“Sure,” Elmer said. “I’ll get my keys.”
I glanced over at Diesel. “I thought you said it was a bad idea to get in a truck with the fire farter.”
“He’s what we’ve got. If we don’t go with Elmer, we walk two hours through the woods to Gail’s house. That’s two hours less to find Munch and Wulf.”
“Yeah, but what if we’re in the truck and he farts?”
“If he farts, we’ll jump out of the truck and run like hell.”
Elmer came out with the keys. I got in front with Elmer. Diesel and Carl climbed into the back.
“Do you ever explore around in the woods?” I asked Elmer.
“Hardly ever. I got a creaky knee. Makes it hard to walk in the pine needles. And the truck’s gotta have a road. I hear them ATVs riding around behind me, going in the woods, but I haven’t got one of them.”
It took twenty minutes to get to the mine, and Elmer was right about it being closed. A large, weather-?beaten sign advertised tours of the Flying Donkey, but the sign was more of a tombstone than anything else. The Donkey’s gift shop windows were covered with crudely nailed-?on sheets of plywood. The plywood was warped and water-?stained. The shop door was boarded shut. The parking lot was large, made to accommodate tour buses that never came. Weeds struggled to grow in the cracks in the blacktop. The mine itself was several yards behind the gift shop. A path led from the parking lot to the mine.
Elmer parked close to the gift shop. We left Carl in the truck, and Diesel, Elmer, and I got out and took the path. Another sign was posted at the mine’s entrance. closed was spray-?painted over the tour times. A half-?assed chain-?link fence was propped across an e
ntrance that looked more like the approach to a cave than a mine.
A dirt path continued past the mine entrance. A smaller, barely legible sign announced that this was a nature walk.
“I’m feeling in the mood for nature,” Diesel said, setting off on the path.
Elmer and I walked along with him, and it occurred to me that this was a maintained path. It should have been overgrown by now, but the brush had been weed-?whacked away. Diesel stopped after a couple hundred feet and then quietly walked several yards into the woods. We followed him and stared down at an air shaft. We returned to the trail and found six more air shafts at regular intervals. We stood over the last air shaft, and muffled voices carried up to us. Diesel motioned for silence, and we quietly walked back to the trail.
“This is why we couldn’t see it from the air,” Diesel said to me. “These underground caves can be huge and wind around for miles. Everyone walk in a different direction. Go two hundred feet and come back. Look for any disturbance in the undergrowth.”
I walked about fifty feet in and saw a wire running pine tree to pine tree, even with the top of my head. The pines were straight and tall and most of the lower branches had been trimmed. An antenna stretched along the trunk of the pine tree, disappearing into the upper branches. There were wires crisscrossing the stand of trees, and I counted twenty-?six antennae joined by the wires.
I returned to the path and waited for Diesel.
“I found the grid of antennae,” I said to Diesel. “They’re hidden by the pines.”
“And I found a hatch that’s probably the roof over a rocket silo.”
“I didn’t find nothin’,” Elmer said.
Stephanie Plum 14.5 - Plum Spooky
TWENTY-FOUR
WE WALKED BACK to the mine entrance and pulled the gate away. A walkway led into the mine interior.
“This is con ve nient for them,” Diesel said. “You can pull a truck into the lot, off-?load materials, and move everything along an underground path. They probably have a couple heavy-?duty carts. And probably there’s another entrance to this cave. Maybe several. I’m guessing if we go back to the fuel depot and the two houses where Munch was living, we’ll find they all hook up with this cave system. And there has to be another house or business where they can park cars.”
“Now that we’ve found them, what’s next?” I asked. “Police? Homeland Security?”
“That would ruin my chances of containing Wulf. I need to get into the mine and look around.” He turned to Elmer. “I want you to go to Gail’s house. You know where it is, right?”
“Yep. I know exactly where.”
“There’s a guy staying there. His name is Hal. He’ll be dressed in black, and he works for a company called Range-?man. Tell him about the mine, and tell him Stephanie and I are inside. Ask him to tell all that to Ranger.”
“Okay. I got it.”
Diesel took my hand and tugged me into the mine entrance.