The main duct was nearly six feet around and rose at a slight angle. He struggled into the air tank’s flame-retardant harness, keeping low, so as not to get blown off his feet. As he was gingerly pulling the straps over his shoulders, the foot he had placed atop the spare tank slipped. The stream of hot exhaust took hold of the tank, launching it down the pipe like a bullet from a gun. He could hear it, banging against the side of the conduit over the jet’s banshee scream.
Max tried to walk, but the pressure against his back was simply too great. Each step was a precarious balancing act that threatened to send him careening down the pipe like the errant air tank. He dropped to his hands and knees, and began crawling blindly out of the bunker. The intense heat blistered his knees and hands through the high-tech suit and gloves, and the weight of the tank on his back made it so his ribs felt like shattered glass grinding inside his chest.
As he lurched farther up the duct, the earth encasing it bled away a lot of the heat. The force of the exhaust pummeling his backside and legs never diminished, but at least the broken blisters had stopped multiplying.
“Pain . . . can . . . be . . . ignored,” he repeated, saying each word as he moved a limb.
JUAN ORDERED AN AERIAL DRONE to be launched as soon as the Oregon was within range of Eos Island. George “Gomez” Adams piloted the UAV from a console behind Cabrillo’s seat. Only the Chairman and Hali were members of the first watch, the watch Juan always used when steaming into a potentially dangerous situation, and it wasn’t as if the replacements were any less competent. He just preferred to have his people with him at a time like this. Eric and Mark and the others could anticipate his orders as if they could read his mind, shaving seconds off reaction times, seconds that could mean the difference between life and death.
Eddie was down in the boat garage, prepping the RIB, the Rigid Inflatable Boat, with Linc and the gundogs. There was only one dock on Eos, and they suspected it was heavily defended, but it might be their only way onto the island. The real-time video feed from the flying UAV would give them an idea of the defenses they might face. Down in the moon pool, the dive team was prepping the Nomad 1000, in case they needed the larger of their two submersibles, and laying out tanks and equipment for a ten-man underwater assault. Weapons crews had gone over every gun on the Oregon, ensuring they were cleaned and the ammo hoppers were full. Damage control reported they were prepped, and Julia was down in medical, if the worst happened and her services were needed.
Gomez and his hangar team had pulled double and triple shifts since Kyle Hanley’s rescue, trying to get the plucky little Robinson helicopter airworthy again. The chopper jockey wasn’t too happy with the results. Without a proper test, under controlled parameters, he couldn’t guarantee the bird would fly. All the individual mechanical systems worked; he just couldn’t say if they all worked together. The elevator had raised the helo to the main deck, and a technician kept the engine warmed to flight temperature, so it sat on five-minute standby, but Adams begged Cabrillo to use it as the absolute last resort.
Juan glanced at the digital countdown on the main view screen. They had one hour and eleven minutes to find Max and get his sorry butt off the island. In truth, they had less than that, because when the Orbital Ballistic Projectile slammed into Eos there was a good chance it would spawn a massive wave. Eric’s calculations said that it would stay localized, and the topography of the sparsely populated Gulf of Mandalay would severely dampen its effect, but any ship within twenty miles of Eos was in for a wild ride.
The Oregon was fifteen miles from the island when its image from the UAV slowly resolved on the main monitor like a gray lump on the otherwise-brilliant seas that gave this part of Turkey the nickname Turquoise Coast.
George flew the drone over the eight-mile-long island at three thousand feet, high enough so its engine couldn’t be heard, and, with the sun beginning a rapid slide into the west, it would be near impossible to see. Eos was nothing but barren rock and the occasional scrub pine. He focused the UAV’s camera on where the Responsivists had built their bunker, but there was nothing to see. Any entrance remained well camouflaged, from this altitude. The only way to know it was even there was the paved road that terminated at the base of a low hillock.
“Hali, capture a couple stills off the feed and enhance them,” Juan ordered. “See if you can find any doors or gates at the head of the road.”
“I’m on it.”
“Okay, George, swing us around. I want to check out the beach and dock.” Using his joystick, Adams banked the remote-controlled plane back over the sea so he could approach the dock from out of the sun. The beach stretched for only a few hundred feet, and, rather than soft white sand, it was composed of waterworn rock chips. Sheer cliffs rose more than a hundred feet on either side of the beach, hemming it in completely. The cliffs themselves appeared unassailable without climbing equipment and a few hours.
The dock was situated at the exact center of the beach, an L-shaped jetty that thrust into the water a good eighty feet before the seafloor fell away enough for the small freighters that had brought the equipment to build the facility. The causeway looked sturdy, and was more than wide enough for the excavators and cement mixers that had once swarmed the island. A corrugated-metal building sat where the jetty met the road. A parapet wrapped around the flat roof, giving a wide-open field of fire for anyone up there. They also had an unobstructed view of the sea approaches. A pickup truck was parked behind the guardhouse.
They could see two guards with high-powered binoculars on the roof, automatic weapons at their sides.
Another pair of guards was walking the jetty, while two more patrolled the beach.
Any communication lines they had with the main facility were buried, so there was no way to knock them out in order to isolate the guardhouse. Juan imagined Zelimir Kovac had laid out the security, and he would have left standing orders that, at the first sign of anything suspicious, the bunker was to be notified so it could go on immediate lockdown.
“Switch to thermal imaging,” he said.
The scene on the monitor changed, so that nearly every detail dropped out, except for the body heat given off by the guards. There were teams of two atop each cliff they hadn’t noticed on the visual scan.
“What do you make of those trace signals next to the guys on the cliffs?” George asked.
“Small engines cooling down. Most likely ATVs similar to the ones they had in Corinth. Heck of a lot of fun to ride, provided no one’s shooting at you.”
Cabrillo was more interested in the signal emanating from the road. It was waste heat from their power plant, just as Eric had said. They had done an excellent job of masking the heat signature. To even the most trained observer, it looked like the road was merely radiating heat built up during the day. The dull-orange line on the thermal scan continued out along the jetty, before spreading nearly the width of the dock.
It had to be a diffuser, he thought, to further mask their heat signature.
He saw no sign of the air-intake manifolds.
Cabrillo hit an intercom button, so he could speak to Eddie and Linc, who had been watching the aerial reconnaissance on a monitor in the boat garage. “What do you think?” He knew the answer, before Eddie replied, “We’re going to pay a hell of a butcher bill, and there are no guarantees. Have you gotten any detailed shots of where the road ends?”
“Hali’s working on it now.”
“They’re coming up on screen,” Kasim said.
The enhanced stills flashed onto the monitor, and everyone eyed them carefully. The road simply stopped at the hill. They knew there had to be doors to allow entrance, but they were too well hidden.