Chapter Twenty-Two

“I’m worried,” Lois said from the backseat. Dark lines cut deep into the flesh at the bridge of her nose. Seabury kept quiet. “Did you hear me?” Still nothing.

“Shouting won’t help,” Hornsby said, turning around. He stared back at her. “Can’t you see he’s not turning back?”

“I guess you’ve been out-voted.” Gretchen smiled. The smile irritated Lois. She crossed her arms over her chest. She fussed and fretted.

“You can’t always have your own way,” said Gretchen with a gleeful expression.

“We need to keep going,” Seabury interrupted, gripping the wheel hard. “We can’t turn back, now.” He formed a narrow space between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. “Not when we’re this close. It wouldn’t be fair.”

Up ahead, they reached the fork in the road without being noticed. It was eleven o’clock, one hour before lunch. Four hours before quitting time at five o’clock during a normal work day. Seabury thought about the security patrol. If they patrolled the road during the afternoon, did that mean security would be light at the mine? He didn’t know. One way or another, he would find out. He had no idea what he’d find up at the mine. Still, he had to go, get over and back quickly, before the others missed him. They could look for the entrance to the cave during the afternoon. Hopefully, they’d find it. If not, they’d have to run the risk of returning to Long Apari, or else stay the night hidden out somewhere until morning.

Ahead, he turned left at the fork in the road and drove on. The road continued a short distance and became a dead end. A sign appeared on a rickety, old wrought-iron gate. Private Property. Keep Out. No Temple excursions available. Some of the words were splashed over with red paint.

Seabury used a dead bolt cutter to snap the chain attached to the lock. He opened the gate, got back in the car, and drove through. A moment later, he ran back and secured the chain in place with a piece of wire and returned to the car. From a distance, it appeared the chain was still intact.

Behind the wheel, Seabury heard Gretchen giggle. She pointed a finger and compared him to James Bond and giggled, again. Lois rolled her eyes in the air, then started in on him, again.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Seabury.”

Hornsby sat in silence, staring out the window. Across the field were the scattered remains of large stone pillars buried in a sea of wild grass. A tall stand of trees lay to the left of the pillars, and Seabury pulled into a clearing inside. His spirits soared. Out of sight. A lucky break, he thought. Now, we won’t be spotted from the road.

A hundred yards back from the pillars, a deep gulch knifed down between the broad shoulders of two separate mountains. The timberline below the rugged, snow-clad peaks choked with clusters of white pine. The map pointed to a spot at the foot of the gulch. They headed out beyond the pillars in that direction, dark stick-like figures concealed among the shadows like deer moving along a trail inside the trees.

Seabury stopped a few minutes later and checked his watch. Eleven forty.

“The act’s solo from here on out,” he said. “I’m going over to check out the mine. There’s something fishy going on over there, and I need to find out what it is. I think Barat’s hoarding gold bullion over there.”

“Gold bullion,” Lois said. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m serious all right, so you need to stay here, out of sight.”

“You’re leaving us,” Lois said, unable to believe him.

“He’s made up his mind,” Hornsby said.

“Super-spy on a mission.” Gretchen chortled.

“I’ll be over and back before you know it,” said Seabury. He slipped back quietly into the woods.

* * * *

He couldn’t believe how much he’d misjudged the distance. It was much further than it looked. The mountain flared out like a giant claw and then swung back into a white pine forest, but he kept going. He jogged at a fast pace, back inside the trees. Eventually, he came to the edge of a barbed wire fence, crawled under, and checked his watch again. Twelve forty-five. Fifteen minutes until the lunch break ended.

He kept to the outer edge of the mine yard. A moment later, he stopped behind a high-powered winch and stared across the yard. A Dry where men changed clothes and showered, stood to the right of a stark red office building. At the back of the yard, a massive wall of volcanic rock and limestone shot straight up the rugged face of a steep mountain covered in timber. A tunnel stood below. He glanced over and back quickly, amazed at what he saw.

To his right, the area beyond the yard surprised him. He thought he would find a large, open-pit coal mining operation taking place there. Instead, he found a limited operation. Hmmm. Window-dressing, he thought. It was just enough show to allow the public to think large scale mining was taking place here when actually, it wasn’t.

