I continued softly to the end of the platform and stood just by the wall, out of sight from the dark, dank-smelling tunnel, listening.
There was a less appealing explanation, of course, albeit a little farfetched: Shattuck had poised himself on the window ledge, taken a shot at me to make me duck, and then had dropped to the floor of the car and let me assume he’d jumped, hoping I’d oblige him by following suit.
A single small sound, as of someone stumbling in the dark, settled the issue for me. I slipped quietly off the edge of the platform and began walking as quickly and silently as possible away from the station, painfully aware that its lights, as feeble as they were, still made it easy for others to see me.
Now inside the tunnel, where each sound reverberated off the cement walls, I could plainly hear someone walking ahead of me-which meant the reverse would hold true if I wasn’t careful. I discovered the only way I could avoid crunching the gravel rail bed underfoot was to straddle the outermost rail and step cautiously from cross tie to cross tie.
The concentration this took, however, especially in my present battered state, made me inattentive to the slow and gradual approach of another southbound train, just beginning to hit the outer reaches of the long curve that led into the station. By the time I looked up, aware of the growing noise and searching out a hiding spot among the indentations in the wall, I suddenly realized I was visible in the subway’s single bright headlamp, as was the distant figure of Robert Shattuck, ahead and away on the other side of the tracks.
I jumped away from the rails, no longer worried about any sound I might make, but as I did, Shattuck turned toward me, as if drawn by my own panic. I saw the shock register on his distant face, and finally, just as the train was about to come between us, his gun flew up and spat a flame in my direction, its explosion muffled by the screaming of the subway’s wheels. A chunk of cement splattered to the left of me as I ducked into an alcove and the train blew by in a deafening, shrieking roar.
I readied my own weapon, steadying my arm against the edge of the shallow alcove, and was sighting where Shattuck had last been when the train pulled clear. But the tracks were empty.
I stayed where I was, straining to regain my night vision, trying to hear anything at all over the receding rumble of the cars. What I heard, or thought I heard, was the rhythmic pounding of feet running away from me.
I separated from my shelter and began jogging along the track, bent low, moving as fast as I could, no longer worrying about the crunch of gravel. Coming abreast of where I’d seen Shattuck, I slowed, crossed the tracks quietly, and began tracing his steps north. Both the noise of the train and the sound of Shattuck’s footfalls had vanished. Sweat began to trickle down my sides.
I came to an opening in the curved wall-a small secondary tunnel with a cement floor-obviously the source of the running sounds I’d heard earlier. It went straight for some one hundred feet and then turned out of sight to the left. A single anemic light was suspended from the domed eight-foot ceiling. The walls were smooth and bare, free of any hiding places-a shooting gallery custom-made for an ambush.
I opened the cylinder of my revolver, extracted the three spent shells, and replaced them with the extras from my pocket, leaving me one in reserve.
In a calmer, more rational setting, logic and caution would have dictated the obvious course to take. By all rights, I should have stayed there, bottling up the exit, waiting for Norm’s backup to arrive, which they were bound to do once they found the train with the shattered window and the debris I’d left behind on the platform. But if, as I suspected, this tunnel was merely the front door to a hideaway that Shattuck had harbored for some time, then it undoubtedly had a back door. That didn’t leave me much of an alternative, at least not a sane one.
Sanity, of course, is in the mind of the beholder, and what I was beginning to formulate didn’t seem too far off-the-wall. The tunnel’s blandness, as I saw it, cut two ways. It did expose me to fire, but it also allowed an ambush from a single spot only-the distant inside curve to the left. It was the only cover available, and was as easily assailable by me as I was from it.
I wiped my hand on my pants, took a firm grip on my gun, and bolted from my hiding place, running as fast as I could in a zigzag pattern directly toward the curve in the tunnel. I was startled to hear, echoing all around me and mixing with the pounding of my feet, the sound of my own voice shouting.
About halfway there, I saw a flash of movement from the inside corner, a glimmer of something metallic. I fired, still running for all I was worth, my aches and pains temporarily replaced by a frantic, pounding euphoria.
The gamble paid off. The glimpse of face and arm I’d shot at vanished, and I poured on more speed for the remaining fifty feet.
At the corner, I paused, poked my head around quickly, and saw a large dark room filled with ventilation machinery and odd pieces of track-repair equipment-squat, ugly, gloomily vague. At the far side was another entrance, animated ever so briefly by the blur of a pale shadow disappearing. I ran through the equipment room, almost without pause, risking exposure so I could keep up the pressure.
That was a mistake. The adrenaline that had served me well during the hundred-foot dash of moments earlier now made me careless. I entered the far exit too fast, sliding past the corner that might have given me protection, and was met by the eruption of a point-blank muzzle flash. Momentarily blinded, deafened, and feeling the sear of burning gunpowder along the right side of my head, I plunged on, hoping pure physical momentum might stifle a second, more accurate shot.
I crashed headlong into Bob Shattuck’s chest, sending him staggering backward. His gun, with which he tried to fracture my skull in a crossward blow, almost missed, its front sight slicing a furrow over both my eyes. It was bad enough, however, to send me reeling to the floor, dazed, my eyesight clouded by my own blood. I fired two shots in his direction, hoping to get lucky. There was a startled shout, a wild shot in return that whacked into the floor harmlessly, and the clang of a heavy metal door.
I lay there panting for a full minute, my gun arm still outstretched, my eyes half-blinking away the warm oozing from the gash just above them.
I rose to a sitting position, found the wall with my back, pulled out my handkerchief, and wrapped it around my head to staunch the bleeding. Then, like an old and stubborn dog with only one purpose in life, I got to all fours, then to one knee, and finally rose to my feet again, as determined as ever to see this through to the end.
I wasn’t driven by the image of Shilly’s mutilated body or the humiliation of having been duped by Shattuck. I kept going because I saw no other option. Only in Korea, decades ago, had I experienced such a seeming loss of choices, when, cold, starving, exhausted, and shell-shocked, I and dozens like me had held on to positions that could easily have been abandoned. Then, as now, retreat-or even common sense-hadn’t appeared as an alternative.
The heavy clang I’d heard had not come from a door but from a large hatchway in the floor. I pulled it open by a ring mounted to a bracket and was thrown off balance by how easily it came away. It was counterbalanced by a weight below and stayed in whatever position I left it, which explained how Shattuck had vanished so quickly. He had already opened it before trying to blow my head off at the entrance, planning a quick escape.
Below me was yet another passageway, lined by dozens of thick, insulated electrical cables. It was narrow, cramped, and as black as night. I cautiously climbed down the short steel ladder at the edge of the hole and looked around. The tunnel was just six feet in circumference but was actually very cramped due to the bundles of cable. It extended in opposite directions, but whether for eight feet or eight miles, I couldn’t tell in the dark. I did hear some noise straight ahead, however, along with a distant, reflected glimmer of light that died almost as soon as I’d noticed it.