by David Dun
The weapon Dan had taken was a fully automatic handheld machine gun. If you pulled the trigger, it shot until the clip emptied. That was all he needed to know until he ran out of ammunition. Then he needed to know how to replace a clip and how to get the first bullet from the new clip into the chamber. He began fumbling around in the dark with the clip when he realized that the second gun was hanging from his shoulder.
There was an awful groaning coming from the far side of the debris pile.
"You've got a man down. Maybe you better help him."
There was silence.
"Please help me," the man wailed. It wasn't the leader. He rambled and begged, and said he wanted to see his family. Then he began wailing.
"Mother, God, I want my mother." The leader had put another man at the debris pile. The screaming turned Dan's stomach. This was nearly the worst moment of his life, second only to holding his wife's dead body.
He was tired. Tired not just in his body, but in his mind and in his spirit. How did men get to such a sorry state that they were killing each other in a hole in the ground? And for what? Out there in the dark the leader waited in silence for him to turn on his light or reveal his presence-then he would shoot. Somewhere there was a fourth man.
Some things were just as bad as being shot. Suffocating in a hole was probably one of them. Either way he would leave his son an orphan. Even as he thought it, sucking air became harder. Now he was running out. As quickly and as quietly as he could, he fumbled and changed tanks.
Without warning Dan jumped up and slid over the debris pile, then began walking in the pitch black, his gun pointed straight ahead. The man screaming tended to drown out everything else. His hand reached out for the rock wall and soon he felt the cold of the earth. He followed the wall.
Staying low, he walked the perimeter of the large chamber, recalling that there was one passage before he reached the main passage that led back to the pool. All of a sudden the staccato spitting of a silenced automatic weapon had bullets smacking the wall just ahead of him. They knew what he was doing, and they were getting desperate. He hit the ground and kept crawling.
This time he hadn't seen the muzzle flash. Perhaps the shooter was smart enough to stand beside a boulder to hide the flame. He came to the first tunnel off the main chamber. Putting out his hand, he crawled until he felt the far wall and then resumed a duckwalk along the wall. Based on the sound of the shots, he was sure they had come from the center of the chamber.
Smack, smack, smack. More shots were fired, but this time he saw the muzzle blast Trying to fix the spot in his mind, he fired back into the blackness. He could not have hit the shooter except by dumb luck.
He knew they would try to cut him off. Probably they would move to the wall. Any moment he should arrive at the main shaft leading back to the pool. He stopped. These men were determined. They would not let him walk out of here and the most likely spot to stop him was the mouth of the main shaft.
Think.
If they waited, he could wait. They all had about the same amount of air and he had a little more. The closer they got to the pool, the worse the air. Soon everybody would have to move away from the pool or get out of the mine.
Seconds ticked by. Every muscle in his back and neck felt stiff. His tongue was dry like toughened leather. He needed cover. He duckwalked forward, feeling for some debris. Something in front of him felt like a boulder. In an instant the exit tunnel was lit by a bright light. It was ahead of him. Without hesitating, he emptied the clip at the light and blew it away. Breathing hard and trying to see where nothing could be seen, he forced himself to wait and to think.
They had attempted to surprise him. Had he been upright he would be dead. Anger filled him. He took a full clip from his pocket; he felt for the clip release. A small button by the trigger guard didn't do it. Probably the safety. Near the top of the clip, he found a lever. It worked. Sliding the new clip into place, he pulled back the small bolt on the ejector. It had an action vaguely similar to his Browning semiautomatic twelve-gauge shotgun.
Sitting on the hard stone, he took off his boots. They scraped the rock in the dark and made soundless travel impossible. He tied the laces together and hung the boots around his neck. Duckwalking, he moved back toward the center of the cave in the direction of the light. It was the last thing they would expect and that's why he liked it. Leveling his gun in front of him, he kept his finger on the trigger. One way or another, this would end. When he had gone about thirty feet in complete silence, he tossed a stone. It hit, and before it rolled, the darkness exploded in machine-gun fire only a few feet from his chest. He shot back and knew he had a hit.
