Havoc - v4 (38 page)

He said, “These must have been prototypes of planes the Nazis ran out of time developing.”

“Good thing too. Our prop jobs wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“Anything on the gamma reader?”

“Background’s a tad high but nothing like what we found on the
Wetherby
.”

They spent another fifteen minutes exploring the cavity just to be sure. There were at least fifteen aircraft stored here, all in remarkable condition. They also found early rockets. Some were mounted on trailers to be launched as the world’s first surface-to-air missiles. Others were small enough to be carried aloft for direct aerial combat. All of them were far more advanced than anything the allies had at the time.

“Clever, weren’t they,” Mercer said, examining a multiple rocket pod intended to fire a deadly swarm of small unguided missiles.

“Just think what the world would be like if they’d turned their genius to helping humanity rather than destroying it.”

Satisfied that the plutonium had been stored deeper in the mine, they retreated back to the forklift and continued their descent down the gently sloping floor. The next cross tunnel revealed another chamber of captured German arms. On benches were man-portable weapons—machine-guns of a type Mercer didn’t know, a bazooka-like weapon that unspooled thin wires for guidance, a table littered with rifles with curved barrels, for shooting around corners presumably. Dominating the entrance to the chamber was the biggest battle tank Mercer had ever seen. It had to be three times the size of a modern M-1 Abrams. The tracks were three feet wide and instead of a single cannon mounted in the boxy turret, this behemoth sported two side by side.

“It’s a
Maus
,” Mercer said, awed. “My grandfather was a military modeler. He built one from scratch using a couple of old pictures. Hitler ordered the prototypes when someone suggested their tanks were vulnerable to attack from railroad guns. Never entered his mind the Allies didn’t have any railroad guns, of course. I didn’t know any of these survived the war.”

Cali looked at him askance. “Ever thought of going on
Jeopardy
?”

“Hey, don’t blame me. A photographic memory is both a blessing and a curse. Want me to tell you the tank’s specifications?” He tapped his helmet. “They’re in here too.”

“Another time, maybe. I got something.”

“Where?”

“That way.” She pointed deeper into the chamber.

Despite the mine’s chill Mercer was sweating in his suit, adding his own unwashed body to the stench permeating the rubber. Guided by the readings on the gamma ray detector they carefully made their way into a subchamber of the main excavation.

“Look.” Mercer shot a finger toward the stone floor. They could make out tracks cut through the dust by the forklift’s solid rubber tires.

“Great job of tracking there, Cochise,” Cali teased. “We could have just followed the trail.”

Mercer shrugged. As he stepped forward he felt something snag his ankle and for a microsecond he wished he could take back that fateful stride. He should have known Poli would have left behind a surprise. He threw himself onto Cali, knocking them both to the ground, his body shielding hers as best he could.

The booby trap was a simple trip wire attached to a couple of grenades with their pins already partially pulled. The wire ran around the room, where the grenades were hidden behind a massive timber balk supporting the entrance back to the main tunnel.

The suit prevented Mercer from hearing the pins pull free and the spoons flip up to activate the grenades, but he knew it was happening. “Open your mouth,” he shouted in the seconds before the bombs went off.

The trio of grenades exploded almost simultaneously. Confined by the surrounding stone, the overpressure wave shot across the room and slammed into Mercer and Cali, causing their suits to squeeze in on them painfully. Had Cali not heeded Mercer’s timely warning her eardrums would have ruptured.

He rolled off her as soon as the wave of compressed air had rolled over them. The cavern was filled with so much dust his light could not penetrate more than a couple of feet. He got to his knees, then shakily to his feet. He was dazed by the explosion, his head ringing and his balance shot by the brutal assault on his inner ears. He glanced down at Cali and ignored all the priorities of mine rescue he’d ever learned or taught.

