Atlantis Found (Dirk Pitt 15)

"It's amazing the roof didn't collapse after the comfit's impact or the later accumulation of ice."

"Their builders must have worked under exceptionally high standards that were possible only under a structured culture."

They gazed in fascination down a network of windowless corridors whose interior walls were beautifully painted with scenes of spectacular seascapes that began with calm waters and progressed to waves whipped by hurricane furies beating against rocky shorelines. If modern men and women looked to the heavens for their God, the Amenes had looked to the seas. Their statuaries were of men and women, not stylized versions of gods.

"A long-lost race who discovered the world," Giordino said philosophically, "And yet there are no artifacts lying around, and no sign of the inhabitants' remains."

Pitt nodded at the network of narrow passages carved into the ice. "No doubt recovered by the Nazis who discovered it, and later taken by the Wolfs to their museums on board the Ulrich Wolf."

"Doesn't look like they excavated more than ten percent of the city."

"They had more mundane things on their mind," said Pitt sardonically, "like hiding Nazi treasures and secret relics, extracting gold from seawater, and planning to destroy the world so they could make it over into their image."

"Too bad we haven't the time to explore the place."

"There's nothing I'd like better than to take the grand tour," said Pitt, shaking off his captivation, "but we have twenty-five minutes or less to find the control center."

Wishing they could linger, Pitt and Giordino reluctantly turned their backs on the great edifice and hurried back to the square and climbed into the Snow Cruiser. Still following the tracks left by a Sno-cat, Pitt steered the big cruiser through the heart of the haunting ghost city and rolled it into a tunnel beyond the mausoleum of the Amenes. Pitt drove less cautiously the closer they came to the mining compound, while Giordino crouched below the instrument panel with his Bushmaster sticking through the shattered middle windshield.

Almost a mile deeper into the tunnel, they rounded a bend and found themselves confronted with an electric auto coming in the opposite direction. The three startled security guards in the other vehicle, easily recognizable in their black uniforms, stared incredulously at the monster bearing down on them.

The driver panicked and slammed on his brakes, skidding across the ice floor of the tunnel without reducing his speed in the slightest. The other two guards had a higher regard for self-preservation and leaped from the auto in a futile attempt at prolonging their lives.

There was a series of shrill screeches from shredding and grinding metal as the Snow Cruiser smashed into the electric auto and rolled over it as though it were a tricycle mashed by a garbage truck. The driver disappeared, along with his crumpled vehicle, under the Cruiser, while the other two guards were crushed against the ice walls of the tunnel by the great tires. As Pitt stared back in his side-view mirror, he saw only a pile of twisted junk sitting flattened on the floor of the tunnel.

Giordino twisted around in his seat and stared back through the slanted rear window of the control cab. "I hope you paid your insurance premiums."

"Only liability and property damage. I never take out collision."

"You should reconsider."

Another two hundred yards through the tunnel, groups of workers in red coveralls were moving wooden crates onto a train of flatbed cars that were connected to a large Sno-cat. Forklifts were transporting the crates past a thick silver steel door whose mounting bolts led deep into the ice. The massive door looked like the types that were used in banks to safeguard the contents of their vaults. A short entryway through the ice led into a spacious cavern.

Two security guards stood stunned at the sight of the gargantuan Snow Cruiser, plunging from what should have been an abandoned tunnel. They stood transfixed in the glare of the headlights. Only when Giordino fired a short burst from his Bushmaster through the broken windshield into the forklift did workers and security guards come alive and scramble back into the cavern to save themselves from being mashed by the mechanical avalanche bearing down on them.

"The door!" Pitt shouted, slamming on the brakes.

Giordino did not acknowledge or question. Almost as if he'd read Pitt's mind, he leaped from the Snow Cruiser and ran to the steel door, as Pitt squeezed off several rounds from his Colt .45 through the doorway to the cavern to cover him. Giordino was surprised by the light touch it took to push the door closed. He'd expected to exert every ounce of strength in his body, but the heavy steel door swung as easily as if it hung in air. Once it clicked against its stops, he turned the locking wheel until the bars slid into their sockets, sealing it closed. Then he found a chain on the forklift and wrapped it around the wheel, securing the end to a wheel of a flatbed car loaded with crates, until it was impossible to turn from the inside. Now the Wolf security guards and workers were effectively imprisoned without any prospect of a quick escape.

"I wonder what's inside the crates?" Giordino said, as he climbed back into the control cab.

"Artifacts from the city of the Amenes, I'd guess." Pitt ran the Snow Cruiser through the gears until he had regained top speed again. An angel perched on the roof of the cab might have helped them this far on their wild passage, but they still had a long way to go. True, surprise was theirs, but it seemed remarkable that they had come this far without a shot being fired at them, a situation that could quickly change, Pitt well knew. The powers of their angel had her limits, assuming that it was a she. Events had been met and overtaken. Once the Snow Cruiser burst out into the open, it would be a different story.

Every gun in the compound would train on it.

At a wide bend in the tunnel, they suddenly burst out into the almost measureless hangar housing the Destiny Enterprises jet aircraft. Without lifting his foot from the gas pedal, Pitt quickly surveyed the two Airbus A340-300 passenger and cargo planes parked in the center of the hangar. A Sno-cat with a train of flatbed cars was stretched beneath the cargo door of the first aircraft, the familiar wooden crates riding up inside the fuselage on a conveyor belt. Wolf Enterprise engineers and workers were climbing boarding steps at the other plane for the trip to the giant superships. Sitting off to one side was a sleek executive jet that was in the process of being refueled.

Pitt relaxed slightly at seeing no security guards. "What have we here?"

"Ah-ha!" Giordino tensed, seeing Pitt's leg stiffen as if he were trying to push the accelerator pedal through the floorboard. He raised a prudent eye over the instrument panel and groaned softly. "Are you going to do what I think you're going to do?"

"Once you drive in a demolition derby," said Pitt, with a diabolical gleam in his eyes, "you never get it out of your blood."

The reaction from everyone in the hangar at seeing the Snow Cruiser appear out of nowhere was the same as that of the others who had confronted it in the tunnel earlier. They all froze in pure astonishment, the expressions on their faces quickly turning to incomprehension and cold fear at seeing a red mechanical demon incarnate burst out of nowhere.

Pitt took less than three seconds to assess his route of destruction. It took the same amount of time for all to realize that his intentions were unmistakable. With a mind-set two notches beyond tenacious, he set a course across the ice floor of the hangar, as straight as the crow flies, toward the first Airbus. The aircraft sat high off the ground, but not high enough for the side fenders of the Snow Cruiser. The right front panel immediately below the side windows of the control cabin caught the aircraft eight feet inside the aft section of the port wing, crushing the ailerons and shredding the wingtip.

The cargo loaders and aircraft maintenance crew were galvanized into action and flung themselves clear as the leviathan struck the aircraft, pivoting it around at a ninety-degree angle as the tires on the landing gear skidded over the ice. They sprawled, desperately slipping and scrambling to get as far away as possible from the thundering titan gone mad. The only sounds they identified were the engines racing through the gear changes. Nothing else about the giant machine looked remotely familiar. But they briefly glimpsed the face of a heavily bandaged Pitt twisting the steering wheel back and forth, and Giordino pointing his Bushmaster menacingly out the side window. They'd seen more than enough to call for security guards, but their frantic appeal came much too late to stop the destruction.