Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Nine-eleven was called a wake-up call, Lieutenant. If the scary colonel has truly gone mad, he may no longer be able to tell the difference.”

  Tony and I got our gear, locked the cars, and set out with the dogs a few minutes later. We had entered McMichaels’s phone number into our respective cell phones. Tony’s battery was fresh; mine was showing faded green bars on the battery icon. We’d put on our tactical vests. Tony carried a shotgun in addition to his Glock. I stuck with my SIG and sent the shepherds out ahead. There was a cleared walkway along the tailrace canal, like a towpath. I had Tony stay about thirty yards behind me in case we walked into something unexpected. The sliver of moon did little to illuminate the woods, but as we got closer to the power plant, all those perimeter lights made the moon superfluous.

  Then we got a surprise. We saw the Keeper, or a boat very similar to it, sitting out in the middle of the tailrace.

  We simultaneously faded left into the woods, and I waited for Tony to catch up to me. The shepherds came hustling back when they realized I was no longer following them.

  “That our boy?” he said.

  “Looks like it, but I don’t see any lights or hear a generator.”

  We watched the darkened boat for a few minutes. Trask could be hunkered down on board and sweeping the canal banks with a night vision scope for all we knew. Or he could have anchored the boat, turned everything off, and gone ashore in that rubber dinghy. In which case, we should be able to find the dinghy.

  “Let’s assume,” I said.

  “Oh, goody,” Tony said.

  “Let’s assume he went ashore, took Ari with him to gain access to the vital area. There should be a rubber dinghy hidden somewhere along here.”

  “Or,” Tony said, “he’s over there on that boat with a thirty-aught, waiting for assumers.”

  “That thought crossed my mind,” I said. “Okay, look: I’ll go see if I can find the dinghy. You take a position in the woods here and cover the boat with the shotgun. If someone starts shooting, you keep their heads down while I . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said with a grin. “While you go see the Baby Jesus.”

  “He didn’t come here tonight to get me,” I said, perhaps with more conviction than I felt. “He’s suckered all the authorities over to the container port for a meeting that’s not going to happen, and by the time they tumble, something bad will go down in that plant. We need to move.”

  “Roger that.” He then settled down behind a tree stump and unlimbered the shotgun. It was a long shot for a scattergun, but the noise might distract a shooter long enough for me to get to cover. Or at least fall down and die gracefully. I would have really preferred that Trask wait a night; my arm hurt, and I needed some downtime.

  Frick found the dinghy. It wasn’t hidden along the riverbank. Instead, it was partially deflated and hanging in a tree just high enough that a passing human wouldn’t see it. Suspicions confirmed: Trask was ashore and ahead of us.

  I signaled Tony, and we put on some speed going up the path. We were taking a chance that Trask was lying in wait ahead, but I didn’t think he was. The controlling factor for Trask was how long the alphabets would wait before they realized they’d been had and came hotfooting back to the plant.

  Frack tripped the trigger wire. He’d gotten ahead of his partner and gave a little yipe when a hank of piano wire snapped back at his leg. As he bent to bite at it, a green tree branch festooned with barbed wire came whipping across the path like an angry cobra right about face level on a walking human. Fortunately for us, we were both twenty feet back when it let go, but even from that distance, we could hear the barbs whistling. We stopped short. Frack, blissfully unaware of his near-miss, had untangled the tripwire and continued on to catch up with Frick, who’d dutifully plunged on up the path. Trees moved all the time; this one hadn’t bothered her. It sure bothered me, and it reminded both of us that we were pursuing a guy onto his home turf. He probably hadn’t assembled that little nasty an hour ago.

  “We need to get off this path,” Tony said, examining the still-quivering branch.

  “That’ll slow us down,” I said, looking into the dark woods to our left.

  “Not like a face full of barbed wire would,” he said.

  “Point taken,” I said. We moved to our left and started pushing our way through the bushes. Fortunately, it was November, or we’d have gotten nowhere fast. I summoned the shepherds with a low whistle and then sent them ahead again, having been reminded once more of the value of four-legged scouts. Even in the woods, the lights of Helios were getting brighter.

