No, came the reply.
Send someone in here to help me.
There was no response, which was no surprise. For all he knew, his capture was a secondary priority. If he pushed too far they might simply blow the house.
Jack laid Belinda on the kitchen counter, dug his knuckles into her sternum, then flicked her eyeballs with his fingers. She winced, then let out a groan.
“Belinda! Do you hear me? Belinda, it’s Jack!”
“Jack,” she murmured.
“Is there a root cellar?” he asked. He wasn’t going into the basement, where the propane would be the thickest, without knowing there was an escape route. Jack kept rubbing his knuckles against her chest bone. “Belinda! Root cellar! Is there a root cellar?”
Her eyelids fluttered open and focused on Jack. “Root cellar?”
“In the basement! Is there one?”
She nodded feebly. “Behind water heater.”
The phone beeped. Two minutes, the text said.
Jack didn’t reply. They weren’t bluffing.
He threw Belinda over his shoulder, walked to the nearest window, spent thirty seconds inhaling fresh air, then clamped the penlight in his teeth and headed down the stairs, the beam dancing wildly over the walls. At the bottom was a narrow brown-brick passage. Now the stench of propane was almost acidic, like a chunk of manila rope being snaked through his sinuses. Jack turned right. Belinda’s head bumped against the bricks. She let out a yelp. A good sign.
The passage opened into a twenty-by-twenty-foot rectangular space with a dirt floor. Sitting against the left-hand wall was a long propane tank. Jack headed that way, playing his flashlight over the piping until he found a cluster of gauges. Zip-tied to one of the pipes was a pencil detonator bundled to a cell phone with duct tape. Simple and effective. The number of wraps on the duct tape made getting to the phone’s battery time-consuming. More important, the accelerometer that was likely built into this phone could also serve as an ideal anti-tamper switch.
Forget it, move on.
Belinda’s body, draped limply over his shoulder, started convulsing. She retched. Jack felt the gush of warm vomit on his neck. He turned his head, shining the beam over the space. Ahead, sitting beside a line of wall-mounted wooden shelves, was the cylindrical water heater. Jack headed that way. Nausea washed over him and his stomach heaved. He kept putting one foot in front of the other.
The cell phone beeped again. He didn’t need to look at it. One-minute warning.
He reached the water heater and followed its curve to the rear wall. His knee bumped against something hard, but not brick. Wood. He looked down and his flashlight illuminated a waist-high hatch.
He dropped to his knees, grabbed the handle, and jerked. The hatch swung open. He bent at the waist and let Belinda slip off his shoulders, then wriggled past her into the tunnel. He reached back, grabbed her wrist, dragged her toward him. On hands and knees, he repeated the process until the tunnel opened into an alcove. Set into its opposite wall were four wooden steps that ended at a set of angled swinging doors; down their center Jack could see a slice of faint light. He crawled up the steps, put his back against the doors, and pressed until he was certain they weren’t locked.
He crawled back to Belinda, dragged her up the steps, her head thumping against each of them in turn. Jack removed the penlight from his mouth and clicked it off, then drew the HK. On his phone he texted, Okay, coming out. Don’t shoot.
He didn’t wait for a reply but instead slowly pushed the doors, keeping his body as close to the ground as possible. If they were seen now and the alarm was raised they’d start taking fire. Death by bullet or death by explosion, it didn’t matter.
Once he got Belinda onto level ground he started his crawl-drag routine again, aiming toward a cluster of trees ahead. Ten feet to go.
He rasped, “Belinda, help me, crawl!”
She muttered something incomprehensible, but his words must have registered. She started clawing at the ground and churning her legs.
Five feet.
Jack’s cell phone beeped. He glanced at the screen:
Time’s up.
He heard a whoosh. The air around him flashed orange.
And then heat.
A voice shouting in German filtered into Jack’s subconscious. He forced open his eyes but remained still. His brain was playing catch-up, assembling imagery and sound into something tangible, familiar.
Cabin, he thought. Explosion. The air was thick with the smell of burning wood and the sound of crackling flames. A few inches from his eyes a leaf was smoldering, its edges glowing orange. His scalp felt hot.
Jack heard a rustling. It was feet crunching through undergrowth, he decided. Don’t move. There were no friendlies out here, he reminded himself. Only hostiles. He squeezed his right hand and felt the solidity of the HK’s grip.
The crunching came closer, somewhere to his front and left.
He tracked his eyes back along the ground until an arm came into view; this he followed back to a head of short brown hair. Belinda.
“Etwas?” a voice called in the distance. Anything?
“Nein.”
The reply came from very close.
Very slowly Jack lifted his head, rotated it, and pressed it back to the earth. Eight feet away, a man illuminated by the flames crept from behind a tree trunk. His eyes scanned the ground ahead and to his sides. He held a compact assault rifle — similar to the FAMAS models carried by the men at Kultfabrik, Jack guessed — across his chest.
Belinda groaned, then stirred, rustling the leaves.
The man froze, then slowly pivoted toward the sound.
Slowly Jack rolled right, sweeping his gun arm under his body as he went until it was fully extended along the ground. He lifted the HK slightly and laid the front sight on the man’s chest. He fired. The man went down. Jack rolled back onto his belly, then wriggled sideways until he was facing the ruined cabin. All that remained of the structure was a burning heap of debris sitting atop the foundation-turned-crater. The heat from the flames stung Jack’s face.
He suspected the propane’s heavier-than-air density had worked in their favor. Most of the gas had settled on the first floor and in the basement, and Jack’s opening of the windows had dissipated some of the former. Sitting as far belowground as it did, the basement had funneled most of the blast vertically. In fact, the ground nearest the house was almost pristine. Farther out, the terrain was littered with smoldering chunks of wood and wreckage, some as big as Jack himself.
Lucky or good? Which was better? In this case, luck.
He reached out, found Belinda’s hand, and pinched and twisted the soft skin of her wrist. She jerked her hand away. Jack whispered, “Belinda, if you can hear me, don’t speak. Flex your fingers.”
She did so.
“We’re in trouble. Can you crawl?”
Belinda lifted her head and looked at him. The hair encircling her face was singed and crinkled. “I can crawl,” she whispered.
Jack took it slowly until he’d put a screen of tree trunks between them and the cabin. He rose to his knees and helped Belinda do the same and held her steady as she got her bearings. She looked back at the cabin. Her eyes glittered in the flames.
“Bastards,” she whispered. “Rotten bastards.”
“Payback comes later,” Jack replied. “Right now we need to keep moving.”
Jürgen Rostock had declared war on them. Jack wanted to be far away by the time Rostock realized he’d missed his targets yet again.