Blowout Page 8

  He reached up and eased the wire out. And for just an instant he was back in SEAL Hell Week, the toughest training evolution in any special ops service in any military anywhere in the world ever—even tougher than the old Soviet Spetsnaz regimen. The unknown was as common as the unexpected. Pain was constant. If an operation was going well you were probably running into a trap. Murphy’s Law. That and incoming rounds had the right of way, something he’d been reminded of at the rec center.

  “Over here!” Ashely shouted as Cameron scrambled out from beneath the shaft.

  The shock from the impact of the bullet in his right thigh was wearing off, and he was limping as he reached where she was crouched beneath the forward end of the feedwater pump, above which was the turbine case, where another lump of Semtex had been molded.

  She started to move aside. “You’ve been shot,” she said.

  “I’ll live,” Cameron said. “Let me in there.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” Ashley said, and she reached up for the wire and started to pull, but Cameron grabbed her wrist and held it in place.

  “Easy,” he said. “No sparks.”

  Their faces were inches apart, and when she realized exactly what he was telling her, she blanched and released the wire.

  “You do it,” she said. “I’ll go find the next one.”

  At that moment another massive explosion rocked the power plant, this one much closer, but higher up toward the top of the furnace nearer to the forward end of the wellhead, and debris was falling back there, twisting metal and what sounded like piping.

  Cameron steadied himself against the feedwater pump case and gently eased the wire out of the explosive.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said, turning, but Ashley was already gone, and as he ducked out from beneath the pump he saw her disappear beneath the steam control valve assemblies, as even more debris rained down from the towering furnace structure less than one hundred feet away.

  He leaned up against the pump, which was about the size of an SUV, his head swirling. He’d lost a fair amount of blood, and although his wounds were only seeping now, he was having trouble keeping on track. But help wasn’t coming. It was just him and the boss’s daughter, a brassy woman with more balls than just about every civilian he’d ever met.

  Pushing away from the case he limped twenty feet farther along the power chain to where Ashley had crawled up beneath a series of large diameter steel pipes coated in a carbon fiber heat jacket. He could only see her feet and her legs from the hips down about fifteen feet up.

  “Wait!” he shouted.

  A second later she ducked out from beneath the maze, a seriously nervous look on her face, but then she smiled. “I did it!” she shouted, climbing back down.

  A third explosion came, this one near the base of the furnace and practically on top of them, so close that the air danced in front of Cameron’s eyes and he was thrown to the floor, his ears ringing, the hum of the turbine blotted out.

  Ashley had fallen to her knees and she was just scrambling to her feet when Whitney was suddenly there, a stricken look on her face, and she was saying something, shouting it seemed to Cameron, but he could barely make out her words.

  The two women helped him to his feet, and he managed to get his voice.

  “Too late. We have to get out of here right now. The ceiling is about to cave in.”

  “They’re all dead in the rec room, Jim. What’s going on? Who’s doing this?”

  Cameron grabbed her arm. “I don’t know, but Mike and Tim are dead up in the control room, and we have to go right now!”

  Ashley suddenly spun around as if she’d been hit in the leg or hip, and blood suddenly erupted from a long gash just below the waistband of her jeans.

  Cameron hadn’t heard the shot but he knew damn well that they were taking incoming fire from at least one of the terrorists left behind. He pulled Whitney to the right and slammed into Ashley, knocking her off her feet, the three of them dropping to the floor behind a steel beam supporting the deaerator casing as two more bullets ricocheted off the concrete floor, just missing them.

  14

  AS FAR AS Egan was concerned stealth was no longer an issue nor were comms with his team, because the explosions had already started and all that was left were Dr. Kemal riding pillion and Gordy manning the electronics in the motor home. There was just about zero chance that anyone was coming to the rescue and no one inside the power plant was going to survive.

  They topped the last rise and raced down to the Newell parked in a shallow bowl as Gordy appeared at the open door, and started to hop from foot to foot, the same thing he said that a computer genius he’d heard of did whenever he was excited.

