The Buried

CHAPTER 40

The spiral stairs had walls on both sides, preventing Orbits from getting any sense of what they had entered.

An old mine? Was there anything to dig for in this part of Kansas? He didn’t know. The last time he’d been in the state was on a road trip with his parents when he was thirteen. All he remembered from back then was that the place seemed like one giant farm.

“This had better open up into something,” he said.

Walking a few steps in front of him, the girl remained silent.

Round and round they went, each section looking exactly like the last. At one point he heard a faint noise coming from behind them. He’d made Danielle stop while he listened, but after several seconds of quiet, he told her to get moving again.

Finally, the stairs ended at another landing. It, too, had a door, though this one was on the wall they’d been circling.

As Danielle reached for the handle, Orbits said, “Wait.” He grabbed the back of her shirt. “Okay, open it. Slowly.”

The door opened inward, so Danielle had to step over the threshold as she pushed it. Orbits dashed in behind her.

“Where’s the lights?” he asked.

Except for the light spilling in from the stairwell, the space was dark.

Danielle stepped over to a box on the wall near the door, identical to the one on the upper landing, and flipped on the switches inside.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then high above them a vapor light flickered to life, and then another and another and another. It took several seconds for them to come to full strength, but even before they reached that point, Orbits could see he and the girl were inside a giant tube, with pipes and steel grating hugging the sides all the way up. The entire floor was clear, though there were scars in the concrete where things had been anchored. Equipment, perhaps?

He almost asked what the hell this place was when it dawned on him.

Frowning, he said, “This is what all the fuss is about? Some damn empty missile silo? I got news for you. You can buy one of these off the Internet for a couple hundred grand. Why would someone want to pay fifty million so you could guide them here?”

For a few seconds, Dani forgot she’d been brought here against her will. She stared upward into the vast space above them as the lights came on, hardly believing she was finally seeing it with her own eyes.

There, just like Marianne had described them, were the gantries that would be lowered when a missile was in place for technicians to work on. Next to them, the conduits that carried the wires controlling the concrete doors at the very top, now buried under several feet of dirt. Off to the right, near the floor, was the hatch covering the service tunnel. And there, straight ahead, was the unassuming door behind which was her father’s unwanted legacy.

When her captor started talking, reality came crashing back. “Why would someone want to pay fifty million so you could guide them here?”

She’d been so conditioned to protect the secret that her arm felt like it weighed a ton as she lifted it and pointed at the door across the room.

The man’s gaze followed the motion. “Yeah? So? It’s a door. What about it?”

Her throat had never felt so dry, and she was sure she wouldn’t be able to answer, but her only hope lay in getting him into the other side of the facility. She swallowed. “It’s what you came for,” she said, forcing out the words.

He grimaced, his expression turning annoyed. “And what exactly would that be?”

“It’s easier if…if I show you.”

She started toward the door, hoping he would follow. After a brief hesitation, he did.

Knowing that being underground would interfere with the ability to track her phone, Orlando set her cell on top of one of the concrete blocks and climbed down the hole, leaving the door open. Descending the built-in ladder was not fun. If there were any more like it, she wouldn’t be going far. At least the baby hadn’t taken that moment to remind her it was almost time.

On the other side of the landing door, she found a spiral staircase.

Okay, she thought. This, I can do.

As she moved downward, she detected the echo of footsteps ahead. How far away was hard to tell. It wasn’t long before they went silent.

Around a hundred steps down, she stopped for a breather.

Quinn’s voice in her head was even louder now, repeatedly telling her this was a bad idea.

Bad or not, she wasn’t going to turn around now. She just prayed there was an elevator she could take back to the top.

Orbits once more made Danielle open the door.

A hallway, circular like a pipe, but made from corrugated metal. More a drainage pipe than sewer, Orbits thought.

About thirty feet in, it bent to the left. After they rounded it, they walked about the same distance before coming to another door.

“This had better be it,” he said, his patience all but gone.

Without looking back at him, she said, “It is.”

Danielle opened the door and turned on the lights.

