'Shit, you idiot,' the man screamed in panic. 'You're gonna kill somebody. Bullets ricochet in here.'
'Throw the gun or wave bye-bye to your fat ass.'
He threw the gun.
'Smart man.'
'I hope you got life insurance,' the leader said. 'That kid of yours will need it.'
'You shouldn't be telling me you're going to kill me. Makes me harder to catch.'
'Well, fuck you.'
Dan took the second gun and began feeling his way back down the tunnel toward his pursuers. He wanted out of this hole, and he figured an outright attack this soon would surprise them. Feeling with his hand enabled him to distinguish large boulders and the wall. It was hard not to stumble. When he came around a bend with a straight view to the main chamber, he saw four headlamps. Now was his chance. He could nail at least one or two of them as if they were pigeons to ground-sluice. He wanted to see Nate again, and killing these men was the surest way to do it.
His body was shaking, hands slick with sweat. He wanted to kill them. He wanted to walk out over their dead bodies. Somehow his finger would not pull the trigger.
Then it was too late. They turned off their lights.
He ran perhaps twenty paces, kicked a rock, and then deliberately hit the ground. At the sound there was a spray of gunfire lighting the darkness. Bullets popped everywhere. Instantly he was slithering fast, without thinking, oblivious to the pain of the hard rock on his knees, elbows, and belly. The shooting stopped. Ammunition would be a problem he knew. They weren't expecting a war.
He could feel the fear like a hot flame in his body fueling his adrenaline. He could see nothing. There was a debris pile, he knew. Reaching for it, he had a premonition. Or maybe he was thinking like the enemy. The leader would have crawled right in front of the debris pile-right where Dan would come through-and would wait. He moved to the side, flat against the wall. Clearly, the questions were: Who would first turn on a light? Or would somebody start shooting at noises?
In the mine, noises were hard to place; echoes confused the ear. Perhaps if he made a noise, he could seduce a light. Scraping the barrel of the gun lightly along the rock might do it. He reached as far from his body as he could, then yanked the gun back. A spray of bullets smacked the wall and fire erupted from a barrel not ten feet away. If the shooter hadn't hesitated at the sound, Dan would have lost his arm. He fired into the blackness at the spot he had seen the fire.
The weapon Dan had taken was a fully automatic handheld machine gun. If you pulled the trigger, it shot until the clip emptied. That was all he needed to know until he ran out of ammunition. Then he needed to know how to replace a clip and how to get the first bullet from the new clip into the chamber. He began fumbling around in the dark with the clip when he realized that the second gun was hanging from his shoulder.
There was an awful groaning coming from the far side of the debris pile.
'You've got a man down. Maybe you better help him.'
There was silence.
'Please help me,' the man wailed. It wasn't the leader. He rambled and begged, and said he wanted to see his family. Then he began wailing.
'Mother, God, I want my mother.' The leader had put another man at the debris pile. The screaming turned Dan's stomach. This was nearly the worst moment of his life, second only to holding his wife's dead body.
He was tired. Tired not just in his body, but in his mind and in his spirit. How did men get to such a sorry state that they were killing each other in a hole in the ground? And for what? Out there in the dark the leader waited in silence for him to turn on his light or reveal his presence-then he would shoot. Somewhere there was a fourth man.
Some things were just as bad as being shot. Suffocating in a hole was probably one of them. Either way he would leave his son an orphan. Even as he thought it, sucking air became harder. Now he was running out. As quickly and as quietly as he could, he fumbled and changed tanks.
Without warning Dan jumped up and slid over the debris pile, then began walking in the pitch black, his gun pointed straight ahead. The man screaming tended to drown out everything else. His hand reached out for the rock wall and soon he felt the cold of the earth. He followed the wall.
Staying low, he walked the perimeter of the large chamber, recalling that there was one passage before he reached the main passage that led back to the pool. All of a sudden the staccato spitting of a silenced automatic weapon had bullets smacking the wall just ahead of him. They knew what he was doing, and they were getting desperate. He hit the ground and kept crawling.
This time he hadn't seen the muzzle flash. Perhaps the shooter was smart enough to stand beside a boulder to hide the flame. He came to the first tunnel off the main chamber. Putting out his hand, he crawled until he felt the far wall and then resumed a duckwalk along the wall. Based on the sound of the shots, he was sure they had come from the center of the chamber.
Smack, smack, smack. More shots were fired, but this time he saw the muzzle blast Trying to fix the spot in his mind, he fired back into the blackness. He could not have hit the shooter except by dumb luck.
He knew they would try to cut him off. Probably they would move to the wall. Any moment he should arrive at the main shaft leading back to the pool. He stopped. These men were determined. They would not let him walk out of here and the most likely spot to stop him was the mouth of the main shaft.
Think.
If they waited, he could wait. They all had about the same amount of air and he had a little more. The closer they got to the pool, the worse the air. Soon everybody would have to move away from the pool or get out of the mine.
Seconds ticked by. Every muscle in his back and neck felt stiff. His tongue was dry like toughened leather. He needed cover. He duckwalked forward, feeling for some debris. Something in front of him felt like a boulder. In an instant the exit tunnel was lit by a bright light. It was ahead of him. Without hesitating, he emptied the clip at the light and blew it away. Breathing hard and trying to see where nothing could be seen, he forced himself to wait and to think.
They had attempted to surprise him. Had he been upright he would be dead. Anger filled him. He took a full clip from his pocket; he felt for the clip release. A small button by the trigger guard didn't do it. Probably the safety. Near the top of the clip, he found a lever. It worked. Sliding the new clip into place, he pulled back the small bolt on the ejector. It had an action vaguely similar to his Browning semiautomatic twelve-gauge shotgun.
Sitting on the hard stone, he took off his boots. They scraped the rock in the dark and made soundless travel impossible. He tied the laces together and hung the boots around his neck. Duckwalking, he moved back toward the center of the cave in the direction of the light. It was the last thing they would expect and that's why he liked it. Leveling his gun in front of him, he kept his finger on the trigger. One way or another, this would end. When he had gone about thirty feet in complete silence, he tossed a stone. It hit, and before it rolled, the darkness exploded in machine-gun fire only a few feet from his chest. He shot back and knew he had a hit.
'Who is that?' he cried into the mike, trying to sound like one of them.
'All right, let's call a truce,' came a frightened voice over the radio.
Maybe he had hit the leader; he sensed the survivors were spooked out of their minds.
'You out there, lawyer man?' a shaky voice said.
He remained silent.
A terrified, whispering voice came back over the radio. 'Are we shooting at each other?'
'Turn on your light,' one man said to the other.
'Fuck you,' came the reply.
'Boss, you there?'
There were two of them talking. He was certain that he had shot two and knocked one silly with the crowbar. But they had body armor, so maybe they weren't dead or even dying. He turned off his radio and concentrated on hearing the next sound.
'We can't just sit here; we'll run out of air.'
'What the fuck do you suggest?'
'I'll come to you.'
'How will I know it's you?'
