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  “Just stupid, I guess,” Bolan said, allowing the thick Massachusetts accent of his youth to return in full force.

  “And exactly which of us is stupid?” Montenegro asked demurely, a slim hand resting on a Glock.

  “I take the fifth.” Bolan laughed, then his face darkened as the diner came into view. Showtime.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mousehole, England

  Amid a whirlwind of loose leaves, the Black Hawk gently landed in the apple orchard. Shoving aside the hatch, Armanjani and the rest of his people quickly disembarked so that the pilot could immediately leave again. A few seconds later, the second Black Hawk arrived to disgorge twenty Ophiuchus soldiers, panting and sweaty from the tight confines.

  “Merciful God, we were like sardines in a can!” a corporal groaned, twisting and turning to ease his cramped muscles.

  “Move the bags into the truck!” Major Armanjani commanded, jerking a thumb toward the barn. “We have no time to waste after such a long journey. The red switch disarms the bomb in the fuel tank, and the ignition key is under the floor mat.”

  As the soldiers staggered away with the suitcases and equipment bag, the third Black Hawk landed to repeat the process, but this time the pilot turned off the rumbling engines.

  “What’s wrong?” Nasser snapped, a hand on the 9 mm Tariq pistol hidden under her loose shirt.

  “Something happened to the last helicopter,” the pilot reported, giving a crisp salute. “They lost power and went down off the Channel Islands.”

  “Were there any survivors?” Khandis asked, turning to face the southeast. “Maybe we could—”

  “No need, they’re dead now,” the major said bluntly, tucking a small remote control back into his pocket.

  Utterly horrified at the callous execution, Khandis started to speak, but then caught a stern glance from Nasser. “Such a pity we lost so many good men,” he said, touching his lips, then his forehead in a ritual blessing.

  “Merely the fortunes of war, Doctor,” Armanjani replied, doing the same in reply. “They were brave men who now are in paradise.”

  “However, we’re not dead!” Nasser announced loudly, drawing her weapon to work the slide. The noise caught the attention of everybody, as she knew it would. Grief had a way of clouding the mind and slowing the reflexes. Fear fixed that problem.

  “I want all of the luggage packed neatly into the rear of the truck!” she continued, the pistol kept in plain sight. “Make sure the license plates are for this year, and break out the grenades in case we encounter any trouble on the way to the base!”

  “Lieutenant, I thought the English police did not carry guns,” a private asked with a smirk. “What trouble could they cause us?”

  “They have radios, fool!” Nasser shot back. “The death of a single policeman would result in an air strike by the RAF!”

  Having personally seen the Royal Air Force in action during several wars and rebellions, the private went pale and nodded.

  “All right, you heard the lieutenant and know the drill!” Hassan added. “Move!”

  Surging into action, the soldiers got to work, and only a few minutes later, the barn door was pulled open, and a big Atkinson truck rumbled out to start driving through the neat rows of trees. Nasser was at the wheel, with Hassan in the passenger seat of the cab, and Khandis sitting uncomfortably between them. Armanjani and everybody else was in the back with the stores of weapons, including heavy machine guns and flamethrowers. Nobody was expecting trouble, but the major knew it was prudent to prepare.

  “Any sign of detection or pursuit?” Hassan asked, craning his neck to watch the sky overhead through the dusty window. His Atchisson autoshotgun was on the floor for easy access, but lying across his lap was a Carl Gustav rocket launcher hidden under a wool blanket.

  “Give me a moment,” Khandis replied, attaching a portable radar unit to the dashboard. As the screen came alive, the glowing arm swept around to display no blips of any kind. “Negative. The sky is clear.”

  At that precise moment, they heard a low rumble of thunder and it began to drizzle.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Nasser said with a wan smile.

  Thankfully, traffic was light at that time of the day, which was just as well. The roads of Cornwall were narrow, designed for farm horses and specifically made too small for the war chariots of the invading Roman Empire two thousand years earlier. These days that lead to a unique form of driving etiquette in which one car would pull over to the side to allow another to pass. The complex social rules of these maneuvers were incomprehensible to Nasser, so she always yielded to the other cars. This merited her countless friendly waves, and more than a few scornful laughs for being inappropriately timid.

  “I hate the English,” Khandis muttered. He had a steel briefcase handcuffed to his wrist containing the access codes for the Scimitar, along with several pounds of primed high explosive. He had heard terrible rumors on television about what Scotland Yard did to Muslim prisoners to make them talk, and he would much rather die in a clean explosion than be slowly taken apart by their surgeons or raped by other prisoners. Death before dishonor!

  Oddly, the fact that Khandis had done the exact same thing to countless other men and women for the Great Dictator had no effect whatsoever on his indignation or demeanor.

  “Lieutenant?” Hassan asked softly, glancing at the steel wall that divided the cab from the cargo section of the truck.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, slowing to let a Royal Mail truck rattle past. The driver waved his thanks, and she smiled in return, then flashed him the finger.

