“Yup.”

“Then let’s saddle up.”

It was during the chopper flight to Pensacola that Langston Overholt got the idea that it might be worth the effort to see if they could steal the crystals from the quantum computer. As was his nature, he took the long view of any situation and thought about what would happen after Bahar got shut down. Having such a powerful machine would give the United States a strategic advantage over her enemies. And while he had no inkling how the machine was built, knowing the crystals’ importance made their recovery paramount. He figured some scientist out there would know what to do with them.

He arbitrarily put their value at fifty million dollars and asked MacD to relay his offer to Juan and let him decide.

Cabrillo would have done it for free, but the extra money wouldn’t hurt.

“Thirty minutes, Max,” Juan said. “Not a second more. Under no circumstances are you to wait for us.”

Max looked him in the eye and nodded grimly. “Aye.”

The pair of them took off at a jog, leaving the others to finish their work. This time they went for the personnel elevator located a short distance from the ore lift, figuring they would have restored it to working order. Cabrillo hit the call button, and a mechanical clank echoed down the shaft. A moment later the empty car arrived. It was more cage than car. Even the floor was open mesh that sagged a little when they stepped onto it.

“That’s not confidence-inducing,” Juan remarked, and hit the button for level 23, hoping Mark Murphy hadn’t been showing off.

They shut off their headlamps as the cage sank into more blackness. Down they went, the car rattling and squeaking like the aged piece of machinery it was. Two minutes into their rapid descent, MacD swatted Cabrillo’s arm.

“Look down.”

There was a faint jaundiced glow emanating from deeper below them. It had to be their target level. Bahar was down here, just like they’d anticpated. The only problem was that Cabrillo had planned to already have the crystals by this time. The chance encounter with the patrol and the delay in finding the mine’s entrance had thrown his timetable onto its head.

“Ready?” Cabrillo asked.

“Sir, Ah was born ready.”

The cage slowed as it neared the station. There was no hiding place inside, so they crouched low to the floor, both holding their assault rifles at the ready. It came to a spongy stop because the long cable stretched and rebounded before settling.

On this level, the elevator antechamber was a rectangular room about twenty feet on a side, with several exit points. In the distance, and out of sight, came the throb of a generator that was powering a single yellow construction light off in one corner.

No one approached, so Juan reached up to unlatch the safety gate and swung it outward. He peered around the edge. Nobody, but an AK was leaning against a wall as if someone had stepped away momentarily. He stood, fingering his rifle.

The generator made just enough noise to mask footfalls, so they both got out of the elevator and up against a wall near one of the openings that gave access to the rest of the mine. Juan was about to look around when a man walked in. He was the sentry who should have been standing by the elevator. He spotted Cabrillo and turned away before Juan could grab him. The guy took off in a dead sprint, fueled by adrenaline and fear.

MacD ran after him, shrinking the distance with each pace. Like a defensive back chasing down the ballcarrier, he moved with single-minded determination. Even missing a limb, Juan considered himself quick, but he was nothing like the display he was seeing.

There were just enough lights strung about for him to watch as he ran after the two. The guard must have sensed Lawless closing in because he suddenly stopped and dropped to the ground, forcing MacD to hurtle over him. Cabrillo knew what was coming and drew himself to a stop. He raised his rifle as the other guy went for the gun he’d had holstered on his hip.

Lawless still hadn’t fully regained his balance and was now facing away from the quarry he’d leapt over. The guy cleared his pistol and was bringing it up when Juan smacked his rifle to his shoulder and drew a bead through the murky shadows. A hesitation would mean MacD’s life, but a miss would most likely hit him.

The REC7 cracked like a whip, and the would-be shooter took the round through his right shoulder. The bullet penetrated his lung and exited just below his nipple. The kinetic force drove him flat to the rocky ground, where he lay still.

“Ah’m obliged,” Lawless called out when he realized what had happened behind him. “But our element of surprise is, as they say, blown.”

Cabrillo made a fast decision. “Screw the money. Let’s get out of here.”

They turned back toward the elevator to beat a fast retreat. Another figure stood in the entryway, a weapon held low at his waist. Cabrillo shoved Lawless and dove as the gun opened up, flickering tongues of flame erupting from its barrel. The bullets sprayed wild, and neither man was hit, but the attack kept them pinned while reinforcements were called up.

Crawling furiously, the two men sought cover behind one of the house-sized support columns. Their only advantage—surprise—was gone, and the defenders knew this subterranean world better than Juan and MacD, who’d only had a feverish examination of the schematic diagram.

To make matters worse, Juan spotted a low-light closed-circuit camera mounted atop a conveyor-belt support. The yard-wide belt ran chest high and vanished into the next room. He doubted this was the only camera, meaning Bahar and Smith had eyes everywhere. It began to pan as it searched for them. Disabling the camera would be the same as being spotted by it, so the two men shuffled over on their backsides until they were directly below it.

“Ideas?” MacD asked while bullets slammed into the stone just feet from their heads.

“All these rooms link together in a large circle. Our best bet is to stay ahead of them and hope we can buy ourselves enough time at the end to snag the elevator.”

“They’ll see us coming,” MacD pointed out.

“Take out the cameras.”

Cabrillo rolled around the corner on his belly to lay down cover fire before springing to his feet and taking off in the opposite direction. Wherever he could, he smashed the lightbulbs strung along the ceiling, but there were really too many of them to completely darken the mine. It was the cameras that were the priority. He could only hope that their being disabled wasn’t showing up on the security monitors in any particular sequence.

Thick walls of solid salt separated the enormous rooms. The portals between them were large enough so that heavy mining equipment could be driven through alongside the big conveyor belt. At each, they paused momentarily to see if an ambush had been laid for them. They also had to watch their backs because at least three guards were in hot pursuit.

Looking through one of the portals into the next room, Cabrillo saw that the miners had left a tracked excavator just inside. The machine had a thick cable spool on its back bumper to feed it electricity and a hydraulic drum on the front that could move up and down as its carbide teeth tore into the rock-salt face. He grabbed MacD and took up a position behind it.

“We need all three,” he said, and they waited.

Moments later two gunmen wearing street clothes entered the room. Both eyed the excavator warily. One stayed by the gaping opening, covering his partner, as the other cautiously approached. Cabrillo crouched lower, praying the third pursuer showed himself before this guy got much closer.

The gunman moved around in a wide arc, his AK held high on his shoulder. It was a stance he’d seen American Special Forces adopt, but this firing position worked best with the lighter-caliber weapons those soldiers used.