BETH AND SWANSON EACH grabbed a wrist of the lifeless, heavy body of Sergeant Hafiz and hauled it outside to dump it in the soggy brush beside the trail. Returning through the gate that camouflaged the entrance, they swung it closed behind them and were in the tunnel and shut the inner door. Smeared blood streaked the smooth floor, and it was eerily still. Swanson pulled Ledford by the collar and put his mouth close to her ear.
“You stay on my six at all times, Coastie. Do what I do. No questions, and don’t hesitate,” he said. “We have to push forward as far as possible. If we get contact, follow my lead.”
She gave a quick nod but did not reply. That life-taking bullet she had fired point-blank into the big soldier’s head was something that she had watched Kyle do to the targets they had downed on the patrols, so she had copied the same move, pulling the trigger without emotion. Once it was done, the man was surely no longer a threat to them. It may have been standard operating procedure in special operations, and she had learned it in a violent way on the job, but she was not yet to the point that it would have no effect on her.
When she removed the night-vision goggles, Kyle saw tears welling in the blue eyes of his baby-faced assassin before she wiped them with her dirty sleeve. Because she had been going along so well, he had momentarily forgotten that she had not been trained for these gut-wrenching missions, that her surge of adrenaline had limits; she was running on fumes, and they had a long way to go. He pulled her into a hug, just as he would soothe a thoroughbred horse, or any first-timer getting a taste of close-up death. “You’re doing great, Beth,” he said. “As good as anybody, and better than most. Now let’s do this.”
The first steps were the hardest as they moved into unknown territory, but they had no choice. They were totally exposed in the hallway, which measured about six feet wide, big enough for a small tractor to pull a trailer of material or supplies. The ceiling was about seven feet high and supported by webs of metal girders. Neat clusters of pipes hid the electrical wiring, and long fluorescent bulbs glowed with a bluish tint. The low hum of electrical generators could be heard from elsewhere in the complex, and the constant vibration was transmitted through the stone walls.
Twenty feet down the hallway, on the right-hand side, was a closed door, and they crept toward it, stacking against each wall. Swanson saw it had no lock, just a knob, and he motioned for Beth to give it a slow turn. She opened the portal into a small room that was filled with neat stacks of cardboard and wooden boxes, routine supplies that probably serviced nearby facilities, including the entranceway. He motioned her inside, closed the door, and turned on the lights.
Mops and brooms stood around like spindly sentries, radios and flashlights were recharging on a long metal rack, and a pile of fresh towels lay on a shelf. The tangy odors from the jugs and bottles of various disinfectants and cleaning fluids assaulted their nostrils. A bin of dry rags occupied one corner. Kyle tossed a towel to Beth and used another to rub away the mud that was thick on his boots.
Beth took off the black beanie and shook her blond hair, then worked the towel into it hard and wiped her face. She tossed the hat aside, then also went to work on her boots. “I don’t think it matters any longer if they happen to notice I’m a woman,” she said. “I’m good to go, Gunny. Just some nerves.”
Kyle peeled off his own wet wool beanie and dried the top of his head and his face with a soft towel. It felt better. “This place is incredible. From the outside, it seemed like part of the mountain, but inside, it is something else entirely.”
“You think my brother got this far?”
“Probably. Even farther. Maybe the door had been left open to bring in supplies or something and they stumbled upon it and just came on in to explore, like kids on a holiday hike.”
Beth looked around the room. “There’s nothing here that would be worth killing them. That’s not it.”
They walked to the next room, and the next, working steadily until they cleared the lower corridor, but still found nothing of interest other than the sprawl of the subterranean labyrinth. Some areas were still under construction, with tools, wiring, and lumber strewn about.
An unexpected, high-pitched whine was barely audible in the silence. “We’ve got contact,” Beth said while Swanson was opening still another storage room. They both ducked into the darkness and closed the door, keeping their weapons ready. The whining came closer and passed them by, then stopped. A door opened down the hall; there were slow footsteps, and a grunt and a scrape as something was moved. Ledford flicked on her flashlight and shone the beam around. Boxes were everywhere, and she knelt to read the black printing. She took a quick, sharp breath, then snapped off the light when the whine resumed, suddenly closer and louder.
It passed by again, heading the other way, and Swanson eased the door open and spotted the disappearing rear end of a blue golf cart with a couple of boxes stacked in the rear. The driver wore brown coveralls, but there was no weapon visible. Some civilian worker who had not been looking for anything unusual in this netherworld and had paid no heed to the mixture of grime and blood at the entrance. That sort of luck would not last.
