“You can find the way out from here,” Chet confirmed. “Just go slow and look for booby traps.”
He allowed her, now, to lead the way. She moved forward about fifty feet, then waited for him to catch up, then did it again. She came to another intersection, but it was obvious which way to go, for light and air were unmistakably coming up the tunnel now. She began to proceed at an extremely deliberate pace, just barely staying ahead of Chet. There was no point in getting too far out in front of him, since she just had to wait for him to catch up, and going slowly gave her more time to look for booby traps. They came to what must be the main adit leading southward out of the mine and found a flatbed car that was still capable of rolling down the rails bolted into its floor. Zula, after inspecting it for piano wires and Claymore mines, insisted that Chet sit down on it. She got her hands on his shoulders and pushed him along down the rails for a surprisingly long time, the brightness ahead of them increasing every time they came to a bend in the tunnel, and finally came around a curve and were blinded by the almost direct light of the sun shining into the mine’s southern entrance. It seemed an obvious place to put a third booby trap, and they were too dazzled to see, so they waited there for a few minutes, eating snacks and letting Chet guzzle another bottle of water. Then Chet got to his feet, and they took the tunnel’s last hundred yards one cautious step at a time.
The last booby trap was a simple tripwire stretched from wall to wall at ankle level, just a few yards short of the exit, where hikers impatient to get out of this place would be tempted to break out into a long stride. Chet insisted that Zula step over it and then get all the way out of danger before he snipped it with his Leatherman. He was afraid that it was some sort of particularly fiendish IED that would detonate when the wire was cut. But nothing happened, and Chet staggered out of the tunnel a few moments later looking like the ghost of a miner who had died in the heart of the mountain a hundred years ago.
They had traveled less than a mile as the crow flew, but entered into a different world. Zula inferred that the prevailing winds must bring wet air from the Pacific up from the south to deposit loads of rain in the valley that now stretched out before them. For the air was palpably moister than what they’d been breathing on the Schloss side of the ridge, and the vegetation was of an altogether different biome. They had entered the mine in an arid wasteland of talus and emerged in the middle of something that was close to being a rain forest.
And a wilderness. There was no graffiti, no party trash at this end. A fire ring stood nearby, and around it were some flat spots where it looked as though backpackers might pitch tents when they ventured up here. But compared to the other side, only a short drive from the town of Elphinstone and a short hike from the comforts of the Schloss, this place was out in the middle of nowhere, a shred of territory caught between the U.S. border and the nearly uncrossable barrier of the ridge that now rose up behind them. Had the views been more spectacular, it might have attracted backpackers and mountain bikers anyway. But better vistas were to be had for less work in places like Glacier and Banff, not so many hours’ drive away, and so this place had been left alone, save by cross-border smugglers and international terrorists. Patches of snow, rounded by the spring melt, spread in the trees all around them and lapped up the slopes of the mountain, contributing to a general runoff that seeped through mud and trilled down small watercourses into cold gurgling brooks that came together, perhaps a mile below, into a river that hurtled south down the valley; and though they couldn’t see it from here, they could hear the roar of the cataract that almost coincided with the border, not marked on maps, but known to the few people who lived in these parts as American Falls.
OLIVIA HAD BEEN warned, of course, that working for MI6 would not be romantic. Not, in other words, the way it was in the movies. It was a bit embarrassing that this needed to be mentioned at all. No one who was worldly and intelligent enough to work for MI6 would really think it would be like a James Bond movie, would they?