Blowout Read online

  Trailer’s two and three were also empty, and when he emerged Brenda and Ada had mounted their machines and were headed back to the turbine building.

  “Team two, what’s your count?”

  “Six down.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Roger, we made a sweep of the trailer. Nowhere to hide.”

  “Roger, understood,” Barry radioed. “Base, one.”

  “One, base.”

  “Clear?”

  “Roger. Plus nineteen, seventy-one remaining.”

  Moose’s job was to secure the floor of the turbine building, which would allow Dr. Kemal a full fifteen minutes to introduce one gallon of his bacterial strain into the primary check valve for the main methane line coming off the wellhead. The soupy liquid would remain aboveground until the morning when the well was opened and methane was allowed to flow up from the coal seam, at which time it would begin to mix with the gas. Within minutes, the scientist had promised, possibly sooner, the new bacteria would interact with what was coming out of the well to produce oxygen. A lot of it, creating a highly explosive mix.

  They’d been seated across the conference table in the cabin at their training ranch outside of Kalispell, Montana, when the doctor had explained what was likely to happen.

  “Certainly an initial explosion that will destroy that end of the operation,” he’d said. “And then most likely the coal seam will catch fire, perhaps even it, too, will explode. Should be quite spectacular.”

  “Better than nine-eleven?” Gordy had asked, and Dr. Kemal, who’d helped with the initial planning for the al-Qaeda attack, had nodded vigorously.

  It had been Kemal who’d predicted that when the towers came down the dust and smoke sent roiling through the streets would contain a toxic concentration of bacteria from the human remains. A lot of the first responders would develop horrible health problems over the coming years. And he’d been right.

  Barry reached the power plant two minutes behind the women. Brenda was already molding lumps of plastique explosive on the turbine case and Ada was right behind her, inserting fuses and stringing wire to the detonator box. They had fifteen minutes allotted to wire the turbine, the generator, the cooling water and boiler feed-water pumps, the surface condenser, and the base of the furnace itself.

  They didn’t look up as Barry passed them and ran through the length of the building to where Moose and Dr. Kemal were at the wellhead, Moose using an electric nut driver to remove the twelve bolts holding the access port to the check valve chamber.

  “How long until you’re operational here?” Barry asked.

  “Five minutes, plus or minus two, if my battery holds out,” Moose said. “The son of a bitch bolts are stiff.”

  Dr. Kemal looked owlish behind his wire-rimmed glasses. But he was calm. Know the plan, follow the plan.

  “Base, one.”

  “One, base,” Gordy came back. “Still clear, though I’m starting to get a data pileup. Nothing my mainframe can’t handle for now. Plus twenty-eight, sixty-two remaining.”

  “Roger,” Barry said, and he went looking for the newspaper reporter who had to be somewhere in the building.

  8

  WHEN ASHLEY WAS nineteen she’d dated a Special Forces second lieutenant, who in an effort to make an impression, snuck her on to the nearly two hundred square mile survival training wilderness of Fort Bragg with only a KA-BAR knife, flint, compass, and fifty meters of light nylon cord. It had been absolute freezing hell for three days until, totally lost, they were finally picked up by the MPs. At this moment she wished she were back there.

  She’d managed to make her way along the base of the turbine to a cubbyhole halfway back within a towering structure of complex machinery, pipelines, gauges, and other things incomprehensible to her, except that she thought she was somewhere under the furnace where the methane would be burned. The space was barely three feet on one side and perhaps eighteen inches deep, about ten feet above the main floor, and pulling her legs up beneath her she tried to make herself invisible.

  Two men in white coveralls were down on the floor to the left, about fifty feet away. Their backs were to her so she couldn’t see their faces, but one of them was large with a mane of black hair, while the other was small, and she got the impression he was a much older man.

