Deep Fire Rising

AREA 51, NEVADA

Mercer spent twenty tense minutes convincing two camouflaged security guards who’d materialized out of the desert that he shouldn’t be run immediately to the local sheriff as a trespasser. What followed was a two-hour ride in the back of a Jeep Cherokee, a further hours-long wait in an isolated building while his identity was checked and rechecked, and then a quick hop in a windowless Blackhawk helicopter to the main complex.

He was escorted to the same spartan room he’d been given his first night at Area 51. Five minutes after stepping from the shower and into some dry clothes left by the soldier at the reception desk there was a knock on the door.

“Omega ninety-nine temple.” Even muffled by the door, Mercer had no problem recognizing the deep voice.

He returned the countersign. “Caravan eleven solstice.”

The door swung open to reveal Captain Booker T. Sykes, his escort from the flight from Washington. The big African American held a six-pack of beer in one hand and a deck of playing cards in the other. He was dressed in desert fatigue pants with a black T-shirt stretched across his chest. An unlit cigar jutted from between his even teeth. “Heard you blew back into town.”

Mercer grinned. “This place has better shampoo samples than the hotel in Vegas.”

Sykes stripped two beers from the six-pack and handed one over. “Cheaper room service, too.” He took a seat at the small table under the window and began shuffling the cards. “Rumor has it base security picked you up wandering in from Highway 375 near the town of Rachel.”

“I got lost looking for a hot craps table.”

Sykes shook his head. “Didn’t figure you’d tell me what was up. Admiral Lasko’s due to arrive in a couple hours for your debrief. I figured you could use a few beers more than the sleep.”

“You could say that.” Mercer took a long pull from his beer and checked the cards Sykes had dealt him. “Did your rumor source say if they caught Donny Randall, the miner that skipped out from my project?”

“The guy vanished into thin air. Knowing me and my Delta team were here, security even called us in to help on the search. We had his tracks running south from DS-Two for eleven miles and then they vanished. No sign a chopper landed to pick him up, no sign of anything.”

“Thermal scans?”

“Lots of jackrabbits, a few coyotes but no missing miner. Even if he’d died out there, his corpse would stay warm enough for us to detect. My men are still searching. I came back when I heard you’re here to see if you have any explanations.”

“I have no idea how he disappeared. I don’t even know why except someone must have gotten to him, bought him off or something. That explosion was deliberate. He tried to kill me and a couple others. I believe he also caused a cave-in before I came here that killed a dozen men.”

“I bet you don’t believe the admiral’s story anymore, huh?”

“About a nuclear waste dump? Not anymore. Hey, I thought this was supposed to be compartmentalized. How do you know so much?”

“Lasko. We talked yesterday after you and your men were sent to Vegas. We’ve been reassigned as special security for his project. He figured the explosion and Randall are the beginning of something bigger.”

“Me too,” Mercer agreed, dropping his cards to reveal a quick win in their first game of gin. “Since we’re going to be spending some time together, does this mean you can tell me what it is you’ve been doing out here?”

“Ah.” Sykes lit his cigar with a gold Zippo. “Let me tell you about Project Monkey Bomb.”

Three hours and several dozen games of gin later, the telephone on the nightstand rang. “Morning, Ira,” Mercer answered, knowing who would be calling. The sun was just starting to outline the mountains outside his room.

“Tell Sykes to bring you to the conference room in five minutes.”

The line went dead.

Startled by his friend’s brusque tone, Mercer replaced the handset and cocked an eyebrow at Sykes. “I think I’m in some deep shit.”

The captain got to his feet. “Yeah, actually you are.”

Ira wore a suit only slightly darker than the bags under his eyes. He’d shaved hastily, probably on the plane, leaving patches of silvery stubble and several raw cuts. A carafe of coffee and four cups were on the conference table. Dr. Briana Marie sat on his left wearing her ubiquitous lab coat over a red blouse. The deputy national security advisor didn’t look up when Mercer and Booker Sykes entered the room and he continued to thumb through a folder as the two men poured themselves coffee.

Mercer took a seat, slurping at his cup for a full minute. No one spoke, no one moved. Dr. Marie looked like she wasn’t even breathing. Ira finally closed the file and pulled off his reading glasses. He looked at Mercer as though he were a stranger. Or an adversary.