  “You son of a bitch, you did it!” he shouted as Egan pulled up, shut the ATV down, and dismounted.

  “Time?”

  “Fifty-nine, thirty-one.”

  “Start up, we’re getting out of here.”

  Gordy looked back up toward the rise. “Where’re Moose and the girls?”

  “Dead,” Egan said. “Now, start up.”

  “He shot Ada!” Kemal screamed.

  Egan looked at the scientist, nothing more than a raghead in his estimation. “It was necessary,” he said. He turned back to Gordy. “I’m going to disconnect the trailer and then we’re going to drive away, unless you want to wait around for the cops or somebody to show up and arrest us all.”

  Widell stopped hopping. “Right,” he said. “Loud and clear. We got miles to make.” And he went back inside the motor home.

  Dr. Kemal was shaking with rage and fear. “They were our team. Our friends.”

  “Get inside, I’ll be right behind,” Egan said. He was beginning to lose his patience, but Kemal was the one person he could not leave behind. If his body was found and identified too soon, the eggheads across at the operations center might put it together and take a little extra care sifting through the debris once things cooled down. If that were to happen before the bacteria at the wellhead was released into the coal seam everything they’d done would have been for nothing. Repairs would be made, and Donna Marie would be back up and running within a month or two. Not part of his contract.

  “There’s still time.”

  “No.”

  “We can’t leave them! For the sake of Allah and our prophet we must go back!”

  The motor home’s diesel rumbled into life.

  “Go inside!” Egan shouted.

  Kemal turned back to the ATV and climbed aboard, but the key was gone, and when he realized it he jumped off and pulled a pistol out from a pocket in his coveralls.

  “Do you want to spend the rest of your life in jail, you stupid bastard?” Egan shouted. He pointed back toward the rise. “Moose is dead, you saw his body. And no one inside the power plant will survive.”

  “You shot Ada.”

  “The bitch would have died trying to find her friend. They were dykes. What does your religion say about that?”

  Kemal shook his head in despair. “They were ready to convert. I gave them a Quran.”

  “Go back and get them, if that’s what you want,” Eagan said, and he tossed the key over. “But you’ll die trying, and we won’t wait for you.”

  “Give me ten minutes,” Kemal said, and pocketing his pistol he turned to get back aboard the ATV.

  Egan unslung his carbine and fired a short burst, catching Kemal low in the back, knocking him forward, the second and third shots taking the back of his skull off.

  “It’s a tough old world,” Egan mumbled.

  Gordy came back to the door, his eyes wide. “Holy shit, you wasted the doc.”

  “He was getting stupid on me.”

  The two of them carried Kemal’s body into the motor home and dumped it on the floor in the rear compartment. Egan went back outside and disconnected the ATV trailer from the hitch, undid the chains, and let the tongue drop to the ground.

  He checked his wristwatch and looked up toward the crest of the
rise. The next explosion, this one just behind the wellhead would occur within the next five minutes, and as much as he wanted to wait around to hear it, he wanted to be well away before the cavalry arrived—which would happen at some point this evening.

  If the final phase of the operation went as he’d planned it, he would be drinking a cold beer he’d left in the mini-fridge in his room at the Radisson in Rapid City sometime before midnight. Tomorrow morning he would fly to Chicago aboard United 6190 at six o’clock. Just another businessman trading in coal futures. Which he thought was actually a good joke.

  From Chicago he would lay low in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula until the dust settled and he found out about his payment from Kast.

  Gordy was behind the wheel when Egan climbed back aboard. “South,” he said. “Twelve miles to White Butte where we’ll ditch the rig and pick up our Chevy. Remember the way?”

  “Just the two of us now,” Gordy said nervously.

  Egan grinned. “Yup, it’s a tough old world out there, son, but look on the bright side. Now we just have to split the money two ways, not six.”

