The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 2

by Christopher Cartwright

  “Now, I’m afraid we’ve arrived and it’s time you helped.”

  She laughed. It felt insane, but came naturally to her. “Why would I willingly help you build a high energy yielding device so you can destroy the world?”

  “Destroy the world?” He looked shocked, and angry. “Is that what you think this is all about? You think I’m crazy and I want to destroy the world?”

  “That’s pretty much what you said earlier. You want to cease all electrical activity on the planet – you want to return the human race to the Dark Ages!”

  Cassidy shook his head vehemently. “On this island we once built weapons for your so called civilizations. Weapons so destructive I eventually had to accept the simple truth that mankind cannot demonstrate the responsibility required to maintain its role as the top of the food chain. I’m doing this because if I don’t the inevitable outcome will see to it that mankind no longer has a place – Dark Ages or not – on this planet!”

  She stared at the old man who’d taken such interest in her. He was clearly crazy, but there was no doubt in her mind he truly believed every word he said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to.”

  “Why not?”

  “What you’re asking is impossible in the time that you’ve given me. Do you understand how much equipment I would need from my office in CERN?”

  “I have no idea, but fortunately for me my son has gone to great lengths to retrieve everything from your office so that you can commence work immediately.” Robert Cassidy smiled. “He’s on his way up – I think you two may have previously met. Did I mention he used to work at CERN, too?”

  She looked up as the door opened wider and a man walked in. He had blond hair, and an almost sheepish grin. He remained silent as he carried her laptop into the room.

  “Daniel!” she screamed at the man who she was meant to marry two weeks ago.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  The elevator came to a stop at the bottom of the dark void. Sam had a powerful flashlight mounted with the scope on the barrel of his Uzi, which he shined around. Everything from the flooring through to the three mile high vertical ice cliffs rising to the roof of the chasm was ice. The elevator was the last remaining evidence of anything manmade.

  “Now where?” Tom asked.

  “No idea. Cover me, and I’ll see if LIDAR can show us the way.”

  Sam slung his Uzi over his shoulder and then pulled out his handheld LIDAR gun. He switched it on and a moment later he was staring at a clear image of the entire vault. The place looked completely sealed – but no one builds a three mile elevator into a dead end for no reason.

  Sam looked at Tom. “Can you see anything?”

  Tom stared at it and then said, “What about this spot here?”

  “The round hole?” Sam tried to enhance the image. “That’s only a few feet wide.”

  “That’s a few feet wider than anywhere else I can see.”

  “Okay, let’s try it.”

  Sam held the LIDAR gun in front of him, searching for anything else. He was confident they were alone in the cavern – otherwise it would have detected the image of a person. A moment later, the elevator began returning to the surface.

  “Shit!” Tom swore.

  Sam moved to look at it. The controls were on the elevator. The bottom area where they’d gotten off had nothing except for a large pulley for the elevator’s cables. There was no way to call back the elevator.

  “Don’t worry about it yet,” Sam said, his voice calm and focused. Let’s have a look at the tunnel you found. Maybe there’s another way out.”

  They slowly walked deeper into the chasm until they reached the round opening carved into the ice. It was too perfectly formed to be anything but manmade. Sam put his LIDAR gun away and checked his Uzi. He then slowly crawled into the tunnel.

  It went for maybe twenty or thirty feet and Sam found he was sweating by the end of it despite being surrounded by ice. A light shined on the opposite end of the tunnel. A beacon of hope they were on the right track. He climbed out the end of the tunnel head first into a well-lit room shaped like a rectangle and made entirely from hollowed-out ice.

  The tunnel Sam had climbed through opened approximately midway down the longer length of the rectangle. A second tunnel ran through the middle of the two shorter ends. These tunnels were carved into the ice and shaped similarly to the one he’d just crawled through – only instead of being empty, these tunnels housed four blue rails, which were bolted into the ice and ran straight through the rectangular room and back out the other side.

