Hot Ice

by Cherry Adair

  Then, how in the bloody hell to cross the uncovered prop blades without getting sucked in and chopped to pieces before they were swept upward on the airstream?

  Only one way to find out . . .

  Coetzee indicated that he’d go first for recon. Hunt nodded.

  The smaller man flung himself from the door opening and was immediately caught by the blast of air and swept upward in a dizzying spin. He managed to spread his arms and legs wide. But it was impossible for him to control his movements enough to stabilize himself. He tumbled and spun, slamming into the walls again and again with bruising force.

  Taylor came alongside Hunt, slipping her arm about his waist as she too watched. Hunt would’ve given his left nut to have her back in Zurich right now.

  Hell, both nuts.

  High above them, Coetzee’s face was bleeding. He’d gone nose-first into a jagged outcropping of limestone and couldn’t even wipe the blood from his eyes because the wind wouldn’t allow that kind of finite movement. He tried to indicate which way he was going, but then the wind would spin him off in another direction.

  He braced, then hit the opposite wall with both feet, clinging to a projection of rocks, and pulled himself inside a small cave. He flung himself back into the wind tunnel moments later.

  No go.

  He managed a pretty decent controlled loop, followed by a roll. And gave a thumbs-up as he angled toward one of the larger openings.

  Hunt knew they had to speed things up or they’d be here for a month. The whole team should be up there inspecting those holes to see which was viable. The only problem was, the wind didn’t show any sign of slowing down. Once in there, it would be practically impossible—no, not practically, plain impossible—to get back down to this doorway. And he was damned if Taylor would be a guinea pig.

  Hunt indicated he’d go next. Jesus. He didn’t want to leave her, but if he could find the way through this nightmare, he could make her safer. And speed this along. Because he knew in his gut that she wouldn’t be safe until they had finished the op—and preferably Morales—and were out of Africa.

  Tate grabbed his arm and shook his head. He’d try. Not waiting for an answer, he launched himself after Coetzee. The two men spun and circled, carried by the capricious wind, but eventually found some sort of rhythm and managed to inspect a dozen wall openings between them.

  Fisk kept track of their painful communications on his PDA. Every time one of the men was flung against the walls in an ungainly heap, Taylor’s fingers tightened against Hunt’s side.

  It took over an hour, but eventually Tate managed to crawl into one of the last four unexplored holes about twenty feet above the spinning blades. He disappeared.

  They watched as Coetzee made it to yet another opening, then launched himself off the rim of the hole when he couldn’t penetrate it more than a couple of feet.

  Two to go.

  Tate was still not back. A good sign? Hunt hoped to hell.

  Coetzee tumbled and spun, then belly flying, aimed for a large opening above where Tate had disappeared ten minutes before. He’d figured out how to grab the edge of an opening, and used sheer brute force and determination to pull himself into it, or at least close enough to—

  The deafening silence was profound as the engine shut off without warning.

  The quiet throbbed in Hunt’s ears as he watched helplessly as Coetzee, arms and legs flailing uselessly, dropped. He tried—the poor bastard—to straighten himself out, but it was such a short drop, he wasn’t able to control the terminal velocity of the fall. He plummeted a hundred plus feet straight down, like a rock through the still air at 120 mph.

  Viljoen started forward. Hunt slammed his arm across the man’s chest without looking at him. “No.” There was nothing they could do.

  The diesel engine started up again with a deep-throated, full-throttled roar.

  Hunt grabbed Taylor around the neck and yanked her head against his chest, turning her away a second before Coetzee was sucked into the fast-moving propeller. The whole thing took seconds.

  But just before Taylor’s nose was pressed against Hunt’s chest, she caught the flash of red and squeezed her eyes shut. It didn’t matter that she’d seen nothing. It didn’t matter that all she’d heard was the earsplitting shriek of those engines. Behind her closed lids she saw Coetzee being minced and diced and flung—everywhere. And God. She imagined the sounds. Screams. Bones grinding. She swallowed bile and wrapped both arms around Hunt, burying her face against his chest, sick to her stomach.

