“Well,” I said, “I thought the idea was a wake-up call, not mass murder.”
“I don’t expect the hot stuff to actually get to people’s water taps, Lieutenant. I just need to force it back along the mains to a water tower or three. Then I call the appropriate people and tell them the city water supply is radioactive. They laugh, say, sure, Snake, that’s a good one. I invite them to test, even provide the equipment. I call the media, let them know where the tests will be done. Then the fun will begin. Of course, they’ll want to know where it came from.”
“From Helios.”
He kept driving away from the tailrace, and now I wasn’t sure why, except that each streetlight on the perimeter road clearly illuminated the Bronco for any watching cameras.
“Yes, from Helios,” he agreed. “Not as the result of any Communist plot, either. Just a horrible mistake, an operational accident.”
“Until they investigate.”
“Exactly so,” he said. “The investigation. That will be the wake-up call. And if they try to cover it up, well, there’ll be leaks of a different kind.”
“But where are the thirty-something Islamic males scrambling the gates and yelling Allahu Akbar?”
He grinned, and for the first time that lunatic gleam in his eyes was fully uninhibited. He suddenly reminded me of Mad Moira.
“No, Lieutenant,” he said. “No whirling dervishes. Worse—much worse. An American. The scariest kind of terrorist—an American sympathizer. A computer expert. A genu-wine feminazi, who blames America first for all the evils in the world and who will happily help the poor, oppressed Islamic hordes defeat the Great Satan.”
“Fucking Mad Moira,” Tony said softly.
“Bingo.”
“Moira’s here? In the plant?”
“Hell, no, Moira’s on the Web, where she lives like the subversive little spider she is. Only I’ve given her some codes and software. She’s going to get us in while keeping the cavalry out at just the right moment.”
“She’s okay with this deal of poisoning the city of Wilmington?”
Trask laughed again. “She might not actually know the full extent of what she’s going to be helping me with,” he said. Billy snickered.
“She’ll point at you when she figures out what you’ve done,” I said.
“If she’s still alive, right, Billy?”
Billy’s grin grew. He was apparently warming to his new line of work. It occurred to me that perhaps Mad Moira might have an agenda of her own in Trask’s little plot. The major had said she’d been using me. Was she using Trask, too? And how had Trask gotten her away from that angry major of Marines?
Trask glanced at his watch again and casually swung the Bronco around. Now I knew why Ari Quartermain looked like a condemned man. He was one. If Trask was going to kill his helper, he’d surely kill any additional witnesses. Like us. I needed to keep him talking.
“So who was the body in the moonpool?”
“One of those derelicts from over there in the container junkyard. Easy to come by with a bottle of Ripple and a C-note.”
He certainly knew where to look; I wondered if anyone else had ever gone downstairs to face a snake.
“Why’d you put the knife on his boot?” I asked.
“Shit in the game, Lieutenant,” he said with a laugh. “Just throwing a little more shit in the game. That’s my specialty: confusion to the enemy. If I have no specific objective other than chaos, it’s pretty hard for the cops to figure out what I’m up to.” He glanced back in my direction. “That’s how the real bad guys see it, too,” he said. “That’s why you hear so much about ‘no credible and specific threats.’ ”
We were now pointed back toward that boiling tailrace. I kept looking out the windows for the shepherds, but all I saw was those open fields between the perimeter fence and the protected area of the plant buildings. The roar of those high, arching plumes grew as we neared the part of the channel where all that water thundered down into the canal. An enormous cloud of mist boiled up out of the channel now, and that maelstrom seemed to be our destination. Once there, Trask’s vehicle would be obscured from the cameras.
Keeping one hand on the wheel, Trask flipped open a cell phone, punched a speed key, and waited. Billy was bumping around in the front seat as Trask drove the Bronco over increasingly rough ground. That big cloud of spray and mist was now only about fifty yards away. I felt Tony tense up beside me, and tried to figure out what we could do, and when. Or even if, because Billy’s hold on that gun was rock solid, its muzzle pointed right between us and carefully held back out of our reach. Trask spoke into the phone.
