I pulled away one of the crates boxing in the trailer. Then another. And another. I worked in the dark as much as possible. I didn’t want to draw any more fire. And as I pulled the crates away, a lurking shadow took form. I flashed my light, careful to keep behind the Unimog. The pale glow revealed a huge silver crate with a lone hammer and sickle stenciled into it, Cyrillic script stenciled across its base.
I hopped up on a smaller crate, and then on the top of the large one, taking the tire iron with me. This was it, the focusing array. It had to be. It was large, it was in a dungeon, and it was Russian. I took the tire iron to the top of the crate, carefully prying open a panel. I worked mostly by feel, the old nails inching out with a cloying squeak revealing the familiar wood shavings below. I brushed them aside and hit my watch light to see two fat copper wires with rubber-insulated leads poking out of the wood shavings.
I pushed aside more shavings until I was looking at a metallic surface. Not flat, but gently rounded. Rounded enough that I was certain that I was staring down at the surface of a sphere, probably ten feet in diameter and, if the journal was to be believed, definitely the final component to the Tesla Device. I ran my fingers over the finely etched latitudinal lines around its circumference, admiring them in the glimmer of my watch light. As I pushed aside still more shavings, I felt the metal case of my watch being drawn down to the surface of the sphere. The sphere was obviously highly magnetized.
“Meryem,” I whispered. “Back up the truck.”
I knew that putting the Unimog into gear was going to be noisy, but what choice did we have? I watched her place a crate of grenades in the back of the Unimog before she got inside, carefully pushing the transmission into gear. Then I dived off the crate as the night erupted into gunfire.
Chapter 49
The muzzle flash was closer this time. It wasn’t coming from the ceiling anymore. Our pursuers had clearly managed to rappel to the water below and now they were coming to finish us off. More bullets flew. I jumped down, taking cover behind the Unimog as Meryem backed it into position. I could see that it had a pintle hook style trailer hitch; the kind they use in the military. The trailer itself had a lunette loop on the towing arm. Now I needed to connect the two without getting shot.
Meryem had already backed up to within a few inches of the lunette loop, but I needed her closer. I motioned her back another couple of inches with the light stick. Stopped her. She was an excellent driver. The pintle hook was bang on with the lunette loop which I spun down onto the barb, before locking the hook like a carabiner. Then I ran forward and dived through the passenger door.
“Go, go, go!”
Meryem popped the Unimog into gear and pulled out in a wide turn. More muzzle flashes erupted from the darkness, the rounds echoing like thunder claps in the vast emptiness of the cistern. I shoved the wooden stock of the Kalashnikov into the crook of my shoulder and leaned out the window, laying down an arc of cover fire behind us in the darkness.
We were almost at the tunnel, but the cistern flared to life again, this time with at least four shooters. Then one of them fired a volley of red tracer rounds that lit the place up like the Fourth of July. Meryem stepped on it, double-clutching into second gear, but she missed and went all the way to fourth. The Unimog bogged down, gunfire flaring behind us. She recovered quickly, however, and found second gear and we lurched forward again.
Once again, it was pitch black behind us. Then, at least one of the wooden crates back at the stockpile began to burn, smoldering in a halo of orange smoke. It looked like the packing material was on fire or fizzling. One of the tracer rounds had probably ignited it. After that I heard bullets, a lot of bullets, all of them popping like supersonic corn. Regardless of why they had ignited, I knew what was coming next.
“Hang on!”
I grabbed the steering wheel and pushed Meryem's head down, below the dash, ducking along with her. We had distance on our side. We had already entered the tunnel. But it didn’t make the explosion any less loud. Or bright. A fireball erupted behind us, flame and fury propelling us forward.
I didn’t know whether the trailer had lifted off its wheels. It felt like it had as hot flame licked the inside of the tunnel. That was one of the advantages of the pintle-hook trailer-hitch system — it was more secure. The hot flame seared the air, sucking the oxygen out of the space. I could feel the backdraft and I hoped, no, I prayed, that the grenades in the back of the Unimog didn’t suffer a similar fate. I counted one second…two seconds…three seconds as the bright flare of the explosion turned dull, leaving only a ringing in my ears. I looked over at Meryem in the driver’s seat, the glow of the primitive instrument panel on her face.
“Are you all right?” I yelled.
She didn’t answer me, but she was driving, so I knew she was conscious. The tunnel we were driving through was maybe fifteen feet high and just as wide. There were wood support members here and there, but for the most part, it was unreinforced earth, dirt and rocks tumbling down as we motored ahead. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think that the explosion had destabilized the structure. But there wasn’t much we could do about it.
The good news was that we were no longer traveling down. No, we were traveling up a steady grade. We drove on for what must have been a mile, then two, and then the incline increased to the point that we were laboring up a significant grade. Then we rounded a bend, and an instant later we ran out of road. A pile of rubble filled the tunnel, blocking what looked like an old barnyard gate.
Meryem stomped on the brakes hard. We had a lot of weight behind us, and I wasn’t sure we would stop in time, but we did, more or less, the front bumper of the Unimog nosing into the pile of dirt and rubble. I hopped out immediately and popped a rock behind the Unimog’s back tire, pulling the shovel out of the truck bed. I could see that we had been lucky. The trailer was still hot from the blast, scorch marks running up the green metal.
I walked up to the pile of rubble in front of the Unimog. Obviously, there had been a tunnel collapse, but only a partial one. Behind the dirt and rock was the wooden gate, huge and arched and old. It was big enough to allow a vehicle through, but I had no idea where it would bring us, because though the Unimog’s headlights revealed gaps in the wood, there was no daylight shining through. Whatever was on the other side of the gate, it wasn’t necessarily any better than what was on our side.
Only one way to find out. I climbed the dirt pile, and started to dig. It was the only way to free the crossbar that held the door in place. I threw the shovel into the dirt, moving it aside as quickly as I could. The first few shovelfuls of dirt were unremarkable. Then I hit something. Something hard. I thought it was just a rock at first, so I levered under it with the blade of my shovel to toss it aside. Except it wasn’t a rock. It was a skull. A human skull, bleached white and picked clean. I had no idea what it was doing there, but I could tell that it had been buried for a long time. I set it aside. I was as respectful as I could be, under the circumstances, but I was also quick. I didn’t want to end up dead too.
I thrust my shovel into the ground again. This time I hit something else. Looked like a collarbone. I shoveled it aside. Somebody had been buried in the dirt. Correct that. More than one somebody. With the next thrust of my shovel, I hit another skull.
“Meryem,” I said.
“Yes, Michael?”
“You see what I’m finding here?”
I glanced back at her. She looked sad, vulnerable.
“Keep digging, Michael.”
I could have sworn I had heard her voice tremble. I kept digging and the bones kept coming. Clearly, I had hit upon a grave. I dug two more skulls out of the dirt and rubble before the wooden crossbar was half exposed. Then I heard a rapid staccato pop!! Loud, but not overbearing. It was gunfire, which meant that whoever was after us was still coming. A rock and more dirt fell from the ceiling of the tunnel above. I redoubled my efforts with the shovel.