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“The ghost’s coming.”
    Ash tried to breathe as silently as possible. Had that woman said ghost ?
    The snipers clattered down the steps as the climbers approached the hole. The browless man’s handgun had a torch under the barrel. He pointed it in front of his feet as he walked. Now that
he was closer, Ash could read the letters on the side of the gun: HK USP 45 CT.
    Ash had never fired a gun, but she’d seen plenty of them. Too many. So she knew HK was the manufacturer, Heckler & Koch. USP stood for universal self-loading pistol, although she
wasn’t sure what the “universal” bit meant. The number 45 would be the diameter of the bullets, 0.45 inches, and CT stood for either counter-terrorist or compact tactical, she
couldn’t remember which.
    These guys didn’t act like a counter-terrorist unit. Ash didn’t doubt that the government would be willing to slaughter fifty innocent people to get them out of the way – she
had personal experience in that area. But why not just arrest the miners, steal from the dig site, then release them again with an apology? Terrorism Risk Assessment did that kind of thing all the
time, and no one asked any questions.
    So, not government. Heckler & Koch was a German company, but Ash couldn’t detect accents in the abseilers’ voices. No surprise – guns got transported all over the world,
sometimes legally, sometimes not. Just because a pistol was manufactured in the Neckar Valley didn’t mean the shooter had ever even been to Europe.
    This group of murderers could be from anywhere, working for anyone. And the letters on the side of the browless man’s gun meant only that it could punch holes in Ash 0.45 inches wide.
    “We’re too late,” the sergeant said. She was staring at the hole where Ash had dug up the box.
    “I see that,” the browless man replied. The other man said nothing.
    “Could the miners have known?”
    “No. But maybe they found it by accident.”
    The sergeant turned to the snipers. “Get back up to the entrance,” she called. “Search the bodies. Get back down here when you’re done.”
    They left wordlessly. No salutes, no “Sir, yes sir”. They don’t act military, Ash thought, despite the woman’s rank. Ex-military, maybe? Private Military Corporation? The
object in the box was worth millions of dollars – she could imagine someone hiring a corrupt PMC to retrieve it.
    “Maybe the ghost got here before us?”
    “Maybe,” said the sergeant. “But I don’t think so.” She stared suspiciously into the darkness of the cavern. She seemed to look right at Ash.
    There was no way out. Ash willed her body to stop trembling. If they saw her, she was dead.
    “There’s another tunnel,” the browless man said. “Over there. We’ll have to search it.”
    The sergeant said, “Harvey, you stay here, check this area. If you find anybody, kill them.”
    The silent man nodded. The browless man and the sergeant jogged towards the tunnel at the south end of the cavern and disappeared.
    Ash had been worried that the deaths of the miners were her fault – she had driven them up to the surface, where they were exposed. But it looked like the soldiers or ex-soldiers or
whatever they were would have killed them anyway. The only death she was responsible for was her own.
    There wasn’t much comfort in the realization.
    Harvey turned away from Ash, and walked slowly towards the far side of the cavern.
    Okay, she thought. Can’t take the north tunnel – snipers between me and the exit. Can’t take the south tunnel, because it’s a dead end. And I can’t stay here.
Harvey will find me, or the others will when when they come back.
    She had no weapons. She’d thought she would be dealing with harmless miners, not gun-toting sociopaths. She couldn’t even rely on Benjamin – his boat was half a kilometre away,
and there was no way to contact him without disabling the radio-jamming equipment. Which must be on the surface, probably near