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  ‘No!’ Saffron shouted, her arms outstretched as she ran. ‘Don’t kill him! There has to be a better way!’

  Jeb Oppenheimer’s crinkled jaw fell open as he stared in amazement at Saffron.

  Kip Wren yelled, ‘Stay aback, ma’am! I ain’t bluffin’!’

  ‘What the hell are you doing down here?’ Oppenheimer said. ‘This isn’t your business, Saffy, get out of the way.’

  ‘It’s my goddamned business now, Grandpa,’ Saffron shot back, ‘ever since I went to the police. They know everything.’

  Oppenheimer stared at her for a moment longer.

  ‘You wouldn’t.’ He smirked. ‘You wouldn’t risk the jail time.’

  The voice that answered came from behind them all. ‘Yes she would.’

  Oppenheimer, Hoffman and the mercenaries turned to see Zamora standing behind them in full uniform, his pistol aimed at Oppenheimer. ‘It’s over, Jeb, no matter what happens. The entire New Mexico Police Department is on its way here right now.’

  Butch Cutler stood alongside Zamora, clearly not intimidated by the mercenaries as he aimed a large Colt revolver at them.

  ‘So is USAMRIID,’ he reported. ‘This whole thing’s been blown sky-high.’

  Oppenheimer appeared completely overwhelmed, unable to speak. Saffron stared at him in horror.

  ‘How could you do it?’ she asked. ‘All those millions of people? You’re planning to kill them all.’

  Oppenheimer’s features hardened again as he took his eyes off the dynamite at his belly.

  ‘It will happen sooner or later all on its own,’ he spat back at her. ‘I’m just controlling the situation.’

  ‘You can’t control nature!’ Saffron wailed. ‘It’s not possible!’

  ‘Either way,’ Butch Cutler said, ‘it’s not going to happen. No pandemic, no population control, no nothing. It’s over. The police will be here any moment.’

  Hoffman peered suspiciously at Cutler.

  ‘If so,’ he asked, ‘then where the hell are they?’

  Neither Cutler nor Zamora replied.

  Saffron looked at the old soldier holding her grandfather hostage. His face was twisted in upon itself in agony, sweat thick on his brow and his legs trembling with the effort of staying upright. She took a careful pace forward.

  ‘I can help you,’ she said. ‘Let him go and we can get you to a hospital.’

  Kip Wren glared at her, but his strength was failing and she saw in his expression the realization that he was out of time. He smiled at her, almost regretfully.

  ‘Apologies, ma’am,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘but I can’t do that.’

  The old soldier’s hands twisted, and she saw him light the dynamite stick’s fuse in a flash of sparks and smoke.

  Saffron hurled herself at Kip Wren and threw a fast right jab that drove her fingers into Wren’s eyes. The old soldier shrieked and jerked backwards, and as he did so Saffron smashed her hands down across the smoldering dynamite stick and yanked it from Kip Wren’s hands. Instantly, half a dozen soldiers plunged down onto Kip in a frenzied tangle of limbs and shouts, binding his arms and legs.

  Saffron hurled the hissing dynamite stick into the depths of Lechuguilla Cave and whirled toward her grandfather.

  ‘Get down!’

  To her surprise, the mercenaries and Jeb Oppenheimer ignored her and fled away from the entrance to Lechuguilla Cave in a chaotic tumble. Confused, Saffron turned and saw the dynamite stick come whirling back out of the darkness to land at her feet.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  Saffron turned and ran hard, hurling herself flat to the ground behind scattered rocks as the dynamite exploded with a deafening boom and hurled the severed body parts of dead mercenaries in all directions to land with soggy thumps around her. She staggered to her feet, her ears ringing and pink blood spots staining her white T-shirt. She heard a laugh echo around the chamber as Jeb Oppenheimer struggled to his feet from behind a boulder and slapped his spindly thigh with one hand as he looked down at the cave entrance.

  ‘We’ve got our man!’ he shouted, and turned to Hoffman. ‘Kill them all.’

  Hoffman, his M-16 rifle once again cradled in his grip, grinned and strode toward Jeb Oppenheimer. One huge hand reached out and gripped the old man by the throat with enough force to bulge his eyes. Oppenheimer gagged in shock as he was lifted onto his toes, his cane still dangling from his wrist.

  ‘Your time, old man,’ Hoffman hissed, ‘is over.’

