The Russian, Valdechesfsky, had eased to his feet and was lifting a long-shafted screwdriver out of a tool kit.
“Drop it and sit down, you son of a bitch!” she hissed. “Try that again and you’re dead!”
Glaring, he obeyed.
From up the corridor someone emptied an Uzi from around a lateral corner. Slugs chopped and whined about her, and a jagged fragment from a ricochet laid the skin of her forearm open. Crying out, she rolled back and fired, spraying the passage side, driving the gunner back at the price of half a precious magazine.
She tried to swallow and wished for just one sip of cool water to clear her powder-parched throat.
Somewhere down the passageway she heard a commanding voice bellow an order in Indonesian, repeating it twice as the speaker apparently met resistance. Amanda thought she recognized it, then she was sure.
“Amanda? Are you all right?”
“Makara, is that you?”
“Just me. I’ve sent the guards out to reinforce the main tunnels. I don’t think it will do much good. We don’t have much time.” His voice, reverberating up the passage, was amazingly conversational. “We’ve got to be going. Amanda.”
“No one’s going anywhere, Makara. You have to surrender. End this without the loss of any more of your people.”
“That’s simply not a valid option for me,” the reply came back. “Be careful, now, I’m stepping into the passage. I don’t want to startle you.”
He appeared in the pool of work light fifty feet away. His hands were empty and he wore no weapons at his belt. Disheveled, dust-grimed, yet still standing tall and undefeated. He smiled. “I must say, I am impressed; I’d never have imagined anyone ever finding this place or breaching its security. Your people are good, Amanda, you’ve trained them superbly, imprinting your flair for the daring and the unexpected onto them. You are everything they said you were.”
Amanda rose onto her knees, leveling the Sterling. “Give it up, Makara.”
“As I said, that’s simply not possible. You would have to hand me over to the Indonesian authorities, and before I could arrange the real thing, I’d be shot trying to escape. I’m too dangerous, and Jakarta knows it now.”
He started to saunter slowly forward. “It would be easier to simply end it here. Let me haunt these caverns with the ghosts of the Japanese.”
“Don’t be a fool, Makara.”
He shook his head. “I’m not. It’s either leave here or die. And I do not intend to die, because I have too many things left to do. I want you to help me do them, Amanda.”
“Stop!”
He hesitated, as she stood with the Sterling still aimed at his chest. “I’ll say it, Amanda: I want you as my ratu samudra, my queen of the sea, with the golden islands at your feet and a thousand ships at your command.”
“That’s insane,” she whispered.
“No, it isn’t!” He held out his arms. “We can do it, you know we can. The two of us, and, with my Bugis, we’d be unstoppable. Five years from now, we’ll be sending our ambassadors to the United Nations. All you have to do is let free all the fire and boldness within you. No one can stop us!”
“I will, Makara; I’ll stop you.”
She wondered if he’d heard, so faint was the rasping whisper she managed.
He was moving forward again, into the gun barrel. Somewhere out toward the main cavern, machine guns were firing again.
“Come with me, Amanda. We’ll go to that island I had prepared for you. For a week we’ll swim and lay in the sun and talk about everything in the world except war and nations and politics. Then you decide. One week.”
He was almost within touching range, danger range. She drew up on the Sterling’s trigger, feeling the sear ready to drop.
“Stop!” she pleaded.
He smiled gently at her foolishness. “Amanda, I know you can’t do it to me, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it to you.”
The Mark 138 satchel charge is as elementary as a weapon can get. Forty pounds of high explosives in a canvas bag and primed with a nonelectric blasting cap on a length of timed fuse, it is usually delivered by a strong throwing arm.
Simple or not, it’s still the weapon of choice for serious bunker busting.
Thick chemical smoke billowed out of both tunnel entrances, the trapped garrison within firing wildly through it.
“Five seconds, sir,” the demolition man said. “You ready?”
Quillain himself had elected to place the charge. “Just about. We’ll go on a three count. Hey, Donaldson, you set?”
“Ready, sir,” the reply snapped back over the tac radio link.
“Then let’s get it done. On my mark, three… two… one… Mark!”
Stone’s demo man yanked and released the ring of an M-60 fuse igniter, the pop of the shotgun primer and the needle jet of smoke announcing a successful fuse light.
“Fire in the hole!” Quilbin roared. Swinging the satchel charge by its strap, he hurled it into the maw of the tunnel. Then all hands fell back fast to evade the results.
In the right-hand tunnel, Stone’s placement was perfect, the thrown charge skidding along the tunnel floor to bump against the foot of the barricade fifty feet in, its defenders not even noting its arrival between the smoke and the sound of their own gunfire.
The placement in the left-hand tunnel was almost as good, only the charge came to rest against a crate bearing a certain Cyrillic inscription.
The right-hand charge functioned perfectly as well. Its detonation blew an almost perfect cylinder of white smoke out of the tunnel mouth, the force of the blast being absorbed in the disintegration of the barricade and the fighting men immediately behind it.
In the left hand passage, however…
The entrance spewed flame and wreckage like a vomiting dragon, the roar of the blast dwarfing the solid thud of the first charge’s detonation, the stone underfoot leaping, taking the assault teams off their feet.
And following the explosion, there came the terrifying grate and rumble of shifting stone.
The world inside the tunnels went black as the power failed. A shock wave hurled Amanda back against the end of the passage. The deeper blackness of unconsciousness almost overtook her. She beat it back, fighting to stay on her feet, screaming at her hands to keep their grip on the machine pistol.
She couldn’t see! She couldn’t hear! She couldn’t breathe! The air was thick with dust and lung-burning fumes.
Then she felt the powerful arms closing around her, hemming her in against the wall. She wanted to scream a denial but she couldn’t force the filthy gases out of her lungs. She fought him. She fought madly to maintain possession of the gun, the stumpy weapon caught vertically between their bodies. She felt herself start to lose.
“Makara!” It was a despairing wail inside her mind, but the faintest rusty whimper without. She locked both hands about the Sterling’s hand grip, yanking back with the last of her failing strength. She felt the muzzle slip under his chin, and she closed her finger on the trigger.
To her disrupted hearing, the hammer of the automatic weapon was the patter of a summer rain on a roof. Hot fluid and matter sprayed in her face.
She fell beside him on the stone floor. The Sterling was gone. It didn’t matter. She forced herself up onto her hands and knees but could go no farther. She’d lost all orientation. Even if she had had the strength to move, she didn’t know where to go. She begged the tunnel atmosphere for oxygen and was spurned.
Harconan whispered his farewell to her: “Amanda…”