Hot Ice (40 page)

"I do love a challenge." Grinning at the big silver beauty, Taylor reached for her tools. "Okay, people, back up and give me some room."

Hunt knew that every safe had a fundamental weakness. It had to be accessible to a locksmith or to those authorized to open it. In this case, Morales had been his normal paranoid, wily self. He'd chosen the best safe on the market, then efficiently dispatched everyone who had anything to do with its invention, sale, and installation.

"Drill through the face?" Fisk asked Taylor as they both stood there looking at the door.

"Nope. I brought my diamond-bit punch rod—but it's not going to fly. They've got a heavy-duty cobalt plate back there. Doing it that way would take forever and a day, and more drill bits than we have access to."

"There's no side access, so no drilling that way either," Fisk told her, covetously eyeing the tools she was laying out on the ground. "How about the plasma cutters—or that thermic lance over there?"

"No, no, and nope." A wide smile lit her face. "We're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way."

"Walk me through what you'll be doing," he instructed calmly.

"First we determine the contact points," she told him, oblivious to everything else as she gently ran her fingers over and around the dial face in a loverlike caress. "The drive cam has a notch in it like the wheels in the wheel pack." She crouched down to look at it from a different angle, talking almost to herself.

"Notch is sloped down to allow the lever and fence to pass through… Want this, Francis?" she asked, handing Fisk her own earpiece so he could listen with her.

"When the nose of the level makes contact with the slope—left and right—we'll hear a small click."

She kept quiet as Fisk listened, face set, eyes closed. "Seven left."

Taylor wrote it down.

"Two right."

"Each of the numbers has a corresponding wheel," Taylor whispered. "When Francis is done, we'll figure out how many wheels are in the wheel pack. Then—Sorry. Was I talking too loudly?"

"No," Fisk muttered impatiently. "But I can't hear a fu—damn thing." He rose and handed her the stethoscope. "You try."

Hunt and the rest of his team stood back. There was nothing they could do to help. Fisk and Taylor were on their own. Right now, the only job the five men could perform was keeping the lights focused and handing the two safecrackers what they asked for as they guarded their backs.

Hunt felt like an E.R. nurse.

Taylor and Fisk worked hard for the better part of five hours. If they hadn't all been wearing the LockOut suits, they'd be sweating profusely. It was hard work. Yet Taylor showed no indication of exhaustion or impatience at the tedium of what she was doing. Instead, her lovely features were lit with an inner light and her eyes sparkled like brilliant blue-white diamonds.

She might not feel the urgency, Hunt thought—he and his people made sure she didn't—but he sure as bloody hell did. Even the most sophisticated and complex locking mechanisms had six or less numbers in a wheel pack. They'd penetrated seven of them already.

Taylor told them she suspected there might be as many as eleven. "Eight," she whispered triumphantly as she penetrated another. Fisk sat on the floor beside her, graphing each new discovery on a special wristwatch computer. They'd taken turns, but it was clear Taylor had more experience, and considerably more manual dexterity, so Fisk had volunteered to graph and learn.

After this many hours at close quarters, Hunt knew every inch of the surrounding area. The banded ironstone of the walls overlaid dolomites and limestone with weathered yellow kimberlite streaked with unweathered blue, indicating what had previously been a classic diamondiferous kimberlite pipe.

A track inlaid in the center of the hard-packed floor indicated a mechanized vehicle of some sort used to bring the diamonds to the surface in the heyday of the mine.

"Nine," Taylor said triumphantly, her voice less than a whisper.

"Water. Drink." Hunt handed her a canteen. As she took it from him without looking up, he noticed the fine tremor in her hands. Not exhaustion, although God only knew she must be. No, there was a feverish energy that pulsed around her as she slugged the water, then absently set the container down beside her as she went back to work.

She had a remarkable ear and infinite patience. It was a pleasure watching her work. No wonder she'd been so successful at what she did. Fisk, now standing beside her, was spellbound by her expertise.

"Ten." Her shoulders slumped and she rested her head against the metal door. "We have the contact area." She glanced up at Fisk, her partner in crime.

"That's it?" Viljoen asked.

Fisk snorted. "Hardly. Now she dials the number on the lock that's in an opposite position from the numbers on the contact area."

"Want to park the wheels?" Taylor asked Fisk.

"Nah. You earned it. Nobody move until she gets it," Fisk warned.

"No. Give me a sec. I need a break. I want to walk around a bit." Taylor straightened and rotated her head on her neck. A faint dew of perspiration gleamed on her skin, making it look like alabaster.

"Want to get some fresh air?" Hunt asked, moving behind her to rest his hands on her narrow shoulders. He started to knead the tense muscles in her neck.

"No. I want to—God that feels good. Thank you. I want to get this sucker open before I'm too old to care. I'll take another slug of water—thanks, Daan…" She gulped from the container, then handed it back,"… then get back to it."

"What does '
parking the wheel'
mean?" Bishop demanded. Hunt knew the other man meant. What did it mean in
time
?

