Page 68 of Gryphon

“I need more aspirin,” Val groaned and hung up.

Holly tucked away her phone after checking the time. She turned to the commander. “You have a ride I can borrow pronto?”

He slapped the hood of the Didgori truck next to him.

“I like the armor, but I was hoping for something a little more subtle.”

52

“Can we please not charge into the unknown without a plan? Just this once?” Mike didn’t even know why he tried.

They’d been parked under the trees along the east side of Liberty Square in downtown Tbilisi for twenty minutes. The sleek black Mercedes was apparently the Georgian Defence Force’s idea of low profile. They must have raided the VIP Motor Pool because nothing was too good for their buddy Tad Jobson.

Mike had stopped arguing about this not matching his idea of low profile when he felt the weight of the door as he swung it open. Up-armored enough to stop a .50 cal round, half again the diameter of the one that almost punched his permanent timecard at the airport.

While Holly, backed up by a dozen massively armed Georgian troopers, had led a scouting mission for the shooter, his ass had been stuck in a Didgori armored truck like a little girl. The only way to avoid the shakes was action. Except there were two patrolling troopers circling his vehicle, putatively guarding outward but equally effectively trapping him inside.

Unable to stop looking at the holes in Miranda’s cockpit windows, he’d finally tracked down Cessna Citation service as a distraction. He’d finished the arrangements about the same time she’d finished her uninformative patrol.

Now, as they watched the entrance to the Bunker Bar, a slow trickle of patrons emerged into the bitter darkness. He recognized a last-call crowd when he saw one.

The entrance stood at the corner of Mikheil Somebody and Shalva Somebody Else Streets. He’d looked at each name a dozen times and still couldn’t remember them. Noted mathematicians, local merchant princes, Georgian gods? Who knew.

Liberty Square turned out to be a parking lot. Maybe Mikheil and Shalva had been freedom fighters. Or poets. Weren’t poets always writing about liberty? Or perhaps they’d invented pay-for-parking in Georgia.

The streets were narrow and tree-lined. The buildings all were two or three stories of yellow stone that had seen much better days. For all that, it looked to be a pleasant neighborhood—for three in the morning on a cold winter’s night.

The final few patrons climbed the last of the stairs up to the sidewalk from a below street-level entrance. One braced a hand on the glass window of a convenience market and barfed up an impressive amount.

Mike had just been fantasizing that the store would open. He’d get a donut and some decent coffee… Now, not so much.

Holly hadn’t answered Mike’s request for a plan, instead clutched the steering wheel and stared at the last of the departing patrons, perhaps drawing imaginary targets on each one’s forehead.

From the back, Tad finally spoke up. “Man’s expecting us, don’t particularly need a plan, do we?”

Mike would like if that was true for once, but he wouldn’t be placing any high-dollar bets on it. Anything much over a buck would be too risky a proposition.

By three-fifteen, the trickle of patrons tapered off. One deciding to sleep off what remained of the morning in the market’s doorway, his feet barely clear of the puddle of another man’s vomit. The sicker had miraculously climbed into a car and driven away down the single one-way lane without hitting the cars parked to either side.

“On the move,” Holly climbed out, leaving him and Tad no other option than to follow.

At the corner, she stopped to scan the streets and nearby windows. Tad, probably because he was a helicopter pilot, looked aloft. Mike kept his eye on the drunk in the doorway, but if he was shamming, he did a superb job of it.

Above the descending stairway, lit by a lone streetlight—the one beside it flickered too weakly to count—a brown awning stretched out to keep the rain off. A single word was printed on the dark fabric in blocky flame-color letters: Bunker. Like the world above had already been bombed and was afire.

As they descended beneath the streets of Tbilisi, Mike took one last breath of the chill air and hoped he had a chance to breathe it again.

The heavy steel door at the bottom of the flight had been propped open with a thin wedge that fell aside when Holly dragged it open.

Inside, another staircase led them several flights deeper beneath the street. At the bottom, another steel door, and they stepped into a darkened cavern—the only light shone in their faces.

There was a very distinct click that seemed to echo in the silence, one he’d learned to recognize from Holly’s training out on the shooting range.

The sound of a safety being switched off on a rifle or shotgun.

Mike whispered, “I told you we should have a plan.”

53

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