“Ah, come on-”
Clark pointed his gun in Marty’s general direction. “That help?”
“Yeah!”
Clark slammed the door, then sprinted to where the others had clustered thirty feet away. Sand peppered them as Marty lifted off, then banked left and headed down the road, where he turned again behind a low hill. After twenty seconds, the chop of the rotors faded.
“Listen,” Jack said.
Over the hill, the flatbed truck was moving.
With Chavez in the lead, they charged up the slope. They were ten feet from the ridgeline when they heard the chatter of automatic weapons. Controlled three-round bursts. Voices shouted, echoing off the canyon walls. Chavez dropped to his belly and crawled forward. After a moment, he signaled the others forward. Below, the flatbed was pulling into the notch in the hillside. As they watched, a man in a yellow hard hat sprinted across the lot, heading for the road. There were three overlapping pops, and the man pitched forward and went still.
“I count four others,” Dominic said. “Don’t see any of them moving. You guys?”
No one answered.
They sprinted down the slope to the concrete lip at the edge of the lot, then followed it up the opposite slope toward the edge of the entrance notch. They crept up to the edge, peeked over, and were met by the sounds of wrenching steel. The cab of the truck was disappearing into the mouth of the tunnel. The cask slipped into the entrance, scraping along the upper rim. The truck ground to a stop, lurched forward a few feet, then stopped again. The engine died.
A man appeared around the rear of the flatbed, his AK at his shoulder. Bullets thunked into the dirt at their feet. They backpedaled and dropped down. Chavez wiggled forward, peeked up, then rose to one knee, snapped off three shots, and dropped down again. “One down,” he said.
“Do we know how big this thing is?” Jack asked.
“No bigger than a footlocker, I’d imagine,” Clark replied. “Two men could carry it. Come on, let’s move.” They picked their way back along the concrete rim, then rolled over the edge one by one and dropped to the ground. Ahead, along the concrete wall, were stacks of crates, coils of wire, rolling tool chests, acetylene cutting rigs, and arc welding units. Beyond them, the corner leading to the notch.
They moved toward it in pairs, leapfrogging one another until Clark could see around the corner. He turned back, pointed to Jack, gestured him forward, then Dominic, then Chavez. At the entrance, nothing was moving. The flatbed was wedged tightly, both sides pressing against the walls and the cask against the roof.
From the tunnel came the humming of an engine. It faded.
“Sounds like a golf cart,” Dominic said.
“Cushman utility vehicle. Sorta the same thing, but faster.”
“What do you know about the layout?” Clark asked.
“Seen a few sketches on the Internet, but since it’s not even done yet, I don’t know-”
“Best guess.”
“This main tunnel probably runs all the way to the north entrance. At intervals down the tunnel, there’ll be ramps that angle downward.”
“Straight shot or curved?”
“Straight.”
“How deep?”
“Almost a thousand feet. At the bottom, the ramp will level out into a landing-how big I don’t know. Branching off the landing will be storage tunnels for the casks. The good news is they’re gonna want to plant that thing as deep as possible, which means a ramp. From the main tunnel to the bottom, it’ll probably take them ten minutes.”
At Clark’s signal, Jack and Chavez sprinted to the rear of the flatbed, climbed up, and began moving forward past the cask. When they were almost to the cab, he and Dominic came around the corner, split around the truck, and sprinted to the walls on either side of the entrance. Clark slid along the wall, knelt down, and peeked under the truck chassis. He straightened up and signaled to Jack:
Slowly, carefully, Jack slid open the cab’s rear window, then accepted a boost from Chavez and squirmed through into the sleeper compartment. He slid down on the floorboard, crawled ahead to the dashboard. Out the side windows, the rock walls came to within a foot of the cab.
He poked his head up over the dash until he could see through the windshield. The tunnel was more massive than he’d originally imagined. Like the skeleton of a submarine, the walls and ceiling were braced by massive hoop girders. Halogen lights affixed to the ceiling stretched into the distance.
Over the hood, Jack saw the top of a man’s head move from right to left and disappear from view. Twenty feet down the tunnel, he saw another man crouching beside a yellow Cushman. Careful to keep his head out of sight, Jack wriggled into the driver’s seat. From the sleeper compartment, he heard a single tap. One… Another tap. Two…
On three, Jack pressed his palm against the horn.
Gunfire erupted on either side of the cab. The man beside the Cushman stood up and fired a burst from his AK. There was a single pop, then another. The man stumbled backward, bounced off the Cushman, and slid to the ground.
“Come on out, Jack,” Clark called.
In pairs, they wriggled beneath the truck and into the tunnel. The first man Jack had seen lay still a few feet away. Dominic trotted down to the Cushman and checked the other man. He turned back, drew his thumb across his throat.
They collected the two AKs and then, with Chavez at the wheel, climbed into the Cushman and started down the tunnel. “How stable is this thing they’ve got?” Jack asked Clark.
“Pretty stable. The slug has to be rammed into the pit with a lot of force. Takes a good-sized charge, and it has to be set. Why?”
“Working on an idea.”
Fifty feet ahead, the string of halogen ceiling lights converged into a circle. “First ramp,” Jack said.
“Easy, Dom,” Clark ordered.
They pulled to within twenty feet, then stopped, got up, and walked up to the ramp’s entrance. Lit from above by yet more halogen lights, the ramp angled down at twenty-five degrees.
“Should be able to hear their Cushman,” Jack whispered.
They went silent and listened. Nothing.
They climbed back into the Cushman and kept going. The tunnel curved to the right. Dominic stopped short, and Jack got out and peeked around the bend. He came back. “Clear.”
They kept going. They reached the second ramp and stopped to listen but heard nothing. Same with the third and fourth. As they approached the fifth, they heard a voice echo up the ramp. They got up and walked forward and looked down.
In the distance they could see the yellow speck of a Cushman appear under a halogen light, then move into shadow, then into light again.
“Three-quarters of the way down,” Jack said.
“If you’ve got an idea, now’s the time,” Clark said.
“Depends on how sure you are about that thing’s stability.”
“Ninety percent.”
Jack nodded. “Ding, need your help.”
They climbed into the Cushman, did a Y-turn, and headed back down the tunnel. They returned thirty seconds later. From the rear of the Cushman, Jack and Ding each lifted out an acetylene cylinder. “Torpedo,” Jack said.
