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.
He switched on a penlight. The glow revealed the gutted interior of a telephone circuit room. Deliberately destroyed with high-explosive charges, panels and wires filled the room. Torn cables hung from conduits.
Years before, someone — perhaps one of the five dead found in the tunnel — had blocked the door with a length of steel pipe jammed like a crossbar between the two panels bracketing the door. The lock and door handle had been shot out. Scratched paint showed that an attempt had been made to force the door open. But the attempt had failed. Judging by the bones in the tunnel and the rust on the shot-out lock, the room had not been opened for years.
Lyons listened at the door. He heard nothing. He returned to the tunnel entry and hissed to Blancanales. His partner joined him in seconds.
"Might be a dead end," Lyons whispered.
"We'll know when we open the door."
Slowly and silently they raised the length of steel pipe. Blancanales stood by to jam it back into place. The door was hinged to open inward, and Lyons slowly eased the door open a hand's width.
Rats squealed and skittered, claws scratching at the door. Concrete and trash spilled through the opening. A rat hurtled into the small room, squeaking, running wildly through the wires and metal fragments until it dropped through the trapdoor. Below, they heard the Shias curse and stomp.
Points of light appeared at the very top of the opening. Dust swirled in the faint light. Lyons and Blancanales smelled the stink of rotting garbage and generations of rat filth. More trash and debris fell through as Lyons continued opening the door. He ignored the rats leaping against his body and scratching over his boots. He could hear the Shias in the tunnel as they continued to stomp on rats.
Ahead of him, Lyons saw a wall of trash. Through the years, trash and debris had been piled against the door, covering it completely. Faint daylight glowed through the top layer of papers and filth.
Now they heard sounds outside — the jangling and crashing of a truck on the street came to them, but no voices.
Moving the square steel box of a wiring panel to the doorway, Lyons stood up and tried to look over the top of the wall of trash. As rats skittered and ran on the other side, he gently cleared a hole through the papers and rotting garbage. He saw a street-level garage. He continued clearing aside the trash.
Autofire hammered.
10
Lyons fell back as Blancanales attempted to close the door against an avalanche of trash and filth. But the debris blocked the door.
On the other side the bursts of automatic-rifle fire continued.
But they heard no slugs hitting the trash or door. They waited, listening.
"They're not shooting at us," Blancanales told Lyons.
Standing on the box again, Lyons looked outside. He saw no one. Another burst shattered the quiet, the autofire echoing in the garage. Lyons heard no ricochets or voices, or the sound of running. He dug through the trash and broken concrete, then crawled into the light.
Scanning the area, he saw debris from years of explosions and fighting littering the garage. Burned-out wrecks blocked the alley exit. Two new Japanese panel trucks sat parked on his left. Then he heard voices coming from a flight of steel-and-concrete stairs.
A dead militiaman sprawled on the stairs, blood draining from wounds. He wore the fatigues of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. A rifle fired, the noise coming from somewhere above the dead man.
"Pol! Get the others! It's clear."
Lyons scrambled out. He pulled out his auto-Colt, checking to see that it was cocked and locked, and ran across the garage to the stairs. He looked up and quickly dodged back as an autorifle fired.
But no slugs came at him. He looked at the dead man. The Iranian had been shot in the back.
Looking across the garage, Lyons saw Blancanales lead the line of men out of the trash pile. Blancanales and Powell ran across the garage to join him. Akbar directed the platoon of Shia militiamen to cover the street and alley exits.
Lyons went up. At the first landing he went flat on the concrete and looked up the next flight of stairs. He saw an open fire exit with the door gone, but the low angle denied him a view of the corridor beyond. He heard voices, then kicks against a door. A rifle fired once.