“About five minutes,” he said. “Remember: stage one, then stage two. Once I give the go for one, two happens on the timeline, right? I won’t call again.”
He listened and nodded his head. Then, unwittingly, he gave us our chance. With his attention divided, he steered the Bronco into a hole, causing it to veer down and hard left. He swore, dropped the phone, and twisted the wheel, but not before Billy was thrown off balance and into Trask’s right shoulder. The stubby muzzle of the submachine gun came over the back of the front seat for just an instant.
Tony moved with the speed of a snake. He grabbed the muzzle of Billy’s gun and pushed it toward Trask with his left hand while punching Billy in the eye with one knuckle extended and some adrenaline-powered intensity. Billy yelled but did not let go of the gun. I jacked open the right rear door and bailed out. As I went, my ears were assaulted by the roar of the submachine gun as Billy reflexively pulled the trigger. I could hear glass shattering in the Bronco. The next moment Tony was rolling on the ground in front of me, and then we were both up and running for the tailrace.
“Peter Pan!” Tony yelled, recalling that wonderful comment by Tommy Lee Jones in the latest film issue of The Fugitive. We didn’t bother to look back, but simply ran right off the edge of the concrete side and plunged into the channel, chased by fragments of dirt and cement as Billy or Trask did his best to ventilate us before we disappeared.
Disappear we did. The tailrace, which had been a calm, cold, and not very deep pond before the jets opened up, was now a surprisingly warm cauldron of Class 99 whitewater. We’d had to climb the terraces of the channel before. Now the channel was full right up to the top terrace. I went ass over teakettle several times as we were swept down toward that fence. I thought I heard the chatter of the submachine gun briefly between periscope observations, but that was now the least of my worries.
We’d gone in about fifty yards below the impact point of the twin plumes of water, which was good news and bad news. The good news was that we wouldn’t be rolling around like bags of wet laundry in the rotor until the end of time. The bad news was that the tremendous current was carrying us into that reinforced chain-link fence spanning the final exit channel. I say “us” although I’d seen no sign of Tony since making that flying leap into the unknown.
I hit the fence upside down and with my back, and it was a good thing I’d taken a deep breath on the last tumble because damn near every bit of it was knocked right out of me. The force of the current pinned me against the heavy wire like a butterfly on a corkboard. I fought hard to get turned around and back to the surface. Then something dark and heavy thumped into the fence right alongside, which just for a second eased the pressure of the current on me as the wire rebounded. I scrambled, clambered, clawed, and kicked my way up the wire until the growing pressure in my ears told me I was going precisely the wrong way. Did I mention that it was really dark down there?
I reversed course as best I could, my lungs burning now, and my injured right arm becoming less useful by the moment. Without light, I couldn’t be sure if I was going up or sideways, but the noise of all that turbulence seemed to be getting louder, and then my head popped into cold air, even as the current pressed my cheek into the chain-link. Realizing that the current had me pinned, I stopped struggling and concentrated on breathing again, which made for a nice change.
The hank of chain-link wire pressing against my right cheek actually felt reassuring.
I looked around for Tony, but couldn’t see him. There was light up here on the surface, bright enough to obscure the plant, whose lights were still blocked by the cloud of condensation and flying spray upstream. I scanned the banks for Trask and his ace helper, but didn’t see anyone. He’d said five minutes, presumably to Moira, who I assumed was standing by to inject her own version of shit into the game remotely via the Internet. The federal host was probably not yet aware that they were in a deadly game.
Hopefully Trask had decided to cut his losses and get his plan under way. I tried to move sideways, toward the bank, but that current had me nailed to the fence. A moment later, Tony surfaced next to me like a Polaris missile and then went right back under as he, too, was smacked into the fence and held. I reached down into the black water and hauled on his shirt, managing to get his head above water, but just barely.
