Hunting Season (29 page)

The Sig was still hanging in her shoulder rig, and she giggled when she thought what she must look like, half-naked, with that big automatic under her arm. Despite its awkwardness, she was glad she still had it. Because if this worked, and if she got out of here, there was no telling what or who was up there in the ammunition plant complex.

She felt water around her ankles as the siphon chamber began to fill again, and she realized she did not have all night. She pushed harder on the pipe, putting her legs into it now, and felt it giving way somewhere up there in the darkness. Then suddenly, the weight of it was in her hands and she jumped back as she lost control of it. The pipe clattered to the floor of the chamber with a huge ringing noise of steel on concrete, barely missing her feet. She picked one end up and found she was able to move it. She put the end down and took a rough measurement. About twenty feet. Good. It had broken off about where she had intended it to. Now, she had to get it to the ladder, haul it up to the ledge, and then see if she could position it somehow on the ledge and shinny up the damn thing to the main tunnel. The trick was going to be locking the bottom end into something long enough for her to make the climb. She began dragging the pipe down the siphon chamber toward the ladder rungs.

Browne heard something. He opened his eyes, shocked to realize he’d been drifting off to sleep. What was that noise? He leaned forward and cupped his good ear, straining to hear it again. He swore silently to himself.

His hearing was fair, for his age, but it was still the product of too many years working in an industrial environment without hearing protection.

He looked at his watch; it was a little after 8:00 P.M. He was wasting time; he had to get going. He decided to wait another fifteen minutes, see if he heard the noise again, and, if not, go down to the main street and check out the plates. If nothing appeared to have happened, he would go to the power plant, start up the hydrogen generator, and get to work.

Kreiss got down off the roof as quietly as he could and began moving from building to building, staying in the deepest shadows and hugging the still-warm concrete sides of the structures. He stopped at each corner, listening carefully but hearing nothing but a slight breeze blowing down the empty street. When he was two buildings away from the power plant, he did hear something, a metallic scraping noise, like a pipe being dragged on concrete. He was about to go up on top of the nearest building to set up the cone, when he realized the noise was coming from the

street—no, from that big hole in the street. He stopped where he was, and he heard it again. Definitely coming from that big hole, where the steel plate appeared to be missing. The guy must have come in the front entrance after all and was now doing something down below the street.

Or had he fallen into his own trap?

Kreiss moved quickly to the edge of the hole. He listened. Definitely something going on, but at a distance—the sound was echoing up what had to be a tunnel, a really big tunnel, under the street. He pointed his finger light into the hole but could barely see the bottom. Something glinted back at him—glass? He heard another noise, coming up out of the tunnel from the direction of the power plant. His light illuminated the ladder rungs embedded into the concrete on one side. He decided to go down. He went over to the far edge of the hole, pointed the tiny light down, and saw where hinges had been ripped out of the concrete right above the ladder. He thought about that for a minute. A man walking out onto one of those big steel plates and falling through because the support was gone wouldn’t have ripped the hinges off. He moved quickly around the perimeter of the hole until he found what he was looking for: scrape marks on the down-street edge of the hole, and a tire scuff on the concrete behind the edge. A vehicle had fallen through, not a human. He pointed his tiny finger light down the hole again. So where was it?

He listened again, but there were no more sounds. He went back to the ladder and climbed over the edge and started down. A cool draft eased by his face as he went down, one rung at a time, with pauses to listen. When he finally reached bottom he stepped away from the ladder and crunched on what turned out to be auto glass, a whole carpet of it, covering two large fluid stains. The steel plate was lying upward from the point of impact. The next thing he noticed was the slope: The tunnel angled down toward the power plant at a surprisingly steep angle. He turned on his finger light and examined the floor. Heavy metal scrape marks went down the tunnel. He stood up. The tunnel was big, its floor perhaps twenty feet down from street level and a bit over fifteen feet square. It smelled of chemicals and stagnant water, and the stream of air coming up from the bottom was heavy with moisture.