“How did you get from the Luxor to where the guards picked you up?”

Mercer couldn’t explain why he lied, but it came without hesitation. “Hitchhiked. I got lucky. A couple of college kids picked me up. They were headed to Rachel because they heard the UFOs fly just before dawn and wanted to be in position near Freedom Ridge.”

“Freedom Ridge has been closed to the public since 1995,” Dr. Marie said sharply.

“I said they were college kids. They probably didn’t know. I’d never even heard of Freedom Ridge.” Mercer knew of the bluff overlooking a corner of the base from a television special.

“So what happened at the Luxor?” Ira hefted the file. “This is a preliminary police report. One dead tourist, one slightly injured security guard, two severely wounded pool cleaners and two unknown subjects found dead outside your room when security chased away three other unsubs.”

Mercer was surprised. And impressed. He thought his indiscriminate cover fire would have maybe injured one of the assassins, not kill two of them. There was something to be said for luck, because firing through walls required no skill. He told the story as accurately as he remembered it, his conversation with Harry, the woman being pushed to her death and his headlong plunge down the sloping glass wall. He omitted nothing except his rescue and subsequent conversation with Tisa Nguyen. He wasn’t going to give her up until he knew what Ira and Dr. Marie were really doing at the DS-Two site.

“And what about Donny Randall and the explosion?” Ira prompted “Any theories?”

“The same ones you have,” Mercer answered. “That the accident that killed those men and prompted you to call me in wasn’t an accident. Donny arranged that as well, expecting to be named overall boss of the project in hopes you’d tell him what was really happening out there. When that didn’t happen, whoever was controlling him decided to cut their losses. Randall was told to kill me and disappear. The charge he planted would have done the job had Ken not spotted the explosives. Donny was in the command trailer and would have seen us on the camera. He remote detonated them an instant too late. He didn’t stick around to see if we drowned and obviously had help getting out of Area 51. Because Sykes’s men didn’t find vehicle tracks, and I assume radar coverage here would have detected a helicopter at even treetop height, you might want to consider a two-man hovercraft met him in the deep desert and took him away. Everyone at the mine knew we were headed to the Luxor, so the killers had a backup team waiting in case Randall failed. Is that about how you read it?”

Ira took a breath. “Everything but the hovercraft,” he admitted. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’ve been square with you.” Mercer’s expression was one of ill-disguised anger. “Don’t you think it’s time you’re square with me? What’s going on out there, Ira? A lot of people are dead and it’s not over a secret nuclear waste dump.”

“It’s not, but I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry. I’ll understand if you want out of the project as long as you promise not to discuss anything that’s happened in the past two weeks.”

“I don’t even know what’s happened in the past two weeks,” Mercer said with frustration.

“It’s best that way,” Briana said gravely.

Mercer could take Ira’s deal now, walk away, and there’d be no hard feelings. He’d probably even keep his job as special science advisor. But he’d never learn the truth, and to Mercer that wasn’t an option. Ira had dangled a mystery in front of him, baiting him with just enough information to keep him interested. He was being played. He knew it, Ira knew it. And both knew Mercer wasn’t going to back down. This offer was more about keeping the guise of secrecy rather than any real secret.

“I’ll stick it out with the promise that I get ten minutes alone with Randall the Handle when you finally catch him.

Ira grunted. “I’ll hold the son of a bitch down for you.”

“So what do you have on the gunmen?”

“No ID. Their clothes had all the labels removed but looked like they could have come from any Sears store in the country. The cops are checking all the cars in the surrounding parking lots, but with a hundred thousand tourists in town at any moment I doubt they’ll find anything. The weapons are on their way to the FBI lab. We’ll probably find they were bought at a gun show from a guy with an attitude toward the government and a real short memory. We haven’t gotten anything on the men themselves, at least from the criminal databases. It’ll take more time to search all the others. I’m not too optimistic.”

“You don’t think they’re locals hired for the job?”

“Not unless the Vegas mob is hiring out Thai contract killers.”

