“Which you happen to know?”
“Which I happened to research,” he said with a smug grin, and stole a piece of blue Stilton from Linda’s plate. “Boo-ya!”
Eddie Seng sat at a nearby table with the gundogs. Juan fluttered the legal pad to get his attention and then tossed it over. “Take a look at this. We’ll meet in the conference room at noon. Gomez should be back with his pictures by then. We go one day later.”
“This from that guy?”
“Yeah, and it’s a godsend.”
“I’ll make copies and give them to the rest of these apes. Sorry, boys, you all have homework tonight.”
“Damned Yankees,” MacD drawled. “It’s pronounced ‘y’all.’ ”
25
THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS ABOARD THE OREGON were spent in feverish preparation while a stunned world awaited the plight of the citizens of Las Vegas. They had water reserves for another two days, under the tightest rationing in the city’s history. If the utility authorities couldn’t reactivate the complicated system of pipes and pumps that drew water across the desert from Lake Mead, evacuations would most likely be ordered. A state of emergency was declared soon after the pumps inexplicably stopped working, and National Guard troops had already been called up.
In the White House, the president of the United States watched the television coverage in mute horror, knowing he could end it but terrified of the price his nation would pay. This was an Abraham Lincoln going-to-war type of decision. This was Truman deciding to drop the A-bomb. This was a decision he feared he hadn’t the courage to make.
There was no such hesitation in Juan Cabrillo’s mind. He knew his choice. Agree or disagree, whenever the American people went to war, he felt they did so to protect the idea of individual liberty, be it their own or another nation’s. This was no different.
Every member of the crew was involved in preparations, once the plan had been approved. Weapons were drawn from the arsenal and additional gear was gotten from stores. A truck to move all the equipment and personnel was rented from an agency in nearby Nice, and under the cover of darkness Gomez choppered in everything they couldn’t declare through customs and stashed it in an abandoned farmhouse.
This was the Corporation’s forte—coming up with a strategy and executing it quickly and flawlessly.
The assault team was in position fifteen minutes inside Cabrillo’s one-day schedule. Not knowing the number of guards Bahar had, he brought a force that was large by their standards and consisted of himself, Linda, Eddie, Linc, MacD, and Max, plus two other gundogs, Mike Trono and Jim O’Neill. Max wouldn’t join in the fray unless absolutely necessary.
Mike and Jim plus Linc, the team’s best sniper, were to act as a diversionary force. They had seen from the aerial shots Adams took that Bahar had constructed a concrete bunker over the mine’s entrance that looked like it could withstand the full load of a B-52’s bomb bay. Knowing Bahar would feel secure inside it, they were sure that once the diversion started he would take cover rather than flee. What he didn’t know was that the Corporation had a back entrance to his fortified bunker.
The three men were dropped off about a mile from where the mine’s access road connected with the main highway. They would have to hike through the woods to get into position, and each man carried nearly fifty pounds’ worth of ammunition for the .22 caliber mini Gatling. Like its big brothers on the Oregon, this weapon had six rotating barrels powered by a car battery. What made the system relatively man portable was the fact that the 30-grain hypersonic bullets were so light, they could pack in thousands of them. Linc’s job, with his Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, was to make sure none of the guards got close to the Gatling.
They would remain in constant radio contact with the rest of the team on secure—well, at least they used to be secure—radios with throat mics. Cabrillo doubted the quantum computer was listening in for nearby radio chatter, but they would keep usage to a minimum.
Cabrillo stayed on the main highway past the gated entrance to the Albatross Mine. The metal crosspieces were rust rimed and graffitied. The mine was down from the road, so they could not see it as they drove.
Another mile farther on was a cut in the trees that bordered the quiet road. The dirt track led into a pine forest, which opened to a meadow that had been cleared of trees decades earlier. Cabrillo took his team across the meadow and eased the truck between some pines on the far side. Behind them towered mountains that still retained a vestige of snow on their summits. They were about a mile from the river.