  She stayed that way, too appalled to lift her face, for a good five minutes. Until, in fact, there was once again a deep, throbbing silence. Then she lifted her head and took a step back, averting her gaze from beyond the doorway.

  “I think I’ve figured—” there wasn’t a drop of spit in her mouth. She tried again. “Ah . . . figured out how the timing works.” Her voice was a hoarse croak as out of the corner of her eye she saw a slow movement . . . something . . .

  Sliding down the blood-splattered titanium door was a—a gory lump of— Oh, God. Hunt had a speck of what she presumed was Coetzee’s blood on his forehead. She couldn’t stand seeing blood on him. Even if it wasn’t his own. She reached up and wiped it off, then scrubbed her hand down the slick material covering her leg.

  The engine started again. She checked her stopwatch, heart pounding. Yes!

  Hunt communicated with his men. They all looked grim. Tate wasn’t back yet, Coetzee was dead. The damn engine was going a mile a minute, determined to break their eardrums. But she had an idea.

  The next time the engine stopped as abruptly as it had started, Taylor was ninety-nine percent sure.

  A man yelled.

  They all looked up.

  Tate.

  “This is the one,” he yelled from three stories above them.

  Hunt talked into his lip mic. “How far in does it—”

  Taylor looked at her wrist, put her hand out to stop him from talking. She put up three fingers.

  Two . . .

  One . . .

  Now. The engine started up again. The noise, in spite of the earplugs, was bone-rattling.

  Fisk started forward, ready to launch himself inside. Taylor grabbed his arm, shook her head. Held up her palm. Wait.

  He glanced from her to Hunt.

  Hunt indicated he should do as Taylor said.

  She kept her attention on her stopwatch, counting off the minutes.

  And waited. And waited. Heart pounding with anticipation . . .

  And waited . . .

  Off. Yes! Fisk gave her a high five and she grinned.

  “Tell me that wasn’t a wild guess,” Hunt demanded into the throbbing silence as he turned to look at her. “Or have you really figured out this son of a bitch?”

  “I think it’s a simple math equation,” she told him excitedly. “The first time the engine was on for about ten minutes. I wasn’t timing it, but I’m guessing. Let’s say it was ten minutes. Subtract three—on for seven seconds, then add one—on for eight minutes, then subtract one—off for a second. Alternating seconds and minutes. I think it represents Morales’s birth date: 1/31/1942.”

  “And you know Morales birth date . . . why?”

  “It’s my job to know things about the people I’m going to rob,” she told him impatiently. “They use that sort of information for safe combinations. Never mind that. What do you think?”

  The demon engine fired up again. She looked at her stopwatch again, then held up five fingers. Four. Three. Two. One.

  Go.

  Fisk launched himself through the door and into the vertical wind tunnel. He was immediately sucked up to slam into the ceiling with bone-jangling force. Taylor watched him flail, holding her breath. If the damn thing stopped again . . . But no.

  Thank God. Fisk made it over to Tate, who grabbed his wrist and pulled him inside the opening with more speed than finesse.

  Viljoen took a running start and powered off next. />
  Hunt tapped Bishop on the shoulder to get his attention, then signed for him to take Taylor and go back to the surface.

  Teeth aching from the incredible noise, she brushed her fingers across Hunt’s tense jaw until he turned his head to glare at her. Knowing he could read her lips, she said, she thought quite reasonably, “Morales needs me to get in. He’ll only bring me right back.”

  Without expression, Hunt motioned Bishop through the door after the others.

  And then there were two.

  Their eyes locked. Hunt took her arm and folded back the thin black fabric covering her wrist. Taylor realized that while the fabric was matte, it had ingeniously been manufactured to deter anyone grabbing hold of the wearer.

  Hunt clamped his fingers tightly over her wrist. Using her other hand, she turned back the hem of his sleeve, then curved her hand, holding on to his much thicker wrist in return. Her fingers turned white from the pressure.

  She held her breath. Listening. Was the engine slowing? Did it sound any different now than it had a second ago? Five minutes ago? A lifetime and Coetzee ago?