  After about twenty minutes, we ran up against the perimeter fence, which was a modern chain-link affair, twelve feet high at least, and topped with three strands of barbed wire slanting out toward anyone approaching. Red and white signs every fifty feet warned prospective intruders to go away or face large fines and many lawyers. On the other side was open ground, with the main generator hall almost a half mile inside the wire. To our right was the tailrace, which was also fenced across the water. A line of orange buoys stretched across the canal fifty feet downstream of the fence, and heavy-duty sodium vapor lights provided illumination of the water area for two tower-mounted TV cameras.

  Just below the concrete generator hall, two enormous nozzles from the condenser outlets pointed in our direction. They looked like bus-sized caves, and the tailrace canal opened into a hundred-yard-wide, concrete-banked channel right below the nozzles. The silhouettes of the green buildings containing the reactors and the moonpool blocked out the night sky behind the generator hall.

  The shepherds ran up to the fence and into the lighted area, so I called them back to where we stood in the relative shadow.

  “Now what?” Tony asked, frowning at the fence line, the lights, and the cameras.

  “Trask has had all the time in the world to make his plans,” I said. “He knows every foot of this perimeter, and he’d know how to put a hole in that fence without getting caught. We just have to find it.”

  “Can the shepherds do that?” he asked.

  “If we had a Trask scent article they could,” I said. Then I realized I had something just as good. Ari’s cell phone.

  I gave the shepherds a good sniff of the cell phone in its leather case, told them to find it, and they began casting for scent. As always, it was fun to watch those exquisitely sensitive noses searching for mere molecules in the grass. Frick suddenly stopped at the side of the towpath, circled once, and then trotted toward the intersection of the concrete channel banks and the perimeter fence. The channel’s bank was a terraced structure, looking like a set of concrete bleachers parallel to the tailrace. The dogs were halfway down the bank between the top edge of the concrete and the placid canal water.

  Frack caught the scent, and they both went slower, tails wagging, noses down, zigzagging across the ground, back and forth along the base of the fence. Just outside the cone of illumination from the left-hand light tower, they stopped and began worrying the bottom of the chain-link. As I was about to recall them, Frick went under, followed by Frack, and then they ran up into the plant area along the concrete rim of the bank.

  “There’s our hole,” I said. We emerged from cover and trotted over to the end of the concrete bank. I was hoping like hell that the cameras weren’t being closely monitored now that the plant was shut down. If they were, we’d be met by a couple of Broncos loaded with SWAT types in about three minutes. As if confirming my fears, as we bent down to find the three-cornered tear in the fence, a noisy Klaxon horn sounded off on one of the light towers on the other side. It went on continuously, sounding like the dive alarm on a World War II submarine.

  Tony looked at me, and I motioned for him to go ahead. We were this close, and I wasn’t going to stop now, even if the guard force had been alerted. There had to be places to hide in the industrial area. The shepherds were waiting about a hundred feet up the concrete ledge. The Klaxon was beginning to hurt my ears as we struggled with the sti
ff wire and some of the canal bottom debris tangled into the fence. Tony went first and got under with a lot of grunting and puffing. I could almost feel the light from those towers giving us a sunburn, and my ears were unconsciously listening for the sound of braking vehicles and slamming doors. As I started under the fence, what I heard instead was a low rumble, which got louder and louder as I pushed my legs and then my stomach under the wire. I heard Tony say “Holy shit,” which was when I realized what the rumbling noise was. Those two enormous jets were firing up.

  Helios was going back online.

  My chest got stuck, and Tony had to get down on his knees to pull on the wire. Trask was slim and wiry, like Tony. Ari would have had to fight to get under, but I was bigger than all three of them, and it was touch and go. Motivation became everything when I saw the tsunami coming down the channel. My vest was the problem, and I was rolling and twisting under the wire to get it unstuck as a churning, foaming wave of river water washed past the fence. Behind it the tailrace channel began to fill up in earnest, the terraced levels of concrete disappearing in sequence as the main condenser circulating pumps got down to business. I could feel and smell the cool spray wafting up to my level as I finally got the damned vest free and rolled out from under the chain-link. Whirling red strobe lights mounted up on the light towers threw psychedelic patterns on the concrete.

