Ira took a breath. “Everything but the hovercraft,” he admitted. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’ve been square with you.” Mercer’s expression was one of ill-disguised anger. “Don’t you think it’s time you’re square with me? What’s going on out there, Ira? A lot of people are dead and it’s not over a secret nuclear waste dump.”
“It’s not, but I can’t tell you any more. I’m sorry. I’ll understand if you want out of the project as long as you promise not to discuss anything that’s happened in the past two weeks.”
“I don’t even know what’s happened in the past two weeks,” Mercer said with frustration.
“It’s best that way,” Briana said gravely.
Mercer could take Ira’s deal now, walk away, and there’d be no hard feelings. He’d probably even keep his job as special science advisor. But he’d never learn the truth, and to Mercer that wasn’t an option. Ira had dangled a mystery in front of him, baiting him with just enough information to keep him interested. He was being played. He knew it, Ira knew it. And both knew Mercer wasn’t going to back down. This offer was more about keeping the guise of secrecy rather than any real secret.
“I’ll stick it out with the promise that I get ten minutes alone with Randall the Handle when you finally catch him.
Ira grunted. “I’ll hold the son of a bitch down for you.”
“So what do you have on the gunmen?”
“No ID. Their clothes had all the labels removed but looked like they could have come from any Sears store in the country. The cops are checking all the cars in the surrounding parking lots, but with a hundred thousand tourists in town at any moment I doubt they’ll find anything. The weapons are on their way to the FBI lab. We’ll probably find they were bought at a gun show from a guy with an attitude toward the government and a real short memory. We haven’t gotten anything on the men themselves, at least from the criminal databases. It’ll take more time to search all the others. I’m not too optimistic.”
“You don’t think they’re locals hired for the job?”
“Not unless the Vegas mob is hiring out Thai contract killers.”
“Thai?” Mercer hadn’t taken the time to look at the assassins’ features so the revelation that they were Asian came as a shock. He immediately thought of Tisa Nguyen. And the group she belonged to.
“Thai, Laotian, Cambodian. Not sure which yet. We’ve got a physical anthropologist coming in to make a determination.”
“There were five men who hit my room and more outside. Anything on them?”
“Nothing on the three that got away. The guards were too far away. They went down the emergency stairs and left the hotel in the confusion. According to a few eyewitnesses who saw the men rush into the pool area, they were tall, short, black, white, Hispanic, well dressed, wearing rags, carrying rifles, carrying pistols, and one guy was certain one of them was carrying a sword. All of which is pretty typical with panicked witnesses.”
The room fell silent. It was clear that the hitmen were professionals. The evidence they left behind wouldn’t amount to anything. The truth was, the assassins were gone. Donny Randall was gone. And in their wake were a whole lot of questions no one could answer.
“What’s happening at the mine?” Mercer asked, pressing on.
“High-speed pumps are draining the shaft,” Dr. Marie answered. “It might take a few days.”
Mercer recalled the force of the deluge and knew it would be longer than a few days. He also recalled the water’s strange salinity, how it had tasted and even foamed up like seawater. He decided against asking about it. Like Tisa’s presence, he thought it best to keep a few things to himself. “Then I guess the only thing to do is wait for the pumps to do their work.”
“And look around for an abandoned hovercraft,” Sykes added.
The pumps were still going full blast, discharging a hundred thousand gallons an hour, when a patrol in a Jeep Cherokee found the truck-sized hovercraft a hundred miles southwest of the DS-Two site. It lay on its deflated rubber skirt next to a heavy-duty trailer. The fuel tank was near empty and Donny Randall’s fingerprints were all over the passenger side of the open cockpit. Tire tracks matching those left by the government Jeeps continued on in the same direction. It was simple to figure out how they’d done it. The extraction team had trailered the hovercraft into Area 51 with a Jeep Cherokee like the guards used to arouse less suspicion. They’d unloaded the air cushion vehicle at its maximum range from where Randall waited at the rendezvous spot. Once they had their mole, they’d returned to the Jeep, abandoned the hovercraft and trailer, and simply drove away. A neat, well-executed operation.
It took just six hours to trace the hovercraft to its manufacturer in California and determine that the vehicle had been stolen a week earlier from the company’s proving grounds. Dead end.
On Mercer’s recommendation, half the miners assigned to the project were sent home with a fat bonus while the men from his shift remained in Las Vegas in case they were needed once the mine was drained. The only personnel left at the DS-Two site were a handful of engineers to monitor the pumps and Mercer himself. Ira and Dr. Marie remained at the main Area 51 complex and called in for daily updates.
He was sitting in the control trailer idly thumbing through a week-old news magazine, his feet on a counter, a cup of coffee at his elbow. He was contemplating getting lunch when a noise penetrated his lazy musings. Not a noise, but rather the lack of noise. For four days he’d heard the steady background roar of water rushing through the twelve-inch pipes from the pumps. It became one of those sounds, like traffic to a city dweller, that became so pervasive he had to concentrate to hear it. When it cut off suddenly, it took a moment to realize it was gone.
Several pairs of feet ran past the trailer as technicians raced to the mine head. Mercer launched himself out the door in their wake. The man overseeing the big cycloid pumps had already hit the master override so the diesel engines chugged in neutral and the pumps spooled to silence.
“What happened?” Mercer snapped, already taking command of the situation.
“Something’s clogged the intake on pump number two,” the air force staffer replied.
“Any increase in turbidity levels?”
“No, sir. Particle levels in the discharged water have remained constant. We’re not sucking mud.”
That eliminated Mercer’s first idea, that the pump had been fouled with silt. “Have you tried reversing the pump to blow the intake clear?”
“The computer does that automatically whenever there’s a jam. It didn’t work. Whatever’s in there is stuck solid.”
Mercer went quiet for a moment. “Okay, what’s the water depth at the intake?”
The sergeant checked a monitor slaved to the main pump station. “One hundred ten feet.”
Not too deep that Mercer couldn’t dive it. He knew from his conversations with Sykes the first night back from Vegas that his team had brought all their equipment to Area 51, including scuba gear. It would be quicker to dive to the clogged intake than wait for an underwater camera to be shipped in.
“Here’s what I want,” Mercer said, his plan in place. “Kill the diesels. I don’t want either pump run up again. We can’t risk the guts being torn out of them if whatever’s down there gets into the other one. While they’re down, make sure the second pump wasn’t damaged. I trust the computer override, but only so far.”