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Crawling furiously, the two men sought cover behind one of the house-sized support columns. Their only advantage—surprise—was gone, and the defenders knew this subterranean world better than Juan and MacD, who’d only had a feverish examination of the schematic diagram.
To make matters worse, Juan spotted a low-light closed-circuit camera mounted atop a conveyor-belt support. The yard-wide belt ran chest high and vanished into the next room. He doubted this was the only camera, meaning Bahar and Smith had eyes everywhere. It began to pan as it searched for them. Disabling the camera would be the same as being spotted by it, so the two men shuffled over on their backsides until they were directly below it.
“Ideas?” MacD asked while bullets slammed into the stone just feet from their heads.
“All these rooms link together in a large circle. Our best bet is to stay ahead of them and hope we can buy ourselves enough time at the end to snag the elevator.”
“They’ll see us coming,” MacD pointed out.
“Take out the cameras.”
Cabrillo rolled around the corner on his belly to lay down cover fire before springing to his feet and taking off in the opposite direction. Wherever he could, he smashed the lightbulbs strung along the ceiling, but there were really too many of them to completely darken the mine. It was the cameras that were the priority. He could only hope that their being disabled wasn’t showing up on the security monitors in any particular sequence.
Thick walls of solid salt separated the enormous rooms. The portals between them were large enough so that heavy mining equipment could be driven through alongside the big conveyor belt. At each, they paused momentarily to see if an ambush had been laid for them. They also had to watch their backs because at least three guards were in hot pursuit.
Looking through one of the portals into the next room, Cabrillo saw that the miners had left a tracked excavator just inside. The machine had a thick cable spool on its back bumper to feed it electricity and a hydraulic drum on the front that could move up and down as its carbide teeth tore into the rock-salt face. He grabbed MacD and took up a position behind it.
“We need all three,” he said, and they waited.
Moments later two gunmen wearing street clothes entered the room. Both eyed the excavator warily. One stayed by the gaping opening, covering his partner, as the other cautiously approached. Cabrillo crouched lower, praying the third pursuer showed himself before this guy got much closer.
The gunman moved around in a wide arc, his AK held high on his shoulder. It was a stance he’d seen American Special Forces adopt, but this firing position worked best with the lighter-caliber weapons those soldiers used.
The third gunman’s shadow oozed into the room as he made a slow approach. It was close enough. Juan and MacD popped up and fired. The closest gunman got off one shot, but the recoil made his rifle slip up and over his shoulder. MacD put him down with a three-round burst while Cabrillo stitched his covering partner across the chest. The third shooter tried to run, but Juan came around the mining machine, took aim, and shot him in the back. He had no qualms about gunning down a coward like that.
What concerned him now was the fourteen minutes gone from their half-hour deadline and the fact that they were nowhere near securing the crystals.
A fourth gunman he hadn’t seen suddenly opened fire from across the echoing room, blowing shards of salt off the wall to Cabrillo’s left. Bits got into his eyes as he ducked for cover, stinging them mercilessly. The need to pack in so many explosives meant neither of them had bothered with a canteen, so he had no water to flush them
out.
With MacD covering him, Juan wasted precious moments wiping at his eyes in order to see again.
Lawless plucked his lone grenade, pulled the pin, and heaved it like a major-league pitcher. The deadly orb skittered along the ground after completing its flat arc and came to rest just around the corner from where the guard had taken cover. He couldn’t have placed it any better. He grabbed Juan’s arm to guide him like a blind man as the grenade exploded. The salt column was just crumbly enough for the explosives to blow a chunk out of the pillar’s corner and riddle the guard with shrapnel.
Tears streaming down his cheeks but his vision steadily improving, Cabrillo continued on through the underground labyrinth with Lawless at his side. They hit the ambush moments later.
They’d just passed on to another room when they came under scathing autofire from at least six rifles. The only way they’d gotten out of it unscathed was that one of the shooters fired at their shadow before they’d fully exposed themselves. The thick wall absorbed dozens of rounds as the gunmen poured on the fire.
“They’re going to pin us here while more men come around from behind,” Juan panted, his heart pounding in his chest.
He looked around. Their rear and flanks were fully exposed.
MacD fired a few blind rounds to let the terrorists know they’d survived the trap.
Cabrillo tossed his rifle up onto the conveyor belt and used its support girder to hoist himself after it. The belt itself was made of wire mesh and industrial rubber. When the mine had been shuttered, the salt that was already on its way out from the working faces had been left on it in a continuous pile of rubble.
Lawless saw what he was doing and climbed aboard alongside him.
“We need to be quick and silent,” Juan warned.
He fired off another burst from his REC7, which drew a thunderous fusillade. It was when the gunmen were hosing everything in sight that the pair made a desperate scramble along the salt piled on top of the conveyor belt. It was treacherous going, and any mistake would likely kick salt over the edge, giving away their position and inviting certain death.
Unseen, they moved like rats scurrying just above where the gunmen sought cover behind some more abandoned mining equipment. The rate of fire eventually slowed, but the echoes continued to clamor through the room, effectively deafening everyone.
Slithering and crawling, never loosening their grips on their rifles, Cabrillo and Lawless passed unseen through the enemy line. One of the gunmen questioned loudly in Arabic about why the Americans had stopped firing back.
“Because they lack courage,” another answered, and touched off another three-round burst.