Beyond the yard, in a narrow, circular space, a few high-powered bulldozers and one steam shovel clawed back the earth. Dark layers of lignite coal, forming black carbon nuggets, lay in shallow piles in the beds of a small fleet of dump trucks. Something more than coal mining was going on here. He crept across the yard toward the tunnel, determined to find out what it was.

“Hey, where you going?” A voice broke from the shadows at the entrance to the tunnel. Seabury pointed to a spot down the tunnel. “Not without a hard hat. Company rules.” The short, stocky Malay with the wide, sloping back of a turtle pointed in the direction of the Dry. “Get one there, and put it on.”

Seabury got a hard hat on a rack inside the door of the Dry, put it on, and came back. The Turtle stood with his arms folded across his chest, waiting for him. “What section you work?”

“Bulldozer,” Seabury said.

Turtle looked up, eyeing him suspiciously. “Why are you in here if your rig’s out there?”

“It’s noontime. I thought I’d take a little walk.”

Turtle checked his watch. “Almost one o’clock. Too late for that.”

Seabury brushed past him and started down the tunnel. The guy followed him, protesting. “Hey, you need to get out of here.” He’d strayed too close. Seabury spun around and crashed a fist into his face. The Turtle was airborne a few seconds as the force of the blow hurled him off his feet, and he crashed unconscious against the wall of the tunnel. Seabury pulled him into a dark alcove a few feet away and headed back down the tunnel.

He’d never liked hitting a smaller man, but what could he do? He’d fought in alleys smelling of week-old garbage behind seedy sailor bars from Amsterdam to Cape Town; however, he’d always battled larger men. He put the thought aside and kept going, down through the dim light of the tunnel.

Ahead, a set of stairs appeared on his left. The area had been blown away during excavation. Now, a deep, hollowed chasm dropped straight down off the floor of the tunnel and formed a huge, underground bunker of interconnected tracks and tunnels at the bottom.

Seabury jolted. Two men came up from down below. The sound of their loud voices caught him off guard, and he ducked into a limestone crevice nearby. He saw them stop on the landing at the top of the stairs, inches from where he hid. His heart thumped like a trip-hammer inside his chest. His eyes enlarged, tense, nervous, as he heard them talking.

“It astounds me,” the shorter of the two said. “How can one man be so clever?”

“Barat’s a genius,” the other man said. “There’s enough gold here in the underground bunker to manipulate the gold price index several times over.”

“Yes. I’m not worried that the price of gold has gone down. Barat will buy gold at a cheaper price. Then, with his stockpile here, he’ll manipulate the market and drive the price back up. Each time I bought gold at a cheap price, it jumped back up, and I made a killing. You just can’t lose with Barat at the helm.”

“I agree,” the other man said.” We’re lucky to have him.”

They both chuckled and headed back out the tunnel. Seabury went below to the bunker. Stopping halfway down the steps, he allowed his eyes to adjust to the sudden surge of bright light in the cavern below. To his left, on the forward wall of the bunker stood a dark wall of tinted glass. It reminded him of the same type of luxury suites owned by high rollers at large NFL football stadiums in the United States. The place looked dark and foreboding. Below it, a network of tracks and trains stood idle near the entrance to several tunnels. Workers woke up, yawned, and stretched after a noon nap and returned to work.

Cautious, Seabury crept back up the stairs into the shadows, but he kept his eyes glued to the floor of the bunker. In the glow of bright light lay gold bullion bars—thousands of them stacked on steel platforms as high as the ceiling. The bullion was grated over with wire mesh.

Enough gold to manipulate the market, Seabury thought as he slipped back upstairs and out through the tunnel. He circled the high-powered winch, crawled unnoticed under the barbed wire fence, and slipped back quietly into the forest.

Stopping briefly, Seabury stared back into the yard. Men, gorged from eating heavy lunches of rice and fish, sauntered at a leisurely pace across the yard. They passed through a gate inside a steel fence toward machinery in the excavated area beyond the fence. They cranked up bulldozers and steam shovels. Soon, the powerful jaws of high-powered machinery clawed and gouged the earth at a controlled rate of production. As his eyes swung down near the front gate, Seabury spotted the security patrol. They passed through the gate, on their way to patrol the road down below the mine.

A half hour later, at two o’clock, Seabury rejoined his group. Hot and perspiring, they sat disgruntled, waiting inside the trees near the gulch at the foot of Muller Mountain. He spotted Hornsby first. The old man looked worried.