Extinction, p.20
Extinction, page 20
After a hesitation, Holder acquiesced, and they went on, leaving Johnson’s body behind. Colcord covered them from the rear, while at the same time looking at his phone and yelling out directions. Cash supported Holder, who was quickly losing blood and soon barely able to stagger. They finally reached the central gallery. The laughter and chanting grew more distant as they moved across the open space and retraced their journey back to the outside.
They emerged into the bright afternoon sunlight, dazzling after the dimness of the mines, Cash gulping down the fresh air. Holder sank to the ground, and she helped ease him down, slipping off his pack. He lay heavily on his back on the ground. “We need to go back in … My partner … Johnson’s body …”
“I know,” said Cash. “We’re gonna call in SWAT teams right now, get them up here ASAP to go back for your partner.”
“My partner …”
“Don’t think about it.” Cash opened Holder’s pack, pulled out the medic kit, and took out the roll of gauze. She unrolled it, folded it, and pressed it down on the still bleeding wound. Christ, it was hard to believe a shoulder could produce so much blood. Holder began passing in and out of consciousness.
“Sheriff, cover the entrance in case they come out,” Cash said as she pulled out her radio and called the lodge, one hand still pressing down on Holder’s wound. She got McFaul.
“We have a man down,” she said. “He’s bleeding. Get a chopper and medic up here—bring blood and saline.”
“What the hell happened?”
“We were attacked in the mine. Johnson is up there, dead. We need the immediate deployment of SWAT teams up there to retrieve Johnson’s body, sweep the mine, and go after the killers. And I mean now.”
39
The first chopper arrived fifteen minutes later and went into a hover above them, lowering a rescue basket. Cash and Colcord lifted the now unconscious Holder into it, spear still sticking through his shoulder. The bird hoisted him up and took off.
Not long afterward, two Black Hawk helicopters belonging to Denver PD landed in the meadow below, and a SWAT team poured out, along with EMTs and paramedics.
That was fast, Cash thought. She watched them with her binoculars but did not see McFaul in the mix of people exiting the bird. He wasn’t in good shape and wouldn’t be able to climb up the ravine anyway, she thought, which still left her in charge.
“I count twelve,” said Colcord, looking down. “Well armed.”
“I’m going back in with them,” said Cash. “You?”
“Damn straight. I need to lead them to Johnson.”
The sun was hanging low over the mountains, the valley filling with golden light. A fall chill was settling down. They waited for the SWAT teams to climb up to the mine entrance. The soldiers arrived, led by a young redheaded woman, who gave Cash a crisp salute. “Lieutenant Commander Graves,” she said. “Denver PD.”
Cash covered up her surprise at seeing a woman SWAT team commander and then upbraided herself. “Agent in Charge Cash. And this is Eagle County Sheriff Colcord. There’s a man down back in the mine. We need to get him out now.”
Graves organized her people efficiently, and they went in, six soldiers in front with Colcord and Cash, and the rest behind with two medics and a stretcher. Colcord called out directions.
Going back into the mine set her on edge, but she found her fury at the killing of Johnson drove her forward. The men had bright headlamps that starkly illuminated the tunnels, reaching every hole and crevice. They moved quickly and silently, passing through the series of tunnels that led to the open gallery. As they came out into the large room, Cash could see it for the first time in sharp relief, the irregular space where, apparently, a large ore body had been removed and then turned into a staging area. Derelict mining equipment lay about, as well as rotting piles of rope and timbers. The tunnels were silent, the sounds of laughter and chanting gone.
Colcord directed them to the small opening at the far side, and they entered the labyrinth of tunnels beyond. There was still the faint smell of smoke but no sign of the killers. Colcord continued calling out the directions until they came around a corner where Johnson’s body had been. There was nothing there but blood on the rocky floor.
“Bastards,” said Colcord darkly, the lights playing on a small pool of blood, with a long trail behind it. “They took his body.”
There was a moment of silence. Cash struggled to master her own rage, mingling with a sick feeling of horror at what they might do to the body. She turned to Graves. “We need to sweep these tunnels. We need to run these fuckers down.”
“How big is the mine?” Graves asked.
“It’s big,” said Colcord. “I’ve got JPEGs of maps on my phone.”
“Can you Bluetooth them to the team?”
He did so.
Cash turned to Graves. “We should break the group up into teams to increase coverage.”
“Right. Three teams of four. You two go with whichever teams you wish.” She turned and issued the orders.
“I’ll accompany your team,” Cash said.
Graves called up the map on her phone and looked at it while Colcord explained where they were. “It’s not complete,” she said. “Where do the tunnels go from this point?”
“The guy who drew this map didn’t explore any farther.”
“Okay. We’ll divide it up into sectors.” She proceeded to do so, assigning leaders and navigators to each team and explaining the rules of engagement. “Unfortunately,” she said, “we can’t be in radio contact. We meet back here without fail at 2000 hours.”
