"I'm always game for an adventure in gourmet dining," said Pitt. "Bring on the gaspar."
"I'm only going along with great trepidation," Giordino muttered.
"Too bad about the fortress being off-limits," said Pitt conversationally. "I hear the museum was worth a visit."
Aragon stiffened slightly and looked furtively through a window at El Castillo. "Si, senor, it is a pity you must miss it. But the government closed it down as too dangerous for tourists."
"Looks pretty sturdy to me," said Giordino.
Aragon shrugged. "All I know is what the police from Managua told me."
"Do its guards stay in town?" asked Pitt.
Aragon shook his head. "They set up a barracks inside the fortress and are rarely seen except when they are relieved by helicopter from Managua."
"None leave the fort, even for food, drink or pleasure?"
"No, senor. They do not socialize with us. Nor do they allow anyone within ten meters of the fence."
Giordino poured his bottle of beer into a glass. "First time I ever heard of a government keeping tourists out of a museum because it might fall down."
"Do you gentlemen wish to stay at the hotel tonight?" asked Aragon.
"No, thank you," answered Pitt. "I'm told there are rapids upriver and we'd like to pass through while it's still light."
"You shouldn't have a problem if you stay inside the channel. Boats rarely overturn in the rapids if people are careful. It's the crocodiles in calm water that present a problem to anyone who falls over the side."
"Does your restaurant serve steak?" Pitt inquired.
"Si, senor. Do you wish more to eat?"
"No, we'd like to take the meat with us for later. Once we pass through the rapids, my friend and I will camp onshore and cook dinner over a fire."
Aragon nodded. "Be sure and camp inland from the banks of the river or you might become food for a hungry crocodile."
"Feeding a croc wasn't exactly what I had in mind," Pitt said, with a broad smile.
Departing late in the afternoon, they cruised through the rapids above El Castillo without mishap until they were out of sight of the town. Seeing no other pangas but their own between bends in the river, they drove the Greek Angel onto the bank, raised the outboard motor and pulled it into the lush underbrush until it was completely hidden from all water traffic.
While it was still light, they found a narrow path that headed toward the town. Then they ate their sandwiches and relaxed and slept till after midnight. Moving cautiously along the path while using their nightscope to penetrate the night, they skirted the little houses and made their way into a thicket of bushes, where they lay now and studied the security surrounding the fortress, spotting and marking the TV security cameras in their minds.
A light drizzle began to fall and soon their thin clothes were soaked through. Standing in a rain in the tropics was like standing in a shower at home. The water temperature was as comfortable to the skin as if it had been preset on a faucet.
When ready, Pitt, followed by Giordino, climbed into a high jatoba tree that towered more than a hundred feet high with a trunk diameter of four feet. The tree stood within several feet of the fence around the fortress, and its lower limbs stretched far over the fence top that was circled with a razor-sharp spiral of steel. Throwing a looped rope around a thick branch ten feet above, Giordino climbed up onto a higher limb before crawling through the smaller branches until he was beyond the fence and twelve feet above the ground. There he paused and swept the ground below with the nightscope.
Using the rope, Pitt hauled his body upward with his hands while his feet walked the tree trunk. Reaching the limb, he crept through the branches until he was even with Giordino's booted feet. "Any sign of the guards and their dogs?" he whispered.
"The guards are lazy," Giordino replied. "They loosed the dogs to run by themselves."
"A wonder they haven't scented us by now."
"You spoke too soon. I see three of them staring in our direction. Oh, oh, here they come on the run."
Before the dogs began barking, Pitt reached into the knapsack on his back, grabbed the steaks from the restaurant and heaved them onto a ramp leading to the nearest bastion. They landed with a distinct plop sound that the dogs heard and homed in on.
"Are you sure this will work?" Giordino murmured.
"It always does in the movies."
"Now there's cheery assurance," Giordino groaned.
Pitt dropped down off the tree limb to the ground and stayed on his feet. Giordino followed, casting a wary eye on the dogs, who chewed their raw meat in happy delirium without paying the least attention to the two intruders.
"I may never doubt you again," Giordino said under his breath.
"I won't forget you said that."
Pitt led the way toward one of the stone ramps, using the night-scope to see when the nearest TV camera swung to its widest arc. When he signaled with a whistle, Giordino ran under the camera's blind side and sprayed the lens with black paint. Moving on, they paused outside the closed and darkened museum, listening for suspicious sounds. Muted voices could be heard over the ramparts inside the main courtyard, where the guards' temporary barracks had been constructed. They entered what was once a storeroom. The stonewalls were still solid, but the wooden beams and roof were long gone.
Pitt motioned toward a central turret that rose above the rest of the fort. It was built like a pyramid with the upper half sliced off at the middle. "If there is a vertical ventilator shaft from below, it has to come out there," he said softly.
"The only logical place," Giordino agreed. Then he cocked an ear. "What's that racket?"
