According to the Armorer’s chron, it was exactly six o’clock when the narrow ravine they traveled opened into a canyon. Sheer walls rose to nearly a hundred feet on either side, and they were grooved with deep horizontal lines, here and there forming ledges where the softer layers of strata had been eroded away.
The canyon floor was less than two hundred feet wide, and it wended off to the right, to a cave entrance. The opening was a lopsided triangle, twenty or so feet tall, fifty in width. Boulders were strewn all around, except for an unnaturally flat clearing immediately in front of the yawning black cleft carved into the canyon wall. was about four hundred yards away.
Carefully J.B. steered the dune buggy close to the wall, beneath an overhanging ledge and behind an outcropping. It would be shielded from Hellstrom’s sight if he came down the canyon, and from any eyes inside the cave. The stony floor was too hard to take their tire treads, so they couldn’t be tracked that way.
After turning off the engine, J.B. turned to Fleur. “Is the front way the only way in?”
She shrugged. “As far as I know.”
Krysty was awake now, dragging a hand over her eyes. “You sure this is the place, J.B.?”
“Hell, no, I’m not sure of anything,” he replied gruffly. “But its location fits the general coordinates we saw, and unless somebody can prove otherwise, I’m going to assume this is the right place. Anybody got an objection?”
No one did. Disembarking, J.B. scanned their surroundings. Because Hellstrom had mentioned beetles guarding the place, a frontal penetration of the cave was out of the question. He saw a rough but scalable natural staircase curving up thirty or forty feet from the canyon floor and swerving over and down to a point directly beside the cave entrance. After a brief discussion, they decided to climb it.
As they headed up, J.B. was struck by the brooding majesty of the place; he could almost understand why the Indians believed a supernatural power guarded the Black Hills. The canyon was totally silent, the only sounds the grating of their feet on rock, their labored breathing and the occasional murmured word. The towering rampart walls seemed subtly charged with menace. Something eerie and uncanny existed here.
They had scaled perhaps half of the staircase’s length, cautiously approaching a projecting granite slab they would have to squirm around, when Jak tapped J.B.’s shoulder.
The youth was peering intently at the canyon’s opposite wall. “Hear something,” he whispered.
“Like what?” J.B. whispered back.
A splitting crack shattered the silence, and a bullet sang past J.B.’s ear, bouncing off the cliff face behind him.
“Like that,” Jak said calmly.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ryan could only judge the direction of the small elevator by the rising and falling sensation in the pit of his stomach.
First it descended, then smoothly switched to travel along a horizontal plane. Doug maintained a smug smile throughout, as if he expected Ryan to be impressed to the point of awe. The one-eyed man kept his face impassive, once sighing with impatience.
“Don’t try anything, Cawdor,” Doug warned. He touched his mastoid bone behind his right ear, then a spot on the base of his throat. “I’m wired for sound. Got a communic implanted in me. Mess with me and I’ll h an armed squad waiting to blow your head off.”
“Why did you let something like that be sewn up inside of you?”
Doug frowned, as if he had never contemplated the question before. “So I can be contacted when the Commander needs me. Why else?”
“Yeah, right,” Ryan muttered. “Why else.”
The doors slid open on yet another stretch of alloy-paneled corridor. The Commander was there to meet them. He greeted Ryan with a bleak smile that didn’t indicate friendliness. He looked at the man’s gray eyes and thought again of ice. There was no malice in them, but nothing else either. The Commander had gone beyond emotions; either they were frozen out of him, or he had never had them. There was no human warmth about him, probably not even in his blood.
In the brighter light of the corridor, Ryan saw faint pink lines on the smooth-skinned face that looked like old surgical scars.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121