“We’re clear here. Ready?”
“Wait, Kyle. Take a look at this first. Boxes of ammo.” She flashed her light toward the door, found the light switch, and clicked it on, flooding the room with fluorescent brightness. Swanson immediately saw a box with stenciled markings that identified it as a case of 7.62 × 39 mm ammunition. The room was filled almost to the ceiling with ordnance of various kinds, not just the 7.62 bullets common to the AK-47 but canisters of machine-gun belts, rockets for grenade launchers, and heavy weapons shells.
He took off his pack and placed it on the floor. “This is more like it, Coastie. Your brother and his friends at least discovered storage rooms crammed with ammo and weapons. That alone would prove that this bridge is not just some benign structure built to hurry traffic along the road. If word got back to the U.S., then Washington would start asking uncomfortable questions that Pakistan would not want to answer.”
“Would that really be worth killing them for? Maybe just shoo them away with some cover story, like being a storage area for ammo needed to fight the warlords.”
“Whatever. It’s too good for us to pass up,” he said. “You keep watch while I bury some C-4 in this pile. We can command detonate it later on if we need a diversion.”
While he planted a brick of explosive and readied the detonator, Ledford stood facing the door, and her eyes came to rest on a square metal frame around a piece of paper encased in plastic. She stepped closer. It was a computer-created image that looked like the layout for a subway. “Here’s some kind of map,” she said.
“Grab it,” Kyle said, and Beth used her fingernails to pry the map from its frame, then dropped it beside Kyle to keep her hands free on her weapon.
“I’m done with this,” he said, then shouldered into his pack again and spent an extra minute studying the paper. “It’s a map, all right, like the kind a hotel puts in guest rooms to show escape routes in case of fire. It diagrams the entire floor that we’re on, and it looks like there’s nothing down here but supply and storage areas and that outside exit. An elevator is at the far end of the corridor to ferry things up, and there’s a stairwell just down the hall from here. OK. We’ll head up one level.”
AYMAN AL-MASRI DID NOT go to bed. He would not consider doing so until he heard from Hafiz that all was well. As a veteran security specialist, and responsible for the safety of the Commander, he was uncomfortable with the performance of the Taliban, and Hafiz had seemed uncharacteristically unsure of himself. The odds against two patrols being simultaneously stymied and one destroyed were enormous. Nothing had been heard from them, and now Hafiz himself had not reported in. Thirty minutes had passed. A vague sense of unrest was bothering al-Masri, a feeling that had served him well over the years as an early warning that something was happening; something much worse than a storm.
He left the living quarters to awaken his small group of inspectors and guards and told them to arm themselves. “Troubling things are happening,” he said. “We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into carelessness by the sheer size and apparent strength of this huge fortress, or its electronic wizardry, or the promises made by others that it is safe.”
He paired up bodyguards with each specialist. The structural engineer was ordered to secure an overall detailed map of the maze of tunnels, and the tactical officer was instructed to inspect some gun positions. Al-Masri took the information technician under his own wing. “We are going to find that defense system control room and try to get it back online. If we can get those computers running, they may help us solve the mystery. Hafiz was supposed to do that, but I think he went outside the bridge first and has not returned.”
The team’s physician was instructed to go to the infirmary and make an independent examination of the chief engineer to see if the lunatic might be of any use at all.
Al-Masri’s mood grew more sour with every passing minute that there was no word from beyond the facility. Hafiz might have stammered a bit in their meetings, but there was no doubt of the man’s capabilities; he was one of the best operatives in the ISI, a trained and ruthless fighter with years of experience. So why had he not put this right? The only conclusion was that things must have somehow slipped beyond his control. Some external force was pushing events.
He steered the battery-powered cart, questioning the IT specialist sitting stiffly at his side as they rode along. “I don’t know if I can bring the facility fully online immediately,” the man admitted. “I suspect there are difficult security passwords and firewalls. That biometric scanner means there will even be a problem just getting into the room. It would help if I had access to the chief engineer’s journals and logbooks, for then we could hope that he has written them down. If everything is in his head, as I suspect, we will have serious problems.”
They scooted onto a freight elevator and went down one level to the third floor. The wide doors slid apart, and al-Masri thought he recognized the color codes. “Do you remember how to get to the control room? Isn’t it off to the right from here?”
“Yes, sir. Down at the end of the blue hall.”
The cart accelerated again, but it was still slow. “So instead of getting the entire complicated machine running, I want you to concentrate on the controls needed to shut this place down, just as if it were under attack. I want some way to lock this place up tight.”