“Thai?” Mercer hadn’t taken the time to look at the assassins’ features so the revelation that they were Asian came as a shock. He immediately thought of Tisa Nguyen. And the group she belonged to.

“Thai, Laotian, Cambodian. Not sure which yet. We’ve got a physical anthropologist coming in to make a determination.”

“There were five men who hit my room and more outside. Anything on them?”

“Nothing on the three that got away. The guards were too far away. They went down the emergency stairs and left the hotel in the confusion. According to a few eyewitnesses who saw the men rush into the pool area, they were tall, short, black, white, Hispanic, well dressed, wearing rags, carrying rifles, carrying pistols, and one guy was certain one of them was carrying a sword. All of which is pretty typical with panicked witnesses.”

The room fell silent. It was clear that the hitmen were professionals. The evidence they left behind wouldn’t amount to anything. The truth was, the assassins were gone. Donny Randall was gone. And in their wake were a whole lot of questions no one could answer.

“What’s happening at the mine?” Mercer asked, pressing on.

“High-speed pumps are draining the shaft,” Dr. Marie answered. “It might take a few days.”

Mercer recalled the force of the deluge and knew it would be longer than a few days. He also recalled the water’s strange salinity, how it had tasted and even foamed up like seawater. He decided against asking about it. Like Tisa’s presence, he thought it best to keep a few things to himself. “Then I guess the only thing to do is wait for the pumps to do their work.”

“And look around for an abandoned hovercraft,” Sykes added.

The pumps were still going full blast, discharging a hundred thousand gallons an hour, when a patrol in a Jeep Cherokee found the truck-sized hovercraft a hundred miles southwest of the DS-Two site. It lay on its deflated rubber skirt next to a heavy-duty trailer. The fuel tank was near empty and Donny Randall’s fingerprints were all over the passenger side of the open cockpit. Tire tracks matching those left by the government Jeeps continued on in the same direction. It was simple to figure out how they’d done it. The extraction team had trailered the hovercraft into Area 51 with a Jeep Cherokee like the guards used to arouse less suspicion. They’d unloaded the air cushion vehicle at its maximum range from where Randall waited at the rendezvous spot. Once they had their mole, they’d returned to the Jeep, abandoned the hovercraft and trailer, and simply drove away. A neat, well-executed operation.

It took just six hours to trace the hovercraft to its manufacturer in California and determine that the vehicle had been stolen a week earlier from the company’s proving grounds. Dead end.

On Mercer’s recommendation, half the miners assigned to the project were sent home with a fat bonus while the men from his shift remained in Las Vegas in case they were needed once the mine was drained. The only personnel left at the DS-Two site were a handful of engineers to monitor the pumps and Mercer himself. Ira and Dr. Marie remained at the main Area 51 complex and called in for daily updates.

He was sitting in the control trailer idly thumbing through a week-old news magazine, his feet on a counter, a cup of coffee at his elbow. He was contemplating getting lunch when a noise penetrated his lazy musings. Not a noise, but rather the lack of noise. For four days he’d heard the steady background roar of water rushing through the twelve-inch pipes from the pumps. It became one of those sounds, like traffic to a city dweller, that became so pervasive he had to concentrate to hear it. When it cut off suddenly, it took a moment to realize it was gone.

Several pairs of feet ran past the trailer as technicians raced to the mine head. Mercer launched himself out the door in their wake. The man overseeing the big cycloid pumps had already hit the master override so the diesel engines chugged in neutral and the pumps spooled to silence.

“What happened?” Mercer snapped, already taking command of the situation.

“Something’s clogged the intake on pump number two,” the air force staffer replied.

“Any increase in turbidity levels?”

“No, sir. Particle levels in the discharged water have remained constant. We’re not sucking mud.”

That eliminated Mercer’s first idea, that the pump had been fouled with silt. “Have you tried reversing the pump to blow the intake clear?”

“The computer does that automatically whenever there’s a jam. It didn’t work. Whatever’s in there is stuck solid.”

Mercer went quiet for a moment. “Okay, what’s the water depth at the intake?”

The sergeant checked a monitor slaved to the main pump station. “One hundred ten feet.”