He hung there like a dead man, and for a horrible second I wondered if I was holding a corpse, but then he coughed, threw up, went back down, and came up again spewing water everywhere. He grabbed on to the wire, saw me, and grinned. He mouthed the words “Hi, Wendy,” and I snorted out a desperate-sounding laugh.
It took us twenty minutes to claw our way across the bulging fence wire and onto the concrete side of the channel, where we flopped like a couple of belly-hooked catfish. Cue the shepherds, I thought. This was when they were supposed to appear out of the darkness and lick my face. That didn’t happen, though, and I couldn’t avoid a pretty bad feeling. They were probably either trapped in the rotor or pinned down on the bottom of the channel, right below where we were recovering. Fuck.
“Who we gonna call?” Tony asked from his supine position on the wet concrete.
“Fresh out of cell phones,” I said. “Did Ari get hit?”
“He might have,” Tony said, propping himself up on one arm. “I had it pointed out the window, but Billy was shooting up the whole backseat, so . . .”
Then I remembered what Trask had said, about planting the video of our coming through the fence to distract the guard force. They’d be coming right here, and very soon, if that five-minutes business was accurate. Tony realized the same thing.
“We gotta move,” Tony said. “We have to stop this thing.”
“Or,” I said, “we wait right here for the guards to find us, tell ’em what’s going down, and let them get in there and stop those assholes.” I didn’t say what was really on my mind: Then I can go look for my dogs.
“You think they’d take us seriously?” he asked. “Their boss is going to fuck with the moonpool? This from the two intruders they just saw on the cameras breaking into the protected area?”
“He’s supposed to be meeting with the feds across the river,” I argued. “Why isn’t he there instead of being in the spent fuel building?”
“Because the guards don’t know that, and besides, he’s Trask and they never know where he’s going to pop up. Plus, he’ll have Quartermain with him to make it look legit.”
“How the fuck do we get in there?”
“By evading the same guards he’s distracting. Hell, we’ll kick the damn doors down if we have to.”
“Then what?” I persisted. “There are at least three doors to get through, all keyed to plant security.” Trask had help. We had nothing.
I think Tony understood my real hesitation to go after Trask, but before he could respond, I looked over his shoulder at the blue strobe lights flickering through that big cloud of condensation. He saw where I was looking, swore, and then we were up and running down the perimeter fence, away from the tailrace channel.
C’mon, mutts, I thought: This is when you come running out of the darkness. But they didn’t, and I wondered if I’d ever see them again.
The ground sloped up from the tailrace for about a hundred yards, and then it fell off again. We made it to that low crest just about the time the security vehicles emerged from the spray cloud. If Trask had been telling the truth, they’d have seen us coming through his hole in the fence on their cameras, so that’s where they’d go first. Our problem, besides being soaking wet, unarmed, and very definitely unwanted, was that we didn’t know what other cameras might be reporting right now as we ran toward the industrial area surrounding the plant. Tony pointed toward some large steel tanks, and we zigged right to get in among them.
The three big buildings were right in front of us, with perhaps a hundred yards or so of open ground to cover before we could get to the middle one, home to the moonpool. There were light towers everywhere and absolutely no way for us to get close to the main buildings if anyone was watching for us. The lone, thin smokestack was blowing air and steam beyond the generator hall, and subdued red strobe lights pulsing along some of the buildings indicated that the reactors were running and that the plant was online. I was starting to shiver in the night air, even though my clothes had begun to dry out.
“Just run for it?” Tony said. He was staring across the open ground at some small outbuildings that were close to the moonpool building’s main entrance.
“Maybe walk for it, like we belonged here,” I said.
It was worth a shot, because time was ticking away and we couldn’t just stand out here in the dark for very much longer. We couldn’t see what was going on down at the tailrace, but the security people wouldn’t stay there forever, either. And Trask was already inside.