  Gordy suddenly grabbed for something inside his white coveralls, but before he could turn in his seat, a pistol in his hand, Egan flipped his PDW off his shoulder and pulled off one shot at point-blank range to the side of the kid’s head, slamming his body against the side window.

  It took a couple of minutes to manhandle the kid out of the driver’s seat and clean up the blood splatter before Egan got behind the wheel and headed south on the dirt road, twenty minutes or more before any communications to or from the Initiative would be possible.

  And in the following confusion it might take an hour or more before the Air Force Rapid Reponse team made it up from Ellsworth in Rapid City.

  15

  ASHLEY FELT NO pain in her right hip, which she didn’t think was right. Jim Cameron was lying half on and half off her and Dr. Lipton, the woman who wasn’t supposed to be here, was sprawled on her side under some piping, their faces inches apart.

  “I think we need to get out of here before the place comes down around our heads,” she said, but she was whispering and Whitney shook her head.

  Cameron rolled away, his pistol in hand and he fired off two shots toward a section of the upper part of the furnace that was still intact.

  The turbine was still running and the high pitched whine louder at this end made any conversation all but impossible. Ashley was sick to her stomach, her head spinning, and it took her a moment to realize that she might be in shock.

  “Can you move?” Cameron shouted. “Can you at least crawl?”

  “Yes!” Ashley shouted and nodded.

  Whitney scrambled on all fours over to where Cameron was crouched behind a piece of machinery that looked something like an oversized water heater, and started shouting something, but Cameron shoved her back a split second before a bullet pinged off the side of the machinery.

  Cameron reached around the feedwater heater and fired back once, then he dropped his pistol, which skittered out across the floor, and fell backwards, his head bouncing off the concrete floor, a crease in his right shoulder.

  Ashley had once listened to her father describe a firefight he’d been involved with in Bosnia. He’d been a lieutenant colonel at the time, a UN observer outside of Sarajevo, when his group of five men, two of them Canadian, one Australian, and two South Africans, had come under intense fire from what turned out to be a Serbian ethnic cleansing squad. The gun battle had gone on for only four minutes before the Serbs had withdrawn.

  “Longest and shortest four minutes of my life,” her father had admitted.

  That was in the late nineties after everything was over, and she’d listened to his story not just as a daughter, but as a budding journalist, and she’d read between the lines that he’d been frightened. It was then that she’d come to respect him as a man and not just love him as an iron man father. He’d become a vulnerable human being to her.

  Capable of the same fear she was feeling now, and admitting it.

  “There was no place to dig in, so we had to stay two steps ahead of them, firing over our shoulders as we bugged out,” he’d explained.

  In her mind it was just like that now. They needed to get the hell out of here.

  Ashley crawled over to where Whitney was dragging Cameron back behind the machinery and lent a hand as two more shots ricocheted off the floor.

  But there was nowhere to go now without exposing themselves to the shooter. And there would be more explosions because they could no longer reach the plastique.

  “Go!” Cameron shouted at them. His complexion was pale. He was obviously in a lot of pain but he wasn’t out of it. “This shit’s going to start coming down around your heads.”

  “We’re pulling you out,” Whitney said.

  “No.”

  “Yes!” Ashley shouted, getting her voice. But she honestly didn’t know if she could move ten feet on her own, let alone drag Cameron out even with Dr. Lipton’s help.

  “Jesus!” Cameron shouted, rearing back.

  Ashley looked over her shoulder as a large figure suddenly loomed out of the smoke and dust. He was wearing a dark brown jacket, some kind of a billed cap on his head, a big pistol in his right hand, and he was limping but moving fast. Her first impression was that the shooter had somehow gotten around behind them and right now they were just seconds way from being blown away.

  Whitney started to scramble toward Cameron’s pistol, which lay about ten feet way completely exposed, when the figure shouted something like, get back, and Ashley suddenly knew who he was and she grabbed Whitney’s leg and held her back.

  “It’s okay!” she shouted.