Not too deep that Mercer couldn’t dive it. He knew from his conversations with Sykes the first night back from Vegas that his team had brought all their equipment to Area 51, including scuba gear. It would be quicker to dive to the clogged intake than wait for an underwater camera to be shipped in.

“Here’s what I want,” Mercer said, his plan in place. “Kill the diesels. I don’t want either pump run up again. We can’t risk the guts being torn out of them if whatever’s down there gets into the other one. While they’re down, make sure the second pump wasn’t damaged. I trust the computer override, but only so far.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“That should do it.” Mercer returned to the command trailer and dialed Ira on a secure phone. “Ira, we’ve hit another snag.”

“What happened?”

“Pump is fouled and we can’t clear it. I want to dive down there with Sykes to take a look. Can you send him over with some scuba equipment?”

“Ah, hold a second.” Ira must have clamped his hand over the mouthpiece because Mercer couldn’t hear a thing. The pause stretched to a minute. “Ah, okay. Dr. Marie wants to know the water depth.”

“A hundred ten feet. Shallow enough for Sykes and me to reach.”

“Hold on again.” This time Ira was away for over three minutes. “Yeah, I’ll send him over, but I’m coming too. There are some things I need to brief you on. We’ll chopper in within an hour.”

Forty-eight minutes later, a Blackhawk landed a quarter mile from the mouth of the box canyon that hid the DS-Two mine at the edge of the shallow lake of water pumped from the tunnel. The lake was ringed with mud where its shores receded each day through evaporation, then expanded again at night as the pumps discharged their flow. Mercer dispatched a Humvee to pick up Ira, Sykes, and the dive equipment, then ordered everyone else from the cavern. Whatever Ira had to say in his briefing would likely be secret.

The Humvee backed into the cave and braked next to the elevator hoist. Sykes immediately began to heave the heavy dive bags from the back of the vehicle as though they were sacks of groceries. Mercer and the driver helped with the air tanks. Ira waited near the lift, peering down into the inky blackness of the shaft. The air held the tang of salty water, like a thin sea mist.

“I guessed at the size,” Booker Sykes said as he peeled open the first bag. Inside was a black wet suit.

Mercer held it up. It looked about right. “I’m touched you noticed.”

“Funny. So what’s it like down there?”

“We’ll take the elevator to the water’s surface. There’s a trapdoor on the bottom. From there it’s a straightforward dive down to the pump intakes. They’re forty feet below where we tunneled off the main shaft.”

“Anything in the tunnel we should worry about?” Sykes continued to pull equipment from the bags: lights, regulators, weight belts.

“I doubt it. The way the water was blowing through there, any equipment would have been shoved down into the sump.”

Sykes took a moment to visualize the dive and nodded to himself. “And what about you? Can you handle the dive?”

“I don’t have your experience, but I should be all right. This isn’t like diving into an unfamiliar cave. I know the shaft and we don’t need to go into the tunnel.”

“That’s for sure,” Ira interjected.

The two men looked up from their work.

“Under no circumstances are either of you to enter the tunnel.” Ira’s tone was harsh.

Mercer was about to ask why, caught the look in his friend’s eyes, and let the question die on his lips. He’d always known Ira to have a great sense of humor and an understanding of how to supervise people. He rarely gave such a direct order unless there was a compelling reason. Mercer understood enough about the world Ira inhabited to know he would never tell him what that reason was. Ira held Mercer’s glance for a moment, and Mercer let his focus drift away. It was as much of an acknowledgment as he would give.

“That’s an order, Mercer,” Ira said. “I don’t give them very often, but when I do people had better listen. This one’s for your protection, not mine. Do not leave the main shaft.”

“Okay,” Mercer finally said.

“Captain Sykes?” Ira directed his attention to the Delta Force operator.

“Sir.”

“Mercer is not to leave your side and neither of you are to enter the tunnel. Go down, clear the intake, and come straight back up. Is that clear?”

Even on his knees, Sykes managed to look like he’d come to attention. “Yes, Admiral.”

He’s scared, Mercer realized. Ira’s scared of whatever’s down there. What the hell were he and Dr. Marie up to? What was it Tisa had said? A single seismic spike, like a bubble, had formed within the rock and then vanished. Her exact words were “a contained nuclear explosion.” Maybe there had been a weapon test like her group believed. Something that got out of control?

