"That I read about." The lieutenant looked down. "Do you mean to say, Colonel, that these steps lead twenty-eight floors underground?"
Smith nodded. "I will go first," he said.
Accepting a flashlight, Smith went down. It was like walking into a cave with stairs. After descending two flights, it became no different than walking down the fire stairs of a skyscraper during a blackout. The undesertlike humidity was oppressive, but it was cool. Cool, Smith thought mordantly, as a tomb.
Spraying his flashlight beam in all directions, Lieutenant Latham piped up behind Smith.
"Is what we're looking for classified?" he asked.
"Specifically, yes. Generally, no."
Latham had to think about that a minute.
"Generally speaking, Colonel, will we know it when we see it? I mean, what should we be looking for?"
"A corpse."
"Oh." The lieutenant's tone implied: I don't like this.
Down and down they went, until the air was close and suffocating. The fire doors, when they had descended five floors, were impossible to open. The concrete had flooded deep. The air thickened with moisture content. Men began coughing. The echoes were comfortless.
Seven floors down, it was like breathing pond scum. Each floor below that was worse. They were able to work the doors open starting ten floors down. Then the search began in earnest through a manmade labyrinth of empty rooms and foul air.
Each successive floor gave up nothing larger than the occasional dead scorpion.
Finally, midway down the twentieth floor below ground, the cracked concrete stairs disappeared into tea-colored standing water.
"I guess this is as far as we go," Lieutenant Latham muttered. "Sorry, Colonel."
Harold Smith stood regarding the standing water, his flashlight darting this way and that.
"Divers," he whispered.
"What?"
Smith's white-haired head snapped around. His voice was charged with urgency. "I want a naval recovery team brought to this site."
"We can do that," Lieutenant Latham said. "Take some doing, but it's possible."
"Now!" Smith snapped.
"What's the rush? If your dead guy's down there, he's been dead a long time."
"Instantly," Smith repeated.
And to a man, the engineering team turned and marched double-time back up the long flights of stairs to the breathable air of the surface.
Smith remained, staring into the water.
"Yes," he said slowly. "This is where he would have gone when the neutron bomb detonated. Water is a perfect shield against radiation. Yes."
Smith returned to the surface, where he dug his briefcase from the waiting helicopter. Sheltered from the others, who were working a mobile radio, he logged onto the CURE computers back at Folcroft.
The situation was deteriorating, he saw from the early reports.
The body of Ambassador Abaatira had arrived in Abominadad. Under the glare of TV cameras, President Maddas Hinsein had thrown open the casket. And had immediately thrown up at the sight of the bloated dead face with its blackened tongue and bright yellow ligature tied so tightly about the throat that the term "pencil-necked geek" fitted Ambassador Abaatira to a T.
The TV transmission had gone dead. Only silence, brooding and portentous, had come out of Abominadad ever since.
Meanwhile, a "peace offering" had been shipped to Nehmad, where the sheik himself had opened the long ornate box to find his only son, Abdul Fareem, strangled, his bloated body desecrated by a yellow silk scarf that seemed to have caused his liverlike tongue to disgorge in death.
Although the sheik had made a public pronouncement that his worthless son was better off dead, he was privately calling for a strike against Abominadad. Washington was resisting. War was near-nearer than it had been at any time.
And the master plan of Kali became clear to Dr. Harold W. Smith.
"She's trying to egg both sides into conflict," he said.
A cold lump of something indescribable settled into his sour stomach.
It was pure, unadulterated fear.
Chapter 42
"You know what you must do." Kimberly Baynes said in a breathy voice.
"I do not know what more I can do." Maddas Hinsein insisted sullenly. "I have done all you asked me. I have attacked the front lines. There is no reply. The U.S. does not want war. I have sent the fat prince's body to his father, the sheik. He makes light of this provocation. The Hamidis do not want war. I do not want war. I have Kuran. I need only wait out the sanctions and I will have won. There."
Defiantly he folded his thick arms. His lips compressed until they were swallowed by his gathering mustache. They lay on a bed of nails in the private torture chamber of Maddas Hinsein, where no one would bother them. They had laid plywood over the nails.
"They dared return your beloved ambassador with the American symbol around his throat," Kimberly said. "You can't ignore that."
"There are other ambassadors," Maddas growled. "Ambassadors are more expendable than soldiers."
"You must answer this provocation."
"How?"
"I think you know what you must do."
"Yes, I know," he said, suddenly sitting up. "Let us have sex. True sex. We have not had sex together yet. Just spankings."
Kimberly turned away. "I am the bride of Shiva. I mate only with Shiva."
"Who is this Shiva?" Maddas Hinsein demanded roughly.
"A great being known as the Triple World Ender because he is ordained to dance heaven, hell, and earth into nothingness under his remorseless feet."