“Couldn’t you have built a Goddamned road up to this place?” Crossman complained to the governor as the APC was jostled by one rut after another.
“It was supposed to be a secret,” Sigurdsen replied, with more verbosity than he had shown since the start of their journey, his only other declarations being “right” and “left” when asked for directions.
“Well, here’s another secret,” Bobby called from the front, able to hear them now that the APC was running in stealth mode, on batteries, the turbines shut down to lose their heat signature. “We’ve hit a dead end.”
“Then stop the car,” Sigurdsen told him, breathing a sigh of obvious relief. “We’re here.”
“We’re getting out,” Lambert radioed to the crew of the scout car. Watch our backs.”
Hefting his rifle, the Gunnery Sergeant hit the hatch control and stepped out, followed closely by Shannon, Governor Sigurdsen and Captain Trang. The rest of the Marines as well as the Intelligence team members fanned out around the vehicle, half to establish a perimeter and half because of an age-old conviction among footsoldiers that a halted vehicle was nothing but a nice, fat target.
The path had terminated in a bare rock face, sloping sharply upward for at least a hundred meters before it levelled off. Looking at it in the blue stealthlights of the APC, Shannon could find no seam in the cliff face, but Sigurdsen strode directly over to the center of it and slapped his bare palm against the stone, then quickly stepped back. With a hermetic hiss and a hum of servos, a ten-meter wide section of the rock wall separated inward and began to slide slowly aside.
“My God.” Shannon shook her head as a subdued, red-tinted light flickered on inside the shelter’s entry chamber. “This must have taken months.”
“And a ton of money,” Sigurdsen confirmed. “Unfortunately, it was worth it.”
“Bring the baby home, Bobby,” Lambert transmitted. “Clear the way, you damned jarheads.”
The dismounted passengers stepped aside to allow the APC and the scout car inside, then moved carefully in behind them as Sigurdsen found the inner door control.
“Stay where you are till the lights come on,” the governor warned, palming the ID plate.
It seemed to Shannon, standing in the dimly-lit, uncertain space of the chamber that it took hours for the false rock face to slide back into place, but it finally sealed into the side of the mountain, triggering the circuit for the overhead lighting.
The place was, if anything, bigger than it appeared from the outside. The entry chamber was as large as an industrial garage—which, indeed, it was. Beside the newly-arrived military vehicles, the garage chamber was already occupied by a heavy-duty, all-terrain utility rover; a light, skeleton-framed dune buggy; and a pair of battery-powered dirt bikes. Spare parts, maintenance equipment, charging stands and fuel tanks took up what little spare room there was along the side walls.
Shannon heard quite a few relieved groans and sighs as the crews of both vehicles dismounted and stretched out the kinks of several hours “in the saddle.” Then, quite suddenly, she realized that everyone in the garage was looking at her, waiting for a decision.
Oh well, she chuckled inwardly, you’re the one who wanted a command.
“Sergeant Lambert,” she said, “you and your men should get some rest, but before you stand down, I’d like you and Sergeant Mahoney to do a security check of this installation—Captain Trang can help you as well. I’d also like a full inventory of all weapons and ammunition within the hour.”
“Right away, ma’am,” Lambert acknowledged.
“Tom, Jock,” Shannon went on, turning to the men, “you’re to help with the inventory. Governor Sigurdsen, I’d like to see your communications setup.”
“First things first, Lieutenant,” Nathan Tanaka interrupted. “You are wounded. Governor,” he addressed the big man, “do you have any medical supplies?”
“Right this way,” Sigurdsen said.
“It’s nothing,” Shannon protested as she was led through the passage out of the garage into a central control area.
“Now, it’s nothing,” Tanaka insisted. “Tomorrow, it will be infected. You are the commander now; you cannot afford weakness.”
She gave up and let the bodyguard lead her to a couch in one corner of the large chamber, gently pulling off the armored vest she’d been loaned. Governor Sigurdsen pulled a briefcase-sized medical kit from one of the supply cabinets that lined the wall and set it on the table in front of the couch, popping its latches.
Tanaka sorted through the various packages in the case’s compartment and came up with a spray can of local anesthetic. Coating Shannon’s shoulder with a generous dose of the liquid, the bodyguard secured a large pair of forceps and a sterile swab and latched onto the largest of the jagged splinters.
“Ready?” he asked with a look of genuine concern that surprised her.
She nodded, turning her head away, and he carefully pulled the barb out of her shoulder, tossing it aside and mopping up the flow of blood with the swab. The other splinters came out easier, and soon he was spreading disinfectant over the area in preparation for bandaging it.
“You should have been a doctor,” she told him seriously.
“I should have been many things,” he replied softly, half to himself, as he taped the bandage in place. “But we do not always hold our fate in our own hands. There,” he fastened the last strip of cloth. “Try not to move this arm for the next day or so.”
“Happy birthday,” Sergeant Lambert deadpanned, stepping up to them and tossing Shannon a Marine-issue T-shirt. “A donation from your adoring fans.”
“Thanks,” she said, gingerly slipping into the garment.
Vinnie, Jock and Captain Trang had entered the room behind Lambert, and the three of them formed a semicircle around the couch, while Lambert flopped down on the couch beside Stark and Tanaka, casually propping his feet up on the table.
“Well, we’re sitting pretty here, Lieutenant,” he informed her. “There’s two main entrances, two emergency exits, three different sources of ventilation, about three meters of rock on all sides and complete 360 degree fiber- optic observation.
“My contractors assured me it would,” Sigurdsen commented with something of a sense of proprietary pride.
“What about food and water?” Shannon asked the governor. “And power?”
“There’s enough food to last a year,” the big man informed her. “As for water and power, we’re sitting on top of an underground river: it’s what dug out most of these tunnels. I had a pair of hydroelectric generators put in; we’ll have power until they wear out… maybe two or three hundred years.”
“I wasn’t planning on hanging around quite that long,” she muttered. “All right, Jock, tell me about the weapons.”
“Ten M-70 Marine Individual Weapons,” the Australian reported, reading off from a display on his pocket computer, “with about 3,000 rounds of rifle ammo and fifty rifle-launched grenades. Two SR-8 autoguns with 2,000 rounds apiece. Four submachine guns with around a hundred rounds each. Three shoulder-launchers with ten reloads. Me’n Vinnie still have our grenade launchers, but we’re down to about two mags for each gun, and that rifle you picked up has five mags left, forty rounds in each. As for the vehicles, the chain guns are a bit low—about three hundred shots per. Grenade cannons are topped off, and they’ve still got ten missiles for the scout car’s launcher.” He shrugged, looking back up at her from the compact machine. “Plus three or four handguns with twenty rounds each and various knives, and that’s about it.”
“Plenty if we lay low and wait for a quick bailout,” Lambert pointed out. “Not even close if we try to hit them.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into a corner wastebasket, earning a dirty look from the governor. “But then, I didn’t sign up to sit on my ass.”
“We should try to contact the
Tanaka shook his head. “I do not think that would be wise. Transmitting from here would bring the enemy down upon us. They might not be able to penetrate this place, but we would lose it as a possible base of operations.”
“The
