Drew brought Chase up-to-date on the situation. He was a compact stocky man with a frizz of prematurely graying hair. They occasionally played chess together, with Drew invariably the winner. "All other access points are secure--no signs of attack," he said, circumscribing the layout of the Tomb with an outspread hand. "Either they don't know about the other entrances or they've decided to concentrate on this sector." He suddenly raised his hand. "Listen!"
From thirty feet above their heads came the muted rattle of small-arms fire. The operations room was on the topmost level, yet still protected by a thick slab of reinforced concrete and a series of leadlined steel doors.
"Any chance of them getting in through the silo door?" Chase asked worriedly.
"Not a snowflake in hell." Drew shook his head. "Not unless they've got a nuke warhead handy. The retracting cover weighs over seven hundred tons. No, their only hope is through the personnel entrance, and I've posted six extra men there. We can pick 'em off like wood pigeons as they come through. That's if they can break down the door --which is about as likely as a cow giving processed cheese."
"It's like being a rat in a trap."
"A pretty damn secure rat." Drew didn't seem too concerned, which Chase found reassuring.
"Any idea who they are?"
"Buchan got a peek at them through the scope, but the light wasn't good enough to make out any detail." Drew nodded toward the clock on the slabbed wall, which read four forty-seven. "Still dark up there."
"How long before dawn?"
"About an hour. But it should be light enough to identify them before then if you want to risk putting the scope up."
"Is that their gunfire or ours?" Chase asked.
Drew grimaced. "Them, the crazy bastards. They're taking potshots at the door. I wouldn't worry about it; they're going to need more than a forty-five to even put a dent in it."
Chase studied the site layout in the cone of light. The complex was in no immediate danger. Each access point was secure and under guard. Desert Range had been built to withstand all but a direct nuclear strike ... so why was he uneasy? What was bothering him?
What was bothering him, he realized, was that the location of the site had been discovered. This particular group mightn't pose much of a threat, but suppose they sent for reinforcements or spread the word around? The Tomb would become a sitting target for every gun-happy loon within a hundred miles. In no time at all they would be under siege--and it didn't take a tactical genius to realize that this was their one weak point. With their supplies cut off, sooner or later the moles would have to push their snouts aboveground and get their heads blown off.
"Access six in Blue Sector," Chase said, tapping the layout with his finger. "That's about a mile away, right?" He looked at Drew, who nodded slowly, frowning. "I want you to put as many men as you can spare on the surface and have them circle around to cut off the attackers' retreat." He described an arc on the map. "Our men open fire at the same time as we come up through access five. If we time it for daybreak we should be sure of getting them all."
Drew blinked and gazed at Chase, dumbfounded. His Adam's apple bobbed above the white triangle of sweat shirt at the open collar of his dark brown tunic. "You want to wipe 'em out?"
"Every single one. No survivors."
"You think that's necessary?"
"Listen, Sam, if word gets out they'll come back with every piece of heavy armament they can lay their hands on. We've got to stop that before it starts." Chase glanced at the clock. "It's nearly five. How long will it take to get your men in position?"
"Fifty minutes." Drew stroked his chin with hairy fingers. "That should be plenty of time to deploy before full light."
"Let's make it dead on six o'clock to make sure."
" 'Dead' being the operative word," said Drew, looking at Chase as if he'd never seen him before. In a sense he never had.
Forty minutes later they were standing tensely in the concrete cubicle next to the ramp leading up to access 5. Now and then shots could be heard ricocheting off the steel door into the desert air like demented wasps. In the corridor outside six men in combat gear were squatting with their backs to the wall, smoking and quietly talking, automatic weapons propped between their jutting knees.
Buchan was waiting nervously by the periscope control box mounted on the wall. "Beats me what the fuck they want." He gestured vaguely. "None of this scientific stuff can be of any use. What are they after?"
"Perhaps it's the idea of people hiding underground they don't like," Chase said. "Makes them feel insecure. Vulnerable. And when things get really bad out there they'll want somewhere safe to run to. This is it."
"How bad are things gonna get, sir?" Buchan asked. He was sweating profusely.
"Don't you listen to the news bulletins?"
"What, you mean all that stuff in Africa and India and those places? I thought that was a plague of some kind, spread by bad drinking water. Nothin' to do with the climate."
"We don't know for sure what caused it," Chase said. "If anybody does they're keeping quiet." He was about to go on and then found he couldn't. All of a sudden he felt very weary, and it had nothing to do with being hauled from his bed in the early hours of the morning. His fatigue was deeper than that, rooted in every fiber of his being, the effect of climbing a steep slippery slope that got steeper and slipperier, so that however hard you struggled upward you kept sliding down and down into unimaginable, unthinkable depths. With Cheryl and Dan gone, his only lifeline was somewhere out in the Pacific. But the lifeline was no more than a thread upon which the fate of the world hung. If the trials failed and the thread snapped, the slope would become a vertical plunge into nightmare and horror and final oblivion for himself and all mankind.
"Five minutes," Drew said, swiveling his black-haired wrist to look at his watch. "Want to take a gander topside?" he asked Chase.
Buchan cleared his throat explosively and blurted out to Drew, "Sir, I gotta tell you. There's two of our guys out there somewhere--Stu-ermer and Monteith." He gulped, staring at the floor with stricken eyes. "They went out before the alarm, hunting for fresh meat. The guys do that, pick up a rabbit or a prairie fox, and get the cook to put it in the pot. I mean I know it's against regulations . . ." His hoarse voice died miserably.
Drew was standing rigidly, fists bunched at his sides, the cords on his neck sticking out. "You stupid bastards!" He released a long hissing breath. "Did you see either of them when you looked through the scope? Was there any sign of them?"
"Like I told you before, there were shapes but that was all. It was too dark. Maybe they came in through another entrance?" Buchan said hopefully. "They might have seen the attack coming and couldn't make it back there--"
"All access points are sealed," Drew told him harshly. "Nobody has entered the complex. Nobody. If Stuermer and Monteith went out, they're still out!"
Chase stepped forward, pointing at the control box. "Hit it!"
Buchan started as if jabbed with a needle, pressed the green button with the heel of his hand, and the lightly greased shaft slid upward accompanied by the whine of hydraulics. Buchan pulled the ribbed rubber handgrips horizontal and locked them in position, then stood aside as Chase pressed his forehead to the molded foam rubber and adjusted the focus. It was like looking into a thin gray mist. Against the flat colorless backdrop he could just make out a group of shadowy figures. He turned the calibrated setting to greater magnification and faces loomed in close-up. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. He swallowed a lump of phlegm in his throat.
There were eight or nine of them as near as he could tell. Pitted and scarred like lepers and dressed in rags, they were huddled around a pathetic fire from which a thin trickle of smoke ascended into the whitening sky. He hadn't expected this; whatever he had been prepared for it wasn't children. The oldest was about fifteen. Some of the others were no more than ten, and one, a girl, little more than a toddler. He didn't want to look and yet his eye was held compulsively by each disgusting detail. A head with the flesh hanging off it like strips of yellow tissue paper. A boy with milky-white eyeballs staring emptily into the distance. A girl with scabrous patches of raw flesh on her back and buttocks. Some with a black fungal growth obliterating their face. At least four that he could see with fingers or hands or complete limbs missing, leaving only raw stumps through which the pale bone gleamed.