n Giordino yanked the broken door inward, sending it crashing to the floor. The security guards were too surprised to offer resistance, as they were pulled into the room and found themselves staring into the muzzles of two very large automatic pistols.
"En el piso, rápidamente!" Pitt snapped, ordering them to lie on the floor as Giordino began tearing up the bedsheets. They quickly disarmed, bound and gagged the stunned guards.
Five minutes later, Pitt, with Claus and Hilda behind and Giordino bringing up the rear, passed through the entrance of the unguarded gate in the fence and scurried across the street that was packed with a milling crowd of security personnel and firemen surrounding the still-burning street sweeper, before slipping into the shadows unnoticed.
38
They had a long way to go. The hangars at the end of the isthmus airstrip were over a mile across the facility from the Lowenhardts' prison quarters. Besides a satellite photo of the facility for a guide, they now had the assistance of the scientists, who were familiar with the layout of the streets.
Claus Lowenhardt fell back to talk softly to Giordino. "Is your friend truly in control of our situation?"
"Let's just say that Dirk is a man of infinite resource who could talk or extricate himself out of almost any awkward situation."
"You trust him." It was a statement more than a question.
"With my life. I've known him for almost forty years and he hasn't failed me yet."
"Is he an intelligence agent?"
"Hardly." Giordino could not suppress a soft laugh. "Dirk is a marine engineer. He's special projects director for the National Underwater and Marine Agency. I'm his second in command."
"God help us!" Lowenhardt muttered. "If I had known you were not highly trained undercover CIA agents, I would have never come with you and risked my wife's life."
"Your lives couldn't be in the hands of a better man," Giordino assured him, his voice low and hard as concrete.
Pitt moved from one structure to another, trying to stay in the shadows away from the streetlamps and overhead lights on the roofs of the buildings. It was not an easy journey. The facility was brightly lit from one end to the other. Floodlights had been installed on every building, along every street to discourage anyone from trying to escape. Because of the abundance of illumination, Pitt scanned the territory through binoculars rather than his nightscope, continually checking for evidence of guards lurking in the shadows.
"The streets seem unusually empty of patrols," he murmured.
"That's because the guards turn loose the dogs until morning," said Hilda.
Giordino came to an abrupt halt. "You didn't say anything about dogs."
"I wasn't asked," she said blankly.
"I'll bet they're Dobermans," Giordino moaned. "I hate Dobermans."
"We're lucky we got this far," Pitt said frankly. "We'll have to be doubly careful from now on."
"And with us fresh out of meat," Giordino grumbled.
Pitt was about to lower his binoculars when he detected a high chain-link fence with circular barbwire running along the top. He could see that a gate on the road leading to the airstrip was guarded by two men who were clearly exposed by an overhead light. Pitt re-focused the lenses and peered again. They were not men but women in blue jumpsuits. Two unleashed dogs nosed the ground in front of the gate. They were Dobermans, and he smiled to himself at Giordino's revulsion of them.
"We have a fence barring the road to the airstrip," he said, passing the binoculars to Giordino.
Giordino peered through the lenses. "Did you notice there is a smaller fence running a few feet in front of the big one?"
"No doubt built to protect the dogs?"
"To keep them from turning crispy-crunchy." Giordino paused and traversed the fence a hundred yards in each direction. "The main fence probably has enough electrical juice running through it to barbecue a buffalo." Giordino paused to check the neighborhood. "And not a vacant street sweeper in sight."
Abruptly, the ground began to move and a low rumbling sound swept the facility. The trees swayed and the windows of the buildings rattled. It was a tremor like the one they experienced inside the lighthouse and on the river. This one lasted longer, over a minute before tapering off. The Dobermans went into a barking frenzy as the guards milled around uneasily. There would be no creeping up on the guards undetected while the dogs were excited and alert.
"We felt an earth tremor earlier," Pitt said to Claus. "Is it coming from the volcano?
"Indirectly," he answered matter-of-factly. "One of the scientists on our research team, Dr. Alfred Honoma, a geophysicist who was lured away from the University of Hawaii, is an expert on volcanoes. In his opinion the tremors have nothing to do with superheated rock ascending through the volcano's fissures. He claims the impending danger is a sudden slip of the volcano's slope that will cause a catastrophic flank collapse."
"How long have you experienced these tremors?" asked Pitt.