“You might be surprised.” Ivanov smiled. He picked up the folding shovel and clipped it to his utility belt, then handed Holliday the short-handled pickax. “Last month the FSB discovered an underground mosque and three hundred illegal aliens in an underground bunker where the Rossiya Hotel used to be.”
The priest took a very up-to-date Magellan eXplorist 610 GPS unit out of his knapsack, slung the bag over his shoulder, then took one of the hard hats out of the box.
“Father Stelletskii’s maps?” Holliday asked.
“On microchips.” Ivanov nodded.
“For an Orthodox priest you have some unorthodox methods.”
“Even the Church must keep up with the times, Colonel.”
A few moments later, when everyone else was ready, Ivanov flipped on the miner’s light, adjusted his respirator mask so that it covered his nose and mouth, and led the way into the narrow, arched brick passageway.
Holliday stayed close behind Ivanov with Eddie and Genrikhovich. Even with the respirator masks the stink of rotting waste was almost overpowering, and Holliday’s eyes began to water at the sting of ammonia seeping from the walls. The corridor was barely wide enough to allow a man passage, and every few yards the light on Holliday’s hard hat caught ominous bulges in the bricks, as though some terrible pressure were building up behind them.
The bricks making up the wall were covered with a gray-green, mucuslike substance, and thin icicles of dripping lime hung from above them like the brittle bones of gigantic spiders. The floor beneath their feet seemed made of some soft, almost spongy gravel, and where the floor met the walls there was a ridge of brownish, tarry goo.
“It is just un poco claustrofobico in this place, no?”
“Just a little,” agreed Holliday.
The passage went straight for what seemed like about two hundred yards and then suddenly dropped down a long slope and narrowed so much they had to turn sideways, their faces no more than a few inches away from the slime on the walls. The spongy footing had gone, replaced now by a gruesomely warm, thick brown semiliquid the consistency of porridge.
“Esto es repugnante.” Eddie groaned.
“It’s even worse than the sewers in St. Petersburg.”
Suddenly something big, muscular and brown struck Holliday on the shoulder, skittered across his back and dropped down into the stagnant filth at Eddie’s feet. The Cuban lashed out hard, bellowing in horror, connecting with the creature and sending it spinning against the wall. It recovered and raced off the way they had come. Holliday shuddered; he could still feel the harsh, bristled fur of the rodent against his face and see the gray, whipping tail lashing as it leaped onto his shoulder. From the feel as it hit him Holliday figured it must have weighed close to ten pounds.
“?Carajo!” Eddie moaned. “?Odio las ratas de mierda!”
“They become very large beneath the streets,” called back Ivanov, his voice muffled by the respirator. “Down here there is a great deal to eat.”
“Which is why there are no ratas in Habana anymore,” said Eddie. “There is nothing for them to eat.”
They continued slipping through the cracklike passageway for another hundred yards or so and then the terrain changed again. The passage widened and the roof above their heads was stone instead of brick. The muck beneath their feet deepened, and every few steps Holliday felt something give beneath his feet. Throughout his career he’d gone through every kind of terrain, from deserts to jungles and rain forests, but he’d never traveled over ground like this before.
The passage ended in a brick wall thickly covered by a hardened carapace of slime that had turned into a greenish yellow solid and dripped down into the swampy sewage muck at their feet like candle wax. There was a narrow hole in the wall, barely large enough for a small man like Ivanov to wriggle through.
“We’ll have to make it bigger,” said the priest. He unlimbered the spade from his belt, unfolded it and began to strike the wall. Holliday stepped up and hammered the pickax into a spot on the wall where the mortar had long since disappeared and pulled.
“Just so long as there are no more ratas,” said Eddie, taking the climber’s hammer off his belt.
Genrikhovich laughed hollowly behind his mask. “You’re standing up to your knees in a thousand years of Russian piss, shit and vomit and you’re worried about a few rats?”
It took them twenty minutes. The straw in the bricks had rotted away years before, and the bricks themselves crumbled like old cheese. With each brick the stench became more intense. Pausing for a moment, Holliday heard a faint skittering, whispering sound, like the distant hard patter of raindrops on an iron roof.
“What the hell is that?” Holliday whispered, turning his ear toward the barely discernible sound. It was not only growing louder by the second, but there was something else about the noise-it was getting stronger, a summer shower growing first to a rolling thunderstorm and then to a hurricane of sound; whispering voices raised to chattering conversations and finally to the screams of hell-racked banshees. Something terrible was coming.
“Moi dorogoi Hrista!” Ivanov whispered.
“I do not like this, compadre,” said Eddie. “Whatever it is, it is very, very bad for us, I think, no?”
“Yes,” agreed Holliday. Some sudden intuition of horror shuddered through him. He dropped the pickax. “Get back from the hole!” he ordered. “Keep away from the walls; stand in the center of the crap on the floor! Now!”
Within seconds all four men were gathered in a small, tight group, back-to-back in the muck. Ahead of the sound came a grotesque wave of odor, a filthy, poisonous attar of oily stench.
Horrified, Holliday trained his miner’s lamp on the newly enlarged hole in the brick wall and suddenly he saw a foaming, roiling mass of gray and white come pouring through it. The wave began to thicken and spread, a thickening tongue lolling from the hole, then spreading upward as well, slipping up the walls and the roof of the passageway but staying away from the liquefied stream in the middle.
Individually each member of the terrible army was at least four inches long, six legged, with long antennae and pale, almost transparent almond-shaped bodies that pulsed obscenely as they scrambled around beside and even over their fellow warriors. Huge albino cockroaches, their brown color bred out of them over millennia of generations in the dark bowels of the great city.
Thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of the wretched creatures poured through the ragged hole. They became so thick on the ceiling above them that the outer layers began to slip and slide and then rain down on them, landing on their hooded heads and Tyvek-covered shoulders, sliding into and then out of their hip waders in clicking hordes, filling the air and then flailing on the sea of ooze covering the floor, all struggling in the same direction, pushing the weaker beneath them to provide a solid raft for the mindless mass to move over.
Holliday felt his gorge rise with burning acid bile and his recent dinner rising in his throat. He clenched his teeth, knowing that if he began to vomit he would either have to take off the mask or fill it and choke to death. He bent his head down, closed his eyes tight and waited for the nightmare to end.
It seemed to go on for an eternity, but eventually the noise passed and only the reeking stink of their passage was left behind. If not for the filters on their masks the four men would almost certainly have passed out from the fumes. Finally Holliday lifted up his head and opened his eyes. Tens of thousands of the creatures were floating on the surface of the muck, their legs fluttering weakly, but the main army had passed. There was a long silence.