Harvey Bennett Mysteries Box Set 3

by Nick Thacker

  “It’s happening!” Reggie shouted. “Time’s up!”

  She didn’t know what to do, but it didn’t matter.

  Above her, the ceiling cracked and boulders of stone began tumbling a hundred feet straight down.

  Onto their heads.

  72

  Ben

  Ben lunged forward, taking Julie with him.

  Get to the door.

  He didn’t know why that direction seemed necessary, seemed correct. He just knew.

  He pushed his wife toward the exit and into the hallway. Reggie was at his side, Mrs. E shortly behind. They ran, taking the final ten feet of space on the demonstration floor before the doorway in three huge strides.

  Pieces of rock were already hitting them, and they were growing bigger. He had seen the ceiling give, seemingly cracking in half and immediately pouring thousands of missiles of rock chips down onto them.

  A head-sized rock caught Reggie’s shoulder, but he hardly flinched. It looked like it had been moving fast enough to break a bone, but Ben hoped the strap holding Reggie’s prosthetic had taken some of the impact. Still, it was likely to have dislocated it.

  They made it to the edge of the doorway, and then into the hallway. They collapsed onto the floor, each laying out on the stone next to the disfigured, bleeding corpse of Vicente Garza.

  The boulders continued tumbling down, and Ben pushed them farther into the hallway. One especially massive one crushed the others in the entrance, effectively closing down access to the demonstration floor. A final volley of rocks and boulders sealed the shaft, a few of the smaller ones spilling out and nearly reaching the CSO group.

  But it didn’t matter. They were safe.

  For now. Ben didn’t know what Sturdivant had done, but his best guess was that he’d somehow sealed off the entrances and exits to the mountain base using explosives.

  “Saddamizers,” Reggie said. “Bunker Busters. We developed them in the 90s for Desert Storm. We called them Saddamizers.”

  “Sturdivant hit us with those?”

  “The exits, sure. They’re not nuclear, so they’ll be impossible to detect more than a few miles away, but they’ll be more than big enough to smash the doorways and shafts that lead out of here.”

  “So, we’re hosed?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah, we’ve been hosed since we got here,” Reggie answered. “So the way I see it, we’re actually lucky we’re still alive.”

  “Well, don’t count your blessings,” Julie said. “There are still Ravenshadow goons around here somewhere, unless they all ran out when things in there got heated.”

  Things in there… Ben couldn’t believe what they had just been through. He looked up to find Victoria staring at him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She nodded, then wiped a tear. Her hands were shaking. She had placed the weapon down next to her dead father.

  “You saved our lives,” Ben said. He turned to the villagers — only half had made it through the doorway before the entire thing collapsed. “Most of us, anyway.”

  “I — I had to do it,” she said. “After what he did. What he made me do. I… I couldn’t help but —”

  She began to sob uncontrollably, and Julie stood and walked over to the woman. She consoled her, wrapped her arm around her. She whispered to her as Ben and the others watched on.

  They stood there for a moment, silently taking in the devastation, loss, and annihilation that one man had ravaged upon the world. They were stuck here, stuck inside a small mountain base with all of their possible exits destroyed.

  Unless…

  Ben looked up at the others. “You think Sturdivant knew about the drainage tunnel?”

  Reggie smiled. Mrs. E answered him. “I believe it is worth checking. It could be an easy way out.”

  Ben had, over time, come to adopt the mantra of there is no easy way out, but he decided to keep that to himself this time.

  “I’m in,” Julie said. She looked from Victoria to Ben and then back again, as if questioning.

  Victoria nodded as she spoke. “If… if you’ll have me, you’re my best shot at getting out of here alive. I know — I know I caused all of this, and —”

  “Nonsense,” Reggie said. “You know Ben causes more trouble for us than anyone else.” He winked at Ben, who just shook his head. “Anyway, yeah — I think all of us should stick together. There still may be some of those Ravenshadow guys around.”

  “Agreed,” Mrs. E said. “They will be looking for their commander. But until they find him dead, they will treat us as enemies.”

  Reggie sighed. “Too bad we don’t have any of those Exos left over. We wouldn’t have any trouble getting through here with them.”

  Ben looked at the rubble spilling into the hallway from the demonstration floor. The Exos and half of their operators were lost forever, sealed beneath a tomb of stone. There was nothing to do for them now except get out, get free, and tell the world what had happened here.

  They could easily get the attention of the world press — Ben and his group had already been in the headlines a few times, for small adventures and takedowns of criminals around the world. Their status was far from celebrity, but they had enough clout to at least bring Garza’s estate to justice.

  He just hoped none of it would fall to Victoria. Ben wanted nothing more than to smear Garza’s name, point to him alone for the abduction and murder of at least one entire Peruvian village, as well as the international war crimes, including killing Sturdivant’s Green Berets.

  But first, of course, they had to get out.

  The drainage tunnel was their best bet, but even then it would be a long shot — the missiles that had taken out the main entrances and exits had caused enough destruction to lead to a complete cave-in of the largest central room, the demonstration floor. What would be the chances that the water-filled tunnel had been left undamaged?

