Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [62]
Moments later, an even larger body of mud came roaring out of the main entry of Hamilcar’s Refuge. It moved fast, pouring down the rampway and out over the jetty, before it tipped out into the waterway, kicking up a hissing geyser of steam.
The huge geyser shot up into the air, its cloudy haze positioned directly in between Pooh Bear and Kallis, giving Pooh Bear several valuable seconds of movement.
But then the haze from the geyser began to dissipate and Kallis’s snipers opened fire with a vengeance.
West ran through darkness. Alone.
Guided only by the light of a single glowstick.
His little tunnel was tight, only big enough for him to run through bent-over.
After about a hundred metres, however, he heard engine noises up ahead and suddenly—
—he burst out into a wider tunnel, with hard-packed walls of dirt and wide enough for a tank to pass through. Low mounds of dirt lay at regular intervals along the centre of the roadway— mounds left behind by the tunnel-borer. A long line of fading American glowsticks had been left along its length to illuminate the way back.
It was the excavation tunnel.
The engine noises came from his right, from over a crest in the sloping roadway—the sound of light car engines and the deep-throated diesel roar of the tunnel-boring vehicle.
Judah and his CIEF team.
Approaching fast.
West chucked his glowstick and, thinking fast, quickly rolled out onto the roadway.
He rolled into the middle of the tunnel, lying lengthways in a dark shadowy spot, pressing himself close to one of the dirt-mounds in the centre of the road, half-burying himself in the dirt.
Judah’s convoy rose above the crest, headlights blazing.
The lead light strike cars whizzed by West on either side, avoiding the dirt-mound by inches, before. . .
. . . the great M-113 tunnel-boring vehicle thundered over the crest and rumbled right over the top of West, its huge tracked wheels clanking by on either side of his body!
No sooner was it over him than West quickly whipped out his MP-7 sub-machine gun and, using its grip as a hook, latched it over a pipe on the underbody of the TBV—and suddenly he was swept along with it, hanging from the huge vehicle’s underbelly!
He had to work fast.
He guessed that he had about thirty seconds till they came to the gorge—the narrow gorge that cut across the excavation tunnel: his escape route.
Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, he could never hope to beat all of Judah’s CIEF force and take the Pieces. Working alone, there was no way he could carry the two huge Pieces anyway.
The thing was, he didn’t want to carry them—he just needed to see them and take a couple of quick photos of the carvings on their upper sides.
West clambered forward along the underside of the moving tunnel-borer, pulling himself forward hand-over-hand, until he came to the front of the great lumbering vehicle—where he climbed up and over its bow and commenced his one-man war against the CIEF.
Marshall Judah sat in the passenger seat of one of the rear LSVs, keeping an eye on his tunnel-borer up ahead.
He never saw West disappear under it—nor did he see West climb forward along its underbelly to its front bumper—nor did he see West shoot its driver right between the eyes and leap inside the driver’s hatch.
No, all Judah saw was several sudden lightning-flashes of gunfire flaring within the big tunnel-borer—before he saw it veer out of control to the left and grind horribly against the left-hand wall of the tunnel!
The big vehicle crunched against the wall, still moving forward but losing speed, and as it did so, more flashes could be seen flaring within it—only these weren’t muzzle flashes from guns, they were different, almost like. . . camera flashes.
Then the big tunnel-borer regained its alignment