Chapter 28 - Blind Faith in the Dark
By 4:00 PM, the storm clouds broke open, dumping torrential sheets of water that turned the historic brick streets of Pioneer Square into miniature rivers.
Underneath the cobblestones lay the Seattle Underground—a sprawling, forgotten subterranean city of nineteenth-century storefronts, abandoned brick archways, and rusted utility conduits built directly over the old mudflats.
The entrance to Sub-Level 4 was an unmarked, reinforced blast hatch tucked inside an old steam-plant basement off Yesler Way.
When Tommy’s tactical team arrived at the perimeter, the steel hatch had already been breached. The heavy deadbolts had been severed with an exothermic cutting torch, leaving glowing slag around the edges of the frame.
"Thermal scopes are blind down there," the tactical sergeant warned, pulling back from the hatch. "The old steam pipes run through the lower corridors at four hundred degrees. The heat signatures bounce off every brick surface like a funhouse mirror. We go down there with night-vision, we’ll be staring at a wall of glowing green static."
"Then we don't use eyes," I said.
I knelt in the puddle beside the hatch, slipping a set of tactical boots onto Jax’s paws to protect his pads from the jagged glass and molten metal. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small, gray woolen swatch cut from the sleeve of the downed mercenary at the convention center.
Jax dipped his nose to the fabric. One sniff. Two.
His nostrils flared with a sharp, pneumatic hiss. He turned his head toward the pitch-black descending staircase, his tail rising into a low, stiff arc.
"Track," I whispered.
Jax vanished into the subterranean dark without a sound.
I descended behind him, my left hand lightly touching the short eighteen-inch leather lead attached to the back of his harness. I kept my tactical flashlight turned off. In a maze of reflective steam pipes, a white light was nothing more than an illuminated target for an ambush.
The heat hit us immediately. The air smelled of sulfur, damp brick, engine grease, and hot iron. The hiss of high-pressure steam leaks created a steady, rhythmic hiss that masked the sound of footsteps.
Jax didn't track by sight. He moved with an uncanny, fluid grace, his body weaving between rusted cast-iron columns and dripping masonry arches.
Every ten yards, he would pause for a fraction of a second, his snout angling upward toward the ceiling vents, tracking the microscopic scent molecules of weapon oil and human sweat carried on the subterranean draft.
Suddenly, Jax’s body went completely rigid.
He leaned back against my shin, using his weight to stop my forward stride.
Two inches in front of my right boot, stretched across the brick corridor at shin height, was a thread-thin monofilament wire tied to an improvised fragmentation mine wired to an industrial propane tank.
Jax had smelled the friction of the nylon string against the rusted iron pipe.
"Good boy," I exhaled into his fur, carefully stepping over the trap and marking the hazard on my wrist-mounted GPS beacon.
We pressed deeper, descending another flight of rusted iron steps into the heart of the grid vault.
Ahead, through a heavy security door hanging off its hinges, three men were working in frantic silence.
They had placed magnetic shaped charges along the master transformers—the massive, oil-filled electrical converters that stepped down high-voltage power from the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River. A digital countdown timer on the master receiver glowed a sharp, menacing red:
03:45... 03:44...
The leader of the cell, a lean man in a black technical jumpsuit, looked at his watch. "Set the remote detonate for sixty seconds. We take the service lift up to the monorail terminal before King County realizes what hit them."
"And the cop?" one of the men asked, racking his weapon. "You think he followed us?"
"If he came down here," the leader sneered, clicking the remote arming toggle, "he’s already buried."
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Then, the single yellow maintenance bulb dangling from the ceiling shattered into a thousand rain-like pieces.
Jax had leapt six feet straight up from the darkness, striking the utility conduit and ripping the wiring clear of the ceiling, plunging the entire vault into total, absolute blackness.
