Page 45 of What Remains

The thought hitched and skidding to a halt, and then he simply froze, right where he was, unable to truly process what he saw: an enormous pile of rubble spilling across the tunnel from left to right and reaching almost to the ceiling.

No.His heart shuddered against a pulse of fresh fear coursing through his veins. The water kept coming, the flow smashing against rubble—and did not push through. Dammed by rock and debris, the water fizzing through this sudden, new fissure was backing up and rising. Even as he stared, he saw the water eddy and swirl, the slower current created by the barrier colliding with that jet spewing from the cleft left by the blow-out—and begin to spin.

“Worthy!” He tore his gaze away from the gathering whirlpool and looked up. Driver hung a good twenty feet above and to John’s left. To his right, Roni’s light winked as she spidered her way to the other man.

“Move!” Driver shouted. “Come on!”

He nearly followed. His left hand reached for a rill of stone, and then he stopped. “That’s the wrong way!” he shouted, though his voice was lost even to himself in the water’s churn and bellow. Why was Driver headingback?The man was heading downhill. “It’s the wrong way, you’re going deeper. Driver, it’s the wrongway!”

Driver either didn’t hear or was determined to ignore him and only continued to crab his way left and up.

But Roni paused. Craning over her right shoulder, she peered down. She’d followed Driver’s example and clipped her flashlight to her vest so that light both sprayed over the rock and illuminated her features: the white oval of her face, its features drawn tight with fear. Although he couldn’t hear her over the water’s roar, he read his name on her lips.

“Roni! Honey!” He shook his head in a vehement negative and this time, he took his left hand away from the rock. “No, wrong way!” he shouted, slashing the air with an emphatic swipe of his hand. “That’s thewrong?—”

With no warning at all, the cavern seemed to swell and then shudder and shake as if they were noisome fleas on the back of some gigantic creature determined to throw them off. A surge of terror scrambled into his throat, and he slapped rock with his left hand and dug his fingers into stone with all strength. He might even have cried out, but if he had, the sound was lost in another enormous squeal and then a hard crack and the thin geyser of a new and harder jet suddenly became a torrent as the opposite wall burst. Water, frigid and foaming, roared out on a hail of debris which cascaded into the whirling pool below. The cavern shuddered and bucked?—

And John lost his grip.

He was aware of falling, of peeling away from rock and plummeting backward into a maelstrom of water and stone. If he had a last glimpse of Roni’s face, he never could remember.What he did recall was the moment his body smacked the water hard enough to force all the air from his lungs in a sickeningwhoosh—and then a cold so intense it burned, and then the moment right after that when his body acted on instinct and his mouth opened for a breath of air that wasn’t there at the same instant his throat filled with frigid water—and then closed down tight so he couldn’t, wouldn’t drown.

Instead, he suffocated.

JOHN: PRESENT TENSE

November 2023: The Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan

1

After droppingoff Davila and Harvey in Khorog, they’d driven to Tajikistan’s Zorkul Nature Reserve, which bordered the Wakhan National Park in Afghanistan. There, they’d hidden the van in a slit cave near Concord Peak and a quarter mile from a little-used trailhead, grabbed their gear, and headed south. By the end of that first day, they were over the border and hugging the mountains, heading east.

The passes were narrow and very high: a necessary evil, Driver said, to avoid being spotted in a landscape where it seemed thatnothingmoved except the snow. But avoid being spotted by whom? If the only people out here were nomads in their winter encampments? Really, who cared?

But this wasn’t his mission. Oh, he still had all that money Ustinov had given him and Davila. Thankfully, he’d remembered the bags were rigged and could only be opened with their thumbprints. Anyone trying to get in any other way…say, a knife…well, that person would be in for a nasty surprise. Before they made that run to the hospital in Khorog, he’d had Davila open his bag and also disable the incendiary device which, Ustinov claimed, functioned as a last resort: a way of making sure no bad guy got his paws on all that cash. He didn’tknow if the money would be useful, but it seemed stupid to leave it behind.

Just what Driver’s mission was or how John figured into his plans other than as both medic and hired gun, the other man wasn’t saying. John didn’t think this was because Driver didn’t trust him because, seriously, just who was John going to tell? No, call it a bizarre sixth-sense, but John thought Driver wasn’t saying because he needed John’s help and if hedidcough up the mission plan, John might tell him what he could do with himself.

For the time being, he did what he was told. The scenery really was spectacular, though after a while, the novelty of those wild, high, snow-covered peaks vanished, principally because John was busy trying to breathe and walk at the same time.

One incongruous bit, though, never quite faded into the background. Peer over the edge of a pass andwaaaydown there, a long narrow, almost ruler-straight stripe that was sometimes white, sometimes black, ran down the valley’s middle and stretched both right and left as far as the eye could see.

It was all very weird. Beautiful, but eerie. The mountains hemming the valley were something primordial: stark, corrugated behemoths of snow and ice and windswept rock seemingly as ancient as the Earth. If not for the road, a person could believe that no one and nothing had ever set foot here before now.

They were, for all intents and purposes, completely alone.

Until the third day.

2

They were threadingtheir way on a narrow filament of a mountain trail high above the valley’s northern edge. The Corridor, Driver said, was higher in the east than the west. This translated to an altitude in the valley of about thirteen thousand feet. Sticking to mountain passes instead of the valley floor put them at an even greater altitude. For the first two days, all John did was pop diuretics, drink water, pee, put one foot in front of the other, and pray his brains didn’t leak out of his ears. By the third day, he was better, but he still mostly watched his feet and tried not to look at his watch.

So, it was a real surprise when, near the end of that day, he blinked up from what felt like a cold-induced coma just in time not to send Driver, who had his binos out, hurtling off the path.

“Whoa,” Driver said, catching his elbow. “Watch out for that first step, there. It’s a doozy.”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s wrong?” Well, that’s what he wanted to say only his lips wouldn’t cooperate and everything came out mushy, like he was talking through a mouthful of oatmeal:Wash shrong?

“I don’t know. It’s just…” Driver squinted then pointed due east. “Wouldn’t have seen them if the sun wasn’t behind us.”

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