Trojan Odyssey Page 29

  "Stuff something in your chest."

  Giordino said nothing, but his bitter stare at Pitt said it all.

  A sober look crossed Pitt's face. "I wonder if those miners have any idea of the toxic mineral content of the muck they're pouring into the sea."

  "They will," added Giordino, "when their hair starts falling out and their internal organs dissolve."

  They continued on, conscious of an unnatural atmosphere deep below the earth and sea. They passed several smaller crosscut tunnels leading off to their left that aroused their curiosity. Another parallel tunnel appeared to be linked by the crosscuts every thousand yards. Pitt assumed it was a service tunnel for electrical conduits.

  "There's the explanation for the earth tremors on the surface," said Pitt. "They didn't use a big tunnel-boring machine for these small tunnels. They were excavated by drilling and blasting."

  "Shall we turn in?"

  "Later," replied Pitt. "Let's push ahead and follow the muck on the conveyor belt."

  Giordino was stunned at the power of the golf cart. He got it up to fifty miles an hour and he soon began overhauling other vehicles on the concrete road.

  "Better slow down," cautioned Pitt. "We don't want to arouse suspicion."

  "You think they got traffic cops down here?"

  "No, but big brother is watching," Pitt countered, discreetly nodding at a camera mounted above on the overhead lighting system.

  Giordino reluctantly slowed and settled behind a bus traveling in the same direction. Pitt began timing the bus schedule and quickly calculated that the buses ran twenty minutes apart and stopped at work sites when and wherever miners waited to board or requested to get off. He glanced at the hands on his watch. It was only a question of time before the technicians on the replacement shift entered the ventilator control room and found their coworkers duct-taped to the floor. So far, no alarms had been sounded, nor had they seen security guards cruising up and down the tunnel as if searching for someone.

  "We're coming up on something," Giordino alerted Pitt.

  A thumping sound became stronger as they moved closer to what Pitt quickly identified as a giant pumping station. The rock that had been crushed to sand was sent from the conveyor belt into a monstrous bin. From there, pumps the size of a three-story building thrust it into huge pipes. As Pitt had concluded, the contaminated muck was then propelled into the sea where Poco Bonito had run aground on the accumulation. Beyond the pumping stations were giant steel doors.

  "The enigma goes deeper," said Pitt thoughtfully. "Those pumps are monumental, far more capable of pumping ten times the excavated muck. They must serve another purpose."

  "They'll probably dismantle them when the tunnel is finished."

  "I don't think so. They look permanent."

  "I wonder what's on the other side of those doors," said Giordino.

  "The Caribbean," answered Pitt. "We must be miles from shore and deep beneath the surface of the sea."

  Giordino's eyes never left the doors. "How in the world did they dig this thing?"

  "They began with an open excavation onshore by digging a portal. First, a starter tunnel was launched with a different type of machine called a roadheader excavator. When it reached a calculated depth, the big boring machine was brought in and assembled in the excavated tunnel. It worked east under the sea, then it must have been disassembled and reassembled so it could begin excavating in the opposite direction toward the west."

  "How could an operation this size be kept secret?"

  "By paying the miners and engineers big bucks to keep their mouths shut, or perhaps by threats and blackmail."

  "According to Rathbone, they don't hesitate to kill intruders. Why not workmen with loose tongues?"

  "Don't remind me about intruders. Anyway, suspicions confirmed," Pitt said slowly. "The brown crud is spread into the sea by man without the slightest consideration for the terrible consequences."

  Giordino shook his head slowly. "A contaminated dump operation that puts all others to shame."

  Pitt reached into his knapsack again and lifted out a small digital camera and began taking pictures of the giant pumping operation.

  "I don't suppose your magical kit can produce any food and drink?" probed Giordino.

  Pitt reached inside and produced a pair of granola bars. "Sorry, that's the best I can do."

  "What else is in there?"

  "My trusty old Colt forty-five."

  "I guess we can always shoot ourselves before they hang us," Giordino said glumly.

  "We've seen what we came for," said Pitt. "Time to go home."

  Giordino was pressing his foot on the accelerator before Pitt finished his sentence. "The sooner we're out of here, the better. We're on borrowed time as it is."

  Pitt continued snapping pictures as they drove. "One more detour, I want to see what's inside those crosscut tunnels."

  As he accelerated, Giordino sensed that heading off into a side tunnel was only part of Pitt's plan. He was dead certain that Pitt wanted to check out the other end of the tunnel and observe the big boring machine in action. Pictures were taken of every piece of equipment they passed. No small detail of the tunnel's construction went unrecorded.

  Giordino swung right into the first crosscut he reached without slowing down, taking the turn on two wheels. Pitt hung on and gave him a waspish look, but said nothing. They had traveled less than two hundred feet when abruptly the golf cart shot into another tunnel. They came to a fast stop and stared in total astonishment.

