The Jungle

26

THEY STRAPPED ON HALOGEN HEADLAMPS AS SOON AS THEY moved just a few feet from the entrance, which they managed to close partway. The interior of the fortress was stark and claustrophobic, with unadorned concrete walls, ceiling, and floor. It was clear, after going only a few feet, that the facility had been stripped bare, probably by the occupying German army during the war. They passed countless rooms whose function they could only guess at and spotted ladders that rose up into the cloche bunkers they’d seen earlier.

“Man, this place is a nine-point-nine on the spook-o-meter,” MacD said, peering into what had once been a restroom, if the drains on the floor were any indication. All the plumbing fixtures were long gone.

Cabrillo guided them through a bewildering maze of rooms, passageways, and dead ends. He estimated that this one fort probably housed more than a hundred men, recalling that tens of thousands had been deployed along the Maginot Line, and that its construction nearly bankrupted the country.

At the last dead end they hit, a trapdoor had been built into the floor. Above it were steel brackets bolted to the ceiling that had once held a hoist of some kind. Cabrillo heaved back on the metal doors to reveal a square shaft that dropped deeper underground. He spat, and it took his spittle several seconds to hit the bottom.

“That’s disgusting,” Linda admonished.

“Ugly but effective,” he countered. “About forty feet.”

They quickly rigged a climbing rope to the old brackets. Because of the extra weight in his pack, Juan rigged a harness to make the going a little easier. He then slung his rifle over his shoulder, took a firm grip on the line, and stepped out into space. Though healed, his collarbone reminded him, as he went down hand over hand, that it had been broken in the not-so-distant past. As he dangled in space, continuing his descent, his headlamp flashed across the featureless walls. He thought that this had been a munitions hoist, back in the day, and that there must be more aboveground features to this complex that he and his team had missed.

He touched bottom and called up for the next person. Max was red-faced and puffing by the time he joined Cabrillo on this lower level.

“You need to exercise more,” Juan said, and patted Hanley’s ample but rock-hard belly.

“Or rappel less.”

Once they reassembled, they continued to look for a way into the Albatross Mine. They had to check every door and examine all the walls for signs of an entrance. When they came to an area where the ceiling had collapsed, they wasted twenty minutes moving chunks of concrete and debris to clear a passage. Eddie’s watch started beeping just after they’d gotten through.

“One minute,” he announced, meaning that in sixty seconds Linc, Mike, and Jim would start the diversion.

Cabrillo felt his frustration level spike. They were wasting time and the only chance they were going to get. If they failed, Eric Stone had orders to give the mine’s location to Langston and pray a nuclear response would come quickly enough that the retaliatory damage Bahar unleashed was manageable.

WATCHING THE MINE through his rifle’s scope, Linc saw no movement save an occasional dust cloud rising up with the passing wind. The buildings looked forlorn and abandoned except for the newly built bunker at the base of the hoist tower. He focused in on what had been an administrative building. He upped the power and concentrated on a corner window.

There! A face had appeared at the corner of the sill as a guard shifted position. He radioed his discovery to Mike and Jim, who had found cover behind an earthen berm that was in an open area where Linc could cover them.

“Thirty seconds,” Mike called back.

Linc kept his attention on the window, knowing the guy would look, once his boys opened up with the mini Gatling.

It sounded more like a power tool than a weapon. The Gatling sprayed a solid jet of tiny bullets that raked the ground, kicking up dirt and small rocks and peppering the buildings like microhail. So many rounds were pouring into the facility, it looked like it was under attack by a hundred soldiers. And that had been the idea. Induce as much panic as possible as quickly as possible.

Linc’s instincts had been spot-on. As soon as the Gatling started chewing apart the mine, the guard at the window popped up to see what the commotion was. Linc eased the trigger and took the heavy recoil on his massive shoulder. The huge bullet ended the guard’s life in a spray of blood.

A second guard who’d been in the room raised his rifle over the sill and looked to be triggering off an entire clip. Lincoln adjusted his aim downward and fired again. The shot passed through the building’s metal cladding and silenced the gunner.

More guards were showing themselves from cover positions all over the complex—from behind piles of dirt and rusted-out equipment and from the buildings themselves. Three men armed with AKs launched themselves out of a small toolshed in a suicidal charge across open ground. They had two hundred yards to cover to reach Jim and Mike.

Linc put one down before the fire team turned the Gatling loose on them. They shook and jittered as they were riddled with more than a hundred rounds in under five seconds. What was left of them soon began to soak into the dusty ground.

