Chapter 3
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Flint hit the service corridor door at a dead run. He slammed the push bar with both hands and burst through into bare concrete and fluorescent floodlights.
The alarm’s deep rhythmic pulse was louder here, amplified by the concrete.
The escape tunnel was a quarter mile ahead. Then the hillside. Then the open field.
The main entrance was sealed behind biometric locks and blast doors, but Kessler had never expected anyone to find the escape tunnel. He’d fortified the front and left the back door on a six-digit code. That mistake was about to cost him.
“Where are the guards?” he asked.
“Split up,” Gaspar replied. “Two still with the guests. One headed for the study. Another is moving your way.”
Flint kept running along the sixty yards of bare concrete, exposed overhead pipes, and buzzing fluorescent tubes in wire cages. His boots pounded the floor.
A guard headed his way, Gaspar said. To secure the exits. He knew the tunnel existed and he was moving to cut it off.
Flint neared the end of the service corridor. The door was twenty feet ahead. Beyond it, the service corridor became the escape tunnel. Then, a quarter mile to the hillside exit.
The tunnel door opened before he reached it.
A guard came through fast. He saw Flint and raised his weapon to fire.
But Flint was already inside the guard’s reach. He’d closed the last ten feet at a sprint while the door was still swinging open.
Flint drove his left forearm into the guard’s right wrist, deflecting the gun toward the wall.
The guard’s finger squeezed the trigger, but the shot went wide.
The deafening gunshot bounced around the concrete corridor and the muzzle flash was bright enough to leave an afterimage across Flint’s vision.
The guard absorbed the impact and tried to bring the weapon back on target. Flint stepped inside the guard’s stance and drove his right elbow into the man’s jaw.
The guard’s head snapped sideways. His grip on the pistol loosened for half a second.
Half a second was enough.
Flint grabbed the slide of the pistol with his left hand and twisted. The weapon clattered to the concrete floor and skidded under a pipe rack.
The guard swung a heavy right fist toward Flint’s temple.
Flint ducked under the punch and drove his shoulder into the guard’s midsection.
The bigger man staggered backward through the doorway and into the tunnel. His boots caught the edge of the rubber matting and he stumbled.
Flint hit him again, a hard right to the kidney, and the air left the man’s lungs with a sharp grunt.
Quickly, the guard grabbed the front of Flint’s jacket and pulled him in close for a strong, solid headbutt. The blow caught Flint above the left eye. His vision blurred. Pain flared across his forehead.
Flint drove his knee into the guard’s groin.
The guard folded forward, releasing his grip on Flint’s jacket.
Flint caught the back of the guard’s head with both hands and drove a knee into his face. The guard went limp and dropped to the rubber matting.
Flint stepped over the guard and sprinted through the tunnel door.
His left eye was swelling where the headbutt had caught him. Blood flowed from a cut above his eyebrow and into the corner of his eye. He wiped it with his sleeve and kept moving.
“I’m in the tunnel,” he said.
Gaspar replied, “Second guard in the study. On his radio, reporting the theft. Kessler is screaming.”
“What about the others?”
“Party guests are freaking out. Those two guards have all they can handle right now,” Gaspar said. “But they won’t stay occupied forever.”
The tunnel stretched ahead. Familiar amber emergency lights and rubber matting on the floor. Twenty feet wide and twelve feet tall, built for armored convoys and two hundred soldiers evacuating at a run.
Flint dashed through as quickly as possible. The pack bounced against his hip with each stride. He steadied it with one hand and ran harder.
At roughly a hundred yards from the hillside, the tunnel curved. Flint leaned into it without slowing. The rubber matting gripped his boots through the turn. He came out of the curve and ran full out.
The blast door had swung shut. The lockdown alarm had released it from the retracted position and the pneumatic closer had done the rest. Several tons of steel-reinforced concrete now blocked the tunnel.
The door was closed.
But the latch had not engaged.
On the way in, Flint had knelt beside the door frame and pressed a hardened steel shim into the lower latch bolt receiver, machined to fill the slot where the bolt seated when the door closed.
With the shim in place, the gravity-biased latching system would try to drop the travel bar and drive the bolt home, but the bolt would strike steel instead of engaging the frame.
The door would rest against its frame. Touching but unlatched.
It was the oldest trick in the trade. Military personnel had been defeating blast door locks since the day they were installed. Missile launch officers left them unlocked during sleep shifts. Maintenance crews dogged them open for convenience.
The latching mechanism on a blast door was designed to withstand a nuclear shockwave. It was not designed to thwart a piece of steel machined to the right dimensions.
Flint put both hands flat against the blast door and pushed.
The door resisted for a moment due to inertia and mass.
