Working swiftly, he pushed aside the biker’s chest protector and uncased a Para-Ordnance 10+1 round, .45-caliber automatic from a shoulder holster strapped under an armpit. He trained the sights on the back of the biker standing on his right and pulled back the hammer. He had never fired a P-10 before, but from the feel, he knew the magazine was full and that the gun possessed most of the same features as his trusty old Colt .45, which was locked inside the NUMA vehicle he’d driven to Colorado from Washington.
The headlights on the motorcycles brightly illuminated the two killers, who failed to detect the figure stealing up behind them, but as Pitt crept closer, he passed in front of the light from the third bike, which was lying on the track, and he became identifiable to Ambrose.
The anthropologist spied Pitt emerging from the bright light, pointed behind the bikers, and blurted, “How did you get back there?”
At the words, Pitt took careful aim and allowed his index finger to caress the trigger.
“Who are you talking to?” the first biker demanded.
“Little old me,” Pitt said casually.
These men were top of the line in their profession. There was no hint of stunned surprise. No pointless discussion. No obvious questions. No hesitation or remote display of uncertainty. Their sixth sense worked as one. Their actions came with lightning speed. In a seemingly fused, well-practiced movement, they jerked the P-10 autos from their holsters and whirled around within a single second, the expressions on their faces frozen in cold implacability.
Pitt did not face the killers full-on, knees slightly bent, his gun gripped and extended in two hands directly in front of his nose, the way they taught in police academies or as seen in action movies. He preferred the classic stance, body turned sideways, eyes staring over one shoulder, gun stretched out in one hand. Not only did he present less of a target, but his aim was more precise. He knew that the gunslingers of the West who’d lived to a ripe old age had not necessarily been the fastest on the draw, but they were the straightest shooters, who’d taken their time to aim before pulling the trigger.
Pitt’s first shot took the biker on the right in the nape of his neck. A slight, almost infinitesimal shift of the P-10 as he squeezed the trigger for the second time, and the biker on the left took a bullet in the chest at nearly the same instant his own gun was lining up on Pitt’s silhouetted figure. Pitt could not believe that two men could react as one in the blink of an eye. Had they been given another two seconds to snap off a shot, it would have been Pitt whose body fell heavily across the granite floor of the mine tunnel.
The gunshots erupted like a deafening barrage of artillery fire, reverberating throughout the rock walls of the tunnel. For ten seconds, perhaps twenty—it seemed more like an hour—Pat, Ambrose, and Marquez stared unbelievingly at the dead bodies at their feet, eyes wide and glazed. Then the tentative beginnings of a dazed hope and the final realization that they were still alive broke the horror-numbed spell.
“What in God’s name is going on?” Pat said, her voice low and vague. Then she looked up at Pitt. “You killed them?” It was more a statement than a question.
“Better them than you,” Pitt said, putting his arm around her shoulders. “We’ve experienced a nasty nightmare, but it’s almost over now.”
Marquez stepped past the rails and leaned down over the dead killers. “Who are these people?”
“A mystery for law-enforcement authorities to solve,” replied Ambrose. He thrust out a hand. “I’d like to shake your hand, Mr. . . .” He paused and looked blank. “I don’t even know the name of the man who saved my life.”
“It’s Dirk Pitt,” said Pat.
“I’m deeply in your debt,” said Ambrose. He seemed more agitated than relieved.
“As am I,” added Marquez, slapping Pitt’s back.
“What mine do you think they entered to get here?” Pitt asked Marquez.
The miner thought a moment. “Most likely the Paradise.”
“That means they purposely trapped themselves when they blew the dynamite that caused the avalanche,” said Ambrose.
Pitt shook his head. “Not purposely. They knew they could make their way back to the surface by another route. Their big mistake was in using too massive a charge. They hadn’t planned on the earth tremors, the collapse of the tunnel, and the opening of the underground fissures that allowed the water to rise and flood the tunnel.”