"Who is that?" he cried into the mike, trying to sound like one of them.
"All right, let's call a truce," came a frightened voice over the radio.
Maybe he had hit the leader; he sensed the survivors were spooked out of their minds.
"You out there, lawyer man?" a shaky voice said.
He remained silent.
A terrified, whispering voice came back over the radio. "Are we shooting at each other?"
"Turn on your light," one man said to the other.
"Fuck you," came the reply.
"Boss, you there?"
There were two of them talking. He was certain that he had shot two and knocked one silly with the crowbar. But they had body armor, so maybe they weren't dead or even dying. He turned off his radio and concentrated on hearing the next sound.
"We can't just sit here; we'll run out of air."
"What the fuck do you suggest?"
"I'll come to you."
"How will I know it's you?"
"Some things you gotta take on faith."
One voice was straight ahead. Dan was sure that he stood between the speaker and the exit. Quickly he turned and duckwalked back to the entrance of the main shaft, put his boots back on, and hurried down the corridor. After making the first turn, he switched on his headlamp and began running. Then he stopped, turned off his light, and fired a single shot.
"I got the bastard," he spoke into his radio.
"Who was that?" He heard an obviously bewildered voice.
"Maybe it's Meat. That you, Meat?"
There was silence.
"If that's Meat, then who operated the winch? And why ain't he talkin' to us?"
"I don't know, but it sounded to me like one of our guys got the snoop. Maybe Meat's radio went dead. I'm getting out of here. Screw this. Without air we'll turn puke yellow and shake to death."
"I'm coming too."
Dan found a boulder and waited. So at least they were convinced their leader was dead or unconscious. Soon he saw headlamps bouncing off the wall. The men were moving erratically, no doubt peering around corners and trying to stay behind cover. Retreating, he found a straight stretch with no place to hide, backed up until he came to a large rock outcropping at a bend. There he waited.
He knew that their hands shook like his, their throats were tight-it was in their voices-barely holding it together until they could rip off those masks and breathe in the goodness of open air. He waited for them, breathing shallowly, not moving a muscle. It was obvious from the light on the rocks that they were getting close. When he guessed they were twenty feet away, he peered around the corner, saw them as vague shadows behind their six-inch lights. He aimed. In the eerie light, with unsteady knees and the quiver in his hands, he hoped the bullets would go over them. "Freeze," he shouted.
Instantly they turned off their lights. He squeezed off a single shot. Bullets poured back through the tunnel, hitting the rock wall twenty feet beyond him. They were utterly panicked, just emptying their guns at where they had seen the muzzle blast. When he heard the click of a man pulling a clip, he flipped on his light, catching them both like deer in the headlights.
"Drop your guns or I will blow you away."
They did as he said. ''You're using up a lot of air. You got no place to go. Either we all go up or we all die. Come on fo
rward. Do exactly as I say, or I'll kill you so I can get out of here alive."
Dan collected both guns, slinging one over his shoulder. Before they made their way back to the heavy stink of the pond, he took their lights and threw away their shoes. They teetered when they walked.
"What the hell is in here?"
"We don't know."
He tossed one gun in the pool and kept the other, replacing the clip. Now he had two guns and almost two full clips of ammunition. Quickly he removed a sample screw-topped capsule from his pack, took a sample from the pond, and put it in his pocket. One of the radios crackled to life.
"Where's McCall?"
"Answer," Dan whispered.
"Dead."
"Who's left?"
"Me and Willy."
"And one more," Dan whispered again with his gun prodding at the man's back.
"And Wilson."
"Jeez. How'd he take down Jansen and McCall?"
"It wasn't hard once he got a gun. You can't see anything down here. You got these damn suits on. Get us up; we're running low on air."
The cable started to rise and Dan stepped in the loop. In turn, each of the two men followed suit and they all rose toward the faint glimmer of light above.