We stood up and started walking toward those small buildings. I hoped that we would look like two shift workers headed toward the building. We didn’t have hard hats, there were no ID badges dangling from our necks, and this wasn’t the time for shift change. All we could do was hope that no one in the security control room was reaching for the zoom controls.
It was a tense hundred-yard stroll, but we made it to the small buildings. We stopped in front of one of them. We were on a concrete sidewalk. Beside us the straight steel walls of the spent fuel storage building rose into the night. The even taller reactor containment buildings flanked us on either side, some two hundred yards apart. Steam pipes and other utility lines snaked overhead. The sign on the building in front of us said that it contained spill kits, decon suits, and firefighting equipment. Unfortunately, it was locked, or we might have been able to put on some suits and at least look like we belonged there.
At that moment, a man came out of the moonpool building carrying three clipboards. He was in his late fifties, wore glasses under his white hard hat, and had a sizable paunch. He was listening to a cell phone as he came out of the building and didn’t see the two of us standing there until he was almost upon us. Then he did, and he stopped dead in his tracks. Tony coldcocked him and then grabbed him before he fell backward onto the concrete.
I snatched up the cell phone and heard a woman’s voice saying, “Tommy? Tommy? What was that?”
I switched the call off and then dialed 911. An operator came on immediately and asked what was my emergency.
“This is a police emergency call,” I announced in my most authoritative tone of voice. Tony was dragging the inert worker into the space between the buildings and removing his ID tags. “I am Lieutenant Richter of the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, and I need to contact Sergeant McMichaels in Southport concerning an emergency situation at the Helios power plant.”
I think it was that last bit that did it, because she didn’t say a word, and a moment later I was patched through to the Southport police station dispatcher, who said he was looking for McMichaels as we spoke. Another minute, and McMichaels himself came on the line.
“Sergeant McMichaels,” he said. “Who is this again?” He sounded sleepy. I woke him right up.
“Cameron Richter, Sergeant,” I said. “Listen hard: Trask is inside the spent fuel storage building at Helios. He has Dr. Quartermain hostage. He intends to release radioactive water into the municipal water supply. County and Wilmington. Shut it all down, Sergeant—it’s starting right
now.”
I hung up before he could ask any more questions. Tony had the fat man’s badge chain in one hand and was swiping the green one through the reader at the door marked SPENT FUEL STORAGE. The LED went from red to green and we were inside, although nowhere near the moonpool. That was the good news. The bad news was that we were facing a steel desk in the anteroom, behind which were sitting two very surprised-looking security guards.
Tony and I both had the same idea, and we simply did it: We ran at the desk, grabbed the front edge, and turned it over on the two guards, who still hadn’t begun to move. It was a heavy desk, and, unlike such desks in police station anterooms, it wasn’t bolted down. It went up and over, spilling logs, telephones, coffee cups, radio chargers, and newspapers all over the place. The two guards went over backward in their chairs, and then the leading edge of the desk came down on their chests and shoulders, pinning them to the floor. The upside-down chairs kept the desk pointed at a slant, so we were able to reach down and retrieve guns, cell phones, cuffs, and Mace cans, and then jerk their shoulder-radio wires out of the belt-mounted base units. Then we snatched the upset chairs out and buried the two guys under the full expanse of the desk with only their lower legs showing. They struggled until Tony stood on the desk, at which point I yelled at them to shut up and listen.
“Off,” I heard one of them squeak. I hadn’t gotten a good look at them during our surprise attack, but these guys were inside desk cops and definitely not the twenty-something, ex-military types like the tough boys in the reaction force. Tony told them to be still and then stepped off the desk so they could breathe. Both of us checked our newly acquired weapons, Glock nines, to see if they were ready to work. They were.
“Listen to me,” I said. “We’re not here to damage anything. Your Colonel Trask has gone nuts, and he’s in here and he’s going to melt down the moonpool.”
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 31