“It figures,” agreed Marquez. “Since they were on the opposite side of the cave-in, they could have easily ridden their bikes up the sloping shaft ahead of the flooding to the entrance. Finding it blocked with snow, they began searching connecting tunnels for a way out—”
“And after riding lost through the mines for hours, eventually came upon us,” finished Ambrose.
Pitt nodded. “By riding up the Paradise’s entrance shaft to this level, they saved climbing the vertical shafts we were forced to struggle through.”
“It’s almost as if they were looking for us,” Marquez murmured.
Pitt didn’t voice his thoughts to the others, but he was certain that once the bikers had ridden to the upper levels to escape the flooding, they had then followed in the footsteps of the four of them.
“It’s all so crazy,” said Pat, staring dazedly at the dead bikers. “What did he mean, we were ‘involved with matters far beyond our comprehension’?”
Pitt shrugged. “That’s for others to decide. The question in my mind is who sent them? Who do they represent? Beyond that, I’m only a marine engineer who is damp and cold and wants to find a thick Colorado prime rib medium rare and a glass of tequila.”
“For a marine engineer,” said Ambrose, grinning, “you’re pretty handy with a gun.”
“It doesn’t take virtuosity to shoot a man from behind,” Pitt came back cynically.
“What do we do with him?” inquired Marquez, pointing at the biker Pitt had clubbed senseless.
“We’ve no rope to tie him up, so we’ll take his boots. He won’t get far in bare feet through the mine tunnels.”
“You want to leave him?”
“No sense in hauling an inert body around. Chances are, by the time we notify the sheriff and he sends his deputies down here, the killer will still be unconscious.” Then Pitt paused and asked, “Have any of you ridden motorcycles?”
“I rode a Harley for ten years,” answered Marquez.
“And I have an old Honda CBX Super Sport that belonged to my dad,” Pat volunteered.
“Do you ride it?”
“Rode it all through college. I still hit the roads with it on weekends.”
Pitt looked at Pat with newfound respect. “So you’re an old leather-crotch, hard-in-the-saddle woman.”
“You got it,” she said proudly.
Then he turned to Ambrose. “And you, Doc?”
“Never sat on a motorcycle in my life. Why do you ask?”
“Because we’ve got what look like three perfectly good Suzuki RM125 supercross bikes, and I see no reason why we can’t borrow them and ride out of the mine.”
Marquez’s teeth showed in a wide smile. “I’m with you.”
“I’ll wait here until the sheriff shows up,” said Ambrose. “The rest of you get going. I don’t want to spend any more time with a live killer and two dead men than I have to.”
“I don’t like leaving you here alone with this killer, Doc. I’d prefer that you ride behind me until we’re out of here.”
Ambrose was firm. “Those bikes don’t look like they were meant to haul passengers. I’m damned if I’ll ride on one. Besides, you’ll be traveling over rail tracks, making it unstable as hell.”
“Have it your way,” said Pitt, giving in to the obstinate anthropologist.
Pitt crouched and removed the P-10 automatics from the bodies. He was anything but a born killer, but he showed little remorse. Only a minute earlier, these men had been intent on murdering three innocent people whom they had never met—an act he could never have allow
ed to happen under any circumstances.
He handed one of the guns to Ambrose. “Stay at least twenty feet away from our friend, and stay alert if he so much as blinks.” Pitt also gave Ambrose his dive light. “The batteries should last until the sheriff comes.”
“I doubt if I could bring myself to shoot another human,” Ambrose protested, but his voice came with a cold edge.
“Don’t look upon these guys as human. They’re cold-blooded executioners who could slit a woman’s throat and eat ice cream afterward. I warn you, Doc, if he looks cross-eyed at you, brain him with a rock.”