From where he worked next to Booker, Mercer could see into the yawning mouth of the mine. It was uniformly square, darker and suddenly ominous. The damp air coming from it felt like an icy breath.

Fifteen minutes later, after Sykes ran through a number of safety procedures Mercer already knew, they were ready for the descent. Ira sent for a crane operator to work the hoist while Mercer and Sykes shuffled into the skip and settled themselves on the floor. Standing around for the minutes it would take to reach the water level was an uncomfortable option with fifty pounds of gear on their backs. Both men had various tools linked to their weight belts for when they reached the pump intake.

“Down and back,” Ira said as he slammed the steel gate.

“Down and back,” Mercer echoed.

The elevator fell from beneath them.

“Oh, one thing I forgot to tell you, Booker,” Mercer said loud enough to be heard over the cage’s rattle, “the water is highly saline.”

“People call me Doc, and how salty?” Sykes asked in the darkness. Neither bothered to turn on their dive lights or the lights on the mining helmets.

“I’d say like seawater.”

“We should be okay weightwise. Just don’t need to add so much air to your buoyancy compensator.”

The temperature plunged as they dropped, the heat sucked into the millions of gallons of water still flooding the mine. Again, Mercer was reminded of a chilly breath. The car began to slow and came to a gentle stop at seven hundred sixty feet. Mercer heaved open the trapdoor cut into the floor of the car and flashed his light into the depths. The still water reflected the beam like a black mirror. He reached for the telephone built into the side of the elevator and ordered them lowered another five feet. The water was now just inches below the steel mesh floor.

Doc Sykes reached down and brought a palmful of water to his mouth. He spat it immediately. “Shit! Tastes exactly like the ocean.”

“Told you so.” Mercer looked closer at the water. Tendrils of something floated on the surface. He snagged one with the tip of a pry bar and brought it into the elevator. It was green and stringy, like seaweed. He smelled it. It had the same decayed fishy odor too. But this was impossible. The subterranean reservoir had been cut off from the rest of the world for tens or hundreds of millions of years. There was no way seaweed could have evolved in this isolated lightless realm so far from any ocean. He showed it to Sykes. A troubled look passed between them.

“Let’s just do this, okay?”

Mercer flicked the mess off the pry bar and re-clipped the tool to his belt. “Right,” he said doubtfully.

Sykes went first. He slipped his regulator into his mouth, took a couple of breaths and eased himself through the trapdoor. He treaded water until Mercer was at his side. They took a minute to adjust their buoyancy and let the water saturating their wet suits warm against their bodies. Sykes gave Mercer the okay sign with thumb and forefinger and sank from view without a ripple.

Mercer was much less graceful but managed to claw his way under the water, feeling it close over his body and experiencing that momentary thrill of weightlessness. If not for their powerful lights, it would have been easy to imagine they were floating in space.

Sykes maintained an easy pace, keeping one hand on the foot-thick pipe that would lead to the clogged intake. His fins moved lazily, more for steering control than propulsion. Like any experienced diver he was letting his weight belt do the work for him. They passed the mouth of the tunnel. Sykes didn’t even flash his light toward it as they glided deeper into the depths.

Mercer stayed five feet above the soldier, keeping Sykes centered in the cone of light from his lamp. The water was polluted with suspended particles too small to identify but too large to be silt. He’d never seen such contaminated artesian water. They should be swimming through water clearer than crystal, not this soup. Sykes didn’t seem bothered by this, but Mercer was troubled. Something was seriously, seriously wrong. He was thinking about aborting the dive and demanding answers from Ira when Sykes slowed his descent.

Mercer checked his depth gauge. One hundred four feet. Sykes was hovering just above the clogged intake, blocking Mercer’s view of the pipe. Mercer finned down next to the soldier and trained his light on the pipe’s terminus.

The mouth of the intake was blocked by a circular piece of white plastic about four feet in diameter, something Mercer didn’t recognize as being in the mine before the flood. In fact, he’d never seen it before. The tremendous suction from the topside pump had warped the plastic, extruding it into the coarse mesh that prevented debris from flowing up the line. The plastic was so deformed that reversing the pump had only lodged it tighter.

