Chapter 14

It took six elevator rides to get them all the way down to the bottom. As the final lift came to a noisy, clanging halt, Remo and Chiun gave each other a silent signal to be wary.

Because there were so many things wrong down here, Remo didn’t know where to begin sorting them out. His senses were flaring from the overload, trying to come to terms with the alien environment. There was the smell of rock dust, so thick and so old it was beyond conception that it should have ever been stirred up. There was the smell of fuel and sweat, and the tinge of radioactivity poisoning the air.

Most subtle and yet most powerful was the combination of signals that told them they were somewhere foreign, where the pressure of the air was different than it had ever been, where the miles of rock above them blocked out the wisps of heat and electronic and pressure waves that had always been there.

And there was a smell unlike any smell Remo knew, and what made it so noticeable was that it was almost human.

But not quite.

Wools led the way. They went past corridors into vast, empty spaces for future waste storage, linked by a rail system for a waste transport car with a clicking electric motor.

“It’s shielded for radiation and it moves slow to make any spillage impossible,” Wools enthused, still trying to win them over.

“Where’s it come from?” Remo asked. “You’re not taking waste down the elevator on a furniture dolly.”

“We have a transport system designed just for the waste-containers,” Wools said. “I’ll show you.”

“So why couldn’t the guys have snuck out that way?” Remo asked. “Seems like the easy explanation for your little ‘we quit’ scenario.”

“Believe me, I’ve tried to come up with a way to make that sound feasible,” Wools admitted. “You’ll see why I can’t in a minute.”

They found the shaft in a hermetically sealed chamber, where a series of mechanical cranes and claws were designed to lift the arriving cargo into the sealed transport car. There was no cargo arriving yet. The radiation level from within was elevated, but not deadly.

“Watch.” Wools took the controls from a bored operator and pressed a button that opened a large pair of metal doors, revealing a transport car with a self-balancing cargo compartment, required to keep the waste level on the steep grade. The car was winched, front and rear, and as they watched it began to move, exiting the doorway and coming to a halt next to a waiting transport car.

“It comes down and gets off-loaded, then travels the second corridor back up,” Wools said, and the car started again, heading through a second pair of metal doors that clanged shut behind it. “Now it’s being superheated,” Wools said. “This sterilizes it of any microorganisms that may be clinging to it. It will be heated seven more times on its trip to the surface, getting as hot as nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit. This way, when we go public we can assure the good folks of Oklahoma that no mutated bacteria and other life-forms are being transported to the world above. As if. Anyway, it discourages stowaways.”

“Couldn’t the sterilizing be turned off?” Remo asked.

“It could, but the alarm system would start a cascading shutdown of all systems. We’d take weeks to get up and running again. Believe me, there’s no way to make this sound like a plausible escape route.”

“Okay,” Remo said. “Show us the murder scene. I mean, show us where, some disgruntled employee scraped his arm before sneaking out.”

“Sure.” Wools chuckled, giving Remo a friendly pat on the arm—or would have, if Remo hadn’t somehow managed to be a lot farther away than Wools had thought.

Wools was not winning over the nonchuckling pair of Feds, he realized despondently. He moved on, taking them beyond the activity of the work zone until they followed a ramp down into a narrow, darkened tunnel lit by bare lightbulbs every fifty feet. Now that they were beyond most of the human works the scents of sweat and aftershave were reduced, so that the other smells stood out. Remo tried to place the smell that alarmed him. It was closer to human than he had first imagined, but still not quite a match.

There was another widening of the cavern where a huge air handler operated noisily, pulling in hot air from behind it, running it over a series of aluminum heat exchangers, and thrusting it back up the way they had come.

“See them pipes?” Wools pointed. “They’re miles long. They got stuff like antifreeze in there but it’s safer, in case of a spill. Goes all the way up to right near the surface, gets cooled down by the dirt, then comes through insulated pipes back down here for the coolness to get extracted and blown all over in the work zone. From here on it gets real hot”

Once beyond the air handler, the temperature rose quickly. When the sound of the giant fans dropped to a whisper, Wools stated, “Is 106 hot enough for you?” Chiun and Remo didn’t answer, and Wools gave them the once-over when they were under the glare of the next lightbulb. “Hey, how come you folks ain’t sweatin’?”

