Checkmate

by Steven James

  “It’s basically rocket fuel.”

  Oh.

  Perfect.

  “What else?”

  “Well, the one thing would be . . . But . . .”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Anhydrous ammonia. There are twelve tankers of it.”

  “Tell me about anhydrous ammonia.”

  “It’s a liquefied compressed gas. ‘Anhydrous’ just means ‘without water.’ Its primary use is in fertilizer. Because of the nitrogen content it’s also used in power plants and, because it absorbs so much heat—it boils at minus-twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit—it’s also used in refrigeration and as a coolant.”

  “Is it flammable? Will it explode?”

  “It doesn’t have a flashpoint, but its upper explosive limit really depends on the vapor concentration in the air. It has a short window of flammability, but, especially in indoor situations where it’s being used as a coolant, it might get mixed with oil and that would widen the range. There’ll be a deflagration, not an explosion exactly. It’ll burn up very fast.”

  “Alright. Well, that’s what we want.”

  Good, good, good.

  “But it does create a vapor cloud,” he continued. “It’s a very strong base, causes severe chemical burns on contact, and, since it’s moisture seeking, it’ll spread fast.”

  “So, inhalation,” I anticipated where this was going, and it was not a good direction. “Your throat, your lungs—it’ll coat them.”

  “Yes. And your eyes. Corneal burns and blindness. The vapor is lighter than air. Heat, low humidity, wind—they can take a plume up hundreds of feet into the air.”

  “Let’s say the wind carries it toward an open-air stadium. Would it settle in there?”

  “A stadium?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, because of the eddy created as the vapor passes over the upper edge, sure, it would settle in. Is there really a stadium downwind?”

  I recalled the breeze in the graveyard.

  “There is.”

  I could picture a vapor cloud curling over the lip of the stadium, then pooling down inside of it. Thousands of people gasping for breath, blinded, panicking, climbing over each other trying to escape.

  “But,” Benson tried to reassure me, “those pressurized tank cars are reinforced by up to three-quarters of an inch of steel. Most of them have a thermal shield as well and another one-eighth-inch steel jacket covering that. These things do not just spring a leak.”

  “But what about getting the ammonia in or out? It has to have valves of some kind.”

  “All the valves and fittings are protected from rollover by a housing on the top of the car.”

  “For now let’s just assume our guy knows what he’s doing. What would happen if these twelve cars ruptured and the vapor cloud entered that stadium?”

  “Depending on the density of the plume, you could be talking about a life-safety situation.”

  “Fatal levels of exposure.”

  “Yes.”

  To tens of thousands of people.

  Benson was quiet. “But it won’t come to that. Those cars are designed to withstand a derailment.”

  “Think. If it were possible to puncture the cars.”

  “It’s not.”

  “But if it were—and we’re not just talking about a few tank cars rolling onto their side, but a dozen of them blowing up or potentially dropping hundreds of feet into a network of collapsed mines. Would they rupture?”

  “I mean . . .” There was a distinct change in his tone. “With heat impingement . . . Anhydrous ammonia has a direct pressure-to-temperature relationship so as heat goes up, so does the pressure . . . Each of those cars is carrying over thirty thousand gallons of . . . Oh, my God.”

  I got an incoming call from Margaret and put Benson on hold. I started to tell her what I knew, but she leapt in. “Ingersoll’s men found some sort of pressure-release mechanism. It’s welded to the track in several places. The only way to dismantle it is by removing that section of track. And even then we’re not sure what might happen—it might be rigged to blow those shafts.”

  I whipped through what I’d found out from Benson: “Anhydrous ammonia. This train, M343, has twelve tankers of it—over three hundred fifty thousand gallons. It creates a vapor cloud that can be lethal. We have to stop that train.”

  “I have a call in to the head of the railroad. You’re there, Patrick. You know more about this situation than anyone. I want you up in the air, getting real-time eyes on this thing. Where are you?”

  “The Charlotte Regional Medical Center.”

  “Good. They should have a helicopter there. And they’ll have a pilot on call or on-site.”

  I’d landed here yesterday after my confrontation with Mason in the mine. “They do have a landing pad, but—”

  “I’ll clear things with the hospital. Just get to the pad.”

  76

  3:19 p.m.

  11 minutes left

  Glenn received word from dispatch and tossed the automatic brake valve handle to put the train into emergency status.

  Along with the dynamic brakes, he also engaged the head-end device and flipped the switch to get the EOT, or the end-of-train device, to dump air from the rear of the train so there would be continuity in the braking.

  Still, it was going to take a while to stop.

