Lopez, crouched low behind a scattering of rocks, shouted back.
‘I don’t know! We need cover right now!’
Ethan looked at the swarms of mercenaries now running toward the ladder, and knew that there was only one direction left for them to take.
‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Into the cave!’
62
Ethan ducked down low and dashed toward the dark maw of the cave behind them as bullets whipped the dust at his feet and sprayed wood chips from fallen branches around him. He followed Ellison Thorne as the big man hefted Kip Wren onto his shoulder and loped into the darkness of Lechuguilla Cave. Almost immediately they were engulfed in a billowing cloud of cordite smoke as Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane opened fire with their Springfield rifles straight up at the ladder above. As Ethan crouched he saw the shots hit their marks to the sound of dull thumps, the leaden Minie balls slamming mercilessly through clothes and flesh. Three of the attackers screamed and fell from the ladder to plunge with their limbs clawing the air.
Ethan and Lopez leapt aside as the bodies thumped down onto the floor of the cave in puffs of dust and the crackle of splintering bones. Ethan aimed his pistol at one of them as he lay screaming in agony and fired a rapid double-tap. The first round hit the man in his belly, the second high on his temple, silencing him instantly.
‘Keep them off that ladder!’ Ethan shouted.
Realizing that their quarry was armed and now veiled in wreaths of thick white smoke, the attackers suddenly scattered for cover, throwing themselves down behind rocks on the lip of Misery Hole seventy feet above them.
‘Three down!’ Cochrane shouted. ‘I’m reckonin’ about ninety-six to go!’
Ethan flinched as wild shots smacked into the solid bedrock nearby, stone chips and a fine powder of shocked rock spilling onto the air around them. Lopez crawled to Ethan’s side.
‘We’re outnumbered here,’ she shouted above the crackle of gunfire. ‘There’s no way out but up.’
Edward Copthorne reloaded his rifle and glanced across at her.
‘There’s no way to us but down!’ he pointed out. ‘We’ve got thousands of passages behind us. We go inside, they’ll never find us.’
‘We’ll stand a better chance against those guys inside the caves,’ Ethan agreed. ‘Out here, they could rush us at once and it’ll all be over and we can’t hold them off that ladder forever. Besides, they look like amateurs, missing more than they hit.’
Lopez didn’t reply, but she got to her feet and dashed off into the darkness behind them. Ethan looked at the old soldiers alongside him, and gestured with his pistol.
‘Let another volley off, then go. I’ll cover you with the pistol.’
Copthorne nodded, and along with the others he aimed his rifle straight up at the lip of Misery Hole.
‘Fire!’
A blast of gunfire smacked Ethan’s eardrums as thick smoke drifted across his field of view, stinging his eyes and burning in his throat. Copthorne, McQuire and Cochrane leapt to their feet and dashed for the cave entrance, using the drifting smoke to conceal their flight. Ethan aimed at several black shapes moving amongst the bushes and rocks high above, firing at them randomly. He was about to turn and flee when a flash of white caught his eye, a man moving from left to right. Ethan squinted through the smoke, and saw the man’s awkward gait as he struggled from cover to cover, dragging someone else along behind him. Ethan recognized Jeb Oppenheimer immediately. At that moment, four small, round objects thumped down to land on the cavern floor around him. Ethan only needed one glance to see what they were.
‘Grenades!’ he shouted.
He fired off another two rounds and then fled into the darkness of the cave. He hurled himself down behind some rocks as four deafening blasts rocked the cavern behind him.
‘Y’ git any of ’em?’ Copthorne asked from somewhere in the darkness.
‘Just the one,’ Ethan said, and reminded himself that he’d fired seven shots, which left eight in the pistol. ‘Mostly just kept their heads down. How’s Kip?’
Ellison Thorne’s voice reached them from somewhere deeper in the cave.
‘He ain’t right. Bullet’s in his leg and it ain’t goin’ nowhere.’
Damn. Right now they needed all the firepower and hands they could muster while they tried to figure out a way of escaping the assault. Ethan looked at the entrance to the cave, the low crevice appearing brightly lit now compared to the depths in which they huddled. The cave behind descended gently, ragged walls and a low ceiling vanishing into impenetrable blackness from which drifted a gentle breeze, as though the earth itself were breathing. There were potentially hundreds of miles of unexplored caverns within, plunging to depths of more than two thousand feet below ground, some flooded, others prone to collapse. Ethan was suddenly acutely aware that they lacked even the most basic expeditionary gear required for a descent into such a complex underground maze. Thousands of people over the years had ventured into such places never to return, hopelessly lost and doomed to starvation and a cold, lonely death far below ground in absolute blackness.
‘Heads up!’
John Cochrane’s voice startled Ethan as it echoed through the cavern, and he turned to see the shapes of men drop into view from the ladder and rush toward the cave entrance. Instantly, three Springfield rifles blasted out a volley of shots that cut down three of the men. Ethan fired on a fourth, another double-tap that sliced through the attacker with a fine spray of blood that spilled onto rocks at the cave entrance. The man fell to his knees before toppling over sideways.
‘They’re trying to overwhelm us!’ McQuire shouted as he struggled to reload his weapon in the eerie half-light.
John Cochrane and McQuire fired at the same time, dropping two more men who materialized at the entrance to the cave, firing their weapons as they searched for cover from which to continue their assault. The Minie balls slammed into them as they ran and the two men cartwheeled into the dust.
Ethan’s ears began aching and ringing from the infernal blasts of the rifles, the terrible noise amplified in the narrow confines of the cave as several more mercenaries tumbled into view. From behind Ethan, Ellison Thorne loomed, a pistol in each hand that spurted smoke and flame as he fired both weapons at once, cutting an attacker down in mid-stride to fall face first onto the rocks.
‘Stand tall, lads!’ Ellison bellowed, his huge chest and the narrow cave amplifying his voice to thunder out above the gunfire. ‘Up an’ at ’em!’
With a sudden and unexpected war cry, Ellison led his men at a run toward the cave entrance, their bayonets and knives flashing, and for an instant Ethan’s vision blurred as he no longer saw the mercenaries plunging toward them, or the antiquated rifles or the pistol in his hand. A flash-vision of other caves from years before filled his mind, the bitter peaks of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains, the screams of the Taliban and United States Marines locked in hand-to-hand combat in the deadly warrens of the Tora Bora cave complex. Young men, far from home, flashing long-knives and bayonets, the primeval grunts and cries of mortal combat as crazed terrorists with no fear of death fought idealistic soldiers struggling to preserve their way of life.
Semper fi.
Ethan leapt up on impulse and rushed forward as Ellison’s men collided with six soldiers who had managed to breach the entrance to the cave. He saw Ellison Thorne grab the barrel of one man’s M-16 and twist it aside before stepping in and head-butting him with a sickening crunch, the mercenary’s legs crumpling as he sagged onto the floor of the cave. Screams soared through the darkness as bayonets plunged deep into unexpecting flesh, stubby machine guns batted aside by the long-barreled Springfields before they could be brought to bear.