Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)

Sienna retargeted Joe, more firmly this time. “I’m sorry,” she said, “tomorrow will be too late. Please, give me the transmitter.”

Joe held still, but one of the hackers intervened, climbing awkwardly out of the tram car and grabbing the remote from the floor of the tunnel. As soon as he had it in his hand, the man climbed back in the car and gave it to Calista, who tapped the screen a few times and offered Joe a satisfied grin.

“A u r e v o i r,” she said as the tram began to accelerate away. “Give your friend my love when he wakes up.”

Joe watched the tram pick up speed and vanish into the gloom of the tunnel. “I knew we should have called the cavalry.”

Hoping to wake Kurt, Joe shook him twice but got nothing. Kurt was catatonic, exactly the way he’d been when Joe pulled him from the water three months earlier. The parallel was eerie. And Joe began to think perhaps it was not entirely coincidental.

“This is bad,” he said.

It may have been the understatement of Joe’s life. He was trapped in a secret base on the wrong side of the DMZ, with an unconscious friend, a 9mm pistol carrying perhaps five shells in the clip, and an angry battalion of North Korean soldiers barreling down on them.

“Bad” did not begin to cover it.

With little time to waste, Joe eased Kurt to the ground and began to look around for options.

First, he raced over to the panel and checked the security video once more. The feed showed more North Korean soldiers picking their way through the piles of unconscious men who’d made the initial descent. Counting up from where he was, Joe could see that the new troops in their gas masks had reached the seventh floor and would soon reach the sixth, where the battle had occurred. He guessed they would clear that floor and the ones beneath it first before making their way to the bottom, but time was not on his side.

He studied the control panel, but it was an incomprehensible mess of Korean and flashing icons. No way he was going to be able to decipher that in time. He looked around, desperately seeking a mode of transportation that didn’t require a physicist to operate. In the dark corner to his left he saw something that might fit the bill.

“Of course,” he said. “The ore had to get down here somehow.”

There, sitting on a platform like the one in Than Rang’s underground base, was a big North Korean tractor trailer. It was a bulk hauler with an open top, more like a dump truck than the modern intermodal shipping containers Than Rang was using.

Joe ran to the cab, climbed in, and was ecstatic to find the keys in the ignition. “Thank God for the internal combustion engine,” he said, twisting the key and listening to the sweet sound of the rumbling diesel coming to life. Forcing it into the lowest gear, Joe managed to get the truck moving and eased it over to where Kurt lay on the floor.

Stopping the truck and jumping out, Joe picked up his friend, carried him to the passenger’s side, and hauled him onto the tattered vinyl of the old bench seat in the cab of the truck. As he settled, Kurt began to thrash around a bit, almost as if he was trying to swim, but then he slumped against the seat and went quiet once again.

Joe climbed back into the cab on the driver’s side and slammed the door.

“Don’t worry, amigo,” he said, putting the truck in gear. “You just enjoy your power nap. I’ll get us out of here. And when you wake up, we’re going to have a long talk about the kind of women you rescue and the kind you leave behind. Because clearly no one has explained the difference to you yet.”

As Joe spoke, he maneuvered the steering wheel and managed to get the behemoth of a truck pointing down the maglev tunnel toward freedom. Pressing the accelerator brought a roar from the engine and began filling the tunnel with thick black exhaust. The truck moved forward and was soon picking up speed.

He hadn’t gone too far when gunshots rang out from behind. From the cab of the rig, all Joe heard was the ping of ricochets bouncing off the thick walls of the truck bed and the boom of a tire exploding.

Trying not to think about the danger, Joe kept his foot on the throttle and continued to gain speed. Between the unmufflered exhaust, the noise of the big engine reverberating off the walls, and the old chassis bouncing and shaking on its leaf springs, the ride back to the south could not have been more opposite from the smooth, quiet ride in on the maglev tram.

Joe cycled through the gears, grinding every one of them. He began to laugh, enjoying the sound and the fury. It had to be a hundred twenty decibels or more. For the hell of it, he reached up and pulled the big rig’s horn, which echoed down the tunnel as it blared.

Soon enough, they were passing forty and then fifty miles per hour. Ahead Joe saw a problem. Every half mile or so in the tunnel was a choke point, where a reenforced concrete ring constricted the diameter of the tunnel. As he closed in on the first one, Joe was pretty confident the truck would fit. As it turned out, he was wrong. At fifty miles an hour, the metal top of the trailer clipped the roof, blasting chunks of concrete loose. It sounded like a bomb had gone off.

The second choke point was even narrower, but Joe didn’t slow down. More concrete was blasted free. This time a large section of the trailer’s side was torn off, clanking to the floor and tumbling loudly across it.

In the mirror, Joe saw the remnants of the twisted bed sticking out two feet to the side. It gave him an idea. Without slowing down, he eased over to the wall until the bent section of the truck bed was grinding against it, gouging a li

ne in the wall, shedding sparks, and adding to the din. Eventually, the metal tore further until the whole side was ripped off and dragging behind the truck.

Joe glanced at Kurt. “You must really be out cold if this isn’t waking you up.”

Joe pulled on the horn lever once again and held it, letting it blare until his ears were hurting. Even then he kept sounding it. He wanted the world, and particularly the South Korean military, to know he was coming. The way Joe saw it, that was their only hope.

Seven miles away, in a listening post manned by the South Korean military, a young private named Jeong studied her monitors. The South Koreans had placed sound detection equipment all along the DMZ to listen for any possible underground incursion by the North.

From time to time they detected odd signals. Small earthquakes had been a problem, and the North Korean atomic bomb and other underground disturbances had sometimes triggered false readings, but nothing like what she was getting now. She called her supervisor over.

“Listen to this.”