“What’s happening?” Maggio asked loudly.
Ryan didn’t answer. He continued looking out the thick glass of the window.
“Ryan! Come on, man, what’s going on?” Maggio called out again.
“They’re gone,” he finally answered quietly.
“What do you mean, ‘They’re gone,’ Goddamn it?”
Ryan turned toward the command chair angrily.
“What do you think I mean? They’re gone, dead, adrift. What do you want me to say?”
Down below, Sarah heard everything that was happening.
“What do we do?” Maggio asked no one in particular.
“We continue with the mission,” Sarah said and released her safety harness.
“In case you didn’t notice, we just lost the mission commander and the LEM pilot,” Maggio called out, wanting to get out from behind the command seat.
Sarah floated up to the top deck and pulled herself into the access tunnel. She appeared a moment later inside the command module.
“You’ve just been promoted to LEM pilot, Maggio. I’m senior on the project in rank, so I’ll be taking command of the excursion team.”
Maggio looked at Sarah for the longest time.
“What mission? It’s over here, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, well, she’s senior above a bunch of junior grades and Army personnel,” Ryan said in a calm and steady voice. “If you can get us there, I’ll land us, and Sarah will find what it is we came for. Can you get us there?”
Maggio looked from Ryan to Sarah. The two people had been in the program less than a month, but both commanded authority through their voices and demeanor.
“Yes, I can get us there,” Maggio said, “But the real question here, flyboy, is whether you can get the personnel down to the lunar surface without killing every mother-lovin’ one of us?”
“If not, Lieutenant, you just may end up having an elementary school named after you.”
Maggio was silent when confronted with Ryan’s confidence.
“You have to admit, Maggio, the idea of a school being named after you is appealing, isn’t it?” Sarah eyed the new command module pilot.
“As a matter of fact, a school in El Paso is just waiting to have my name put on it. Yeah, sure. Why not?”
Sarah reached out and pulled a floating Ryan toward her.
“You be the one to tell Mendenhall,” she said.
“Hell, I’m asking him to be my copilot.”
An hour after the last shots fired at the battle for Columbus Hill, Jack and Tram eased themselves off the electric cart while still in front of the double steel doorways. Jack looked over at the gift shop that had never felt a tourist’s touch. He wondered if they had planned on Hitler visiting the mine after the war was over, or if reich schoolchildren would have been paraded in and allowed to buy such items as Nazi coffee mugs and pictures of the artifacts discovered inside the mine. Collins shook his head in wonderment at the arrogance he was staring at.
“Come on, smiley. Let’s follow along and see if we can find my friends.”
Tram had the now reloaded M-14 lying across his arm as he examined the small Buck Rogers spaceship in the window. He turned and looked at Jack with a curious stare.
“‘Private’ will do, Colonel,” he said, with no malice lacing his voice.
“I’ll be damned-I didn’t think you spoke English. Your sergeant didn’t say anything about it.”
“I’m sure he wasn’t asked,” Tram said as he moved toward the large steel doors.
“You actually sound like you spent time at Yale, at the very least,” Jack joked.
Tram turned and faced Jack. With a slight tilt of the head, he gestured for him to go through the doors in front of them.
“Actually, Colonel, it was UCLA.”
“Hmm,” Jack said. He slid by the small Vietnamese soldier and entered the mine.
When both men stood on the precipice overlooking the main gallery of the mine, neither could believe what they were seeing. The immenseness of the excavation was nearly overpowering. They saw the small electric cart far beneath them in front of the damaged and ancient plastic-looking enclosures. He saw the long forgotten roadway paved over either by the Nazis or someone more recently. The gallery was lit up like New York’s Grand Central Station and its brightness cast shadows in all directions from where the lights were anchored overhead.
“Well, your English is so good, try describing this in a letter back home,” Jack said. He placed his M-16 over his shoulder and started down the steep trail, following the tracks of the electric cart.
“‘Amazing’ is the word that comes to mind,” Tram said as he turned to follow Collins.
The two men couldn’t help but be made uneasy by the false interior breeze that caused the tattered remains of the Nazi banners and streamers to sway and ripple in the wind. It was just another glorious day in the land of National Socialism.
“The day we stop running into more surprises left by these people, I think that’s the day I’ll retire,” Jack said, intending for Tram neither to hear nor to answer.
“They were very industrious, but how many men and women did the SS kill to get this mine dug?”
Jack eyed the Vietnamese sniper as he walked. He wondered why it had taken so long for the private to say something. Now he had an opinion about everything.
As they progressed down the steep incline of the man-made ramp, Jack had a feeling he was being watched, but from where he couldn’t tell. He heard Tram click the safety off on the old M-14; evidently he was feeling the same thing himself.
Far in back of them, near the steel doors, a pair of eyes was indeed watching. The Mechanic held up his hand. His men were anxious to get free of the exposed roadway. They were soaked from their climb up the waterfall and their entrance through the underground river. They had lost one man, who had drowned when the river had taken its downhill course under rock. They then had to fight to get up the rock wall Collins and Everett and his men had fallen from the previous week.
As the Mechanic watched Jack and his smaller companion walk the inclined trail, he finally gave the order for his men to follow, instructing them that they must do so from a great distance as he suspected more Americans were inside already.
Since his previous visits to the mine had been only cursory, the Mechanic knew he would have to be led to the valuable cache of advanced weaponry that he knew was hidden here. Once that was accomplished, he would return to his native Saudi Arabia and sell the specifications for whatever he found. From McCabe’s and Rawlins’s descriptions he knew it would be worth heaven itself to his cause.
The Mechanic fell into line and followed his men as he watched the long-ago flags flap in the strange breeze that seemed to come from nowhere.
As Alice and Sebastian gently sat Garrison Lee on a rock outcropping, Niles examined one of the buildings. He tore a flap of skin from the two-story structure that had been pushed in millions of years before by an earth movement that had slammed it askew of its neighbor. The age was such that any material or organics left over after this disaster had long since vanished. As Niles felt the strange material, he was approached by Appleby.
“It’s a composite, perhaps nylon, maybe a plastic and nylon weave, but it’s really too strong for that,” the man from DARPA said. He joined Niles, who handed the piece of material over to Alice and Lee. “It will take a while to learn how some of the materials survived in their original form, while others petrified.”
“I can’t imagine the violence of the earth that crushed the life out of this place,” Ellenshaw said. He moved the M-16 to his shoulder and looked into one of the glassless windows of the damaged enclosure.
Niles looked around and noticed small plaques had been placed in several rocks lining the ancient thoroughfare of crushed and mangled buildings. The words were in German and had been etched in the bronze of the embedded plaques.