One of the Shia militiamen waited for the Americans at the head of a flight of stairs leading down to a basement.
"Okay, my friends," Powell said, "time to take the shortcut!"
Powell introduced the militiamen. "This is Akbar. He used to go to school in California. We work together all the time."
"Even if the Agency's uptight," Akbar added. "The money's all right."
"But that's all over if we can't get my job back," Powell said as he pointed down to the flashlights waving in the darkness below.
The stairs led down into a series of connecting basements. Water from broken pipes created black lakes stinking of sewage. The pointman led the line of militiamen and Americans through corridors, along fallen girders, across rows of crates. Sudden splashes startled the men, and rifle safeties clicked off. In the light of their flashlights, they saw a swarm of rats swimming through a flooded section. The flashlight beams sparked red from the hundreds of eyes of rats waiting on the far side.
Finally the Shias and Americans came to a steel hatch.
"Ready for a bad scene?" Akbar asked Lyons and Blancanales.
"The Iranians are on the other side?"
"Not that kind of scene, this kind..." As he swung open the door, the Shia militiamen covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs.
The smell hit like the shock wave of an explosion. The two men of Able Team choked and coughed as a warm wind, stinking of a miasma so fetid it seemed poisonous, rushed at them. But the Shias went through the hatchway.
Choking, nauseated, the Americans followed. In the dim light, they saw an underground garage filled with black sewage. Daylight came through a few street-level grills. The line of men hurried along a catwalk to the opposite side. They reached another door, threw it open and rushed into the semidarkness of a tunnel filled with pipes and electrical cables. The cold air of the tunnel felt like spring water on their faces.
Powell pointed to the closed door behind them and explained: "The plumbing got blasted in a car bombing years ago. There's about a thousand refugees living in the abandoned offices. They fixed the water lines, but no one can get down there to fix the sewer lines. So they just let it go. Must be the world's biggest cesspool. Been fermenting for maybe five years. And gangs use it as a body dump. Adds to the stink."
"That... that was bad," Lyons said, laughing.
Blancanales finally got his breath back. "Is that our route of retreat if..."
"No way," Powell told them. "This tunnel will take us there. The Iranians probably have got an ambush right above us. We hit them, then walk out on street level."
"What about an ambush in this tunnel?" Blancanales asked.
The line of men slowed. The Americans heard whispers and quiet footsteps ahead. The flashlights went out except for one held by the first man.
"Probably not."
"Probably isn't good enough," Lyons said.
"You want point? Take it. Come on, specialist. We'll take point. First in line for the firefight."
Powell led Lyons forward. They moved by touch along the line of Shia militiamen. Ahead they saw the silhouette of a crouching man. As they approached he motioned them back and hissed a warning in Arabic. Powell translated for Lyons, "Akbar found a booby trap..."
By the glow of his flashlight, Akbar secured a safety, then cut a trip line. He examined the device and hissed back to Powell. "One of ours. An old one."
They continued through the silence and darkness, Powell and Lyons in line behind Akbar as he followed an old map. From time to time, sounds came from the street above them, the faint thuddings of tires on asphalt carrying through the meters of stone and concrete.
Coming to an intersecting tunnel, Akbar switched off his flashlight. The men in line stopped as he listened. Lyons heard a coin jangle across steel and concrete. The flashlight beam returned and Akbar peered into the other tunnel. He compared the code stenciled onto the tunnel wall to the codes of the map, then continued.
The line followed. Now no traffic moved above them. They walked through an absence of sound, hearing only the sounds they made. Equipment clicking and knocking against rifles, every footstep, every breath echoed in the tunnel.
Akbar waved his light over the tunnel walls, noting stenciled codes. They passed another intersecting tunnel. Akbar ignored it. Then they came to a maintenance shaft. A point of light came through the manhole cover. In the darkness, the spot of light seared their eyes like a magnesium flare.
Squinting against the daylight, Akbar checked the maintenance shaft carefully. First he waved the flashlight beam into shadows and crevices. Finally he checked the rungs of the ladder. He pointed to a rung at face height. Lyons leaned close and saw a fine coating of dust on the rusting steel. Every rung had dust on it.
After another hundred steps they came to a narrower intersecting tunnel. Akbar and Powell checked the tunnel entrance carefully. They found nothing. Continuing, they followed the tunnel as it sloped upward.
A group of fighters had preceded them. Akbar found the dead where they had sprawled for years, their bones broken by high explosive and shrapnel, gnawed by rats. As the others crowded up behind him, Akbar pointed out the monofilament lines, the blast and scorch marks on the tunnel sides.
Apparently, a group of fighters the skull fragments indicated five had attempted to travel through the tunnel. They had encountered a clever booby trap. Set to be triggered by the first man, the monofilament ran back ten meters to a detonator that had fired two claymore-type charges. The blast had killed the entire line.
Someone had taken the serviceable rifles. Only one Kalashnikov remained among the old bones and rags, its sheet-metal receiver and magazine twisted together and pitted, the barrel bent, the wooden stock and fore grip torn away by point-blank shrapnel blast. Only bone fragments remained of the man that had held that rifle.
As Lyons walked carefully over the anonymous dead men or women, no one would ever know he saw bits of glittering shrapnel mixed with the bones and powdery rags. And the bones... he noticed that every bone had been scarred by thousands of rat teeth. Only the teeth of the dead lacked the marks, the hard enamel grinning from skulls and fragments of skulls and jaws.
Akbar moved slowly now, silently checking every possible position for a bomb, using his flashlight to examine every shadow and crevice. They passed panels of telephone circuits, unused for years. Akbar stopped to read the crumbling sticker on a panel door.
"This is the place," he announced quietly.
"Where are the Iranians?" Lyons asked, looking upward.
"If they're at the address they gave us, up there," Powell whispered. He continued to the end of the tunnel. An access ladder went straight up through a black rectangle. His flashlight showed the interior of a small room above them. "And I think they are because it's the same address the prisoner gave us. But who knows? Maybe they're up there, maybe not. Or they could be in a nearby building."
"What's above us?"
"A parking garage. It opens to the street and to the alley. There should be another garage across the alley. If there's an ambush, they'll expect us to come from the street. But we'll be coming up behind them if they're on street level. Probably they're on the second and third floors, to be able to fire down."
"We'll go up first," Lyons volunteered, motioning toward Blancanales. "We've got the appropriate technology for this," he added, tapping his silenced auto-Colt.
Lyons and Blancanales slung their assault weapons over their backs and cinched the slings tight. With Lyons going first, they ascended the ladder into absolute darkness. Blancanales checked his silenced Beretta 93R and waited for his signal.
By touch, Lyons found an open area in a floor littered with broken concrete and bits of wire. Wires touching his head, scratching his face, he stood up in the darkness, listening, searching for light or form. Closing his eyes, he hoped for maximum dilation of his irises. But open or closed, his eyes saw only black.