  "Mind-boggling," Giordino muttered under his breath in awe.

  "Don't stop," ordered Pitt. "Keep going."

  Giordino acquiesced and drove the golf cart at top speed into another tunnel. He didn't hesitate or wait for Pitt to urge him forward. His foot never came off the pedal as they charged through the crosscut into a fourth tunnel. At last they could go no farther, and Giordino braked the cart before they struck the far wall. They sat there for several moments, staring left and right into eternity, taking in the immensity of what they were seeing.

  The gargantuan proportions of the tunnel network became even more spectacular when Pitt and Giordino in stunned disbelief forced themselves to accept the fact that there was not one but four immense interconnected tunnels of equal size.

  Giordino didn't astound easily, but he was shamelessly overwhelmed. "This can't be real," he said, in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Carefully, Pitt steeled himself, shutting out all inclinations to fog his mind from the impact and blind his concentration. There had to be an explanation for the Herculean undertaking. How was it possible that Specter had built four massive tunnels under the mountains of Nicaragua without exposure by international intelligence or the media? How could such a vast project have gone unnoticed for more than four years?

  "How many railroads does Specter intend to operate?" Giordino muttered dazedly.

  "These tunnels weren't built to run cargo across the land by rail," Pitt mused.

  "Barge transportation, maybe?"

  "Not cost-efficient. There has to be another objective behind it all."

  "There has to be a colossal bonanza at the end of the rainbow for such an expensive undertaking."

  "The cost must have easily run more than the estimated seven billion."

  Their voices reverberated up and down the cavernous tunnel that was completely empty of men and vehicles. If not for the perfectly arched walls and roof and the smooth concrete surface, they could have imagined themselves in an immense natural grotto.

  Pitt tilted his head down at the floor of the tunnel. "So much for a rapid transit cargo system. They removed the railroad tracks."

  Giordino nodded discreetly at a security camera mounted on a post that was aimed directly at them. "We'd better beat a hasty retreat back to the main tunnel and find another means of transportation. This cart is too conspicuous."

  "Good thinking," said Pitt. "If they haven't figured out that they have unwelcome intruder
s by now, they must be brain-dead."

  They retraced their journey through the three empty tunnels, stopping just short of the fourth, where they had started. They parked the golf cart in the crosscut tunnel beyond a security camera and nonchalantly walked down the roadway until they reached a stop where eight other miners were standing around waiting for the bus. Close up and through their sunglasses, Pitt could see their eyes. They were all Asian.

  Pitt nudged Giordino, who got the message.

  "Ten will get you twenty, they're Red Chinese," whispered Pitt.

  "I won't take the bet."

  No sooner had the double-decker bus arrived than a fleet of carts with red and yellow lights flashing sped past and into the crosscut tunnel they'd just deserted.

  "Once they find the cart, it will take them all of ten seconds to know we're on this bus," said Giordino.

  Pitt's eyes were on a train that was approaching from the east sector of the tunnel. "My thoughts exactly." He held up a hand and motioned for the bus driver to continue after the waiting miners had boarded. The door closed with a hiss and the bus moved on.

  "When was the last time you chased a freight train?" Pitt asked Giordino, as they hurried across the road and stood talking in detachment as the locomotive passed by, the engineer inside the cab reading a magazine.

  "Several years ago in the Sahara Desert, the train carrying toxic chemicals to Fort Foureau."

  "As I remember, you almost fell off."

  "I hate it when you make sport of me," said Giordino, with a downward twist of his lips.

  The instant the locomotive passed by, they sprinted along the track. Pitt had already clocked the train's speed at twenty miles an hour, and they judged their running speed accordingly. Giordino was fast for his size. He put his head down and charged after a flatbed car as if he was carrying a football toward the end zone. He grabbed the hand ladder as it passed, held on and was literally swept onto the car. Pitt also used the momentum of the train to swing himself aboard.

  The flatbed car was loaded with two pickup trucks of unknown origin powered by an electrical motor. Shiny new, they looked to be fresh off the boat. Without a word between them, Pitt and Giordino threw open a door and slipped into one of the truck's cabs, crouching down below the windows and the dashboard. Their timing couldn't have been more perfect, as two security patrol cars came screaming past the train, lights flashing as they raced after the bus.

  Pitt looked pleased. "Our little maneuver was missed by the cameras or they'd have come after us instead of the bus."

  "About time we had some luck."

  "Stay put," instructed Pitt. "I'll be right back."

  He opened the door on the side of the train away from the road and lowered himself to his hands and knees. Crawling from front to back, he removed the chocks and tie-down chains that held the pickup truck to the rail car. Then he scrambled back inside.

  Giordino looked at him strangely. "I can read your mind, and I can't see how we're going to drive off a moving train into a tunnel that's blocked on both ends."

  "We'll worry about it when the time comes," Pitt tossed off placidly.

  There is nothing on earth that remotely resembles a big tunnel-boring machine.

