RECCE II (The Union Series Book 5) by Phillip Richards Page B

connects to an underground reservoir used by the air factory.
There is a pipeline connected to that, which leads out of the village and back
into the Bosque.’
    ‘Told you, didn’t I?’ Myers blurted, holding him
arms out triumphantly. ‘You could get straight in using the pipeline all
along!’
    ‘It isn’t an easy way to enter the warren,’ Yulia
cautioned. ‘You would need certain equipment.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘Floatation devices. Waterproofing. The water is
very, very cold.’
    Myers shrugged. ‘Well. Still . . . I said it was a
good idea.’
    ‘Could Bhasin use your route to escape from the
warren?’ I asked Yulia.
    ‘Yes,’ she replied instantly.
    ‘Well let’s go, then!’ Wildgoose said.
    I shook my head. ‘We can’t do anything until the FEA
get the comms network up and running. If they don’t, then we’ll be on our way
back to the surface . . .’
    ‘And leave the boss to die . . .?’ Puppy asked.
    ‘Yeah. I tried to argue with the sergeant major, but
. . .’
    He gave a thin smile. ‘We heard.’
    ‘Well, we’ll know one way or another in a few
minutes,’ Wildgoose said. ‘Can you hear that?’
    We all stopped to listen.
    ‘Hear what?’ I asked. I couldn’t hear anything except
Ramos’s last, laboured breaths.
    ‘Exactly. The screaming has stopped.’
     
    Captain Mori and his men might have been prepared to
die for their cause, but they obviously hadn’t been prepared to suffer the pain
that the FEA had inflicted upon them. By the time I returned to the storage
chamber where the sergeant major had waited, Rusakov emerged to announce that
the brutal torture of their prisoners had been successful.
    As he made his announcement, two FEA soldiers
dragged a Guardsman out after him, quickly hurrying him away into another
darkened tunnel nearby. His resolve shattered, the Guardsman sobbed in
self-pity as he disappeared into the gloom.
    ‘Most of the command equipment has been destroyed,’
Rusakov said, pointing toward the destroyed computer hardware scattered across
the command chamber to prove the point. ‘The network has not been damaged,
though. It is controlled from a separate chamber. None of the optical cables
have been touched, it has only been turned off. We must now turn it back on.’
    In response, the sergeant major glanced at me.
‘Close in the commanders.’
    I nodded and quickly relayed the message by hand
signal to the other troopers in the command chamber, tapping two fingers on my
upper arm and then tapping my helmet. Commanders. On me.
    The message quickly spread across the chamber.
    ‘Do your men have the expertise to reverse whatever
was done to the network?’ the sergeant major asked Rusakov, with a hint of
doubt in his voice. ‘I assume that turning the network back on is a little more
complex than flicking a switch?’
    Rusakov smiled. It was the same cruel smile he had
flashed me earlier, before the torture began. ‘Our new friends will show us
how.’
    The sergeant major shrugged indifferently. ‘Good
enough for me. What about our platoon commander?’
    Rusakov let out a sigh as he prepared himself to
deliver bad news. ‘They tell me that your comrades were taken away by Colonel
Bhasin and a platoon of his men.’
    ‘Where were they taking them?’
    ‘Out of the warren,’ Rusakov answered. ‘They say
there is a way out using tunnels that run water into an underground lake.’
    The sergeant major’s eyes flicked to me for a
second. The information provided by the tortured Guardsmen matched Yulia’s
story. I knew that it changed nothing. He wasn’t going to lead the platoon
underground until he had comms with the surface, even if that meant losing our
comrades and failing our mission to deny the missiles from our shady enemy.
    He looked back at Rusakov. ‘What else did you find
out?’
    ‘They think that the commanding officer and his
staff were the traitors, not themselves.’ Rusakov said. ‘They think that they
needed to capture the