The three teams set off, Cash’s team taking a tunnel to the left off the gallery. It appeared to be another feeder to the big space and the ore body beyond. They soon hit it, the tunnel branching into many side channels, vertical shafts, and crawl spaces. Where the seams broadened out, columns of rock had been left, with roof-shoring beams that looked rotten. The air became close and clammy, and the ceiling got lower, so much so that they had to stoop as they went along. Cash could almost feel the weight of a billion tons of mountain above her, and it set her on edge. She kept up near the front, next to Graves, scanning the cave floor with her beam, but there were no signs or marks of passage.
Every few minutes, they stopped to listen, but the only sounds they heard were the dripping of water and the occasional creaking of the mountain. As they swept the tunnels, it was all Cash could do not to think of those brutes desecrating Johnson’s body. At a certain point, the ceiling dropped farther, until they could not proceed unless they got down on their hands and knees. They crawled forward, the gritty, fractured rock floor digging into Cash’s knees. The entire tunnel began to slope upward, getting steeper so that they were half crawling, half climbing—until they abruptly emerged into a large cavity.
Now Cash faintly smelled something burnt drifting in the thick air. She signaled a stop, and they listened intently. Nothing.
They continued on. It was strange, she thought, that nothing seemed to live in the cave—none of the usual spiders or rats. They came to a partial cave-in—not on the map—and had to scramble over loose boulders and rocks, below other rocks still hanging precariously from the ceiling. Beyond, a small stream flowed along the bottom of the tunnel, the wet rocks stained orange, red, and green with metal oxides. The burnt smell grew stronger, acrid and metallic. Cash signaled at Graves, pointing to her nose, and Graves nodded.
Graves stopped, checking the map on her phone. “By my reckoning, we’re approaching the edge of the map now, or maybe a little beyond.”
The tunnel ended in a vertical shaft, with several chains hanging down, swaying and clinking back and forth in a strange movement of air. There was no way to cross. Graves edged up to it and gingerly shined her light down. She suddenly stepped back, her hand over her mouth, her face expressing shock and disgust.
Cash looked down.
The shaft ended about thirty feet below in a tangle of old iron cables and rotting wood. Among the detritus, Cash could see a horror—a scatter of dismembered limbs, a torso, and a debrided human skull in two pieces, with much of the flesh and hair still on it. Torn pieces of an Erebus security uniform lay scattered around.
Johnson.
“Good god,” said Graves.
Cash averted her eyes and backed up, struggling to suppress the sudden nausea that rose in her gorge.
The others came and looked down, issuing quiet expressions of shock and rage.
This was followed by silence.
“We’ll need special equipment to retrieve these remains,” said Cash. “And a forensics team. For now, I think we should keep going—if you agree, Commander?”
“I do agree. We need to run down the freaks who did this.”
But first they would have to cross the gap formed by the shaft. Cash could see there was a ledge, about a foot wide, running along the wall on one side of the pit. She turned and pointed to one of the team, who had a rope coiled up and attached to his pack. “You a rock climber?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Cross that ledge and set up a fixed rope at either end so the rest can edge across, clipping on to the rope as a safety.”
The man immediately went to work. Anchoring the rope at one end on an old beam, he worked his way across and tied it to an iron ring projecting from the rock, which he tested and found sound. He tightened it.
“Okay, let’s cross,” Cash said. “Cover both directions; this is a point of vulnerability.”
They crossed, one at a time, using a harness and carabiner clipped to the fixed rope, and continued on. The tunnel now plunged downward and narrowed vertically, as if following a vein into the mountain, becoming so tight they had to turn sideways in places.
“By my reckoning,” said Graves, “we’re now definitely off the map.”
“At every dividing point from now on,” said Cash, “we’ll lay down a marker.”
But the narrow tunnel did not branch. It ran straight for what seemed like hundreds of yards. Suddenly, Cash saw a flash and gleam in the distance. They stopped and crouched, playing the beam down the long crack—and as they moved their light, the light at the end of the tunnel moved accordingly.
“Something’s reflecting,” murmured Cash.
They went forward and moments later found themselves in front of a polished, stainless steel door that blocked the tunnel.
Cash was astonished at the mirrored surface of the door, seeing her own dirty, outraged reflection staring back.
“What’s this?” Graves asked. “This looks totally new.”
“I’m pretty sure this leads to the Erebus labs,” said Cash. “Built into the mountain. The Erebus security director said they had blocked some tunnels with steel barriers.”
Graves frowned. “What should we do … knock?”
Cash shook her head. “Nah. Why warn them? They can’t open it anyway. We need to get a warrant—and surprise the hell out of them.”
40
Sheriff Colcord took the lead for his search team, navigating using his JPEGs of the mine layout. He was impressed by the Denver PD SWAT team—they were well-trained men and women, not all that different from what he’d experienced in Iraq, where forty percent of the troops he’d commanded were women.
They moved fast and silently through their sector, which was complex and random, as the nineteenth-century miners had followed every vein and seam to the end. Now that it was brightly illuminated, he could see that it was the perfect environment for an ambush, with many holes, stopes, drifts, and risers going every which way. The scent of burning hung in the air, but as they examined the ground, they found no evidence of any recent occupation. Colcord was a hunter and an experienced tracker, and it amazed him how careful they must have been to leave no trace of their passage, when even a few overturned pebbles or a layer of grit or sand could capture the brush from a foot, a skid, or a drag mark.