  I stood up to behold the sight of those two giant plumes of water lifting out of the nozzles to crash into the channel almost a hundred yards below the generator hall.

  “Gotta get higher,” Tony shouted over the din of the thundering water, and I could immediately see why: The channel was swelling fast, and the water was already climbing the next terrace level below ours. I looked for the shepherds, but couldn’t see them in the cloud of mist that was growing above the impact zone from the nozzles.

  I looked up. The terraces were about five feet high, and the concrete was getting wet from all the spray. There was nothing to hang on to for a pull-up, and neither of us could jump five feet.

  Tony pointed at my shoulders, and I understood at once. I got down on my hands and knees and braced myself. I could feel the rising water lapping at my boots. Tony stepped up on my back and then hoisted himself up to the next terrace. Then he pulled me up. We repeated the procedure twice more before we were on the top of the channel walls. Fine for us, but where the hell were the dogs? Then I realized we were standing out in full view of the cameras, and we started running toward the nozzles, if only to get away from those light towers. The noise from the jets sounded like a pair of 747s turning up on the takeoff ramp as we got closer to the generator hall. I wondered who’d decided to put the plant back online.

  We made it to a stack of what looked like giant concrete barrels sitting next to the perimeter road. There were two rows of them, and they were fifteen feet high and easily eight feet in diameter. We ducked down between the two rows while I scanned the tailrace area for the dogs. I had this terrible feeling they’d been swept down the channel and were now pinned against the water fence. What I saw instead was headlights coming around the corner of the six-story generator hall.

  Regular patrol? Or the response team?

  We couldn’t hear anything over the roar of those tailrace nozzles. All we could do was watch the headlights. The vehicle was coming directly toward us on the perimeter road, so we put one of the barrels between us and the lights and waited to see what they would do. As I clung to the smooth concrete sides, I saw the radiation triangles painted on them and realized these must be the storage casks Ari had talked about.

  The security vehicle, a Bronco with a light rack on top, passed the casks and kept going on the perimeter road. Regular patrol. I looked over at Tony, who mouthed the words “Now what?” over the thunder of the nozzles. I was worried sick about the shepherds, but if Trask and his hostage were somewhere ahead of us and inside the plant, then that was the priority. The next big trick was going to be getting into the plant itself. Trask solved our problem when he and Billy the Kid stepped out of the darkness and pressed guns into our necks.

  Billy relieved us of our weapons and phones as we stood spread-eagled against the concrete sides of a cask. He was thorough enough to check for ankle guns and boot knives. I had a knife, and Tony had one of each. He took our cell phones and smashed all of them, mine, Ari’s, and Tony’s, against the wall of a cask while Trask stood cover. Then we marched in single file, Billy ahead, the two of us, and Trask behind, toward the second Bronco, which we’d apparently missed while concentrating on the first one. Billy opened the right rear door and pointed. Tony got in first, then me. We joined a frightened-looking Ari Quartermain in the backseat. Billy stood outside, pointing his weapon at us, while Trask got into the driver’s seat. Then Billy got in, sitting sideways to keep us covered. He was doing his strong-arm trick, holding the weapon high at an unnatural angle, but covering all three of us just fine. Once he closed his door, we could hear again.

  “Welcome to my game, Lieutenant,” Trask said. “I was almost hoping you’d find your way in.”

  “We found your way in,” I said. “The rest wasn’t all that hard until the waterworks started.”

  “Yes, isn’t that something? I wish I could claim credit for the timing, but I was very impressed with your resourcefulness. First the snake, now this.”

  “You were watching?”

  “I’ve been busy, Lieutenant,” he said. He looked tired but determined. “I’ve reworked those two tailrace cameras to send two signals, one to the security control room, one to a portable monitor. When you showed up in the woods, I diverted the real picture until you were through. Yes, I was watching.”

