He arbitrarily put their value at fifty million dollars and asked MacD to relay his offer to Juan and let him decide.
Cabrillo would have done it for free, but the extra money wouldn’t hurt.
“Thirty minutes, Max,” Juan said. “Not a second more. Under no circumstances are you to wait for us.”
Max looked him in the eye and nodded grimly. “Aye.”
The pair of them took off at a jog, leaving the others to finish their work. This time they went for the personnel elevator located a short distance from the ore lift, figuring they would have restored it to working order. Cabrillo hit the call button, and a mechanical clank echoed down the shaft. A moment later the empty car arrived. It was more cage than car. Even the floor was open mesh that sagged a little when they stepped onto it.
“That’s not confidence-inducing,” Juan remarked, and hit the button for level 23, hoping Mark Murphy hadn’t been showing off.
They shut off their headlamps as the cage sank into more blackness. Down they went, the car rattling and squeaking like the aged piece of machinery it was. Two minutes into their rapid descent, MacD swatted Cabrillo’s arm.
“Look down.”
There was a faint jaundiced glow emanating from deeper below them. It had to be their target level. Bahar was down here, just like they’d anticpated. The only problem was that Cabrillo had planned to already have the crystals by this time. The chance encounter with the patrol and the delay in finding the mine’s entrance had thrown his timetable onto its head.
“Ready?” Cabrillo asked.
“Sir, Ah was born ready.”
The cage slowed as it neared the station. There was no hiding place inside, so they crouched low to the floor, both holding their assault rifles at the ready. It came to a spongy stop because the long cable stretched and rebounded before settling.
On this level, the elevator antechamber was a rectangular room about twenty feet on a side, with several exit points. In the distance, and out of sight, came the throb of a generator that was powering a single yellow construction light off in one corner.
No one approached, so Juan reached up to unlatch the safety gate and swung it outward. He peered around the edge. Nobody, but an AK was leaning against a wall as if someone had stepped away momentarily. He stood, fingering his rifle.
The generator made just enough noise to mask footfalls, so they both got out of the elevator and up against a wall near one of the openings that gave access to the rest of the mine. Juan was about to look around when a man walked in. He was the sentry who should have been standing by the elevator. He spotted Cabrillo and turned away before Juan could grab him. The guy took off in a dead sprint, fueled by adrenaline and fear.
MacD ran after him, shrinking the distance with each pace. Like a defensive back chasing down the ballcarrier, he moved with single-minded determination. Even missing a limb, Juan considered himself quick, but he was nothing like the display he was seeing.
There were just enough lights strung about for him to watch as he ran after the two. The guard must have sensed Lawless closing in because he suddenly stopped and dropped to the ground, forcing MacD to hurtle over him. Cabrillo knew what was coming and drew himself to a stop. He raised his rifle as the other guy went for the gun he’d had holstered on his hip.
Lawless still hadn’t fully regained his balance and was now facing away from the quarry he’d leapt over. The guy cleared his pistol and was bringing it up when Juan smacked his rifle to his shoulder and drew a bead through the murky shadows. A hesitation would mean MacD’s life, but a miss would most likely hit him.
The REC7 cracked like a whip, and the would-be shooter took the round through his right shoulder. The bullet penetrated his lung and exited just below his nipple. The kinetic force drove him flat to the rocky ground, where he lay still.
“Ah’m obliged,” Lawless called out when he realized what had happened behind him. “But our element of surprise is, as they say, blown.”
Cabrillo made a fast decision. “Screw the money. Let’s get out of here.”
They turned back toward the elevator to beat a fast retreat. Another figure stood in the entryway, a weapon held low at his waist. Cabrillo shoved Lawless and dove as the gun opened up, flickering tongues of flame erupting from its barrel. The bullets sprayed wild, and neither man was hit, but the attack kept them pinned while reinforcements were called up.
Crawling furiously, the two men sought cover behind one of the house-sized support columns. Their only advantage—surprise—was gone, and the defenders knew this subterranean world better than Juan and MacD, who’d only had a feverish examination of the schematic diagram.
To make matters worse, Juan spotted a low-light closed-circuit camera mounted atop a conveyor-belt support. The yard-wide belt ran chest high and vanished into the next room. He doubted this was the only camera, meaning Bahar and Smith had eyes everywhere. It began to pan as it searched for them. Disabling the camera would be the same as being spotted by it, so the two men shuffled over on their backsides until they were directly below it.
“Ideas?” MacD asked while bullets slammed into the stone just feet from their heads.
“All these rooms link together in a large circle. Our best bet is to stay ahead of them and hope we can buy ourselves enough time at the end to snag the elevator.”
“They’ll see us coming,” MacD pointed out.
“Take out the cameras.”
Cabrillo rolled around the corner on his belly to lay down cover fire before springing to his feet and taking off in the opposite direction. Wherever he could, he smashed the lightbulbs strung along the ceiling, but there were really too many of them to completely darken the mine. It was the cameras that were the priority. He could only hope that their being disabled wasn’t showing up on the security monitors in any particular sequence.