  In the middle of the room a single vehicle was fixed to the blue quad-rails by a series of wheels that gripped the rails at every angle. It was made of glass and ceramic materials and shaped like a cross between an elongated egg and a bullet. At a glance it was designed to seat up to three people. Sam thought it looked like a futuristic mining cart or great rollercoaster ride. Either way, there was no doubt about its purpose.

  “Tom, you’ve got to see this!” he said.

  Tom’s head appeared out the end of the tunnel and his solid frame and large body followed behind. He looked up at the cart. “Where have you taken me, Disneyland’s new ride for Frozen?”

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Sam and Tom strapped themselves into the five-point harnesses inside the strange vehicle. The door closed with a soft-pressurized latch and the internal climate control began to hum. Sam found a single white lever in the middle of his front seat. Sam studied it. A series of green markers were arranged next to a forward arrow and vice versa a series of red markers were arranged in the opposite direction.

  Sam turned to face Tom behind. “It looks like I’m driving.”

  “Then let’s go, driver.”

  Sam eased the lever forwards and the cart leapt forwards, pushing his back hard into the seat as the electric motor hummed. He immediately returned it to the neutral position, but the cart was already through the first tunnel and was descending steeply. It built up speed until Sam felt like he was freefalling into the dark below.

  He pulled the lever backwards until the cart slowed to a stop. He found himself being supported entirely by the five-point harness, which meant they were now in a completely vertical shaft. He felt the blood rush to his head.

  Tom tapped him on his shoulder. “You’d better get this thing moving before the brakes give out and we fall to our bloody deaths.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, easing the lever back to the neutral position until they started moving again.

  After a few minutes the tunnel evened out into a dark and level position. Sam slowed the machine to a stop again. “I can’t see a thing.”

  Tom reached forwards. His long arm stretching past Sam and flicked a single switch on the roof, labelled, external lighting.

  All areas surrounding their cart suddenly lit up with a powerful yellow light. They were in another cavern hollowed out of ancient ice, hardened and compressed over thousands of years. To the left of them was a vertical ice wall that reached both higher and lower than their lights could penetrate. The cart was made of glass above and below, allowing Sam to see that sections of the rails were suspended above a void so deep their lights couldn’t penetrate. To the right was a stainless steel circular tunnel, like the ones Alexis had shown him of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Only this one reached nearly fifty feet in height compared to the one he’d seen in photos which were roughly five to six feet.

  “My God, they did it!” Sam said, in awe.

  Tom looked up at the giant structure. “Yeah, which means the Cassidy Project is close to completion.”

  “All right,” Sam said, increasing speed again. “Let’s see if this thing can tell us where The Island’s going to launch the rocket from.”

  Sam pushed the lever forward and the electric motor instantly moved the elongated egg shaped tunnel cart faster. There were no speed instruments or any other way to determine how fast they were going. The craft felt stable as it
s multitude of wheels spun around the four tubular rails which formed the tracks. It followed the same tunnel as the Massive Hadron Collider, occasionally dipping or raising twenty to thirty feet to extend below or above protruding steel equipment and ice, giving Sam the feeling he was on probably the most expensive rollercoaster ride of all time.

  “How long do you think this thing’s going to keep going?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t know. Alexis said the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has a total circumference of seventeen miles, and this was meant to be a lot larger. Without a reference, we’d never know.”

  “Can you speed her up anymore?”

  “I think so,” Sam said. “I don’t know how much this thing can take, but I’ll give it a try.”

  He pushed the lever completely forward until the tunnel cart zipped through the quad rail tracks at jarring speeds like some horrific rollercoaster. Twenty minutes later, the ride came to a sudden halt as a series of magnetic slow down points forced it to stop.