  “Did…did the major blow up the helicopter that sank?” Hassan asked.

  “Of course!” Nasser replied curtly, keeping both hands on the wheel. “Why do you ask?”

  “Did he also do the same thing to the other Black Hawks that managed to get us here, but then left intact?”

  Such an insightful question from the uneducated sergeant startled the lieutenant. “Of course not!” Nasser replied. “We’ll need those for the negotiations!”

  “What negotiations?” the sergeant asked, confused.

  “I will tell you later,” she replied.

  Leaving the village behind, the truck rumbled into the countryside, and Nasser had to constantly check the map as she zigzagged into the hills and finally reached an abandoned stone quarry.

  A faded legal notice on a weathered sign announced the closure of the Hercules Granite Mine decades earlier, and a rusty steel chain blocked the entrance. Pulling out a remote control, Nasser pressed a button and continued driving. The chain dropped into the ground just before the truck’s grille.

  “Hopefully, nobody saw that,” Khandis whispered softly.

  “The area is completely deserted,” she replied, as the chain rose behind them once more. “That is why the major chose it as our hardsite.”

  Dropping into a lower gear, Nasser started driving down a switchback road and zigzagged around the quarry.

  “This is mined, correct?” Khandis asked, trying not to look out the window. The sheer edge of the road was only inches away, and the bottom of the quarry looked impossibly distant.

  “Of course!” Nasser replied, steadily tapping the brakes. “The remote deactivated the mines. They will rearm once we are past. Anybody trying to follow us would never reach the fifty-foot mark alive.”

  “That sounds more than satisfactory,” he said, closing his eyes.

&nb
sp; “Afraid of heights?”

  “No, just of dying.”

  Eventually circumnavigating the spiral down the face of the quarry, Nasser shifted back into high gear upon reaching the bottom. Giving a wide berth to a rocky drainage pool, she drove into a dark tunnel and switched on the headlights.

  In the bright beams, Khandis could see that tunnel was actually a mine of some sort, the rough walls supported by thick wooden beams to prevent a collapse. Wooden flooring had been added to facilitate moving equipment. The dusty boards creaked under the weight of the truck, but none of them snapped or broke apart.

  Never having been to this base before, Nasser was suitably impressed. Clearly, the major had taken everything into consideration for their arrival.

  The tunnel went on for over a mile, constantly angling off in different directions, where the ancient Cornish miners had stubbornly followed the elusive vein of precious metal.

  “What did they dig for anyway, gold or silver?” Hassan asked, a touch of excitement in his voice.

  “Tin,” Khandis replied, watching the rock wall flow past his window only inches away. He had researched the area thoroughly.

  “Why did they need that?” the sergeant demanded skeptically.

  “Tin is a component of bronze weapons,” Dr. Khandis replied. “Knives, swords and such. But after that came bronze cannons, which changed the face of Europe, and were used all the way to the Napoleonic Wars.”

  “Plus the American Civil War,” Nasser added.

  The doctor frowned in disbelief. “Really?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “Steel is better.” Hassan sniffed.

  “True. But the British could not make decent steel at that time. Nobody could!” Dr. Khandis smiled. “That is, except for the Persians and the Spanish.”

  “Why not dig for gold, then simply buy weapons from other people?”

  “Because whoever controls the weapons controls your freedom,” Nasser stated in a no-nonsense voice. “Weapons are the essence of liberty! There is no other reasonable way to measure, aside from counting the dead.”

  As the sunlight from the mouth of the tunnel dwindled in her sideview mirror, Nasser used a different button on the remote control once more, and there came a fast series of soft explosions. Buried charges threw a thick layer of dirt and debris along the tunnel, masking their passage, and making the mine appear as if it hadn’t been visited for decades. There was even a smattering of bat guano, as well as several desiccated rats.

  “I dislike being underground,” Hassan said softly, touching a long jagged scar on his arm from a childhood accident. The sand dunes of the desert often shifted as if they were alive and considered humans their natural prey.

  The doctor laughed. “Aside from the ozone vents for my equipment, there are numerous exits. We can leave any time we wish, day or night.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely! The major guarantees it,” Khandis said, glancing briefly sideways.

  Saying nothing, Nasser returned the look, and the two of them held a fast, silent conversation before returning to the task at hand.

  Reaching a dead end, Nasser slowed the truck to a crawl and gently nosed the grille against the rough-hewn wall as she’d been instructed. A section of the rock depressed with a loud click, then the rest slid aside to reveal a brick-lined tunnel illuminated by halogen bulbs. On either side of the tunnel was a Remington .50-caliber machine gun behind a sandbag nest, bulletproof riot shields stacked against the wall for the operators to use during a firefight.

  “Ben Franklin,” Nasser said proudly.

  “Excuse me?” Khandis asked.

  “The major is a fan of the American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin,” she explained lugubriously. “He often said that to achieve success, you must first plan for failure.”