There was a slight shimmy in the cable that Dan didn't recall. Probably they had damaged the assembly when jerking on the timber. Something wasn't as tight on his mask and he could smell petroleum vapor or something similar. As he rose, he strained to see what waited at the top, but it was useless. There could be an army with guns ready and there was nothing he could do except die fast in a hail of lead.
He wondered if the men below him knew he wouldn't bother killing them just because somebody was trying to kill him. No purpose in it.
When he got within twenty feet of the top, he could see the winch operator. Although he had an automatic in his hand, he didn't look very spooked. This guy hadn't heard the muted pops, the screaming men, nor felt the terror of hundreds of rounds smacking rock in the dark. Just sat up here thanking God it wasn't him.
As Dan reached the top, he realized that there was nobody topside to do the thinking. The operator was no candidate for higher education. Meat was perhaps a suitable moniker. Dan stepped off the cable, reached out, and took Meat's gun as if he were taking it from a child. Tossing it down the hole, he saluted the man who still hadn't been able to discern his face behind the mask.
"Hey," Meat said. "What're you doing?"
"Hey," Dan said. "You have a real good day, Meat. Afraid I gotta take your shoes, though."
"Who are you?" Meat said as the other two stepped off.
"I'm Superman. Hurry with the shoes."
"You bastard," Meat said as the other two stood by.
Dan stepped back twenty feet or so. "You gentlemen will want to stay right here, because if I should see you again when I go around that corner, I'll turn you into bratwurst. You got that?"
Dan watched Meat, cursing and swearing, untie his shoes. Interestingly, the man sat on the ground, almost as if he were a child having a tantrum.
"How does a guy get a name like Meat?"
"It's on account of his last name," Ed said.
"And what might that be?" Dan asked.
"It's Ball."
"That would explain it," Dan muttered to himself as he began running, desperately hoping that no one stood between him and the mine entrance.
24
The search warrant had turned up nothing.
Dan had taken to clicking his ballpoint pen with tedious regularity. The rumors were mind-boggling-namely, that when the police arrived there were no bodies and no blood to be found in the mine, even the footprints had been swept away. Given the number of men down there, it must have been a massive undertaking to remove all evidence of then-passage.
Sheriff McNiel walked in looking weary. "I'll be blunt, Dan. They say you must be hallucinating. There was a guard sitting right in front of that mine shaft."
"Yeah, reading a paperback novel. He never saw me go in, and he wasn't there when I came out."
"All we found was a massive cave-in that looks fresh, about two hundred feet in."
"A cave-in?"
"Yeah. Tons of rock. You'd have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get in there. And I'm telling you the county can't afford that. My deputies said it looked like somebody might have swept the place. There were no Hazmat suit hangers at the entrance and of course no Hazmat suits. We found no pool of anything, no fumes, no vertical shaft, and no winch."
"If it's plugged at two hundred feet, you won't find anything. And let me guess, to dig it out would cost millions?"
"More money than the county has."
"Well, if that isn't just mouse turds in the cornmeal."
"Stop talking like a hick," Maria said under her breath.
"They had all the time in the world to dynamite the mine,'' Dan said. ''It's twenty or thirty miles from anything. Nobody would hear it."
"We don't have evidence to prosecute," McNiel said with finality. "Who would we prosecute?"
"I understand," Dan said. "What do they say about the big reservoir out there and the plastic pipe?"
"They're growing pacific yew in hedges and they use that to mix pesticides."
"That's bullshit."
"Well, what do we do, arrest them for lying?"
"I've seen the hedges," Maria said. "I'll bet they've already run agricultural chemicals through the pond, so if we looked for residue, we'd find bug killer. But shouldn't we at least look?"
"I'll never get another search warrant. What is it we suspect they do with that reservoir that's illegal?"
''Do they have permits to spray pesticides?'' Maria asked.
"They do," the sheriff said.