  “About time you civilians got off your butts!” Cameron shouted. “How’d you get in?”

  “Your visitors left the back gate open,” Osborne said, dropping down beside Cameron. “You okay?”

  “I’ll live. We’ve got one shooter somewhere about fifty feet away, high, damned good. And we still have one or more C4 or Semtex charges set on a timer. Should go off any moment now.”

  “Just the one detonator by the turbine?”

  “So far as I know.”

  “I shut it down,” Osborne said. “Dr. Lipton, you okay?”

  “Everybody at the rec center is dead.”

  “Have you been injured?”

  “No.”

  “Ms. Borden?”

  “I feel like I’ve been kicked in the butt.”

  “Looks like you’re going to get a good story this time,” Osborne said. He eased over to the edge of the feedwater heater and took a quick peek.

  The shooter fired once, the bullet grazing the side of the pump inches away from Osborne’s head and he ducked back. “Determined,” he said. “What’s back there that can hurt us, other than the one using us for target practice?”

  “Only one?” Whitney asked.

  “Yes.”

  She shrugged. “The furnace, but there’s no gas feed to it until morning. Nothing’s pressurized, no steam. If they blow up anything else, a lot of steel girders, pipes, and some serious machinery could come down on our heads. Lubricating oil reservoirs could catch fire, but most of the microbes have already been injected into the seam. All that’s left is the gadget in the morning.”

  Osborne had a general idea what she was talking about, and so far as he knew it was all strictly classified, on a need to know basis, and someone would have to have to talk to Ashley Borden before she got out of here. The details weren’t ready for the media. The attack would be reported as against the ELF project.

  A lot of black smoke was roiling out from the far end of the generating hall, some of it extremely noxious, and it was starting to make breathing difficult.

  “We’re going to have to get out of here before we choke to death,” Ashley said.

  “Not without help,” Whitney said. “The bastard has us pinned down.”

  “I tried to call for backup, but all of our commu
nications are down,” Cameron said.

  “I figured as much,” Osborne said. “I had State Radio call Ellsworth about ten minutes ago, so help should be on its way.”

  “I don’t know where the hell you got the protocol, but I’m sure glad you did,” Whitney said. “So how do we get out of here?”

  “Create a diversion,” Ashley said. “I’ll go for the Glock.”

  She started to move out from behind the feedwater heater but Osborne grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “You’ll get yourself killed that way. Whoever is doing the shooting has the high ground and they’re damned good. Anyway you need to come out of this in one piece, your father would never forgive me otherwise. And I can’t go out for dinner and drinks with a corpse or a cripple. Deal?”

  Ashley looked up at him, and after a moment she managed a tight smile. “Deal,” she said. “What’s your plan?”

  “You and Dr. Lipton are going to help Jim out of here,” he said. He handed his 9mm SIG-Sauer and spare magazine of ammunition to Cameron. “Do you have a spare?”

  “No,” Cameron said, seeing what Osborne had in mind. “But I’ve only fired three times, and I loaded a fifteen-round mag.”

  “Then we’re about even for now,” Osborne said. His SIG was also loaded with a fifteen-round magazine. “Ready?”

  Cameron checked the pistol and nodded. “I owe you one.”

  “What?” Whitney demanded.

  “We don’t have time, Doc,” Cameron said as he managed to get to his knees, steadying himself with one hand.

  Whitney, realizing what was about to happen, started to protest, but Cameron reached around the feedwater heater and pulled off two shots that were immediately returned as Osborne dove out from behind the machinery, rolling as he moved, snatching the Glock with one hand while levering himself to the right with his other, and pulling off four shots in rapid succession toward where he figured the lone shooter was hiding about fifty feet above the floor.

  A half-dozen shots ricocheted off the concrete floor following just behind him as he made it to the relative safety of a broad steel beam supporting the ceiling.

  Ashley and Whitney helped Cameron to his feet. They looked across to where Osborne was holed up and Cameron nodded.