  They were about to find out. But first, they needed a bit more protection.

  “Garza took all our rifles,” Ben said. “We’ve got the Desert Eagle — Reggie, take that.”

  “Should we look for weapons?”

  “No,” Ben said. “Our best bet is to let Reggie take point —”

  “— human bait,” Reggie said. “Got it.”

  “—let him take point so he can kill anyone we come across.”

  “So we can steal their weapons,” Julie said.

  “Right,” Reggie added. “Human bait. Whatever man, I thought we were friends.”

  Ben smiled, but still shook his head. How one man could remain so resilient and nonchalant in times of stress was beyond him, but he vowed to become more like his best friend.

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Let’s roll. Reggie, lead the way.”

  73

  Julie

  They ran for ten minutes without interruption, all without seeing another living soul.

  Ravenshadow must have cleared out before the first bomb hit, Julie thought. While they were getting blasted in the observation room.

  When the team had reached the stairs, Julie paused.

  “Wait,” she said. “There’s… water. Coming from near the door.”

  They all looked down. In the dim light the water sparkled as it sloshed through the tiny gap between the door and the stone frame around it. She wondered where it was coming from, and — more importantly — if there was more of it.

  Reggie opened the door, and the trickle of water turned into a slightly larger stream. Still not much, but it worried her.

  “Let’s hope that’s just from a broken pipe or something from a higher floor,” Ben said.

  No one spoke as they ascended the stairs. The water continued pouring down, and Julie saw that it was originating from somewhere high above. They climbed the stairs to the second of the three floors — the floor they came in through — and when they reached the doorway Reggie paused once again.

  “It’s picking up,” he said. “The water level.”

  Julie
saw that he was right. The water coming from above them was now pouring down in a single sheet against the wall. Drips were hitting her face, the humidity in the stairwell was already starting to rise.

  Ben turend to Victoria. “Did your father show you around this place?”

  She shook her head. “He barely spoke to me,” she said. Her voice was still shaking, still full of trepidation. “The only thing I heard about this place was that they didn’t think it was a mine at all. None of them saw any mining equipment, and my father could never find any official blueprints or area maps that mention it.”

  Julie knew why — this place wasn’t a mine, nor had it ever been one.

  “There obviously weren’t staircases here before,” Victoria said. “My father added them when they moved in. But the shafts were already here.”

  Julie was surprised to hear that. The shafts were large, perfectly sized for the metal staircases that now filled them, so it was strange that they hadn’t been originally meant for staircases. It was all further proof that this place had once been a sort of underground city rather than a mine, inhabited by the descendants of the Atlanteans.

  But what were these shafts for? she wondered. If this was a city at one point, how did they get from one level to the next? Ropes?

  It seemed like having stairs or ladders would have been ideal, but it was clear that there had never been any stairs in these shafts.

  The water came in more heavily as Reggie opened the door to the second floor. The stairwells on each level were lit with a single, dim light fixture mounted above each door, and Julie looked up to the floor above them. It was obvious now that the water was pouring in from the top level, from somewhere beyond the door that led to the third floor. It seemed as though the only thing keeping a solid wall of water from falling over them now was the door itself.

  “We need to get out quick,” Reggie said, stepping through the doorway.

  He didn’t bother to look for any opponents — it was clear now that the Ravenshadow base had been cleared, or the men were dead. Julie hadn’t seen much more evidence of Sturdivant’s earthquake that had caused the ceiling to collapse in the demonstration floor, but it was also true that they had stayed along the southern side of the base. The entrances Sturdivant would have targeted were on the north and west sides, according to Beale’s reconnaissance.

  It was very possible that they were in fact sealed inside a tomb of stone. Julie ignored the feeling, pushing it away as a problem to be dealt with later.

  They ran along the same hallway they’d run through before, this time heading toward the smaller offshoot shaft that would lead to the drainage tunnel. But even before they got to the entrance to the shaft Julie could see there was a problem.

  “It’s blocked,” Ben said.

  The tunnel had collapsed in on itself, and bits of stone had tumbled out into the hallway. Water was gushing around it, heading down the hallway in the opposite direction, pooling in the corners. And even from here, Julie could see that it was getting higher.

  “Shit,” Reggie said. “Our scuba gear is on the other side of that shaft.”

  “Even without the gear, our way out is on the other side of that shaft,” Julie said.

  “We must find another way,” Mrs. E said. “But we would have seen any other obvious exits.”

  Julie turned to find Victoria speaking in hushed tones with some of the Peruvian villagers. They conversed for a moment then looked back at the CSO group.

  “They say there are other ways out,” Victoria said. “But none of them know where.”

  “Great,” Reggie said. “So… there aren’t any ways out of here that we know about. Any of them want to take a guess?”

  “They say there are air shafts, for ventilation, that locals have found accidentally over the years. Many are blocked by debris and stones, but some may be accessible.”

  “Ask them if they’re large enough for us to fit in,” Julie asked.