“We did a stint in Phoenix,” Remo explained.

“Oh.”

“This tunnel’s man-made.”

“Yeah?”

“You said it was an old gem mine?”

“Yeah, some good rubies came out of the Pit. That’s what the hired hands call this place. The Pit.”

“What kind of rubies?” Chiun asked.

“Red ones.”

“Of what quality?”

“Not many gemstones, if that’s what you’re asking. The mine was played out fifty years back. Nobody with any brains would be breaking in down here to get at our gems, if that’s what you were thinking.”

“Have you checked thoroughly?” Chiun persisted.

“Heh-heh. Yeah. For a while some of the grunts had a sort of contest going as a way of passing the time, about who could find the biggest gem. Then the contest became who could find any gem. Know what? Three months later one guy finds a piece of rock with one little crumbly ruby in it, worth less than it would cost to extract”

Chiun pursed his lips in disappointment, but his eyes scanned the walls as he walked.

“This is the Intersection.”

There was a small metal desk and a bored security guard who was watching them approach without much interest, an assault rifle over one shoulder.

“Here’s the purported crime scene,” Wools announced miserably.

“What, you mean the place with the yellow crime scene tape and the inch-deep puddle of dried blood?”

“Not a puddle so much—”

“It is like a catch basin at an abattoir,” Chiun noted. “There is the blood of just one man here.”

“He’s not getting his severance pay, I guarantee you that. Left without any notice whatsoever.”

“No man can survive after losing that quantity of blood. He is dead.”

“You’re exaggerating,” Wools insisted.

“Who put up the tape?” Remo asked.

“Kerker County sheriff.”

Remo turned on him. “Locals? You mean no other Feds have been notified?”

“Why would we bring in the Feds?” Wools asked, sweating even more than the heat called for. “This isn’t federal land or a government project. Sure, the federal government will be our best customer when we open this place up—”

“If you open this place up,” Remo said, walking away from the man.

“What’s that mean?”

“Where does this go?” Remo was standing at the mismatched boards nailed in place over Shaft C. Chiun was peering into the blackness at the end of the tunnel, where the dangling lightbulb scarcely reached.

“That’s an abandoned shaft,” Wools said. “Dangerous down there. Nobody’s been down there since a part of it collapsed in the 1930s.”

“I see,” Remo said. “So you don’t know what’s down there. You don’t know if there’s an access way to the surface, for example.”

“There’s not.”

Remo raised his eyebrows at Wools, who flinched. Remo kept his eyes on the little man until Wools’s skin was almost visibly crawling. “Okay, we don’t know.”

“And you didn’t try to find out because it would ruin the site,” Remo concluded.

“You got to understand, this is the deepest existing subterranean access on the continent! It was here or Nowhere! And there can’t be an access way that way. See for yourself—nobody’s come through those boards since Teddy Roosevelt was in office!”

“Until recently,” Remo said, snatching Wools by the collar and bringing his pasty face into close proximity of the wood planks. “Fresh damage to old rot. See it?”

“No, you can’t prove—”

“See it?” Remo asked, mashing Wools’s face against the plank.

“I thee it.”

Remo dropped Wools to the floor, relieving him of his flashlight in the process. “Your man got any glow sticks?”

The security guard was standing around looking worried, but he had wisely refrained from unslinging his automatic rifle.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Remo said, shrugging off the collapsed Wools. “We’re from the federal government. Got glow sticks?”

“In the emergency pack in the desk.”

“Get them.”

The guard handed Remo an emergency supply pack.

“You going in there?” Wools, asked in astonishment.

“Yeah.” Remo scrounged in the pack for other goodies and came up with a nonmilitary Meal Ready-To-Eat, featuring a menu of ham steak and au gratin potatoes. “MRE, Little Father?”

Chiun glared at him.

“Just trying to break the tension with humor.” They slithered through the wood planks and into the blackness.

Watching them disappear into the blackness, Wools wondered if those two were crazy. They hadn’t even turned on the flashlights yet.

“They’re dead meat,” the guard said.

“That’s okay,” Wools said, feeling a rising tide of optimism. “They’re with the federal government.”