Chapter 17: The Things you Find

One for the Ladies

Blood covered the front of Tom’s man dress and leaked onto his pants.

“Son of a…”

A quick look saw Tom drop the bloody thing on the floor. The only thing the big man wore now was boots and jeans.

"This is just swell." Tom pulled a vest off one of the men and tried to scrub off as much blood from his chest and hands as possible. In disgust, he threw the bloody thing down and put on another guard's vest. The garment was barely big enough to get on more or less comfortably, but there was no way he could button it.

“I haven’t seen or heard a thing,” Al said from the doorway.

“Good.” Tom moved straight to the diagram on the wall between the stairwells. “Let’s move fast down to this level.” He pointed to level one, a level above the basement and one level below the tunnel.

“Let’s do it.” They continued with Tom out front and Al on lookout behind them.

The floors below were quiet, and they made good time.

On the landing, before the tunnel, Al passed Tom and dropped to his knees. He peeked around the corner. The tunnel was well-lit. Lights were strung on the ceiling the length of the passage. It looked like any other well-engineered tunnel through a mountain, except in this case, the road was dirt, and a large chamber was hollowed out in the tunnel’s center. The tunnel and chamber both were dead quiet. Diagonally across from the stairs was what appeared to be a large storage room.

“I don’t see anyone. Let’s go.” Al ran down the stairs, turned the corner, and went down the next set of stairs. Behind him, he only heard Tom’s footsteps, no shouts, no alarm. They’d made it undetected.

At the next landing, Al raised his hand. “It sounds like someone’s beating on a door yelling.” He crept down the stairs until he could view the floor below.

“No one’s here.” A long hallway stretched in front of him. There were closed doors on both sides of the hallway, evenly spaced apart. A wooden chair was leaning against the wall at the far end of the hallway.

“There’s an empty chair at the end where it sounds like the yelling is coming from.”

Tom followed him down. “Right, let’s go have a look.”

“Hold on.” Al opened the door leading to the basement. He shut it quickly. Whatever was down there, it was loud. Maybe too loud for people not to notice.

Halfway down the hall, Tom turned his head. “It sounds like whoever is doing all that pounding and yelling, they're not happy.”

“You’d think someone’s butt should be in that chair?”

“Agreed, hang back at the stairs just in case.”

“Got it.” Al took a position at the bottom of the stairs, keeping an alternating eye on the stairs and Tom.