Marty banked sharply, spiraling back the way they’d come before stopping in a hover over the road. In the lot, the truck had stopped. Men were piling out of the cab.
“I count five,” Dominic called.
As they watched, two of them sprinted down the length of the flatbed toward the EC-130. Still running, the men raised AK-47s and started firing.
“Shit!” Marty shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Those are the bad guys,” Clark told him.
Marty slid the helo to the right, away from the road and behind the hill.
“This’ll do,” Clark said.
Marty brought the EC-130 down in a one-bump landing. Clark and the others climbed out. Clark leaned back through the door and shouted, “Find cover and set down. Stay off the radio, and be here when we get back.”
“Ah, come on—”
Clark pointed his gun in Marty’s general direction. “That help?”
“Yeah!”
Clark slammed the door, then sprinted to where the others had clustered thirty feet away. Sand peppered them as Marty lifted off, then banked left and headed down the road, where he turned again behind a low hill. After twenty seconds, the chop of the rotors faded.
“Listen,” Jack said.
Over the hill, the flatbed truck was moving.
With Chavez in the lead, they charged up the slope. They were ten feet from the ridgeline when they heard the chatter of automatic weapons. Controlled three-round bursts. Voices shouted, echoing off the canyon walls. Chavez dropped to his belly and crawled forward. After a moment, he signaled the others forward. Below, the flatbed was pulling into the notch in the hillside. As they watched, a man in a yellow hard hat sprinted across the lot, heading for the road. There were three overlapping pops, and the man pitched forward and went still.
“I count four others,” Dominic said. “Don’t see any of them moving. You guys?”
No one answered.
They sprinted down the slope to the concrete lip at the edge of the lot, then followed it up the opposite slope toward the edge of the entrance notch. They crept up to the edge, peeked over, and were met by the sounds of wrenching steel. The cab of the truck was disappearing into the mouth of the tunnel. The cask slipped into the entrance, scraping along the upper rim. The truck ground to a stop, lurched forward a few feet, then stopped again. The engine died.
A man appeared around the rear of the flatbed, his AK at his shoulder. Bullets thunked into the dirt at their feet. They backpedaled and dropped down. Chavez wiggled forward, peeked up, then rose to one knee, snapped off three shots, and dropped down again. “One down,” he said.
“Do we know how big this thing is?” Jack asked.
“No bigger than a footlocker, I’d imagine,” Clark replied. “Two men could carry it. Come on, let’s move.” They picked their way back along the concrete rim, then rolled over the edge one by one and dropped to the ground. Ahead, along the concrete wall, were stacks of crates, coils of wire, rolling tool chests, acetylene cutting rigs, and arc welding units. Beyond them, the corner leading to the notch.
They moved toward it in pairs, leapfrogging one another until Clark could see around the corner. He turned back, pointed to Jack, gestured him forward, then Dominic, then Chavez. At the entrance, nothing was moving. The flatbed was wedged tightly, both sides pressing against the walls and the cask against the roof.
From the tunnel came the humming of an engine. It faded.
“Sounds like a golf cart,” Dominic said.
“Cushman utility vehicle. Sorta the same thing, but faster.”
“What do you know about the layout?” Clark asked.
“Seen a few sketches on the Internet, but since it’s not even done yet, I don’t know—”
“Best guess.”
“This main tunnel probably runs all the way to the north entrance. At intervals down the tunnel, there’ll be ramps that angle downward.”
“Straight shot or curved?”
“Straight.”
“How deep?”
“Almost a thousand feet. At the bottom, the ramp will level out into a landing—how big I don’t know. Branching off the landing will be storage tunnels for the casks. The good news is they’re gonna want to plant that thing as deep as possible, which means a ramp. From the main tunnel to the bottom, it’ll probably take them ten minutes.”
At Clark’s signal, Jack and Chavez sprinted to the rear of the flatbed, climbed up, and began moving forward past the cask. When they were almost to the cab, he and Dominic came around the corner, split around the truck, and sprinted to