here?”
Instead of answering, Kyle unloaded the launcher and emptied the chamber, then stood in front of the muzzle, facing away from it. The firing slit was closed but parted easily with the press of a nearby knob. Fresh air rushed in, and Swanson leaned closer to the opening. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of a broad section of the long valley. “This could have blown us apart on approach,” he observed with a voice as dry as that of a scientist reciting an unpleasant fact.
“So why didn’t it?” Beth moved closer to also get a look from the opening. Dawn was approaching, and the darkness was fading fast.
“I don’t know, and don’t really care right now,” he said. “Let’s think about this, Coastie: We overcame a lot of heavily armed guards, then found the motion sensors and the cameras, and then once we broke into this rock castle, we found crates of stored ammunition.” He tapped the big gun. “Now this: a straight-out-of-the-box Mk-19 that has been turned into a robo-warrior. Open this little slot, slide it out on those rails, shoot for a while, slide it back, close the door, reload, and do it again—and it looks from the wiring that most of it can be done by remote control.”
“Then that’s what my brother and his team came on, something like this. I remember how Dad drew pictures for us of the Cu Chi tunnels and how gun positions were so cleverly hidden that Americans would walk right over them and not even know they were there. It was a nightmare to root them out. This looks just like that; this one looks ready for a war all by itself.”
“Yep. I agree.” A cold feeling washed over him. How many rooms like this were there? How many weapons? What kind? Why? It was a honeycombed defensive position built into solid rock, but with an offensive purpose. All Marines remembered Iwo Jima and the deadly bunkers of the Pacific islands of World War II, and this bridge might be covering the granddaddy of them all. “This could be more than enough reason to kill some curious foreigner intruders. And it means that I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“I thought they might be hiding a nuke in here, but that would not explain all of this fancy hardware and the engineering. With a nuke, they could just drill a hole and hide it. But why put a nuke underground at all, because you would want to inflict maximum damage, not to confine the blast. I don’t know the reason for this secret place, but our intel people have not picked it up, and Washington cannot allow it to exist.”
The alarm ground down from its hellish howl, and stillness settled in the room. Kyle took out his knife and sliced through a handful of wires. “They can repair this, but I don’t want to leave it working, in case we have to come back this way.”
Beth Ledford turned out the light and gently opened the door.
22
WILLIAM LLOYD CURTIS SPED back to Washington with the windows down, letting the wind drum hard into the car. His head still felt cottony, the sluggishness that usually resulted when he drank too much beer, but the howling wind and an espresso macchiato from a Starbucks drive-through had helped cut through the mental fog. He was not drunk, not even tipsy. He licked some of the steamed milk foam from his upper lip.
The chance to let his frustrations run free and bullshit with strangers in a bar where he was unknown had been cathartic, a needed winding-down from the unexpected ISI setback. The roughneck part of his own life, when he had built his construction empire, was truly in the past. For a moment in the bar, he wondered if he could recapture the flavor of those exciting years when he wore dirty jeans and Grateful Dead T-shirts and could use his fists as well as his brain. All the while, he knew that was only a fantasy for a middle-aged man who now wore expensive suits and was an undersecretary in the U.S. State Department, the man who ran the U.S. Bureau of American-Islamic Affairs.
By the time the Beemer M3 hit the Beltway after the drive from Williamsburg, Bill Curtis had regained control of his emotions. Everything was still on track. The sprawling intelligence network within the countries of the BAIA was intact, and he really could harbor no lasting resentment against General Gul for not wanting to send a professional ISI killer onto American soil; the general was simply protecting his own agenda, and Curtis never burned such a valuable source over any single decision. They could work together on other projects.
Still, it was clear that he was on his own in containing the nosy Coast Guard woman and her Marine protector. He did not know where they had hidden, but his wide web of contacts was alert, and when they surfaced, he would be waiting.
By the time he drove over the Lion Bridge, he had rolled up the windows and turned on the air-conditioning, and the interior of the luxury automobile had become a comfortable cocoon in which he was shielded from the noise and the smell of the traffic. Washington was still alive with activity, and the streets were busy with pedestrians, from tour groups to workers. Men in running shorts ran laps on the Mall, and young women spoke urgently into their cell phones.
Women, Curtis thought. They always had to stay in contact with their girlfriends and their mothers and their distant cousins and friends from the second grade, as if they were all stuck together by verbal glue. They all had to know what each other was doing at every moment. A woman might hate her mother, but that did not mean they would not talk on the phone for hours. That was why cell telephone companies were part of his financial portfolio.
Then it hit him. The obituary of the slain American doctor from the bridge incident had included the names of his only two relatives: the Coast Guard sniper and their mother. He had been from somewhere out west, some farm state: Indiana? Iowa? Yes, Iowa. If it was a fact of life that daughters stay in touch with moms, then it would logically follow that this Ledford woman out in the land of alfalfa and cows might have some information that Bill Curtis needed. He suddenly smiled and honked his horn once in celebration. He would go and see her.
“DO WE GET PIECES of cheese when we get out of this maze?” Beth Ledford was only half kidding. The long corridors, side hallways, and vacant rooms still under construction seemed endless, like a high school science experiment to train mice. The fire alarm had emptied the structure, allowing them more freedom of movement, and they had taken advantage of the opportunity to uncover and clear more gun positions, storage areas, support centers, even a mess hall and living quarters. The place seemed endless.
Kyle admitted, “We’re just seeing more of the same shit. It must have a purpose, but I don’t see it.”
“It’s just a big bridge.”
“With a ton of remote control armament. It burns me that we can’t find what they think they are defending in this pile of rocks. There’s nothing of real value here. Nada.”
“So we can go home now?”
They were in a yellow hallway, before a bright red cross with the word INFIRMARY printed neatly in several languages. “Let’s duck in here while I call the extract team.”
The solid door to the medical facility was unlocked, and when they stepped inside, it automatically closed behind them. Swanson momentarily felt claustrophobic, as if trapped underground, but six feet away stood another secure door, and he realized they were in an airlock chamber. Blasts of cool, filtered air were pushed in by fans near the floor and slid along their clothing before being sucked out through vents in the ceiling. After ten seconds of the high-pressure sweep, the fans stopped, and the second door swung open silently on its oiled hinges.
They moved into a room that looked in every way like a modern medical clinic, with spotless floors and furnishings. Equipment was neatly stored in cabinets. At the rear of the long room were two empty metal-framed beds covered in white sheets with tight hospital corners, and on each was a blanket folded in half. A frame on rollers supported a head-high curtain that partitioned off the far side of the beds.
Kyle motioned Beth to cover him as he moved forward, pistol drawn.
AYMAN AL-MASRI CLIMBED ONTO a spool of wire cable beside the road topside and spoke to the approximately fifty workmen who had evacuated the facility. When he identified himself as representing the NMO,