After so many hours cramped in the truck, Cabrillo felt his spine pop when he stepped to the ground. The air was some of the cleanest and clearest he’d ever breathed. The temperature hovered around sixty but would drop overnight.
Their hope was to find the abandoned entrance to the old Maginot Line fort by dusk and make their assault at first light.
Since all this land was part of a national park, there was the possibility of running into hikers, but it couldn’t be helped. But since they were dressed as hikers themselves, and their weapons were sheathed in tissue-thin bags that could be torn away in an instant, they would arouse little suspicion if Bahar had guards this far out.
They hiked through the forest in a twenty-yard string, Cabrillo on point and Eddie in the drag slot. The ground was littered with pine mold, and moving silently was next to impossible. Except for Lawless. Like he’d been a few weeks ago in Myanmar, the man was as stealthy as a cat.
In the distance they could hear the rain-swollen Arc River rushing past. Fed from glaciers higher in the mountains, it caused the air to chill as they descended toward its banks. And when they glimpsed it through the trees, the water was a turquoise color because of the sediment left in the ancient glacial ice.
Once they were close enough, the team maintained their spread and started marching toward the Albatross Mine, all the while keeping a lookout for the entrance to the nearly eighty-year-old subterranean fort. They had no idea what to expect, so they looked for anything man-made.
Cabrillo walked closest to the river, so he was the first to spot the two men. They were a hundred yards ahead, both standing on the riverbank and scanning their surroundings through binoculars. He ducked behind an overturned stump but wasn’t fast enough. One of the men saw him and tapped his partner on the shoulder. The two were dressed in typical outdoors gear, but there was nothing woodsy about their demeanor. Neither man was carrying a rifle, but that didn’t mean they weren’t armed.
They started jogging toward Cabrillo’s position. One of them plucked a black rectangular object from a pouch on his belt. Juan was certain it was a radio, and knew if this encounter was reported, the element of surprise would be blown. He also knew that if they got into a gun battle, the sound would echo up and down the valley for miles.
Juan set his rifle down on the ground and slowly got to his feet. He pretended to do up his fly, like the men had just caught him urinating in the woods. It was a ploy that usually made the other guy lower his guard. He could see now that it was definitely a radio. These weren’t innocent hikers but a random patrol of Bahar’s guards. Cabrillo cursed their bad luck because, no matter the outcome, their timetable was in ruins.
When they got closer, he could see both men had dark Semitic features with heavy brows and black hair. One of the men pointed at Cabrillo, then waved him off as if to say he should turn back.
“Is there a problem?” he asked in Spanish, not thinking that either of these guys was a native French speaker.
“You go,” one said, and pointed back up the valley.
“Allez,” the other grunted, his thick accent proving Cabrillo right.
“Hey, hon, what’s going on?” It was Linda Ross, coming down out of the woods and acting like a confused tourist.
Both guards turned to look at her. Cabrillo sprang. He chopped the wrist of the man with the radio, sending the compact unit skittering away, and in the same movement slugged the second guy in the jaw wi
th everything he had. Even as the man was dropping to the ground, his eyes showing nothing but white, his partner recovered enough to start reaching under his coat for a weapon.
Linda bounded at him in a flying leap. She hit him high in the shoulders and used her considerable momentum, and not so considerable weight, to drive him into dirt. She picked up a fist-sized rock from the water’s edge and bashed him across the temple.
In moments, both unconscious men were dosed with sedatives, to keep them out for twenty-four hours, and were gagged and bound at the wrists and ankles. Juan kept their radio but tossed their handguns into the river. The men were then wedged under a fallen tree and covered with brush until they were invisible.
“The mine is going to go on alert when they don’t report in,” Max said.
It was a reminder that Cabrillo didn’t need. He flexed his fingers to ease a little of the pain and stripped the cover off his REC7 assault rifle. It was clear that there weren’t any tourists wandering these woods. He had Eddie contact Linc and his team to tell them that the schedule was out the door and to be ready for anything. Lincoln acknowledged with a double click of his microphone.
