Caleb exchanged glances with Brielle, Misty, and Forrest, but none of them knew what to make of that information any more than he did. Giving them a nod, he led them toward the chain-link fence, the only sound their boots crunching through the icy snow cover as their breath frosted the air around them.
He and the rest of the team had spent a few days sitting on their asses in Zagreb while the analysts from both STAT and the CIA worked to find the stolen nukes, waking up every morning wondering if it would be the day they’d see pictures of mushroom clouds on the TV.
The analysts had started from scratch, focusing their attention on every seaport within a day’s travel of Incirlik, ultimately coming up with a list of nearly five hundred ships that had moved out of those ports around the time the nukes had been stolen. Then they’d tracked every ship on that list, using images from satellites and port cameras to see where they were headed and what they’d offloaded during their various stops.
Caleb hadn’t envied what had to be a grueling task, but in the end, they’d stumbled across an image of someone resembling Julian standing on a dock in Odessa, Ukraine, watching as a large crate was loaded onto a truck. The picture was grainy, but Brielle had sworn up and down that it was her brother. The crate was the perfect size for a B61 warhead, though there was no way of knowing if there was only one crate on the truck or twenty. The vehicle had certainly been large enough to hold all of them.
That truck had gone straight to the international airport where it had driven into the back of a large cargo plane, then flown nonstop to a city in Siberia called Krasnoyarsk. STAT had lost visual on the truck at that point, but as it turned out, about a hundred miles to the northeast was a tiny village named Surinda. It was a coincidence that couldn’t be ignored. Less than twenty-four hours later, Caleb and the rest of the team were stomping through the snow in an abandoned town, praying they hadn’t made another mistake.
“I’m not seeing any security cameras,” Misty said, scanning the small building and surrounding area with her night-vision binoculars. “No motion sensors, either.”
Caleb frowned. It didn’t make sense that a place with a weird-looking tower and a building with a fence around it didn’t have cameras.
“Let’s take a closer look,” he said.
When they reached the gate along the east side of the perimeter fence, Caleb was even more surprised to see that there wasn’t a chain or any other kind of locking mechanism on it. His teammates mirrored his concern.
“Is it just me or does this feel like a trap?” Misty muttered. “I mean, we don’t even know how many people are in that building.”
“It isn’t just you,” Caleb confirmed. “Watch yourselves.”
As they moved across the fenced-in area toward the small building, Caleb realized that given the number of vehicles inside the fence line, they could be dealing with twenty or thirty people in there. While he wasn’t necessarily concerned about those odds when it came to the team, he was worried Brielle could get hurt in the crossfire.
The thought was so terrifying he actually stumbled on the uneven, snowy ground. From the corner of his eye, he saw Forrest and Misty looking at him strangely, the latter mouthing the question,You okay? with a concerned expression.
Caleb nodded and pressed his ear against the heavy steel door, motioning for the others to remain silent as he listened for sounds of movement inside. While his nose wasn’t worth much, if there were people inside the structure, he would be able to hear them, even if they weren’t saying anything—a person couldn’t hide their heartbeat.
“There’s no one in there,” he said, turning to see that Jake and the rest of his teammates had shown up.
If they were in Maine, Caleb would have thought they’d slipped into a Stephen King novel. But seeing as Siberia was about as far from Maine as they could get, probably not. Drawing his weapon, he gave the heavy door a solid shove, sending it flying back, ready to shoot the first person—or balloon-wielding clown—he saw.
The room was empty. Other than a few electrical boxes mounted here and there, the tiny space didn’t have a damn thing in it.
Except for a set of closed elevator doors.
“An unmarked building in the middle of a deserted village in Siberia equipped with some kind of communication tower on top and an elevator inside,” Jake murmured, glancing at Genevieve. “Do you think this is some kind of Russian military complex? That the warheads were brought here for exploitation?”
“A military complex?” Genevieve said with a grimace of doubt. “Without any military guards?”
They all stood there in the middle of the room for a few seconds, staring at each other.
“I guess we take the elevator?” Caleb finally said.
With a nod, Jake moved forward and poked the single unmarked button to the right of the polished silver elevator door. “I guess we don’t have any other choice.”
A moment later, the door slid open, and they all crowded inside. Like the outside, there was only a single button inside on the control panel, with no indication of a floor level or anything like that. When Harley pushed it without saying anything, Caleb couldn’t help but think that this was a really bad idea.
The car began to drop in complete silence, the descent continuing much longer than Caleb thought it would…hundreds of feet at least. It was strange being in an elevator without the typical numbers to give an idea of how far they were going. Hell, at this point, he would even have appreciated some of that boring music to break up the growing tension.
In the silence, Caleb picked up the sound of a rapidly beating heart, and he looked at Brielle standing slightly ahead and to the right of him, fear and anxiety radiating off her in waves. Following instincts he didn’t even try to understand, he took a small step toward her until his arm was pressed firmly against her back. She moved her head just enough to see him out of the corner of her eye but didn’t say anything, even as she leaned a little into the contact.
The elevator abruptly stopped, and Caleb immediately turned his attention toward the door.
“Everyone be ready,” Jake said as the door slid open.
Caleb refrained from pointing out that they were all stuffed inside an eight-foot-by-eight-foot steel box. If there was anything waiting for them, they were screwed. But when the door finally slid all the way back, the corridor outside the elevator was completely empty. That didn’t make him feel much better. One look at the familiar walls and floor and Caleb had no doubt that every member of the team was thinking the same thing he was. That they’d all been in a tunnel exactly like this not that long ago beneath the air base in Turkey. Yes, this one might be significantly larger than the one they’d been in the first time, with lights mounted every ten feet or so, but it had definitely been carved by the same creatures.
But at least that confirmed they were in the right place. With tunnels like these, the nukes had to be somewhere in here.