Pitt paused, listening, his senses alert, his ears piercing the night. Then he nodded in the darkness. "That whirring sound must be coming from the ventilator fans."
Keeping in the darkened shadows, they climbed a narrow ramp of stones that protruded from the walls of the turret and ended at a small access door. A rush of cool air through the narrow opening struck them with nearly the force of a wind tunnel. Bending low against the draft, Pitt entered and found himself standing at the base of a large wire-mesh cage. The whirring noise from the fan blades beating the air below the mesh opening magnified and tore at their eardrums.
"Noisy devil," yelled Giordino.
"That's because we're right on top of it. Be a lot worse if it didn't have silencers installed. As it is, the noise is pretty well muted outside the turret."
"I didn't bargain for a gale-force wind," said Giordino, as he examined the thickness of the wire-mesh cover.
"The fans are designed to produce a computer-calculated volume of air at an efficient pressure."
"There you go again with the lecture. Don't tell me you took a basic course in tunnel construction."
"Have you forgotten the summer between semesters at the Air Force Academy when I worked in a silver mine in Leadville, Colorado?" retorted Pitt.
"I remember," said Giordino, smiling. "I spent my summer as a lifeguard in Malibu." Giordino peered through the wire mesh. A glow of light rose from the opening. He walked around the mesh until he found a bolt holding it to a latch. "Locked from the inside," he observed. "We'll need to cut through the mesh."
Pitt produced a small pair of wire cutters from his backpack. "I thought we might need these if we ran into barbwire."
Giordino held them up to the light from below. "They should do nicely. Now please stand back while the master creates an entrance."
It looked easy, but wasn't. Giordino was sweating rivers twenty-five minutes later when he finally cut a hole high and wide enough for them to crawl through. He handed the cutters back to Pitt, pulled the mesh apart and peered into the shaft. The square-cut ventilator shaft, acting as the passage for the expelled air from the tunnel far below, was fifteen feet wide. A circular metal tube filled one corner. This was the access shaft, with a ladder that seemed to vanish into a bottomless pit.
"For maintenance in case the ventil
ator system needs repair," Pitt volunteered loudly over the fan noise. "It also serves as an emergency exit for the mine workers should there be a fire or a roof collapse in the main tunnel."
Giordino entered the shaft feet first onto the lower rungs of the ladder. He paused and looked up at Pitt sourly. "I hope I won't regret this!" he shouted over the roar of the fans, as he began his descent.
Pitt was thankful the shaft was lit. After dropping down the ladder fifty feet, he paused and looked below. All he could see was the ladder stretching into infinity, like the tracks of a railroad. No sign of the bottom was visible.
He pulled out a paper towel from a pocket, tore it into two small pieces, wadded them up and stuffed them in his ears as plugs against the irritating noise level of the fans. Besides the main fan system, booster fans had been installed every hundred feet to maintain the required pressure to vent the tunnel to the surface.
After what seemed half a lifetime, and what Giordino estimated was a drop of five hundred feet, he stopped his descent and waved a hand. The bottom of the ladder was in view. Slowly, cautiously, he turned until he was upside-down. Then he crawled downward until his eyes could see under what was now the roof of a small control center that monitored and detected the gasses, carbon monoxide, temperature and fan system operations.
Pitt and Giordino had passed far below the main fan system and could now converse in low tones. Giordino raised up until he was on his feet again and spoke to Pitt, who had slid down the ladder beside him.
"What's the status?" Pitt asked softly.
"The ladder runs through a ventilator systems control center that sits about fifteen feet above the floor of the tunnel. A man and a woman are sitting at computer consoles. Luckily, they're facing away, with their backs to the ladder. We should be able to take them out before they know what hit them."
Pitt looked into Giordino's dark eyes, only inches away. "How do you want it?"
Giordino's lips parted in a conniving grin. "I'll take the man. You're better at incapacitating women than I am."
Pitt glared at him. "You big chicken."
They wasted no more time and dropped down the ladder into the control booth silently without being detected. The system operators--the man wearing black coveralls, the woman in white--were intent on monitoring their computers and did not see the reflection of their assailants in their screens until it was too late. Giordino came in from the side and slugged the man with a right hook to the jaw. Pitt opted for striking the back of the woman's neck just below her skull. Both went out with no more than slight moans.
Keeping unseen below the windows, Pitt pulled a roll of duct tape from his knapsack and tossed it to Giordino. "Bind them up while I remove their coveralls."
In less than three minutes the unconscious ventilation systems operators were bound and gagged in their underwear and rolled under counters out of sight from anyone passing by below. Pitt slipped on the black coveralls, which were a loose fit, while Giordino burst the seams of the white coveralls that came off the woman. They found matching hard hats on a shelf and put them on. Pitt casually carried his knapsack over one shoulder, while Giordino looked official with a clipboard and pencil. One after the other, they dropped down the ladder to the tunnel floor.