Then it moved.
Slowly at first and then gathering momentum as the hydraulic hinges took the weight and the door swung open on its arc.
Flint squeezed through the widening gap and kept running.
Behind him, the blast door swung to a stop against the tunnel wall, still unlatched. Still open. Anyone following would walk right through. But by then, Flint would be gone.
The tunnel narrowed as it approached the hillside exit. The temperature dropped. The air lost its filtered sterility and smelled like earth and standing water.
The steel door at the end of the tunnel had been electronically sealed when the lockdown was triggered. A red indicator light on the interior panel confirmed.
Beside the keypad, set into the concrete wall at waist height, was a steel handle painted red. Emergency manual release. A mechanical override, separate from the electronic system.
Every building code on earth required that exit doors be operable from the inside during an emergency. The Soviets had built it into the original design, and Kessler’s renovation had preserved it.
The handle connected to a mechanical linkage that physically retracted the locking bolt regardless of what the electronics commanded.
Flint grabbed the handle and pulled.
The mechanism resisted. Steel ground against steel as the manual linkage fought the electronic lock.
The mechanical system was designed to win this fight. Which it did. The bolt retracted. The door swung open.
Cold night air hit his face. The smell of wet grass and damp earth replaced the sterile underground air. Wind moved through the trees above him. From far behind, he could hear the faint pulse of the alarm, muffled by sixty feet of earth and concrete.
He stepped out into the drainage channel. Standing water splashed under his boots. The hillside rose around him, dark and quiet.
He settled the night vision device down over his eyes and the world turned pale green. The tree line was thirty feet up the slope.
“I’m out,” he said.
“Guards are still inside. The one you put down is moving again. He’s on his radio. They’ll figure out which direction you went, but the blast door is standing open, and they’ll waste time trying to understand why the latch didn’t hold. You’ve got a few minutes.”
Flint pulled the hillside door closed behind him. It locked automatically. Anyone following from inside would need to use the same manual release he’d just pulled. They’d figure it out. He’d be gone by then.
He climbed the slope through the undergrowth, retracing the path he’d cleared the night before. The brambles caught at his pack strap. He pushed through and reached the tree line.
He looked south toward the surface buildings. Lights came on everywhere. The parking area was lit by security floods. Staff and guests came to the surface to find out what was happening.
Flint turned north and ran across the open field ahead of him. His muscles ached. The cut above his eye had stopped bleeding but his left eye was swollen to a slit. The watch was secure in its case, the case secure in his pack, the pack bouncing against his bruised hip.
“Gaspar, tell Drake I’m on the way.”
“Already done.”
Half a mile north of the property, beyond a second tree line and a narrow country road, a grass airstrip served a local flying club.
Flint had walked the strip three days ago at dawn and measured it.
Three thousand feet of flat, well-drained turf.
Short by commercial standards. More than enough for the Pilatus.
He’d set out portable infrared runway markers along both edges of the strip before midnight. Battery-powered LED units that were invisible to the naked eye but clearly visible through night vision equipment.
Drake would use his goggles and landing lights to put the Pilatus down on a grass strip he’d never seen before, in the dark, guided by GPS coordinates and the kind of skill acquired over years of putting aircraft into places aircraft weren’t meant to go.
Flint crossed the country road and saw the Pilatus sitting at the far end of the grass strip. A dark shape against the darker tree line. The navigation lights were off. The engines were running. He could hear the low whine of the turbofans as Drake brought the power up.
He ran to the aircraft. The airstair was down. He took the steps two at a time and ducked into the cabin.
Drake’s voice came from the cockpit. “You look terrible.”
Flint drew the stairs up and secured the door. “Go,” he said as he joined Drake up front and slid into the co-pilot’s seat.
The Pilatus surged forward on the grass strip, engines building to full power. The landing gear hammered across the uneven turf. Flint braced himself as the aircraft accelerated.
Drake used two thirds of the grass strip before the plane’s nose lifted. A hundred yards later, the wheels left the ground.
The Pilatus climbed steeply into the dark sky, banking north and away from the property.
Flint looked out the window. The bunker’s surface buildings were a cluster of lit rectangles growing smaller by the second.
He reached into his pack and removed the padded case. He held the watch in his palm.
The pink gold caught a faint glow of the cockpit instruments. The movement was still running. Eight hundred and twenty-three components, keeping time the way they had for almost two centuries.
He closed the case and leaned his head back against the seat.
“Head home?” Drake asked through the headset.
“Yeah,” Flint replied.
“We’ll need two fuel stops, but we’ll get there,” Drake said.
The Pilatus leveled off and turned northwest. Dawn was a thin line of orange on the horizon ahead of them. Flint closed his eyes.