Silence, however, was not my first priority. I wanted to enter the silo fast, before anyone could draw a bead on my silhouette against the highlighted entrance. I therefore descended the first stretch of ladder in a barely controlled free-fall, trusting my memory to judge the distance to the first platform. It was a graceless, noisy effort, compounded by Sammie following right behind me and virtually landing on my head, but it was worth it-no sooner had we collapsed in a heap than a muzzle flash spat at us from far below, and the walls around us exploded with the reverberations of a pistol shot.
Lying on my back, my feet still entangled in the rungs, and with Sammie lying on top of me, a second shot rang out, the bullet ringing harmlessly off metal somewhere above us. I felt Sammie’s small muscular body tense against mine.
“Don’t move,” I whispered in her ear, “give him a couple of minutes.”
We lay there, barely breathing, listening. Below us, mixing with the subtle sounds of dripping water, of vague and distant mechanical noises, we were both aware of someone moving, possibly seeking a better angle for another, more accurate shot. I was distinctly aware of how little of my body my Kevlar vest actually covered.
“Okay,” I murmured to Sammie after two very long minutes.
She got off me like a shadow, and I rose just as quietly, leading the way to the next ladder heading down.
Our environment now was radically different from what it had been moments earlier, when we’d been lying on the floor looking down. There, we’d been in the light, in the open, surrounded by the cool, dry air of a normal fall day. Here, all was dark, damp, and tomblike. The metal rungs of the ladder were slippery and wet, the cement to which it was attached smooth with the same calcium skin that coated cave walls. And despite our silence, I felt surrounded by sound-the rustling of clothes, our virtually suppressed breathing, the mere brushing of a hand across a hard surface. I felt I was locked in a huge, wet, very cold echo chamber, the only available warmth threatening to come from the end of an invisible gun barrel somewhere far below us.
Things did not improve as we progressed. The moisture increased along with the cold, tickling the hairs in my nose and reaching down my collar like a draft. What little light there’d been from the trapdoor became absorbed by the mist, reducing the entrance above to a hazy, pale rectangle with no radiance or effect. Reality became solely what I could feel beneath my hands. All sense of smell was suffused by the dampness and the cold, and hearing became clogged by a minute cacophony of drips, sighs, and subtle shiftings-the living sounds, I came to think, of the millions of tons of water all around us, held at bay by a few feet of seventy-year-old cement.
Several more flights and I stopped, letting Sammie come up next to me until her ear was inches from my mouth, a fact I could by now only determine by touch. “I’m going to go to the far end of the landing and turn my flashlight on to see what’s below. You stay here, ready to shoot anything that moves.”
Her hand touched my cheek, turning it, and her lips brushed my own ear. “Why take the risk?”
I ignored the doubtfulness I heard in her voice. “I want to speed this up if I can. He’s not worried about getting his ass shot off like we are, so he’s probably making good headway by now, especially if he knows about the way out.”
“You hope,” she whispered back. “You turn that light on, and that’s what he’s going to shoot at.”
I put my hand on her back. “Just do it, Sam,” and I gave her a small push.
I counted to five to give her time to position herself, during which I heard her gun being slipped from its holster. Then I held out my flashlight, pointed it down, as far from my body as possible, and leaned far over the low railing. I pushed the on button. There was a blinding, dazzling snowstorm of light-the halogen glare of the torch bouncing off a billion tiny particles of moisture, all suspended in the still air. In that paradoxically clear instant, as if frozen by a camera’s electronic strobe, I found myself hanging in midair, far beyond the comfort of the thin iron railing, between an invisible roof and a murkily distant, shiny-wet floor, still far, far below. In that moment, before I could orient myself, I felt I was being sucked into the abyss, drawn away from my precarious perch by the sheer immensity of the swirling emptiness, momentarily numbed by a surge of the pent-up exhaustion I’d been holding off for too long.
“Joe,” Sammie shouted, still standing in a classic shooter’s stance, aiming down, but with her eyes wide and staring at me in alarm.
I watched dumbfounded as the light slipped from my hand and spiraled down, and I grappled with the railing to regain my balance. Everything went dark as the big flashlight smashed to pieces below us.
“You okay?” she asked in alarm.
I fought a sudden impulse to sit down where I was and give up-let others finish the job. “Fine, fine-just lost my footing.”
Her own light came on and searched the bottom of the silo, revealing a catwalk crossing to the opposite wall, several huge pipes with calcium-encrusted valves, and the rough-hewn, solid-rock surface beneath it all. At the foot of the catwalk was another ladder, which slipped through a narrow opening between the bottom of the silo wall and the uneven floor, almost like an irregular drain.
There was no one in sight.
“Go,” I told Sammie, shrugging off my momentary inertia. “Fast as you can.”
She moved to the top of the next ladder, but paused there a moment to reach out and touch my arm. “You sure you’re feeling up to this.”
I nodded. “Go. I’m right behind you.”
Finally unleashed, she fairly flew down the remaining flights, at times taking controlled leaps from level to level, using the slippery handrails like guide wires to stabilize and slow herself. I followed as best I could, but she’d already thoroughly checked out the bottom of the silo and was crouching at the top of the ladder leading through the slit in the rock by the time I caught up to her. From our vantage point, all we could see was that a larger chamber opened up below us on the other side of the narrow opening. We could also see that in order to squeeze through the slit and get beyond it conventionally, we’d have to descend feet-first, hugging the ladder, and offer our backs to whoever might be waiting.
“What’d you think?” I asked her.
“Be a good place for an ambush. How ’bout a head-first recon?”
I nodded and stood at the top of the ladder. Sammie slithered onto her back between my legs, a flashlight in one hand, her pistol in the other, and began to slide down the ladder headfirst, her shoulder blades to the rungs. As her hips went by and the weight of her body threatened to pull her straight down the rest of the way, I caught her and lowered her slowly as I might a rope, grabbing her thighs, then her knees, and finally her ankles. Using proper harnesses and climbing gear, it was the same way we trained to attack upper-story windows from the roof-showing the smallest target, and having our hands and weapons available for use. It looked funny, but it worked.
“Clear,” she finally said. She stored her light and gun, took hold of the rung just below her, and did a controlled flip to land right side up as soon as I released her ankles. I climbed down conventionally and joined her in a short, six-foot-diameter tunnel, hewn entirely out of the bedrock. Here, the cave effect was complete-the calcium leaching that had covered part of the cement walls in the silo, giving their rough, manmade surface the smoothness of polished stone, had taken over entirely down here. The rock ledge, long ago scarred by dynamite and pick, had been filled in and softened by decades of gentle, mineral-rich water drippings, until it now resembled the butter-colored grottoes of tourist attractions like the Mammoth and Carlsbad caves. There were even stubby stalactites and stalagmites reaching out for each other on both sides of the tunnel’s beaten path.