Thick walls of solid salt separated the enormous rooms. The portals between them were large enough so that heavy mining equipment could be driven through alongside the big conveyor belt. At each, they paused momentarily to see if an ambush had been laid for them. They also had to watch their backs because at least three guards were in hot pursuit.
Looking through one of the portals into the next room, Cabrillo saw that the miners had left a tracked excavator just inside. The machine had a thick cable spool on its back bumper to feed it electricity and a hydraulic drum on the front that could move up and down as its carbide teeth tore into the rock-salt face. He grabbed MacD and took up a position behind it.
“We need all three,” he said, and they waited.
Moments later two gunmen wearing street clothes entered the room. Both eyed the excavator warily. One stayed by the gaping opening, covering his partner, as the other cautiously approached. Cabrillo crouched lower, praying the third pursuer showed himself before this guy got much closer.
The gunman moved around in a wide arc, his AK held high on his shoulder. It was a stance he’d seen American Special Forces adopt, but this firing position worked best with the lighter-caliber weapons those soldiers used.
The third gunman’s shadow oozed into the room as he made a slow approach. It was close enough. Juan and MacD popped up and fired. The closest gunman got off one shot, but the recoil made his rifle slip up and over his shoulder. MacD put him down with a three-round burst while Cabrillo stitched his covering partner across the chest. The third shooter tried to run, but Juan came around the mining machine, took aim, and shot him in the back. He had no qualms about gunning down a coward like that.
What concerned him now was the fourteen minutes gone from their half-hour deadline and the fact that they were nowhere near securing the crystals.
A fourth gunman he hadn’t seen suddenly opened fire from across the echoing room, blowing shards of salt off the wall to Cabrillo’s left. Bits got into his eyes as he ducked for cover, stinging them mercilessly. The need to pack in so many explosives meant neither of them had bothered with a canteen, so he had no water to flush them
out.
With MacD covering him, Juan wasted precious moments wiping at his eyes in order to see again.
Lawless plucked his lone grenade, pulled the pin, and heaved it like a major-league pitcher. The deadly orb skittered along the ground after completing its flat arc and came to rest just around the corner from where the guard had taken cover. He couldn’t have placed it any better. He grabbed Juan’s arm to guide him like a blind man as the grenade exploded. The salt column was just crumbly enough for the explosives to blow a chunk out of the pillar’s corner and riddle the guard with shrapnel.
Tears streaming down his cheeks but his vision steadily improving, Cabrillo continued on through the underground labyrinth with Lawless at his side. They hit the ambush moments later.
They’d just passed on to another room when they came under scathing autofire from at least six rifles. The only way they’d gotten out of it unscathed was that one of the shooters fired at their shadow before they’d fully exposed themselves. The thick wall absorbed dozens of rounds as the gunmen poured on the fire.
“They’re going to pin us here while more men come around from behind,” Juan panted, his heart pounding in his chest.
He looked around. Their rear and flanks were fully exposed.
MacD fired a few blind rounds to let the terrorists know they’d survived the trap.
Cabrillo tossed his rifle up onto the conveyor belt and used its support girder to hoist himself after it. The belt itself was made of wire mesh and industrial rubber. When the mine had been shuttered, the salt that was already on its way out from the working faces had been left on it in a continuous pile of rubble.
Lawless saw what he was doing and climbed aboard alongside him.
“We need to be quick and silent,” Juan warned.
He fired off another burst from his REC7, which drew a thunderous fusillade. It was when the gunmen were hosing everything in sight that the pair made a desperate scramble along the salt piled on top of the conveyor belt. It was treacherous going, and any mistake would likely kick salt over the edge, giving away their position and inviting certain death.
Unseen, they moved like rats scurrying just above where the gunmen sought cover behind some more abandoned mining equipment. The rate of fire eventually slowed, but the echoes continued to clamor through the room, effectively deafening everyone.
Slithering and crawling, never loosening their grips on their rifles, Cabrillo and Lawless passed unseen through the enemy line. One of the gunmen questioned loudly in Arabic about why the Americans had stopped firing back.
“Because they lack courage,” another answered, and touched off another three-round burst.
“Silence!”
Juan recognized John Smith’s voice.
As badly as he wanted to confront Smith, there were too many men to engage, even from above, and because the rubberized belt provided little protection the pair continued to slink away. Only when they had gone well beyond visual range did Cabrillo roll over the conveyor’s edge and drop to the ground. He crouched under the mechanism.
“Good call,” MacD said. “How much time do we have?”
“Thirty seconds, give or take. Come on.”
They took off running again. Then they felt it. The earth barely moved. There was too much solid rock between them and the blast to dramatically shake the ground. It was more like a gentle bump, and then came a quick puff of air as the explosion sent shock waves through every open cavity and chamber. Now it really was a race against time.
27
HUNDREDS OF FEET ABOVE THEM, THE EXPLOSIVES HAD detonated in the confined room that had undercut the river bottom. The shattering blast fractured the already crumbling ceiling, gouging out a fifty-foot plug of salt that crashed to the floor in clouds of choking white dust. Max and the others had felt it where they waited at the entrance to the Maginot Line fortress and could only hope that MacD and Juan were racing for them already.