  “Hmm, very wise. Are you sure Mohammed didn’t say that first?”

  “Sorry, no, it was Franklin.”

  Inching the truck carefully inside the new tunnel, Nasser paused to let the false wall close behind them, then proceed down the passageway until they entered a spacious garage. There were several more Atkinson trucks parked along the far wall, along with numerous motorcycles, several forklifts, and a British-made Warrior APC fully armed with a 7.62 mm machine gun and a 30 mm cannon.

  “How did that get down here?” Hassan asked, sounding almost scandalized by the presence of a motorized fighting vehicle this deep underground.

  “How do you expect?” Nasser snorted. “Piece by piece.”

  In a corner of the garage were neat rows of tanks of pressurized oxygen, and off by itself was a softly humming industrial air cleaner. All of the indicator lights were green, showing that the CO2 filter didn’t need to be replaced yet, nor the dust filter or humidifier grid.

  Parking the truck near a gas pump, Nasser turned off the engine, but left the keys in the ignition. With the tunnel blocked, there was no place to drive the vehicle anymore. They were trapped down here until further notice.

  As everybody got out of the truck, Major Armanjani strode over to a wall phone and lifted the receiver. “Status report,” he snapped.

  Walking over to an iron railing, Hassan glanced down into darkness. “What’s this?” he asked, the words echoing off the bare rock.

  “Drainage ditch,” Khandis answered, rubbing the skin under the handcuff. “There is always some minor seepage from the surrounding rivers and lakes.”

  The sergeant went pale. “Could the mine flood?” he asked in a small voice.

  “No, we have too many pumping stations as protection,” Nasser answered, slapping the man on the back. “Our biggest problem is rats.”

  “Rats?”

  “They love to chew on the power cables,” the major replied. “But we fixed that by coating them with poison and laying out hundreds of traps.”

  “Good to know,” Hassan said uneasily. Ever since first hearing about the plan, he had tried not to think about this part. He hated small places, and couldn’t even tolerant being inside the tight confines of an army tank. The air in the garage seemed thick, and it was difficult to breath, but Hassan said nothing. A weakness shown was only an invitation to be attacked.

  “Thank you,” Major Armanjani said, hanging up the phone, then he turned and smiled. “Excellent news! We are getting inquiries about the Scimitar!”

  As everybody congratulated the major, he strode from the garage, and they fell into line. The terrorists exited into a different corridor, where brick columns had been added to support the ceiling instead of simple wooden timbers. The rough-hewn rock had been sprayed with gunnite to prevent any water seepage, and help maintain the environment.

  “What is this?” Hassan asked, running a hand over the smooth gray material covering the walls.

  “Concrete, of a sort,” Khandis said. “But reinforced with steel filaments and epoxy.”

  “And you just spray it on, like paint?”

  “Blast it on is more correct. The gunnite comes out of the hose at 140 kilometers per hour.”

  “Amazing,” Hassan muttered, stroking the material. “Think of what our people could do with this back in Iraq!”

  “Unfortunately, it’s very expensive,” Nasser countered.

  “But oil is free!” Hassan smiled. “Well, almost. At least to us it is.”

  Since the situation was too vastly complex to explain, Nasser said nothing in reply. Silence was starting to become her default position.
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  Just past a humming hydroelectric power station, the major turned into a side corridor and soon reached a steel door. Pressing his palm against a glowing plastic square, Armanjani impatiently waited, tapping the toe of his boot. A few seconds later, there was an angry buzz, then the door unlocked and cycled aside.

  As they walked into the control room, everybody had a brief flash of déjà vu. The control room was almost identical to the one on the Red Rose, except that the riveted steel walls had been replaced with gunnite, and there was no porthole, only another industrial air cleaner as well as several potted plants, the ferns swaying gently in the breeze from the cleaner.

  The air was cool and dry in here, the ceiling covered with bright halogen lights, which illuminated a series of workbenches. There was a coat rack next to a weapons cabinet full of AK-47 assault rifles, boxes of ammunition and stacks of 30 mm grenades. Boxes of U.S. Army MRE food packs stood stacked in neat rows, more than enough food to feed the entire staff for a month.

  “Most impressive,” Nasser said, brushing back her hair. “We could stay down here for a month if necessary!”

  “For years,” Armanjani corrected. “But if all goes well, we’ll be leaving in two days.”

  “Has a sale been made already, sir?” Hassan asked eagerly.

  “Let’s see,” Khandis said, resuming his usual position at the control board. Making all of the equipment identical was extremely clever. During an emergency, he wouldn’t have to search for a particular button or switch. He knew exactly where everything was located. The man felt sure that he could operate the console in total darkness.

  “Well?” Armanjani asked, going to the kitchenette and starting to make tea.

  “We are getting offers,” Khandis said, adjusting the controls. “But only a few of them are legitimate.”

  “Tell me the top five.”

  “The Mafia says that it is interested, but insists on a face-to-face meeting, as does North Korea.”