Still, he wasn’t going to take his eyes off them. No sense taking chances. Not at this point.
But maybe he should put some clothes on, just in case.
Riding the scooter across the ground was both easier and harder than Michaels had expected. The ride was bumpy and slow. Then again, he hadn’t fallen off, which was something.
He had no idea how far they had come. It seemed as if they had been riding for hours, though a glance at his watch showed they’d actually been rolling for only about forty-five minutes.
The five of them wore LOSIR gear, line-of-sight infrared com sets that wouldn’t be picked up by ordinary radio receivers, and on scrambled channels so that anybody else with such gear couldn’t hear them anyway. Even so, Howard had ordered com-silence except for emergencies, and so far, at least, there hadn’t been any of those.
Knock on wood…
The night vision devices worked well enough. It wasn’t exactly like noon, and the helmet’s computer coloration was more pastel than reality. But it didn’t look like an unlighted desert in the middle of the night, either. The wonders of modern technology.
On point, Julio Fernandez slowed. Howard followed suit, and Michaels leaned back a hair to slow his own scooter. Michaels watched carefully. Once they arrived, there was a pattern in which they would have to park the vehicles, so as to screen them from the sensor’s view. There would be a dead zone behind the scooter screen, Howard had told him, an invisible gap in which they could work undetected. Well, at least unseen. They’d be making a fair amount of noise pretty quick…
Julio raised his hand and made a “stop” gesture. He angled to his left a hair. Howard altered his course. Michaels followed Howard, knowing that he had to park his scooter two meters to the right and a meter back. The other two troopers would complete the pattern behind and to the side of Michaels.
Thirty seconds later, the five were parked. Fernandez came back and the men gathered close. “Right there,” he said, pointing.
Howard said, “You heard the lieutenant. Do it.”
The two troopers said, “Yes, sir!”
They looked pretty strange, outfitted in the gear they wore. Exoskeletons, Howard had called them. Specialized equipment with motors and frames that essentially turned the wearer into Hercules, several times as strong as an ordinary man. There was a mechanical hum as the power units started. The two troopers, looking like something from a science fiction movie, moved to what looked like any other patch of dirt out here and started digging. One wielded a heavy pick, the other a shovel.
Howard had examined the plans for the once-secret bunker with great care. He had talked at length with his engineers, and determined a method of attack that should work.
“There’s thirty or forty feet of earth between the surface and the roof in most places,” he’d said. “It would take a backhoe days to dig all the way down. And the entrances are all hardened steel and reinforced concrete, so blasting through those would be a major chore. However, there are relatively weak spots.”
Howard had shown Michaels on the diagrams. “Here, at these access ports, the stairwells are open all the way down. Now, there is a big plug of concrete and rebar surrounding the actual entrance and exit, but if you go just a couple meters out, the slab is much thinner, only about a meter thick, under half a meter of earth. They couldn’t make it too heavy without having to build massive support structures. Punch through that, move a little more dirt, and you are in the stairwell.”
“Three feet of reinforced concrete doesn’t seem like something a couple of guys with picks and shovels are going to cut through in a hurry, even wearing Spider-Man suits,” Michaels had said.
“No, sir, that is true. However, they built this place back in the 1950s, and they designed it to withstand the technology they had back then. Obviously they didn’t have the resources we have today. These days we have shaped charges that will go through concrete and rebar like a hot knife through butter. All we have to do is clear away the dirt and get to the hard stuff.”
“That seems awful easy. Why didn’t Ames update things when he moved in?”
“I’m guessing that he was banking on the fact that no one knows about this place. You don’t need thick walls to guard a place no one knows about. And besides, I don’t really know what he could have done about it. These weak spots are design elements. He would have had to essentially rebuild the entire bomb shelter to get rid of them, and there was no way to do that and still keep this place a secret. Like I said, though, I’m guessing here.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Assuming you’re right and these weak spots are still here, isn’t the idea to surprise him? Won’t this charge make a pretty loud ‘bang’ when it goes off?”
“It will. But I think we have that covered.”
Howard had told him why, and Michaels had to admit, it sounded as if it might work.
The two troopers were moving dirt at an incredible rate. In just a few minutes they reached the concrete. A few more minutes and they had cleared a rough circle five feet across.
Those exoskeletons were certainly impressive.
Fernandez climbed down into the shallow hole and set a brick-shaped block the size of a loaf of bread onto the concrete.
Fernandez said, “Ready, sir.”
Howard looked at his watch. He touched a control on his LOSIR headset and said, “Thirty seconds, on my mark.”
Fernandez nodded and touched a control on the shaped charge.
“Mark,” Howard said into his throat mike.
“Twenty meters, people, that way!” Fernandez said.
They moved. Quickly.
40
Ames was back at the monitors drinking a cup of coffee when the truck blew up. He was looking right at it when it turned into a fireball, washing out the filters on the cameras with a bright white glare. He could feel the room vibrate, and heard the sound echo around him.
He set his coffee cup down carefully and rubbed at his eyes, still staring at his monitors.
When the images cleared, he saw what was left of the flatbed, mostly just the frame and wheels, burning like mad. Even the tires were on fire.
Of the men who had been there, there was no sign.
Blown halfway to Mexico, no doubt.
What could have happened? A fuel leak? Maybe the truck had been hauling explosives? No. He shook his head. He had seen that the thing was empty.
He shook his head, then took a sip of his coffee. What should he do about this? Anything? The men were beyond help, that was for sure. He hadn’t seen them for a few minutes, had assumed they had climbed back inside, unable to fix whatever was wrong. If they had — and they must have, because he didn’t see them running around out there — they were toast.
He could call the state police, he supposed, and report it, but he didn’t really want to have his presence noted. Even out here, somebody passing by would spot it soon enough and call it in. Yes, he was curious — but not enough to talk to the police. It didn’t concern him, and it wasn’t worth giving up the privacy and secrecy he had worked so hard to establish here.
Besides, the men in that truck were beyond help. There was nothing he or anyone else could do for them now. At least they probably never knew what hit them.
Where there had been a slab of concrete and steel rods, there was now a crater. But there was still dirt to be removed.
“Reaves, Holder, front and center!” Fernandez yelled. “Get those supersuits in gear!”
The pair of exosuited troopers moved forward, not quite a zombielike lurch, but not as smooth as a normal man’s walk, either. Accompanied by the hums of motors and hydraulics, they started moving dirt again.