Okay. A vehicle had crashed through the plate, hit bottom here, and then slid down the tunnel into—what? Another metallic clank, this one much clearer than when he had been up on the street. From way down there, in the darkness. He stepped away from all the broken glass as carefully as he could and started down the tunnel, using the finger

light in spot mode to sweep the tunnel floor directly in front of him. The farther he went, the steeper it seemed to get, until he had to walk alongside the tunnel wall with one hand on the sloping concrete sides to keep from sliding down out of control.

After going a couple of hundred feet, he thought he saw a faint green glow ahead. The smell of water was much stronger, and then he could hear falling water. He kept going, taking smaller steps now to maintain his balance. He must be near or even past that power plant building. The green glow was getting stronger, and then he realized he was listening to someone working, working hard, huffing and puffing a little, doing something with a metal object. Based on the shape of the glow, the tunnel he was in ended up fifty feet ahead, and whatever was going on was happening below the level of the tunnel. He decided to get down flat and crawl the rest of the way. As he got closer to the edge, he suddenly froze in place as a swaying snakelike object rose over the edge, backlit by the green glow from below. In silhouette, it looked like a large cobra.

Browne crept down the main street from the administration building, keeping to the sides of the buildings and walking as quietly as he could. He stopped frequently to listen for any more of the mysterious sounds, but there was only the normal nighttime silence. He’d probably imagined it.

When he got to the hole in the street where the plate had been, he shook his head. He broke out his flashlight and played it around the edges of the hole, saw the scrapes and scuffs on the concrete, and then pointed the light straight down into the Ditch. He saw the steel plate, which had been torn off its hinges. The carpet of smashed automobile glass gleamed back at him, and he saw the drag marks leading down toward the power plant.

He swore softly. They’d driven right into it. Right into it. He snapped the light off and sat back on his haunches. There was a ladder of steel rungs built into the concrete wall. Should he go down there? Confirm what had happened? What if they were still alive? He thought he heard distant noises from the tunnel, but then decided he was imagining things. He went to the up-slope side of the hole and shined the light as far down the tunnel as he could, but there was nothing visible. That cinched it: Their vehicle was probably down in the siphon chamber, so even if they’d survived the fall, they were gone. Really gone. Swallowed up by the endless caverns under the arsenal.

He stood up, wishing the plate had not come off its hinges. But it had and that was that. The clock was running. As of Monday morning, at

the latest, someone would be in here looking for those two, and he would have to be gone. He and the truck would have to be gone. Time to get to the power plant. He had between twenty-four and thirty-six hours to finish pressurizing the truck. He grabbed the girl’s supply bag and headed down the street.

The water was swelling in the siphon chamber below as Janet struggled with the heavy pipe, determined not to drop it. It had taken nearly all her strength to pull the damn thing up to the ledge, and now she was trying to stand it on end to reach the main tunnel up above. She had braced herself against the rusty steel ladder rails that arched onto the ledge and was trying to direct the swaying end of the pipe to the lip of the tunnel above.

She had to get it perfectly vertical or it would simply roll off and she’d have to start again, and the ChemLight gave off barely enough light. She was very conscious of how narrow the ledge was, and that her strength was waning. She had to get this right, then summon the strength to shinny up the pipe.

She landed the top of the pipe on the concrete above, made sure it would stay there, and then took a moment to rest. She kept one hand on the pipe as she closed her eyes and slumped against the ladder rails, breathing deeply. Her legs were getting cold again as the clammy air rose up to the ledge, driven by the rising water. She had to get out of here. Then she felt the pipe moving and she jumped to steady it. She stood up too quickly, lost her balance, and reflexively grabbed the pipe with both hands to steady herself and keep from falling over backward into the siphon chamber. But of course the pipe wasn’t attached to anything, and she cried out as she realized she was going to fall. And then the pipe stopped moving. She swayed out over the edge for a terrifying instant, recovered her footing, and hugged the pipe. She looked up. There in the green glow from the ChemLight, a frightening black-masked face was looking down at her.

