Authors: Clinton McKinzie
TWENTY-TWO
G
etting into the mine didn’t look that tough.
It was an hour and a half later. I was standing on top of the brush-covered hill above the tunnel entrance, looking down at a wasteland of broken stone. The mountains of debris had been dragged from the earth’s belly and strewn for acres around the gaping wound that was the mine. It seemed obscene to expose the subterranean rock this way. To eviscerate the hills. I knew the deed was done years before Hidalgo had come here, but now he was like an infection in the wound. He’d crawled into it and was spreading around in there like some toxic bacteria.
He’s got a lab in there,
I remembered Roberto saying.
Slave labor. Kidnapped chemists. Men with guns guarding them.
And now my brother was in there, too.
I kept seeing what I’d seen through the light-enhancing binoculars. Roberto escorted to the house by the kid with the gun. Zafado coming out, grinning and nodding. The Escalade pulling up silently. Bruto grabbing Roberto from behind. My brother’s head arcing back to smack into Bruto’s face. Zafado’s chrome automatic. The kid dancing with excitement. Then all of them disappearing into the dark car.
The two long construction trailers that were the quarters for Hidalgo’s second-rate bodyguards and gunmen were almost a half-mile away, beyond the edge of the enormous slag heap. They were too far away for anyone inside to hear if I moved with something less than Roberto’s grace. Since it was three in the morning, I wasn’t surprised to see that all the windows were dark.
What I couldn’t see below me was whether the entrance was guarded. I didn’t think it was—we’d never noticed anyone hanging around it, or the trucks even slowing when they sped into the pit. But still, this wasn’t a time to be clumsy. I crouched onto one knee and then the other to tug tight the laces of my approach shoes.
Then I checked my weapon one more time.
The clip of the .40 pistol was full, and a peek beneath the slide showed a brass cartridge in the chamber. An extra clip was heavy in my left pants pocket.
Thirty-one shots,
I thought. I would have felt better if I had one of Tom’s nasty-looking guns with me. But the keys remained in his pocket, across the river and far out of my reach.
I closed my eyes and took a breath. Then another.
Until now, Mary and Tom and I had more or less followed the law. The occasional tiptoeing forays over the line and onto the dark side had been harmless. The results would never see the light of a courtroom, and therefore would not prejudice the precious rights that were the very reason Mr. Hidalgo had come into this country. The tapes from the long-range camera would be destroyed. The same for the sound recordings from the Flash Gordon listening device that only occasionally worked. Then there’d been the single literal tiptoeing incursion when I’d come onto Hidalgo’s property to leave the note and get Tom pissed on, but that, too, had been harmless. For Hidalgo, at least. Less so were whatever stealthy administrative moves Tom and Mary were making to keep the operation from coming to the attention of their superiors too soon.
But what I was about to do was way over the line. I was going to bring my brother out. Whatever it took. They could sit back there and wait to see what happened, but I was going to make something happen.
If I were to analyze the situation coolly, I might have been able to at least understand Mary’s point of view. I was a trespasser here. An armed trespasser, acting without a warrant or the color of authority. If something bad happened to me in that hole, a conservative Wyoming jury would find Jesús Hidalgo and his employees well within their rights to blow me away. Once, of course, the lab within was removed or dumped into some bottomless hole. Cop or not, in this state you don’t go fooling around on another man’s property.
But I wasn’t cool enough to understand. I sure as hell wasn’t cool enough to wait and see what happened.
I wondered if they were watching.
Up here, exposed on top of the hill, it would be easy to spot me using the enhanced starlighting of the long-range camera or the space-age binoculars. They had to know I was here. I’d torn out of the crater in the Pig after locking Mungo in the small cabin where I slept. I’d driven fast up to the bridge and across it, but not fast enough that the Fed’s Suburban couldn’t overtake me. The Pig was old and rattling—the Suburban was sleek and powerful.
But they hadn’t come. And they’d let me go. Now I didn’t let myself wonder why.
