'Come on, let's go,' said Anna Marie, her face pale as death.
Those two men back there.' Nathan held back.They were going to help me. And now they're gone.' His voice was shaky from more than the mindless violence; he could hear the whispers of the recently dead, all the fear and the doubt and the dread of the endless dark.
Trask saw how he held his left shoulder, and the scarlet seeping through his fingers. 'Are you okay?'
'Yes ... no,' the other answered, shaking his head undecidedly. 'I mean, this was for me.'
'So don't waste it!' Anna Marie hissed. 'Now let's go.'
She's stronger than she looks, Trask thought, following after her. And behind them in the reek and the turmoil, more gunshots and shouting as men came clambering over the rubble, their faces smudged but their eyes eager as they scanned the basement.
At the back of the cave, unseen until now, a solid plug of concrete stood wall to wall and floor to ceiling. It was fitted with a steel manhole or 'airlock' three feet in diameter to the left of the stream. The stream itself came gushing out of a steel spout of roughly the same diameter, but set lower in the wall, some twelve inches above the sluice. Two more outlets where they flanked this central jet were dry: the outflow was insufficient to warrant their operation.
The airlock door stood open and Trask helped Anna Marie to slide through, then directed Nathan, Chung and the caver to follow after. Trask went last, and as he grasped handles on the door and swung his feet into the tube Anna Marie called back to him from the other side:
'Close the door after you, Ben. Just yank on the handles.' He reached out again and did so, feeling the circular door settle onto oiled hinges. But before swinging it shut he saw
shadows, mobile on the wall of the cave, as two armed, gas-masked men entered at the run. Silhouetted against the smoky lighting of the wire-mesh tunnel, Trask saw that they wore civilian clothing, the anonymous grey of CMI. As yet, however, they hadn't seen him. Then .. .
... A third man, unmasked, joined them; and Trask froze as he heard this one say, 'Okay, where are they?' For it was a voice he recognized. A lot older than he remembered, true (of course it would be), but the same clipped, efficient, cynical and self-serving voice he had known all those years ago. Yet even though his talent told Trask it was so, still he had to be sure, even at the risk of life and limb. Which was why he waited with the door only half-closed, knowing that if they spotted him and started shooting - and if a few lucky rounds should get into the tube - then he'd be finished.
'A bunch of them came running in here,' a gruff, muffled voice answered the first. They can only be back there. If the three of us open up together, hose the place down, we'll probably get them all. And remember, our orders concerning the one called Nathan are clear: we're to kill him. If the others get taken out in the process, so what?'
'I don't much care about the others,' that eager, oh so well-remembered voice snarled in return. 'But as for the alien - my orders are to take him alive! Now cover me ...' The owner of the voice crouched down and came loping through the writhing smoke into the cave, following the course of the sluice. Trask had his machine-pistol, and it was still cocked. Apply a gentle pressure to the trigger . .. this one would bother him no more. But he couldn't do it, even though he now knew who or what he was dealing with. For if Harry Keogh had spared this man - despite all he'd done or tried to do to him - who was Trask to take his life?
And still he waited.
Tendrils of smoke cleared, and now the man was only a few paces away. Trask's eyes were accustomed to the gloom; he looked, saw, knew that he was right. And at the same time the man spotted him on all-fours in the airlock. Their