  A third man, also dressed in white coveralls, passed just below her hiding place and the pit of her stomach went hollow. He was armed with some sort of a short, wicked-looking rifle that he held as if he were ready to fire at anything or anyone who got in his way. She got a brief glimpse of his face, and he seemed angry to her. Driven, she decided. He had a purpose and nothing was going to get in his way.

  He stopped for a second a few feet to her right, barely ten feet away from her and she held her breath. All he had to do was turn his head to the left and look over his shoulder and he would see her.

  It looked to her as if he was talking to someone, the noise of the spinning turbines too loud for her to hear anything, but a second later a woman, also dressed in white, came into view and she said something to him, and then reached into a canvas bag slung over her broad shoulder and pulled out a piece of what looked like Play-Doh about the size of several slices of bread rolled up into a fat tube.

  The man said something else then hurried off as the woman molded what Ashley realized was Semtex or C4 plastic explosive around the flange of a big pipe and seconds later moved out of view. A second, much smaller woman with a narrow face and very short cropped hair appeared in view. She plugged a fuse into the lump of plastique and, trailing a bundle of thin wires, disappeared.

  They had killed Magliano and they were here to destroy this place. Only by the grace of God had she been out of sight under the turbine when the lieutenant had been shot to death, otherwise she knew damned well that she’d be lying in a pool of her own blood next to him.

  Which gave her two problems to solve, the first being how to stay alive long enough for the three men and two women to finish their work and leave so she could get the hell out, or for the cavalry to show up. The second was to get the hell out before the plastique popped off, because it was going to get real unhealthy around here when it did.

  But another part of her, the reporter part, was fascinated by what was going on. She was in the middle of a terrorist attack, though the five people she’d watched didn’t seem to be Middle Eastern. More homegrown, or maybe European. It was like being on the sidelines of a 9/11, and she wanted to see everything, hear everything, smell everything, and commit it all to memory, because if she got out of here alive she would have one hell of a story.

  A clatter of metal down on the floor startled her so badly she almost cried out and she turned in time to see the older man take what looked like a plastic gallon of something out of his shoulder bag, open it, and pour it into a waist-high opening in a big pipe that ran down into a circular grate about the size of a manhole cover in the floor.

  The woman with the plastique appeared when he was finished and the three of them had a conversation as the black-haired man placed a thick metal plate over the opening and used a tool to screw on bolts or nuts to hold it in place.

  None of this made any sense to Ashley. The terrorists were here to sabotage the facility, but if the Initiative was really all about worldwide ELF communications she would have thought destroying the antennas would have been more important than destroying the electrical-generating station.

  From where she was hiding she couldn’t see Magliano’s body but in her mind’s eye she could play back in slow motion and living color his head jerking to the left, a spray of blood and something else, something chunky, flying out of his skull as he was flung backwards, his hands flying outward as if he were raising them in a cheer. It was an image she knew that she would never forget.

  She turned to the right and hunched down a little lower to get a better angle, but the man with the gun was gone, and all she could see was tile, and the maze of pipes and wire conduits.
/>   Something made her turn back and when she looked down the man with the thick mane of black hair was directly below, staring up at her.

  9

  JIM CAMERON, THE director of project security, raced up the metal stairs to the second-level access door that led directly into the power station control room and held up for just a moment. At thirty-two he didn’t have the wind he’d had when he’d played quarterback for the Navy, and he was dripping blood from bullet wounds in his right thigh and left arm just above the elbow, but he was seriously motivated.

  He was a career SEAL lieutenant commander conning a desk who’d happily come over from the Pentagon to take on the role of chief of security for the Initiative. Like most SEALs he was slightly built, a little under six feet, with short-cropped hair and an even, sometimes bland demeanor. But anyone who’d ever met him immediately saw something in his eyes, the way he carried himself, the quietness of his voice, that was somehow impressive, even comforting in a way. When Jim Cameron walked into a room, heads turned and just about everybody breathed a sigh of relief; he’s here, everything will be okay now.