The Suzukis were still idling in neutral, and it took them less than a minute to figure out the shift, brake, and throttle controls. With a farewell wave to Ambrose, Pitt roared off first. There was no room for the machines to move between the outer rails and the walls of the tunnel, not without scraping the handgrips on the rough granite. Pitt kept his wheels in the center of the rail tracks, closely followed by Pat and Marquez. Bouncing over the rail ties with rigid suspensions rattled their teeth and made for uncomfortable riding. Pat felt as if her insides were being shaken around by a Laundromat dryer. Pitt found the trick was to find the proper speed that gave the least vibration. It worked out to twenty-five miles an hour, a speed that might have seemed slow and safe on a paved road but was quite dangerous inside a narrow mine tunnel.
The hard-rock acoustics made the exhaust blast echo in their ears. The beams from the headlights hopped up and down, striking the rails and overhead timbers like strobe lights. He narrowly missed an ore car that was sitting on the tracks and partially protruding from an intersecting tunnel. After riding up the gentle grade of a lift shaft, they reached the upper level to a mine that was labeled “The Citizen” on Pitt’s directional computer. Pitt rolled to a stop where the tunnel met another at a fork and consulted the tiny monitor.
“Are we lost?” Pat queried above the rattle from the exhaust pipes.
“Another two hundred yards down the tunnel on the left and we should come to the end of the mine tunnel you said comes out under the New Sheridan Hotel.”
“The entrance to the O’Reilly Claim was covered over a hundred years ago,” said Marquez. “We’ll never get out that way.”
“Never hurts to look,” said Pitt, shifting gears and easing the clutch on the Suzuki. He gave the bike a burst of speed and was forced to brake hard within two minutes, when he suddenly confronted a brick wall that solidly blocked the old mine entrance. He came to an abrupt stop, leaned the bike against a timber, and studied the bricks under the headlight.
“We’ll have to find another way,” said Marquez, as he pulled alongside, came to a stop, and set both feet on the ground to keep the bike upright. “We’ve come out at the basement foundation wall of the hotel.”
Pitt appeared not to have heard him. As if his mind was a thousand miles away, he slowly reached out and ran his hand over the old kiln-dried red bricks. He turned as Pat stopped her bike and turned off the ignition.
“Where do we go now?” she asked, her voice betraying near-total exhaustion.
Pitt spoke without turning. “There,” he answered offhandedly, pointing in the general direction of the brick wall. “I suggest you both move your bikes to the side of the tunnel.”
Pat and Marquez didn’t get it. They still didn’t get it after Pitt climbed on the Suzuki, revved up the engine, and spun gravel under the rear wheel as he rode back into the tunnel. After a short minute, he was heard accelerating down the tracks toward them, the Suzuki’s headlight beam dancing madly off the timbers.
Marquez reckoned Pitt was doing nearly thirty miles an hour when he thrust out his legs and dug his heels onto the twin ore cart rails less than ten yards from the wall, released his grip on the hand controls, and stood up, allowing the Suzuki to speed on from under him. Slumped backward to compensate for his momentum, he actually remained upright for nearly twenty feet before his feet slipped off the rails and he folded into a ball before tumbling through the tunnel like a soccer ball.
The motorcycle stayed on its wheels, but was just starting to lie on its side when it crashed into the brick wall with a protesting screech of metal and a cloud of dust, before bursting through the old decaying bricks and vanishing into the void beyond.
Pat ran over to Pitt’s body, which had skidded to a stop and was sprawled on the ground. She would have sworn he had killed himself, but he looked up at her, blood streaming from a gash on his chin, and grinned like a madman. “Let’s see Evel Knievel try that one,” he said.
Pat stared down at him in amazement. “I can’t believe you didn’t break every bone in your body.”
“None broken,” he muttered in pain, as he slowly rose to his feet. “But I think I bent a few.”
“That was the craziest thing I ever saw,” mumbled Marquez.
“Maybe, but it worked better than I expected.” Pitt, clutching his right shoulder, nodded at the hole in the brick wall. He stood there, getting his breath and waiting for the pain from bruised ribs and a dislocated shoulder to ease, while Marquez began pulling away the bricks loosened by the bike’s passage to enlarge the entry.