“There are three more floors like this,” she said.

The room was full of stacked wooden crates of varying sizes, all in tidy rows.

“What do we have here?” he asked.

“See for yourself.”

He walked over to a stack of boxes that were three times as long as they were thick.

“How am I supposed to open this?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Danielle.

He considered it for a moment longer, and then said, “Screw it.”

It took two shoves to move it far enough for gravity to send it crashing to the floor. Though the top didn’t come all the way off, it ripped from two of the sides, creating a gap through which he could see the barrel end of a rifle. He worked the weapon out the hole.

An M16A2. Not the latest version but still an excellent model. This one had been prepped for long-term storage and clearly never used. He examined it, liking the feel of it in his hands. His gaze drifted to the boxes nearest him.

“All these contain weapons?” he asked, and looked over at Danielle.

Only she wasn’t there.

Quinn reached the meadow first and spotted the rectangular metal plate standing on end. When the others joined him, they spread out to approach it in a widely spaced line in case of ambush.

The plate turned out to be a door that had covered a hole in the ground. Quinn scanned the interior and saw it was empty.

“Orlando’s phone,” Nate said, picking it up off a concrete block. “At least she wanted us to find her.”

Ananke peeked into the hole. “I hate to repeat myself but horror film.”

Quinn lowered himself over the edge.

“Am I the only one who remembers what we found the last time we went below ground?” she asked.

“Stay up there if you want,” he said as he reached the landing. “We need someone to watch the entrance anyway.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want that responsibility. I’m going with you.”

As she moved onto the ladder, Daeng said, “I’ll stay.”

Once Ananke was out of the way, Nate came down.

“Cover the door,” Quinn told them.

Moving as far to the side as he could, he opened the door on the landing.

“Clear,” Nate whispered.

They headed down the spiral staircase, moving as quickly as they dared. Just shy of the hundred and fiftieth step, they heard a distant, muffled gunshot.

While Orbits pushed on the wooden crate, Dani inched toward the still-open door. She made her escape when the box started to fall.

Holding her cuffed hands high so she could run as fast as possible, she raced down the tunnel. If she could make it across the silo and into the stairwell, he probably wouldn’t be able to catch her before she exited the top and locked him inside.

She was almost to the silo entrance when she heard Orbits enter the other end of the hall. She looked back, but he was still out of sight around the bend.

As she twisted forward and reached for the door handle, she realized it was already moving on its own.

Orlando knew what kind of place she was in before she even passed through the door at the bottom of the stairs.

Kansas countryside. A massively fortified underground facility. It had Cold War missile-launch facility written all over it.

Walking into the empty silo confirmed it.

As she leaned against the wall and caught her breath again, she took a look around. Directly across from the stairwell was the only other door. She would have liked to rest there for a little while longer, but knew there was no time to waste. She pushed herself off the wall and headed across the room.

She felt a twinge of discomfort as she neared the door, and paused for a moment. When it didn’t get worse, she grabbed the handle and pulled the door open.

Less than three feet away, and coming at her fast, was Dani, eyes wide.

Orlando barely had time to turn her head before the woman knocked into her.

Orlando staggered backward, smarting from Dani’s shoulder connecting with her cheek. The collision had knocked Dani off balance and sent her down to a knee.

“That’s far enough!” Orbits yelled from beyond the door.

Dani shot a look at the open door, and then sprang to her feet and ran toward the stairwell entrance.

A bullet ripped out from the hallway, missing Orlando by a few feet. She ducked to the side and pressed herself against the wall next to the door. Three more shots, growing louder and louder, the man’s suppressor losing its effectiveness.

Across the room, Dani had nearly reached the other door when one of the bullets smacked into the door frame. The girl dropped to the floor and skittered out of Orbits’s direct line of sight. Another shot boomed, this time the bullet piercing the stairwell door itself.

As the sound of the shot subsided, Orlando could hear Orbits running down the hallway toward them. Without looking, she pointed her gun around the opening and let off three quick shots.