"
Reader's Digest
version? This is a three-hundred-number dial. Big by any standards. The contact area is forty, so I'll park the dial at… What do you think, Francis? Ninety?" He nodded. "Yeah. That's what I thought too. When I turn the dial to the right, the drive cam will reengage to begin spinning the wheels from that position. So every time the dial passes ninety, the drive pin will click as each wheel in the wheel pack—Your eyes are glazing. Never mind. I have to count clicks now, so no noise."

Another hour and seventeen minutes passed before Taylor straightened and stepped away from the door. "We're in."

"Good job," Hunt told her.

"
Good job
?" She raised her eyebrows. "That wasn't a good job. That was a masterful job. It was brilliant job." She grinned, pleased with herself. As well she should be.

"Am I the best, or am I the best? I'm taking a well-deserved rest. You guys pull this puppy open, I'm too weak and feeble."

There was nothing weak or feeble about her, he thought. Jesus. She was magnificent. "You are, without a shadow of a doubt,
the
best," Hunt assured her as Tate and Bishop pulled the heavy door open.

The second the thirty-six-inch-thick titanium door broke away from the seal of the doorframe, a deafening, thunderous roar filled the tunnel. The force of the noise yanked the five-ton door out of their hands. It slammed open against the rock hard enough to dislodge enormous chunks of limestone from the walls and ceiling.

Hunt threw himself at Taylor, taking her down to the ground. The safe door trembled like tinfoil as the noise blasted through the opening. He covered Taylor's head with his arms, and buried his face in her hair, as the
sturm und drang
continued unabated.

Level Two.

Dante's Unforgiving Winds.

Chapter Forty-three

Dante's Inferno

Level two

Hunt quickly gave Taylor a set of earplugs from his belt pack, installed his own earplugs, then shone his Maglite into the cavern through the open door. Even with the heavy-density earplugs, the sound of the four-turbo diesel engine in the floor was still unbearably loud. He glanced at Tate for a reading of the noise level. The other man held up his wrist PDA for Hunt and the others to see: 162dBA.

Logarithmic scales. The dBA of a jet taking off was 140. Bloody hell.

Hunt shone his light around the walls. There were no acoustic materials in the approximately 300-by-300-foot cavern. Morales had indeed produced his own infernal hurricane.

Taylor stepped back behind them so that he and his team would have room to ascertain what they were dealing with. Fortunately, T-FLAC had a simple and expedient nonverbal form of communication. With hand gestures, the conversation was fast and furious.

The only way to go was across.

But across to
what
?

Six flashlights strobed the circumference of the cavern. Small apertures in the walls appeared black. Some looked to be as small as a foot in circumference, others some six or eight feet in diameter. One of them would lead to where they wanted to go. The others…

Hunt picked up an oil-stained chammy from Taylor's bag of tricks, still spread at his feet, and tossed it through the doorway into the vertical air tunnel as a wind-drift indicator.

Sucked in, it swirled upward in a dizzying spiral of blurred motion, then flattened against the ceiling some hundred feet above their heads. And stayed there.

Jesus bloody Christ.

He did a quick calculation on his own PDA, gave a low, soundless whistle, then turned it to the others. The propeller was spinning at a hair over 250 mph.

They'd all had flight training, all done thousands of hours of parachuting and freestyle and 3-D dives, so they knew the correct body positions to navigate. But those drops had been done at a minimum height of four thousand feet, giving them time to control the fall rate; 7,200 was safer. This was only three
hundred
feet. Far too low to maneuver. Safely or otherwise.

And those jumps had been with proper equipment. All right, with damn improper equipment, depending where they were—but this—fuck it to hell—this was suicide. Terminal velocity alone would kill them before they had a chance to go belly-down. Hunt felt a clutch of sheer undulated fear as he watched the speed and ferocity of those five spinning blades.

First they had to establish which of the openings they wanted. With sign language, they eliminated a dozen. Fisk did a quick, rough schematic on his wrist PDA as they worked, eliminating then adding back in when Hunt thought a particular hole large enough for a man to get through.

Then, how in the bloody hell to cross the uncovered prop blades without getting sucked in and chopped to pieces before they were swept upward on the airstream?

Only one way to find out…

Coetzee indicated that he'd go first for recon. Hunt nodded.

The smaller man flung himself from the door opening and was immediately caught by the blast of air and swept upward in a dizzying spin. He managed to spread his arms and legs wide. But it was impossible for him to control his movements enough to stabilize himself. He tumbled and spun, slamming into the walls again and again with bruising force.

Taylor came alongside Hunt, slipping her arm about his waist as she too watched. Hunt would've given his left nut to have her back in Zurich right now.

Hell, both nuts.

High above them, Coetzee's face was bleeding. He'd gone nose-first into a jagged outcropping of limestone and couldn't even wipe the blood from his eyes because the wind wouldn't allow that kind of finite movement. He tried to indicate which way he was going, but then the wind would spin him off in another direction.