A black van shot out of what had been a mechanics’ garage and raced for the bunker. Mike tried to tear into it with the Gatling, but the little .22 caliber rounds pinged off its armored hide and couldn’t puncture the run-flat tires. Linc had time to put three rounds into it before it disappeared around the back of the bunker, but to no effect.

“Chairman, the rooster is in the henhouse,” he radioed on the off chance his voice would reach into the underground fortress.

He swept the facility with his scope, hunting for targets. One guerrilla had been hidden on the roof of a salt-storage shed, and he made his presence known when he popped up and fired off an RPG. He was gone before Linc could take a shot. The missile left a trail of exhaust like a slash across the sky as it flew errantly in the general direction of the Corporation’s machine-gun nest. The impact blew a wad of earth into the air, but little else.

Linc kept his gun trained on the roof, counting the seconds it would take to reload the rocket launcher.

Mike Trono beat him to the punch and had anticipated the next attack flawlessly. A millisecond before the terrorist raised himself, he unleashed a fresh burst from the mini Gatling. The rocketeer stood up in the stream of fire and was torn apart by the two-second burst. His body sagged over the edge of the roof a moment before gravity did its job and he plunged silently to the ground.

Lincoln wiped his face and continued his scan, but he was pretty sure the fight was out of these guys. That was confirmed a moment later when a white rag tied to the end of a shovel handle appeared at the side entrance to the garage. Two men stepped out into the open, one waving the flag, the other holding his hands so far over his head he looked to be walking on his tiptoes.

There was no way any of the team was going to break cover, so after about two minutes the two unarmed men made a show of lying down on the ground with their fingers laced over the back of their heads. It was a position Linc recalled from the Gulf War when he’d had two dozen armed men throw down their weapons and personally surrender to him.

He hoped it was going so well underground.

THEY FINALLY CAUGHT a break ten minutes after the diversion was supposed to start. MacD spotted footprints on the dusty floor, and, assuming Mercer was the last person in this place, they followed them to a crude hole cut into the wall in an out-of-the-way storage room. Boards had been laid across the door-sized hole, but with a couple kicks they splintered inward, and the team found themselves inside the Albatross Mine.

The space had an eight-foot ceiling, and they were tucked into a corner behind one of the thick support columns left behind in the living rock. All around them were jagged façades of dirty-looking salt. From the map they had all memorized, they knew exactly where they were and the route to their destination.

It took a few minutes to cross from this room to the next, and then on through a third, until they reached the ore elevator shaft. An orange safety barrier was down over the near-bottomless borehole. Next to it was another metal door that led to a staircase that zigzagged all the way to the lowest level. Fortunately, they had to descend only two levels before reaching the one where the miners had accidentally dug too close to the river bottom.

They reached the side branch of the mine fifteen minutes later. This was where Mercer had indicated they had the best chance of succeeding. All of them gratefully dropped their packs to the ground. Each of them had been lugging as much high explosive as they could carry. The mining engineer had also calculated the amount necessary.

This antechamber, unlike the rest of the mine, was a humanscaled room. The ceiling was dangerously fractured, and there was standing water in some of the irregularities in the floor. Eddie, who had the stamina of a marathon runner, got to work with a cordless drill with a long diamond-tipped bit. Max and Linda set about organizing the explosives and rigging them to blow when they had enough holes bored into the rock face.

As much as Cabrillo wanted to stay and help his team and then make a quick exit back up to the sunshine, he looked over to MacD. “You sure you want in on this?”

“Think of it as my final exam at the end of my probationary period.”

Juan nodded. “All right. We pull off this little caper, and you’re a full-fledged member of the Corporation.”

“So that means Ah get a share of the bonus?” the laid-back Louisianan asked.

“Yup.”

“Then let’s saddle up.”

It was during the chopper flight to Pensacola that Langston Overholt got the idea that it might be worth the effort to see if they could steal the crystals from the quantum computer. As was his nature, he took the long view of any situation and thought about what would happen after Bahar got shut down. Having such a powerful machine would give the United States a strategic advantage over her enemies. And while he had no inkling how the machine was built, knowing the crystals’ importance made their recovery paramount. He figured some scientist out there would know what to do with them.

He arbitrarily put their value at fifty million dollars and asked MacD to relay his offer to Juan and let him decide.

Cabrillo would have done it for free, but the extra money wouldn’t hurt.

“Thirty minutes, Max,” Juan said. “Not a second more. Under no circumstances are you to wait for us.”

Max looked him in the eye and nodded grimly. “Aye.”

The pair of them took off at a jog, leaving the others to finish their work. This time they went for the personnel elevator located a short distance from the ore lift, figuring they would have restored it to working order. Cabrillo hit the call button, and a mechanical clank echoed down the shaft. A moment later the empty car arrived. It was more cage than car. Even the floor was open mesh that sagged a little when they stepped onto it.

