The darkness transformed the already oppressive confines of the mine chamber into a tomb. Despite Stone’s warning, Kasey felt paralyzed by the sudden weight of so much impenetrable lightlessness.
Then the chamber exploded with gunfire.
The heat of incoming rounds creased the air above her and she threw herself flat on the floor. Her training overcame the inertia of conscious thought; her pistol found its way into her hand and before she knew what she was doing, she was firing at muzzle flashes just a few yards away.
She could not tell if she was hitting anything, but as her mind caught up with what her body was automatically doing, she realized that her answering fire might well be giving her position away to the Dominion gunmen. She let go of the trigger and rolled sideways, into the embrace of darkness where she bumped against something and felt it move.
Avery?
Shouting down the irrational fears that would, she knew, become a self-fulfilling prophecy if she did not master them, she reached out with her free hand and found what she thought was a leg. She groped her way up, finding a hand—definitely Avery—and then dragged the other woman away from the incessant gunfire, toward what she hoped was the back wall of the chamber, where she knew a tunnel led even deeper into the mine.
That was when the ceiling began raining down.
The gunfire abruptly ceased, and through the ringing in her ears, Kasey could hear the noise of rocks hitting the ground behind her.
“Stay with me!”
She had no idea if Avery heard her, but she maintained a firm grip on the disembodied hand and kept moving forward, found the wall, then the tunnel mouth. As she moved into it, she struck something...no, another someone.
“Who?” The shout was barely audible, but she thought it sounded like Sievers.
“Me! I’ve got Avery.”
The shape moved aside. “Go!”
Kasey plunged into the darkness, dragging Avery behind her. The rock scraped through the fabric of her jeans, shredding the skin of her knees, but the pain was just one dull sensation in a symphony of stimuli. Time and space lost all meaning. She might have been crawling for days, or perhaps just a few seconds.
And then, with no warning whatsoever, light returned to the world. Kasey’s spirits lifted, but only a little. The ebb of darkness revealed the unchanged hopelessness of their situation.
Avery was breathing fast, almost hyperventilating, with tears cutting tracks through the mask of dirt that now clung to her face. Kasey realized that she was not in much better shape and bit her lip until the tremors racking her torso finally subsided. Further back, she saw Sievers, his back to them, crouched in what she immediately recognized as a shooting stance. His flashlight lay on the ground beside him, pointing toward the mouth of the tunnel, but the beam was being reflected back from a shimmering impenetrable curtain of dust. After a few seconds of scrutiny, Sievers holstered his pistol, picked up the light, and began moving up the passage.
He was also covered in dirt, but Kasey did not fail to notice the darker hue staining one arm. “You all right?” she croaked.
“I’ve been better.” His voice sounded distant, funereal. “It’s just a graze.”
Kasey bit back a pessimistic reply. “Stone?”
Sievers’ face creased in alarm, and then he looked back the way they had come. “Stone! Give a shout!”
There was no reply.
“Damn it!” Sievers raged. He shouted twice more, then turned back. “Screw it. First things first. We have to get out of here.” He shone the light up the tunnel. “Should we see where that leads?”
Kasey’s first impulse was to shriek in dismay. Going deeper into the mine sounded like a very bad idea. But she resisted the urge and answered with an equivocal shrug. “Knock yourself out.”
Sievers frowned but said nothing as he stepped cautiously over the two women and ventured along the passage. With the flashlight pointed away and his body mostly filling the tunnel, the oppressive darkness soon returned, and Kasey reconsidered her position.
“Come on,” she told Avery. “We should probably stay together.”
Avery nodded dumbly, then looked up. “What about Stone? We can’t just leave without... without knowing.”
“The best thing we can do for him is find a way out.”
Avery blinked as if unable to comprehend this logic. Kasey reached out and drew her to her feet, then headed down the tunnel after the diminishing glow of Sievers’ flashlight.
They caught up with him just a few seconds later, stopped cold at a dead end. “We’re not getting out this way,” he declared.
Kasey’s heart began pounding in her chest. “Told you,” she said, trying to sound cocky instead of vindictive or just plain terrified. Trying and failing.
“Let’s head back. There was another tunnel.”
“And if that one’s a dead end, too?”
“Then we start digging.”
