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"No, sir"

"I didn’t think so" He lifted his eyes to the rooht, everybody Let’s show Cohts later, they made camp at the base of theon racks; they awoke at dawn to prepare their ascent The ground around the portables was littered with tracks in the dust, the nighttirand feast denied by walls of steel TheAnything they brought they would have to hump on their backs Without the portables to protect them on the ht light of , the terms of their mission were starkly defined Find Martinez and kill him, or die in the dark

Henneo outside the walls of the garrison But he had made his way, over the years, to this position of relative safety by doing just the opposite Tulsa, New Orleans, Kearney, Roswell-Henneh the ranks on a ladder of battle and blood No one doubted his capabilities, and his presencePeter would lead one squad, Dodd the other Alicia was Alicia: the scout sniper, the odd e, to answer to no one Everyone knehat she could do, yet her status was a source of unease a that Peter are of-if they spoke of their concerns, it wasn’t to him-yet their discomfort was evident in the way they kept their distance, the cautious glances they gave her, as if they could not quite bring thee between the human and the viral, situated somewhere between: where did she fall?

They set out just after dawn Noas a race against the hours They would need to set the charges and have everybody in position before sunset The cool desert night had yielded to a scorching sun, its thru their backs, then their shoulders, then the tops of their heads There was no time to rest; rations were passed down the lines as they cli back to confer with Henneman By the time they reached the mouth of the cave, it was late afternoon

"Jesus, you weren’t kidding," Henne at the cave’s h its rays traveled only so deeply; beyond lay a maw of blackness The amphitheater with its curved stone benches, the spaces between them littered with dry leaves and other debris, was inexplicable; if an audience sat here, what did they watch? Metal banisters fra trail that switchbacked down into the cave They had three usable hours of daylight left

They reviewed the plan a final ties at the base of the cave According to Alicia’s round, where a narrow tunnel descended another three hundred feet to the first of several large chaes would be laid inside this tunnel, wired to a radio detonator with a clear line of sight to the cave’s h the tunnel, its destructive force h the narrow space-in theory, sending whatever was down there running toward the elevator shaft Once the charges were in place and Dodd’s men had returned to the surface, Peter and Alicia would co at the bottom, seven hundred feet below the surface, held in place by its counterweights, which were lodged at the top A winch would lower Peter and Alicia by rope to the base of the shaft and pull them back up when they made their escape

Dodd and his team set out Fifteen minutes later, he radioed from the bottom They’d made it to the mouth of the tunnel

"Creepy as hell down here," Dodd said "You’ve got to see this for yourself"

They would, soon enough Dodd’s squad had three hundred feet of cable to connect the detonator to the package A five-minute silence ensued; then Dodd’s voice returned The boun their ascent Peter and Alicia aiting at the top of the elevator shaft, which was located a quarter mile away, in a structure that once had housed the park’s offices The winch was in place The ti it close

Dodd’s voice on the radio: "Blue Squad, good to go"

Alicia and Peter clipped into their harnesses; Hennee of the shaft and pushed off, dropping into the blackness like coins into a well Portable fluorescents clipped to their vests bathed the walls in a yellowish glow Peter’s mind was clear, his senses acute There was a kind of fear that deepened awareness, bringing focus to the mind; his was that kind The te the hair on his are swift, their weight suspended by the harnesses, as if they were descending in two cupped hands The elevator’s cables-a thick trunk of twined steel and two smaller lines wrapped in plastic-flowed past A dark shape eed below: the top of the elevator The cables were bolted to a plate on the roof They landed with a soft thunk

"Red Squad down"

Alicia pried loose the hatch, and they dropped inside The doors of the car stood open A feeling of i at the entrance to a cathedral The air was dauely ureic They scanned the space with the lights of their rifles, their bea into the i foret a load of this place," Alicia said

Alicia had relasses; she was in her elelow of the fluorescents, she knelt and removed two objects froht sticks of HEP wired to a erly placed this on the floor of the cave The second was the radio direction finder, a small, boxy object with a directional antenna and a nal at 1432 ahertz She flicked the poitch and stepped fro the RDF before her to sweep the space beyond It began to issue a faint but regular beeping The needle nudged to life

"Gotcha"

Peter radioed the surface: the target was present He’d had no cause to doubt Alicia’s claim, yet suddenly the situation had acquired a more potent reality Somewhere in these caverns, Julio Martinez, Tenth of Twelve, lay in wait

"Tell Dodd to stand ready and wait for ed All eyes, Lieutenants"

The moment had cohted with ain, here they were, the two of thee this ords; all had been said Neither could exist without the other, yet the distance between them could never be crossed They ho they were, which was soldiers at war The bond transcended all others but one, the one thing they could not have Alicia earing, as ever, her tradeiven up the cross for an M4 rifle with the fat tube of a grenade launcher fixed under the barrel Martinez would receive no mercy from her, no final benediction

"See you soon"

She faded into the darkness

At theline along the lowest tier of the a, an enrichht Dodd was clutching the detonator Its signal, transmitted to the receiver at the base of the cave, would close a si a jolt of current down the wire to the bomb

Even at this distance, it wouldhe could let his men see, the journey to the bottom of the cave had rattled him Dodd had never experienced any place like it in his life-an unearthly world of alien shapes, strange colors, and distorted di down into nothingness The trip down the tunnel had felt like crawling into his own grave In the orphanage, Dodd had learned about hell, a reallooony Although the idea had initially terrified hi about it had struck hih only a boy, he’d sensed that hell was just a story the sisters had concocted to keep the children in line, not unlike the fables they read the children to teach siest survivor of the Massacre of the Field had always afforded hi the children, as if this experience had somehow made hi never really known his parents, he did not feel the loss of the of that day-but under the spell of his playrief, Dodd came to see himself as a boy with special powers of perception, especially where the sisters’ ood with that, it made a kind of sense Heaven was a pleasant idea he was happy to go along with, since believing in it cost hio Hell: it was pure nonsense