Before Commander Boli wrote off my bringing him the book, he would do all he could to find out who had blown up the building. They’d easily find the bodies in the ditch—if they hadn’t already. They’d have no trouble tracking us to the farm—especially in the daylight with their dogs. I could think of only one alternative, and given what Lazzo had attempted to do in kidnapping Hayley, it was definitely a risky one. We had to trust Eddie. We had to trust Silas and Cera. We had to risk the safety of all surviving Americans to try to keep ourselves alive.
We were five miles from the secret back entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain bunker, an entry only presidents and vice presidents knew about—well, and me, thanks to the book. We had to get there, and we had to take three non-Americans in there with us.
FORTY-TWO – Traitor (Danny)
I told Eddie they needed to trust me and follow me. He didn’t object. We set out for Cheyenne Mountain and arrived at the back door a few minutes after 2:00 a.m. I found the dead tree the book mentioned and dug out the base of it until I found a long bolt. I pulled the bolt out and pushed the tree trunk over. There was a lockbox under the trunk with a scroll-lock. I entered the five-digit code and lifted the lid on the box, revealing another keypad. I had memorized the twelve-digit code for that as well and typed it in. A hum slowly turned into a whirring noise as the ground in front of me began to move. A four-by-four square hole was revealed, with a ladder leading down into the darkness.
I looked back at the others. I had no idea what to expect in there. I knew the secret tunnel was nearly two miles long—that was about all I knew. Eddie had a puzzled look on his face. “What?” I asked him.
“I studied maps of this place for hours. This tunnel, it was not on the maps.”
“No, I know. Only the presidents knew about it.”
“And vice president?”
“Yeah, he did too.”
“He told you about this?”
“Kind of.” I nodded.
That seemed to be enough for Eddie. “You want me to go first?”
“No, Eddie, I need you to come in with Blake last. We don’t know what we’re going to find in there, and if there are Americans in the tunnel, they’re not going to welcome you.”
“Danny,” Eddie put his massive hand on my arm. “We don’t have to go in if you don’t want us to. You don’t have to trust us. You have risked and lost enough.”
“I appreciate that, but I’m not leaving you out here. Cera doesn’t deserve any of this. I’ll deal with what comes for bringing you in. But you stay at the back. You let Blake protect you.”
“We will give you our guns then.”
“How about this? We leave them at the base of the ladder here. We’re probably going to have to exit this way again anyway. We’ll have them here if we need them.”
“Sounds good.”
We all climbed down the ladder. Eddie, Silas, and Cera left their rifles and handguns at the base of it. I gave Blake the code to seal the exit, and I moved on ahead. To my right and left there were two large steel doors I knew to be garages. Each garage supposedly held a transport vehicle and two motorcycles. As the vehicles had been replaced annually, they’d only be a couple years old. Hopefully they’d still run if needed. I didn’t open the doors for fear of making noise, though I was definitely curious about how the vehicles were intended to get out.
There was no one in the tunnel. We walked the entire two miles to the actual bunker back entry without any opposition. The backdoor in—or doors to be exact—were not at all what I was expecting. They were a pair of three-by-three foot steel squares—crawling height barely—with a giant eighty-inch screen on the wall above them. I flipped a switch beside the screen and it came to life—presumably wired into the bunker’s power. The screen displayed twelve six-by-six inch boxes of video feeds—obviously from throughout the bunker. What we saw shocked us. Cheyenne Mountain was crawling with Qi Jia troops.
One of the screens showed a room with seven Americans in a cell. The other screens showed Qi Jia troops sweeping, moving bodies around, eating, working on computers, and coming in and out of the bunker. By the raingear they had on and the wet footprints on the floor, it was clear it was raining outside now. That was great for us in terms of covering our earlier tracks.
“Look,” Eddie whispered suddenly. “Commander Boli.”
The person Eddie indicated as Boli was in a room with two Qi Jia soldiers and an American soldier with his back to us, addressing someone sitting in a chair we couldn’t yet see.
When the standing American soldier turned around, I heard Hayley gasp and Flynn curse. Captain Baker. What the hell is he doing?
“Go figure. My dad is helping them.”
That was obvious. But why? And helping them with what?
Baker and Boli moved enough then to let us see the man in the chair. It was General Niles.
“Niles,” I whispered.
“Who’s Niles?” Hayley asked.
“He’s the general who was begging Baker to come quickly. The guy who essentially put everyone at risk. But he’s also our highest-ranking military officer left, far as we know.” I saw Baker strike Niles across the face. He was clearly yelling at the general. How long has the Cheyenne Mountain bunker been compromised? Before Baker even got here? Or did Baker let them in?
“They had to have promised Baker something,” Blake whispered in my ear.
Sure, but what? I watched Baker turn and leave the room, and I followed him onto another screen, where he was speaking to a group of Qi Jia soldiers and two of his SEALs. I glanced back at the other screen and could see that General Niles was severely beaten. His face was a bloody mess. He must not yet have given up whatever it was they thought he had. Commander Boli shook his fist in the general’s face, and then the two guards in the room came over, unfastened the general, and led him to the cell with the other seven Americans. They threw him on the floor, and a young woman rushed over to tend to him immediately. A young man in the cell pointed his finger at the guards and clearly said something to them. One of the guards pointed his gun at the man and pulled the trigger. We watched the man’s head explode as the shot echoed down the tunnel. He fell immediately to the ground.
The gunshot told me two things. One: we weren’t entirely soundproof where we were. We had to be careful not to make noise. And two: the cell was close by. The gunshot was clear before the echo—like the initial discharge was right next to us. I looked carefully at the screen and considered the angle of the view into the cell with the prisoners. No other screen showed the cell, but I was almost certain the cell was on the other side of the solid steel wall next to us, which made perfect sense. It was the only visible place in the entire bunker to keep prisoners, and only a president or vice president would have the codes to escape from it. There were two steel doors on the sides of the screen that appeared to slide into the bunker walls—essentially pocket doors. I was willing to bet one of them opened directly into the cell holding General Niles and the other seven—six now—prisoners. I huddled with the others and shared my thoughts in a whisper. Then we returned to watch the screens.
Shortly after 4:00 a.m., Commander Boli left the bunker. Captain Baker stood at a map-covered table with several Qi Jia soldiers and his two men. We could see the maps from directly overhead. He was running his finger in circles around the Knights Peak area. Occasionally he would point at the other soldiers and they would nod, but he kept going back to the maps.