THE ANSWER at that precise moment was that she was looking warily around a corner at the very farthest end of the forbidden wing of the complex.
About twenty yards away from her there was a pair of the double swing doors that were so familiar to her from her own work in predark hospitals. Each of the doors had a large circular pane of glass at its center to avoid the danger of people bumping into one another.
One of the doors had been propped open, so that she could see beyond it to where a couple of sec men were sitting at a small table, playing cards.
What was particularly interesting to her was what she could glimpse behind the mena heavily bolted door, painted pale green, with an iron grille in it.
It wasn’t the sort of thing that Mildred had ever seen in any hospital that she’d ever visited. But she had once seen a documentary about the women’s prison at Tehachapi, and there’d been an awful lot of similar barred and bolted doors in that.
Mildred had been concentrating so hard on this peculiar sight that she had failed to pay attention behind her. Suddenly she was aware of the sound of studded boots, marching fast toward her along the corridor.
Her hand dropped to the butt of the ZKR 551 revolver, and she tensed herself for the arrival of the sec man.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The snow was blinding, but it was just possible to make out the blurred shape of the whirling, snarling, scratching bundle of dark fur that came bounding toward them, out of the heart of the stinking cave.
Ryan opened fire from the hip, working the bolt action on the Steyr, pumping three of the powerful 7.62 mm rounds into the bear. At his side, he heard the distinctive flat snap of Trader’s Armalite. A little way over to his right there was the lighter sound of Professor Gibson’s .22-caliber Anschutz Kadett rifle.
Out of sight in the blizzard, there was the muffled boom of two of the Mossberg 12-gauges.
Ryan heard a shriek of pain that was so unearthly that it crossed his mind that someone in their party might have been shot in the panicked cross fire.
There was another blast from one of the shotguns and another from the woman’s rifle. The wind dropped for a moment, and it was possible to glimpse their prey, lying twitching and scrabbling with its claws at the shattered ice, blood soaking into the smooth dark fur.
“I’ll be hung, quartered and dried for the crows!” Trader exclaimed. “It’s only a little cub.”
Brunner was on his hands and knees at one side of the narrow trail, staring back into the cavern, his eyes wide and staring. “Wasn’t the cub that chilled Cooke.”
Ryan stood still, trying to see into the opening of the den, but it was blacker than pitch.
“Got to be the mother in there, Trader!” he shouted. “Run or fight?”
“Fight,” Trader yelled, down on one knee, reloading the Armalite, his eyes never leaving the cave. “We try and run, and it’ll take us out from behind.”
“Bullshit! We gotta get out right now.” It was one of the unnamed sec men, his silvered Mossberg dangling from his right hand. “Come on!”
Brunner and the third survivor followed him, blundering off into the shroud of white that made rapid progress impossibly dangerous.
Thea Gibson tried to stop her men, but her words of protest were whirled away by the eldritch scream of the wind. She watched the sec guards flee, turning back to face Ryan and Trader, shrugging her shoulders.
“They have lost their nerve,” she called.
The dying cub made a last, feeble effort to try to rejoin its mother within the cavern, struggling to its feet for a moment. As it toppled forward on its face, breaking its prominent lower jaw, it gave a final desperate howl of agony.
The response was almost instant.
Ryan dropped flat in the snow, gesturing for Trader and the woman to do the same. After a moment’s hesitation they followed his lead.
Just in time.
The earth seemed to shake as the mother grizzly emerged from the dark mouth of the cave, its head turning from side to side. It was difficult to make out any details through the blizzard, but Ryan was sure that the object in the mutie beast’s jaw was probably a severed human leg.