He looked outside, at the destruction below, and saw not destruction, but clean water.
Even as he was letting the chop of the sea below soothe him, Thoreau said, “We’re out here so we can take off this headgear for a few minutes and relax a bit—it won’t hurt us much. I’d suggest we all take this opportunity to pick our noses or whatever. And Beck, would you come forward?” Thoreau’s voice sounded funny—sharp and clipped, not his usual slow drawl.
Ashmead slid out of the co-pilot’s seat: “Sit down but don’t touch anything. We’ve got something to tell you.”
“I do,” Thoreau said, his eyes never leaving his displays. “Slick lost Chris Patrick’s homer before we put down in Georgetown. I’ve been working with a rescue team to try and find out why, and why we lost contact with the other Black Hawk.”
Ashmead took over: “Beck, we’ve got people at the crash site in Kentucky now. There were no survivors.”
Beck pulled off one glove after the other and palmed his eyes. “Sabotage? That bastard Watkins?”
“Maybe,” Ashmead answered; “maybe not. These methane-fueled engines are new, chancy. Could have been natural causes.” Then he grinned bleakly. “But we don’t think so. We think it was Watkins and, since I’ve killed people on suspicion of a lot less, I took the liberty of radioing a friend of mine—in my business it’s handy to have as many friends as you’ve got enemies. So, just for your information, Watkins is as good as dead in the water. Prick McGrath,” Ashmead added ruefully, “and I went over every inch of both birds, and we couldn’t find any sign of tampering. We did that because we knew damn well that if Beggs wants to scream bloody murder about the Russian shoot-down, it’d be more convenient if there weren’t any survivors to mention Morse and argue that we let the 727 go down in a sacrifice play. I’m sorry about Chris Patrick—we all liked her—and sorrier than you’ll ever know about Prick, but at this point, if you believe what you’re telling us, it ought not to matter.”
Beck took his hands away from his face and looked into the blue, cloudless sky. “You know, there isn’t anybody on earth I’d rather be doing this with than you and yours, Rafic.”
He got up, went aft and, to take his mind off Chris Patrick, said to Nye: “Let’s get going on those numbers. We don’t have much time.”
Nye, who’d heard the discussion on the flight deck, nodded. Then he said soberly: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
“Let’s hope,” Beck corrected, feeling as if his entire body were encased in cotton batting and his mouth belonged to a lizard.
When they put down in a park where a low stone building still stood among leafless trees, though the stenciled sign that had said PARK COMMISSION MAINTENANCE: NO ADMITTANCE was gone, everybody knew exactly what to do.
Slick forced open the building’s steel door with Ashmead’s help while Thoreau shut down the chopper and booby-trapped it with a radio-detonating device as well as a tamper-trigger.
When they’d slid the heavy door aside, Beck stepped in and shone his halogen lamp around: the emergency route in and out of Langley seemed untouched by the blast. But that was what its architects had intended.
Even the emergency generator functioned when Slick found its circuit breaker and tripped it, flooding the tunnel, its tracks and electric car, with red light.
Nye fed his Langley access card into a slot in the wall and the car whirred. Beyond it, a three-inch-thick steel door drew back to reveal the beginnings of the more than two miles of tunnel hewn from solid rock.
There wasn’t a rockfall on the track for as far as they could see; the disaster-bracing above had held while hell broke loose on the surface.
And yet, somewhere, there was a breach: Beck’s digital Geiger counter ran out of digits and he tapped Ashmead to bring it to the Covert Action Chief’s attention. For some reason, he was hesitant to speak, as if he were in a tomb.
Ashmead didn’t say anything either, just shrugged.
They all piled into the electric cart, Nye and Beck in the middle with the team around them, shielding them with their bodies from whatever they might encounter, Thoreau facing behind, Ashmead driving, Slick standing with legs spread and weapon at the ready, though everyone else in the car was seated.
Somehow, though Beck was sure no one could have broken in here and survived for long, the tactical caution of the team around him made Beck feel better.
Twenty minutes later, because the car crawled at a snail’s pace and once in a while they did find a rock on the tracks which had to be moved, they drew to a halt before the door to Langley’s sub-basement, where Nye had to perform a more complicated entrance procedure: hand and voice print as well as card ID.
Beck saw him shiver as he took off his glove to press the plate and wince once he’d done it: hot is hot, and Langley was hot as hell. Like stigmata, red weals appeared on Nye’s palm.
Beck saw them as he gloved it once more and touched his friend, who slumped against him, then recovered: “All in my mind, no doubt,” Nye joked lamely as the door slid back and, leaving the cart, they stepped inside.
Above their heads was the executive garage and tons of collapsed building: Thoreau had given them a description of a photo-reconnaissance shot he’d seen to explain why he didn’t want to bother with a flyby.
Beck couldn’t have cared less about what existed or no longer existed above ground.
Down here, where 159 had flourished and then died of budget problems and lack of tangible, usable results, the condition of things mattered terribly.
Every time Beck saw crumbled concrete fallen from the ceiling it was as if someone jabbed him with a hot poker. When a passageway they needed to enter was blocked by a buckled steel door that would not be moved, Beck began to swear in Greek, the foulest of his store of epithets, until Nye told him, “Relax, we’ll just go in the other way.”
The two additional years Nye had spent down here had seen many changes. Without his first-hand knowledge, they’d never have made it to the proper corridor.
But eventually they did and, though everyone’s breathing was raspy, Nye laughed like a delighted child: “Looks good as new.”
It wasn’t, behind the black door that demanded lock-plate and voice identification, but it was close enough.
They fired up the emergency power source and they all held their breath.
When the red lights came on and the dust covers came off the equipment, Slick said: “Looks like we’re rolling,” and stretched out in an ergonomic chair, his feet up on a communicator’s Telex that wouldn’t be telling anyone anything because there was no one upstairs to tell and soon there wouldn’t be enough power left in the entire building to draw any of the steel doors back, let alone send out a message.
Looking around in the red light, with perspiration rolling down his skin so that it crawled, Beck said: “Okay, gentlemen. Time for the good news/bad news. The good news is that whatever we can do, we’ve got the power to do. The bad news is that once we do it, we’re trapped in here.”
“That ain’t news to me, Casper,” Slick said.
“Well, Nye and I think that there’s no reason you can’t leave now if you want to: you too, Ashmead. Take your team and get out.”
“We can’t get past the voice ID. And you’ll need all the power you can coax out of these things,” said Ashmead, his face glistening with sweat in his helmet. “Don’t get all humanitarian on us, kid. We’re here to see that you do your job.”
With a flick, Ashmead’s submachine gun was trained on him. A glance out of the corner of his eye showed Beck that Thoreau had Nye similarly covered.
Slick yawned and stretched: “Not that we thought you’d punk out, but you never know how somebody’s going to act under pressure.”