“That one,” Turcotte said. They’d watched a dozen or so cars with small green stickers on the front center of the windshield pull in and out of the convenience-store parking lot over the course of the past several hours. Turcotte had pointed out the stickers and explained that they were decals used to identify cars that had access to government installations. As night had fallen, the lights had come on, illuminating the parking and leaving their van in the darkness across the street.
“I’ve got him.” Kelly started the engine to the van and followed the Suburban out of the parking lot of the Mini Mart.
They followed the truck as it went north through town and then turned onto Reservation Route 2. They were a quarter mile from the split in the road. “Now,” Turcotte ordered.
Kelly flashed her high beams and accelerated until they were right on the bumper of the Suburban. She swung out and passed, Turcotte leaning out the window and giving the finger to the driver of the truck as he screamed obscenities.
Kelly slammed on the brakes and they skidded to a halt at the intersection with the gravel road. The driver of the Suburban came to a stop on the gravel road, headlights pointing at the van.
“What the fuck is your problem, asshole?” the burly driver of the truck demanded as he stepped out and started walking toward the van.
Turcotte jumped out of the passenger side of the van and met him halfway between the two vehicles, caught in the glow of the headlights.
“You an idiot or what?” the driver demanded. “You pass me and—” Without a word Turcotte fired the stun gun, dropping the man immediately. He cuffed him with plastic cinches from his vest and dragged the body into the back of the van. “Get into the truck,” he ordered Von Seeckt and Nabinger.
The two men scuttled over into the backseat of the Suburban.
Kelly drove the van a hundred meters down the tar road, where the turn concealed them from the intersection.
There was no place to conceal the van, so she just pulled off to the shoulder. Turcotte made sure the man was secure and quickly frisked him.
“This isn’t much of a plan,” Kelly muttered as she locked the van and pocketed the keys. “And I’m not sure I buy your easy-to-get-in-and-out theory.”
“One of my commanders in the infantry used to say any plan was better than having Rommel stick it up your ass on the drop zone,” Turcotte said as they jogged up the road toward the truck.
“I don’t get it,” Kelly said.
“I never did, either, but it sounded good. What’s really interesting,” he said, pausing for a second and looking at her in the starlight, “is that you’re the first person who ever said that about that quote. I never told my commander I didn’t get it.”
“And?” Kelly said.
He began jogging again. “It means you listen and you think.”
Turcotte took the wheel this time. He scanned the interior and reached above the visor; an electronic card key was there, such as those used in hotels to open doors. He checked the name: Spencer. “The plan is getting better by the minute.” He tucked the card between his legs next to the stun gun. “Everyone down. We’re going to be on camera in a second.”
Throwing the engine into gear, he rolled down the gravel road, past the laser sensors. There was no way he could see it, but he had no doubt that the vehicle was being surveyed by infrared cameras to check for the decal and insure it was authorized. He knew the decal was covered with a fluorescent coating that could easily be seen through such a device. He watched the road carefully, hoping that there would be no more forks where a decision had to be made.
A sign appeared in the headlights warning that they were now entering a federal restricted area and the fine print listed all the dire consequences unauthorized personnel would face and all the constitutional rights that they no longer had. Four hundred meters past the sign a steel bar stretched across the road. A machine such as those used at airports to give out parking tickets was on the left side.
Turcotte pulled up and inserted the card key into the slot.
The steel bar lifted.
He continued on, then the road split. Turcotte had less than three seconds to make a decision. To the left loomed the mountain. To the right the valley floor. He turned left and immediately was in a narrow valley. The sides closed in and camouflage netting covered the road, staked down on the rock walls on either side, confirming his decision. A thirty-foot-wide opening in the base of the mountain appeared directly ahead, carved into the side of the mountain. A dull red glow came out of the opening.
A bored security guard in a booth just inside the cave opening hardly looked up, waving the Suburban in. A large parking garage was off to the right and Turcotte turned that way. The man-made cave was dimly lit by red lights.
That was both to defeat detection from the outside by not having bright white light coming out of the entrance, and also to allow people to begin getting their night sight when departing.
The slots were numbered, but Turcotte took his chances and went to the far end, out of sight of the guard, and parked. There were about ten other cars in the garage.
Over fifty spaces were empty, which meant that the night shift was a skeleton crew, for which Turcotte was grateful.
There was a pair of sliding doors set in the rock twenty feet from where he had parked. “Let’s go.”
Turcotte glanced over his shoulder at the three people following him — Kelly short and compact, Von Seeckt leaning on his cane, and Nabinger bringing up the rear. Kelly smiled at him. “Lead on, fearless one.”
He slid the card key into the slot on the side of the elevator. The doors slid open. They crowded inside and Turcotte examined the buttons. They ranged from HP, Garage, down through sublevels 4 to 1. “I’d say HP stands for ‘helipad.’ They probably have one cut into the side of the mountain or maybe even on the top of the mountain above us. Any idea what floor we should go to?” he asked Von Seeckt.
The old man shrugged. “They had stairs when I was here last, but we did go down.”
“I’d say bottom level,” Kelly suggested. “The greater the secret, the deeper you go.”
“Real scientific,” Turcotte muttered. He hit sublevel 1.
The elevator dropped, the lights on the wall flashed, then halted at sublevel 2. A message appeared on the digital display above the number lights:
ACCESS TO SUBLEVEL 1 LIMITED TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
TOP SECRET Q LEVEL CLEARANCE REQUIRED. DUAL ACCESS MANDATORY.
INSERT ACCESS KEYS NOW.
Turcotte looked at the two small openings — made for small round objects — one just below the digital display and the other on the far wall. They were far enough apart that one person could not operate both keys — just like the launch systems of ICBM. “I don’t have the keys for that, and our Mr. Spencer didn’t have them on him either.”
“Let’s try this level,” Kelly suggested.
Turcotte pressed the open button and the doors slid apart, revealing a small foyer and another door and another warning sign:
SUBLEVEL 2
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. RED CLEARANCE REQUIRED.
An opening for a card key to be passed through was just below the sign. Turcotte held up the card key he’d appropriated from the Suburban. It was orange. “We’re still out of the depth of Mr. Spencer’s security range.” He stepped forward and shrugged off the small backpack he had on. “But I think I can handle this little roadblock.” He removed a small black box.
“What’s that?” Kelly asked.
“Something I found in the van. They had all sorts of goodies back there.” A card key was attached to the box by several wires. Turcotte slid it into the slot in the direction opposite that indicated by the arrow. “It reads the door code backward, memorizes it, and then reverses the code. I’ve used similar devices in some of my other assignments.”