Orbits fired again, his bullet hitting the jamb, inches from her muzzle. She shot twice more and then moved her gun back.

She glanced over to check on Dani. The girl was moving along the wall, heading away from the stairwell door. Orlando heard a soft scrape from the hallway, closer than before, Orbits trying to sneak up. She sent another shot inside and heard him scurry backward.

She was about to shoot again when she grabbed her belly.

Oh, crap. Not now.

The cramp threatened to bring her to her knees, but she pressed against the wall and willed herself to remain standing. She looked back at Dani and saw that she was pulling at something embedded into the concrete.

Doing her best to ignore her pain, Orlando sent another shot into the hall. When she glanced back across the room, Dani had disappeared.

By the time Dani saw the woman, it was too late to stop. She crashed into her and stumbled to the ground. But hearing Orbits’s voice was all she needed to push back to her feet.

She sprinted across the silo, her eyes locked on the door to the stairwell.

When the first bullet flew past her, she looked back, thinking the woman had tried to shoot her. But instead, the woman was firing into the hallway to keep Orbits back.

Several more bullets sailed into the silo. She’d almost reached the door when one ripped into the frame less than a foot from her head. As she dove for the floor and moved to the side, another bullet punched into the door.

Orbits had the stairwell entrance covered. There was no way she was getting out.

She huddled next to the wall, frozen by panic.

Remember, Marianne whispered. Remember.

Dani almost said out loud, “Remember what?” Then she realized she knew what her sister meant.

The details.

The sequence to open the top hatch. The exact number of spiral steps to the silo floor. The metal-lined tunnel to the storage area. The four floors packed with weapons procured by their illegal-arms-dealing father. The four special items contained in the secret level below the others, where also waited the true treasure, the one she had come to retrieve.

There were other details. Lights and wiring and plumbing and…

The service tunnel.

She had noted its entrance when she initially entered the silo, but had thought no more of it. Until now.

It was her only chance.

After jumping to her feet, she ran along the wall, bent at the waist. When she finally reached the hatch, she knelt down and pulled up on the long lever that would unlock it. For a moment, it seemed stuck in place, but it finally gave way and the hatch swung open.

She climbed in and took one last look back. The woman was shooting into the hall again. For the first time, Dani sensed something odd about her beyond the fact she was there in the first place, but there was no time to think about it.

She closed herself in and began crawling through the darkness.

Orlando moved backward through the silo, toward the spot where Dani disappeared. Twice, she fired at the hallway, the angle only allowing the bullets to hit the wall a few feet in.

When she reached the metal plate, she sent off two more shots, one making it through the doorway, and the other hitting the wall right outside it.

She saw now that Dani had been pulling on a long handle mounted to a hatch. She moved the handle up and yanked the hatch open. On the other side was a dark tunnel, large enough for a person, but only if on all fours.

She fired off the remaining bullets in her mag and then moved into the tunnel, closing the hatch behind her.

Using her penlight, she looked for a way to lock the door but found none.

After replacing the empty magazine in her pistol, she shone the light down the tunnel. No sign of Dani, but there was only one way she could have gone. With her belly just an inch above the floor, Orlando began to crawl.

Who the hell is out there? Orbits wondered.

It couldn’t be The Wolf’s people. She would have needed to be right behind him all the way from the gas station, and he knew for a fact that had not been the case.

It also wasn’t Danielle. He’d seen her running across the silo just a moment before another bullet had flown his way, and besides, the way the shots were angled, the shooter had to be somewhere outside to his left.

The first time he tried to get in closer, he was forced to retreat by a shot that had almost clipped his shoulder. When the shooting died down, he tried again.

He heard two more shots, but held his ground as one of the bullets hit the right wall three feet from the door, and the other seemed to have missed the hallway completely.

He was about to move all the way to the opening when several shots rang out. He pressed himself to the floor, wanting the shooter to pull his trigger again so Orbits could get a better idea of the person’s location.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Thirty.

Maybe the asshole needs a nudge.

Orbits aimed as far left as he could and fired into the room.

There was no return shot.

He slid along the wall until he was right at the door, and fired again.