The IT man rode silently for a moment. “That also will take some time. Why not just signal that there is a fire, sir? That would not seal off the facility, but it would empty it of all civilian workers.”
Al-Masri smiled. A brilliant idea. He yanked his foot from the accelerator and slammed the brake so hard that the IT man was almost thrown overboard. The cart stopped beside a red box on the wall, clearly marked as a fire alarm. He jumped out and yanked the handle.
SWANSON AND LEDFORD WERE barely at the top of the stairwell when the fire alarm screeched, and the shrieking startled them both. Kyle ran to the first door he saw and burst through it, quickly quartering the area with his weapon although he could see nothing but darkness. Beth came in fast behind and shut the door, breathing hard. The smell of gun oil hung thick in the small space.
In the corridor outside, people ran past their hideout, shouting in various languages. Boots thumped in the stairwell as workers bolted for the exits.
“Did you smell any smoke before the alarm?” Kyle asked.
“No.” She leaned against the wall in the darkness, catching her breath.
“Exactly. Neither did I, so there’s no telling where the fire may be, or even if there is one. Maybe on the far side of the bridge.” He made the decision. “We stay on track.”
He unhooked his flashlight, flicked it on, and pointed it at the wall by door. “Hit the switch, Coastie. Nobody will be looking in here for a while.”
Beth flipped the switch, and bright light immediately bathed the room. “Holy cow,” she stammered, looking past Swanson’s shoulder. “What is that doing here?”
Swanson spun, almost tripping over an Mk-19 grenade launcher mounted on an adjustable platform that was locked in place on a short set of rails. Affixed to the weapon was a forty-eight-round can of 40 mm high-explosive grenades, and the weapon appeared ready to fire. He gave a low whistle of surprise and ran his hand over the familiar shape. Kyle had run thousands of rounds through similar Mk-19s, the reliable American-made grenade launcher that was a staple of the U.S. arsenal because of its heavy firepower and adaptability to various platforms. “This baby can do some damage,” he said. “One of those grenades can punch through two inches of armor, and it’s an infantry platoon’s worst nightmare.”
Beth had to raise her voice to be heard over the alarm. “Yeah. I read the manual, too. But what is it doing in here?”
Instead of answering, Kyle unloaded the launcher and emptied the chamber, then stood in front of the muzzle, facing away from it. The firing slit was closed but parted easily with the press of a nearby knob. Fresh air rushed in, and Swanson leaned closer to the opening. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of a broad section of the long valley. “This could have blown us apart on approach,” he observed with a voice as dry as that of a scientist reciting an unpleasant fact.
“So why didn’t it?” Beth moved closer to also get a look from the opening. Dawn was approaching, and the darkness was fading fast.
“I don’t know, and don’t really care right now,” he said. “Let’s think about this, Coastie: We overcame a lot of heavily armed guards, then found the motion sensors and the cameras, and then once we broke into this rock castle, we found crates of stored ammunition.” He tapped the big gun. “Now this: a straight-out-of-the-box Mk-19 that has been turned into a robo-warrior. Open this little slot, slide it out on those rails, shoot for a while, slide it back, close the door, reload, and do it again—and it looks from the wiring that most of it can be done by remote control.”
“Then that’s what my brother and his team came on, something like this. I remember how Dad drew pictures for us of the Cu Chi tunnels and how gun positions were so cleverly hidden that Americans would walk right over them and not even know they were there. It was a nightmare to root them out. This looks just like that; this one looks ready for a war all by itself.”
“Yep. I agree.” A cold feeling washed over him. How many rooms like this were there? How many weapons? What kind? Why? It was a honeycombed defensive position built into solid rock, but with an offensive purpose. All Marines remembered Iwo Jima and the deadly bunkers of the Pacific islands of World War II, and this bridge might be covering the granddaddy of them all. “This could be more than enough reason to kill some curious foreigner intruders. And it means that I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“I thought they might be hiding a nuke in here, but that would not explain all of this fancy hardware and the engineering. With a nuke, they could just drill a hole and hide it. But why put a nuke underground at all, because you would want to inflict maximum damage, not to confine the blast. I don’t know the reason for this secret place, but our intel people have not picked it up, and Washington cannot allow it to exist.”
The alarm ground down from its hellish howl, and stillness settled in the room. Kyle took out his knife and sliced through a handful of wires. “They can repair this, but I don’t want to leave it working, in case we have to come back this way.”
Beth Ledford turned out the light and gently opened the door.