"There's got to be something," said Dan. "Maybe the DA has-"
''Oh, believe me, we're talking to him. He wants evidence. Even if we took your testimony, Dan, we don't know who was shooting at you. Some guy named Meat Ball is all we have and you threatened him, not the other way around. We'll be watching them. If they sneeze, we'll be on it, but as it stands now we can't charge anyone."
Dan sat stunned, not quite believing it. Without saying a word he got up and walked to the door.
The woman's hands flowed over his back. She was an artist. Slowly she stripped the tension from his shoulders and loosened his lower back. Whatever his secretary paid her, it wasn't enough. Kenji was in the wintertime conference room that was something of a sunroom, a library, and a good place for a drink. It contained a collapsible massage table that he was beginning to use with regularity.
Nothing, not even the best massage, brought his stress level to normal, but it was an improvement over a back full of violin-string muscles. His enemies were everywhere, poking into everything. Blowing up the mine was only a temporary measure and would set back research immensely because now they had no volume of effluent on which to run their tests. And a ghost was stirring in the grave, thanks to Dan Young.
Hans Groiter entered the sunroom and dismissed the masseuse.
"He was in the mine," Kenji said. "Do you suppose he found the body?"
Groiter didn't bother telling him that if he did, it was headless.
"I hid it well."
"They're going to look into it. I guarantee you that."
"Let them investigate. There's a mountain of rock in the way. And we took everything out, including the photographer's body."
"You took the body out without my authorization?"
"Yeah. But you don't want to be involved in the details. You're better off not knowing."
"Who else knows?"
"Only those who absolutely need to know. You're safe. Relax."
"Don't tell me to relax. I told you to stop them. Since that time you've accomplished nothing. They have come onto Amada land, forced us to derail a major project, and set us months behind. They're going to cost us hundreds of millions and you tell me to relax."
''It takes time. We will get Maria Fischer.
That will divert him, and we'll know everything they know."
Groiter's threat about the photographer's body was only implied, but it was just beneath the surface of his words. Of course Hans wanted Kenji to believe that if something should happen to him, the people who "needed to know" about the photographer's body might pay a visit to the sheriff. When the time was right, he would deal with Groiter. Probably send him off to the South Seas with a nice pension that would disappear if the photographer didn't stay buried. Right now the unnerving uncertainty was good for both of them.
"Suppose he did get a sample of the effluent. How long do we have before they've analyzed it?"
"Three or four days. But what's it going to tell them?" Groiter said.
"It's going to tell them that we're doing something with wood distillates and that it has nothing to do with yew trees."
"It'll tell them that somebody spilled a wood alcohol byproduct in the mine."
"Even that tells them too much. But you can't explain that effluent without understanding the catalyst. So that tells them a lot. Way too much,'' Kenji said.' "Those two fucking lawyers did something the police could never have done without a warrant. Up until now they had no way or reason to get one."
"Once we snatch Fischer, everyone will be distracted."
"I need time," Kenji said. "Sixty days to get this lab wrapped up and moved. We can't hang onto it any longer. We've lost all the effluent and it will be tough to continue working on bulk conversion. Until I get out of the country, I want those two lawyers dead or distracted."
Corey was not averse to all of the wishes of the German. This morning she had to take care of a major detail in what had become their plan to take down Maria Fischer.
In her kitchen after her second cup of green tea, she went to the drawer and removed a razor-sharp fillet knife from the knife rack, then picked up a day pack that she had already loaded. On the way through the garage, she picked up a torch and the TV/VCR player. She climbed into the front seat and turned the key, sending the van rumbling to life.
It took about sixty minutes to drive from her house to the grower's place deep in the mountains at the end of an isolated back road. Jack Morgan was a pot farmer who grew most of his crop on property Corey had acquired with a tiny portion of her father's money. For $10,000 every six months, paid in small-denomination bills, Jack had the use of 160 forested acres with good access to water. Located miles away from any residence, the property was almost surrounded by Forest Service land.