One camera showed the three helicopters coming into view in the distance.
Something stung Cavanaugh's nostrils. "Do you smell smoke?"
"From the ventilation system." Duncan flicked a switch. "There. It's shut off. The outside air and the smoke can't get in. We've got enough air in here for a couple of days."
Cavanaugh nodded. "We won't need to stay inside that long. Those choppers'll soon be forced to leave to refuel. They won't come back, not after the fire and the explosions send the state police and emergency crews up here."
"They can't hope to get away unnoticed. I don't understand why Escobar's acting this desperately."
"What you said earlier-maybe you were right." Cavanaugh kept staring at the green-tinted images. Some of the outside cameras were having trouble adjusting their night-vision lenses to the fierce brightness of the spreading flames. On a few, all Cavanaugh saw was a glaring green tint. "Maybe this isn't Escobar."
"Then who else-"
Haze in the room irritated Cavanaugh's throat. "I thought you sealed the ventilation system."
"You saw me do it."
"Then what's causing this smoke?"
Thicker haze drifted from a ventilation panel in the ceiling.
"1 smell-"
"Aviation fuel." Cavanaugh pushed Duncan ahead of him, charging toward the corridor outside the control room. At the same moment, flames burst from the ventilation panel and ripped along the ceiling.
Cavanaugh felt the heat at his back as he and Duncan reached the corridor.
In the ceiling, smoke and flames erupted from a second ventilation panel.
Pressed down by the heat, Duncan coughed. "The fire must have come down the ventilation shaft before I blocked it."
"No! Look in the control room! The top left monitor!"
Despite the haze and the fire on the ceiling, they managed to get a half-distinct view of the screens. The one on the top left showed the earth on top of the bunker. The fire hadn't reached the bushes up there, and yet smoke spewed from the ventilation shaft.
"How the hell did aviation fuel get down the ventilation shaft?" Cavanaugh asked.
More smoke spread along the ceiling.
"We can't go out the front way!" Coughing, Duncan pointed into the control room toward the haze-enveloped screens.
A monitor on the top right showed an image from a camera that was aimed along the inside of the entryway toward what should have been forest. All the screen showed now were flames.
But the screen next to it showed the back exit, where the trees and bushes remained untouched, the fire not yet having spread that far.
Stooping, Cavanaugh hurried through the smoke-filled kitchen and living room. He and Duncan reached the front corridor and ran to the right along the wall of doors that ended at the bunker's rear exit.
Duncan twisted the lever on the dead-bolt lock and pulled the door open. Ready with his assault rifle, Cavanaugh rushed with Duncan along an exterior concrete passageway toward cool air and not-yet-burned trees. But the wind from the approaching fire whipped branches, and the forest's shadows were pierced by the rippling reflection of flames crackling nearer on the right. Suddenly, Duncan slammed backward into Cavanaugh, the two of them falling, the roar of an automatic rifle filling the passageway, muzzle flashes like strobe lights as bullets ricocheted off concrete. Duncan screamed.
With equal abruptness, the shooting stopped. Amid the smell of cordite, weighed down by Duncan, Cavanaugh groaned from a pain in his left shoulder. From the trees, he heard a scrape of metal that sounded like someone trying to free a shell stuck in an assault rifle's firing chamber. The approaching blaze dispelled shadows. Astonishingly, it revealed Prescott crouched among bushes. Glancing wildly toward the fire, Prescott held an AR-15, presumably Roberto's, and furiously worked to pull back the knob on the side.
"Duncan," Cavanaugh managed to say.
No answer.
The pain in his shoulder intensifying, Cavanaugh squirmed out from under Duncan's weight. He smelled the nauseating coppery odor of blood.
"Duncan, move!"
He hoped desperately that Duncan's wounds weren't serious. But then he saw Duncan's mangled face, where at least half a dozen high-powered rounds had made him unrecognizable.
"Duncan!" Forced to drop his rifle, Cavanaugh dragged his friend back toward the bunker. He struggled to get inside before Prescott freed the jammed cartridge. The closer Cavanaugh got to the doorway behind him, the more heat pressed against his back.
The scrape of metal ended.
"No!" With one last desperate effort, Cavanaugh pulled Duncan through the doorway. Another furious volley sent bullets zipping above Cavanaugh's head. They struck the corridor's ceiling and cracked against the concrete above the door. Cavanaugh slammed the door shut just before Prescott corrected the barrel's upward tug, forcing down his aim as Cavanaugh had taught him, sending bullets walloping against the metal door.
"Duncan." Cavanaugh's left shoulder ached worse. Coughing from the smoke and the heat, he concentrated on Duncan, feeling for a pulse, but it was obvious he would never find one.
"Duncan!"
11
Anger fought with grief. Too busy raging to fear for his life, wanting only to hammer Prescott's face until it was as unrecognizable as Duncan's, Cavanaugh scrambled back. After one last look at his friend, he ran in a crouch toward the living room. He couldn't go out the rear door. The passageway was like a shooting gallery, funneling bullets toward the target. As long as Prescott keeps his aim down, I don't have a chance, Cavanaugh thought. The only reason Cavanaugh was alive was that Duncan had been ahead of him and had taken almost the full force of the barrage.
Racing through the living room, Cavanaugh fought not to choke on the smoke. A round had hit an exposed area at the top of his left shoulder, between the vest's strap and his neck. As he charged bent over through the kitchen, his hand came away smeared with red from where he'd touched the meaty portion between his collarbone and his neck. Blood welled.
He dropped to his knees and gasped whatever relatively smoke-clear air was near the floor. Stung by the heat from the burning ceiling, he hurried to the munitions room. To leave the bunker, he needed to use the front exit, but as the camera in that passageway had shown, the burning trees and bushes out there blocked his way. The arsenal had a trapdoor that led to a concrete tunnel connected to an exit near the landing pad, but since that was the area where the fire was most intense, Cavanaugh wasn't sure he could use the tunnel as an exit.
Amid spreading smoke and heat, he shoved away the table on which the Kevlar vests had been piled. He kicked away a carpet, exposed the tunnel's trapdoor, and lifted the handle. Wafts of smoke drifted up, confirming his suspicion that the tunnel wouldn't protect him. If he tried to avoid the flames by climbing down there, the fire would suck out the tunnel's oxygen, asphyxiating him before it cooked him.
Cavanaugh's shoulder was stiff with greater pain. He felt lightheaded.
Need to stop bleeding. Need to do it fast. Cavanaugh thought. He lurched toward a shelf that contained several red-colored pouches: Pro Med trauma kits favored by emergency service organizations. Among other things, each kit contained a fist-sized gauze wad called a "blood stopper" because it could soak up as much as a pint of blood. But as the fire worsened, Cavanaugh didn't have time to open a kit, pull out a blood stopper, apply it, and tape it down.
All he had time for was the tape. Not surgical tape. Instead, he grabbed a roll of silver-colored tape that was next to the trauma kits and was considered part of the first-aid supplies. Duct tape. The gunfighter's friend. He couldn't count the number to times he'd seen wounds sealed with duct tape. He ripped his collar open and used his right sleeve to wipe blood from the meaty part where his shoulder met his neck. He tore off two sections of tape and pressed them crossways onto the wound. Then he pressed them harder, wincing from the pain but feeling the thick tape's sticky underside grip his skin and adhere to it.