Snow swallowed. “But what about the Commander?”
Donovan was still looking at him. “First, we finish the op,” he said.
Snow realized there-was no room for argument. Gripping the M-16 tightly, he followed the SEAL into the darkness. He could make out a fitful illumination ahead of them: light from around a bend in the tunnel, dancing off the brickwork of the far wall.
“Keep your weapon at the ready,” came the murmured warning.
Snow moved cautiously around the curve, then stopped short. Ahead of him, the tunnel came to a sudden end. Iron rungs in the far wall led to the mouth of a large pipe set in the ceiling.
“Oh, Christ,” Donovan groaned.
A single flare, sizzling in the muck of a far corner, cast a dim light over the scene. Snow looked around wildly, taking in the frightful details. The walls of the tunnel were scarred and raked with bullet marks. A deep bite had been taken out of one wall, its edges burned and sooty. Two dark forms lay sprawled about the mud beside the flare, packs and weapons strewn beside them in wild disarray. Feathers of cordite drifted through the dead air.
Donovan had already leapt toward the closest of the figures, as if to rouse it. Then he stepped back again quickly, and Snow caught a glimpse of a neoprene suit torn from neck to waist, a bloody stump where the head should have been.
“Campion, too,” Donovan said grimly, looking at the other SEAL. “Jesus, what would do this?”
Snow shut his eyes a moment, taking short choppy breaths, trying to keep a hold on the thin edge of his control.
“Whoever they are, they must have gone up that way,” Donovan said, indicating the pipe above their heads. “Snow, grab that magazine pouch.”
Doing as he was told, Snow leaned forward and snatched the pouch. It almost slipped out of his hands, and looking down he saw it was slick with blood and matter.
“I’ll set the charges here,” Donovan said, pulling bricks of C-4 out of his own haversack. “Cover our exit.”
Snow raised his weapon and turned his back on the SEAL, staring down toward the bend in the tunnel, flickering crazily in and out of sight in the lambent glow of the flare. His comm unit hissed briefly with the sound of static—or was it the sound of something heavy, dragging through the mud? Was that a soft, moist gibbering beneath the electrical cracklings and spittings?
The unit dropped into silence again. From the corner of his eye, he saw Donovan plunging the timer into the explosive, punching up a time. “Twenty-three fifty-five,” he said. “That gives us almost half an hour to find the PL and get the hell out of here.” He stooped, pulling the tags from the headless necks of his fallen comrades. “Move out,” he said, picking up his weapon and shoving the dog tags inside his rubber vest.
As they began to move forward again, Snow heard a sudden scrabbling from behind, and a sound like a cough. He turned to see the forms of several figures clambering down from the pipe and dropping into the muck by the fallen SEALs. Snow saw, with a sense of eerie unreality, that they were cloaked and hooded.
“Let’s go!” Donovan cried, racing toward the bend in the tunnel.
Snow followed him, panic driving his legs. They clattered down the ancient brick passage, racing from the horrible scene. As they rounded the curve, Donovan slipped in the mud and fell, tumbling head over heels in the murky gloom.
“Make a stand!” he shouted, grabbing for his weapon and snapping on a flare at the same time.
Snow turned to see the figures heading toward them, running low with a kind of sure-footedness. The brilliant flare light seemed to give them a momentary pause. Then they surged forward. There was something bestial about their scuttling that turned his blood to ice. His index finger eased forward, feeling for the trigger guard. A huge roar sounded beside him, and he realized Donovan had fired his grenade launcher. There was a flash of light, then the tunnel shook with the concussion. The weapon jerked and bucked in his hands and Snow realized that he was firing his own M-16 wildly, scattering bullets across the tunnel before them. He quickly took his finger off the trigger. Another figure rounded the bend, emerging from the smoke of the grenade into Snow’s field of fire. He aimed and touched the trigger. Its head jerked back, and for a split second Snow had the image of an impossibly wrinkled and knobby face, features hidden within great folds of skin. Then there was another roar, and the horror disappeared in the flame and smoke of Donovan’s grenade.
His gun was firing on an empty clip. Snow released his finger, ejected the clip, dug into his pocket for another, and slammed it home. They waited, poised to fire again, as the echoes gradually faded. No more figures came loping out of the smoke and the darkness.
Donovan took a deep breath. “Back to the rally point,” he said.
They turned back down the tunnel, Donovan reaching up to snap on his flashlight. A thin red beam shot into the murk ahead of them. Snow followed, breathing hard. Ahead lay Three Points, and their gear, and the way out. He found he was thinking from moment to moment now, concentrating only on getting out, getting to the surface, because anything else would mean thinking of the horrors that had scuttled out toward them, and to think of those would mean…
He suddenly ploughed into Donovan’s back. Staggering for a moment, he glanced around, trying to determine what had caused the SEAL to stop so suddenly.
Then he saw, in the beam of Donovan’s light, a group of the creatures
“Mother of God,” he breathed. “What do we do now?”
“We blow our way out,” Donovan said quietly, raising his weapon.