Hobbling because he’d smashed his bad knee again, he approached the exit to the main shaft. He played his light over the portal. The grenades had blown the timber support from where it had stood for a half century, and the wooden lintel, as thick as a railroad tie, had fallen too. The stone above the opening had been fractured by the blast, and with nothing to support it, cracks appeared and widened as he watched. A chunk the size of an anvil crashed to the ground. Mercer took one last look to where he knew Cali lay stunned, perhaps injured or worse, and raced through to the main shaft, abandoning her behind an avalanche of rubble that buried her alive.

“You have to believe me, Vladimir, it’s in both our countries’ best interest that this doesn’t appear to be a terrorist attack,” the President of the United States said, his smooth voice covering his irritation. He listened to the Russian president’s reply. “Would you rather call it a mishap and look incompetent or admit it was a terrorist act and embolden more fanatics?”

Ira Lasko and John Kleinschmidt, his immediate boss, listened to the President’s side of the conversation from the laager of sofas in the middle of the Oval Office. As national security advisor, Kleinschmidt had immediate access to the President day or night and had presented Mercer’s findings to the chief executive an hour before. The administration had been saved more than once by Philip Mercer, so when he asked for the President to intervene, the former senior Senator from Ohio generally listened.

“Apples and oranges,” the President said in response to the Russian. “One plane flying into a skyscraper can be an accident. Three on the same day while another goes down over Pennsylvania all on live television isn’t something you can pretend didn’t happen. You have a different opportunity with the situation in Novorossiysk.

“We’ve talked about this before. This is a war, Vlad, and every time they score a victory a couple more fighters join their ranks. A blow like this is going to incite hundreds, maybe thousands, to carry on the fight against us…. What? No, it doesn’t matter. If they feel that Caspian oil is a threat, they’re going to take it out. What better way than to exploit a bunch of brainwashed kids who think they’re buying their way into heaven, while sitting back and saying how awful it is that a tiny fraction of their population hates the West so much. Yeah, you’re the West now too whether you like it or not.”

The President made a rude masturbatory gesture with his hand as the Russian leader spoke for several minutes.

“That’s right, Grigori Popov.” The President chuckled for the first time since the conversation began. “I’ve got a couple hundred deputy this and assistant thats. I don’t know half of them and I don’t expect you to know all of yours either. But I have it from a good source that he was responsible for getting the plutonium into the hands of the bombers. I don’t know why it wasn’t released but we know Popov is there now when he should be meeting a member of my staff five hundred miles to the north.

“I’m asking that you send someone you trust to Novorossiysk to find out what this Popov is doing. If it’s a coincidence, fine, I owe you a personal apology, but if I’m right and he’s scouring the harbor for those missing barrels while everyone else is trying to coordinate relief efforts, then you’ll know I’m right.” The President’s voice deepened and took on a familiar companionate timbre that connected immediately with any listener. Pollsters had shown that this tone alone garnered him ten points in the election.

“Vladimir, you’re facing a national tragedy that could help fuel a global war if it isn’t handled properly. You’ve got the full resources of the United States behind you on this but you have to make the right call. Don’t give the bastards the satisfaction of claiming a victory here. Take it away and spare both our nations a much tougher fight in the future. This is about hearts and minds as much as it is about oil and power.” He paused again, his handsome face showing nothing. “Thank you, Mr. President. “

As soon as he hung up the phone John Kleinschmidt asked, “Well?”

“He said he’d think about it.”

“He doesn’t have the luxury,” Ira said. “It’s going to be all over the Internet in an hour or two that terrorists destroyed that tanker terminal and stopped the flow of oil from Kazakhstan.”

The President met Lasko’s gaze. “We’ve put him in a tough spot, asking him to lie to his people about the most significant act of terrorism since 9/11, while at the same time telling him that one of his own top advisors might be involved.”

“What would you do, Mr. President?”

“I’d like to think I’d come clean and let the chips fall where they will, but our esteemed Russian colleague is a hell of a lot more pragmatic than I am. My gut tells me he’ll follow our script, but he’s going to ask for quid pro quo when the time comes.”

