‘I’d say this pool’s been contaminated,’ he said.
Saffron nodded and then fell sideways. Ethan managed to catch her in one arm, his other hand still on the handle of the knife wedged in his side.
‘We need to get out of here,’ he said quickly, and turned them both toward the cavern exit.
Saffron was breathing heavily as she struggled to keep moving through the low, awkward passage, and Ethan could feel thick blood flowing warmly from around the knife still wedged in his side. He tried not to think about what damage the steel blade might be causing inside him, forcing himself onward one step at a time toward the dim light ahead from the cave entrance.
Another blast of noise from explosives thundered down the passage, a shock wave hitting Ethan and a fine mist of particles stinging his face. The cavern ahead was filled with thick smoke, and he could hear the occasional crack of a rifle as he staggered toward the light.
He instantly saw John Cochrane lying halfway between the cave entrance and the last line of defense, sprawled on his back and staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. Half of his forehead was missing, his ear hanging from his scalp in a web of tattered fronds of skin and bone. The cave entrance was littered with bodies and fallen chunks of rock.
Lopez saw him coming over her shoulder as she lay with her pistol propped up on the rocks.
‘We’re pinned down!’ she shouted. Then she saw their wounds. ‘Are you okay?’
Ethan nodded and managed to struggle up alongside her before both he and Saffron collapsed, breathless and sweating, in the darkness. Lillian Cruz dashed across to them, her eyes wide as she took in their injuries. Lopez saw the knife in Ethan’s side, and her skin turned pale as she looked at him.
‘Jesus, Ethan, we need to get you to a hospital.’
‘We need to get out of here first,’ Ethan said, his own voice a raspy whisper in his ears.
‘They’re still trying to blow the entrance to the caves,’ Lillian shouted above the crackle of gunfire. ‘We can’t hold them off much longer.’
Ethan looked across at Ellison Thorne. His shoulder was stained with crimson blood where a bullet had hit him, his features tight with terminal defiance. Nathaniel McQuire appeared uninjured but he was clearly exhausted, his face smeared with soot and scratches from the blasts of the explosives. Edward Copthorne was lying unconscious alongside them, several patches of blood on his clothes betraying multiple bullet wounds.
‘He ain’t stayin’ with us much longer,’ Ellison said, and gestured to the cave entrance. ‘It’s time we end this, for once and for all.’
Ethan nodded, one hand clutching the blade impaled in his side as he looked at the cave entrance. There, he could see sticks of dynamite piled loosely around the sides of the cavern, connected by a fuse wire that ran to a simple detonator lying beside Edward Copthorne’s inert body.
Ethan crawled to his knees and picked up his pistol from where it lay beside Lopez.
‘We’re ready,’ he said.
Lillian Cruz helped Saffron to her feet and Lopez stood up with her rifle held at port-arms, bayonet fixed and ready. Ethan looked down at Ellison Thorne one last time as the big man picked up a handful of dynamite sticks and cradled them in his arms, a cigarette lighter in his big fist.
‘Who was holding the camera, Ellison?’ he asked. ‘They’ll still be in danger, they’ll need help.’
Ellison Thorne smiled. ‘Not now they won’t,’ he said.
Before Ethan could challenge him again, Ellison lit the dynamite in his grasp in a fizzing cloud of sparks and blue smoke. Lillian prodded them all toward the edge of the cave entrance as Ellison staggered to his feet, holding his lethally blazing explosives and nodding once at Ethan. Ethan turned and hurried toward the light, squinting through the smoke and aiming his pistol ahead as they burst out into the vertical shafts of sunlight beaming down to the bottom of Misery Hole.
A single soldier was squatting amid boulders right in front of Ethan, fiddling with a pack of C4. Ethan aimed and fired a single shot, the round snapping the man’s head sideways as though he’d been clubbed with a baseball bat. He saw Lopez fire a round at a man further up the slope, hitting him squarely in the chest and taking him clean off his feet to land with a thud on his back.
Ethan split to the right of the cave entrance with Saffron and Cutler as Lillian and Zamora hurled themselves in the opposite direction.
Ethan shouted out as he crouched down with one arm across Saffron’s shoulders and Cutler shielding the pair of them with his body. ‘Get down, now!’
Ethan glimpsed dozens of mercenaries all aiming assault rifles at them, when the cave entrance exploded as Ellison Thorne’s dynamite ignited.
72
A superheated blast wave of shattered rocks and flame roared from the mouth of the cave, spitting a cloud of supersonic debris that radiated out across Misery Hole. The mercenaries besieging the cave hurled themselves aside as they were hammered by the deadly shrapnel, shielding their faces as they hit the ground. The infernal blast rolled and echoed through the cavern as a tumbling shower of dust, stone chips and shattered vegetation fell from around them. Ethan took his hands from over his head, wiping dust from his eyes as he looked back to see the mouth of Lechuguilla Cave now obscured by a mountain of shattered rocks still tumbling down to thump onto the ground nearby.
Lopez and Lillian Cruz lifted their faces from the dust, but Saffron remained motionless. Ethan struggled across to her side and gently rolled her over. Her face was pale and her eyes rolled up in their sockets, but she was conscious, groaning with the pain that was now beginning to seep like acid through her body as the contents of her stomach leaked into her bloodstream.
‘She needs a hospital, now,’ Cutler said, ‘or she won’t make it.’
Ethan was about to reply when some of the mercenaries began to recover themselves and leapt from cover, M-16s at the ready as they surrounded them, a tall man with pallid, pock-marked skin at their head. His red hair glistened in the sunlight above his paunchy face as he looked down at them.
‘At last,’ he said, lifting his rifle to point at Ethan, ‘it’s time to bring this to a close.’
Zamora, on his knees and with a rifle pointing at him, shook his head.
‘Don’t do this.’
The man ignored him and aimed his assault rifle, the ugly black barrel pointing straight between Ethan’s eyes, and then a deafening gunshot burst the air around Ethan’s head. He heard himself cry out and grab his face in shock, only to see the assault rifle aimed at him spin wildly away through the air. The pale-skinned man doubled over in shock as he stared at the ragged, bloody hole torn through his hand.
A barrage of voices shouted out, laden with fearsome rage as they raced closer, and as Ethan looked up through the shimmering beams of light sweeping down through the clouds of dust and smoke, he saw dozens of figures rappeling down toward him.
‘Put your weapons down! Down down down!’
Ethan, his eyes itching with grit, watched as United States Marines plunged into the cavern around them. Snipers enshrouded in bush camouflage popped up from the edge of the ridge a hundred feet above, weapons pointed unwaveringly at Hoffman and his men. The sudden sound of distant thunder became a deafening, hammering chorus as a pair of Bell-Boeing V22 Osprey aircraft roared past against the disc of blue sky above, escorted by two Apache Ah-64 gunships, the sound of their amassed rotors thundering down through the cavern like the footfalls of a charging army of giants.