up from nightmares she’d had for years and could never understand or hope to explain. In those shapes she saw a little girl, scared beyond belief, reaching out to someone for help, but getting nothing in return. She had been a loner all her life, mostly because she could not bring herself to trust anyone, not completely. And yet there had been one person who had earned her respect, her absolute trust above all others. Who had proved to Michelle that he would never let her down, who had literally sacrificed everything he had to help her. And she had just allowed that man to slip into the waters of the York alone. To go off on what amounted to a suicide mission. Alone.
She could not let that happen. Screw whatever was going on inside her head. Sean was not going to face this without her. If they went down, they’d go down together.
The images in the clouds suddenly dissipated, returning to a grayish white of harmless puff. Michelle grabbed her gear and slipped into the water.
CHAPTER 79
A FEW FEET BELOW THE SURFACE of the York, Sean moved through the water easily with the aid of a diver’s propulsion unit while his flippers made efficient strokes. His oxygen came from a miniature air tank wrapped around the lower part of his face. He also carried a waterproof bag tied to his ankle. The assault tonight on Camp Peary had come together in a whirlwind of seat-of-their-pants improvisation. There were a million ways it could all go wrong, and very few ways for it to turn out all right.
The revelation about the title of the song “Shenandoah” had told Sean that he was on the right track. Shenandoah County used to be Dunmore County. It had been a subtle clue but once uncovered it pointed in one direction only: Dunmore’s hunting lodge on the grounds of Camp Peary, Porto Bello. That must have been where Monk Turing had gone. The only way he would find out why was to follow the man’s path. A path that had led to his death.
He reached shore, some distance down from where Monk Turing had made his own egress, even as Horatio’s late night boat ride hopefully drew the attention of Camp Peary’s perimeter security far away. However feeble, Sean was also counting on the notion that the Camp Peary folks probably wouldn’t believe someone else would be so
A flashlight was out of the question, so he pulled NV goggles from his bag, slid them on and fired them up. His line of vision instantly turned to an amorphous green, but at least he could see in the absence of virtually any ambient light.
Sean slid forward on his belly after hiding his propulsion unit under some shore brush. The fence, the point of no return, was dead ahead. Sean pulled out a small device that did one thing and one thing only: It registered the presence of energy of any kind. He aimed it at the fence and waited for a green light to appear. It did. The fence was not electrified, nor was it covered by monitoring sensors.
Sean had learned that the outer perimeter of Camp Peary was so immense that the CIA had not wasted time or budget dollars putting in elaborate security there. The inner defenses that covered every square inch of the facilities, operations and training areas were another story. It was state-ofthe-art in its lethality. Which was why Sean was counting on Heinrich Fuchs, who’d apparently been the only person ever to escape from what Sean assumed was a very secure federal military stockade in its own right.
However, right this instant it seemed ludicrous in the extreme to bet his freedom and more likely his life on something that had happened over sixty years ago. And suddenly an overwhelming sense of panic hit him as he lay in the wet red clay of the York’s shoreline preparing to break into one of the most heavily guarded facilities in the United States. Right now Sean wanted nothing more than to turn around, slip back into the inviting waters of the river and go home. Yet he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed.
He nearly screamed out when he felt it. On his shoulder. Next he heard the familiar voice whispering in his ear in a calm, reassuring voice.
“It’s okay, Sean.
He turned to find her kneeling over him, a look on her face that told him everything he needed to know. He squeezed her arm in return and nodded. What a fool he’d been to even consider for a second that she was not up to this. Hell, she was more up to it than
A minute later they knelt down and Sean pulled out the document that Heinrich Fuchs had given Monk Turing. The paper was now full of new writing and calculations that Sean and Michelle had worked out. They had to chance a light as they peered at the map.
Fuchs had left no helpful marks on trees or an X on the ground to mark the entrance to his tunnel, not that those would have survived over the years anyway. Yet they didn’t have to rely on that because of Monk Turing. On the Fuchs document Monk had carefully noted directions, landmarks, compass points and, through his daughter, left one important clue as to their target. He also knew that Monk Turing had not braved death to cavalierly retrace the escape route of a German POW. Turing must’ve had another reason, a good one.
Following Turing’s directions they headed northwest and reached a small clearing completely surrounded by birch trees. This was it. Sean started marking off paces but Michelle stopped him.
“How tall was Turing?” she asked.
“Five-seven.”
“You’re seven inches taller,” she whispered. “Let me walk the paces.” She did, using shorter strides than she ordinarily would. Monk Turing must have had the most meticulous mind, Sean thought, because when Michelle stopped walking around trees, and through bushes and other forest clutter, he knew they’d found it. They were in a part of the woods that seemingly had had no human intervention for decades if not centuries; and yet if you knew what Sean knew, it had.
He knelt down and traced the letter with his hand. It had been done with a long vine of kudzu pulled from one of the trees and laid on the ground.
X didn’t mark the spot; the letter V did. V, Sean knew, for Viggie because Monk had written that on the document as well. The two of them dug their hands under what appeared to be the normal ground cover of deep forest. Yet their fingers finally found the edge of the weathered board and they pulled. A four-by-four square of wood rose up revealing the entrance to the tunnel.
They lowered themselves through the opening and then let go of the edges, dropping a few feet and landing on the tunnel’s dirt floor. Standing on Sean’s shoulders, Michelle reached back through the opening and replaced the cover over the entrance.
As she did so, Michelle saw a bit of rope encircling the support board that held up the tunnel’s cover.
“Monk must have put a rope here before he got into the tunnel,” she said, pointing it out to Sean. “He’d have to use it to climb back out. The hatch is too far off the ground.”
“I brought some rope too,” he said. “On the way out, I’ll hoist you up and you can tie the rope up there. Then I’ll use it to climb out.”
With the hatch replaced, they risked turning on their lights. As they moved forward the tunnel wall sloped downward, forcing the tall people to bend over as they walked. The walls were solid red clay, dry and firm. Every two feet or so there were decaying timbers set into the ceiling and also wedged against the walls.
“Doesn’t look like it would pass your basic mine safety inspection,” Michelle said a little anxiously. “You think he built this all by himself? I mean that’s a lot of work for one guy.”
“I think other prisoners helped him, but he was the only one to actually use it.”
“Why?”
“I think the other prisoners were released after the war in Europe ended, maybe about the time the tunnel was finished. But Fuchs wasn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Like Horatio I did a little history reading. If Heinrich Fuchs was a signal operator on his ship he would’ve had to be familiar with the Enigma code. Back then the Allies didn’t release any prisoner with knowledge of that code. They kept them to exploit that information and also to keep them from returning to Germany.”
