He began to fall. He’d been falling all along. But as he felt his feet lose contact with the ladder, his hands madly scrabbling at the wall, his fingers found the lip of the duct, a thin metal ridge that bit into his skin.

“Whoa!” he cried, his voice ricocheting down the length of the shaft. He seemed to be clinging to the side of the shaft by will alone; his feet were dangling in space. “Whoa now!”

How he did it he couldn’t have explained. Adrenaline. Amy. That he didn’t want to die, not yet. He pulled with all his might, his elbows bending slowly, drawing himself inexorably upward—first his head and then his chest and then his waist and finally the rest of him, sliding into the duct.

For a moment he lay still, gulping air into his lungs. He lifted his face then and saw a light ahead—some kind of opening in the floor. He twisted himself around and held Amy as he’d done before, scooting along on his backside, clutching her by the waist. The light grew stronger as they moved toward it. They came to a slatted grate.

It was sealed, screwed shut from the outside.

He wanted to cry. To come so close! Even if he’d been able to reach through the narrow slats, somehow, to find the screws with his fingers, he had no tools, no way to open it. And going back—impossible. He’d spent the last of his strength.

He heard movement below them.

He pulled Amy tight. He thought of the men they’d seen—Fortes, the soldier in the pool of blood, the one called Grey. It wasn’t how he wanted to die. He closed his eyes and held his breath, willing the two of them into absolute silence.

Then a voice, quiet and searching: “Chief?”

It was Doyle.

One of the lockers was already resting on the ground at the rear of the truck. It looked like somebody had been unloading and then, in a panic, dropped it. Richards searched quickly inside the cargo compartment and found a tire iron.

The hinge gave way with a bright snap. Inside, cradled in beds of foam, lay a pair of RPG-29s. He lifted the rack to find, beneath it, the rockets: finned cylinders, about half a meter long, tipped with tandem-charge HEATs, capable of penetrating the armor of a modern battle tank. Richards had seen what they could do.

He’d placed the requisition when the order had come through to move the sticks. Better safe than sorry, he’d thought. Vampires, say aaah.