  Victoria asked, and the Peruvian man she was speaking with eyed Ben.

  “He says they can fit into the shafts.”

  Julie stepped toward him. “It’s better than nothing,” she said. “Let’s find one of them, see if someone can fit into it, and they can call for help once they’re out.”

  Victoria translated along. But when she looked back at Julie, she knew there was something wrong. “That’s just it,” Victoria said. “I haven’t seen any of those shafts, and neither have they.”

  “But… you said they exist.”

  “That’s what they told me, but they haven’t ever seen any from inside the mountain. Their village knew of two, but there was only twenty or thirty feet of length before the shafts were stopped up with rocks and debris.”

  “And they were human-made?” Ben asked.

  Victoria asked the man.

  “Absolutely,” she said after a moment. “They explained that the shafts were square-shaped, with perfectly straight walls, chiseled out of the stone itself. They were part of the myth and lore of the region; a way for the ‘keepers of the mine’ to access the outside world.”

  “Okay,” Reggie said. “We need to find one of these little shafts. Let’s get back to the stairs, head up a level.”

  “Agreed,” Ben said. “If there are any, they’ll be at the top level.”

  Julie found herself once again following along, once again wondering if they would actually be able to find an exit, and once again wondering how she’d gotten them into this whole mess.

  They reached the stairwell — once again — and began climbing. Julie noticed the water level rising, and the pace of the water was increasing.

  74

  Ben

  At the top level of the base, Ben looked around for anything that might hint at potential freedom. Unfortunately the place was exactly the same as they’d left it — the long, straight hallway dumping into the small video booth at the end of the hall, and the smaller, older shaft covered by a curtain next to it. He tried to see if there were anything else that seemed out of place, but the lights were beginning to flicker. Two bulbs near him had already gone out, either from the original explosion and earthquake or due to a short from the flowing water.

  There was no water collecting on the floor up here, but Ben saw it trickling from the ceiling and pouring down the walls. He hadn’t noticed the tiny cracks in the ceiling before, but it was almost as if the ceiling blocks were somehow hovering, not actually connected to the walls. It was a feat of engineering, but it was one he’d seen before.

  Ever since they’d determined that this place had originally belonged to the Atlanteans and Chachapoyas, the details began revealing themselves. The size of the shafts was similar to those of the tunnels they’d found in Egypt, and the design, build quality, and workmanship was exactly the same as well.

  “Want to go to the video room again?” Reggie asked, still holding the Desert Eagle.

  Ben shook his head. “I have no idea. There’s nothing up here. It’s the same as we left —”

  Ben’s feet fell out from underneath him. He felt his knee overextend a bit as he landed hard on it, but he regained his balance. Julie and Reggie crashed to the ground in front of him, while Mrs. E bounced off the wall behind her.

  “The hell was that?” Reggie asked.

  “Aftershock,” Ben answered. “The mountain’s shifting.”

  “You don’t think Sturdivant hit us again, do you?” Julie asked.

  “No need,” Ben said. “The exits were most likely blocked off during the first explosion, and he’s probably got men on the ground to take out anyone who’s made it beyond that.”

  “In other words,” Reggie said. “The mountain’s coming down on top of us.”

  “Just like Jeffers said.”

  To answer, the water surged and picked up, pushed along from a space beyond Ben’s vision. It curled and ebbed against his boots, first at the ankle, then up to his calves.

  “Water’s coming in fast, now,” Reggie said. “We nee
d to figure this out now, guys.”

  Ben was thinking the same thing. They were on the top level of the base, and where there had been no standing water on the floors before there was now a river.

  And that river was rising — fast.

  Two of the Peruvians, a man and a woman, began breathing rapidly. Ben turned to face them when Victoria translated.

  “They cannot swim,” she said. “They are scared.”

  “We’re all scared,” he replied. “But they’re going to have to learn to swim, and stat.”

  “Over there,” Mrs. E said. “It looks like the water is coming from that tunnel.”

  It was the tunnel they’d been led through by Victoria, the one that had been obscured by the curtain. They trudged toward it.

  “Why did your father hide this tunnel behind the curtain?” Ben asked.

  “He only meant to make it more difficult to find the interrogation room,” she answered. Ben sensed a hint of regret in her voice. “You all weren’t the first he used it on.”

  Ben nodded. “Besides connecting this side of the top level with the stairs on the other end, does it go anywhere?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “It’s graded,” Reggie said. “The water’s coming this way because it’s slightly downhill from the origin point.”

  As he spoke, the water in the tunnel reached Ben’s knees. It was beginning to froth and foam up, miniature whitewater rapids around their legs.

  “Let’s get up there,” Ben said. “We don’t have a better option. The lower levels will be even more flooded than this one.”

  No one spoke as they sloshed forward. Ben waited for the four villagers to hike past, taking up a point at the back of the line, just in case someone slipped. He wasn’t about to let anyone else die on his watch.

  The three men and one woman from the group of villagers were surprisingly strong as a group. Their feet were solid on the stone floor, though it was growing more slippery by the second. They held hands and pulled each other along, one step at a time.