They had descended three long flights in a hurry when the beam of his tac light chanced on a kind of niche in the stone wall to his right—and then held there as he paused briefly on a landing.

The recess was filled with sealed steel drums.

Large fifty-five-gallon drums, stacked two and three high and going several rows deep into the surrounding rock.

Their warning labels were printed in various different languages, but it was easy enough to see they all said the same thing.

Nimec glanced over them.

De rebut Radioactif.

Radioaktiver Müll.

Reciduous radioactivos.

Scorrie radioative.

“Goddamn,” Rice said. He stood slightly behind Nimec on the riveted metal landing, his own flash trained on one of the English drum labels. “Radioactive waste. They’re storing rad waste.”

Nimec grunted. He doubted that was all they were doing there. Before entering the tunnel, he’d looked down from atop the ridge-back and noticed heavy equipment at the bottom of the notch. Earth-hauling trucks. They were stashing this stuff, true. Hoarding it deep in the ground. But he had a feeling their operation would prove to be a two-way street. That they were pulling something out of the ground too.

He moved his eyes further down the stairs, angling his tac light in that direction to illuminate the way.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll worry about this later.”

Burkhart waited in the dimness near the foot of the stairway, flattened against a rough stone wall on its right, his Sturmgewehr angled toward its upper levels. One of his men stood beside him, his back also to the cold stone. Three more men were hugging the opposite wall. All wore night-vision goggles.

They could hear the enemy sprinting downward.

Burkhart had counted three sets of footfalls. And while he could not be certain of it, he would have wagered the first of those sets belonged to the UpLink security chief . . . Peter Nimec.

Burkhart had never met him, of course. But he believed he understood him. The man had come from a world away with only a single purpose, a single mission, and that was to locate and rescue the vanished members of his organization. Nimec would care little at this stage for anything besides, something Granger would have quickly realized if he were captured—as the UpLink strike verified had happened.