Chyornaya Peschera Cave
Mission Time: Day 2
1058 Hours
The last of the Ocelot commandos who had been unfortunate enough to be caught in the hornet swarm collapsed in a choking, throat-scratching pile in the dust, and the horrible drone that had reached a terrible cacophony when mixed with the screams of the dying had, at long last, dissipated. The hornets cleared, lighting off their victims and wafting away like smoke in the wind.
He watched them as they left him in great columns. He was not worried. They would come again, when he would call them.
A chuckle sounded from the forest, a basso sound that rumbled like thunder. A moment later, he lumbered out of the treeline across the crevasse. He was an immense man who, upon first sight, would be mistaken as grossly fat. It was, however, muscle sheathed in a layer of blubber he'd cultivated in the years since the war. Still, he could be nimble as a child if he wanted.
Despite being the infiltration specialist for the Cobras, he did not wear any sort of camouflage, instead opting for a rather unsubtle ocher-colored vest over his black uniform. He wore a balaclava across his face, so that only his hooded eyes peered out at the world.
He held his weapon lazily against his thigh. It was a Thompson submachine gun, the same weapon he'd used in the war, when he'd mowed down Germans and Vichy (and maybe a few Russkies in the bargain; The Pain wasn't picky when it came to who wandered in his sights, much to the annoyance of The Boss and The Sorrow). He sauntered over toward the last of the Ocelots, tapping the Tommy gun against his thigh as he did.
The man lay on the ground, his breathing nothing but a thin whistle, blood staining his fingertips where he'd clawed at his swelling throat, but he was alive, and his eyes rolled like a maddened horse as The Pain walked over to him. He opened his mouth, could only choke out a wheeze.
The Pain stood over him, a vast and corpulent form.
"Tell me, comrade," The Pain said, placing his bootheel gently against the man's Adam's apple, "does it hurt?"
He wasn't particularly interested in an answer, because a moment later, he crushed the man's windpipe beneath his boot like it was an eggshell.
The Pain's eyes narrowed with satisfaction, and that slitted gaze slid to the crevasse. The CIA man, the one The Boss had babied, he'd taken a plunge down there to avoid The Pain's hornets. The Pain walked toward the canyon, and when he stood at its lip, he peered downward. Only the black abyss stared back. He thought idly about raking submachine-gun fire in there to make sure The Boss's apprentice was dead, but that wasn't his way. If the young man had survived his fall (and he wasn't sure of that; the canyon could be twenty feet or two hundred feet deep), he'd be blandering down in the darkness, and even if he managed to find his way out, there was only one way out of the network of tunnels and burrows.
And The Pain would be waiting for him there.
He slung his Thompson over his shoulder and headed off. Then he paused, noticing that he wasn't alone in this clearing of the dead.
A single, solitary hornet, the size of his thumb, had lighted on his shoulder, almost like a pirate's parrot. It droned, crawling along the man's shoulder. It sat there, buzzing intermittently. Almost as if it were talking to him.
"We'll get him yet, honey," The Pain said, chuckling again at his joke. He looked back over his shoulder at the crevasse.
Enjoy the silence while you can, Snake, he thought. Soon you'll hear the buzzing... and it will be the last thing you hear.
Wherever he was, it was dark but far from silent. There was water dripping somewhere—an echoing, unpleasant sound that brought Snake out of the dazed, swimmy haze of borderline unconsciousness.
Water. Somewhere.
He opened his eyes, saw blackness, closed them, opened them again to be sure. Blackness. Pitch blackness.
The crevasse curved down to a steep incline that led to a slick pocket of rock, and in that pocket, Snake would come to learn, there were a vast network of caves and tunnels. When Snake had come down, plummeting to escape the swarm of hornets, he'd hit the rock on his pack, sparing him a broken back or a fractured skull. He'd rolled, tumbled, fell through the pocket and came to a halt here, in this drippy dank hell where no light shone.
That could've gone better.
His left hand felt like fire, like he'd soaked it in lye. He could feel one hell of a welt budding there, oozing and bleeding. Those weren't ordinary hornets that had battened upon them, that was for sure.
That dripping, somewhere in the dark. He remembered reading that the tooth-like stalactites and stalagmites that gnashed in the mouths of caves were the result of dripping water over centuries, millennia.
There was another sound. At first, Snake thought it was a buzzing, and he tensed, thinking the hornets had followed their prey down here into the darkness. Then he realized the buzzing was a chirping, and it was inside.
The codec.
Snake groaned, lifting his head off the cold wet stone. Even though he hadn't broken anything, his whole body ached and throbbed. His hand was fire and the arm he'd broken a week earlier screamed like a rusty bonesaw was playing a symphony on it.
He reached with probing fingers, switched the codec. The major's voice poured into his ears in a flurry.
"Snake? Snake, are you there? What's your status?"
"Major . . . " His voice came out in a rusty groan.
"Are you all right?" Para-Medic's voice broke in over the major's frequency. "Are you hurt? Report!"
Snake flexed his fingers, relaxed them. "Took one hell of a fall, that's for sure," he grunted sourly. "But I think I'm fine. Didn't break anything but my ass." He held his hand in front of his face, but in the dank gloom he couldn't even make it out. "Looks like there's no way to get back up, though."
"What happened?" Zero wanted to know.
Snake rubbed the back of his left hand, the one that felt like a miniature volcano had sprouted there. "Got ambushed," he muttered.
"The Ocelots?"
"Yeah, at first. But then . . . something else."
"What?"
