Ted Bell - Spy

Which was nothing.

The whole building was empty inside. He was looking at a big empty box at least a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and four stories high. No floors. No windows. No staircases. No nothing inside. There was a roof up there overhead. Corrugated aluminum. The arched steel beams that supported it seemed to be fairly new. And the featureless brick walls were freshly painted white floor-to-ceiling on all four sides. There was a narrow steel catwalk beyond the door and he stepped out onto it. He was about twenty feet above the ground floor.

He flicked his mini-light on and played it down below. The spacious floor looked to be painted concrete, spotless and shiny. In the center of the floor was a circle. Just a faint line, really, with a diameter about sixty feet across, maybe more.

Homer moved left along the yellow-painted catwalk hung from the ceiling and extending all the way around four sides of the building. Across the way were two office doors like the one he’d just come out of. But he wasn’t curious about those doors.

What got his full attention was the fact that the Yankee Slugger cab he’d seen pulling inside this very building about an hour ago, had now disappeared. He certainly hadn’t heard that big diesel crank up, and he would have, wouldn’t he? Even when he was hiding out there in the boneyard, he would have heard that monster cranking up, backing out into the street and roaring off. He hadn’t heard a thing. But the Slugger was gone.

He saw that the catwalk had a single staircase leading down to the ground on the street side of the building.

He moved toward it along the narrow metal walkway carefully, not because there was anybody to hear him, the place was obviously empty, but because if he tripped and went over the rail, well, that would be all-she-wrote for damn sure.

He went downstairs slowly, keeping his light aimed on the steps all the way to the ground. The big main door, so cracked and peeling on the outside, was a shiny brushed steel on the inside. No handles or locks. It just slid up into the wall above it. He turned away from his inspection of it and looked at the faint outline of the circle in the center of the floor. Had it changed? It looked different than it had when he’d been up on the catwalk. He went over to check it out, kneeling down inside the circle to feel its outline with his fingers.

Now he could see that the big sixty-foot circular section was slightly lower than the rest of the floor. Like a tiny depression. The outline he’d seen from above was due to the fact that this section wasn’t flush. There was about an eighth of an inch of dull steel showing all the way around. Something, a sound maybe, made him lean forward and put his ear to the floor.

It was that gear noise he’d heard earlier up in Smokey’s office. A deep whirr, and then a soft hiss.

And suddenly the whole center section was moving. He was dropping down through the floor.

He stood up and quickly stepped off the moving platform. He stepped away from the hole, watching wide-eyed as the huge round section of floor descended slowly and steadily. Almost noiselessly. A foot. Two feet. Still dropping. He could hear something down there now. The noise of whatever machinery below supported a huge round section of concrete floor. A massive hydraulic lift of some kind. And now, another noise. A big diesel firing up. Then, a second one started. A third. More.

Wait a minute. Trucks? In the basement?

He lay down flat on his stomach, trying not to hurt his wounded arm any more, and inched forward until he could see just over the edge. There was a faint reddish light down there, swirling with diesel fumes. It was too thick to see anything but shadowy shapes in the red mist. He shoved himself forward a few more inches, lowered his head, and peered down inside.

If there was somebody down there aiming to blow his head off it was going to happen now. He hadn’t heard anybody and he thought he would have. But, you never know.

Nobody shot him. But what he saw beneath him took the breath right out of him.

Monster rigs. A whole lot of them, tractor trailer trucks, in fact. Maybe fifteen, or even more, he thought. At least twenty. But that was only all the ones that he could see from this angle. The underground garage was big, he could see now, lowering his head even more, because the great oval section had now descended flush into the lower level floor.

All the way at the back of the lower level was a well-lit tunnel.

So, that was how they did it, got the ghost trucks cross the border with nobody catching on. He’d seen all the reports of Mexicans building tunnels under the border. Big ones, with air-conditioning even. To move illegals and drugs into the States. But this tunnel was something else entirely. It was large enough to accommodate eighteen-wheelers. Must have taken years to build this thing. Rawls owned a construction company in addition to everything else. He was in cahoots with the Mexicans somehow. Bringing trucks in for some reason.

Homer’s case was starting to add up. J.T. had been a smuggler, a crook. And a traitor. He’d never killed a man before, but if he had to start, it wasn’t a bad place.

There was a loud snort of a big diesel engine revving. He watched in wonder as, below him, a truck pulled forward and stopped right in the middle of the circular lift. It wasn’t the Yankee Slugger he’d seen pull in earlier. No, this was an ancient road warrior, an old fifties vintage Mack truck with faded green paint on the cab and trailer. Yellow road lights, now lit up a row of rusty chrome-plated horns mounted on top of the cab. He couldn’t see into the cab. Blacked-out windows, of course. He watched, unable to tear his eyes away, as the whole center section started turning clockwise, turning the rig around so it’d be facing the street.

When the lift platform had rotated one hundred-and-eighty degrees, it stopped.

Then the beat-up old Mack truck started rising on its hydraulic pedestal. It was a truck with a big juicy tomato logo and Ocala Farms Inc. painted on the trailer. At the same time, the main door of the building started sliding up inside the wall. All this crap going on, Homer thought, and not a single solitary human being on the property besides himself and the man he’d killed.

The whole thing was, what, automated?

Homer figured it was way past the time to beat feet the hell out of Mr. J.T.Rawls’s haunted truck graveyard and that is just what he was fixing to do. He ducked underneath the half-opened street door and took off at a run, darting across the ghost town’s main street to the burned-out Texaco where he’d parked the Vic.

He’d get on the radio and call in the dead man’s location. Then he’d get off the radio and get to the bottom of whatever the late J. T. Rawls had been up to in this little ghost town.

50

LA SELVA NEGRA

H arry Brock slapped in a fresh mag and jacked a round into the chamber of his semi-automatic rifle. Then he said, “How old is Caparina, anyway?”

“Almost thirty,” Saladin replied.

“Yeah? Told me she was twenty five.”

Harry and Saladin nervously eyed the low, blunt structure on the opposite rim of the canyon. They were nearing the end of the bridge. So far, they’d seen no movement and no more of the hellish little lead-spitting Trolls. But neither man had any illusions about a champagne reception immediately upon arrival on the other side.

Hassan flicked the selector on his weapon to full auto. He, like Harry, was crouched down behind the flared steel mudguard that covered the tank treads. This was all the protection the little green battlebot afforded the casual rider and, as they had witnessed, it was precious little.

“Don’t believe everything Caparina says. You’ll find yourself one day wishing you hadn’t.”