Still exchanging light gunfire with the men hunkered behind the rocks, Nimec’s team had gotten pitons and lines out of their rucksacks and were driving the metal anchors into the cliff head. Nimec didn’t know how many of the ridge’s defenders were left. Probably no more than two or three to judge from their fitful salvos.
Amid the clang of hammers and continued smatters of fire, he swept his eyes in a semicircle, seeking the tunnel entrance Granger had offered up information about.
Then, abruptly, he spotted it.
He called to Waylon over his headset, heard static crackle in return, didn’t pause to consider the odds of his brief message having been communicated.
Grabbing Rice’s shoulder, waving another two men over to them, he whirled toward the tunnel, turned on the high-powered tactical flashlight mounted under the barrel of his baby VVRS, and led the way inside.
Nimec’s voice cut through the white noise in Waylon’s earpiece like an isolated sun ray penetrating dense overcast.
“I’m headed into the tunnel, rappel team’s on its way down,” Nimec said. “Keep pushing forward, they’re going to need cover.”
“Got you, sir.” Waylon heard a hack of static in his ear, and wondered whether his own response had slipped through the parted wave of electromagnetic interference. “Can see the notch in front of me.”
And he could. It was an ugly, angular gash that looked like it had been hastily carved from the wall of the pass with a gigantic serrated butcher knife.
Waylon could also hear something of equivalent nastiness — the growl of a muscular engine at his rear, rising above the buzz of the two other Sword ATVs speeding along with him.
Something was coming on. And closing.
He tossed a glance over his shoulder at the man in his aft gunner’s seat.
“What kind of problem have we got?” he shouted over the blasting wind.
The gunner turned to look, spotted the Light Attack Vehicle in pursuit.
“Bad one,” he said.
Waylon eased off his accelerator and radioed out an urgent message to Sam Cruz.
Cruz didn’t pick up Waylon’s signal, but fortunately that wasn’t imperative.
He knew the plan.
In the lead slot of the three-ATV incursion team that had met Chinstrap Two in McKelvey — dropped there so they would enter Bull Pass behind Waylon’s men and guard their backsides — Cruz had spotted the Light Strike Vehicle up ahead moments after it launched from the pass’s crumbled west wall.
As he sped forward at maximum horsepower, pushing within range of the opposition’s militarized dune buggy, Cruz waved his accompanying vehicles into attack formation and hollered for his gunner to open fire.
The Light Strike Vehicle’s driver had been outwitted and he knew it.
The motor-pack of ATVs that had appeared from McKelvey were gaining behind him like angry hornets. Reymann swerved to elude their firing guns, his own rear gunner turned toward them in his elevated weapons station, swinging his.50-caliber in wide arcs, disgorging a torrent of ammunition from its link feed-belt.
The hornet vehicles continued to close distance nonetheless, two of them splitting to his left and right while the third stayed at his rear and dodged the lashing machine gun volleys. There was no room for his larger vehicle to maneuver in the tight-walled pass. No time to use his grenade launcher as the hornets nimbly hopped alongside his flanks, trapping him between them. Nowhere for him to go but straight ahead toward the leading trio of ATVs that had now molted speed before him, their tail guns pouring ammunition in his direction.
Boxed-in, caught in a vicious four-way cross fire, Reymann was cursing under his breath with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief when a sleet of bullets knocked him back in his seat, turning his head and most of his body into a crimson mire.
One of Pete Nimec’s biggest unanswered questions was resolved minutes after he entered the tunnel, Rice and the others following him down a metal stairwell into the darkness.
They had descended three long flights in a hurry when the beam of his tac light chanced on a kind of niche in the stone wall to his right — and then held there as he paused briefly on a landing.
The recess was filled with sealed steel drums.
Large fifty-five-gallon drums, stacked two and three high and going several rows deep into the surrounding rock.
Their warning labels were printed in various different languages, but it was easy enough to see they all said the same thing.
Nimec glanced over them.
De rebut Radioactif.
Radioaktiver Müll.
Reciduous radioactivos.
Scorrie radioative.
“Goddamn,” Rice said. He stood slightly behind Nimec on the riveted metal landing, his own flash trained on one of the English drum labels. “Radioactive waste. They’re storing rad waste.”
Nimec grunted. He doubted that was all they were doing there. Before entering the tunnel, he’d looked down from atop the ridge-back and noticed heavy equipment at the bottom of the notch. Earth-hauling trucks. They were stashing this stuff, true. Hoarding it deep in the ground. But he had a feeling their operation would prove to be a two-way street. That they were pulling something out of the ground too.
He moved his eyes further down the stairs, angling his tac light in that direction to illuminate the way.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll worry about this later.”
Burkhart waited in the dimness near the foot of the stairway, flattened against a rough stone wall on its right, his Sturmgewehr angled toward its upper levels. One of his men stood beside him, his back also to the cold stone. Three more men were hugging the opposite wall. All wore night-vision goggles.
They could hear the enemy sprinting downward.
Burkhart had counted three sets of footfalls. And while he could not be certain of it, he would have wagered the first of those sets belonged to the UpLink security chief… Peter Nimec.
Burkhart had never met him, of course. But he believed he understood him. The man had come from a world away with only a single purpose, a single mission, and that was to locate and rescue the vanished members of his organization. Nimec would care little at this stage for anything besides, something Granger would have quickly realized if he were captured — as the UpLink strike verified had happened.
To what else could its timing and accuracy be attributed? Burkhart thought. He saw a flicker of light from above now, pulled further back against the wall. There was a great deal of information Granger had obviously divulged. Enough to bring Nimec and his men here to Bull Pass. To the notch. But his greatest bargaining chip would have been the knowledge he possessed about the whereabouts of the UpLink field team. And if he had told Nimec about the tunnel — a fact made evident by the helicopter’s landing on the ridge-back — then he would have surely told him its descending stairs were the fastest route to the cage in which the woman scientist was being held.
This man Peter Nimec…
A man who led on the ground, risked his life along with those who followed him…
Burkhart knew he would not delegate the actual rescue to others.
It would be Nimec leading the way down the stairs, just as Burkhart himself had chosen to meet him.
Nimec suddenly halted on the stairs and raised his hand, stalling up the three men behind him. He wasn’t sure why. Or at least he couldn’t have stated why. It might have been simple caution. Or that he’d noticed a trace of movement below, heard something below, a subtle forewarning that someone might be down there — except he wasn’t even positive about that. But he told himself that they had better proceed very slowly until he knew.