They continued sweeping along the riverbank, searching for a bunker or an armored pillbox, but also on the alert for other guards. They’d gone another quarter mile when Max did an uncanny bird whistle. He was halfway up the slope. When Juan arrived, he saw what the French called a cloche, or bell.
It was an immobile armored turret, with machine-gun ports to give the men inside a wide field of fire. Unfortunately, it was cast in too-thick steel to be cut open, and the ports were too small to expand. It sat atop a rust-streaked and dirty concrete foundation that had been there so long, it seemed to blend in with the forest.
“Where there’s one,” Hanley said, “there’s bound to be more.”
And, sure enough, they found two more of the cloches before they hit the mother lode. The entrance to the bunker was two solid metal doors set in a concrete frame that projected out of the hillside like a portal into the earth. Above the doors were some faded stenciled numbers that had been this fortification’s designation. The remnants of the road that had once led to the bunker were barely noticeable, but, with a little imagination, it was possible to see it rising up and over the rim of the hill.
The doors themselves had been welded shut with a crude bead of solder that ran from top to bottom.
“Okay, everyone fan out and keep watch,” Cabrillo ordered. “Max, get to it.”
Hanley set his pack onto the ground at the base of the garage-sized doors and started rummaging about while the rest of the team took up surrounding positions to look for more roving patrols. Max molded the puttylike Hypertherm along the weld, making sure to use just enough to melt the solder away. He worked quickly, and within just a couple of minutes he was set and had a detonator in place.
“Ready,” he radioed.
“Push out the perimeter and give me a sit rep,” Juan ordered.
The smoke generated by the chemical reaction would be a dead giveaway, so Cabrillo needed to know it was clear all around them. It took a quarter hour, but he felt relieved that they were alone out here.
When the last all clear came in, he ordered Max to burn the door.
With a sizzling hiss and a glare like looking into the sun, the Hypertherm ate into the weld so that molten metal ran down in dribs and drabs that quickly turned into a fiery torrent. Acrid white smoke as thick as cotton candy billowed over the bunker’s entrance, but with the wind blowing up the valley it was being carried away from the Albatross Mine, which was another mile downstream. When it was over, the seam glowed cherry red.
Max was ready for this and sprayed the seam with liquid nitrogen from the Oregon’s engine room that he had in a vacuum flask. The metal was still hot, but with a pair of thick welder’s gloves he could safely touch it. The right-hand door squealed mercilessly as he heaved it open, and a damp chill oozed out of the ground within. Beyond was a white concrete wall and inky darkness.
“We’re in,” he informed the others.
The rest of the team came in at a jog. Cabrillo was the last to arrive.
“Good job.”
“Was there ever a doubt?” Max held up his meaty hands for the others to admire. “Nothing made by man can resist these babies.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s go.”
Just before Juan stepped over the threshold, the guard’s radio squawked and then a voice came through en clair. “Malik, anything to report?” someone asked in Arabic.
Cabrillo pushed the transmit button. “Nothing.”
“Why did you miss your scheduled call in?”
“My stomach is not well,” Juan ad-libbed.
“See the doctor when your shift ends in an hour.”
“I will. Out.” He tossed the radio aside. “We’ve got one hour before they know we’re here. Let’s put it to good use. Linc, you with me?”
“Go ahead.”
“Give it sixty minutes and light ’em up.”
“Roger that.”
He could only hope they had gained access to the mine itself by then or this was all for nothing. And then there was the second part of this operation, the one MacD had told him about in private after returning from Monte Carlo. It was something that went beyond the pale, but its rewards boggled the imagination. He cursed the name Overholt, and led his people inside.
26
THEY STRAPPED ON HALOGEN HEADLAMPS AS SOON AS THEY moved just a few feet from the entrance, which they managed to close partway. The interior of the fortress was stark and claustrophobic, with unadorned concrete walls, ceiling, and floor. It was clear, after going only a few feet, that the facility had been stripped bare, probably by the occupying German army during the war. They passed countless rooms whose function they could only guess at and spotted ladders that rose up into the cloche bunkers they’d seen earlier.
“Man, this place is a nine-point-nine on the spook-o-meter,” MacD said, peering into what had once been a restroom, if the drains on the floor were any indication. All the plumbing fixtures were long gone.
Cabrillo guided them through a bewildering maze of rooms, passageways, and dead ends. He estimated that this one fort probably housed more than a hundred men, recalling that tens of thousands had been deployed along the Maginot Line, and that its construction nearly bankrupted the country.
At the last dead end they hit, a trapdoor had been built into the floor. Above it were steel brackets bolted to the ceiling that had once held a hoist of some kind. Cabrillo heaved back on the metal doors to reveal a square shaft that dropped deeper underground. He spat, and it took his spittle several seconds to hit the bottom.
“That’s disgusting,” Linda admonished.
“Ugly but effective,” he countered. “About forty feet.”
They quickly rigged a climbing rope to the old brackets. Because of the extra weight in his pack, Juan rigged a harness to make the going a little easier. He then slung his rifle over his shoulder, took a firm grip on the line, and stepped out into space. Though healed, his collarbone reminded him, as he went down hand over hand, that it had been broken in the not-so-distant past. As he dangled in space, continuing his descent, his headlamp flashed across the featureless walls. He thought that this had been a munitions hoist, back in the day, and that there must be more aboveground features to this complex that he and his team had missed.
He touched bottom and called up for the next person. Max was red-faced and puffing by the time he joined Cabrillo on this lower level.
“You need to exercise more,” Juan said, and patted Hanley’s ample but rock-hard belly.
“Or rappel less.”
Once they reassembled, they continued to look for a way into the Albatross Mine. They had to check every door and examine all the walls for signs of an entrance. When they came to an area where the ceiling had collapsed, they wasted twenty minutes moving chunks of concrete and debris to clear a passage. Eddie’s watch started beeping just after they’d gotten through.
“One minute,” he announced, meaning that in sixty seconds Linc, Mike, and Jim would start the diversion.
Cabrillo felt his frustration level spike. They were wasting time and the only chance they were going to get. If they failed, Eric Stone had orders to give the mine’s location to Langston and pray a nuclear response would come quickly enough that the retaliatory damage Bahar unleashed was manageable.
WATCHING THE MINE through his rifle’s scope, Linc saw no movement save an occasional dust cloud rising up with the passing wind. The buildings looked forlorn and abandoned except for the newly built bunker at the base of the hoist tower. He focused in on what had been an administrative building. He upped the power and concentrated on a corner window.