When they got their bearings and stared around their surroundings, Pitt and Giordino stood spellbound in awe, as they stared at the immense spectacle, their eyes narrowing under the glare of an unending array of lights.
This was no ordinary railroad tunnel. It was no railroad tunnel at all.
29
The horseshoe-shaped tunnel was far more immense than either he or Giordino had imagined. Pitt felt as though he was standing in a Jules Verne fantasy. He estimated the bore at fifty feet in diameter; far wider than any tunnel ever constructed. The diameter of the Chunnel that ran between France and England was twenty-four feet and the Seikan Tunnel that connected Honshu with Hokkaido was thirty-two.
The whirr of the ventilator fans was replaced with a buzzing sound that echoed up and down the tunnel. Above them, mounted on a series of steel beams, a huge conveyor belt traveled continuously toward the eastern end of the tunnel. Instead of rocks twelve to eighteen inches in size, the muck had been crushed almost to sand.
"There's the source of your brown crud," said Pitt. "They grind down the rock until it has the consistency of silt so it can be pumped through a pipe into the Caribbean."
A railroad track and a parallel concrete roadway ran beneath the conveyor belt. Pitt knelt and studied the rails and ties. "Electric-powered, like the subways of New York."
"Mind the third rail," warned Giordino. "No telling how much voltage is running through it."
"They must have generator substations every few miles to provide power."
"You going to put a penny on the track?" Giordino asked in jest.
Pitt stood and stared into the distance. "No way these tracks could handle high-speed two-hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour trains carrying cargo containers. The rails are not of superior quality and the metal ties are laid too far apart. On top of all that, standard railroad gauge between rails is four feet eight and a half inches. These measure about three feet, which makes it a narrow-gauge railroad."
"Laid as equipment support and supply transport for a tunnel-boring machine."
Pitt's eyebrows rose. "Where did you come up with that?"
"I read about TBMs in a book somewhere."
"You move to the head of the class. This tunnel was excavated by a boring machine, a big one."
"Maybe they intend to replace the tracks later," Giordino speculated.
"Why wait until the entire tunnel is dug? Tracklaying men and equipment should follow in the wake of the boring machine to save time." Pitt slowly shook his head pensively. "A tunnel this size wasn't built for train traffic. It must serve another purpose."
They turned as a large double-decker bus painted lavender silently passed, its driver waving. They turned away and acted as if they were discussing something on Giordino's clipboard as workers sitting inside, wearing different-colored jumpsuits and hard hats, passed by. All were wearing sunglasses. Pitt and Giordino also noted the Odyssey name and horse logo on the side of the bus. The driver slowed, not sure if they wanted a ride, but Pitt waved him on.
"Electric-powered," said Giordino.
"Eliminates carbon monoxide exhaust pollution."
Giordino walked over to a pair of empty battery-powered golf carts that looked like miniature sports cars. "Nice of them to provide us with transportation." He climbed behind the wheel. "Which way?"
Pitt thought a moment. "Let's follow the excavated muck on the conveyor belt. This may well be our only chance to confirm if that's the source of the brown crud."
The cavernous tunnel seemed to trail off forever. The road traffic looked to be restricted to transporting mine workers, while the narrow-gauged railroad carried only muck and cargo. The golf cart's panel held a speedometer, and Pitt clocked the speed of the conveyor belt. It was traveling at the rapid clip of twelve miles an hour.
Pitt turned his attention to the upper works of the tunnel. After the boring machine had passed, the miners had installed rock bolt support systems to strengthen the rock's natural tendency to reinforce itself. Then a thick lining of shotcrete or gunite was sprayed on the tunnel pneumatically at high velocity. Conveying the concrete for long distances would have been accomplished by booster pumps spaced from the entrance source to the recently excavated area behind the boring machine. This would have been followed by an injection of fluid grout under pressure to seal off leaks from groundwater. Besides ensuring water tightness from without, the shotcrete and grout would also improve the flow of fluid through the tunnel, a phenomenon that Pitt began to believe was a distinct possibility.
The overhead lights illuminated the tunnel so brilliantly it almost hurt the eyes. Both men could now understand why the workers in the bus had worn sunglasses against the glare. Almost as if they timed their actions, Pitt and Gi
ordino put on their own sunglasses.
An electric locomotive pulling several flatbed cars and carrying open crates of rock bolts passed, headed in the opposite direction toward the ongoing excavation. The train crew all waved at the two men in the golf cart, who responded by waving back.
"Everyone is real down-home friendly in these parts," remarked Giordino.
"Did you notice the men wear black jumpsuits and the women either white or green?"
"Specter must have lived a former life as an interior decorator."
"More like some sort of caste identification system," said Pitt.
"I'd cut off an ear before I wore lavender," muttered Giordino, suddenly becoming aware that he was covered in white. "I think I'm out of uniform."