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They came across a few bodies as they made their way inside but these were not soldiers; they were thin to the point of emaciation, skin stretched tight across cheekbones and shoulders. They were brittle and broken.
“Prisoners,” Bones said.
Maddock wasn’t so sure. “That, or victims of the same thing that’s inside that egg.”
“Guinea pigs?”
Maddock nodded. “And if I’m right, there’s no way of knowing if we’ve been contaminated simply by coming in here, or if it’s got some kind of half-life and is already burned out.”
“Pleasant thought, dude. Maybe Professor’s got a theory; he’s usually got an answer for everything.”
“Personally, I’d rather not know. We’re going to have to do this regardless.”
From somewhere further along the corridor came a deep bass thrum that resonated through the walls all around them. It could have been a generator firing into life, or a drill. A huge drill. Sound echoed through the concrete, becoming increasingly distorted as it did so.
“This way,” Maddock said, taking them toward the noise. They turned right to face concrete walls splattered red. The first thing they saw was the smear of blood along the floor like a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow. Maddock cursed under his breath but took one cautious step after another until they reached a body which had been dragged along the ground.
“Spetsnaz.” Maddock recognized the emblem tattooed onto the man’s neck. He checked for a pulse. Nothing. As he turned the corpse over he saw that the Russian’s chest had been torn open to expose splintered ribs. Internal organs shifted and started to spill as he lowered him back down again.
The noise came again.
This time Maddock knew that the sound had come from whatever had done this to the dead Russian. It wasn’t a drill or a generator. It was the deep-throated growl of the monsters they’d faced out on the ice.
He gave the nod for Bones to move on. As they took the next corner it became abundantly clear why the Spetsnaz leader had been so eager to leave.
Three more of his men had been torn apart, limbs severed from their bodies, chewed and torn, ripped and covered in so much blood there could have been forty instead of four dead men in the room. The fourth lay in the doorway, wedging the door open. His head had been crushed by vice-like jaws.
They looked at each other, at the corpses, and then back at each other. The place was quiet now. Too quiet. The door ahead led to wherever the creatures had made their lair. They had a choice. Move the body and allow the door to close—and hopefully trap the animal in there—or go inside and face the thing.
The problem was the egg. They had no way of knowing where it was, but the crappiest laws of the universe guaranteed the creatures were between them and it. That was just the way the world worked.
“I’m going in. You secure the rest of the building after the door closes behind me.”
There was no argument from Bones, despite the fact that separating didn’t feel like the smartest move. He gave the briefest of nods and dragged the dead man out of the way. A sticky trail of blood smeared along the floor. Maddock tried not to step in it, but it was impossible. The man had spilled his guts across the floor and the staircase on the other side. There was nowhere that wasn’t stained dark with the stuff.
Maddock went through the door.
He stopped and listened on the other side after the door closed behind him.
The path ahead was lit by dull lights.
He had to tread carefully, and softly.
As he listened, he realized that there were two distinct sounds, one animalistic, the great cat’s growl, the other the voice of a man, speaking soft and low in Russian. Neither man nor beast was aware of his presence.
Maddock held his gun at the ready, descending into the darker levels of the basement. The stone steps had been hewn into the rock. At the bottom, he paused again to listen. The sounds traveled eerily around the rock, carrying a strange echo that made him realize that this was more than a simple cellar dug into the ground. The walls and the ceiling above him were, in the main, roughly hewn. Myriad cables ran along them, connecting machine after machine. Numbers flashed on screens that meant nothing to Maddock. Some of them could just as easily be some fancy washing machine as they could be the control center for a guided missile system. It wasn’t his job to work out what they were. He just had to get the egg and get out of there with the rest of his team. Or at least the ones who were left.
He wasn’t going to be able to count on surprise. He needed to think this through. The animal would have his scent.
He reached the end of the passage, and as he turned to enter what seemed to be a cavernous laboratory hewn out of the ground, he saw the wild-eyed Russian crouching beside one of the sabertooth tigers. His first thought was that the beast was one they’d faced down in the mountains. No, it was smaller, caged in this space. How many more of this extinct species could there possibly be?
The beast opened its mouth and roared, but it didn’t move an inch closer to him.
The Russian rose to his feet and stood beside it, one hand resting on its great head. The creature showed no sign of objecting to his proximity. Was it tame?
“Ah,” said the Russian in heavily accented English. “Join us, please.”
“You can speak English?” Maddock shouldn’t have been surprised, but realized that meant the man had understood everything they’d said in his presence despite the fact he had only babbled in Russian. He’d played them.
“I can do many things,” the man said. “Most importantly for you, I can allow you to leave alive, or I can let Lena here play with you, if you’d prefer. Your choice.”
Maddock shook his head; it was an involuntary movement. Close up, the beast was every bit as threatening as the ones that had attacked them in the mountains, despite its smaller stature. Its menace seemed almost amplified because it was more restrained, controlled, making it all the more obvious it was the madman’s weapon.
Maddock took a breath. The sabertooth matched it with a rumble, jowls curling back into a snarl. The creature was tensed, ready to spring at the word of its master.
Maddock said, “All I want is the egg. I’m not after you, I don’t care about this place, or your pet. My mission was to bring Pandora’s Egg home. I can’t leave here without it.”
“This.” The Russian reached into the depths of his pocket to fish out the exquisitely crafted Fabergé egg. “Do you even know what it is?”
“I don’t need to know. I just need to do what I’m told.”
“Ah, the military mantra. Let me educate you. What you call Pandora’s Egg was made by the great Fabergé. Every year he would fashion an Easter egg to be presented as a gift to the Russian royal family. Many of them have survived, but not all. Some were lost during the chaos of the revolution. This one was designed by my ancestor Grigori Rasputin. It contains something as powerful as anything ever created in this place. Inside its brittle shell is Romanov’s Bane, revenge on the kind of people who betray the spirit of Mother Russia.” He ran a hand along the tiger’s back. The creature turned its head to look at him for a moment before turning its gaze back to Maddock.
