Well?”
“It reeks,” Mad Dog said, and then, noting Hood’s immediate response, added, “Like rotting vegetables or sewage. A hint of sulfur. But it’s tolerable.”
Hood glanced back over at Rollie, gesturing for him to perform another test, just to be sure.
“There’s something else, too, but it’s kind of faint. A sweet smell. Pine maybe? Yeah, it smells like a pine-scented candle in a shithouse.”
“You hear anything?”
Mad Dog cocked his ear toward the tunnels again then shook his head. “Just you guys breathing. You sound like fucking Darth Vader.”
Hood laughed despite himself and was about to tell the other men to take their masks off, but Mad Dog wasn’t finished. “There’s some kind of luminescent lichen on the floor. Big patches of it. I didn’t notice it with the NVGs on. It’s faint, but now that my eyes are adjusting, I can see it pretty well—” He knelt suddenly, lowering his face until it was just above the cave floor and then began crawling forward, into the center passage. After a moment, he glanced back and was grinning again. “Footprints. They definitely went this way.”
Hood looked over at Rollie again. “Anything?”
The other man shook his head.
“All right, Bender, take off your mask. You and Mad Dog will be our bloodhounds.”
“More like canaries in a coal mine,” Bender said, but nevertheless eagerly removed his mask. “Not that I’m complaining.” He took a deep breath, and then his face wrinkled in disgust. “Ugh, maybe I am. It really reeks.”
“Canaries or bloodhounds, take your pick. Rollie and I will keep masks on so that we can treat you if we run into something. You let us know the second you start feeling weird, okay?”
“Roger that.”
“Take a minute or two to let your eyes adjust.”
Mad Dog was back on his feet and looking around. “Wild,” he said. “It’s almost bright enough to see where I’m going.”
He took a step forward, but Hood clapped a hand down on his shoulder, restraining him. “Rollie’s gonna take point. We’re relying on visuals first, and our NVGs still give us an advantage.”
Rollie nodded and, with the sample-detector registering nothing, started down the center passage, moving with painstaking slowness. Mad Dog was right behind him, weapon at the high ready and aimed at a point just to Rollie’s right. Hood directed Bender to go next and fell into step behind him, bringing up the rear. Hood’s view of what lay ahead was mostly obstructed by the other men, but he watched them all intently — especially Mad Dog and Bender — for any signs of trouble.
Mad Dog, in true bloodhound fashion, stayed low to the ground, bent over to get a better look at the stone floor of the cave, and presumably, the patches of lichen that preserved the footprints of whomever had passed this way before them. Every few seconds, he would raise his head and sniff the air, but then resume following the trail.
Then, without any warning, Mad Dog whirled to his right, training his rifle on the wall beside him. The abruptness of the move immediately put Hood on an alert footing, and he too shifted his aimpoint to the same spot, triggering his PEQ-2 as he did. The normally invisible laser stabbed through the air like the shaft of a spear to splash against the wall of the tunnel, lighting up the surrounding stone like a spotlight, illuminating… Nothing. The wall was completely bare.
Mad Dog seemed to have realized it as well. He shifted the rifle right, then left, then brought it up in a slow arc, but seeing nothing, lowered the weapon again.
“What?” Hood whispered. “What did you see?’
“There was something there. Moving.”
Hood probed the surrounding area with his laser but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t see anything.”
Mad Dog’s rifle shifted again as he searched, but then he shook his head. “I don’t know where it went. Might have been a bug or something. You didn’t see it?”
Hood hadn’t seen anything and hadn’t seen any insects since entering the cave. That didn’t mean there wasn’t something there, but it seemed unlikely. “You jumping at shadows now, brother?”
“What the hell do you know?” Mad Dog shot back, sounding uncharacteristically irritable. “With all that crap you’re wearing, no wonder you can’t see anything.”
“All right, simmer—”
Beside him, Bender stiffened and swung his weapon around toward a spot on the opposite wall. Hood reacted as before, transfixing the wall with his targeting laser, but once again there was nothing there.
“You saw, it right?” Mad Dog asked.
“I don’t know what I saw,” Bender said. “But there was definitely something there. Just for a second. It was moving, then it just disappeared.”
“Like it melted into the wall or something.”
Bender seized on Mad Dog’s suggestion. “Yeah.”
Rollie glanced back, looking at both men and then at Hood. He shook his head slowly, the silent message easily understood. Hood shared the other man’s concern. Hallucinations might be indicative of some kind of toxic exposure. “Maybe you guys should mask up.”
Mad Dog turned toward the sound of his voice, his expression slightly manic. “Not a chance. There’s something here. Something you can’t see with NVGs.”
Hood debated making it an order but decided that would be overreacting. Mad Dog was probably just having a rare case of nerves. Even seasoned operators weren’t immune to the kind of primitive reptile brain response that could happen deep underground. “All right, Dale. It’s cool. Just make sure you have PID before you pull that trigger.”
“Always.” Mad Dog seemed somewhat mollified by the concession, and as they continued forward, there were no further sightings of the ephemeral “bugs,” but Mad Dog and Bender remained hyper-alert, their heads not merely on a swivel but practically spinning.
A few minutes later, Mad Dog paused to sniff the air again. In the NVGs, Hood could clearly see the look of alarm on the other man’s face. Mad Dog raised a fist — the signal to “freeze”— and then waved in Hood’s general direction, beckoning him forward.
Hood approached cautiously, rolling heel to toe to avoid even the slap of boot soles on stone, and leaned in close. Mad Dog seemed to sense his presence in the darkness. “Caught a whiff of burnt propellant.”
Hood knew what that meant. “A firefight?”
“I think so. It’s faint, but I think we’re getting close to where it happened.”
Where what happened? Hood wondered. What he said aloud was, “Good job. Let’s hold up here for a few, look and listen.” He conveyed the message to Rollie with a hand signal, then moved up to whisper it in Bender’s ear.
For three full minutes they remained still as statues — Hood and Rollie watching the darkness with their NVGs, Mad Dog and Bender listening for any sounds that might indicate an enemy lying in wait — but they neither saw nor heard anything at all. Satisfied that there was no immediate threat, Hood gave the signal to begin inching forward.
After moving a mere ten meters, he spotted something glinting on the ground, a shiny surface reflecting the invisible light back at him. Another three steps revealed more gleams, a scattering of metallic objects that shone like pinpoints of sunlight on a wind-tossed sea.
Rollie eased closer to the large patch and knelt down to pick something up. Hood could easily distinguish the object pinched between the other man’s gloved thumb and forefinger — a brass shell casing.
Mad Dog’s nose had not deceived. There had been shooting here, a lot of it judging by the amount of brass that littered the floor of the passage. Hood kept advancing until he reached Rollie’s position. The brass was a 7.62-millimeter round, which meant it could have come from an insurgent’s Kalashnikov or from any of the FN SCAR battle rifles carried by the Monster Squad, but given the sheer quantity in that one spot, Hood guessed they had come from Imhotep’s 240B machine gun.