  Did she have the wrong birth date for Morales? Were her calculations off? Would worrying about her endanger Hunt?

  “Together,” they mouthed at the same time, then jumped into the wind.

  Forty-four

  The force of the wind jerked Taylor ass over teakettle in the opposite direction, almost wrenching Hunt’s arm from the socket. He held on. Nothing was going to make him release her.

  Having watched the others and done thousands of hours of flat-flying and 3-D training in similar environments himself, the sheer ferocity of the wind tunnel didn’t surprise him. The force of the wind shot them up to the ceiling in seconds with stunning, breath-stealing force.

  Hunt did his best to cushion her strike. But it was impossible to position himself. His shoulder hit the ceiling first, then his arm. He made a grab for her, managed to catch her elbow, but she still hit the solid rock hard with wide eyes and a loud oomph. Ah, hell . . .

  He managed to haul her closer to his own body and get her attention, indicating how to do a standard “box man” position—belly down. The more surface they presented to the updraft, the better chance they had of maneuverability. She got it right away. Thank God she was fit and athletic. It was hard even for him to sustain the belly-down position consistently because of the extremely strong wind currents buffeting their bodies.

  He glanced down and saw both Tate and Bishop leaning out of the cave to catch them on the fly. He angled his body, head down now, using every means in his power to navigate the current across the vast open space and reach his men.

  As soon as Taylor saw how he angled his body, she tried to follow suit. It wasn’t easy. He swung her by her wrist, using all his strength to at least get her flying in the right direction. Her momentum pulled him along after her.

  Far beneath them, the propeller blades rotated in a deadly silver blur. How soon . . . ?

  He managed to get them closer to the cave. There was no ledge, nothing to grab hold of as they passed. Tate lunged halfway out of the cave, the idiot, and made a futile grab for Taylor’s other arm. He missed.

  Bloody hell.

  The force of the wind took them up. Twisting in the wind. Up. And up. They needed to go down and sideways about nine feet. Hunt hit again, this time protecting Taylor by using his forearm to prevent them from smacking into the ceiling. He pushed off with his shoulder. They went careening into the side wall. Taylor stuck out her foot, which saved her from the body slam, but sent them in the wrong direction immediately.

  Wrong direction and upside down.

  How long did they have? Hunt wondered. How fucking bloody long? He straightened them out, maneuvered in the right direction. Slow. Systematic. Patient.

  Had the tone of the blades changed?

  No, bloody hell, they had not.

  A few more feet. There! He grabbed Tate’s forearm, then pulled Taylor with him as they docked with Tate and Fisk’s assistance.

  “Oh, Lord. That was amazing,” Taylor shouted with sheer unadulterated glee in her voice as she lay flat on her back, panting. She sat up smiling, then grimaced, putting a hand to her forehead and closing her eyes. “Ew. Vertigo.”

  “Fix on a point until it settles,” Hunt told her, knowing the feeling. He rose to his feet, and his head brushed the roof of the tube they were in. “What do we have?” he asked Tate, glancing down to make sure Taylor was coping with the dizziness. She looked okay, and he held out his hand to pull her to her feet.

  “The codes to Level Three,” Tate reminded him. “And I can’t tell you how happy that makes us.”

  Whatever the good news was, Hunt welcomed it. It meant they’d get through faster. “Walk and talk,” he told the others. “Distance?”

  “Two point six miles,” Fisk offered.

  “ ‘Eternal rain and putrid waters,’ I believe,” Hunt mused. “The gluttons will be punished by Cerebus.”

  “Who, or what, is Cerebus?” Taylor demanded beside him.

  “A canine monster with three heads and red eyes who tears at the damned.”

  She shuddered, “Geez, that’s creepy. I’m guessing we’re the damned, huh?”

  “Not this time,” Viljoen told her. “We can circumvent this level. But you can get a look at a damned effective three-pronged laser that could slice right through you in about thirty seconds flat. Brace yourselves for the smell. It’s rank. I’m afraid we’ll have to endure the ‘putrid, stinking mud’ for the duration.”