The thin layer of shale was all that remained between the river and the mine, a layer that had helped prevent the mine from flooding years ago. But without the underpinning of salt, the layer cracked under the weight of the water flowing above it. At first it was just a thin spray that found its way into the mine, but the crack soon widened as the water sought a fresh outlet. The spray turned into a stream, before the entire ceiling collapsed and the river poured in as a roaring cascade that made the opening larger still as it gushed through.
In seconds, nearly every acre-foot of the Arc River was being sucked into the earth as if a drain had been pulled. It was an otherworldly scene, almost biblical in its destructive might. Just a few rivulets managed to pass by the open maw, and it would remain like this until the entire mine flooded.
Moments after the explosion, the tumbling water found the two main shafts leading into the depths and began plunging downward in near-solid columns. Mercer hadn’t included calculations of how fast the mine would become inundated, but it appeared it would take far less time than anyone believed possible, and Cabrillo and Lawless were on the first level above the already flooded sections.
The explosion didn’t cause Juan’s and MacD’s steps to falter, as they kept running. They made it through two more rooms and were just two away from reaching the elevators when they came up short. Off in a distant corner was a brightly lit area that glowed cheerily. They were too far away to see details, but it was an incongruity that gave them both pause.
They crept closer, hugging the walls so as not to give themselves away. The area was partially partitioned off as if to hide the fact that it was deep underground, and through an opening they could see furniture had been brought from the surface so that Gunawan Bahar would be as comfortable as possible in his lair. No one was about at the moment, and the two men moved hastily away and soon found another incongruity. It was a steel box twice the size of a shipping container. It was too large to have been brought down the elevator, so Bahar must have had it constructed there.
Its size was the only thing comparable to a container, for this thing had smooth stainless steel sides and the sleek look of a high-tech machine. Dozens of cables snaked out of it like tentacles. These were power and data feeds, with multiple redundancies built in.
A glass vestibule protruded off one side, and within they could see the white coveralls commonly called bunny suits used in clean environments. There were pegs for four of them, but only three dangled like deflated balloons.
“Bahar?” Lawless asked.
“Doubtlessly,” Cabrillo replied, and changed out his partially empty magazine for a fresh one.
He opened the door and was hit by a gust of air from the overpressurized space. This was another measure to keep contaminants away from the quantum computer. He glanced at MacD, to sync up their timing, and spun the doorknob at the same time, throwing his full weight against it. He went low while Lawless covered overtop of him. They needn’t have bothered because this room was one more layer of protection, a second empty vestibule, with degaussing mats on the floor.
They repeated the maneuver on the final door and burst into a large open space that hummed with electronics. This was Murph’s and Stoney’s dreamworld. The computer and its peripherals dominated the room, an eerie black presence that somehow seemed alive. Juan could feel its raw power, and the hairs on his arms came erect.
“Are they dead?” an unseen Bahar asked, assuming it was Smith/ Mohammad coming back with a report.
“No,” a woman’s voice replied from speakers mounted in the ceiling. “They are here. Welcome, Chairman Cabrillo. I’ve been monitoring your progress.”
Juan felt a sudden chill as he realized he was being addressed by a computer.
Gunawan Bahar appeared from around the computer core and stared goggle-eyed at the two armed men confronting him. He looked ridiculous with only his face showing under the hood of the clean suit. “No,” he said. “It’s impossible. Nothing can breach the surface bunker.”
“Probably right,” Juan agreed with a lit
tle smile. “We never tried. Move over there.”
The computer spoke again. “My predecessor, a machine called the Oracle, calculated that you and the Corporation would not be paralyzed into inaction by Mr. Bahar’s plan. I believed you would, and I think convention dictates that I owe you an apology.”
“Don’t worry about it. I had my doubts too.”
“Chairman, may I ask a question?” the computer asked politely.
“Ahh, sure.”
“What do you intend to do to me?”
“Sorry, but I’m taking those crystals.”
“I expected as much. May I make an alternate suggestion?”
“Why not,” Juan said, feeling strange holding a conversation with a machine.
“Take the crystals, but I believe it is in your best interest to destroy them.”
“Come again?”
“Humanity is not ready to wield the kind of power I represent, as demonstrated by the actions of Mr. Bahar.”
“We’re not all like him,” Juan countered.
“True, but you can’t imagine my capabilities, and I believe such abilities prove corrupting.”
“So, you really can take over the world?”
“In a manner, yes.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Eventually I would be destroyed by a cruise missile from a ballistic submarine, the only computer systems that I haven’t been able to breach, but mostly because desire is another human trait. I have no wish to take over the world, but my limited time has taught me others are more than willing.”
“Juan, we’ve got to go,” MacD urged.
“Can you undo everything you’ve done?” Juan asked the machine.
“Of course. And I’ve been given additional orders since Mr. Bahar’s arrival in the mine. Two nuclear reactors, in California and Pennsylvania, are in the beginning phase of meltdown.”
“Please, restore all control that you’ve taken.”
“I am sorry, but I only recognize commands from Gunawan Bahar.”
The Jungle of-8 Page 34