“That’s not confidence-inducing,” Juan remarked, and hit the button for level 23, hoping Mark Murphy hadn’t been showing off.

They shut off their headlamps as the cage sank into more blackness. Down they went, the car rattling and squeaking like the aged piece of machinery it was. Two minutes into their rapid descent, MacD swatted Cabrillo’s arm.

“Look down.”

There was a faint jaundiced glow emanating from deeper below them. It had to be their target level. Bahar was down here, just like they’d anticpated. The only problem was that Cabrillo had planned to already have the crystals by this time. The chance encounter with the patrol and the delay in finding the mine’s entrance had thrown his timetable onto its head.

“Ready?” Cabrillo asked.

“Sir, Ah was born ready.”

The cage slowed as it neared the station. There was no hiding place inside, so they crouched low to the floor, both holding their assault rifles at the ready. It came to a spongy stop because the long cable stretched and rebounded before settling.

On this level, the elevator antechamber was a rectangular room about twenty feet on a side, with several exit points. In the distance, and out of sight, came the throb of a generator that was powering a single yellow construction light off in one corner.

No one approached, so Juan reached up to unlatch the safety gate and swung it outward. He peered around the edge. Nobody, but an AK was leaning against a wall as if someone had stepped away momentarily. He stood, fingering his rifle.

The generator made just enough noise to mask footfalls, so they both got out of the elevator and up against a wall near one of the openings that gave access to the rest of the mine. Juan was about to look around when a man walked in. He was the sentry who should have been standing by the elevator. He spotted Cabrillo and turned away before Juan could grab him. The guy took off in a dead sprint, fueled by adrenaline and fear.

MacD ran after him, shrinking the distance with each pace. Like a defensive back chasing down the ballcarrier, he moved with single-minded determination. Even missing a limb, Juan considered himself quick, but he was nothing like the display he was seeing.

There were just enough lights strung about for him to watch as he ran after the two. The guard must have sensed Lawless closing in because he suddenly stopped and dropped to the ground, forcing MacD to hurtle over him. Cabrillo knew what was coming and drew himself to a stop. He raised his rifle as the other guy went for the gun he’d had holstered on his hip.

Lawless still hadn’t fully regained his balance and was now facing away from the quarry he’d leapt over. The guy cleared his pistol and was bringing it up when Juan smacked his rifle to his shoulder and drew a bead through the murky shadows. A hesitation would mean MacD’s life, but a miss would most likely hit him.

The REC7 cracked like a whip, and the would-be shooter took the round through his right shoulder. The bullet penetrated his lung and exited just below his nipple. The kinetic force drove him flat to the rocky ground, where he lay still.

“Ah’m obliged,” Lawless called out when he realized what had happened behind him. “But our element of surprise is, as they say, blown.”

Cabrillo made a fast decision. “Screw the money. Let’s get out of here.”

They turned back toward the elevator to beat a fast retreat. Another figure stood in the entryway, a weapon held low at his waist. Cabrillo shoved Lawless and dove as the gun opened up, flickering tongues of flame erupting from its barrel. The bullets sprayed wild, and neither man was hit, but the attack kept them pinned while reinforcements were called up.

Crawling furiously, the two men sought cover behind one of the house-sized support columns. Their only advantage—surprise—was gone, and the defenders knew this subterranean world better than Juan and MacD, who’d only had a feverish examination of the schematic diagram.

To make matters worse, Juan spotted a low-light closed-circuit camera mounted atop a conveyor-belt support. The yard-wide belt ran chest high and vanished into the next room. He doubted this was the only camera, meaning Bahar and Smith had eyes everywhere. It began to pan as it searched for them. Disabling the camera would be the same as being spotted by it, so the two men shuffled over on their backsides until they were directly below it.

“Ideas?” MacD asked while bullets slammed into the stone just feet from their heads.

“All these rooms link together in a large circle. Our best bet is to stay ahead of them and hope we can buy ourselves enough time at the end to snag the elevator.”

“They’ll see us coming,” MacD pointed out.

“Take out the cameras.”

Cabrillo rolled around the corner on his belly to lay down cover fire before springing to his feet and taking off in the opposite direction. Wherever he could, he smashed the lightbulbs strung along the ceiling, but there were really too many of them to completely darken the mine. It was the cameras that were the priority. He could only hope that their being disabled wasn’t showing up on the security monitors in any particular sequence.

Thick walls of solid salt separated the enormous rooms. The portals between them were large enough so that heavy mining equipment could be driven through alongside the big conveyor belt. At each, they paused momentarily to see if an ambush had been laid for them. They also had to watch their backs because at least three guards were in hot pursuit.

