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"It's all so crazy," said Pat, staring dazedly at the dead bikers. "What did he mean, we were ìnvolved with matters far beyond our comprehension'?"
Pitt shrugged. "That's for others to decide. The question in my mind is who sent them? Who do they represent? Beyond that, I'm only a marine engineer who is damp and cold and wants to find a thick Colorado prime rib medium rare and a glass of tequila."
"For a marine engineer," said Ambrose, grinning, "you're pretty handy with a gun."
"It doesn't take virtuosity to shoot a man from behind," Pitt came back cynically.
"What do we do with him?" inquired Marquez, pointing at the biker Pitt had clubbed senseless.
"We've no rope to tie him up, so we'll take his boots. He won't get far in bare feet through the mine tunnels."
"You want to leave him?"
"No sense in hauling an inert body around. Chances are, by the time we notify the sheriff and he sends his deputies down here, the killer will still be unconscious." Then Pitt paused and asked, "Have any of you ridden motorcycles?"
"I rode a Harley for ten years," answered Marquez.
"And I have an old Honda CBX Super Sport that belonged to my dad," Pat volunteered.
"Do you ride it?"
"Rode it all through college. I still hit the roads with it on weekends."
Pitt looked at Pat with newfound respect. "So you're an old leather-crotch, hard-in-the-saddle woman."
"You got it," she said proudly.
Then he turned to Ambrose. "And you, Doc?"
"Never sat on a motorcycle in my life. Why do you ask?"
"Because we've got what look like three perfectly good Suzuki RM125 supercross bikes, and I see no reason why we can't borrow them and ride out of the mine."
Marquez's teeth showed in a wide
smile. "I'm with you."
"I'll wait here until the sheriff shows up," said Ambrose. "The rest of you get going. I don't want to spend any more time with a live killer and two dead men than I have to."
"I don't like leaving you here alone with this killer, Doc. I'd prefer that you ride behind me until we're out of here."
Ambrose was firm. "Those bikes don't look like they were meant to haul passengers. I'm damned if I'll ride on one. Besides, you'll be traveling over rail tracks, making it unstable as hell."
"Have it your way," said Pitt, giving in to the obstinate anthropologist.
Pitt crouched and removed the P-10 automatics from the bodies. He was anything but a born killer, but he showed little remorse. Only a minute earlier, these men had been intent on murdering three innocent people whom they had never met-- an act he could never have allowed to happen under any circumstances.
He handed one of the guns to Ambrose. "Stay at least twenty feet away from our friend, and stay alert if he so much as blinks." Pitt also gave Ambrose his dive light. "The batteries should last until the sheriff comes."
"I doubt if I could bring myself to shoot another human," Ambrose protested, but his voice came with a cold edge.
"Don't look upon these guys as human. They're cold-blooded executioners who could slit a woman's throat and eat ice cream afterward. I warn you, Doc, if he looks cross-eyed at you, brain him with a rock."
The Suzukis were still idling in neutral, and it took them less than a minute to figure out the shift, brake, and throttle controls. With a farewell wave to Ambrose, Pitt roared off first. There was no room for the machines to move between the outer rails and the walls of the tunnel, not without scraping the handgrips on the rough granite. Pitt kept his wheels in the center of the rail tracks, closely followed by Pat and Marquez. Bouncing over the rail ties with rigid suspensions rattled their teeth and made for uncomfortable riding. Pat felt as if her insides were being shaken around by a laundromat dryer. Pitt found the trick was to find the proper speed that gave the least vibration. It worked out to twenty-five miles an hour, a speed that might have seemed slow and safe on a paved road but was quite dangerous inside a narrow mine tunnel.
The hardrock acoustics made the exhaust blast echo in their ears. The beams from the headlights hopped up and down, striking the rails and overhead timbers like strobe lights. He narrowly missed an ore car that was sitting on the tracks and partially protruding from an intersecting tunnel. After riding up the gentle grade of a lift shaft, they reached the upper level to a mine that was labeled "The Citizen" on Pitt's directional computer. Pitt rolled to a stop where the tunnel met another at a fork and consulted the tiny monitor.
"Are we lost?" Pat queried above the rattle from the exhaust pipes.
