weapon at the ready, Hawkins took the point position again and moved swiftly into the passageway, holding his pistol in a two-handed grip.
The last to enter, James pulled out a small block of C-4 from the satchel charge, shoved in a radio detonator and hid the explosive wad alongside the secret door. Just in case.
Exiting the tunnel, Hawkins found a huge room carved into the rock. Wooden pallets were placed in orderly lines along opposite walls and large cisterns stood in the corners.
“This was the barracks for the soldiers,” McCarter stated, glancing around. The place was enormous, suitable for a small army. He spotted small brass placards on the walls showing where racks for spears and swords used to be located. Now there were only rough outlines left by the smoke of primitive candles.
“Some sort of a museum exhibit,” Manning observed warily. There was no concrete down here. The walls were raw stone, covered with a ripple pattern of chisel marks from the artisans who had hammered the room into existence two thousand years ago.
“I don’t like this,” Encizo muttered, looking around quickly. There didn’t seem to be any other way out of the barracks. “Which means that either we missed something or else…”
A ghostly whimper interrupted the thought, closely followed by a man’s cruel laugh.
This was it! McCarter realized, the knowledge sending adrenaline pumping through his veins. The slavers were right on the other side of the stone walls. But where was the bleeding entrance?
Switching his goggles from UV to IR, Hawkins saw nothing unusual. He knew the team was missing something obvious, but what? They could start tossing grenades, but the moment they started, the jig was up for the girls.
Removing his goggles, McCarter pulled out a flashlight and clicked on the bright halogen light. Sweeping the beam around the barracks, he saw the hidden door immediately. Every one of the brass plaques on the wall was above a sleeping pallet, except one located on a black wall, the brass tarnished and dirty.
Clicking off the light, McCarter pressed the plaque and the nearby pallet slid aside silently on greased tracks. Worn stone steps led down again. The sound of laughter was louder.
“Just like Afghanistan,” Hawkins whispered, readying a stun grenade. When the Soviet Union had invaded the ancient country, their battle tanks had been meet by booby traps designed centuries ago for Roman war chariots. Hinged sections of road opened wide and a tank dropped fifty feet onto solid granite. What killed horses two thousand years ago, only stunned the crew of the tank. But before they could recover, the Afghans poured gasoline through the air vents of the armored transport and burned the Soviets alive. Grisly, but effective.
Moving swiftly along the flight of stairs, the commandos found themselves descending into a huge natural cave. The floor below was lined with rows upon rows of steel cages, young woman lying inside on piles of dirty straw.
Like animals in a zoo, James noted, feeling a furious coldness swell deep inside.
Several of the prisoners were weeping, the sound echoing slightly off the hard walls of the cave. Reaching the floor, McCarter switched to IR again, searching for any hot spots. Immediately he saw the rectangle of a door set into the far wall, the outline glowing with warmth. Jackpot.
The Stony Man team headed that way, moving past the rows of cages in the dark. The smell from the dirty straw was foul. There were no bathroom facilities for the prisoners. Obviously another part of the process designed to break their spirit. The soldiers hardened their hearts and concentrated on the mission. If the team started freeing the girls, some would began to shout, alerting the slavers. The only way to release them all was to take out the Sardinians first.
A soldier’s burden, Hawkins thought grimly, trying to ignore the sobbing teenagers.
A guard armed with a cattle prod was sleeping in a chair beside the door. Manning and James grabbed his arms as McCarter clapped a hand across the man’s mouth and slit his throat with a fast slash of a Gerber combat knife. The guard awoke drowning in his own blood and thrashed wildly for a few moments before going still.
With the sound of the dead man’s life dripping onto the floor, Encizo went to the door and ran a check with the EM scanner. It was clean, no traps this time.
Hawkins took point again and tried the latch. It moved easily and the door swung aside on loud creaking hinges. Damn! The big Southerner brought up his MP-5 fast, but the next room was empty.
As their goggles adjusted to the bright electric lights, the Stony Many commandos saw rubber mats on the rock floor making paths through the torture chamber. There was no other word for the place. Gleaming steel tolls hung from hooks on the walls, and heavy wooden stocks, looking like something from the Middle Ages, were situated over rusty drains. Ripped clothing was piled to the side, mostly T-shirts and swimming suits. A stainless steel surgical table was filled with personal items, rings, eyeglasses, hair clips and such. Video cameras were mounted on tripods to record the humiliating strip, and the air was redolent with the smell of pine disinfectant. A hose lay coiled in a corner, the nozzle trickling water down a drain.
This must be where the girls were first taken to be stripped of everything from the outside world. A wooden butcher’s block was surrounded by the remains of cell phones that had been smashed into useless rubbish, and the hopper of a nearby shredder was filled with the remains of wallets and credit cards. The last hope of escape was destroyed right before the helpless captives.
Across the room was a door made of burnished steel.
Moving in that direction, the team tightened their grips on the weapons as the metal door opened and out walked a whistling man with a coiled whip in his hand. The slaver paused, registering shock at the unexpected sight of a group of armed soldiers inside the underground base, then McCarter shot him in the face with the crossbow.
The barbed quarrel came out the back of his head, and the dying man wheezed in pain as he eased to the rubber mats on the floor. Already at the door, Hawkins kept it from closing completely with a knife blade, while Encizo and James pulled the rings from grenades.
A guttural voice laughed harshly and several men responded in Sardinian. The words almost made sense, the language was so close to Italian, but there were just enough differences to render it incomprehensible.
“Please,” a young woman cried out in English. “My father is a senator! He’ll pay anything you want for me! Anything!”
“We make more, you go Sudan,” the first voice said in halting English. “Big show, daughter American senator.”
There came the sound of ripping cloth, and the young woman screamed.
Instantly, Hawkins pulled open the door, Encizo and James tossed in their grenades, and the rest of Phoenix Force moved in with their weapons firing. A group of men was clustered around a young woman dressed only in bra and panties. They turned at the noise, cursed and shoved her aside to claw for the handguns in their belts.
Aiming carefully, McCarter put an arrow through the throat of a bald man holding a fistful of blouse, then dropped the weapon and pulled around his MP-5. Hawkins shot a Sardinian in the forehead, then rocked back as an incoming round hit him in the belly.
On the count of eight, the stun grenades detonated while still rolling along the floor, the bright flashes filling the room. Blinded by the light, the Sardinians began to shoot wildly, one of them blowing the face off the slaver standing right alongside. The glowing streaks of tracer rounds filled the air.
Over near a video-mixing board, two men worked the bolts on their Kalashnikov assault rifles, chambering rounds. Encizo took out one, Hawkins the other. The Sardinians died with their life blown out the backs of their chests.
Shooting as carefully as if he was at a gun range, Manning placed four rapid head shots in a row, taking out the men clustered around the console.
Diving forward, James tackled the terrified girl to the floor to get her out of the line of fire, trying to keep her covered with his body. He grunted as a bullet hit his back, the NATO body