  The TBM that dug the tunnels under Nicaragua from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific shore stretched over one hundred and twenty yards in length, followed by another hundred yards of its equipment train.

  An incredibly complicated monster that looked like the first stage of a Saturn rocket, it was driven by an electric variable-speed drive that eliminated any hydraulic oil leakage and pollution. The Specter TBM fractured flakes of bedrock by the continuous rotation of a series of carbide cutters mounted on a massive steel cutter head that could cut a circular tube through hard rock fifty-two feet in diameter at the rate of one hundred and fifty feet a day. The body that enclosed the cutter head also contained the drive motors that provided the enormous power it took to thrust the cutter's teeth into the rock, and the hydraulic presses that exerted the immense pressure it took to force the TBM into solid wall and grind away the rock.

  The giant machine was articulated, and its operator, who was positioned at the front of the machine, could automatically steer it with the use of a laser while he monitored the operation. The excavated muck was transported to the rear section of the TBM and passed through a rock crusher that mashed the rock into fine sand. From there, the conveyor belt carried it back toward the opposite end of the tunnel, where it was pumped out into the sea.

  The train stopped two hundred yards behind the TBM and beneath the overhead conveyor to unload at a supply depot and terminal. A series of large freight elevators ran out of sight through the roof of the tunnel. A group of women in white jumpsuits exited one of the elevators and climbed into a bus. Pitt angled close to them and overheard one woman say the inspection had to be finished in eight hours so a report-could be sent to company headquarters above.

  It made no sense to Pitt. Headquarters? Where above?

  No one seemed to mind as he casually drove the truck from the flatbed onto the loading dock and down a ramp to the concrete road. Then he pulled over and stopped behind a row of three other electric trucks.

  Giordino looked around the busy area, where at least thirty miners were engaged in operating the mass of machinery. "That was too easy."

  "We're not home yet," said Pitt. "We've got to find a way out of here."

  "We could always climb out through another ventilator."

  "Not if we're under Lake Nicaragua."

  "How about the one we came from?"

  "I think we can safely forget that plan."

  Giordino was absorbed, watching the operation of the big TBM. "Okay, mastermind, what's your next scenario?"

  "We can't escape from this tunnel, because it isn't completed yet. Our only hope is to sneak out the Pacific side from one of the other three tunnels' ventilators."

  "And if it proves impossible?"

  "Then I'll have to come up with another plan."

  Giordino pointed down the loading dock, where security guards were checking the ID passes of the miners. "Time to shove off. We don't exactly fit our descriptions."

  Pitt held up the ID clamped to the breast pocket of his jumpsuit and stared at it with amusement. "I'm in trouble. This guy is five foot two. I'm six-three."

  "What about me?" Giordino said with a sly smile. "How will I ever produce a head of long hair and a set of boobs?"

  Pitt cracked the door and looked up and down the far side of the loading dock and found it deserted. "Out this way."

  Giordino followed Pitt and slid across the front seat of the pickup. They hit the loading dock crouched and running before cutting into an open door of a warehouse. Sneaking around unopened crates containing replacement parts for the various equipment and TBM, they found a rear passage that took them out of the warehouse and back along the railroad track. They paused behind a row of Porta Pottis and took stock.

  "It'd help if we had transportation," said Giordino, wrinkling his nose distastefully.

  "Wishing will make it so," Pitt said with a big grin.

  Without waiting for Giordino, he stood up, walked from behind the Porta Pottis and casually approached one of the security guards' vehicles that was parked unattended. He settled behind the wheel, turned the ignition to the electric motor and pressed his foot on the accelerator, as Giordino leaped through the opposite door. The electrical power from the batteries flowed through the front-wheel-drive, direct-coupled differential and the car silently moved away.

  The Pitt luck still held. The security guards were so busy examining the miners' IDs that they did not notice their patrol car being stolen. Not only was the electric car whisper quiet, but the noise and clatter of the TBM made it impossible for them to hear the workers trying to call their attention to the car theft.

  To make it look official, Giordino reached toward the dashboard and flicked the switch to the revolving lights on the forward edge of the roof.
As soon as they came to the first crosscut tunnel, Pitt hung a hard left and repeated the maneuver, swinging into the main tunnel and heading toward its western portal.

  Pitt assumed that the four tunnels had been excavated under Lake Nicaragua to come up beyond the narrow stretch of land separating the lake from the ocean at the old port of San Juan del Sur. Here the ventilators had to be placed before the tunnels continued out from shore.

  But Pitt was wrong.

  After driving several miles, they came to a massive set of pumps like the ones they had encountered on the eastern end of the tunnel network. Then the tunnel abruptly ended at another pair of gigantic doors. The trickles of water that seeped around their edges and down the tunnel gave proof that they were not surfacing near San Juan del Sur but had come to a dead end far out under the Pacific Ocean.