“Find it?” she asked.
“Either those two were here for at least a week, or there’s some people missing… probably two or three.”
“There’s only two sleeping bags.”
“Well, there’s a lot of shit over there. Maybe somebody swiped the other sleeping bags.”
“Three!” Marty called, getting up from the rock and coming over to them. “There’s three missing and they’re down there.” He pointed into the crater. “They apparently died in an avalanche. Check this out.”
He played a video clip of two men and a woman preparing to descend the escarpment in full rock-climbing gear. They were happy and excited, all in their early thirties, one white male, one black, and a small Asian woman. The blond woman from the tent was in the video too, but she was not dressed for climbing, and the man with red hair was probably the person holding the camera.
The next clip showed them descending out of sight a hundred yards or so down the face.
After that, the clip showed an avalanche much worse than the one Marty and company had witnessed upon their arrival. The blonde was screaming in the background, and the man holding the camera kept saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” over and over again for nearly a minute until the avalanche ended. From the look of the video, it did not appear that anyone below could possibly have survived.
“Unbelievable,” Sullivan said. “Who in their right mind goes down there?”
Marty shrugged and tucked the camera into his pocket. “Maybe they figured there was nothing else left to do with their lives. They were rock hounds… and this is the ultimate experience for a rock hound.”
“And now it’s their grave,” Sullivan said. “So, okay, we camp here tonight. In the morning we’ll load this food back into their truck and head south. That hybrid will get better mileage than the Jeep. Anybody got a better idea?”
“Don’t forget our cannibalistic underground dweller,” Emory said.
“We sleep in shifts anyway,” Sullivan said. “Nothing’s changed.”
Thirty-Seven
It was pitch-black by eight o’clock that night, and Emory sat against a rock with one of the sleeping bags wrapped around her shoulders, unable to even see her hand in front of her face. They had pulled the SUV away from the fissure so they could see the trench unobstructed, and every ten minutes or so she would scan 360 degrees around the encampment through the NVD looking for movement or heat signatures.
A woman’s scream split the night, and Sullivan came instantly awake, grabbing the carbine resting across his belly. “Shannon!”
“Here!” she said to the darkness. “It wasn’t me.” She turned on her night vision device and got to her feet, scanning the trench line.
Sullivan pulled on his helmet and scanned through his own NVD. “How far? Could you tell?”
“Hundred yards maybe.”
“What’s going on?” Marty said in the inky blackness.
“Ruck up!” Emory told him. “A woman screamed out there.”
“Probably a trap,” Sullivan said, shrugging into his harness. He could see Marty fumbling around in the dark looking for his equipment, pulling a flashlight from his pocket. “If you turn that fucking thing on, I’ll stick it so far up your ass you’ll have light comin’ out your ears.”
“Well, how the hell else am I supposed to find my shit?”
“Try remembering where you put it!” Sullivan said, walking over and picking up Marty’s gear from behind him and shoving it into his arms. Then he grabbed Marty’s helmet from a rock and jammed it down on his head. “Try not to forget your dick.”
Emory smiled to herself. “He remembered his weapon, John. That’s the important thing.”
“Hark, his guardian angel speaks.”
She laughed. “We’ll walk the trench line above ground. Me and Marty on the right, you on the left.”
“I say Marty walks down in the trench.”
“Sully, fuck off… anybody seen my goddamn gloves?”
They covered roughly a hundred yards before Sullivan spotted anything telling down in the trench. His fist went up and the other two stopped in their tracks, crouching low to the ground. He peered carefully over the edge of the fissure for a better look, to see what appeared to be a human being lying on the bottom, zipped up in a mummy sleeping bag. Switching to infrared, he saw that it was indeed a trap.
The person in the mummy bag gave off a strong heat signature, so was alive, and there were additional heat signatures as well… two sets of footprints glowing eerily in his viewfinder even as they cooled away to nothing, leading away from the bag into a split in the wall of the trench.
“You two in the cave,” he called out, not knowing what else to call the little hidey-hole. “Come out with your hands up.”
No one answered and no one came out.
“What is it?” Emory asked.
“A goddamn ambush,” Sullivan answered. “I think it’s the girl from the video down there in the bag… Come out, for the last time!” he shouted.
He heard what sounded like someone beginning to dig in, so he aimed his M-203 and a fired a 40mm grenade into the opening, blowing it apart and showering the person in the mummy bag with dirt.
When the dust cleared, two blasted bodies lay mangled in the trench, their heat signatures already fading, and Emory slid over the edge, pulling Marty in with her. She knelt beside the mummy bag and Sullivan kept watch above.
“Get your light out, Marty.”
Marty shined his light on an Asian woman’s face as Emory unzipped the bag to reveal her badly battered and naked body. Emory began an examination.
“Multiple broken bones,” she called up. “Distended abdomen… internal bleeding.”
“She must have survived the avalanche somehow,” Marty muttered in amazement.
“Poor thing,” Emory said, zipping the dying woman back up to keep her warm. “John, there’s nothing I can do for her!”
Sullivan’s face appeared over the edge. “How long does she have?”
“An hour… maybe.”
The woman found her hand. “My friends…” she whispered. “Tammy… Ted?”
“I’m sorry, they’re gone.”
“Find the camera,” the woman whispered, trying to squeeze Emory’s hand. “There’s video of the crater… for future… future study.”
“We have it,” Marty said.
“Take it to our friends in Oklahoma… an Air Force bunker there. Tell them Yon gave it to you. They’re geo… geologists…”
“There are a lot of Air Force bases in Oklahoma.” Emory said. “Which one?”
“Altus,” said Yon. “They’re at Altus.” She lingered another ten minutes then died.
In the morning, they returned to the site and examined the remains of the man and woman Sullivan had blown up with the grenade. Each of them had a pistol and a knife. Another hundred yards down the trench they found a truly surprising sight: a reinforced concrete tunnel in the side of the crater wall.
“Where the hell does it go?” Marty wondered aloud.
“I’m guessing it leads to an old bunker,” Sullivan said, stepping carefully around the edge to enter the tunnel without sliding away down the steep wall of the crater. Emory and Marty followed, all of them switching on the flashlights attached to their carbines.
“What kind of bunker?” Marty asked.
“SACOM… Strategic Air Command. If this tunnel doesn’t lead to a missile silo, it should lead to a command bunker.”