The Jungle of-8

by Clive Cussler

  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 with 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 TH
EY 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 started 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.

  More guards were showing themselves from cover positions all over the complex—from behind piles of dirt and rusted-out equipment and from the buildings themselves. Three men armed with AKs launched themselves out of a small toolshed in a suicidal charge across open ground. They had two hundred yards to cover to reach Jim and Mike.

  Linc put one down before the fire team turned the Gatling loose on them. They shook and jittered as they were riddled with more than a hundred rounds in under five seconds. What was left of them soon began to soak into the dusty ground.

  A black van shot out of what had been a mechanics’ garage and raced for the bunker. Mike tried to tear into it with the Gatling, but the little .22 caliber rounds pinged off its armored hide and couldn’t puncture the run-flat tires. Linc had time to put three rounds into it before it disappeared around the back of the bunker, but to no effect.

  “Chairman, the rooster is in the henhouse,” he radioed on the off chance his voice would reach into the underground fortress.

  He swept the facility with his scope, hunting for targets. One guerrilla had been hidden on the roof of a salt-storage shed, and he made his presence known when he popped up and fired off an RPG. He was gone before Linc could take a shot. The missile left a trail of exhaust like a slash across the sky as it flew errantly in the general direction of the Corporation’s machine-gun nest. The impact blew a wad of earth into the air, but little else.

  Linc kept his gun trained on the roof, counting the seconds it would take to reload the rocket launcher.

  Mike Trono beat him to the punch and had anticipated the next attack flawlessly. A millisecond before the terrorist raised himself, he unleashed a fresh burst from the mini Gatling. The rocketeer stood up in the stream of fire and was torn apart by the two-second burst. His body sagged over the edge of the roof a moment before gravity did its job and he plunged silently to the ground.

  Lincoln wiped his face and continued his scan, but he was pretty sure the fight was out of these guys. That was confirmed a moment later when a white rag tied to the end of a shovel handle appeared at the side entrance to the garage. Two men stepped out into the open, one waving the flag, the other holding his hands so far over his head he looked to be walking on his tiptoes.

  There was no way any of the team was going to break cover, so after about two minutes the two unarmed men made a show of lying down on the ground with their fingers laced over the back of their heads. It was a position Linc recalled from the Gulf War when he’d had two dozen armed men throw down their weapons and personally surrender to him.

  He hoped it was going so well underground.

  * * *

  THEY FINALLY CAUGHT a break ten minutes after the diversion was supposed to start. MacD spotted footprints on the dusty floor, and, assuming Mercer was the last person in this place, they followed them to a crude hole cut into the wall in an out-of-the-way storage room. Boards had been laid across the door-sized hole, but with a couple kicks they splintered inward, and the team found themselves inside the Albatross Mine.

  The space had an eight-foot ceiling, and they were tucked into a corner behind one of the thick support columns left behind in the living rock. All around them were jagged façades of dirty-looking salt. From the map they had all memorized, they knew exactly where they were and the route to their destination.

  It took a few minutes to cross from this room to the next, and then on through a
third, until they reached the ore elevator shaft. An orange safety barrier was down over the near-bottomless borehole. Next to it was another metal door that led to a staircase that zigzagged all the way to the lowest level. Fortunately, they had to descend only two levels before reaching the one where the miners had accidentally dug too close to the river bottom.

  They reached the side branch of the mine fifteen minutes later. This was where Mercer had indicated they had the best chance of succeeding. All of them gratefully dropped their packs to the ground. Each of them had been lugging as much high explosive as they could carry. The mining engineer had also calculated the amount necessary.

  This antechamber, unlike the rest of the mine, was a humanscaled room. The ceiling was dangerously fractured, and there was standing water in some of the irregularities in the floor. Eddie, who had the stamina of a marathon runner, got to work with a cordless drill with a long diamond-tipped bit. Max and Linda set about organizing the explosives and rigging them to blow when they had enough holes bored into the rock face.

  As much as Cabrillo wanted to stay and help his team and then make a quick exit back up to the sunshine, he looked over to MacD. “You sure you want in on this?”

  “Think of it as my final exam at the end of my probationary period.”

  Juan nodded. “All right. We pull off this little caper, and you’re a full-fledged member of the Corporation.”

  “So that means Ah get a share of the bonus?” the laid-back Louisianan asked.

  “Yup.”

  “Then let’s saddle up.”

  It was during the chopper flight to Pensacola that Langston Overholt got the idea that it might be worth the effort to see if they could steal the crystals from the quantum computer. As was his nature, he took the long view of any situation and thought about what would happen after Bahar got shut down. Having such a powerful machine would give the United States a strategic advantage over her enemies. And while he had no inkling how the machine was built, knowing the crystals’ importance made their recovery paramount. He figured some scientist out there would know what to do with them.