Veer threw himself into the water and plunged deep beneath the waves.
Hannah felt the incredible noise coming from the rear dock sear through her eardrums as she stumbled down the corridor, and she knew that she would not be able to make it out of the building and onto the dock in time to escape the horrendous agony consuming Veer’s men on the docks outside.
She hurried along the darkened corridor in pursuit of Riggs’ men, and then she came up against a steel door that had been firmly closed. Hannah reached out and pulled the handles of the door, but the SEALs had fled and secured it closed behind them, preventing Veer’s men from following them easily into the main base.
Hannah cursed as the noise intensified, an ear-splitting screech that seemed so powerful that it was a physical thing, as though invisible men were assaulting her all around her body, battering her with endless blows. In her pain and confusion, she turned away from the source of the sound and in doing so found herself looking at the entrance to the anechoic chamber.
And suddenly she understood.
She staggered alongside a pressure hatch and turned right, stumbling into the anechoic chamber as she turned and tried to force the door shut. Her limbs were numb, the noise reverberating through her chest like war drums and shaking her eyeballs in their sockets as she heaved the door closed, squeezing her eyes shut as she felt what seemed like razor blades piercing them and her eardrums.
The hatch sealed and some of the intolerable pain eased. Hannah sighed in incredible relief as she leaned against the hatch and twisted the valve closed. The terrible pain and the horrific noise vanished and she slumped to her knees, her vision starring and her ears ringing as though they were about to burst.
Veer floated thirty feet beneath the waves and watched as his men hurled themselves into the water. He could still hear the infernal noise screeching across the dock above, but down here it was sufficiently muted that he could bear it.
The bodies landed in the water, some of them missing limbs, some of them thrashing in agony and gradually falling apart, the water stained red with blood that diffused the already meagre light from the glow sticks on the docks.
Veer remained silent and still, even when the enormous form of a sea leopard loomed past him, homing in on the gruesome feast appearing on the surface of the water. The enormous creature was three times Veer’s size, but it remained beneath the surface of the water until the terrible cacophony had faded away before it climbed and began tearing at the mass of flesh now clogging the surface.
Veer allowed himself to ascend slowly, saw one or two of his men appear from the darkness around him and clamber out of the water again, careful to avoid the gigantic predator feasting on the grisly remains all around them.
Veer swam to the dock and pulled himself out of the water, then yanked his mask from his face.
‘What the hell happened?’ one of his men asked in horror.
The dock was littered with corpses, most of them no longer recognizably human, the flesh having split from the bones and been reduced to a bloodied jelly inside the wetsuits his men had worn.
‘Acoustic weapon of some sort,’ Veer uttered, his voice sounding strange in his own ears as he looked at the blast door and then at his companions. Three men, of an original hundred, remained with him.
‘With me, let’s finish this!’
‘Get that door open, and let’s finish this right now!’
Veer led his men inside the corridor at a run, weapons held before them and their barrel-mounted flashlights illuminating the interior in stark beams of white light. They only covered fifty paces before they came upon the sealed blast door.
‘Blow it, now!’
Veer watched impatiently as his men attached charges to the sealed door and then backed away down the steps. Veer huddled in below the door and covered his ears as the troops activated their detonator and flipped the switch.
An ear shattering blast thundered through the chamber and Veer heard the heavy door crash down as his men burst from their hiding places and rushed the door with weapons drawn.
Veer prepared to open fire even as Hannah Ford stumbled out of an adjoining door, a pistol in her hand. She saw him coming and immediately tried to aim the weapon at his face. Veer smashed the pistol from her grasp, the weapon spinning away across the dock and into the water with a splash as he jammed the barrel of his rifle up under her ribs.
‘Hello again,’ he sneered, water streaming down his face and across his thick beard.
‘It’s here!’ one of his men shouted.
‘Looks like your boyfriends have stood you up at the last,’ he smiled without warmth. ‘Don’t worry though, we’ll make good use of you just as soon as we get out of here.’
‘Got to hell,’ Hannah snapped back at him.
‘You first!’ Veer snapped and shoved her along in front of him.
XLVII
‘You did what?!’ Ethan yelled above the clatter of gunfire.
‘Hannah’s still back there!’ Sully replied. ‘She made a dash for Black Knight but Veer’s men showed up and cut her off!’
Ethan’s voice echoed down the corridor as he ran after Sully, rage seething through his veins.
‘There was no time!’ Sully shouted back as he raced up the stairwell to the command center. ‘If I hadn’t shut the door that damned thing would have killed us too!’
Ethan cursed as Riggs and his team hurried across the center to rappel lines Ethan and Saunders had thrown out of the shattered windows, secured against the thick steel legs of the planning table.
‘Tell me the sub’s coming up!’ Ethan asked.
‘They’re almost here and aware of the enemy!’ Riggs replied as he checked the radio set. ‘Time to leave!’
‘Hannah’s still back there!’ Ethan snapped. ‘We can’t leave her!’
He saw the conflict on Riggs’ face, swiftly overwhelmed by mission protocol.
‘We can’t save everybody and she made her choice, Warner! We go now, or we stay buried here forever! You gonna cry into your cups or cover us?!’
Ethan felt like screaming as he hurried to the windows and grabbed an M-16 rifle. Riggs took one last look at the dock, the water below them churning now as something began rising up from the black depths.
‘Now!’
Ethan aimed out of the command center windows as Del Toro and Saunders opened fire on the darkened maw of the tunnel opposite. Gunfire raked the icy walls of the tunnel and drove Veer’s men back out of sight as Ethan lifted the M-16 rifle and aimed carefully at the tunnel entrance through the smoke drifting through the cavern.
He selected the 203 grenade launcher and fired twice. Two grenades arced from the weapon across the pens and bounced onto the icy dock as they rattled into the mouth of the tunnel. Above the rattle of gunfire from the SEALs Ethan heard the cries of panic from within the tunnel and then two blasts thundered out as bright flares of light illuminated the ragged tunnel mouth.
The grenades showered Veer’s men with supersonic shrapnel and Ethan saw chunks of ice plunge from the ceiling of the tunnel to clutter the entrance as the armed men fled the assault. Ethan turned to his left and yelled across the control center.
‘Go, now!’
Riggs and his men burst from the control center windows and plunged down the rappel lines as Ethan and Saunders opened fire once more, covering their descent.