“Let’s just go.” Alicia started to crawl again. “I’m starting to like the look of these Russians.”
Drake kept pace, crawling with his elbows, nose an inch off the jagged, dusty terrain. The early morning sun was already beating down. A steady breeze billowed the overlarge tents ahead and stirred mini dust devils. The trio topped the last little rise and waited.
Hayden’s voice came over the comms. “Go.”
They rushed the perimeter. Drake’s weapon spat. A guard fell instantly. Others followed suit around the rough circle. The team’s rush ate up the ground between them and the enclosures. Within seconds, they were amongst the utility vehicles, packing crates and diesel drums. The tent flaps burst open and a swarm of badly dressed men flew out, weapons held high or still strapped to their backs. One still held on to a half-empty bottle of Southern Cross vodka.
Their shouts of pain stung the morning air.
Two more figures burst out of the tent. “Victoriyah!” one of them yelled. “Call Nikolai!”
The woman, black-haired and half-dressed like the men, and sporting a confident, superior expression, threw her own vodka bottle in the direction of Hayden’s team. “Of course, Maxim. I have little else to do.”
Maxim discharged a stream of bullets into packing crates. Drake ducked as one nicked off the frame by his head. More bullets thudded into the crates as Maxim’s men caught up with the situation. Mai leaned out and picked one off with a perfect head shot, sending him flying back into his boss’s legs, crumpling him.
“Idiot!” Maxim yelled, scrambling to his feet and kicking at the corpse, face a livid red. “Victoriyah! Hurry up!”
“Suck it, Maxim.”
Drake turned an almost amused look toward the women. “Sounds like those two are practically married.”
Alicia peered out, and almost got her head blown off. Splinters of wood cascaded across her hair. “Bollocks.”
More shots rang out. Hayden’s team advanced, drawing the fire. Drake climbed on to the lip of a badly stacked crate and peered over. In the two seconds he had spare, he put a bullet through someone’s throat and saw the through-and-through pass tantalizingly close to Victoriyah’s skull.
“We’re thinning them out and they know it,” he said. “Let’s move.”
The trio burst from behind the crates, passing close to three haphazardly parked trucks, and out into the open. Only forty feet separated them now, and the pit of Babylon lay off to the left like a festering, exposed sore.
Drake focused on Maxim, but the Russian hit the dirt fast. Victoriyah threw herself alongside him, throwing the cell phone at his head.
“Dumb fucking thing doesn’t work.”
“No, Victoriyah. It’s the dumb fucking thing trying to work it!”
Drake fired as Maxim rose, his shot whizzing by the Russian’s head. By then it was too late to do anything about the object clasped in the man’s other hand — a grenade.
Maxim threw the pineapple shaped explosive. Drake hurled himself to the right and rolled. Mai and Alicia were an instant behind. Plumes of dust and sand rose around them. In three more seconds the grenade exploded, sending shrapnel shards spinning every which way.
The ground shook. Alicia let out a sharp cry. Mai struck Drake’s bottom half, still rolling. Drake heard the terrible death-filled fizz of deadly objects passing by him at killing speed. The ground rumbled again.
At last he stopped, fully alert, bringing his gun up and looking to the tents. Dust clouds obscured his view. Beside him, Mai reached out for Alicia, pulling the Englishwoman into her.
“Are you hit?”
“No. But I think I saw one of those fucking spider things.”
Drake peered through the clouds. Hayden’s voice shouted in his earpiece, “Come in. Are you okay?”
“We’re good. Just—”
And then their entire world shifted. The very ground they were lying on began to subside, to crack. Narrow fissures ran from the site of the grenade explosion all the way to the pit of Babylon.
Drake saw what was about to happen. “Uh, oh.”
The earth collapsed beneath them.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
Drake tumbled forward, clawing at anything that might arrest his fall, but the rocky earth fell away in a steep cascade, taking all three of them with it. Evidently, the cave-in wasn’t confined to their area, but extended all the way to the tents, as Victoriyah’s echoing voice berated Maxim for his insanity.
Time stopped as Drake fell. Their lives hung in the balance. This could be an endless fall down a bottomless pit or a sharp plunge down a steep slope. He tucked his body as it bounced off the sides, drew his head down as shale and stones poured all around it. At last, he hit the bottom, plainly a narrow space, since he immediately rolled a short way up the opposite side.
And that meant…
He dragged himself to his knees, head spinning, limbs howling with pain. He steadied himself by staring at the ground and bringing a pile of rocks into focus, then looked up.
A Russian’s top half protruded from rubble further up the slope, partly buried, but still miraculously holding his gun and staring wild-eyed at his situation. Two more guards groaned and crawled through the debris that had collected at the bottom. Beyond them, Drake saw Maxim and Victoriyah sprawled across each other, struggling hard.
Rivers and streams of rock continued to run down both slopes.
Far above, Drake saw one of the tents leaning over the new crevice, balanced precariously and slowly slipping.
Crap! He pulled at Mai and cast about for a weapon. Their guns were nowhere to be seen. Alicia ran past him then, leaping nimbly from pile to pile, drawing her Army-issue knife as she closed the gap on the fallen Russians. Drake followed her. Alicia slammed the hilt of her weapon under the first man’s chin, giving him no chance to react. The second struck out at her, glancing a blow off her shoulder. Alicia caught the arm and broke the wrist as Drake drove his own knife through the man’s throat. Only Maxim and Victoriyah remained.
Then a bullet blasted into the rubble nearby, raising a mini explosion of shale. Damn, how the hell were they going to cancel out that bastard?
The Russian half-buried up the slope was laughing, making a point of taking careful aim. There was nothing they could do to stop him. “Hold still!” he cried. “I want to take your stupid heads off.”
“Wing them,” came Maxim’s authoritative command. “We can bury them down here. A fitting end, I say.”
“Get your fucking arse off me!” Victoriyah shouted.
Alicia, never a girl to stay put and take it, exploded into action, sprinting through the debris and shrieking like a banshee. Drake ran in her wake, feeling the itch as crosshairs lined up on his exposed back.
Mai screamed from behind them, “Drop—”
Then the cry of Torsten Dahl crashed down like thunder and the big Swede came feet first, slipping and sliding down the crumbling slope, torrents of rock streaming around him, smashing into the half-buried Russian and almost breaking him in two. Both men plummeted to the bottom, the Russian bent and shattered, the Swede brushing himself off and seeking out his next target.
Alicia hit Maxim hard, tackling him around the waist. Drake came up against Victoriyah, thrusting with his knife, but thrown off balance by the shifting mounds of debris. When he realized he was falling, he threw his body hard against the slope. Victoriyah laughed at him.
“What’s this? You want to play?”
Drake crouched as she came at him, almost wincing at the sight of her shapely bare legs bloodied and scraped by the headlong tumble. He caught her lunge by dropping a shoulder, and heaved her aside. As he turned he noticed, beyond Mai, that the far edge of the fissure was slowly collapsing into the pit of Babylon.