The silver river below was running like mercury in the moonlight. I picked out the spiny ridge beyond. I studied it until I could see where some stars cut deep into a half-hidden recess. The notch. I raised my right hand high and extended my middle finger.
Even on the purely emotional level that I was operating on, I could understand that Tom hadn’t wanted to come. He didn’t give a shit about my brother or me. He’d said it once before—Roberto would get the information to burn Hidalgo or they’d kill him, and either way, we’d get to go in. My upraised middle finger was mainly for Mary. She’d just made love to my brother less than twenty-four hours ago. Now she was sitting back there and waiting to see what happened to him. The two Feds might have had the courage to violate administrative policy and legal technicalities to do what was right and avenge their dead colleague, Damon Walker, but they didn’t have the courage to follow through with what they’d started.
I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I started down through the brush.
The hillside was heavy with cactus and sage. Slipping in and out of the night shadows, I made no more noise than a small animal scurrying around. When I stepped onto the slag, though, and took my first step up the twenty-foot pile before me, suddenly I was a bull in a china shop.
My weight started a small avalanche of clattering stone. Then another and another as I half swam up to the summit.
Shit!
The backside was mostly sand, thank God, and I staggered down it praying that the debris shifted and slid all the time. And that if there was a guard at the entrance, he was either asleep, very used to the noise, or drunk off his ass.
My prayer was in vain.
I heard a clattering from beyond the bulldozer-made mountains ahead of me. Someone had heard me. Someone was coming, looking for me. Two someones by the sound of it, maybe three. There were no voices, only the sound of boots scrambling around on the loose rock.
Shit!
I was going to get captured or killed before I even got into the mine.
If I ran for the cover of the brush on the hillside, they would be sure to hear and see me. If I stayed where I was, they’d be sure to find me. Moving as softly as I could, I slipped behind some bigger rocks and crouched down, trying to make myself about two feet tall. Carefully, silently, I began to pile more stones on top of those in front of me and to the sides and rear. I tried to dig myself into the dirt and stone.
I listened to them coming, working their way over the miniature mountains, ridges, and valleys. They moved without speaking—and that made me wonder if they might be Hidalgo’s more professional men. Zafado and Bruto, the two who scared me the most. I took out the pistol and held it two-handed, my forearms flush against my thighs, and my chin, mouth, and nose cold against the top of my gun.
I waited, not knowing what the hell I was going to do.
I expected Bruto’s cowboy hat to be the first thing I saw, but it looked like some kind of old-fashioned TV antenna.
What the hell?
Then,
Antlers. Fucking antlers.
A bull elk staggered over the ridge and half slid down into my little valley. He stopped no more than thirty feet from me. Bending his gigantic rack low, he brandished the sharp spikes toward me as if he were preparing to charge. Then an impossibly long tongue slipped out and slurped at a rock.
Feeling like an idiot, I realized that all sorts of animals would come here to lick at the exposed minerals. To taste the salt. It was something that Hidalgo’s men had undoubtedly grown used to. A nervous laugh came out of my mouth.
The elk froze midlick and lifted his head. His tongue sounded like Velcro as it peeled off the rock. He snuffed the air, raising then lowering his enormous rack to catch different levels of the atmosphere. Finding my scent, he wheeled around and stormed out of there. He made enough noise for a marching band.
Ten minutes later, I lay on top of the last debris ridge and stared at the hole that had been ripped into the hillside. No light emanated from it. It was the most perfect black I’d ever seen. A literal black hole, like the ones in space that suck in and digest everything in their path.
We have no legal authority to enter Hidalgo’s property,
I heard Mary’s voice saying.
There was no one guarding the entrance. I guessed there was really no reason to—the whole compound was so remote, and there was only the one road leading into it unless you went a long, long ways overland the way I had.
God, I didn’t want to go in there.