Looking through one of the portals into the next room, Cabrillo saw that the miners had left a tracked excavator just inside. The machine had a thick cable spool on its back bumper to feed it electricity and a hydraulic drum on the front that could move up and down as its carbide teeth tore into the rock-salt face. He grabbed MacD and took up a position behind it.

“We need all three,” he said, and they waited.

Moments later two gunmen wearing street clothes entered the room. Both eyed the excavator warily. One stayed by the gaping opening, covering his partner, as the other cautiously approached. Cabrillo crouched lower, praying the third pursuer showed himself before this guy got much closer.

The gunman moved around in a wide arc, his AK held high on his shoulder. It was a stance he’d seen American Special Forces adopt, but this firing position worked best with the lighter-caliber weapons those soldiers used.

The third gunman’s shadow oozed into the room as he made a slow approach. It was close enough. Juan and MacD popped up and fired. The closest gunman got off one shot, but the recoil made his rifle slip up and over his shoulder. MacD put him down with a three-round burst while Cabrillo stitched his covering partner across the chest. The third shooter tried to run, but Juan came around the mining machine, took aim, and shot him in the back. He had no qualms about gunning down a coward like that.

What concerned him now was the fourteen minutes gone from their half-hour deadline and the fact that they were nowhere near securing the crystals.

A fourth gunman he hadn’t seen suddenly opened fire from across the echoing room, blowing shards of salt off the wall to Cabrillo’s left. Bits got into his eyes as he ducked for cover, stinging them mercilessly. The need to pack in so many explosives meant neither of them had bothered with a canteen, so he had no water to flush them out.

With MacD covering him, Juan wasted precious moments wiping at his eyes in order to see again.

Lawless plucked his lone grenade, pulled the pin, and heaved it like a major-league pitcher. The deadly orb skittered along the ground after completing its flat arc and came to rest just around the corner from where the guard had taken cover. He couldn’t have placed it any better. He grabbed Juan’s arm to guide him like a blind man as the grenade exploded. The salt column was just crumbly enough for the explosives to blow a chunk out of the pillar’s corner and riddle the guard with shrapnel.

Tears streaming down his cheeks but his vision steadily improving, Cabrillo continued on through the underground labyrinth with Lawless at his side. They hit the ambush moments later.

They’d just passed on to another room when they came under scathing autofire from at least six rifles. The only way they’d gotten out of it unscathed was that one of the shooters fired at their shadow before they’d fully exposed themselves. The thick wall absorbed dozens of rounds as the gunmen poured on the fire.

“They’re going to pin us here while more men come around from behind,” Juan panted, his heart pounding in his chest.

He looked around. Their rear and flanks were fully exposed.

MacD fired a few blind rounds to let the terrorists know they’d survived the trap.

Cabrillo tossed his rifle up onto the conveyor belt and used its support girder to hoist himself after it. The belt itself was made of wire mesh and industrial rubber. When the mine had been shuttered, the salt that was already on its way out from the working faces had been left on it in a continuous pile of rubble.

Lawless saw what he was doing and climbed aboard alongside him.

“We need to be quick and silent,” Juan warned.

He fired off another burst from his REC7, which drew a thunderous fusillade. It was when the gunmen were hosing everything in sight that the pair made a desperate scramble along the salt piled on top of the conveyor belt. It was treacherous going, and any mistake would likely kick salt over the edge, giving away their position and inviting certain death.

Unseen, they moved like rats scurrying just above where the gunmen sought cover behind some more abandoned mining equipment. The rate of fire eventually slowed, but the echoes continued to clamor through the room, effectively deafening everyone.

Slithering and crawling, never loosening their grips on their rifles, Cabrillo and Lawless passed unseen through the enemy line. One of the gunmen questioned loudly in Arabic about why the Americans had stopped firing back.

“Because they lack courage,” another answered, and touched off another three-round burst.

“Silence!”

Juan recognized John Smith’s voice.

As badly as he wanted to confront Smith, there were too many men to engage, even from above, and because the rubberized belt provided little protection the pair continued to slink away. Only when they had gone well beyond visual range did Cabrillo roll over the conveyor’s edge and drop to the ground. He crouched under the mechanism.

“Good call,” MacD said. “How much time do we have?”

“Thirty seconds, give or take. Come on.”

They took off running again. Then they felt it. The earth barely moved. There was too much solid rock between them and the blast to dramatically shake the ground. It was more like a gentle bump, and then came a quick puff of air as the explosion sent shock waves through every open cavity and chamber. Now it really was a race against time.