  Sam opened his eyes. The tunnel cart was inside a large work station. The lights were on and the entire cavern could be seen clearly. Computer monitors and diagnostic machines lined the walls. Computer screens displayed images of a number of security cameras inside the Massive Hadron Collider. A second tunnel could be seen descending in a perpendicular direction. An egg-shaped tunnel vehicle, like the one he and Tom were in, was stationary at what appeared to be the start of a separate track, built with quad tubular tracks, but yellow instead of blue.

  Two workers stepped into the room.

  They were both struggling to carry a single large canister, and were seemingly oblivious to Tom and Sam's arrival. Sam reached for the door. It didn’t open. He hadn’t thought to see how the door opened after closing it.

  “Quick, we have to catch them!” Sam whispered in frustration.

  The workers spotted them and lowered the canister. The one closest to the tunnel vehicle shook his head and said, “Leave it. We’ve got to go. We have enough!”

  “Quick!” Sam said.

  Tom pressed a green button he spotted at the base of the door and it released with a loud hiss as the pressure equalized. “Go!”

  Sam climbed out the door. He aimed the Uzi at them. “Stop!

  Both men had already climbed inside the tunnel vehicle. The smaller of the two men closed the door and the craft leapt forward. Sam squeezed the trigger, sending several bursts into the back of the tunnel vehicle before it descended sharply and disappeared.

  Sam raced to the edge of the tunnel. He took aim to fire again and stopped – the railway tracks ran into a subterranean river and all that remained of the tunnel vehicle were the ripples where it had struck the water.

  “Damnit!” Sam swore. He took a deep breath. The air was salty. He felt the yellow rounded material used to make the quad rails. It was tough as steel but flexible as rubber. He tried to pry at it with his knife, but it didn’t move. “This thing must be designed with flexibility in mind to accommodate the small amount of movement as the height of the water changes.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We stopped them from leaving with the canister.” Tom’s nostrils flared as he breathed deeply. “Is that seawater?”

  “It would appear so.”

  Tom smiled. “Which means, we just worked out how they were getting in here for the past twenty years without anyone noticing.”

  Sam grinned. “And it also means we know where the Island must be hiding.”

  “We do?”

  Sam pointed to the map on the wall which showed the directions and destinations of the tunnels. It showed exactly where the seawater-filled tunnel opened to the sea. He placed an asterisk with a pen on the map. “It’s over here. If they were moving canisters out, it means the Island must be somewhere near this point.”

  “What do you think’s inside the canister?”

  Sam looked at the device. There were several in the alcove behind it. A thermometer gave the precise temperature as absolute zero. Sam shook his head. “Forget about the canisters. We have to find that island before the Cassidy Project goes into effect.”

  Tom stopped him. “What did you find in the canister?”

  “This.” Sam opened his computer tablet and pressed on an icon. He showed it to Tom – the image exactly matched the canister he was looking at.

  Tom shook his head. “Where did you get this image?”

  “Alexis sent it to me. It was her theoretical design to store and transport individual subatomic particles without letting them break apart or degrade over time.” Sam swore. “I don’t know how they convinced her to do it, but it appears they already have her technology to transport the God Particle. And that means Robert Cassidy is now in possession of the ability to play God.”

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Sam took a photograph of the map of the tunnels. He and Tom were approximately two thirds of the way through the circuit. If they continued along the same tunnel tracks they’d reach the first ice tunnel where they’d entered and could return to the elevator. Sam still didn’t have a clue how to access the elevator, though. He studied the map to see if there was another way to the surface, but he never got the chance to find one.

  The blue quad tracks began vibrating with the hum of an oncoming tunnel vehicle. Sam moved into the alcove with Tom. His Uzi was loaded with a new magazine of 32 rounds and ready to fire. Three tunnel vehicles came to a sudden stop following the series of magnetic speed reduction devices. Several people began climbing out, each with weapons in their hands.

  Sam didn’t wait to talk. There was no doubt about their purpose here. Unlike the workers he had seen before, these were dressed in military snow attire, and were clearly trained soldiers. Most likely, mercenaries or security guards. Either way, he didn’t wait to find out. He fired a small burst of bullets into the first three.

