The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

orders to follow if none of them made it. The only real priority now—”
    A sound cut him off: a violent, concussive bass wave, like a shotgun blast amplified many times over. It came from the chamber four hundred feet above, and echoed down the shaft in strange harmonics that set the metal stairs vibrating. Everyone looked up. They listened as the reverberations faded.
    Only silence followed.
    Travis thought of the men with the tape measure and the hammer, getting a sense of the steel’s bulk.
    “They’re trying to blow the door,” he said.
    “Who are they?” Dyer said. “Private sector guys?”
    Travis nodded. It occurred to him that, until now, Dyer had been entirely unaware of any hostile presence outside the mine. Having come in the back entrance, he’d encountered none of them.
    Now as Dyer took the information into account, his gaze seemed to dart back and forth over nothingness in front of him. The look of someone considering a large number of variables and making a fast decision. He jerked his head to indicate the tunnel leading away off the drop shaft, back in the direction he’d come from.
    “This way,” he said. “Right now.”
    The tunnel wasn’t as dark as it’d seemed at first glance, against the brighter mercury lamps in the vertical run. There were dim orange lights here, widely spaced, and after a few seconds Travis found his eyes adjusting. In the same short time, Dyer picked up the pace to just under a sprint, cursing softly under his breath.
    “This was supposed to be the one place they wouldn’t know about,” he said. “That’s why it was the rendezvous point.”
    “They knew about it hours ago,” Travis said. “They even had the door combo.”
    He described the dream, leaving nothing out. He included their own speculation that Garner was still alive, and that the dream had been real—seen through the eyes of someone held captive with him, and sent to Travis by way of an unknown entity.
    If any of it threw Dyer, he didn’t show it. He seemed about to reply when another thudding blast made them all flinch and stutter-step.
    It hadn’t come from the upright shaft behind them.
    It’d come from the darkness far ahead.

Chapter Thirty-Two
    They came to a stop just inside one of the orange pools of light. Travis studied Dyer’s face and was surprised by the stress it showed, even taking the circumstances into account. Dyer didn’t strike him as a man prone to fearing for his own safety, yet at the moment he looked deeply afraid.
    It crossed Travis’s mind that he himself had given no thought to escaping this place, until they’d set off a minute ago. All his focus, at first, had been on getting inside, and then it’d shifted to reaching the bottom of the mine and figuring out what to do there. He supposed that on some level he hadn’t really expected to make it back out.
    But Dyer wanted out. That much was obvious. And it really didn’t look as though he was afraid for himself. There was more to it. A lot more, Travis thought. A missile commander in some bunker under South Dakota, with a launch order in hand, might look as tense as Dyer did right now.
    The man turned back and forth, staring in both of the tunnel’s directions, as if willing either unseen exit to become viable again.
    “Christ,” he whispered.
    “They’re not inside yet,” Travis said. “The explosives they’ve used so far are nowhere near big enough to get through those doors.”
    He imagined the men outside were using whatever small-scale stuff they’d already had with them, stored in one of the vehicles like the gas masks had been.
    “They’ve got Holt on speed dial,” Dyer said. “They can chopper in whatever they need, from wherever’s closest. They’ll have the doors down in half an hour.”
    His eyes tracked over their three MP5s but dismissed them in about a second. He paced to the wall and leaned his forehead into it, thinking hard but getting nowhere.
    “I was told there’s a residence at the top of the shaft,” he said.
    “There is,” Travis said.
    “Anything in there we can use to set a trap? Gas lines to the stove or dryer?”
    “Both electric.”
    Dyer went back to thinking.
    “What’s in the Breach’s chamber?” Travis said. “Other than the Breach. Is there any equipment? Anything big? Anything useful as a weapon?”
    “Wouldn’t think so,” Dyer said, “given what Garner told me.”
    “Let’s see for ourselves,” Travis said.
    They were three flights