  With a heave of effort, Hoffman turned and hurled Oppenheimer toward Lechuguilla Cave, the old man’s limbs flailing as he tumbled through the desert dust to land in a heap near the entrance. A ripple of grim laughs from Hoffman’s men followed him.

  Saffron stared in disbelief at Hoffman. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  Hoffman ignored her as he turned to Cutler and Zamora.

  ‘Drop your weapons and get in that cave or we’ll blow you away right here and now.’

  Half of the mercenaries whirled and trained their assault rifles on Cutler and Zamora. Cutler looked at them and then glanced across at Zamora.

  ‘Fancy going down in a blaze of glory?’

  ‘Not so much.’

  Cutler slowly lowered his revolver as he called out to Hoffman.

  ‘Whatever Wolfe is paying you, it won’t be nearly enough to get you out of this.’

  Hoffman appeared unimpressed. ‘I don’t really care,’ he said with a grim smile that conveyed an utter ruthlessness. ‘Because neither of you will be around to report anything, and we’ll be gone within minutes.’

  Hoffman gestured to his men, and they disarmed Cutler and Zamora and shoved them down toward the depths of the cave. They stumbled in the darkness as they struggled to see their way. Saffron hurried down with them and took her grandfather’s arm. Oppenheimer struggled to his feet, steadied himself with his cane and turned to glare up at Hoffman.

  ‘I’ll pay you double,’ he shouted, ‘triple, whatever you want!’

  Hoffman shook his head.

  ‘You’re a damned fool, old man,’ he shouted. ‘You think that you’re powerful because you’re rich, but you’re a small fish in a very big pond and I work for the sharks. You’re nothing, Oppenheimer, a nobody compared to who I work for!’

  Hoffman turned away, and looked at one of the soldiers next to him.

  ‘Don’t shoot any of them. We need this to look like an accident. Get the explosives out and blow the cave. It’ll hide any evidence that they were here at all, and if we need anything in the future we can come back when they’ve all rotted to hell.’

  69

  Ethan, along with Lopez, Ellison Thorne and the remaining soldiers had watched the entire exchange in amazement, from Saffron’s unexpected wrecking of their plan to Oppenheimer being hurled toward them to land at the mouth of the cave.

  ‘What the hell?’ McQuire uttered in disbelief.

  Ethan replied grimly, ‘Looks like Oppenheimer’s finally getting what he deserves.’

  Beside them, Lillian Cruz scowled at the mercenaries.

  ‘They’ve got one of your men now,’ she said. ‘He’s still alive. Whatever you all planned hasn’t worked.’

  Ethan looked across at Ellison Thorne. ‘You sure Kip’s not going to make it?’

  Ellison Thorne shook his head.

  ‘Can’t see how, even with all of those clever sawbones and new-fangled contraptions they’ve got today in hospitals. He’ll have mustered out by noon.’

  ‘None of it matters a damn,’ Saffron snapped, and pointed at Lopez. ‘You were all doomed when she cut herself a deal with my grandfather.’

  A silence descended within the cave, even the breeze from the depths seeming to hang listless as Ethan stared at Saffron for a long and disbelieving moment before he turned to look at Lopez. Everyone in the cave was staring at her, and Ethan watched her glaring back at them defiantly like a cornered wildcat.

  ‘What the hell, Nicola?’ Ethan asked, staring at her. />
  Lopez glared back at Saffron.

  ‘And we had a ticket out of here until you dropped in and screwed everything up saving that worthless old bastard,’ she shot back, pointing at Jeb. ‘Nice work.’

  Ellison Thorne glowered at Lopez from the shadows.

  ‘What trickery has she gone an’ done on us?’ he growled. ‘We wondered how the old man found us so swiftly.’

  ‘She betrayed all of you,’ Saffron said, and looked at Jeb Oppenheimer. ‘How much did it cost you, Grandpa, for another traitor to join your ranks?’

  Oppenheimer was not looking at them, staring instead with interest into the dark depths of the cave, but he answered her question.

  ‘A quarter million bucks,’ he muttered as he hobbled off into the darkness of the caves behind them. ‘Cheap at twice the price.’

  Ethan stared at Lopez in horror. To his surprise, Lopez smirked as she leveled Saffron with a cold gaze.