  “While the entertainment level is high,” Taylor said somewhat ironically “there’s no way Morales flies up here like a bat. How does he get in?”

  “I suspect he has some sort of remote-control device to turn off the toys once the codes get him through each level,” Hunt said almost absently.

  It wasn’t just a case of a single man getting past that turbojet prop. How had Morales gotten things inside the mine? Hunt wondered. Where was there a tunnel wide enough, high enough, to transport all the things Morales had been stockpiling? He knew Morales hadn’t personally carried any of the crates down here.

  They were missing a detail, because somewhere down here there was a form of transportation. An elevator. A narrow-gauge railway track. Something they were missing.

  Dante’s unforgiving winds weren’t high-tech. That wasn’t the way Morales thought. He was a literal man. He’d been typically literal when he’d bombed the Ithembalabantu AIDS clinic in Durban two years ago, killing 509 men, women, and children. To Morales, AIDS and homosexuality were synonymous. The reality, and the actual facts and details, were irrelevant in the strength of his beliefs.

  Hunt kept a sharp eye out for any side caves, anything that might indicate another route. He glanced back to check on Taylor.

  She was running her fingers along the rock wall as they walked. “Look how smooth the walls and floor are.” She spoke as softly as the men had. “I can’t begin to imagine how Morales got people down here to do all this stuff. And how many people, I wonder? It must’ve been an incredible feat of engineering just to dig tunnels this large, let alone hauling all the Dante’s Inferno deterrents down to each level.”

  Taylor was a woman of unpredictable interests, fascinated by everything she encountered. No one else would realize it, but Hunt knew she was scared. Her speech was a little too fast, and she was trying too hard to be cheerful.

  Still, he’d bet his last paycheck that coupled with her fear was the exhilaration he knew she enjoyed when she was pulling a heist. The woman loved to live dangerously.

  The damn air ride would have scared the piss out of anyone. To Taylor it had been yet another adventure. Another learning curve. Something else to include in her bag of skill acquisitions.

  He moved her in front of him to protect her back as the tunnel narrowed and they had to walk single file. “There’s something decidedly cocked-up with this place,” he said.

  Her ponytail was crooked, and the loos
e shiny strands brushing her shoulders drifted as she walked. Oblivious that she had the disheveled look of a woman fresh out of a man’s bed, she turned to frown at him over her shoulder. “What is cocked-up, and how and why does it sound so ominous?”

  “Let’s say Morales had all five disks. He comes up here, he opens the safe door into Level Two using the correct codes. He wouldn’t have had that turbo going full blast. Ergo, there was a way to turn the bloody thing off.”

  He almost walked into her when she stopped and turned around fully to face him. Her eyes glittered with amusement in the torchlight. “Ergo?”

  “Therefore.”

  “I know. I’ve just never heard anyone say it before.”

  He made a “turn around” gesture with his fingers. “Walk.”

  The tunnel widened and the four men paused up ahead. Hunt and Taylor joined them. Viljoen rubbed the side of his nose. “So we missed an off switch somewhere inside the door?”

  “I doubt it was anything as simple as a switch,” Hunt answered dryly. “The information would have been on the disk with the combination for the lock.” He removed the canteen strapped to his thigh, uncapped it, and handed it to Taylor as he talked. “My guess is there’s another way in.”

  “I don’t think he could have walked across where that propeller was,” Bishop pointed out. “That thing was at least twelve feet below floor level.”

  “Ja, I agree, man. Not walk across those props, and surely not climb up a hundred feet to here?” Viljoen said.

  “And how,” Taylor said, handing Hunt back the water, “would he bring things in and take them out? You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.” Something glittered in the wall, and she crouched down to look at it. “Hand me your flashlight, would you?”

  Hunt unsnapped the light from his thigh, handed it to her, then turned back to listen to his men.

  Taylor had never seen a diamond in the rough. She ran her fingers over what could be, might be . . . Was it? There were seven, small, shiny, translucent, metallic-looking . . . She scratched her thumbnail over one of the forty-point stones as the men, oblivious, walked ahead, Hunt bringing up the rear.