  But everyone back in the rec center was dead, and the vision of their shot-to-hell bodies would never leave him. He’d been crawling around beneath the double-wide, chipping away ice from a frozen toilet discharge pipe when the shooting had begun, two of the shots from what he figured were light caliber automatic weapons hitting him from an oblique angle. The two shooters had been somewhere outside the rec room, but close. And the hell of it was that he’d left his weapon in the office at the rear of the trailer. His people were having a party, not preparing for an invasion.

  By the time he had scrambled out from under the double-wide the gunmen had already left, and he’d gone inside knowing exactly what he’d find, and knowing exactly why the shooters were here.

  He’d retrieved his Glock 33 that fired hollow point .357 SIG ammunition, hesitated for just a second back in the rec room—they had become his friends—before he’d checked to make sure one of the killers hadn’t stayed behind and then had raced on foot over to the power station as he tried to call out on his cell phone.

  He stopped and looked at it now. The battery was up but there were no signal bars. They had their own cell phone tower atop the power plant’s one-hundred-and-fifty-foot chimney, and from where he stood the thing seemed intact to him.

  Which made no sense.

  He’d wanted to reach the Air Force’s Special Forces Rapid Response team from Ellsworth down in Rapid City, which was on call 24/7, or at the very least Whitney to warn her to stay away. But he was getting nothing.

  Easing the heavy arctic door open Cameron stepped into the narrow confines of the cold room designed to keep the below-zero winter winds from following someone inside the control room, and hesitated again to listen. In the far distance, below, he could hear the low-pitched hum of the turbine spinning on maintenance power to keep the shaft from sagging, but nothing else. No shooting, no one crying for help. The normalcy was ominous, and he got the terrible feeling that he was too late, that just like in the rec room everyone here was already dead.

  He opened the inner door and rolled inside, keeping low and moving fast to the left, his pistol in both hands out front and low, and he stopped before he got five feet. Tim Snow was crumpled in a bloody heap at the side of his desk, the telephone still in his hand, and Mike Ridder was slumped on his knees, his head on the floor as if he were praying like a Muslim, his blood splattered all over the plate-glass window that looked down on the turbine floor.

  This was a military-style operation. Cut the communications and then eliminate the personnel. Problem was that Pete Magliano was here with General Forester’s daughter who had stormed the gates.

  Still keeping low, Cameron made his way around the control console to where the window ended, flattened himself against the wall, and took a quick look down at the floor.

  Pete was nowhere to be seen, but a slightly built man in white coveralls scurried from around the air preheater and disappeared beneath the economizer mechanism at the base of the furnace, as another much larger man, also dressed in white, pointing a short carbine weapon at something or someone above him, made a “come here” gesture.

  A slightly built woman in jeans and a dark blue windbreaker crawled out of a narrow space beneath the furnace about ten feet off the floor, and made her way slowly down the ladder from what was probably a maintenance point.

  It was Ashley Borden, the newspaper reporter Whitney had warned was coming their way. Pete might have hidden her there, but he was a PR flack, not combat trained, and he wouldn’t have had a chance against whoever these people were.

  Which was beside the point.

  Cameron sprinted to the door and out into the short corridor that ran back to the control center auxiliary electrical room, which held racks of repeaters for all the monitoring and operating panels, and directly to the right to another door that led out to the balcony from which stairs led down thirty feet to the turbine floor.

  The man with the carbine had moved to the left and was apparently talking into a lapel mike, while keeping his weapon pointed at Ashley.

  The distance was impossible for a pistol, but the noise was loud enough to more than easily cover the sounds of someone coming down the stairs, which Cameron took two at a time.

  The big man made a gesture with the weapon for Ashley to head in the same direction the other man had taken, but spotting Cameron, who’d nearly reached the bottom, she stepped back and suddenly dropped to her knees.