Mercer wanted to tear the suit from his body and attack the pile of debris with his bare hands, knowing that on the other side Cali must assume he’d left her for dead. He calmed his breathing because the suit’s filters couldn’t keep up with his pumping lungs and he felt he was going to start hyperventilating. The helmet’s plastic eyepiece was also fogged, though with the dust choking the mine’s main shaft it was impossible to see more than a yard or two.

He groped his way along the shaft like a blind man, his flashlight turned off since it was worthless anyway.

One of the first rules about mine rescue he’d learned, going back to stories his own father had told, was that during a cave-in you never leave your buddies. You are going to live or die, that was up to fate, but you were always supposed to do it together. That way you could rely on each other as you waited for rescue. That’s the reason Mercer disregarded his training and instinct to leap through the collapsing mine entrance. There would be no rescue.

The blast hadn’t been big enough to be felt on the surface, and even if Sasha, Ludmilla, and the others became worried after an hour or two, Mercer and Cali had the only three flashlights. If the soldiers on the rescue chopper tried to dig through the avalanche they would probably make matters worse and entomb themselves. And if they were prudent and called in mine rescue specialists it would take days to assemble them here, days Mercer couldn’t afford.

His heavily gloved fingers brushed against something smooth. He’d found the forklift. He hoisted himself onto the seat and flicked on the motor. He felt its reassuring vibration through the suit. It took just a moment to reach the rubble that lay strewn halfway across the main shaft where it had collapsed. Rather than attack the pile closest to the entrance, Mercer began moving larger stones away from the area to give himself working room. He lifted them with the forklift’s tines and then manhandled them off farther down the drive.

By the time he’d finished clearing a wide swath of debris, the dust had settled enough for him to examine the rockfall. He tapped a few stones with the butt of his flashlight, and while his ears continued to ring, he could feel the rocks’ stability or looseness through his hands, reading the stones like a blind man reads Braille. In his mind he mapped out every boulder he wanted to remove, calculating its effect on the rest of the pile in the same fashion a chess master plans out entire games before making the first move, because he knows how his challenger will react. Mercer knew this opponent all too well, had faced it a dozen times for real and a thousand times in his nightmares. He shut out the distraction of knowing Cali was on the other side of the barrier, scared that she would die alone in the cold womb of the earth.

For twenty minutes Mercer studied the pile, and when he finally reached out, he plucked a little chip of stone no bigger than his fist and watched as it created a cascade of pulverized rock. He got down on his hands and knees to examine how the pebbles had settled on the floor. Satisfied that the effects of his action were within the parameters he’d established, he removed a larger stone and again analyzed the results.

Noting that they weren’t exactly what he’d anticipated, he adjusted his attack plan slightly and got to work. In a way he was like a master jeweler facing the most important diamond cut of his career. Only it wasn’t one swift motion that determined success or failure, it was dozens as he slowly whittled the pile away, ever careful that the stones didn’t become unbalanced, shifting weight loads from stone to stone as he bored a hole through the debris.

When he’d cleared enough away from his hole, he used the forklift to remove the detritus. It took him an hour to worm his way through half the mound and that’s where he encountered a slab of stone he couldn’t move. The jigsaw of rock was locked tight.

He tried shouting for Cali, but with the bulky contamination suit muffling his voice the gesture was futile. At that point Mercer should have left her, and returned when rescue personnel arrived, but he’d spent enough time with the stone to know how far he could push it. He returned to the forklift and smiled to himself tightly when he saw that the tines were held on by knobs welded to the lift chassis with thick carbon steel pins. He jerked one of the pins free and wrestled the hundred pound lance from the machine, then slid the cupped end onto the other tine, doubling its length.

Careful not to disturb the edges of the hole he’d created, he eased the single elongated tine into the burrow, hopping off the lift several times to ensure he was positioning it correctly. The tip scraped against the slab of rock and he lowered the metal bar slightly to wedge its leading edge under the stone. Again he inched his way into the hollow to check the position.

He weighed odds, cursed, then tore the soft rubber helmet from his head. “Cali, can you hear me? If you can, don’t take off your helmet. Bang something metal against the rocks.” He then realized his precarious situation and added, “But not too hard.”