When they reached the far side of the sector, they turned back and swept the next set of tunnels leading back through the zone, and then back again. As time went on, it began to seem like a fool’s errand, all the tunnels empty and silent. The killers were evidently not there. But if they vacated the mine, where did they go? And how did they get out?
Yearwood had said clearly that Jackman connected with the two other mines, Fryingpan and Hesperus. But those two mines had been retrofitted for Erebus’s labs, and he’d seen with his own eyes that the security in those labs was tight. He had no doubt the tunnels into the lab area had all been sealed by Erebus.
Something was not right about this. The stolen maps and Maximilian’s failure to mention the existence of the Jackman Mine had shaken his confidence in Erebus’s cooperation and made him suspicious. But why would they try to hinder the investigation? One of their own security guards had been murdered and his body desecrated. Maximilian and Erebus had every reason to cooperate and in fact had cooperated overall. But he still felt uneasy.
They needed to go back into those labs. Not a tour, but a surprise search. Were they engaged in some sort of forbidden research? Making a doomsday virus or some other biological WMD? Or breeding killer saber-toothed cats or genetically altered freaks or monsters? It felt preposterous—the stuff of thrillers. But whatever it was, he felt that Erebus was hiding something, maybe even from most of their employees. Gunnerson had implied as much. That something might be in those labs.
The search party came to another intersection of tunnels, and he checked the map on his phone.
“Straight through,” he said. “There’s a large cavern up ahead.”
They moved through the intersection and continued on. The air was particularly dead in this zone, and Colcord found himself breathing harder. He thought of Cash—she was amazingly fit, despite her rather heavy size. Fitter than he was. He vowed to do something about that as soon as this case was over, join a gym or start hiking regularly in the mountains. His thoughts drifted back to her—the more he got to know her, the more he liked and respected her, despite that sharp tongue. He wondered what had happened back in Portland, Maine, that sent her out to Colorado.
The tunnel emerged into the cavern labeled as a stope on Yearwood’s map—an area where a large amount of ore had been removed. The blazing lights of the team illuminated the space. In the center stood an ancient ore crusher, used for breaking big rocks into smaller ones, with a huge, rusted flywheel, crusher bed, and a long, operational handle.
Dangling from the handle were two small, neatly woven ornamental balls.
41
By the time Cash and her group came out of the mine and rendezvoused with the others at eight o’clock, the sun had set and the stars were out in a brilliant show. As they were waiting for the last group to exit, Colcord came over.
“We found his mutilated remains,” she said. “At the bottom of a shaft.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” He lowered his voice and said, “We found two more ornaments.”
“Jesus,” she murmured. “You think inside they’re the, ah, eyeballs of the victim, like the others?”
“Yes.”
“And beyond that,” Cash went on, “we ran into a brand-new steel door that, it seems, blocks off a tunnel leading into the labs in the Fryingpan Mine.”
Colcord stared. “No shit. Did you try to go through it or knock on it?”
“We almost did. But then I thought twice about that. There’s something to be said for the element of surprise.”
“This just reinforces what I was thinking: we need a no-knock warrant.”
“Really?” said Cash. “You think you could get a judge to sign off on that?”
“I think so. We base the warrant on Johnson’s murder. The steel door was just beyond where his body was found—that’s proximity. We make it a no-knock so we don’t have to warn Erebus ahead of time. Barrow would have a fit and try to quash it. We just go in.”
“Hundred percent agreed,” said Cash. “But … I hate to tell you, McFaul won’t go for it. He’s always worried about his tender sweet ass and who might try to mow it for him.”
This comment was a little strong for Colcord’s taste, but he said nothing—and it was true. Colcord was not impressed with McFaul at all. Probably a political appointee.
Cash said suddenly, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m gonna bypass McFaul. I’m still AIC, and normally, the CBI director doesn’t get involved in subpoenas and warrants. We’ll take it directly to a judge.”
Now the third team came out of the mine entrance, their lights bobbing in the dark as they unloaded their packs. They had found nothing.
It seemed incredible to Cash, and it made her furious, to think that Erebus had known of this mine all along and never said anything. Was it deliberate? Was it possible that Erebus didn’t want them to find the killers? That all this searching and promises of cooperation were phony and just for show?
Cash turned to Colcord. “Let’s go back to the lodge and put in a request for that no-knock. And then we better get some sleep because tomorrow is going to be one hell of a day.”
42
When Cash and Colcord arrived back at the lodge, McFaul intercepted her at the elevator from the rooftop heliport. “We need to talk,” he said. “In the conference room.” He looked at Colcord. “In private.”
She followed him across the main lodge floor, wondering what shit McFaul was going to dump on her now. There were still a fair number of guests, taking selfies and watching the evening gathering of beasts at the lake. She had the suspicion that some of them were hanging around not despite the killings but because of them. What an Instagram moment.
They wouldn’t be there long, if she had her way. After all this, after Johnson’s death, they simply had to shut down the resort.
McFaul held open the door for her. “Take a seat,” he said.
She was dead tired, but tried to keep up an alert and energetic appearance.
