Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,106

to be useful, they’d drug them again and return them to the surface.”

Drake glanced around, the plane taking a bounce that jarred his knees against the underside of the table. He grimaced, then threw up his hands.

“Am I crazy?”

Henriksen frowned and cast a dark look toward the front of the plane, apparently irritated at the pilot. But then he turned back to Drake.

“That may not be as far-fetched as it sounds,” he said.

Jada rolled her eyes. “Everything about this is far-fetched. But all the pieces fit together too neatly not to be true.”

“Nanjing has a long history of stories about people vanishing. Three Jin princes and their courts went missing in the third century. During the Ming Dynasty, when Nanjing was the capital of China, hundreds of thousands of workers were brought in to rebuild the city, and there were stories that a demon lived under the old city gates and would eat the workers if it caught them out at night. Many of them supposedly vanished.”

“The Minotaur?” Jada asked. “Or whoever the Mistress of the Labyrinth made up to look like a Minotaur?”

“Could be,” Drake said.

“These guys in the hoods,” Corelli said. “If they’re still down there, how many do we think there are?”

Drake could see he was thinking in terms of combat. How many guns would they need to get past the hooded killers of the labyrinth, the Protectors of the Hidden Word?

“Are there still slaves?” Olivia wondered aloud.

Drake thought of Sully and Ian Welch, and he knew the answer. It enraged him to think what Sully might be going through—he didn’t want to think about the images of torture in Diyu—but it reassured him as well. If all of their conjecture held together, it meant that Sully was still alive.

Henriksen looked contemplative. “There’s a famous story about an army detachment—three hundred men—who disappeared while returning to Nanjing in 1939. They were expected, but they never arrived.”

“Maybe they did,” Drake said. “But they hit a detour.”

Olivia cried out as the plane shook violently. The laptop slid from the table. Corelli made a grab for it, but the aircraft pitched to starboard and he toppled after the computer to the floor. The large screen winked out as the laptop landed with a crack, Corelli sprawling on top of it.

Jada slid into Drake, who held on to the table to keep from falling from his chair. Henriksen stood, but the pitch of the plane threw him into the wall. He made his way to the door and flung it open. Drake could see into the vacant passenger cabin, and his stomach lurched as he got a better view of just how badly they were listing.

“What the hell is going on?” Drake asked, following Henriksen into the passenger cabin. They leaned on seats and braced themselves on the overhead compartments as they struggled toward the cockpit. The tall man had a small spot of blood seeping through his shirt where his knife wound had been bandaged.

“I don’t know,” Henriksen replied, eyes dark with resignation. “But this isn’t turbulence.”

They reached the front of the cabin. Henriksen began pounding on the door to the cockpit, shouting for the pilot or the copilot to let him in. Drake shifted his stance and felt something sticky under his boot. When he glanced down, he swore under his breath and tapped Henriksen, pointing out the narrow pool of blood trickling out from underneath the door.

“Back up!” Drake shouted, drawing his gun.

Henriksen moved aside, eyes wide, and covered his ears against the boom a gunshot would make in such a closed space. Drake tried not to think about the possibility of a ricochet and what would happen to the plane at this altitude if a bullet ripped through the aircraft’s skin.

Then he pulled the trigger three times, blowing apart the cockpit’s lock.

Drake kicked the door in, Henriksen right behind him.

The pilot lay dead on the floor, his slashed throat gaping like a bloody, mocking grin. The copilot held a disturbingly familiar curved blade, the same sort used by the Protectors of the Hidden Word. The guy looked Greek; he sure as hell wasn’t Chinese. For a second, Drake wondered if everything they had been assuming was wrong, if they really knew nothing at all about the threat they were facing and the people trying to keep them from finding the fourth labyrinth. Then he noticed the glazed look in the copilot’s eyes, his lost and distant gaze, and he knew the man was not in his right