  ‘Predictable, to the last,’ she said coldly. ‘You’re damned right I took his bribe, and you’re damned right he paid me to guide his mercenaries to this cave. Gave me a GPS tracker to reveal the location of Lechuguilla Cave. If you’d thought about it, you’d have also guessed that I’d tossed the GPS tracker long before we got here.’

  ‘Not long enough to avoid a bloodbath!’ Saffron shouted. ‘People are dying because of what you did!’

  Nathaniel McQuire turned his rifle to point at Lopez. ‘Well if that don’t beat the Dutch! You sold out on us!’

  Ethan leapt forward between Lopez and the weapon. He looked at her and saw a glimmer of shame in her dark eyes.

  ‘Why?’ he finally managed to ask.

  ‘We needed a way to get support here quickly,’ she snapped back at him. ‘I figured if I dropped the tracker somewhere close by, Jarvis would be able to locate it if he had the IP address of the device.’

  Ethan eyed her uncertainly.

  ‘That’s a hell of a risk, Nicola,’ he said. ‘It could have backfired on us.’

  ‘You’re goddamned right there!’ Saffron hissed, reaching out for Lopez.

  ‘Cut it out!’ Ethan snapped, blocking Saffron’s way. ‘We can sort this another time, right now we need to get the hell out of here.’

  ‘There ain’t no way out,’ Ellison Thorne said. ‘We searched plenty.’

  Ethan turned to Butch Cutler and Zamora.

  ‘Some rescue you’ve pulled off here. Any other great ideas?’

  ‘We were too late,’ Cutler said, ‘couldn’t get in front of them in time.’

  ‘Where’s the cavalry?’ Lopez asked them.

  McQuire laughed at her. ‘You can’t get horses down here, ma’am.’

  Cutler looked at McQuire oddly before replying to Lopez.

  ‘They can’t move unless your man, Jarvis, can prove Donald Wolfe’s involved. I haven’t heard from him and our damned cell phones won’t work down here, so now all we’ve got is the tracker you’ve supposedly dumped somewhere in the deserts.’

  Lopez smiled coldly.

  ‘They got here real fast, so they almost certainly found it,’ she said. ‘Which means that Oppenheimer most likely picked it up, being the scrooge that he is.’ Lopez looked across at the old man. ‘He won’t have left it behind.’

  Oppenheimer stared at Lopez in horror and then reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a small black device that lay in the palm of his hand, his face twisted with rage at Lopez’s betrayal. The old man hurled the device into the darkness and turned away, hobbling deeper into the cave.

  Ellison Thorne looked at Lopez for a long moment as he realized what she had done.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured, his eyes twinkling with suppressed admiration.

  Saffron shook her head.

  ‘You’ve risked all of our lives on a gamble, and made a profit to boot!’

  Ethan was about to reply when he saw movement at the mouth of the caves. Mercenaries were sneaking forward carrying boxes of what looked suspiciously like explosives, and were mounting them near the cave mouth.

  ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘They’ve got Kip Wren, so now they’re going to blow the cave mouth in and seal it.’

  Ellison Thorne nodded.

  ‘That’s what we did, more than a hundred years ago now,’ he said. ‘Blew the entrance so that nobody would find it. Was a bunch of goddamned scientists that decided to dig through the rubble and found these caves back in 1986.’

  Ethan turned as he heard Oppenheimer arguing with Saffron as they backed into the cave. The old man hurried away from her with his awkward gait, his cane clicking in the darkness until they could no longer hear it.

  ‘Now where the hell is he goin’?’ asked John Cochrane.

  ‘He still wants the bacteria,’ Ethan said. ‘Even now it’s all that he’s interested in.’

  ‘To hell with him,’ John Cochrane said.

  ‘I can still change him,’ Saffron protested. ‘He’s not completely destroyed yet.’

  ‘Leave him,’ Ethan said to her, grabbing her arm. ‘He doesn’t care about you or anybody else. All he gives a damn about is his own immortality.’

  Saffron shook her head as she leapt to her feet. ‘I can’t leave him down here!’

  Ethan watched her dash away before he turned to Ellison Thorne. The big man sighed heavily.

  ‘We don’t have time for this.’ He looked around the cave at them all, and then his features creased with concern. ‘Where’s Lillian?’

  Ethan scanned around them, but could see no sign of the medical examiner.

  ‘Oh you’re kidding,’ Lopez uttered, looking behind her into the depths of the cave.