I’d only been under the ground once before. About five years before, in southwest Colorado. That time Roberto and I had rappelled off the end of a rope into a chamber that resembled the mouths of those beasts you see in
National Geographic
pictures of life thousands of feet beneath the ocean’s surface. Fanged stalagmites and stalactites looking as if they wanted to snap together. To get out, we’d had to crawl through a passage the diameter of a coffin for more than a hundred yards. It had almost crushed me—not my body, although that was a near thing, too—but my soul. I didn’t want to go down there again. I belonged in high, wide-open spaces without even the ground to press in on me.
But this man-made hole turned out to be nothing like the coffin crawl. It was a tunnel sloping gently downward, easily thirty feet wide and just as high. There were no fangs hanging from the ceiling or rising up from the floor. Only a road of flat hard-packed earth and some kind of conveyor belt on the right side.
From my hip pack, I took out the night-vision goggles I’d taken from Tom’s kit. I switched them on, and the tunnel was bathed in green light. The walls were rough stone bursting with edges. The road ahead seemed to wind slightly as it snaked into the earth. I could only see ahead to the next curve. Over my head and to the sides were steel beams bracing the roof, and, every hundred feet or so, the shape of an overhead light switched off.
The lights made me nervous. What if they were to come on? Or, worse, what if one of the trucks came roaring up this underground avenue? There were few places to hide. The conveyor belt was only two feet high. From the high cab of an SUV I’d be obvious, even lying down. The walls, although very rough, were more or less regular. Only occasionally did they cut in deep enough to offer a shallow space into which I might be able to fit my body. In the light it would be like trying to hide behind a streetlamp.
The green glow of the night-vision goggles grew dimmer and dimmer as I jogged. I fiddled with the adjustments, but I couldn’t make them pick up much light.
Piece of FBI shit,
I thought. Maybe the batteries were dying. But then I realized why they’re called low-light goggles. They magnify tiny amounts of ambient light, and down here, as I went deeper, there was no ambient light. No stars, no moon. The thought of it made my stomach lift a couple of inches.
My one-man illegal assault had so far been ridiculously quixotic. My brother might be being beaten or worse. . . . And here I was, racing to the rescue, and I’d nearly been smothered by an avalanche of slag, then almost gored by an elk, and now I was lugging two extra pounds of headgear that was as useful as a Halloween mask.
I tore them off, and considered ditching them. I ended up stuffing them back in my hip pack with the flashlight, water, and energy bars.
The tunnel went on and on, descending at the same slight angle. I was moving fast but awkwardly. One hand traced the wall at my side and the other wavered in front of my face so I didn’t smash into a wall. Occasionally I lost my equilibrium and staggered.
I wanted to look at my watch to see how long I’d been running, but was afraid of what its soft blue light would do to my night vision. But then I realized I didn’t have any night vision down here anyway. I was totally blind. So I went ahead and hit the luminescence button and saw that it had only been twenty minutes. It felt like hours. The tension did that, I guessed. The blue glow faintly illuminated the wall next to me, and for a moment I was bathed in a warm, blue light. I periodically began to use the watch—Roberto’s watch—to move even faster.
The darkness was a physical presence, much more than just a lack of light. As I moved through it I felt a resistance that couldn’t be explained by the faint wind following me down. I could sense its pressure against my bare arms and face. Against my eyes, too, which seemed to be open impossibly wide, as if they were bulging with the need for light.
The tunnel and the darkness and my passage through it went on and on. The only sound other than my breath was my shoes occasionally scuffing on the dirt floor.
This is my brother’s world,
I told myself.
He’s going to be all right. He doesn’t need me down here. I should turn around. Get the hell out. Turn around and run.
But I kept running downhill.
There was a faint vibration in the dense air. A low sort of rumble that at first seemed like it might be my imagination. It was growing almost imperceptibly louder.
Maybe my eyes were somehow adjusting to the total dark—
Maybe they’re growing stalks
—because it seemed, after a long while, that I could see a little better. The walls my hands touched were a dimmer black. After a little while longer I began to imagine I could make out the steel beams. I didn’t know what was real any longer. The darkness had invaded me. Hypnotized me. I made myself stop and groped at one imagined beam. It was there. It was real. I touched my eyes and they had not grown out on stalks—there was light coming from farther down the tunnel.