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 clochebunkers 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.
There! A face had appeared at the corner of the sill as a guard shifted position. He radioed his discovery to Mike and Jim, who had found cover behind an earthen berm that was in an open area where Linc could cover them.
“Thirty seconds,” Mike called back.
Linc kept his attention on the window, knowing the guy would look, once his boys opened up with the mini Gatling.
It sounded more like a power tool than a weapon. The Gatling sprayed a solid jet of tiny bullets that raked the ground, kicking up dirt and small rocks and peppering the buildings like microhail. So many rounds were pouring into the facility, it looked like it was under attack by a hundred soldiers. And that had been the idea. Induce as much panic as possible as quickly as possible.
Linc’s instincts had been spot-on. As soon as the Gatling started chewing apart the mine, the guard at the window popped up to see what the commotion was. Linc eased the trigger and took the heavy recoil on his massive shoulder. The huge bullet ended the guard’s life in a spray of blood.
A second guard who’d been in the room raised his rifle over the sill and looked to be triggering off an entire clip. Lincoln adjusted his aim downward and fired again. The shot passed through the building’s metal cladding and silenced the gunner.
More guards were showing themselves from cover positions all over the complex—from behind piles of dirt and rusted-out equipment and from the buildings themselves. Three men armed with AKs launched themselves out of a small toolshed in a suicidal charge across open ground. They had two hundred yards to cover to reach Jim and Mike.
Linc put one down before the fire team turned the Gatling loose on them. They shook and jittered as they were riddled with more than a hundred rounds in under five seconds. What was left of them soon began to soak into the dusty ground.
A black van shot out of what had been a mechanics’ garage and raced for the bunker. Mike tried to tear into it with the Gatling, but the little .22 caliber rounds pinged off its armored hide and couldn’t puncture the run-flat tires. Linc had time to put three rounds into it before it disappeared around the back of the bunker, but to no effect.
“Chairman, the rooster is in the henhouse,” he radioed on the off chance his voice would reach into the underground fortress.
He swept the facility with his scope, hunting for targets. One guerrilla had been hidden on the roof of a salt-storage shed, and he made his presence known when he popped up and fired off an RPG. He was gone before Linc could take a shot. The missile left a trail of exhaust like a slash across the sky as it flew errantly in the general direction of the Corporation’s machine-gun nest. The impact blew a wad of earth into the air, but little else.
Linc kept his gun trained on the roof, counting the seconds it would take to reload the rocket launcher.
Mike Trono beat him to the punch and had anticipated the next attack flawlessly. A millisecond before the terrorist raised himself, he unleashed a fresh burst from the mini Gatling. The rocketeer stood up in the stream of fire and was torn apart by the two-second burst. His body sagged over the edge of the roof a moment before gravity did its job and he plunged silently to the ground.
Lincoln wiped his face and continued his scan, but he was pretty sure the fight was out of these guys. That was confirmed a moment later when a white rag tied to the end of a shovel handle appeared at the side entrance to the garage. Two men stepped out into the open, one waving the flag, the other holding his hands so far over his head he looked to be walking on his tiptoes.
There was no way any of the team was going to break cover, so after about two minutes the two unarmed men made a show of lying down on the ground with their fingers laced over the back of their heads. It was a position Linc recalled from the Gulf War when he’d had two dozen armed men throw down their weapons and personally surrender to him.
He hoped it was going so well underground.
THEY FINALLY CAUGHT a break ten minutes after the diversion was supposed to start. MacD spotted footprints on the dusty floor, and, assuming Mercer was the last person in this place, they followed them to a crude hole cut into the wall in an out-of-the-way storage room. Boards had been laid across the door-sized hole, but with a couple kicks they splintered inward, and the team found themselves inside the Albatross Mine.