Night Probe! (Dirk Pitt 6)

The sound of a piston-engined plane intruded on the silent countryside. Shaw twisted around and looked skyward, but could see nothing. The plane was flying without navigation lights. He judged by the sound of the engines that it was circling at only a few hundred feet above the hill. Here and there the light of a star was blotted by what Shaw knew were parachutes.

Fifteen minutes later, two shadows moved out of the trees below and climbed toward him. One of the men was Burton Angus The other was stockily built. In the darkness he could have passed for a huge rolling rock. His name was Eric Caldweiler, and he was former superintendent of a coal mine in Wales.

"How did it go?" Shaw asked.

"A perfect jump, I'd say," Burton-Angus replied. "They practically landed on top of my signal beam. The officer in command is a Lieutenant Macklin."

Shaw ignored one of the cardinal rules of undercover night operations and lit a cigarette. The Americans would know of their presence soon enough, he reasoned. "Did you find the quarry entrance?"

"You can forget about it," said Caldweiler. "Half the hillside slipped away."

"It's buried?"

"Aye, deeper than a Scotsman's whiskey cellar. The overburden is thicker than I care to think about."

Shaw said, "Any chance of digging through?"

Caldweder shook his head. "Even if we had a giant dragline, you're talking two or three days."

"No good. The Americans could show up at any time."

"Might gain entry through the portals," said Caldweiler, stoking up a curved briar pipe. "Providing we can find them in the dark."

Shaw looked at him. "What portals?"

"Any heavily worked commercial mine requires two additional openings: an escape way in case the main entrance is damaged, and an air ventilation shaft."

"Where do we start searching?" Shaw asked anxiously.

Caldweder was not to be rushed. "Well, let's see. I judge this to be a drift mine-a tunnel in the side of the hill where the outcropping broke the surface. From there the shaft probably followed the limestone bed on a down% yard slope. That would put the escape way somewhere around the base of the hill. The ventilator? Higher up, facing the north."

"Why north?"

"Prevailing winds. Just the ticket for cross-ventilation in the days before circulating fans."

"The air vent it is then," said Shaw. "It would be better hidden in the hillside woods and less exposed than the escape portal below."

"Not another safari up the mountain," Burton-Angus complained.

"Do you good," said Shaw, smiling. "Work off the fancy buffets of those embassy row parties." He mashed out the cigarette with his heel. "I'll go and round up our helpers."

Shaw turned and made his way into a heavy thicket near the base of the hill about thirty meters from the old rail spur. He tripped over a root at the edge of a ravine and fell, arms outstretched for the slamming impa

ct. Instead, he rolled down a weed-blanketed slope and landed on his back in a bed of gravel.

He was lying there gasping, trying to get his knocked-out breath back, when a figure materialized above him, silhouetted against the stars, and touched the muzzle of a rifle to his forehead.

"I rather hope you're Mr. Shaw," a polite voice said.

"Yes, I'm Shaw," he managed to rasp.

"I'm pleased." The gun was pulled back. "Let me help you up, sir."

"Lieutenant Macklin?"

"No, sir, Sergeant Bentley."

Bentley was dressed in a military black-and-gray camouflaged night smock with pants that tucked into paratroop-style boots. He wore a dark beret over his head and his hands and feet were the color of ink.