Killer Thrillers Box Set: 3 Techno-Thriller, Action/Adventure Science Fiction Thrillers (109 page)

A few minutes later, however, and he’d navigated around or beneath the rocks, and his head soon popped back out of the hole he’d entered long before.
Too long
.
 

He looked down at the radio, only to find the battery low indicator light still blinking at him. No telling how long he had left. He should have checked it before he left.
He clicked it on, just in time to hear a broadcast from Julie.
 

“—Back on? Ben, can you hear me?”

“I’m here,” he said. He stood, stretching to his full height for the first time in over an hour. He could feel the deep muscle pain in his lower back already beginning to creep over the area, and he made a mental note to himself to work out more often.
 

“Okay, great. I’ve got something for you. Check out the cave on the northeastern side of the lake. There are a few, but the one farthest north should be right.”

Ben had reached the truck and was simultaneously fumbling with the ignition as he grabbed the maps spread on the passenger seat. He took the first one, which was a close up of the western side of the lake, with a few caves — including the one he’d just emerged from — labeled and highlighted. He threw it back and grabbed the second map.
 

This was the correct one, showing a detailed blown-up view of the northern and northeastern sides of the lake, a dozen or so winding caves traced over. One of the larger lines was drawn on top of the body of water itself, signifying that at least a portion of the cave traveled below the lake.
 

“Got it,” he said as he put the truck into gear and sped up onto the road. He could already see the lake glistening back at him, catching light and bouncing it back into his eyes. He took a quick look back down at the map to confirm. “I’m looking at it. Seems to be one of the only ones that goes under the actual lake, and not just stop before it gets there.” He waited for a response, but none came. “How’d you find this one?” he asked.
 

Still nothing.
 

He held up the radio to examine it and found that it was completely dead. No lights blinked.
 

Crap.

He hoped Julie was right.
 

54

THIS CAVE WAS SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER than the first, a fact he was more than a little excited about. Hopefully he wouldn’t need to crawl or slide down the cave shaft like before, and he could no doubt move much more quickly through it.
 

He parked the truck again, left the keys on the seat, and jumped down. He’d unclipped the radio as well and left it on the stack of maps on the passenger seat — no use letting it weigh him down.
 

The ceiling of the cave was high enough that he had multiple inches above his head as he followed its twisting curves. It descended much slower than the first, but he was able to almost jog through it, making up for lost time.
 

He kept the beam of the flashlight in front of him, finding few obstacles such as rocks or sticks to watch out for.
 

This could almost not be easier.
 

As soon as the thought ran through his mind, he almost tripped over a deep step-like formation. He caught himself on the wall and immediately slowed to a walk. He saw that this step was only the beginning — while the cave’s main artery remained large enough to run through side-by-side with another person and tall enough to stand inside, it now took a steep drop and began the
real
descent.
 

He calculated that this shelf must be the point where the cave twisted beneath the lake’s bottom, a cavity carved from millions of years of water dripping through cracks and fissures in the ground.
 

The precarious drop shallowed a bit as he descended, and he was able to pick up the pace once again. After a minute he came to a fork, but barely slowed as he chose the left passage.

The right side was larger and seemed to continue beneath the surface of the lake, while the left was a bit smaller and had a shallower decline. But it was the way the tunnel had been
cut
that made it the obvious choice.
 

Instead of being smooth from years of water and weather, the left tunnel had an unnatural sheen to it, along with a rugged, scratchy look.
 

As if it had been created by a series of explosions.
 

Ben slowed to a walk as he examined the walls more closely. He could now see the slightest hint of depressions in the rock, small half-cylinder horizontal pathways, dead-straight and spaced out about two feet from each other up the wall and over his head.
 

Dynamite.
 

It would have been a low-grade explosive, with enough in each channel to blow the rock to bits and allow it to be cleared, but weak enough that it wouldn’t cave in on itself.
 

Still, it was a massive amount of work, and Ben grew livid as he walked.
They did this right under our noses.
 

Whoever “they” were, they had done a fantastic job, too. The lines were straight, and the tunnel was well-defined and seemed extremely stable. No support beams framed the arced cave, either.
 

They brought in their tools, dug this place out, cleared the mess, and no one knew about it.
 

He couldn’t remember the specifics of the numerous park restoration and construction contracts he’d heard about over the years, but this one had to have been one of them. Most likely this one had been part of a larger one, masked as a standard safety excavation and then piled with paperwork to become lost in a bureaucratic mess.
 

Still, it had been done, and it had taken a long time — perhaps started before Ben was even hired on.
 

He stifled his anger, focusing instead on reaching the end of this manmade tunnel and finding whatever it was they’d hidden down here.

The tunnel bent to the right and down, and suddenly came to a stop. There, in the dim light of the flashlight’s glow, Ben saw it.
 

The bomb.
 

It was… different than he’d expected, but then again, he had no idea what it would look like. He remembered the newscasters explaining that the first bomb had been a… hyperbaric bomb?
Something like that.
Is this the same kind?

The bomb looked strangely like a beer keg, the kind he’d seen at a few of the park’s staff parties at the end of their summer seasons. It was silver, and stood in the middle of the room. The sides bulged out, rounded, but the top and bottom were flat, perfect circles. It wasn’t huge, maybe rising to his waist.
 

On top of it was a tablet computer, like an iPad, but slightly smaller. This was somehow hardwired onto the top of the barrel, a mess of cabling that Ben wasn’t about to try and fiddle with.
 

