Hawke didn't want the sound of automatic weapons echoing down the tunnels.
Hawke drew his sidearm from his thigh holster. He always kept a parabellum round chambered at times like this, and a full mag. He fitted the noise suppressor to his weapon, stepped silently out from the darkness at the edge of the cavern, raised his pistol and fired twice, phut-phut, two head shots.
The guards crumpled to the ground, and he motioned the team forward into the cavern.
'Maybe this is the Sheik's back door,' Sahira said.
'Let's hope so,' Hawke replied. 'We certainly wouldn't want to come in through the front.'
It was a vault. A massive round titanium door stood between them and whatever was on the other side. Hawke put the radius of the vault door at about fifteen feet. 'Same handprint recognition pad,' Abdul said, staring at the print screener mounted on the right.
'May I offer you a hand, sir?' Abdul said, looking up at Hawke and taking one of the newly dead guards by the wrist.
'Please,' Alex said, and Abdul lifted the right hand of one of the corpses and placed it against the screen, activating it. Digital lights in the center of the round door began flashing. The large stainless-steel wheel at the center instantly spun through any number of combinations. A second later, the door suddenly swung open with a hiss, perhaps four inches.
The moment the door opened, Ugg's radiation detector began to beep softly for the first time. Sahira looked closely at Ugg's controller and studied the readouts the bot was analyzing, saying softly to herself, 'This door has a lead shield.'
'Talk to me, Sahira,' Hawke said.
'Gamma rays,' Sahira said. 'We're on it. The nuclear device has got to be somewhere inside this vault. Although this is a very weak signal. The weapon may be shielded. Or located somewhere well beyond this location.'
Abdul and Stokely swung the perfectly balanced one-ton door open just enough to allow the bot inside. Sahira used Ugg's joystick and tank treads to send it climbing up and over the rounded threshold of the vault's entrance. Once inside, she stopped it and looked at the readouts. 'No human thermal heat, no gas, no bacteria,' she said. 'Trace radiation.'
'What's in there, Sahira?' Hawke asked.
'Gold,' she said, matter-of-factly.
'Go,' Hawke said to his team, standing back and waiting as they entered before stepping inside.
Gold. An Egyptian pharaoh's fantasy hoard of gold. Endless gold, row after endless row of gold ingots and bars neatly stacked upon endless metal shelves, shelves that stretched off into the darkness and rose up to the dimly lit twenty-foot ceiling. Hawke made a quick calculation and estimated he was standing within six feet of many billions of dollars. Now he knew how al-Rashad funded his worldwide jihad, blowing up airports, schools, hospitals. He literally had limitless resources.
And that was just what he could see through his NVG goggles. He saw a dim rectangle of light at the end of one of the golden corridors and signaled his team to follow. The rectangle looked like an exit.
Ugg was first to exit the gold vault and looked both ways, the radioactivity sensor beeping noticeably louder now. A second later, Sahira, studying her monitor for hostiles, called out to the team stacked up at the door, 'Clear! Go!'
NEAR THE END OF THIS NEW TUNNEL they came to a barrier. Not a physical barrier, but an ever-shifting spiderweb of red laser beams, constantly in motion. There was simply no way a human being could penetrate this barrier without causing every alarm inside the mountain to start screaming.
Sahira touched Alex's forearm. 'Look all the way through the web. The beams are emanating from some kind of device mounted on the wall at the end of this tunnel. Take the device out, and we're clear.'
'Right. But we can't get to it to disarm it.'
'No, we can't. But Ugg can.'
'Ugg can't get under the lowest beam. The turrets are too high.'
'Maybe not. Watch this.'
Sahira pressed a toggle switch on the controller and the bot instantly lowered itself until its underside was less than a half inch off the ground.
'How the hell?' Hawke said.
'Air suspension. I designed him with bladders that raise or lower him twelve inches.'
'Wizard.'
'Heartbreaker.'
'Let's see what your little Ugg can do, shall we?'
'As you wish,' she replied and pushed the joystick forward. The bot moved swiftly and silently beneath the lowest of the brilliant red beams, clearing by perhaps half an inch. Hawke and Sahira peered at the screen as the wall-mounted device came into view. 'Now what?' Hawke said.
'Two options. I can use his robotic arm to open the device and sever the laser's power supply. Or I can fire a quick burst of automatic fire and destroy the whole thing.'
'The former. The less noise we make, the better.'
Hawke watched Ugg's mechanical arm extend, pry open the metal lid exposing the inner workings of the laser device, and use its finely articulated claw to carefully separate and disconnect the tangled myriad of wires. It clipped several with its wire cutters. Then it reconnected one red-coated wire to a new terminal before cutting one final connection.
'What's it doing now?' Hawke asked. 'I mean you. What are you doing now?'
'Preventing any disruption of the status alert signal from going to the alarm systems when the power is cut off. Watch.'
Ugg's pincers found the power cable and cut it cleanly. The laser beams disappeared instantaneously. The tunnel was clear. And there were no alarms.
'Good work. Let's go,' Hawke said, moving rapidly to catch up with Ugg, the machine already disappearing around the next bend. Sahira suddenly clutched his arm.
'Alex! Stop!'
'What?'
'Look.' She held up the controller. On the screen was another unmanned robot coming rapidly toward Ugg.
'That looks identical to the one you designed!' Hawke said.
'It is one of the ones I designed,' Sahira said in utter disbelief.
'How many were manufactured?'
'Only a handful.'
'So how the hell does this Sheik of Araby end up with one of our highly classified British robots in his personal arsenal?'
'I have absolutely no idea. Only someone who has access to the highest-'
She was interrupted by the resounding rattle of machine-gun fire.
'The other one is shooting at Ugg! Shoot back!' Hawke said.
Sahira's fingers flew all over the controls, blindingly fast, sending Ugg careening all over the tunnel while managing to keep both barrels of the machine guns pouring lead into its twin. The enemy bot tried to reverse away but Ugg accelerated, chasing down the evil twin and giving it both barrels, blasting it to pieces until almost nothing but the tracks remained, grinding to a smoking, sparking, frazzled halt.
Hawke smiled at the ridiculous sensation he was experiencing. He suddenly found himself wanting to cheer for a bloody machine!
FIFTY-NINE
THE SMILE DIDN'T LAST LONG. After an hour of climbing, always upward in the dark, the team entered a new stretch of tunnel, trailing along behind the wounded but victorious Ugg. Ugg's radioactive warning beeps had become much louder now, especially when it had passed the opening of a fresh tunnel leading off to the left. Sahira desperately wanted to explore it, but Hawke insisted they keep moving until they engaged the enemy.
