Silent Assassin(65)

“Cobra, come in, are you there?”

Morgan was stuck. Trapped. Buried. This was a tomb, and he was going to die here.





CHAPTER 33


Montauk, January 29





“Cobra, Cobra, come in,” said Shepard through the comm.

Morgan took a fire extinguisher from the wall and began to beat it against the door. The metal resounded deeply, vibrating to his core, but the blow barely made a dent. Far down the hall, the chimps were screaming still.

He beat metal against metal, again and again. He knew it was futile, it would do nothing, but all he wanted to do was to hit something. He was trapped under rock and metal, with no way out, and it felt like force was the only thing he had left.

“Cobra!” Shepard insisted. “If you’re alive, come in!” He hit until he was exhausted, then he dropped the fire extinguisher and leaned against the wall. Then he spoke.

“I’m here,” he said. “No worse for wear except being buried fifty feet deep. Did the rest of the team make it out all right?”

“Bishop, Spartan, and Diesel are fine, and they got the scientist out too.”

“Novokoff?”

“Escaped,” he said. “Off into the night. He must have had some escape plan already in place, because they found no sign of him anywhere.”

“Is there anything they can do to get me out then?”

“The lower stairs collapsed after the self-destruct sequence,” said Shepard. “There’s too much debris in the way. There’s no way they can get to you without some significant equipment that we don’t have on-site. Sorry, Cobra, there’s nothing they can do right now.”

“I see,” he said.

“Cobra, this is Bloch. Stay calm. We’re going to get you out of there.”

Morgan looked around the hallway, looking more cramped by the second. “Oh yeah?” said Morgan. “How? Are you going to dig me out of here?”

She hesitated. He knew she didn’t have an answer to that. It gave him some hollow satisfaction to catch her in her comforting lie. “We’ll find a way,” she insisted.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said. “Listen, the rest of the facility’s completely destroyed, right? Even the ventilation system and the air purifiers? Am I going to run out of air here?”

There was a pregnant pause, and then Shepard said, “Actually, it’s not how much air you have in there right now that’s the problem.”

“Well, then what the hell is the problem?”

“You just had incendiary devices go off on every level above yours. Fire. That means that almost all the oxygen in all the other levels has been converted into carbon dioxide. CO2 is heavier than oxygen, so it’s slowly going to move down to where you are.”

Great. “So how much time do I actually have?”

“An hour,” he said. “Maybe two. It’s hard to tell how airtight the blast doors are. Just sit tight, Cobra. We’ll figure this out.”

Morgan felt a strange calm in being there. An hour of air. Not enough to get a team down there to dig him out, judging by the thickness of the doors. Suddenly, he had time. He had all the time in the world down there. After all, the only thing he had left to do was to die.

He walked down the hall to the lab area, where the dozen screaming chimpanzees threw themselves against the bars of their cages with furious abandon and bared their teeth at him. This wasn’t normal, Morgan thought to himself. Couldn’t be normal. What the hell had they done to the poor beasts? This was no life.

He walked back to Rogue’s corpse, silently apologizing for looting him one more time, and took his handgun. Then he walked back to the monkey lab, and he shot each of the apes in the head one by one. The ones that remained wailed like banshees until he had put a bullet in the last one. What remained afterwards was an eerie, muffled quiet. That gave him a thought.

“Shepard,” he said. “How did the air get down here? There has to be a ventilation shaft of some kind.”

“That’s the first thing I looked for,” said Shepard. “The good news is that they made the shaft big enough for a man to climb.”

“Have I ever told you how much I hate good news, bad news?” said Morgan. “All right, give me the bad.”

“In a facility like this, the used-up air can’t simply go out into the open. The shaft leads up straight into an air purifier. No way for you to get through.”

“What floor is the purifier on?” asked Morgan.

“First. That’s the limit for the biohazard, which is why there’s a different stairwell down to second. But there’s no opening to any areas that lead outside.”