Cold Warriors by Rebecca Levene Page B

trapdoor as it landed.
    "Shit!" Morgan said. Now they wouldn't be able to close off the route behind them.
    An instant later a figure appeared in the doorway, the shadow-puppet outline of a man clutching a gun, silhouetted against the bright sunlight.
    Morgan knew he only had a few seconds till the man's eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the house. He used them to swing himself over the lip of the hole. His feet scrabbled beneath him to find purchase, and it took him a second to realise that the thing banging against his leg was the ladder, rope and not wood as he'd expected.
    He slithered quickly down it, a hundred cold slogs round assault courses making him nimble. It was long, sixty foot or more, but he reached the bottom before anyone had followed him, the light from the trapdoor above shining uninterrupted into the darkness below. At the bottom, his feet landed in a thin layer of water which splashed up cold and a little slimy against his ankles.
    Beyond the small, pale square of light in which he stood was complete darkness. Tomas and the little girl were dim figures on the periphery of it, none of their features visible.
    "This way," the girl said. She'd produced a small torch from somewhere, but the beam barely troubled the darkness, only revealing a thin strip of uneven, rocky ground and nothing of what lay ahead.
    After a short, stumbling run, they arrived at a rectangular entranceway to a tunnel as clearly man-made as the cavern was natural. Another, faster run through that, and they were at a T-junction leading off into darkness left and right. The girl led them right without hesitation, then left at the next junction.
    Hurrying in her wake, Morgan soon lost count of the turnings. It was an endless, shadowed flight through featureless stone tunnels and wider, echoing caverns. Sometimes the floor was smooth, sometimes pockmarked. On one occasion it was beneath a foot of water. The air was chilly to the point of discomfort, as if they were buried somewhere beneath Siberia, not Budapest sweltering under its midsummer sun.
    The ceiling dipped so low at one point that Morgan was forced to his hands and knees, but he scrambled through anyway, trusting the girl to lead them out and not into a fatal dead end.
    "Where the hell are we, man?" he whispered to Tomas. He'd already given up asking who the girl was. Tomas couldn't, or wouldn't answer him.
    "It's called the Labyrinth, I think," Tomas said. "A huge network of tunnels beneath Buda."
    "Who built them?" Morgan asked some time later, when they were crossing a big open chamber bisected by a clear stream.
    "Some are World War Two bomb shelters. Some are much older than that - hundreds of years. People have always needed a place to hide."
    After that, Morgan saved his breath for the flight. They'd lost their pursuers long ago, but the girl didn't seem to want to stop running. Morgan couldn't figure out why he was willing to trust her, except that she was ten years old, and what the hell was she going to do to them? He guessed someone must have been using her as a go-between, and she'd found herself caught up in the action when Tomas had stolen whatever it was that Karamov was trading.
    It was when Morgan finally felt safe that Karamov's man found them. He loomed out of the darkness ahead, a solid lump of black until the torch's beam picked out his features, the sharp nose and wide mouth.
    It only took the man a moment to recover from his shock, and then he was fumbling for the Glock he'd tucked into the waistband of his trousers.
    Tomas grabbed the girl by the shoulders and Morgan thought he meant to shield her with his own invulnerable body. But she skipped forward two steps before Tomas could stop her.
    Karamov's man hesitated, then brought his weapon to bear.
    The girl didn't even flinch. She kept the beam of her torch trained straight in his eyes and - brighter as she drew closer - it blinded him. The bodyguard cursed and backed away. Morgan knew that any moment he'd