The miner peered around the fractured wall and aimed his miner’s lamp inside. After a few seconds, he looked back and said, “I think we’re in deep trouble.”
“Why?” asked Pat. “Can’t we get out that way?”
“We can get out,” said Marquez, “but it’s going to cost us big time.”
“Cost?”
Pitt limped painfully to the opening and peered inside. “Oh, no,” he groaned.
“What is it?” Pat demanded in exasperation.
“The motorcycle,” said Pitt. “It crashed into the wine cellar of the hotel restaurant. There must be a hundred broken bottles of vintage wine flowing down a drain in the floor.”
6
SHERIFF JAMES EAGAN, JR., was directing the rescue operation at the Paradise Mine when he received the call from his dispatcher informing him that Luis Marquez was being held in custody by the Telluride town marshal’s deputies at the New Sheridan hotel for breaking and entering. Eagan was incredulous. How was this possible? Marquez’s wife had been adamant in claiming her husband and two others were trapped inside the mine by the avalanche. Against his better judgment, Eagan turned over command of the rescue operation and drove down the mountain to the hotel.
The last thing he expected to find was a mangled motorcycle sitting amid several cases of smashed bottles of wine. His astonishment broadened when he stepped into the hotel’s conference room to confront the confessed culprits and found three damp, dirty, and bedraggled people, two men and one woman, one of them wearing a torn and tattered diver’s wet suit. All were in handcuffs and in the custody of two deputy marshals, who stood with solemn expressions on their faces. One of them nodded at Pitt.
“This one was carrying an arsenal.”
“You have his weapons?” Eagan asked officially.
The deputy nodded and held up three Para-Ordnance .45-caliber automatics.
Satisfied, Eagan turned his attention to Luis Marquez. “How in hell did you get out of the mine and wind up here?” he demanded in complete bewilderment.
“It doesn’t matter!” Marquez snapped back. “You and your deputies have got to go down the tunnel. You’ll find two dead bodies and a college professor, Dr. Ambrose, who we left guarding a killer.”
There was a genuine feeling of skepticism, almost total disbelief, in Sheriff Jim Eagan’s mind as he sat down, tipped his chair back on two legs, and pulled a notebook from the breast pocket of his shirt. “Suppose you tell me just what is going on here.”
Desperately, Marquez gave a brief account of the cave-in and flooding, Pitt’s fortuitous appearance, their escape from the mysterious chamber, the encounter with the three murderers, and their forced entry into the wine cellar of the hotel.
At first the details came slowly, as Marquez fought off the effects of strain and exhaustion. Then his words flowed faster as he s
ensed Eagan’s obvious doubt. Frustration swelled and was replaced by urgency, as Marquez pleaded with Eagan to rescue Tom Ambrose. “Dammit, Jim, stop being stubborn. Get off your butt and go see for yourself.”
Eagan knew Marquez and respected him as a man of integrity, but his story was too far-fetched to buy without proof. “Black obsidian skulls, indecipherable writings in a chamber carved a thousand feet into the mountain, murderers roaming mine shafts on motorcycles. If what you tell me is true, it will be the three of you who will be under suspicion for murder.”
“Mr. Marquez has told you the honest truth,” said Pat slowly, speaking for the first time. “Why can’t you believe him?”
“And you are?”
“Patricia O’Connell,” she said wearily. “I’m with the University of Pennsylvania.”
“And what is your reason for being in the mine?”
“My field is ancient languages. I was asked to come to Telluride and decipher the strange inscriptions Mr. Marquez found in his mine.”
Eagan studied the woman for a moment. She might have been pretty when attractively dressed and made up. He did not find it easy to believe she was a Ph.D. in ancient languages. Sitting there with her wet, stringy hair and mud-smeared face, she looked like a homeless bag lady.
“All I know for sure,” said Eagan slowly, “is that you people destroyed a motorcycle, which might be stolen, and vandalized the wine cellar of the hotel.”
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