  ‘She’s going after the bacteria too?’ McGuire said in disbelief.

  Ellison loaded his rifle as he gestured to the cave entrance and looked at Ethan.

  ‘You’ve got to get out of here,’ he said. ‘And you need to take Saffron and Lillian with you. We’ll hold out until your reinforcements arrive, if they ever do. We can blow this cave in from the inside once you’re clear, which will prevent Oppenheimer’s men from getting to us. We’ve got enough dynamite left to do it, and Kip won’t survive beyond noon. We win.’

  Ethan glanced at the mercenaries outside the cave, and saw in the background two of them trying to stabilize Kip Wren, an intravenous line now in his arm.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he replied, ‘Doug won’t let us down. Shall we do this the old way, as one?’

  Ellison Thorne nodded, and as he did so he and his comrades began loading their rifles once more. Behind him, Lopez picked up Kip Wren’s rifle and began stuffing a Minie ball down the muzzle, following it with wadding. Ethan checked his pistol – six shots remaining, and he had a spare magazine. Twenty-one shots in total, plus five rifles: twenty-six shots, against maybe seventy or eighty heavily armed men.

  ‘It’s suicidal,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Even if we do get clear, we’ll still be outnumbered and we can’t climb back up and out of Misery Hole without getting shot.’

  ‘Ain’t got no choice,’ John Cochrane said. ‘I’d liked to have had all eight of us here and an army behind us, but those days are long past.’

  Ethan stared at Cochrane, and then suddenly something smashed through his thoughts like a freight train as he squatted in the half darkness, watching Ellison and his men loading up.

  ‘Eight of you?’ Ethan said.

  Ellison Thorne glanced at him but said nothing as he finished loading his rifle and aimed it at the cave entrance. Ethan slapped his head in disbelief.

  ‘My God, I’ve been such an idiot!’

  Lopez smiled in the darkness.

  ‘Nothing new,’ she chortled, and looked at Ellison Thorne. ‘Something you need to tell us?’

  Ellison shook his head, but Ethan spoke for him.

  ‘The supplies,’ he said, ‘the medicines and clothes and everything that you would have needed to survive this long. Paperwork, documents, evidence that you weren’t a hundred fifty years old. Damn it, you do have someo
ne protecting you.’

  ‘That ain’t no concern of yours,’ Ellison warned him with a pointed finger.

  Ethan wasn’t about to be intimidated, and on an impulse he fished the old photograph from his pocket and looked at it.

  ‘You all said the same thing,’ he pointed out. ‘This photograph was taken after the Battle of Glorietta Pass, 1862. I didn’t realize it until we got here this morning, but now I get it. This photograph was taken after you’d escaped from the Confederate retreat into Texas. It was taken after you’d sheltered in these caves.’

  Lopez frowned curiously.

  ‘So what? There’s seven of them in the picture,’ she said.

  ‘Sure there are,’ Ethan nodded. ‘But who was holding the camera?’

  Lopez stared at him for a moment as she realized his point. Ellison Thorne was about to answer when Edward Copthorne shouted out a warning.

  ‘Enemy to the front!’

  Ethan whirled to see four mercenaries plunge into the entrance and open fire randomly into the darkness, the staccato clatter of their assault rifles deafening in the confines of the cave. Behind them, Ethan glimpsed a half-dozen more men carrying what might have been plastic explosives, hugging the walls of the cave as they prepared to blow the entrance.

  ‘Take out the shooters first!’ Ethan hollered as Ellison’s men took aim.

  Ethan ducked his head away from the noise and the smoke as all five rifles fired at once, the barrel of Lopez’s weapon barely a foot from his head as she blasted one of the attackers deep in the belly, the soldier folding over the round and tumbling to his knees.

  Ethan aimed at one of the men carrying the explosives and fired, catching him cleanly in the chest. The soldier crumpled and dropped his explosives as Ethan leapt up from behind cover and charged forward through the thick veils of smoke, aware of the bayonets glinting alongside him as Ellison, Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane all dashed out toward the entrance with a volley of war cries.

  As they crashed into another wave of attackers rushing down toward them, Ellison Thorne shouted to Ethan above the din.

  ‘Find Lillian and Saffron! I don’t want any o’ these bastards slipping past and killing them, and you’ll need to get them out before we can blow the entrance!’