They continued sweeping along the riverbank, searching for a bunker or an armored pillbox, but also on the alert for other guards. They’d gone another quarter mile when Max did an uncanny bird whistle. He was halfway up the slope. When Juan arrived, he saw what the French called a cloche, or bell.
It was an immobile armored turret, with machine-gun ports to give the men inside a wide field of fire. Unfortunately, it was cast in too-thick steel to be cut open, and the ports were too small to expand. It sat atop a rust-streaked and dirty concrete foundation that had been there so long, it seemed to blend in with the forest.
“Where there’s one,” Hanley said, “there’s bound to be more.”
And, sure enough, they found two more of the cloches before they hit the mother lode. The entrance to the bunker was two solid metal doors set in a concrete frame that projected out of the hillside like a portal into the earth. Above the doors were some faded stenciled numbers that had been this fortification’s designation. The remnants of the road that had once led to the bunker were barely noticeable, but, with a little imagination, it was possible to see it rising up and over the rim of the hill.
The doors themselves had been welded shut with a crude bead of solder that ran from top to bottom.
“Okay, everyone fan out and keep watch,” Cabrillo ordered. “Max, get to it.”
Hanley set his pack onto the ground at the base of the garage-sized doors and started rummaging about while the rest of the team took up surrounding positions to look for more roving patrols. Max molded the puttylike Hypertherm along the weld, making sure to use just enough to melt the solder away. He worked quickly, and within just a couple of minutes he was set and had a detonator in place.
“Ready,” he radioed.
“Push out the perimeter and give me a sit rep,” Juan ordered.
The smoke generated by the chemical reaction would be a dead giveaway, so Cabrillo needed to know it was clear all around them. It took a quarter hour, but he felt relieved that they were alone out here.
When the last all clear came in, he ordered Max to burn the door.
With a sizzling hiss and a glare like looking into the sun, the Hypertherm ate into the weld so that molten metal ran down in dribs and drabs that quickly turned into a fiery torrent. Acrid white smoke as thick as cotton candy billowed over the bunker’s entrance, but with the wind blowing up the valley it was being carried away from the Albatross Mine, which was another mile downstream. When it was over, the seam glowed cherry red.
Max was ready for this and sprayed the seam with liquid nitrogen from the Oregon’s engine room that he had in a vacuum flask. The metal was still hot, but with a pair of thick welder’s gloves he could safely touch it. The right-hand door squealed mercilessly as he heaved it open, and a damp chill oozed out of the ground within. Beyond was a white concrete wall and inky darkness.
“We’re in,” he informed the others.
The rest of the team came in at a jog. Cabrillo was the last to arrive.
“Good job.”
“Was there ever a doubt?” Max held up his meaty hands for the others to admire. “Nothing made by man can resist these babies.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”
Just before Juan stepped over the threshold, the guard’s radio squawked and then a voice came through en clair. “Malik, anything to report?” someone asked in Arabic.
Cabrillo pushed the transmit button. “Nothing.”
“Why did you miss your scheduled call in?”
“My stomach is not well,” Juan ad-libbed.
“See the doctor when your shift ends in an hour.”
“I will. Out.” He tossed the radio aside. “We’ve got one hour before they know we’re here. Let’s put it to good use. Linc, you with me?”
“Go ahead.”
“Give it sixty minutes and light ’em up.”
“Roger that.”
He could only hope they had gained access to the mine itself by then or this was all for nothing. And then there was the second part of this operation, the one MacD had told him about in private after returning from Monte Carlo. It was something that went beyond the pale, but its rewards boggled the imagination. He cursed the name Overholt, and led his people inside.