Blazing dark eyes framed in a horizontal oval of black fabric like a ninja.

Kreiss?

“Special Agent Carter,” Kreiss said.

“What in hell are you doing down there?”

She closed her eyes and started to laugh, although, even to herself, she sounded more than a little hysterical.

Browne had the hydrogen generator up and running in fifteen minutes.

As pressure built in the retort, he went through the connecting door to

the truck. He found the battery charger on the front seat and pulled in an extension cord from the power strip so that he could begin to trickle charge the truck’s two batteries. The propane truck had been parked here for a long time now, and he wanted it ready to go when the time came to get out of here. The pressure gauge on the main propane tank had been shut off to prevent leakage. He cracked it open and saw it registered forty-two pounds. For weeks, it had registered nothing at all, but now that there was pressure, it ought to build faster. The copper supply should be sufficient; if not, he would tear down some of the circuit breakers in the turbo generator hall. But he knew what his major constraint was now: time.

He went back into the control room and saw that the low-pressure pump had activated, sending pure warm hydrogen gas into the propane truck’s tank. The retort was boiling happily away, with a chunk of copper still visible. He could hear the putt-putt sound of the little diesel generator next door. Nothing to do now but wait for this lump of copper to dissolve, switch over to the second one, flush this retort, and reload it. Once he began using the larger pump, the volume transfer would be smaller, but he might be able to get it up to three, maybe four hundred pounds before he had to get out of here. It all depended on when an alarm would be raised about the missing security truck. He was almost certain it would not be until Monday, or at least no one would come here until Monday. If he could generate straight through until early Monday morning, he might make his target pressure. He wondered if he could stay awake. Maybe Jared would come in Sunday morning. He checked to see that the row of five-gallon nitric-acid bottles were full, felt the side of the retort to make sure it wasn’t getting too hot, and then picked up the food sack.

He switched off the single lightbulb and slipped out the door into the loading bay. The street was just outside. He stood there, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness and listening for any unusual sounds. When the street became visible as a pale avenue in the darkness, he walked out toward the nitro building. He still had not decided what to do with the girl. If it came to it, though, he could just leave her.

Kreiss steadied the pipe while the semi hysterical woman down below on the ledge caught her breath. His question had not been rhetorical: What in hell was she doing down here? Or at the arsenal, for that matter? He looked over the side of the tunnel lip again. There was a ChemLight sitting on the ledge next to her. She appeared to be in her underwear, except

for her blouse and her gun rig. He called her name. She looked up, her face a pale mask of fatigue.

“I have a rope. Have you looked for any other way up?”

“There isn’t one.” Her voice was dull. She was right on the edge of exhaustion.

“All right. I’m going to tie a harness into the rope and pass it down. Put it on, wrap your legs around the pipe, and I’ll pull you up.”

She nodded but said nothing. She still had a death grip on the pipe. He sensed there was water rising in the chamber beneath the ledge. He peeled the Velcro straps off the packs he wore on his chest and back and then shrugged out of the harness. He pulled the fifty-foot-long coil of six hundred-pound test nylon line out of the backpack, then attached it to the harness using a bowline. He passed it down to her on the ledge. He had to instruct her on how to put on the harness, and her movements were unnaturally slow. Finally, she had it. He felt the lip of the main tunnel and found a segment of steel angle iron. Good. No concrete edges to fray the rope.

“Wrap your ankles and hands around the pipe,” he ordered.

“Pull yourself up like an inchworm, hands, then ankles. If the pipe starts to go, let it go, and hold on to the rope.”

She didn’t say anything. He said it all again and made her acknowledge.

She did, but her voice was faint. The harness would hold her, but it would help a lot if she could assist. He wasn’t sure if he was strong enough to pull up a deadweight, not with the way this tunnel sloped. He was very glad he’d worn the rubber-soled boots.