  Tom aimed the Remington 12 gauge shotgun at the second tunnel vehicle as it slowed to a stop. He fired and it blew a hole in the windshield. He then pumped the shotgun again and fired a second shot – killing everyone inside.

  More tunnel vehicles arrived.

  Tom fired another two rounds of 50 caliber, 12 gauge shotgun shells. “Let’s not stay around to see who our next guests are.”

  Sam climbed into the front seat of their tunnel vehicle. He leaned out and sprayed the entrance to the workstation and loaded another magazine of thirty two rounds into his Uzi with a click. “Time to go.”

  Tom climbed in and closed the hatch. Sam didn’t wait for the air pressure to equalize before he pushed the lever all the way forward. The egg shaped rollercoaster lurched ahead, hurling their backs hard against the seats.

  Tom looked behind. Two mercenaries climbed into the stationary tunnel vehicle used by the first three unwanted guests to arrive. He heard the sound of gunfire as one of them destroyed the glass door. “We’ve got company!”

  “Nothing we can do about it!” Sam yelled.

  “We’ll see about that,” Tom yelled back. Three bullets raked the rear windshield, sending large cracks through the reinforced glass. Tom shoved the Remington Twelve Gauge shotgun through the crack and fired.

  Tom missed.

  Tom pumped the shotgun and fired again. The spray of shotgun pellets showered the front windshield of their attacker’s tunnel vehicle. There was damage but not enough to break the glass completely.

  Tom carefully aimed at the machine following and squeezed the trigger. The shot fired wide and missed by miles – as Tom felt his guts suddenly wrenched from his insides as the tunnel vehicle dropped down a steep decline, and he fell hard into Sam.

  “You okay?” Sam asked.

  “Never better,” Tom replied. “You?”

  “Fine, but you’d better hold on,” Sam said. “I can see our destination up ahead. I’m going to slam on the brakes, but you and I will only have seconds to get out before the guys behind slam into us.”

  “Go for it.”

  Sam pulled the lever all the way backwards an
d the magnetic brakes slowed them to a standstill in a matter of seconds. They were both out of the rollercoaster in another two seconds. And their attackers slammed into the back of their cart one second after that.

  Sparks, and mingled fragments of glass, steel and blood shot through the dark tunnel ahead as the two tunnel vehicles smashed into each other.

  Sam raced through the ice tunnel to where the elevator was thankfully waiting for them. On the surface they both kept a fast pace somewhere between a jog and a run. Time was running out faster than they could keep up. If they lost this thing, they’d need to wait another hundred years to use electricity again.

  The sunlight opened up in the distance.

  “I don’t mean to bring a bit of a downer to your party,” Tom said. “But given the Sikorsky has no electricals – how do you suggest we get out of here?”

  Sam looked at the yellow de-Havilland Tiger Moth. “It looks like they kindly left us with transport.”

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Tom climbed into the forward cockpit of the Tiger Moth. The little bi-plane was painted a bright yellow and had tandem seating with controls at the forward and aft cockpits. “After what I saw you do with the tunnel vehicle, I think I’ll fly.”

  Sam grinned as he moved to the single propeller at the front. “Sure, but may I remind you what happened to the last aircraft you flew?”

  “Hey, the Sikorsky flew through some sort of magnetic field which shorted all its avionics!” Tom opened the fuel line. “All right, spin the prop!”

  Sam spun it hard, but nothing happened.

  Tom pushed the choke button all the way in and said, “Okay, go again.”

  He watched as Sam tried to spin the prop but the engine failed to fire. It was severely cold and it was a wonder someone had ever got the damned thing to fly in the area. “Try it again or I’m going to have to get out and push.”

  Sam pulled down on the outward blade of the wooden propeller – hard. The engine fired and Tom slowly increased the fuel pressure until it was running smoothly. The propeller pulled at the old biplane and Tom found the two front wheels failed to hold in the snow.