the room. This was a godsend – if only a brief one – for suddenly his face was clear of the water as the level dropped several inches. He snatched in great gulps of air, coughing and gasping, and when the water cleared from his eyes he saw that the room was now empty of people. He looked around, but from down in the pit he couldn’t really see much, apart from the rotting corpse still sitting there. The others, including Lotte, had fled.
Yet lying there and still chained to the floor, with the water still gushing out through the grate, his respite was set to be short-lived.
Once the reverberations from the blasts echoed away, the silence inside seemed just as deafening to Dyatlov. He moved forward cautiously. The smoke was so thick that without the night-vision goggles clamped over his eyes, he doubted he be able to see anything. As it was, the world was a strange, flickering green-coloured place, criss-crossed with the beams from his and his men’s laser sights.
Sliding down one wall, and with another assault-team member similarly hugging the opposite wall, he eased forward along a short corridor.
Part way down, the passage was interrupted with a short flight of stairs going upwards, before the corridor continued, then disappeared around a bend to the right.
There was no sound of fighting coming from anywhere else in the building, no shooting or yelling or more flash-bangs going off. Just this peculiar quietness.
Dyatlov froze. Footsteps somewhere, rushing up a staircase from the sound of it. Then running feet overhead. He jerked a thumb upwards, indicating the floor above them. Black Team should be up there dealing with that. Their job was here on the ground-floor level, as well as down in the basement area.
He finally reached the turn in the corridor and he whipped around the wall, aiming straight ahead. A closed door confronted him at the end, and he and his squad approached cautiously.
In the wall behind them a hidden panel slid silently aside.
Three or four masked figures wearing their dark robes emerged from the shadows, raised their guns, and opened fire into the backs of the knot of police just ahead.
The corridor erupted with violence and noise. Taken completely by surprise, a handful of Dyatlov’s men went down in a spray of blood. The sound of gunfire and screaming overwhelmed his senses, and this was taken up throughout the building as the din of battle shattered the tension.
Dyatlov, being at the front, was shielded by those behind, and he spun and ducked. There was total pandemonium in the corridor, with several of his men lying prostrate on the floor. Charging towards them were three figures dressed in bizarre robes, their faces hidden behind dark masks. As they ran full pelt along the hall they were firing from the hip, the muzzle-flashes blinding him through his goggles.
Dyatlov fired on instinct, preying he didn’t hit any of his own men, and was rewarded with the sight of two of their attackers going down. A third was flung back against the wall, two red bullet holes blooming across their chest. Slowly their legs buckled and they slid down to the floor, leaving a slick trail of blood on the wall.
The corridor was thick with swirling smoke but the shooting here had stopped. Elsewhere he could hear the sound of prolonged firing, plus the dull concussion of grenades. Over his communications ear-piece came shouted instructions and warnings, relayed from the fighting above:
“Shooters to the left!”
“Room clear! Two down, condition unknown!”
“Grenade, grenade!” Another thud of an explosion. “Six in the corridor, three on the stairs. Zero 1, send a half squad!”
Fuck! Dyatlov thought. What a fucking shit storm!
He made a snap decision. He ordered four of his squad to proceed through the closed door they had been approaching, while he and the two remaining men would come with him through the secret panel from where the gunmen had appeared. Wherever it led to. As for their wounded,
