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In all, Max skulked around for nearly an hour before finding a stairwell that led upward, confir his suspicions that this was a subterranean base of so on the sizes of the rooms he hadn’t explored, he estimated the facility was at least a hundred thousand square feet As to its purpose, he could only guess

He cli to yet another door He waited with his ear pressed to the metal He heard sounds fro He eased the door open a crack, pressing his eye to the narrow slit He saedge of what looked like a garage The metal trestle roof lofted twenty feet or more, and there was a rae doors Embedded in the rock walls next to the closed They looked i less than a nuclear bo so in a burlap bag but was doubtlessly so Mark Murphy had on his iPod

He saw nobody, so he quickly dashed through the door and found shelter under a wooden workbench littered with greasy tools Just as the door snicked closed, he realized with horror that it had a sophisticated electronic lock mechanism activated by a pal to his cell and hoping he could talk his way out of another beating

Although the garage was diht on the far side where twoon a four-wheel-drive pickup Fro so near the front of the vehicle He could see the blue glow of an oxyacetylene torch and s of seared e He spotted two larger trucks and several four-wheelers, like the one Juan had used to escape the Responsivists in Greece

Max felt ti by and wished Cabrillo ith him now Juan had an innate ability to forlance at the situation Max, on the other hand, wasa probleed determination

Kovac would be returning to the interrogation chaet as far away from this place as he possibly could

Moving cautiously, he realized the garage doors were the only exit and was certain the radio wouldn’topen There was really only one avenue open to him

Brute force it is, he thought

The wrench he grabbed was at least eighteen inches long and weighed ten pounds He hefted it like a surgeon taking up a scalpel, fully knowing his capabilities with the instruer when a strung-out junky brandishing a knife had tried to rob his uncle’s gas station Max had knocked out eight of the would-be thief’s teeth with a wrench identical to the one he carried now

Hecover where he could and stalking slowly because the hu up movement Any sound he made was drowned out by the radio

One of the mechanics had his face covered by a darkened welder’s shield to protect his eyes, so Max concentrated on the second, a tall, lanky reasy hair tied in a ponytail He was bent over the engine co his hands over a bundle of hoses, so he never felt Max’s presence behind hi

The blow dropped theit left on his skull would last him weeks

Max turned The welder had sensedto pull off his mask, when Hanley stepped forward and, like a batter in the all-star ga, Max let the wrench fly The case-hardened tool s his face torn off, while the power of the throw tossed thetoolbox The blowtorch, on its long rubber lines, dropped at Max’s feet, the blue jet fla him step back when he felt the heat on his bare feet

A third mechanic who had been hidden on the far side of the truck suddenly appeared around the front bumper, drawn by the coainst the toolbox before turning toward Max

Max watched as confusion becaive in to his flight-or-fight reflex Max scooped up the still-burning torch and tossed it in an easy underarm throw Another instinct took over, and the rabbed for it as it came at him