“She’s one of the main architects behind the plan to infiltrate the movement,” Nik continued. “She condemned Grisha to death.”
Valari stared down at the floor. “Would you at least put me in a cell so I can get some sleep?” she said tiredly.
“She’s hiding something,” Nathan said with a rush.
“What’s wrong?” Nik asked.
Valari and Bear began to unbutton their heavy parkas.
“There’s something hidden. On her, I think.”
Valari’s hands stopped moving and she stared at Nathan. “Do you read minds?”
“Get her parka off,” Nathan yelled.
Slayer-of-Men ran a knife down the front of the garment and jerked. Buttons hailed across the stone floor as he roughly pulled it off her. A small, flat-black box hung between her breasts on a cord around her neck.
“What is that?” Slayer-of-Men asked.
Nathan stood up, grabbed it and jerked, breaking the cord as well as off-balancing Valari.
'It’s a location transmitter,” Nathan said and threw the box against the stone wall as hard as he could. It broke into countless pieces.
Valari laughed. “If they paid attention, there’s an air strike on the way,” she said through a twisted smile.
Something snapped in Grisha and he raised his machine pistol to kill her once and for all.
The walls seemed to scream. Concussion beyond sound knocked everybody off their feet. The floor sharply heaved and every light bulb in the room exploded, plunging them into darkness. They heard explosions and the roar of attacking planes.
Screams and shouts filtered through sudden smoke. The room rocked with another blast. A light pierced the stygian blackness and a voice shouted above the din.
“This way! Come this way! It leads to the lower levels.”
Grisha didn’t try to stand. He maintained a tight grip on his weapon and scrambled toward the light on all fours. And ran into somebody.
“Sorry, didn’t see—” With a stomach-wrenching jolt, he realized the person was dead. He rolled the body over and peered at the face. Haimish stared glassily upward toward the gory cleft in his head left by a piece of concrete. Despair washed over Grisha.
He dropped Haimish and continued moving toward the flickering light. People scrambled between him and the battery lantern, semaphoring messages of terror and flight. As he got to the door another explosion smashed them down.
The light disappeared. Grisha’s mind swam hard against the currents of concussion. Something tugged at him.
“Grisha,” Wing said with a note of anguish. “You must help me, I can’t pull your weight by myself.”
The urgency in her voice spurred him into dizzy action. He moved his feet blindly, and with her tugging at him, fell down an incline littered with hard edges. Dimly he realized he sprawled on stone steps.
“Wait,” he said tiredly. “I need to clear my head a little.”
“Very well,” she said, releasing his arm. “But there is fire up there and the smoke will get to this level soon.”
“I… know.” He gently cupped his hands over his ears. Her voice sounded like a whisper, but logic told him that she must be talking very loudly—if not shouting. His head felt stuffed with cotton.
One ear leaked blood.
Fear lifted him back to full consciousness. “I’m ready,” he said loudly.
“You don’t gotta scream at me,” Wing snapped.
“Oh, I thought I was deafened.”
“Come on.” She turned and moved carefully down steps outlined by a glow of light from around a distant corner.
43
Bear’s mind went from stunned grayness to the alert certainty he was alone in a burning room. He peered around. Numerous bodies reflected firelight.
Valari crossed his mind for less than an instant before he sought escape. He scuttled across the carnage of the shattered chamber. Fire licked at the logs supporting the damaged roof.
She hadn’t told him about the transmitter. But then he hadn’t asked, either. A huge explosion outside the building sent him burrowing under two corpses.
Smoke curled around his nose and he pushed his way over the bodies. The head on one flopped over and he beheld the face of Slayer-of-Men. Bear relieved the dead man of his automatic weapon.
Valari had been standing directly in front of this man. What had killed him?
Pieces of burning wood fell from the ceiling, landing next to Bear. He lost all curiosity about anything other than self-preservation. A door yawned open, emitting a slight glow of welcome and offering solid walls leading downward. He stumbled through and braced himself against the rough wall.
He’d been in this passageway before, years ago. The Cossacks had tortured an Indian to death in an attempt to make him confess to pilfering supplies. A frightened Bear had witnessed both the pilferage and the torture.
The Indian died insisting he was innocent. Bear was pretty sure the Indian was the guilty party, but then he had been drunk at the time. He was drunk for the torture, too.
With a roar the burning roof collapsed behind him. No turning back now. Was there a back way out of the interrogation block?
There had to be, he decided, because bodies never came out the front of the building. Heat intensified on his back and he eased down the steps toward the bend in the passage.
Voices rose out of the dimness ahead of him and he stopped. For a long anguished moment he thought someone was coming back up the steps. But the voices receded and he moved downward again.
By the time he got to where the stairway made an abrupt right angle, the mild concussion eased to nothing. Dank air flowed past him, feeding oxygen to the burning debris above. He squatted and edged the top of his head around the corner.
A kerosene lantern hung in the passageway, splashing red light across the cold, icy stones. He saw no sign of a guard. That’s because they believed everybody but them to be dead, he thought smugly.
Emboldened, he rose to his feet and moved purposefully around the corner and down the steps. Just as he remembered, the steps bisected a passageway where one had to turn right or left. His brow furrowed.
Which way had they turned that long ago day? He had been drunk on vodka and nearly blind with fear. The Cossacks had insisted he watch the interrogation as an object lesson.
At the time he hadn’t been all that sure they weren’t going to kill him, too. Rarely did he let those memories surface. But the catharsis worked and he distinctly remembered turning left.
So, on that day he had turned left. What about now? Did the torture chamber have a door that led outside the redoubt?
Suddenly the steps beneath his feet lurched and he fell heavily on the stones. A muffled explosion sounded from above as the stone basement shuddered and jerked. A more immediate noise caught his attention and he looked back up the stairs to see burning rubble pouring down like molten lava.
He pushed himself to his feet and staggered quickly down the passageway to the left. Behind him a wall of smelly, smoking debris firmly blocked the passageway. One less choice to agonize over, he decided.
He tightened his grip on the weapon and moved carefully toward the torture chamber.
