He gave a throaty chuckle. “I remember her fondly.”
“That’s good,” Hux said. “Not to sound overly dramatic, but this is a matter of life and death. Do you recall the place you met?”
“Yeah. Is she with you now?” he asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Since this is just a little on the bizarre side, I want to verify. Ask her where she has a mole.”
Hux asked and relayed the answer. “She says it’s private and you are still a cochon.”
“Good enough for me,” Mercer said with a grin that carried over the airwaves.
“We need to know everything there is to know about the salt mine.”
“Are you looking to throw good money after bad too?”
“Nothing like that. All I can say is that some very bad people have taken it over, and the group I work for plans on taking it back. What we need is a detailed schematic of the entire place, above ground and below.”
“It’s a little hard to describe over the phone,” Mercer informed her. “There’s about thirty miles of tunnels, as I recall.”
Hux was ready for this. “Could you draw it out for us? We have a courier already heading to Washington, D.C.” Tiny Gunderson wouldn’t like the idea that he’d been demoted from chief pilot to courier, but it was the fastest way without putting the plans into the electronic ether. “He’ll be in D.C. by nine o’clock your time, tonight.”
“I guess you don’t know that I’m playing poker tonight with a guy who’s got a tell a blind man can see.”
“This is urgent, Dr. Mercer, or we wouldn’t be asking.”
“Do you have my address?” he asked.
“Yes, we do.”
“All right. I’m game. Do me a favor. Say to her, ‘Mauve peignoir,’ and tell me what she does.”
“She blushed, and called you a pig again.”
Mercer laughed and said, “I’ll meet your courier at nine.”
“Well?” Cabrillo asked when Julia punched off the phone.
Hux looked pointedly at Soleil. “He’s quite the charmer. You’ll have to tell me the story of the mauve nightie.”
Soleil’s blush deepened. “Later.”
“Well?” Cabrillo asked a second time.
“He’ll do it. Tiny can pick it up tonight and be back with it by tomorrow.”
“Once we have his diagram, we can formulate our plan to take out Bahar’s computer.”
They headed back to the harbor and made a startling discovery. MacD Lawless was leaning negligently against a fence near where they had berthed the lifeboat.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Juan called out.
“Long story, but Ah came down to talk to the harbormaster to see if the Oregon had come in yet and saw the Or Death tied up pretty as you please.” His sunny smile faded. “We need to talk. Langston Overholt himself came to get me and had me flown here on an Air Force jet.”
“Let me guess,” Juan said knowingly. “Bahar has made his move with his quantum computer.”
MacD’s jaw dropped. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Eric and Mark figured out that he’d built it, and it stands to reason he’d use it against the United States. Tell me everything.”
They boarded the disguised hydrofoil as MacD told them what had been going on since he’d parted with the team in New Orleans, but it wasn’t until they were halfway back to the ship that the dread chill creeping up Juan’s spine went into overdrive. Linda had said Langston had phoned earlier about a mission involving a Chinese ship. That didn’t jibe with what was happening in Washington, and the sickening realization hit home.
As soon as they arrived on the Oregon he had Hali Kasim track Linda down.
“When you spoke with Overholt, did he sound different to you?” he asked without preamble.
“No. He sounded fine. Is something wrong with him?”
“Did you tell him we were headed here?” Trepidation carried in his voice. If she had, they were blown.
“No. I said we had another op and would need a week. He said it was no problem, since the Chinese looked like they were sticking around the Gulf of Alaska.”
Juan let out a long-held breath. “Thank God.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“That wasn’t Langston. That was the quantum computer you were talking to.”
Cabrillo had taken Eric’s and Mark’s warnings seriously, but this was the first time he truly understood the staggering capabilities Gunawan Bahar had at his disposal. Like the president had remarked earlier, they were squared off against a man who wielded the power of God.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” Linda asked. She’d gotten it too.
“Yeah,” Juan replied. “Yeah, I think this time we really are.”
AS BADLY AS CABRILLO wanted a Predator drone over the Albatross Mine, he knew that the request was impossible because Bahar would get wind of it. Instead, Gomez Adams would be renting a helicopter there in Monaco and doing an aerial survey of the place. In the meantime they would have to make do with archived satellite imagery off the Internet. His concern went so deep that he had Mark ensure the images hadn’t been doctored recently. Fortunately, they were clean.
The mine sat in the Arc River Valley near the alpine town of Modane and, as Soleil had recalled, very close to the Italian border. From the air, there wasn’t much to look at. It was a basic industrial brownfield site, with several dilapidated buildings and the remains of the tower for the headgear hoist that once carried men into the mine and salt back out. A single access road snaked to the mine over an undulating series of switchbacks, but it also had rail access. Despite the graininess of commercial satellite pictures, they could see that some of the track bed had been removed, so that locomotives could no longer reach the facility.
A river approach was likely because the mine’s southern boundary ran directly along the banks of the Arc River. There was even a bridge crossing the river nearby that looked like it went to an abandoned gravel pit that must have worked in conjunction with the mine when it was in operation.
Linc, Eddie, Linda, and Juan were in the conference room, studying the images projected on the big flat-panel monitors.
“Why a mine?” Lincoln asked suddenly.
The others were so deep in their own thoughts, no one had really paid attention.
“What did you say?”
“I said, why put this thing in a mine?”
That was something Cabrillo hadn’t given much thought to, so he had no answer. He called Mark down in his cabin and posed the question to him.
“It’s shielding,” he replied. “Eric and I had considered this when we first realized Bahar had built a quantum computer and were trying to guess a location. You see, the operations inside the machine take place at the atomic scale. It can automatically correct for atomic vibrations because they come at a set rate and frequency. One of the things that could unbalance the computer and cause it to kick out error messages is if it got bombarded by a heavy enough cosmic particle.
“As you know,” he went on, “the earth gets hit tens of trillions of times an hour by subatomic junk winging in from space. A lot of this is deflected by the magnetosphere, and what does get through is generally harmless to us. Though an interesting note, there is a theory posited that some cancers are the result of genetic damage caused by a single cosmic ray hitting a DNA strand.”
Juan knew to let him ramble but still had to grit his teeth.
“Anyway, on the exacting scales the computer works at, an impacting cosmic ray could disrupt the machine’s function catastrophically, so they need to shield it. Here’s the rub. I have no idea why they chose this salt mine. If cosmic radiation is a threat, we would have thought they would have buried it deeply under the densest rock they could find. The best theory Eric and I could come up with is, there might be some other mineral mixed in with the salt to help shield against one particular cosmic ray that would cause the most damage.”