Sykes pulled out his board and a grease pencil and drew a sharp question mark.

Mercer shook his head. He had no idea what they were looking at. Both men levered their pry bars next to where the plastic had bent around the steel pipe, heaving in concert to peel an inch of the disk from the intake. They shifted the levers and repeated the maneuver, working their way around the pipe like they were opening a can. The intake mesh had gouged a waffle pattern into the plastic that locked the two like Velcro. It took several minutes of heavy work before the disk popped clear. It floated free, bobbing in the currents formed by their effort. As it slowly revolved, the side pressed into the intake danced into the beams of the lights. The lettering printed around the perimeter was perfectly legible: RYLANDER CRUISE LINES. THE HAPPY SHIPS.

The mysterious disk was a plastic tabletop, one of several dozen usually found arranged around the swimming pool on a cruise ship. An unremarkable artifact in and of itself, something that probably gets lost at sea quite often when the weather’s rough, but how had it gotten stuck eight hundred feet under solid rock a good four hundred miles from the nearest ocean?

Sykes didn’t need to redraw his question mark. The confusion was in his eyes.

Mercer grabbed his own board and wrote for a moment. We’re going down the tunnel to the working face. Calculate our air time.

Sykes shook his head. Mercer jiggled the board, emphasizing his demand. Again, the commando shook his head. Mercer erased his message and wrote another.

I’m going with or without you.

Wasting just another second with silent defiance, Sykes checked Mercer’s gauges and his own and typed the numbers into the dive computer strapped to his wrist. He read the numbers and wrote: We’ve got forty minutes at this depth. More where the tunnel branches off.

Mercer used a snap clip to attach an air bag to the tabletop and pulled the lanyard that inflated the rubber sphere. The table rose into the murk. They’d haul it onto the elevator when they finished the dive. He started for the tunnel, confident that Sykes was right behind him. At sixty-seven feet they reached the tunnel. Mercer twisted in and continued on, swimming in smooth strokes that pushed him through the water with minimal effort. He didn’t even consider the last time he’d been in this tunnel was when the flood had claimed Ken Porter’s life. He focused entirely on what lay beyond the dike they’d blasted through. There had never been a subterranean lake — at least not until four months ago. The water looked and tasted like seawater because that’s exactly what it was. And the answer to how it got to the middle of the Nevada desert lay a quarter mile ahead.

He had to force himself not to rush. In his wake he left a steady trail of bubbles as he drew deep, even breaths. His light receded from him as he swam, like the corridor from a nightmare that never ends. It took seven minutes to reach the site of the explosion. All the debris from Donny Randall’s final blast had been swept away in the flood. Most of the working face was gone too. Only jagged chunks of rock hanging from the ceiling and jutting from the floor like rotted teeth marked this as the spot where Ken had died.

Mercer didn’t slow. But as he pushed through the shattered dike, his light vanished, the beam swallowed by an enormous chamber. Mercer stopped dead in the water, trying to adjust to the sudden change from the tunnel’s claustrophobic confines. Sykes swam up next to him. He played his light around. The water was too deep to see the floor and the walls were lost from view. He flashed his beam upward and tapped Mercer on the shoulder.

The light bounced off the water’s surface forty feet overhead. The pumps had drained the reservoir to the same level as the main shaft where the elevator waited.

They didn’t need to confer to know what to do. Sykes watched his depth gauge and worked his computer to calculate decompression stops. No matter what they found, they had five minutes before they had to return to the elevator car.

A moment later they broke the surface. Mercer swept his beam around in a circle, the light penetrating much farther through air than the water. The chamber was at least five hundred feet across, and the ceiling was a dome lofting a hundred feet above them. The cave’s walls were smooth and curved, like the interior of a stone sphere that had been polished to perfection.

All of this he saw in a quick glance, an impression more than an observation, because something else had caught his attention. As confused as he was about finding seaweed and as stunned as he was discovering the table, what he saw now defied all logic.

Even in the low light of a single dive lamp, the size and silhouette were unmistakable. Floating serenely in the middle of the underground lake was the dull gray shape of a submarine.