Criss Cross

Chapter 37

After waiting a few moments to let my eyes adjust to the dim red light, I crept down the hallway toward those stairs. I paused there, remembering reading in the dossier that at least twenty-five container cars were buried belowground and that there were five or six above in the cone of the anthill.

The stairs both up and down were unlit. Below me, the stairs dropped into darkness, and that gave me a claustrophobic feeling even when I turned on the flashlight and shone it down the shaft.

The workers who’d helped Rivers build the anthill had described it as a maze belowground, the kind of place you could easily get lost in. And at the back of my mind, there was the nagging possibility that the padlock had been left open on purpose because the prepper was coming right back.

My cell phone buzzed. A Wickr text from Ali: Home! So much fun! Captain W is a beast on a mountain bike!

I hit the thumbs-up emoji, wrote, Working. I will call you later.

Then I stood there, straining to hear if someone was calling for help, but I heard nothing except that hum, which seemed to boil up from below. I glanced at my watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed since I’d left Sampson.

I decided to climb. I flicked on my little flashlight, went up a flight, and found small doors, one on either side of the landing. Both were unlocked.

The container car on the left held shelves stocked deep with food supplies. The one on the right was set up as an emergency medical facility and had a safe that I assumed held medicine.

I climbed up another flight and found two more doors. The container car on the right was the armory. The place smelled lightly of oil and solvent. There were at least eighty assault rifles in racks and three hunting-style rifles with scopes.

The container car on the left was an ammo dump, with crate after crate of 5.56x44mm NATO surplus ammunition. I looked around and saw a crowbar but recognized the futility of trying to open every crate to see if it held anything but bullets. There were just too many.

I went up the next flight of stairs and found a fifth container car, this one with three workstations and an array of computers and monitors, all dark except for two set up on a bench in a corner.

Those two screens were each split into four quadrants that showed real-time feeds from security cameras. It was obvious which feed came from the camera over the door: you couldn’t see a thing because of the mud I’d smeared on it. The next three feeds on that monitor seemed to be from cameras fixed high on the anthill; they showed various angles of the darkly shadowed meadow.

Had I been seen? No, I decided.

The next feed was a wide-angle shot that showed the road to the house and the machinery parked there. The last two cameras were trained on the house, one aimed at the front, one aimed at the back. Nothing moved behind the windows, which were not shuttered or draped.

There were no more stairs, but a fixed ladder led to the last container car, that bunker on a bunker that stuck out of the top of the anthill. It was not lit inside, and I had to use the flashlight again to look around.

It was then that I saw that slits about six inches tall and three inches wide had been cut at intervals in the upper walls of the container. Shooting ports.

And there was a sliding window cut into the wall facing the house. I peered through it, noticing that a metal flap could be lowered across it for protection.

There was a small door that allowed access out to the roof of the anthill. I opened it, looked out, and saw a winch bolted to the side of the container car with coils of rope on the roof below it. That puzzled me until I saw a low metal gate in the waist-high defensive wall that surrounded the roof.

The gate was almost three feet across and I realized Rivers must use the winch and rope to bring things up the side of the anthill.

I stepped back into the bunker and was taking one last look around Rivers’s little citadel when I happened to glance through the window back toward the house. Even though I was two hundred yards away, I saw something move up there.

I spun around, clambered down the ladder to the room with all the monitors, and ran to look at the feed from the cameras facing the house. Nothing. But on the feed showing the road and the excavation equipment, I saw something. The camera picked up the motion and shifted to some kind of infrared lens.

Dwight Rivers was walking fast down the hill and carrying a shotgun.

Then he broke into a run and sprinted toward his doomsday bunker.