"Hornets."
"Hornets?"
"Yeah. A huge swarm of them. They just came out of nowhere. Killed most of the Ocelots. I barely got away. My hand feels like fire."
"What about the Ocelot commander?"
"He got away," Snake said. He felt a bitter tang in his voice. "He left his men to die."
"What in God's name were hornets doing there?" Para-Medic wondered.
The major didn't speak for a moment. Snake knew he was thinking of his report of the Virtuous Mission, and how Sokolov had been abducted while a horde of hornets had swarmed them on the Dolinovodno bridge.
When Zero finally did speak, he was brisk. "Well, anyway, it's good to hear you aren't injured. Slipping and falling may not have been part of the plan, but getting into that cave system was. Proceed further into the cave. Our intelligence indicates that it is structured like a maze of caverns, but there is an exit somewhere. Find a way out of the cave and head for the aqueduct."
Snake heard something scurrying in the dark to his left. Something that sounded like it was on several legs, and dragging a heavier something behind it. A rat, maybe. "All right. But it might take me a while to get out of here."
"Why?" Zero's voice took on a hard edge of concern. "Did the enemy lay a trap for you?"
"No."
"Then what is it?"
Snake sighed. "It's dark down here."
"Dark?"
"Yeah." He shook his head. "I should've brought a flashlight with me."
Zero's concern gave way to bemusement. "So what you're telling me is that it's going to take you a while because you don't have a flashlight?"
"Pretty much."
"Snake," the major said slowly, like an irritated parent explaining to a toddler why drawing on the walls was wrong, "if you don't have a flashlight, you should be looking for a substitute. I tell you, American soldiers these days rely too much on ready-made equipment—"
Here we go again, Snake thought.
"—and not only that, they can't seem to grasp that one piece of equipment can have multiple functions. Back when I was in SAS, we never had that problem. We were trained to use every piece of equipment in as many ways as possible. If you don't have a flashlight, look for something else. You need to develop flexible innovative thinking if you want to. . ."
He paused. "Are you even listening to me?"
Snake couldn't help but grin. "Hanging on every word, sir."
Zero grunted. "First, take a look at what you're carrying with you now. Don't you have anything that can provide you with some light?"
Snake mulled it over for a moment. As a matter of fact, there was one thing he'd stashed with him that might be able to get him out of this jam. He reached in his front pocket, slid out one of the remaining cigars. He clamped the stogie between his teeth, took out the Zippo, and sparked it alight. In the dim glow of the lighter's flame, he could see something slithering near his left boot. He kicked it away.
The codec squelched, and Sigint's voice piped up: "How are you fixed for weapons?"
Snake looked around, the ember at the end of his cigar glowing like a baleful orange eye in the dark. His fingers scrabbled on the slick and slimy rock, searching for the Colt. His left hand slipped, and the fiery pain was swallowed in biting cold as he punched into a puddle all the way to the wrist. His knuckles nudged on something hard and metal. His hand opened, closed on the cold and familiar barrel of the .45.
He fished it out and scrubbed it against his leg hastily, hoping that the workings of the weapon hadn't gotten wet. It was far too dark to break the pistol apart. He wedged it in his belt.
"Worse comes to worst, I've got my knife," he said bitterly.
He rose to his feet cautiously. The sound of the water seemed to swell, amplifying in the black. He became dimly aware of a faint fluttering overhead, like several fans going at full blast.
He pressed his lips tightly together around the cigar and started fumbling for a wall. He felt like a blind man, searching, fingers questing for purchase. His fingers found a semi-solid mass of moss, but it crumbled in his grip. He—
He fell.
More precisely, he staggered, pinwheeling his arms in a helpless effort to maintain his balance. He fell on his belly. Something ran squealing over his wounded hand. He gasped and sat up, clutching his hand to his chest, aware that a rat had just skittered over it; he'd felt the noisome drag of its snakelike tail.
He tried to stand, rapped his head on the new cave's low ceiling. He was driven back to his knees with large red blooms flowering in the darkness before his eyes.
He swore loudly, and the curse resounded several times over. He winced, rubbing his skull.
His codec burbled again, and EVA's voice hissed in his ear. "Snake, are you all right?"
"Yeah." His words echoed flatly. "Just barely. I got chased into the canyon by a bunch of hornets."
"That was The Pain," EVA replied.
One of the Cobras. I should've known.
"Are they tracking me?" he asked.
"I don't know," EVA said.
"You don't know? Or won't tell me?"
"I mean what I say," EVA said, almost snapping. "The Cobras only take orders from The Boss. Not even Volgin has any idea what they're up to. And I don't really know much about them either."
"No kidding."
"I'll try to dig up as much as I can about them. You just focus on moving ahead. That cave is known as Chyornaya Peschera. In Russian, that translates as 'the black cave from which cold wind blows.' It's a magma cavern formed millions of years back, back when Tselinoyarsk was the site of volcanic activity. The structure of the cave is pretty complex, but you should be able to find the aqueduct if you keep moving forward. Head toward the interior of the cave. When you find your way out, you'll come out in an aqueduct overgrown with mangroves. This leads to the Ponizovje swamp." She paused. "And Snake?"
"Yeah?"
"Be careful. That cave—"
"—is pitch-black inside?" he broke in.
EVA breathed a sigh of relief. "Good! I did remember to tell you, then!"
Snake fumed silently in the darkness.
"Just be careful," she warned. "It's easy to get lost down there. It's happened before."
Before Snake could ask what she meant by that last part, the codec went silent.