Saeed blinked. “I am unarmed.”
“Then keep your head down if there is shooting,” laughed the other man.
Resignedly, Saeed dropped to a prone position and lowered himself into the fissure. It was pleasantly cool in the shadows, but this gave him little comfort. He felt his adrenaline spike as his feet lost contact with the solid surface and his full weight depended from the tenuous grip of his hands on the equally uncertain rope of head cloths. He started involuntarily as a hand gripped his belt, but it was only Farid, pulling him onto the ledge where he and the others stood.
Saeed blinked rapidly to adjust his vision to the new environment. The fissure in the otherwise solid wall was immense, spreading from the relatively small corner where they stood to a maximum height of twenty meters. It was indeed large enough to fly a helicopter through, if the pilot of that aircraft was either very skilled or completely insane.
As the sunspots gradually faded from his vision, he was able to more clearly distinguish what lay on the other side of the opening. The Mi-25, its rotor blades looking like an enormous asterisk, sat patiently on the floor of the enormous cavern. “Another long drop, brother. And we have no more kefiyas.”
Farid sneered at him, then leaned out into the fissure, gave a short whistle and caught the Kalashnikov rifle as it fell through the air. “Now we do.”
Saeed’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Now how will we get out of here? This is reckless, Farid.”
“Reckless? This was your plan, brother.” Farid chuckled at his sibling’s obvious anxiety. “It is time for you to show some faith. You may go first.”
Another belay was quickly established, two more men culled from their fighting force in order to secure the line. Saeed rode the wave of his rising ire as he dropped to his hands and knees and started down into the cave.
Suddenly, from deep within rock, there came the unmistakable thump of an explosion, and in that instant the cloth rope slipped through his fingers.
Kismet looked frantically around the laboratory, searching for anything that might postpone or commute the unexpected death sentence. In the space of only a few minutes, it had grown as hot as a sauna in the metal enclosure. Everything in the lab seemed to be made of stainless steel and as such was conducting the heat as effectively as a griddle on a stovetop. Heat radiated from every surface until the air itself roiled like a liquid.
Hussein and Marie seemed to be dancing in place, shifting rapidly from one foot to the other as the floor seared right through the soles of their shoes. Kismet realized mordantly that he was also hopping back and forth, but it wasn’t enough. It felt as if his boots were going to burst into flame. Then he spied something that would offer at least a few moments of respite. “This way!”
He knocked over the rack of specimen cages so that it was spread out like mattress frame. Because the cages were also metal, it would only be a matter of time before they also grew red hot, but the flow of air under the wire mesh would give them a few minutes of relief. Marie followed Hussein onto the makeshift platform. “Nick, what’s happening?”
“Some kind of self-destruct.” He wiped a hand across his forehead, flinging away beads of sweat which landed on the floor and evaporated with a hiss. “It must have been activated when he closed the door.”
“When who closed the door? Pierre?”
“It must have been an accident,” he lied, none too convincingly. It wasn’t an accident. Why, Pierre?
No time to worry about that.
In the back of the lab, several chemical containers had been jolted from their shelves by the impact of the door slamming shut. The respective contents of those jars and bottles were now beginning to smolder on the floor, evaporating or burning outright, and releasing an acrid miasma that made the superheated air even more difficult to breath. Kismet’s eyes stung as he stared at the chaos, looking for inspiration.
“Stay here. I’ve got an idea.” He jumped back onto the floor and ran into the heart of the chemical cloud. His boot soles left black footprints on the metal floor as the rubber began liquefying on contact, and when he tried to stop in front of the storage cabinets, it was like hitting an oil slick. His feet shot out from under him and he hit the floor on his tailbone.
Everything he touched seemed to be on fire, burning right through the fabric of his jeans and scorching his hands when he tried to get back to his feet. He gritted his teeth against the pain and struggled erect, trying to focus his attention on the labels of the remaining bottles.
For a moment, he was suffused with hope. There were several substances which could be combined to form highly reactive or explosive compounds. He grabbed a glass jug of iodine and another of clear ammonia, and hastened back to the cage. He spent only a few seconds there, just long enough to see that Hussein, already compromised from his scorpion sting, was now on the verge of passing out, while Marie could only watch in disbelief. Then he was moving again, running for the door. That was when his enthusiasm wilted.
His plan had been to blow the door with an explosive chemical cocktail, but he now saw the futility of that scheme. The door was about thirty centimeters thick — twelve inches of metal. The force required to blast through it, even if it were possible, would almost certainly kill anyone inside the lab. He jogged in place in front of the solid barrier, looking for a better answer. That was when he saw her.
“Son of a bitch!”
Although her copper-colored hair was concealed by a black watch cap, he had no difficulty recognizing the woman who had called herself Dr. Rebecca Gault, framed in the glass viewport. As shocked as he was by her presence, he was not one bit surprised by her attire. She wore black combat fatigues and looked like she belonged on a SWAT team. After his call to the International Red Cross, he had justly assumed her to be some kind of intelligence operative, probably with the DGSE, one of the world’s most ruthless espionage agencies, but he could not have imagined that her mission would coincide with his own. Then again, he would not in his wildest dreams have believed that Pierre Chiron would trap him inside a gigantic pizza oven.
As he watched, Rebecca activated the tram from the control board, and then sprinted to catch the car as it accelerated from the complex. She was pulled aboard by her comrades, and at that instant, Kismet caught a final glimpse of his former mentor, sitting sphinx-like on the flatbed.
He realized painfully that he had stopped moving his feet, and that his boot soles were nearly gone. He rocked back onto his heels, where there was a little more insulation remaining, and tore his attention away from the now empty window. The interval had brought him no closer to a solution. If he couldn’t go through the door, what did that leave?
The walls? The floor?
The door might have been a foot thick, but the floor almost certainly was not. The fact that the stainless steel had grown so warm, so quickly suggested that it was relatively thin, with some kind of burner unit underneath. It was a slim hope, but if nothing else, it was something to do in the last remaining seconds of his life.
He set the jugs on the floor and removed the stopper from each so that the expansion of the contents would not cause them to burst. Nevertheless, it was like putting a kettle of water on a stove. Within seconds, a stinging vapor cloud began to boil off the ammonia. Kismet was too busy to notice.