“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.”
“Okay, thanks,” Juan said, and ended the call before Mark could expound further.
“Sorry I asked,” Linc said sheepishly.
“Listen, why don’t we pick this up again when we have something more concrete to work with? We’ve got a good overview, but to plan the assault we need details.”
Heads nodded around the table, and the meeting broke up.
It wasn’t until after supper that Tiny arrived back aboard with Philip Mercer’s diagrams. Most of the crew were lounging around the dining room, some sipping brandy, others nibbling after-dinner cheeses. Cabrillo, who’d dined with Soleil, decided that this was as good a spot as any to take their first look at the plans and ordered the lights be set on bright. The clubby feel of the room lost some of its luster under a bright halogen stare.
Juan slipped out of his suit coat and loosened his tie. He fiddled with the cap of a Montblanc pen while he waited.
“Hey, gang,” Tiny called jovially when he entered the room. He wasn’t a regular feature aboard the Oregon, so his arrival was greeted warmly. The big pilot never looked so rumpled. His blond hair stuck out in tufts, and there wasn’t a square inch of his white uniform shirt that wasn’t rumpled. In his hand he carried a yellow legal pad and a single rose.
He crossed through the dining hall, shaking hands and slapping backs, until reaching the Chairman. “Tah-dah,” he said with a flourish, and set the pad on the table. He handed the rose to Soleil. “Mercer sends his compliments.”
She smiled.
Cabrillo spun the pad so he could see it. Mercer had written out a several-page description of the facility and the underground conditions. He detailed how over the years the miners had dug too close to the bottom of the river and that they refused to work the lower shafts. Roland Croissard had bought the facility during what he thought was a regular labor dispute. It was only after hiring Mercer and reading his report, and a report by another expert when he didn’t like what had been said in the first, that he realized he’d been swindled.
The first time he’d even visited the place was on the day Mercer delivered his report. Soleil had come with him on a lark.
Water seepage had been manageable, but Mercer calculated that the continued use of explosives deeper in the tunnels would cause the plug of rock between the mine and the river to fail. The flood would be catastrophically fast.
There was a gem among all the technical information, one that Mercer hadn’t disclosed to Croissard, and it was something he doubted many of the original miners remembered.
“There it is,” Juan blurted out when he read it.
“What do you have there?” Max asked. Unlike Juan, who had dressed for dinner, Hanley wore jeans and a western-style checkered shirt, complete with pearl snaps.
“One of the mine’s upper tunnels intersects with a piece of history.”
“Come again?”
“The miners bored their way into an old tunnel that was once part of the Maginot Line. Mercer writes that they had boarded it up, but he took the boards down and checked it out.”
Constructed after World War I as the ultimate defense for the homeland, the French had built a near-continuous wall of underground bunkers and forts along the border with Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy. The forts had armored turrets that could pop up from the ground like obscene mushrooms and unleash directed cannon and mortar fire. Many of the structures were interlinked so that troops could be shuttled from one to another on subway trains. And some were so large, they were virtually underground cities unto themselves.
The Germans never obliged the French to use their grand fortification. When they invaded in 1940, they hooked through Belgium and Holland and poured into France where the defenses were weakest.