  Cameron fired four shots, center mass, as he moved in a dead run across the turbine floor, the first and second of them going wild, but the third and fourth hitting the big man in the right shoulder, and low in his back. He went down, the carbine skittering across the floor.

  “You okay?” Cameron shouted to Ashley, his voice barely carrying over the turbine noise.

  “There’re at least four others!” she shouted. She was white-faced, but she didn’t look frightened.

  The large man was struggling to reach inside his coveralls for something when Cameron pointed the Glock at his forehead from a distance of less than three feet.

  “Not worth dying for today.”

  Moose said something into his lapel mike, as he pulled out a standard U.S. Army–issue Beretta 92F semiauto pistol and started to raise it, a wild look in his dark eyes.

  Cameron fired one shot, the man’s head crashing back on the tile floor, a large pool of blood spreading from the back of his skull.

  Ashley got to her feet and stepped back. “They’ve planted explosives all over the place!” she shouted. “Plastique, I think. Wires leading from the detonator caps.”

  “Can you show me?”

  She nodded.

  “What about Pete Magliano, the guy who brought you over here?”

  “He’s dead, back by the front of the turbine.”

  Cameron bent over Moose’s body and pulled the bud from the man’s left ear, and held it up to his ear.

  “Team two, one, sitrep?” a man demanded.

  “Team two, good to go in three,” a woman replied. “What delay do you want?”

  “Stand by,” the man identified as one replied. “Base, one, clear?”

  “We’re degrading, but still clear. Plus thirty-six, fifty-four remaining.”

  “Moose, one, I have Kemal. What’s the holdup?”

  Cameron bent close enough to Moose’s body so that he could speak into the lapel mike. “One, Moose. I have the reporter.”

  “Good, we’re out of here in three. Hustle,” Egan radioed. “Two, one. Fifteen-minute initial delay, coordinated over eight.”

  “Roger, setting it now,” the woman came back. She sounded excited.

  “Rendezvous now,” Egan radioed and he sounded just as excited as the woman.

  Cameron pocketed the earbud. “Now show me where they planted the Semtex.”

  10

  OUTSIDE, BETWEEN THE south wall of the turbine building
and the transformer yard where they’d parked the three ATVs, Barry waited with Dr. Kemal for the others. The wind had come up and Barry felt a deep chill, as if something or someone had just walked over his grave.

  He was about to speak into his lapel mike when Ada Norman came out of the door, a wild look in her eyes.

  “It’s set,” she said breathlessly. In the overhead lights atop the building her face was shiny with sweat. She pushed up a sleeve of her white coveralls to look at her watch. “The first charge goes in thirteen, and the last eight minutes later.”

  “Where’s Brenda?”

  “She was setting the last plastique under the preheater,” Ada said. She spoke into her lapel mike. “Brenda, where the hell are you? We’re waiting.”

  There was no answer but all of them could hear the high-pitched sound in their earbuds like an electrical motor or something running. Someone’s voice-operated transmit relay was being triggered by the noise.

  “Ackerman, get your ass out of there. We’re running out of time!” Ada shouted, and she looked fearfully at Barry.

  “Moose, copy?” he radioed.

  But there was no answer.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” Ada told him. She started back to the door, but Barry grabbed her.

  “It’s too late!” he shouted. “Someone else got to them. The guy we missed at the double-wide. We’re outa here now.”

  “We can’t leave her, goddamnit. If they take her alive she’ll talk.”

  “They won’t take her alive, and you know it,” Barry said. He’d planned for this contingency. In fact he’d expected it. The only one he couldn’t leave behind was Dr. Kemal. He was coming out dead or alive. Just the presence of his dead body would be enough to tip off the Initiative people—especially Whitney Lipton—what the real mission had been tonight.

  “Fuck you, I’m going after her!” Ada screamed.

  She pulled away and started for the door, when Barry fired two shots, both of them hitting her high in the back, and she went down hard, her head bouncing off the gravel, her body skidding a few feet under her momentum.