Kasey felt Avery’s hand tighten in her own and knew the other woman was probably as panicked as she. Kasey knew she needed to do something to distract them both from the harsh reality of their situation. “Avery, did I hear you right? That treaty made Mexico part of the U.S.?”
“What? Um...Yeah. I mean, not all of Mexico. Mostly just the northern states.”
Sievers seemed to grasp what Kasey was trying to do. “There’s no way that would ever fly, right?” he said as he nudged past them. “You can’t just write a piece of paper and buy another country.”
“Well, probably not anymore, but that’s how America got as big as it is. That and conquest. The treaty mentioned unresolved land claims from the Mexican-American War.”
Kasey tried to recall her American history lessons from college. “That’s how we got California.”
“And most of the American southwest. But during the war, American troops actually pushed as far as Mexico City, and a lot of your congressmen wanted to claim all that territory. Manifest Destiny. They were outnumbered by other lawmakers who thought it was a dangerous overreach of power, and in the end, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the border pretty much where it is today, except for a bit of Arizona and New Mexico that came with the Gadsden Purchase ten years later.”
Sievers set a slow pace, allowing Avery’s impromptu lecture to calm all their nerves. “So what changed? Why did President Wilson think he could reclaim those territories?”
“Two things. First, in the 1860s, the French invaded Mexico and installed Maximillian as emperor of Mexico. This was in direct opposition to the Monroe Doctrine, which held that the Americas should be kept free of European influence, but because of the Civil War, there wasn’t much that could be done. By 1867, the Mexicans managed to overthrow Maximillian. The Cinco de Mayo holiday celebrates the Battle of Puebla, which was sort of the opening shot in their war to kick the French out.
“The second development was the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Not only was there the possibility that the unrest would spill across the border—which did happen in 1916—there was also a very real chance that European powers might again try to regain a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. Wilson saw a chance to permanently end that threat and stop any future violence by negotiating with both rebel leaders and the governors of the northern states. My guess is that, when Bierce vanished with the treaty, Wilson shelved the idea. World War I came along and pretty much put an end to European imperialism.”
“Did the Mexicans want to join the U.S.?”
“At the time, most of the political power in Mexico was in the hands of wealthy property owners. If you were a rural farmer, you lived at the whim of whoever owned the land you worked.” Avery shrugged. “It’s not much different today I suppose. America is still the land of opportunity, right? If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have such a problem with illegal immigration.”
Sievers gave a noncommittal grunt. They had reached the end of the tunnel and were once more confronted with the settling dust cloud from the cave-in.
Kasey felt some of her panic rising again, so she forced herself to stay with the conversation. “Back up a second. You said something about Manifest Destiny.”
Avery’s eyes went wide. “Of course. How could I be so stupid? I was so fixated on the Spear of Destiny... It all makes sense. The Dominion wants to create an American empire to dominate the hemisphere. Their version of Manifest Destiny.”
“I thought the Dominion wanted to overthrow America,” Sievers said. “Not make it bigger.” He shone his light into the dust cloud. “If those guys made it out before the roof fell in, it might be something we need to worry about.”
Kasey thought Sievers was right on both counts. Something about Avery’s explanation did not quite mesh with the facts, particularly with the Russians being involved. Still, it was the start of a working theory. “The Dominion has known about the treaty for a while. They knew it was out here somewhere, and what it said. My guess is that their plan is to go ahead with Destiny...whether they have the treaty or not.”
“Which is one more reason we need to get our butts out of here,” Sievers said. He took a tentative step into the haze. “Better stay close. And you might want to avoid breathing this crap.”
Kasey tugged her shirt collar up in a futile effort to cover her mouth and started forward, just a step behind Sievers. The gloom enfolded him, almost completely eclipsing the rays from his flashlight, and Kasey’s claustrophobia returned with a vengeance, not mere discomfort, but a panic so complete that it overwhelmed her voluntary nervous system. Without conscious thought, she drew back, letting go of Avery’s hand and bolting for the relative safety of the tunnel, but just two steps out into the pervasive cloud had left her completely disoriented. She crashed into the wall, gasped and breathed in a mouthful of dust. She began to claw at the wall, desperate to find the mouth of the tunnel, if only to be free of the choking dust, then felt a hand close around her wrist and pull her forward.
Kasey screamed.