Still nothing.

He peeked into the silo.

No Danielle. No shooter.

He’d had a view of the stairwell door the whole time, so how was that even possible?

As he stepped through the doorway to take a better look, he heard the pounding of feet approaching the stairwell door from the other side. He jumped back and pulled the hallway door shut just as the other one opened.

For a moment, he panicked.

But then he remembered. He had a whole arsenal at the other end of the hall.

Quinn yanked open the door at the bottom of the stairs just as the only other door in the room beyond slammed shut with a loud thunk. He took a second to scan his new surroundings before sprinting across the circular room toward the other exit.

Pressing himself against the wall, he cracked the door open an inch. Someone was running but the steps were distant. Quinn motioned for Nate and Ananke to cover the door, and then he pushed it all the way open.

The moment Nate whispered, “Clear,” Quinn swung around the jamb and raced into what turned out to be a tunnel, his friends following. There was another thunk from farther down. They ran around a bend and down to the door at the far end. Once more, Nate and Ananke covered it while Quinn pulled on the handle, but it didn’t move.

“It’s jammed,” he said. “Give me a hand.”

Nate grabbed the handle and pulled with Quinn. It wouldn’t move at first, but then there was a pop from the other side and the handle gave way. Nate stepped back as Quinn pushed the door open.

The room on the other side appeared to be a storage area. Wooden crates were stacked in rows on either side of the door. More were straight ahead on the other side of a central aisle. No one in sight, though.

Quinn and Nate crept out, each sticking close to one of the rows. With each step they could see more of the room.

“All clear that way,” Nate whispered when they reached the end.

Though Quinn didn’t see anyone in the direction he was looking, either, something did catch his attention. “Cover me,” he said.

He moved into the central aisle and over to a crate that had fallen on the floor and broken open. He pulled one of the sides back.

Rifles.

M16s.

Nearby were other crates, exactly the same size. More rifles, he assumed. Several of the stacks were identical.

From deeper in the room came a crash.

The girl had said there were three other floors just like this one. If Orbits could get to one of them, he’d have more time to search for additional weapons.

He found the way up at the other end of the room. A freight elevator, more than large enough to carry multiple crates between levels. As he took a step toward it, he heard a voice coming from back toward the tunnel and realized his pursuers were already in the room.

Hoping to slow them down, he rocked a stack of boxes back and forth until they tumbled into the aisle and blocked the way. He ran into the elevator and pulled down the vertical door.

Looking at the controls, he saw he was on level one, and that the other three levels were above him. There was also a fifth button off to the side with no markings, just a slot for a key next to it.

He pushed the button for level four, and the elevator began moving. When he arrived, he looked for the emergency stop button to keep the car there but the panel didn’t have one. It wasn’t all bad, though. When the car started moving again, it would alert him that trouble was on the way.

He ran out of the elevator and headed out among the boxes.

A gentle breeze blew across the meadow but did little to dampen the morning heat. Daeng had been born in a part of the world where it was hot year round and he was used to sweating, but he wasn’t stupid enough to stay in direct sunlight. Which was why he was sitting in the shade created by the open metal door when he heard the distant sound of a car in the woods.

He stood up and turned his head toward the noise, but after only a few seconds, the motor cut out. He was able to determine it had come from the same direction in which they had arrived. He sprinted across the meadow to the woods and crept between the trees, slipping between the strains of the barbed-wire fence and sneaking up on the spot where the cars had been left.

A small sedan had joined the three vehicles already there. He moved around until he could get a good look at it and saw it was empty. He studied the area for movement, but saw nothing. The new arrivals could have gone to only one place.

Moving quickly but without making noise, he retraced his path to the meadow. He was still a dozen feet from the edge of the trees when he spotted three people at the hatch. No, four, he realized, catching sight of a woman’s head right before she disappeared into the bunker. Two men followed her down. When the final person — a woman — followed, she turned just enough for him to see her face.

The Wolf.

There was no time to worry about how they had gotten free.

He raced across the meadow toward the hatch.