While Crawford was preoccupied with the screen, Jason glanced down at the cell phone clipped to the colonel’s belt. Why was he talking with Randall Stokes? For moral support and spiritual guidance? Highly unlikely, thought Jason. Maybe Crawford was soliciting tactical advice. Whatever the case, he was anxious for Flaherty to report back on Stokes’s shady involvement.
‘The air quality in there is surprisingly good,’ the engineer reported, after glancing at the data readings coming back from the bot’s onboard sensors. ‘Plenty of oxygen for—’
‘Wait,’ Jason interrupted. ‘Back it up a bit.’
The engineer did.
Eyes narrowed to slits, Jason attempted to discern something in the image. ‘Can you shine some light in there?’
‘Hey, hey,’ Crawford protested, throwing up his hands. ‘What about the element of surprise, Yaeger? If they see the light—’
‘It’s important, Colonel,’ Jason insisted firmly.
Crawford’s jaw jutted out. Circling his eyes at those assembled around him, he realized that his opinion was vastly outnumbered. He relented by throwing up a hand. ‘Fine. Give it some light.’
The engineer pressed a button that shut off the infrared. The screen went black for a split second before the bot’s floodlight snapped on. The refreshed image showed crisply the tunnel’s raw features.
‘There,’ Jason said, pointing to an unnatural form partially hidden along the ceiling. ‘Can you get a better shot of that?’
‘Sure.’ The engineer worked the controls to angle the camera up and zoomed in on the compact object fitting snugly into a hole in the rocky ceiling. It had an angular body and a circular eye.
There was no doubt as to what they were now looking at. ‘A camera?’ Jason gasped. ‘What the hell is that doing in there?’
Staring dumbfounded at the image, Crawford was speechless.
‘What … like a surveillance camera?’ Meat said, coming over for a better look.
‘Yeah,’ Jason said.
Meat stated the obvious: ‘That’s not good.’
Clearing his throat, Crawford finally spoke up. ‘First the metal door. Now this? It has to be a bunker.’
‘Could be.’ Jason studied him. For the first time, Crawford’s unwavering confidence showed signs of cracking. Oddly, Crawford seemed to be feigning surprise. Why?
‘Let’s kill the light and keep moving,’ Crawford suggested.
Jason concurred.
The engineer adjusted the camera and flipped back to night vision. Before she got the bot moving again, she warned, ‘We’re about thirty-five metres in, and we only have a fifty-metre cable.’
For another five minutes, they all watched in silence as the robot wound through the mountain’s stark bowels. Twice, the engineer needed to swivel the camera sideways to study openings in the wall. But both times, the floodlight revealed dead ends. Along the way, they’d spotted two more surveillance cameras.
Deeper the bot went, until the fibre-optic cable spool nearly emptied.
Then the passage’s repetitive structure changed abruptly. The jagged walls, glowing emerald in night vision, widened before falling away. Only the ground was discernible at the bottom of the screen.
‘What do we have here?’ Jason said, squaring his shoulders.
‘Looks like … a cave?’ The engineer paused the bot and its audio feed went eerily silent. Pushing another button, she said, ‘Let’s try sonar.’
Crawford was locked in constipated silence.
A small panel popped up in the monitor’s lower right corner. Within seconds, the sonar data-capture was complete and a three-dimensional image representing the interior space flashed on the screen.
‘Wow. It’s pretty big,’ the engineer said, interpreting the data.
To Jason, the sonar image resembled a translucent blob. ‘How big?’
It took her a second to put it to scale. ‘Like the inside of a movie theatre.’ She studied the sonar image five seconds longer. ‘It’s not picking up any exit tunnels. Looks like a dead end. Nothing throwing off a heat signature in there either.’
‘So no one’s in there?’
‘Nothing living.’ Her eyes narrowed as she studied the image more. ‘There’s some strange formations along the outer edges of the cave. See here?’ She pointed to the anomalies for Crawford and Jason and they each had a long look at them.
‘Probably just stones,’ Crawford said dismissively.
‘No,’ Jason disagreed. Atop the strange mounds structured like beaver dams, he could make out plenty of orb-like shapes. ‘Those aren’t stones,’ he gloomily replied. ‘If no one is in there, let’s turn on some lights.’
This time, Crawford was hard pressed to protest. He reluctantly nodded. ‘Fine. Do it.’
The engineer clicked off the infrared, turned on the floodlight.
Onscreen, the immense space came to life.
‘My God …’ she gasped.
Jason cringed. The space was indeed a cavernous hollow deep within the mountain. And heaped like firewood all along its perimeter were countless human skeletons.
35
Stokes noted the time again and felt his adrenaline bubble up. Over an hour ago, the assassin Crawford had dispatched to Boston was supposed to have provided a kill confirmation on Professor Brooke Thompson. Twenty minutes earlier, he’d tried to take matters into his own hands by calling the assassin directly. The call had immediately gone to voicemail. That meant the pesky professor could still be alive — a very sloppy loose end.
Looking over at the photo wall, Stokes glared at a framed shot of himself and Crawford, barely men, dressed in full combat gear. Their hands were clasped in a victory handshake. We were so glad to be alive, he thought. The photo was taken the same day US peacekeeping forces had withdrawn from Beirut following the 1982 Lebanon War — one in a long line of Arab-Israeli turf wars.
It was in Beirut that he and Crawford had engaged in their first covert operation together. The CIA had planted them in Lebanon at the onset of hostilities, long before the peacekeeping operation had formally begun. They’d assisted Israeli Mossad agents to take down unsuspecting senior members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He’d learned immeasurably from the Mossad agents — men unparalleled in their drive and focus, with a centuries-old bloodlust imprinted in their DNA. They were the most cunning killing machines Stokes had ever met.
This same snapshot, however, also reminded Stokes of Osama bin Laden’s 2004 videotape, in which the coward specifically mentioned Beirut as his inspiration for bringing down the World Trade Center. Another example of how winning the battle did little to win the war. That got his adrenaline pumping even harder. Fucking terrorist scum, Stokes thought. I’ve got inspiration too, you Muslim freak. You wait and see. I’m gonna make your little jihad look like child’s play. You’ll all pay. Every single one of you.
He scratched nervously at his raw palms again before turning his attention to the computer monitor, where the cave’s camera feeds were showing plenty of activity. As Crawford had indicated during their last phone conversation, the PackBot was being sent into the cave to explore the passages and pinpoint the Arabs’ location.
To buy some time, Crawford had cleverly diverted the robot down the passage leading away from the Arabs. Stokes had watched the machine rove through the winding tunnels, on three occasions pointing its robotic eye up at the cave’s surveillance cameras. But Stokes wasn’t concerned, because not one component of the security system could be traced back to him.
The bot was now parked in the cave’s voluminous burial chamber, panning its camera left to right. For those viewing the bot’s video transmission, the macabre sight would be nothing less than terrifying — like glimpsing Hell itself.