Ancestor? Was this man claiming to be descended from the Mad Monk who had become so entangled in the court of the tzars and their downfall? Could he have created some kind of nerve agent or biological weapon that could have survived this long hidden inside the egg? Was that what had killed the people in this place? The men on the submarine? Was the Russian immune to it? A shudder passed through him as he realized the much more likely alternative that the man was willing to die for his revenge.
“How did you manage to steal it?” Maddock asked, moving a step closer, keeping his hands visible, knowing it would make him seem less threatening, even with the gun in his hand. “You did steal it, didn’t you?”
“One cannot steal what is rightfully his.” The Russian’s voice remained calm, even.
“Right, and I suppose you’ve never heard the story about the evil released from Pandora’s Box never being able to be put back inside again?”
The tiger strained forward, opening its mouth on those vicious teeth that gave it its name and releasing a roar of defiance. The Russian’s touch was enough to hold it at bay.
For now.
But there was no way he could get close enough to the Russian to take the egg without the big cat going for him.
“You are a sanctimonious, condescending young man who knows very little about the world. That is not your fault. You are a military man. As you say, you do not need to know these things. This will stop the enemies of our great country, those who would make peace with the West. Those of our own people who would allow the capitalists to corrupt our nation.”
“What about the innocents? Don’t they factor into this?”
“Innocents? There are no innocents in this world. When this gift is opened there will be no innocents there. It will be presented to a weak Russian and a corrupt American. There will be the yes men and advisers who hang onto their every word, and the media who get pleasure out of the weakening of our state. But no innocents.” His voice rose with each line. There was an anger and a passion in the words as he spat them.
His control over the tiger relaxed as he lifted his hand from its back.
The cat understood that he’d been given freedom to act.
It sprang forward, full body rising, claws out, too fast for Maddock to react, closing the ten feet between them in a heartbeat. He couldn’t do anything. The weight of the beast hit him square in the chest, hammering the air from his lungs. His arm went back, the gun spinning out of his grasp. The sabertooth’s momentum drove him to the floor, the beast’s weight slamming him down. He could taste the cat’s meaty breath in the air. He could feel the heat of it on his face.
Claws pierced his coat.
They snagged against his flesh, tearing.
The big cat lifted its head back one last time, unleashing a final roar of victory before snapping its jaws.
Maddock had no time to fight back, and no leverage or strength to fight with. He felt it all leak out of him with the trickle of blood from the exposed chest wound. The creature tore into him. There was nothing he could do to stop it.
In a heartbeat it could rip into him and tear him apart.
All it would take was one mighty snap of its jaws to cleave his head from his shoulders.
Maddock reached out desperately, stretching his fingertips, trying to snag hold of his gun. He knew that it was already too late. Even if he could catch hold of it there was no way he’d be able to fire a bullet to stop the arrival of bloody death.
He was a dead man.
A crack echoed; a sound so out of place, quickly followed by another.
The creature’s eyes glazed over, dead, its weight falling onto Maddock’s chest and pinning him down as the tiger gave up its grip on life. The sheer weight of the beast was suffocating. He gasped for breath, struggling against the pressure, but saw Bones behind its head.
“You can thank me later,” the big man said, stepping over Maddock as he strained to push the dead animal off him.
“Stay back.” The Russian held the egg out in front of him. “Stay back or I break this open.”
“You break it, you lose your revenge. That isn’t going to happen. All these years of festering hate wasted? No.”
“Keep back,” the Russian repeated.
Maddock gave another heave, succeeding in shifting the weight a little.
He breathed deeply, feeling the pain lift from his chest as he gasped for air. There was something broken in there. A rib or two at least. He just had to hope that it wasn’t any worse than that.
“I said keep back,” said the Russian.
“Look, we both know that you aren’t going to do anything with that thing,” Bones said. “So why don’t you hand it over?”
“I would rather die.”
“That can be arranged.” Bones sounded as if he would like nothing better.
Maddock had barely extricated himself from beneath the dead tiger, kicking his legs free at last, when the Russian flung the egg to the ground.
The delicate ornamental shell cracked open.
Everything seemed to freeze, suspended in a moment that would determine whether they all lived or died.
But, as far as Maddock could tell, nothing happened.
He didn’t know what he’d expected; some wisps or curls of noxious gas rising from the two halves, maybe. There was nothing.
The Russian started running, barging past Bones who had clamped his free hand over his mouth.
“Too late!” the Russian cackled. “Romanov’s Bane is free! Free!”
Bones grabbed hold of the madman’s arm, hauling him back, spinning him and throwing him up against the wall. He slammed a fist into the man’s gut, doubling him up. As he sank to his knees, Bones stood over him. When he looked up, all the wild-haired fool seemed capable of was more babble, his grip on sanity seemingly lost once more.
“Get out of here,” Bones said.
“I’m not leaving you,” said Maddock.
“That’s good, because I’m not planning on staying here. Just go. Keep your distance. And don’t breathe.”
“We need an antidote. He has to have it.”
“If there is one... if it’s here... I’ll find it. Just get outside and wait.” Maddock was about to argue, but Bones cut him off. “There’s no point both of us being exposed any longer than we need to be. Someone has to get off this island. Check the rest of the complex, who knows if there’s anything in here.”
Maddock knew that his friend was right.
They needed to find the antidote, assuming there was one, but how could they do that without knowing what they were up against? The gas had been colorless and odorless. They’d both been exposed to it. They were both dying. It was as simple as that.
“I’ll get him to talk,” Bones promised.
Maddock didn’t doubt him for a moment.