  “Sir?” Billy said, without taking his eyes or that gun off us. “The time?”

  “I know, Billy, I know,” Trask said, glancing at his watch. “So what would you do with our two interlopers here?”

  “Pop ’em and drop ’em in the rotor,” Billy said promptly. He looked really eager to take care of that matter personally for his favorite colonel.

  Trask looked at me. “Know what a rotor is, Lieutenant?”

  “As in mechanical?”

  “As in hydraulic. There’s one at the base of every waterfall. The water comes straight down and then it rolls, under the surface, in a permanent horizontal vortex. That’s why people who go over a waterfall often never come back. They get trapped in the rotor, where they roll around for a year or so until they, how shall I put this—return to the biosphere. There’s a beauty of a rotor at the end of that tailrace out there, and if they happen to turn off the jets, the underwater section of the fence keeps things, um, confined.”

  Ari hadn’t moved or said anything since we’d joined him in the backseat. His hands were folded in his lap, and then I noticed that his wrists were bound together with a white electrical cable tie. He was gray-faced, staring straight ahead like a condemned man.

  “Well, hell, Colonel,” I said. “If we’re going into the disposal, you can at least tell us what this is all about, can’t you?”

  “Just dying of curiosity, are you, Lieutenant?” Trask said.

  “It would appear so,” I said.

  “Billy, I think you have the right idea, and I’m even going to let you do the honors.” He turned back to me while he started the vehicle. “You see, Lieutenant, I can use Dr. Quartermain here, but I don’t need you—I just needed film of your intrusion. At the appropriate time, I’ll inject that back into the surveillance system, which hopefully will pulse the reaction team to come out here and run around in circles while we’re in there, doing our thing. Neat, hunh?”

  “Sounds like a good diversion,” I said. Neither Tony nor I had been cuffed, and I knew Tony wasn’t going to just sit there and eat a round or six. Billy was watching both of us like a hawk, though, and he looked entirely ready to shred the both of us and the backseat. “But diversion for what, exactly?”

  “The moonpool, Lieutenant. The moonpool. I’m going to show this decadent society what
the future will look like once we cut and run over there in the Middle East. Give them a little taste of real twenty-first-century terrorism.”

  “You’re going to drain it? Cause some kind of meltdown?”

  “No, Lieutenant. That’s much too messy. Why spoil a perfectly good atomic power plant? No, this has to do with a vulnerability they haven’t thought about. That’s why Dr. Quartermain there is looking so glum.”

  He put the Bronco in drive and turned back out onto the perimeter road.

  “You have some more inside help, don’t you?” I asked.

  “In a manner of speaking, Lieutenant. I have somebody by the balls, and, as usual, when you have people by the balls, their hearts and minds tend to follow. The best part is, he won’t know what he’s done until it’s much too late. But Dr. Quartermain here—he knows. Why don’t you tell them, Ari?”

  Trask turned the Bronco off the perimeter road and began a slow descent toward the tailrace. Any camera would see a security vehicle resuming its patrol. The booming of the water jets grew louder, even inside the vehicle.

  “The water supply for the moonpool isn’t river water,” Ari recited. “It’s municipal water. The pool loses water due to evaporation, so there’s a connection between the pool’s refill system and the municipal water system. He’s going to reverse it.”

  Holy shit, I thought. “Municipal as in the county water supply?”

  “Better than that, Lieutenant,” Trask said patiently. “Municipal as in county and city water. Wilmington City, to be precise. The county produces more water than it needs, so they share. You remember what happened to your Ms. Gardner, don’t you? Expand the scale just a bit and you’ll get the picture.”

  I was impressed, all right, but, at the same time, I didn’t think it would work. Trask must have read my thoughts.

  “I can see you’re skeptical,” he said. He turned the vehicle to the right onto a side road, leading us away from the tailrace. The regular patrol, driving a random pattern, like they were supposed to. I shrugged, and the muzzle of Billy’s weapon rose and fell with my shoulders. No genius there, but the boy certainly could focus.