They could hear Kim coughing; then he said, “Go… go…”
Taylor turned back to Brodie, who was now pulling the boots off the guards. He said, “Cover.”
She dropped to one knee and aimed her rifle down the long corridor that ran from the bunker room for about forty feet, then seemed to T-intersect at another corridor running left and right.
The corridor was lit by celling fixtures connected by the electrical conduit that ran into the bunker room. Brodie knew he should fire a burst into the conduit and kill the lights, which would give him and Taylor the cover of darkness. But that would put Kim in total darkness, and Brodie couldn’t do that. Or could he? The mission comes first, as they say, and the mission was to get the hell out of this underground labyrinth, then get help for Kim, which was the secondary mission. Bad enough leaving a man behind… but not in the dark.
As he was wrestling with this, Taylor fired a burst of rounds at the farthest lighting fixture, and Brodie could hear the bullets impacting the concrete and ricocheting before the lights in the corridor went out.
A few seconds later, two men carrying rifles appeared at the T-intersectionof the corridors, which meant there were more people down here and they’d heard the gunfire. The two men turned into the darkened corridor, and they were backlit by the lights beyond where Taylor had severed the electricity. Taylor saw them and whispered, “Scott—”
“Got it.” They both emptied their magazines downrange and both men fell.
Taylor quickly pulled on a pair of boots and Brodie did the same. Taylor grabbed the other rifle from the second man they’d killed at the doorway and ran back into the bunker room to give Kim the rifle and also give him some options that included not being taken alive.
Brodie checked both dead men for a walkie while keeping an eye on the lighted end of the corridor. No walkies, but each man had a cell phone that Brodie saw had no signal in the subterranean bunker. The phones were locked anyway, and therefore useless to Brodie and Taylor. Brodie left them in place in the event the phones could be tracked somehow, so whoever was doing the tracking would think these guards were at their post outside the bunker—which they were.
Taylor rejoined him and said, “We’re good to go.”
“Right. I got point. Twenty feet.”
“Go.”
Brodie held his rifle to his shoulder in the firing position and began walking quickly down the dark corridor, with Taylor twenty feet behind him.
They reached the T-intersection where the two guards lay on the floor, painted red, as they used to say, more dead than alive.
Brodie and Taylor retrieved the dying men’s rifles. They were the same make as the ones Brodie and Taylor were carrying—Heckler & Koch G36s, the service rifle for the German Bundeswehr. They were made primarily out of polymer, which is a fancy word for plastic, though still more durable than they looked. But Brodie and Taylor were able to smash them against the concrete walls to deform the barrels and render them useless.
Brodie checked the men for comms devices. No walkies, but each had a cell phone that he checked. Locked and no reception. He left them.
Taylor gathered up another half dozen mags, which she shoved in her belt and whispered to Brodie, “I can see your T-shirt with my eyes closed.”
He nodded, then knelt beside one of the guards who was half-lit by the lights in the intersecting corridor. The guy had taken three or four hits and his camo shirt was wet with blood, and definitely darker than Brodie’s white T-shirt. Brodie unbuttoned the man’s shirt and looked at his face. Young guy. Blond hair. Handsome. Dying for a cause. Wrong cause.
Brodie pulled off the man’s blood-soaked shirt and put it on.
Taylor was crouched at the intersection, looking left and right down the long, empty corridor.
Brodie joined her and she whispered, “Which way?”
“I’m looking for a sign that says, ‘Exit, Thank You for Coming.’?”
“Not fucking funny.”
“Right… Well, I thought I saw these two guys appear from the right.”
“Okay… so maybe that’s the exit.”
“Which is also the entrance for any more assholes who are down here.”
“It might be the only way out of here.” She added, “The corridor to the left could dead-end.”
He thought a moment, then said, “There are always two or more exits to an underground bunker complex, so people can get out if there’s a collapse caused by bombs or artillery, or if one way is blocked by enemy soldiers coming in. So, either direction will eventually lead to a way out.”
Taylor replied, “The war’s over, Scott. Every entrance and exit except one could be blocked off by the authorities or by reconstruction.”
“You make a point.” He said, “These guys came in from the right, so we go to the right.”
