forward and put his ear to the floor.
It was that gear noise he’d heard earlier up in Smokey’s office. A deep whirr, and then a soft hiss.
And suddenly the whole center section was moving. He was dropping down through the floor.
He stood up and quickly stepped off the moving platform. He stepped away from the hole, watching wide- eyed as the huge round section of floor descended slowly and steadily. Almost noiselessly. A foot. Two feet. Still dropping. He could hear something down there now. The noise of whatever machinery below supported a huge round section of concrete floor. A massive hydraulic lift of some kind. And now, another noise. A big diesel firing up. Then, a second one started. A third. More.
Wait a minute. Trucks? In the basement?
He lay down flat on his stomach, trying not to hurt his wounded arm any more, and inched forward until he could see just over the edge. There was a faint reddish light down there, swirling with diesel fumes. It was too thick to see anything but shadowy shapes in the red mist. He shoved himself forward a few more inches, lowered his head, and peered down inside.
If there was somebody down there aiming to blow his head off it was going to happen now. He hadn’t heard anybody and he thought he would have. But, you never know.
Nobody shot him. But what he saw beneath him took the breath right out of him.
Monster rigs. A whole lot of them, tractor trailer trucks, in fact. Maybe fifteen, or even more, he thought. At least twenty. But that was only all the ones that he could see from this angle. The underground garage was big, he could see now, lowering his head even more, because the great oval section had now descended flush into the lower level floor.
All the way at the back of the lower level was a well-lit tunnel.
So, that was how they did it, got the ghost trucks cross the border with nobody catching on. He’d seen all the reports of Mexicans building tunnels under the border. Big ones, with air-conditioning even. To move illegals and drugs into the States. But this tunnel was something else entirely. It was large enough to accommodate eighteen- wheelers. Must have taken years to build this thing. Rawls owned a construction company in addition to everything else. He was in cahoots with the Mexicans somehow. Bringing trucks in for some reason.
Homer’s case was starting to add up. J.T. had been a smuggler, a crook. And a traitor. He’d never killed a man before, but if he had to start, it wasn’t a bad place.
There was a loud snort of a big diesel engine revving. He watched in wonder as, below him, a truck pulled forward and stopped right in the middle of the circular lift. It wasn’t the Yankee Slugger he’d seen pull in earlier. No, this was an ancient road warrior, an old fifties vintage Mack truck with faded green paint on the cab and trailer. Yellow road lights, now lit up a row of rusty chrome-plated horns mounted on top of the cab. He couldn’t see into the cab. Blacked-out windows, of course. He watched, unable to tear his eyes away, as the whole center section started turning clockwise, turning the rig around so it’d be facing the street.
When the lift platform had rotated one hundred-and-eighty degrees, it stopped.
Then the beat-up old Mack truck started rising on its hydraulic pedestal. It was a truck with a big juicy tomato logo and Ocala Farms Inc. painted on the trailer. At the same time, the main door of the building started sliding up inside the wall. All this crap going on, Homer thought, and not a single solitary human being on the property besides himself and the man he’d killed.
The whole thing was, what, automated?
Homer figured it was way past the time to beat feet the hell out of Mr. J.T.Rawls’s haunted truck graveyard and that is just what he was fixing to do. He ducked underneath the half-opened street door and took off at a run, darting across the ghost town’s main street to the burned-out Texaco where he’d parked the Vic.
He’d get on the radio and call in the dead man’s location. Then he’d get off the radio and get to the bottom of whatever the late J. T. Rawls had been up to in this little ghost town.
50
LA SELVA NEGRA
H arry Brock slapped in a fresh mag and jacked a round into the chamber of his semi-automatic rifle. Then he said, “How old is Caparina, anyway?”
“Almost thirty,” Saladin replied.
“Yeah? Told me she was twenty five.”
Harry and Saladin nervously eyed the low, blunt structure on the opposite rim of the canyon. They were nearing the end of the bridge. So far, they’d seen no movement and no more of the hellish little lead-spitting Trolls. But neither man had any illusions about a champagne reception immediately upon arrival on the other side.
Hassan flicked the selector on his weapon to full auto. He, like Harry, was crouched down behind the flared steel mudguard that covered the tank treads. This was all the protection the little green battlebot afforded the casual rider and, as they had witnessed, it was precious little.
“Don’t believe everything Caparina says. You’ll find yourself one day wishing you hadn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I believe you’re trying to make me jealous. My ex-wife had many lovers before you, Mr. Brock.”
“Doesn’t seem to bother you much.”
“Maybe that’s because I view all of her lovers, such as you, not as a rival, but as a fellow sufferer.”
Harry grinned at him and cocked his gun. “Lock and load, Saladin,” he said, “We’re about to go find that loose woman of yours or die trying, I guess.”
As the tank neared the last third of the bridge, both men were relieved not to have seen Caparina’s charred corpse lying in the smoking ruins of the tank. And they were mildly shocked that no one had bothered to kill them yet.
“Drone aircraft formation,” Saladin said suddenly, “Get low as you can. Hug steel, Harry!”
“Shit,” Harry said, flattening himself as best he could in the cramped space between the fore and aft mudguards. Both of them were wearing jungle fatigues the same shade of camo as the battlebots were painted. Harry hoped that it afforded a small measure of visual protection. It all depended on how alert the operator flying the UAV was at this precise moment.
“No movement!” Harry said. “Don’t even blink!”
He watched three sleek silver craft bank and turn as they flew up the ravine directly toward them. He saw the telltale red tips at the ends of the wings and knew the goddamn things were armed with air-to-ground missiles. The drone squadron was now on a collision course headed straight for the bridge. All you could do was wait for a launch and watch one of those little red bastards home in on your dead ass.
Nothing of the kind happened.
The lead drone dipped its inverted-spoon nose at the last possible second. Harry held his breath as it streaked directly beneath the bridge with about six inches of clearance. The two flankers streaked across overhead, where they began a lazy turn, climbing to the south. Probably on a search circuit that would route them along the southern perimeter of Top’s compound, Harry thought.
If Top was on his game, which he surely was, he’d be scheduling these drone recon flights at odd hours, eliminating any predictability that would allow intruders inside unnoticed. The two intruders aboard the tank whipped their heads around and watched the lone silver bird dart and twist its way up the deep green ravine, finally disappearing around a rocky promontory and into heavy mist. When Hassan and Brock faced forward once more, the Troll was rumbling off the bridge and onto a wide apron of crushed sandstone.
“That was good,” Harry said, his eyes darting back and forth, looking for any movement in or around the seemingly abandoned pillbox fortification.
“Why?”
“Nobody sent that drone squad to take us out, or, believe me, it would have. That last flight was on routine patrol and the operator didn’t pick us up.”
“Asleep at the wheel.”
“We got lucky.”
“Better lucky than smart.”
