Page 126 of Stars
But Kilaqqi still wore a NASA sweatshirt, and he had a photo of Sasha hidden in a roll of leather he’d unwrapped and stared at when they were waiting at the airport in Norilsk. He was connected to Sasha somehow, someway, enough to have a picture of Sasha smiling for the camera on him at all times.
Did Ethan trust Sasha—and the man Sasha knew?
“You get one minute,” he breathed. Kilaqqi nodded.
They moved together, Kilaqqi matching his movements like his own shadow. It was unnerving, especially because he couldn’t hear Kilaqqi. The man was quieter than Welby and moved like a ghost.
The door to the nuclear command center rose before them like a monolith in the shifting emerald. Ethan ran a quick sweep of the door, checking for trip wires and booby traps. “Clear,” he breathed.
He turned to Kilaqqi.
Kilaqqi moved to the door as Welby came behind Ethan and Blake, stacking in a line at the breach point. Pete waited behind Kilaqqi, ready to undog the wheel lock and haul the door open.
For a moment, nothing happened. Kilaqqi stood with both hands extended, fingertips brushing the old iron in a whisper as light as a butterfly landing in darkness. He bowed his head and took a breath—
Ethan felt it in his bones: a sudden scrape, awrongnessthat skittered down his spine and made his muscles clench, his skin go tight. Every cell in his body screamed, a primal, instinctive need to run, to flee, to escape. His vision narrowed to a pinprick, a tunnel before him.Run, run, run,thundered through his mind. There was a sound and there wasn’t a sound, something beneath hearing and above it at the same time. A vibration he felt in his soul, strumming on his fear. There were things in the darkness behind them. The darkness was alive.
Blake gasped. Welby’s rifle scraped the concrete wall.
Shouting came from inside the bunker. Ethan’s head snapped up, suddenly clear; the vibration, the hum gone. A weight lifted from his chest, and he dragged in a breath and blinked. He could see again, and he turned around, checking on his team. Blake’s hands trembled, but Welby nodded over Blake’s shoulder.
Frantic Russian shouts went back and forth, muted through the thick bunker door. The sounds of chaos, of confusion. Of terror. His gaze slid sideways to Kilaqqi, who stepped back and moved behind Pete with his rifle at the ready.
A single gunshot cracked inside the bunker.
“Go,” Ethan ordered.
Pete undogged the door. He jerked it back a foot and held. Ethan flipped up his NVGs and dropped to one knee, rifle up, as Blake and Welby hurled smoke grenades into the bunker.
Gunshots snapped their way, pinging off the concrete-and-iron door. Ethan fired back, three shots in the direction of each incoming bullet. He heard one man scream. Another shouted a curse he’d once heard from Sasha.
The smoke billowed through the bunker, turning the room to a cloud of white and gray. “Go, go,” Welby called, the spotter with the best vantage. “Break left.”
Ethan turned left and hugged the wall, moving low and fast under the cover of the smoke. He watched Blake check right and slide beside him. Welby peeled out of the darkness, then Pete, and finally Kilaqqi, bringing up the rear.
A bullet zinged off the wall next to Ethan’s head. He ducked, spun, and fired back. Another shot came for him, too high. He adjusted his own aim, squinting through the smoke. There, a shadow moving beyond a computer terminal. He fired a single shot.
A body crumpled to the ground.
More screaming in Russian. Damn it, he should have learned the language alongside Jack.
Screeching, metal grinding on metal, and the sound of gears turning hit him. Footsteps running. Shouts fading.
“They’re making a run for it!” Blake tried to stand—
Ethan and Welby hauled him down as a bullet slammed into the wall a millimeter above his skull.
“Move left,” Ethan whispered. “Stay low.” They still had at least one shooter in the bunker with them.
The smoke was clearing, and Ethan spotted legs beneath computer terminals and toppled chairs. He fired low, sending bullets into three ankles. When the men fell, he slung lead into their chests and moved on. Bullets snapped around him, both incoming fire and his team fighting back. Iakov Zeytsev and his people may have been FSB, may have worked under Ilya Ivchenko, but they had been caught by complete surprise by this attack.
And by whatever Kilaqqi had done.
The last shadow Ethan was tracking disappeared through the bunker door on the far wall, the entrance leading to the main tunnel. He heard boots slapping on concrete, the sound of a man running away. “They’re fleeing.”
“Now we find out if those Spetsnaz are going to stop them or not,” Welby said.
“If we can take them out before they get to the entrance, we won’t have to find out.” Ethan swung around a computer terminal and moved low and fast toward the open door. Welby stacked on the opposite side, Pete and Blake in their positions behind them both. “Kilaqqi,” Ethan called. “Do you have anything else you want to do?”