26
THEY STRAPPED ON HALOGEN HEADLAMPS AS SOON AS THEY moved just a few feet from the entrance, which they managed to close partway. The interior of the fortress was stark and claustrophobic, with unadorned concrete walls, ceiling, and floor. It was clear, after going only a few feet, that the facility had been stripped bare, probably by the occupying German army during the war. They passed countless rooms whose function they could only guess at and spotted ladders that rose up into the cloche bunkers they’d seen earlier.
“Man, this place is a nine-point-nine on the spook-o-meter,” MacD said, peering into what had once been a restroom, if the drains on the floor were any indication. All the plumbing fixtures were long gone.
Cabrillo guided them through a bewildering maze of rooms, passageways, and dead ends. He estimated that this one fort probably housed more than a hundred men, recalling that tens of thousands had been deployed along the Maginot Line, and that its construction nearly bankrupted the country.
At the last dead end they hit, a trapdoor had been built into the floor. Above it were steel brackets bolted to the ceiling that had once held a hoist of some kind. Cabrillo heaved back on the metal doors to reveal a square shaft that dropped deeper underground. He spat, and it took his spittle several seconds to hit the bottom.
“That’s disgusting,” Linda admonished.
“Ugly but effective,” he countered. “About forty feet.”
They quickly rigged a climbing rope to the old brackets. Because of the extra weight in his pack, Juan rigged a harness to make the going a little easier. He then slung his rifle over his shoulder, took a firm grip on the line, and stepped out into space. Though healed, his collarbone reminded him, as he went down hand over hand, that it had been broken in the not-so-distant past. As he dangled in space, continuing his descent, his headlamp flashed across the featureless walls. He thought that this had been a munitions hoist, back in the day, and that there must be more aboveground features to this complex that he and his team had missed.
He touched bottom and called up for the next person. Max was red-faced and puffing by the time he joined Cabrillo on this lower level.
“You need to exercise more,” Juan said, and patted Hanley’s ample but rock-hard belly.
“Or rappel less.”
Once they reassembled, they continued to look for a way into the Albatross Mine. They had to check every door and examine all the walls for signs of an entrance. When they came to an area where the ceiling had collapsed, they wasted twenty minutes moving chunks of concrete and debris to clear a passage. Eddie’s watch start
ed beeping just after they’d gotten through.
“One minute,” he announced, meaning that in sixty seconds Linc, Mike, and Jim would start the diversion.
Cabrillo felt his frustration level spike. They were wasting time and the only chance they were going to get. If they failed, Eric Stone had orders to give the mine’s location to Langston and pray a nuclear response would come quickly enough that the retaliatory damage Bahar unleashed was manageable.
WATCHING THE MINE through his rifle’s scope, Linc saw no movement save an occasional dust cloud rising up with the passing wind. The buildings looked forlorn and abandoned except for the newly built bunker at the base of the hoist tower. He focused in on what had been an administrative building. He upped the power and concentrated on a corner window.
There! A face had appeared at the corner of the sill as a guard shifted position. He radioed his discovery to Mike and Jim, who had found cover behind an earthen berm that was in an open area where Linc could cover them.
“Thirty seconds,” Mike called back.
Linc kept his attention on the window, knowing the guy would look, once his boys opened up with the mini Gatling.
It sounded more like a power tool than a weapon. The Gatling sprayed a solid jet of tiny bullets that raked the ground, kicking up dirt and small rocks and peppering the buildings like microhail. So many rounds were pouring into the facility, it looked like it was under attack by a hundred soldiers. And that had been the idea. Induce as much panic as possible as quickly as possible.
Linc’s instincts had been spot-on. As soon as the Gatling started chewing apart the mine, the guard at the window popped up to see what the commotion was. Linc eased the trigger and took the heavy recoil on his massive shoulder. The huge bullet ended the guard’s life in a spray of blood.
A second guard who’d been in the room raised his rifle over the sill and looked to be triggering off an entire clip. Lincoln adjusted his aim downward and fired again. The shot passed through the building’s metal cladding and silenced the gunner.