In the meantime Dan Hunt is also in Montana following Collin's directions one step at a time. He's piloted another helicopter over to outside the mine. (In a previous chapter we learned that both he and Raymond were helicopter pilots in the Army so at least it explains how they can fly them if not how they keep affording them.) He finds a heavily armored, silent-running truck that Collin rigged up, presumably by learning how with books from the library. It's so fortunate he can just do everything.
All Hunt knows is he has to drive the truck to the mine entrance, get inside and wedge it in. He's spotted almost immediately, of course, but there are several buttons he has to press in order and he has no idea what they do. He just hopes Collin planned for his escape.
The possessed and cult members start firing at him and the first switch starts a tape recorder. Collin tells him to put a gas mask on. He drives into a whole group of people, flips the second switch and bombs go off. He just runs over the next group of people. "Hunt drove right over them when they refused to give way, watching in fascinated horror as their skulls ruptured under the advancing wheels." p.347 Can you see under your own wheels when driving? No? Me neither. But I've never driven a "massive armored flatbed" before.
He continues to drive into the mine, possessed and deluded skulls bouncing off his windshield, until he gets all the way inside where he flips the third switch. Out pours some sort of gas, presumably lethal, because everyone seems to die. Hunt waits a bit before grabbing some grenades, the key and an assault rifle before making his way deeper into the mine.
Samantha and Weston have watched this whole attack from the hotel. She decides it's now or never and puts into effect a clever act to escape her guard. You've seen it a million times on tv. She "seduces" him.
""I...I don't know how to say this, but," she gave him a shy look, "I'm a virgin, you know. All these years saving myself for the right man, the special man. Someone I'll never meet, now." She stretched out in a subtly provocative, vulnerable posture. "I never wanted to die a virgin...never to know what it is like to...to make love," she said the last words in a husky, ashamed whisper, glancing at him sidewise like a frightened little girl." p.349-50
He falls for it, of course. He gets a couple buttons on her top undone and then she strikes him in the nads and runs. The front door is locked so she keeps going, eventually finding, of all things, a lit candle. She makes her way down to the cellar where she finds a tunnel has been dug between the hotel and the mine.
Making her way in she comes across a scary figure with big eyes and a trunk which turns out to be Dan in a gasmask. They embrace and he gives her a gasmask so they can head back into the mine. But who do they see? Mr. G! He gets around. Also he is unaffected by the gas as are the reanimated dead that come up behind to capture them.
Dan wants to know why the gas didn't work. I mean, other than the fact that the demon can bring the dead back to "life" did he mean against the Satan beast? Mr. G tells him that the demon can control the wind currents in the tunnels, obviously, and blew the gas away from them. So simple. Now they will be brought to the sacrifice.
Samantha is at her wit's end and Mr. G is really sorry is has to end like this. We get another reassurance that there's no hard feelings. "His eyes, though displaying cool knowledge of personal power and ruthless intent, contained no trace of cruelty. He was truly alien" p.357 No, he's just an asshole. Somehow that makes it worse. This has been emphasized before, in other chapters. He's not evil, he just works for evil.
Off their taken further into the mine.
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