The FBI agent saw it, too. “What is that?” he asked sharply.
“I don’t know.” Kloster squinted upward. He could make out, beyond and above the trees, the upper part of Smuggler’s Cirque. The steep slopes and peaks were bathed in a flickering yellow glow. “Looks like a fire.”
The pale man leaned forward, gripping the dashboard, his eyes so bright and hard they unnerved Kloster. “Where?”
“Damn, I’d say it’s in that old mine complex.”
Even as they watched, the glow grew in intensity, and now Kloster could see dark smoke billowing upward into the snowstorm.
“Fast.
“Right, sure.” Kloster really gunned it this time, the VMC churning across the snow at top speed — only twenty miles an hour, but plenty fast for an unwieldy groomer.
“Faster.”
“It’s pegged, sorry.”
Even as he made the last turn before the tree line, he could see that the fire in the cirque was big. Huge, in fact. Flames were shooting up at least a hundred feet, sending up towering pillars of sparks and black smoke, as thick as a volcanic eruption. It had to be the Ireland Pump Engine building itself — nothing else up there was big enough to produce that kind of inferno. Even so, it couldn’t be a natural fire — nothing natural could spread so fast and so fiercely. It occurred to Kloster that this must be the work of the arsonist, and he felt a stab of fear, which was not reassured by the strange intensity of the man next to him. He kept the pedal to the metal.
The last stubby trees slid past them and they were now on the bare ridge. The snow was shallower here, due to wind scouring, and Kloster was able to eke out a few more miles per hour. God, it was like a firestorm up there, mushroom clouds of smoke and flame pummeling the sky, and he fancied he could even hear the sound of it above the roar of the diesel engines.
They crossed the last part of the ridge and headed up the lip to the hanging valley above. The snow grew deeper again and the VMC churned its way forward. They cleared the lip and, instinctually, Kloster stopped. It was indeed the Ireland building, and it had burned so fast, so furiously, that all that remained was a burning skeleton of timbers — which even as they watched collapsed with a thunderous cracking noise, sending up a colossal cascade of sparks. It left the Ireland Pump itself standing alone, naked, the paint peeling and smoking. The fire began to die as quickly as it had exploded: when the building collapsed, huge piles of snow had fallen from the roof into the burning rubble, sending up volatile plumes of steam.
Kloster stared, stunned by the violence of the scene, the utter suddenness of the building’s immolation.
“Move closer,” the man ordered.
He eased the groomer forward. The wooden frame had been consumed with remarkable speed, and the cascade of snow from the collapsing roof and the continuing blizzard were damping down what remained of the fire. None of the other buildings had burned — their snow-laden roofs were protecting them from the incredible shower of sparks that rained downward all around them like the detritus of countless fireworks.
Kloster eased the cat among the old mining structures. “This is as far as I’d better go,” he said. But instead of the argument he expected, the pale man simply opened the door and got out. Kloster watched, first in amazement, and then horror, as the man walked toward the smoking, fire-licked remains of the structure and circled it slowly, like a panther, close — way too close.
Pendergast stared into the hellish scene. The air around him was alive with falling sparks mingled with snowflakes, which dusted his hat and coat, hissing out in the dampness. The engine and all its pipework had survived intact, but the building was utterly gone. Plumes of smoke and steam billowed up from hundreds of little pockets of heat, and timbers lay scattered about, hissing and smoking, with tongues of fire flickering here and there. There was an acrid stench, along with the whiff of something else: singed hair and burnt meat. All that could be heard now was the low hiss of steam, the crackle and pop of isolated fires, and the sound of the wind moaning through the ruins. He made a circuit around the perimeter of the fire. There was enough light from the many dying fires to see everything.
At a certain point he paused abruptly.
Now, moving ever so slowly, he stepped deeper into the fire zone, raising the scarf to cover his mouth against the acrid smoke. Winding his way among pipes and valves, his feet crunching on the cracked cement floor littered with nails and glass, he approached the thing that had stopped him in his tracks. It resembled a long, black log, and it, too, was hissing and smoking. As he got closer he confirmed it was the remains of a human body, which had been handcuffed to a set of pipes. Even though the arm had burned off, and the body had dropped to the floor, a carbonized hand remained in the cuffs, the fingers curled up like the legs of a dead spider, blackened bones sticking out from where the wrist should have been.
Pendergast sank to his knees. It was an involuntary motion, as if all the strength was suddenly drained from his body, forcing him down against his will. His head fell forward and his hands clasped together. A sound came from his mouth — low, barely audible, but undeniably the by-product of a grief beyond words.
63
Pendergast did not linger long over the charred body. He rose, a tall figure among the smoking ruins, his cold gaze surveying the burnt remains of the pump building. For a moment, he remained as immobile as a statue, only his two pale eyes exploring the scene, pausing here and there to take in some invisible detail.
A minute passed. And then his eyes turned back to the corpse. He reached into his coat, slid out his custom Les Baer 1911 Colt, ejected the magazine, checked it, slid it back into place, and racked a round into the chamber. The firearm remained in his right hand.
Now he began to move forward, a small flashlight appearing in his other hand. The heat of the fire had melted much of the snow in the immediate vicinity of the area, leaving puddles of water and even, here and there, exposed brown grass, now quickly being reblanketed with snow. He made a circuit of the ruined building, peering through the falling snow, stepping over the innumerable piles of charred and smoking debris. Darkness was falling, and the snow thickened on his shoulders and hat, making him appear like a wandering ghost.
At the far side of the devastation, where the flanks of the mountainside began to rise up, he paused to examine a small, scorched wooden door, which covered what appeared to be a tunnel entrance. After a moment he knelt and examined the handle, the nearby ground, and then the door itself. He grasped the handle and tested the door, finding it locked from the inside — padlocked, apparently.
Pendergast rose and — with a sudden explosion of movement — stove in the door with a massive kick. He grasped the broken pieces and ripped them out by main force with his hands, throwing them aside. As quickly as it had come, the furious violence passed. He knelt, shining the light inside. The beam revealed an empty dewatering tunnel running straight into the mountain.
He turned the light to the ground. There were fresh scuffs and various confused marks in the dust, both coming and going. A moment of stasis…and then he was suddenly in motion, trotting alongside the pipe as smoothly as a cat, his coat billowing behind him, the Colt in his hand gleaming faintly in the dimness.
The pipe ended in a low stream of water that interrupted the tracks. Moving forward, Pendergast came to an intersection; continued on; reached another, and then — trying to think like his quarry — took a right, where the tunnel abruptly changed slope and ascended steeply to a higher level.
The tunnel continued for a quarter mile, deep into the mountain, until it struck what had once been a complex mineral seam, perhaps a dozen feet wide. This seam almost immediately divided the tunnel into a warren of shafts, crawl spaces, and alcoves, the spaces that remained after the ancient mining operation had cleared out every vein and pocket of a complex ore body that had once threaded this way and that through the heart of the mountain.
Pendergast paused. He understood that his quarry would have anticipated pursuit, and as a result had led his presumed pursuer to this very place: this maze of tunnels, where he, with his undoubtedly superior knowledge of the mine complex, would have the advantage. Pendergast sensed it was very likely his presence had already been noted. The prudent course of action would be to retreat and return with additional manpower.
