Trojan Odyssey (Dirk Pitt 17)

"There you go again with the lecture. Don't tell me you took a basic course in tunnel construction."

"Have you forgotten the summer between semesters at the Air Force Academy when I worked in a silver mine in Leadville, Colorado?" retorted Pitt.

"I remember," said Giordino, smiling. "I spent my summer as a lifeguard in Malibu." Giordino peered through the wire mesh. A glow of light rose from the opening. He walked around the mesh until he found a bolt holding it to a latch. "Locked from the inside," he observed. "We'll need to cut through the mesh."

Pitt produced a small pair of wire cutters from his backpack. "I thought we might need these if we ran into barbwire."

Giordino held them up to the light from below. "They should do nicely. Now please stand back while the master creates an entrance."

It looked easy, but wasn't. Giordino was sweating rivers twenty-five minutes later when he finally cut a hole high and wide enough for them to crawl through. He handed the cutters back to Pitt, pulled the mesh apart and peered into the shaft. The square-cut ventilator shaft, acting as the passage for the expelled air from the tunnel far below, was fifteen feet wide. A circular metal tube filled one corner. This was the access shaft, with a ladder that seemed to vanish into a bottomless pit.

"For maintenance in case the ventil

ator system needs repair," Pitt volunteered loudly over the fan noise. "It also serves as an emergency exit for the mine workers should there be a fire or a roof collapse in the main tunnel."

Giordino entered the shaft feet first onto the lower rungs of the ladder. He paused and looked up at Pitt sourly. "I hope I won't regret this!" he shouted over the roar of the fans, as he began his descent.

Pitt was thankful the shaft was lit. After dropping down the ladder fifty feet, he paused and looked below. All he could see was the ladder stretching into infinity, like the tracks of a railroad. No sign of the bottom was visible.

He pulled out a paper towel from a pocket, tore it into two small pieces, wadded them up and stuffed them in his ears as plugs against the irritating noise level of the fans. Besides the main fan system, booster fans had been installed every hundred feet to maintain the required pressure to vent the tunnel to the surface.

After what seemed half a lifetime, and what Giordino estimated was a drop of five hundred feet, he stopped his descent and waved a hand. The bottom of the ladder was in view. Slowly, cautiously, he turned until he was upside-down. Then he crawled downward until his eyes could see under what was now the roof of a small control center that monitored and detected the gasses, carbon monoxide, temperature and fan system operations.

Pitt and Giordino had passed far below the main fan system and could now converse in low tones. Giordino raised up until he was on his feet again and spoke to Pitt, who had slid down the ladder beside him.

"What's the status?" Pitt asked softly.

"The ladder runs through a ventilator systems control center that sits about fifteen feet above the floor of the tunnel. A man and a woman are sitting at computer consoles. Luckily, they're facing away, with their backs to the ladder. We should be able to take them out before they know what hit them."

Pitt looked into Giordino's dark eyes, only inches away. "How do you want it?"

Giordino's lips parted in a conniving grin. "I'll take the man. You're better at incapacitating women than I am."

Pitt glared at him. "You big chicken."

They wasted no more time and dropped down the ladder into the control booth silently without being detected. The system operators--the man wearing black coveralls, the woman in white--were intent on monitoring their computers and did not see the reflection of their assailants in their screens until it was too late. Giordino came in from the side and slugged the man with a right hook to the jaw. Pitt opted for striking the back of the woman's neck just below her skull. Both went out with no more than slight moans.

Keeping unseen below the windows, Pitt pulled a roll of duct tape from his knapsack and tossed it to Giordino. "Bind them up while I remove their coveralls."

In less than three minutes the unconscious ventilation systems operators were bound and gagged in their underwear and rolled under counters out of sight from anyone passing by below. Pitt slipped on the black coveralls, which were a loose fit, while Giordino burst the seams of the white coveralls that came off the woman. They found matching hard hats on a shelf and put them on. Pitt casually carried his knapsack over one shoulder, while Giordino looked official with a clipboard and pencil. One after the other, they dropped down the ladder to the tunnel floor.

When they got their bearings and stared around their surroundings, Pitt and Giordino stood spellbound in awe, as they stared at the immense spectacle, their eyes narrowing under the glare of an unending array of lights.

This was no ordinary railroad tunnel. It was no railroad tunnel at all.

29

The horseshoe-shaped tunnel was far more immense than either he or Giordino had imagined. Pitt felt as though he was standing in a Jules Verne fantasy. He estimated the bore at fifty feet in diameter; far wider than any tunnel ever constructed. The diameter of the Chunnel that ran between France and England was twenty-four feet and the Seikan Tunnel that connected Honshu with Hokkaido was thirty-two.

The whirr of the ventilator fans was replaced with a buzzing sound that echoed up and down the tunnel. Above them, mounted on a series of steel beams, a huge conveyor belt traveled continuously toward the eastern end of the tunnel. Instead of rocks twelve to eighteen inches in size, the muck had been crushed almost to sand.

"There's the source of your brown crud," said Pitt. "They grind down the rock until it has the consistency of silt so it can be pumped through a pipe into the Caribbean."

A railroad track and a parallel concrete roadway ran beneath the conveyor belt. Pitt knelt and studied the rails and ties. "Electric-powered, like the subways of New York."

"Mind the third rail," warned Giordino. "No telling how much voltage is running through it."

"They must have generator substations every few miles to provide power."