'When was the last time you chased a freight train?' Pitt asked Giordino, as they hurried across the road and stood talking in detachment as the locomotive passed by, the engineer inside the cab reading a magazine.
'Several years ago in the Sahara Desert, the train carrying toxic chemicals to Fort Foureau.'
'As I remember, you almost fell off.'
'I hate it when you make sport of me,' said Giordino, with a downward twist of his lips.
The instant the locomotive passed by, they sprinted along the track. Pitt had already clocked the train's speed at twenty miles an hour, and they judged their running speed accordingly. Giordino was fast for his size. He put his head down and charged after a flatbed car as if he was carrying a football toward the end zone. He grabbed the hand ladder as it passed, held on and was literally swept onto the car. Pitt also used the momentum of the train to swing himself aboard.
The flatbed car was loaded with two pickup trucks of unknown origin powered by an electrical motor. Shiny new, they looked to be fresh off the boat. Without a word between them, Pitt and Giordino threw open a door and slipped into one of the truck's cabs, crouching down below the windows and the dashboard. Their timing couldn't have been more perfect, as two security patrol cars came screaming past the train, lights flashing as they raced after the bus.
Pitt looked pleased. 'Our little maneuver was missed by the cameras or they'd have come after us instead of the bus.'
'About time we had some luck.'
'Stay put,' instructed Pitt. 'I'll be right back.'
He opened the door on the side of the train away from the road and lowered himself to his hands and knees. Crawling from front to back, he removed the chocks and tie-down chains that held the pickup truck to the rail car. Then he scrambled back inside.
Giordino looked at him strangely. 'I can read your mind, and I can't see how we're going to drive off a moving train into a tunnel that's blocked on both ends.'
'We'll worry about it when the time comes,' Pitt tossed off placidly.
There is nothing on earth that remotely resembles a big tunnel-boring machine.
The TBM that dug the tunnels under Nicaragua from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific shore stretched over one hundred and twenty yards in length, followed by another hundred yards of its equipment train.
An incredibly complicated monster that looked like the first stage of a Saturn rocket, it was driven by an electric variable-speed drive that eliminated any hydraulic oil leakage and pollution. The Specter TBM fractured flakes of bedrock by the continuous rotation of a series of carbide cutters mounted on a massive steel cutter head that could cut a circular tube through hard rock fifty-two feet in diameter at the rate of one hundred and fifty feet a day. The body that enclosed the cutter head also contained the drive motors that provided the enormous power it took to thrust the cutter's teeth into the rock, and the hydraulic presses that exerted the immense pressure it took to force the TBM into solid wall and grind away the rock.
The giant machine was articulated, and its operator, who was positioned at the front of the machine, could automatically steer it with the use of a laser while he monitored the operation. The excavated muck was transported to the rear section of the TBM and passed through a rock crusher that mashed the rock into fine sand. From there, the conveyor belt carried it back toward the opposite end of the tunnel, where it was pumped out into the sea.
The train stopped two hundred yards behind the TBM and beneath the overhead conveyor to unload at a supply depot and terminal. A series of large freight elevators ran out of sight through the roof of the tunnel. A group of women in white jumpsuits exited one of the elevators and climbed into a bus. Pitt angled close to them and overheard one woman say the inspection had to be finished in eight hours so a report-could be sent to company headquarters above.
It made no sense to Pitt. Headquarters? Where above?
No one seemed to mind as he casually drove the truck from the flatbed onto the loading dock and down a ramp to the concrete road. Then he pulled over and stopped behind a row of three other electric trucks.
Giordino looked around the busy area, where at least thirty miners were engaged in operating the mass of machinery. 'That was too easy.'
'We're not home yet,' said Pitt. 'We've got to find a way out of here.'
'We could always climb out through another ventilator.'
'Not if we're under Lake Nicaragua.'
'How about the one we came from?'
'I think we can safely forget that plan.'
Giordino was absorbed, watching the operation of the big TBM. 'Okay, mastermind, what's your next scenario?'
'We can't escape from this tunnel, because it isn't completed yet. Our only hope is to sneak out the Pacific side from one of the other three tunnels' ventilators.'
'And if it proves impossible?'
'Then I'll have to come up with another plan.'
Giordino pointed down the loading dock, where security guards were checking the ID passes of the miners. 'Time to shove off. We don't exactly fit our descriptions.'
Pitt held up the ID clamped to the breast pocket of his jumpsuit and stared at it with amusement. 'I'm in trouble. This guy is five foot two. I'm six-three.'
'What about me?' Giordino said with a sly smile. 'How will I ever produce a head of long hair and a set of boobs?'
Pitt cracked the door and looked up and down the far side of the loading dock and found it deserted. 'Out this way.'
Giordino followed Pitt and slid across the front seat of the pickup. They hit the loading dock crouched and running before cutting into an open door of a warehouse. Sneaking around unopened crates containing replacement parts for the various equipment and TBM, they found a rear passage that took them out of the warehouse and back along the railroad track. They paused behind a row of Porta Pottis and took stock.
'It'd help if we had transportation,' said Giordino, wrinkling his nose distastefully.
'Wishing will make it so,' Pitt said with a big grin.
Without waiting for Giordino, he stood up, walked from behind the Porta Pottis and casually approached one of the security guards' vehicles that was parked unattended. He settled behind the wheel, turned the ignition to the electric motor and pressed his foot on the accelerator, as Giordino leaped through the opposite door. The electrical power from the batteries flowed through the front-wheel-drive, direct-coupled differential and the car silently moved away.
The Pitt luck still held. The security guards were so busy examining the miners' IDs that they did not notice their patrol car being stolen. Not only was the electric car whisper quiet, but the noise and clatter of the TBM made it impossible for them to hear the workers trying to call their attention to the car theft.
To make it look official, Giordino reached toward the dashboard and flicked the switch to the revolving lights on the forward edge of the roof. As soon as they came to the first crosscut tunnel, Pitt hung a hard left and repeated the maneuver, swinging into the main tunnel and heading toward its western portal.
Pitt assumed that the four tunnels had been excavated under Lake Nicaragua to come up beyond the narrow stretch of land separating the lake from the ocean at the old port of San Juan del Sur. Here the ventilators had to be placed before the tunnels continued out from shore.
But Pitt was wrong.
After driving several miles, they came to a massive set of pumps like the ones they had encountered on the eastern end of the tunnel network. Then the tunnel abruptly ended at another pair of gigantic doors. The trickles of water that seeped around their edges and down the tunnel gave proof that they were not surfacing near San Juan del Sur but had come to a dead end far out under the Pacific Ocean.
30