He stared at the cold metal object, wondering what to do next.
 

I don’t really have a plan for this part,
he realized. He’d just assumed he’d find the bomb, take it back up with him, and throw it in the lake.
 

Or, he had secretly hoped it would be like an old western — a single fuse, lit and burning its way down the cable until it reached the payload. A simple
snip
with a knife or a deadeye shot with a six-shooter would have taken care of that.
 

But it wasn’t the wild west, and Ben stood motionless for another few seconds.
What now, genius?
 

He stepped closer to examine the cables. All of them were black — no guessing “blue” or “red” and pulling one of them out. They were wrapped in a thick bundle with electrical tape after protruding from two sides of the tablet, and spread out again at the other end, before heading into the large metal canister.
 

As he examined the device, a plan began to form. It was primitive, but it was something.
 

The bomb is cylindrical. Which means it can be rolled.
 

He had no idea how heavy it was, or how delicate.
But he was beyond waiting around for something else to happen — it was just him, a bomb, and not much time left.
 

He gently grasped the top lip of the barrel-like container and rocked it back and forth. It seemed heavy, which made sense, but not completely stationary.
This might work
.
 

He rocked a little harder, testing both for weight and, as he suddenly realized, to simply see if it would explode.
 

If I get out of this, there’s no way anyone’s ever hiring me to be part of a bomb squad.
 

Trial and error didn’t seem to be a factor in examining an explosive device, but then again, there was nothing else he could do.
 

Thankfully, he didn’t explode. No fiery balls of fire ripped him to shreds as he played with the bomb-keg, so he continued with the plan.
 

Rock gently. Rock a little harder. A little harder… harder —

He lost his grip on the barrel, and the whole mess crashed to the floor. It clanged as it bumped on the hard rock and began to roll down the slightly sloping cavern until it smashed into the wall at the bottom of the chamber.
 

Ben was irritated that he’d cowered away from it when it fell, as if hiding a few inches back would have saved him from a deadly explosion.
 

But it hadn’t exploded, and though he wouldn’t purposefully repeat the experiment, he now knew that a little tumbling around wouldn’t be enough to detonate it.
 

He breathed in and out a few times and stepped up to the bomb, noticing a dim bluish light emanating from the barrel’s top. He pointed the flashlight away and saw that the dim light remained.
 

What the —

The top of the barrel, now on its side, faced away from him. The light was casting shadows in the room, fighting with the beam of his flashlight. He walked around the device and saw the cause of the blue glow.

The screen.

The tablet computer was on, with nothing but a blue screen and white text scrolling around. It was code, no doubt some sort of computer program that the creators of this device had installed on it.
 

But at the top right of the little screen appeared a few strings of numbers as well, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they represented.
 

A countdown.
 

Ben read the numbers, almost scared to finally learn the truth. There were four two-digit spaces, and he assumed what each meant. Days, hours, minutes, seconds.
 

He felt a chill run down his spine as he saw that the first two places held only zeroes.

00:00:52:37
.
 

52 minutes, 37 seconds.
 

55

IF HE WAS TIRED CRAWLING out of the first cave he’d traveled down that day, he was now utterly exhausted
.

Rolling the device up the shallow parts of the cave floor had been hard enough, but the steep sections were nearly impossible. Ben was sweating, the slipperiness of his hands only adding to the challenge.

He’d made it up and out of the manmade portion of the tunnel and back into the natural cave section. Each slight bend or change in grade was exacerbated by his companion, the hundred-plus-pound explosive device. Ben couldn’t help but wish that he’d taken someone
—
anyone — with him.
 

Why was I trying to be such a hero?

He knew it had been the smart thing to do at the time. Mitigate risk, spread out, stretch their resources to their capacity, and get as many people away from ground zero as possible.

But now, struggling to roll a metal can up a cave floor with wet hands, all while running out of energy and time, he was having second thoughts.
 

Maybe I can leave it here, call for help, and then wait for someone to come by.

He shook his head, reminding himself of his dead radio. Even his cellphone was worthless. He’d never had great service in the park, and certainly not in this area. The closest tower was near the ranger station and base areas, a small pocket of civilization in an otherwise vast — and remote — wilderness.
 

So he kept pushing, rolling the device up and over sticks and rocks. Many of them were small enough that he could push the object over them without hesitating. Larger rocks forced him to hold the bomb still with a knee while he grabbed the obstacle and threw it to the side.
 

In this way, he’d covered most of the ascent. It was slow going, but he was making decent time.
 

Until he reached the step.
 

He’d forgotten about the step — the rock stair that jutted out from the cave floor that he’d almost tripped over when he first entered the cave.
 

The first thought he had was that he was close to the exit. But that wasn’t what mattered to him right now.

The cylinder bumped into the rock, and Ben crouched behind it, stuck, both supporting himself and trying to hold the weight of the rolling explosive device from plummeting back down the cavern.
 

So far he’d been able to work in the dark, keeping the flashlight in his back pocket. But now he needed a better plan. He reached around and grabbed the light, flicking it on and examining his predicament.
 

The ledge wasn’t large, just as he remembered it, but it presented an extremely frustrating problem — the bomb would need to be lifted completely up and over the ledge, then set back down on the cave floor above it, all without losing control of it.
 

There was no way around it, literally or figuratively.
 

Ben stuck his knee behind the bomb and flashed the light in a full circle around him just in case he’d missed something, his heavy breathing calming slightly as his body took advantage of the short break.