  + + +

  By the time I arrived at the landing pad, the on-call pilot was firing up the helicopter. “You must be well connected, my friend,” he called over the sound of the rotors. “The order to take you up came straight from the top.” I wasn’t sure if he was referring to someone from the hospital or to Margaret, and at this point I didn’t really care.

  I’d ended the call with Benson, but I still had the cell phone with me. However, with the sound of the rotors, I wasn’t sure it was going to do me a whole lot of good on the helicopter. “Can we patch in to a landline from the headset, or does it only connect with emergency services?”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  We took off. I set up a conference call with Margaret and the president of Knoxville Southeast Railway, a nervous, twitchy-sounding guy named Albert. I didn’t catch his last name.

  I told the pilot, “Take us over the stadium.”

  As we flew across the city, I could see that traffic on I-277 near the overpass had been blocked and the cars were already backed up for nearly half a mile. No vehicles were on the overpass itself. All the roads leading out of Uptown Charlotte were clogged with traffic—and that was just going to get worse as we tried to evacuate the stadium.

  I didn’t know how Margaret had gotten word out so fast, but then I saw that we were not alone in the sky—a news chopper was hovering above the stadium. Maybe it’d been there to cover Fan Celebration Day or maybe—

  “We can’t reroute the train,” Albert said frantically into my earpiece. “And it’s not braking like it should.”

  “What does that mean?” Margaret asked.

  “Something’s wrong. It’s not going to be able to stop in time.”

  As we soared near the stadium I could see fans streaming out of it and, considering the possibility of a poisonous vapor cloud spreading across the area, I briefly wondered if it might have been better to have them stay in it.

  No, Pat. They would have been trapped there with the gas.

  I imagined that by now hazmat teams, fire engines, and EMTs would all be on their way.

  We can’t reroute the train.

  We can’t stop it in time.

  All the parking spots near the stadium were filled. I’m not a great judge of numbers, but I’d say at least twelve to fifteen thousand people were still inside the stadium itself.

  We need to do something to stop those tankers from rupturing.

&nbs
p; My pilot swiveled the chopper around and I saw M343 approaching from the southwest.

  I eyed the track leading in the other direction as it went toward the northeast. “Take us up there,” I told the pilot.

  He tilted us forward and we shot through the sky.

  There’s a pressure mechanism on that track. There’s no way to get it off in time.

  But you have to stop this. You have to!

  “Can we derail the train?” I asked Albert.

  His voice was tense, desperate as he replied. “Even if that were an option, we could never get a derailer out there in time.”

  “A semi on the tracks? Anything like that?”

  “That’s not going to do it.”

  But by then I was only half listening. I could see that about three-quarters of a mile from the stadium the tracks branched out into a train yard. M343 was coming up from the opposite direction . . .

  That’s crazy, Pat.

  Maybe. But—

  “There’s a rail yard northeast of the stadium,” I said to Albert. “I see some engines there with the Knoxville Southeast Railway logo. Is that your train yard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are there any engineers there?”

  “Certainly, but—”

  “How soon can we get an engine fired up and on its way out of there?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “How soon!”

  “Just a matter of minutes if I put the call through, but—”

  Margaret interrupted him. “What is it, Patrick? What are you thinking?”

  With that pressure-release mechanism out there, the track is going to blow when an engine crosses over the—

  But you’re talking about several acres of land dropping away and over a quarter of a million gallons of poisonous, liquefied compressed gas escaping a few hundred meters from a stadium filled with—

  Albert muttered, “There’s no way we’re going to be able to stop that train.”

  “Then,” I said, “we need to blow the track before it gets there.”

  A pause. “What are you talking about?”

  “Send one of those rail yard engines down the track to—”

  “What?” he gasped. “Toward M343? A collision course?”

  “Yes. Run it across that pressure mechanism so the tracks will blow.”

  “But M343 will derail when it hits the blown section of track or collides with that other engine,” he countered.

  “The guy at your dispatch center, Benson, he told me those tanker cars are reinforced, that they’re designed to withstand rolling over—but they’re not designed to withstand being blown up or dropping into collapsed mine shafts.”

  “So,” Margaret said, “you’re thinking we blow the track and just let the cars derail?”

  “Yes.”

  Albert said, “That’s insane.”

  “I’m out of ideas. And we’re out of time.” I was staring at the stadium. All those people. “What else do you propose?”

  “Well, we need to come up with an action plan and—”

  Margaret cut in. “There’s no time for that. We need to stop M343 before it crosses that section of track. Is there any other way we can do it?”

  A blunt silence. I assumed that Albert was processing everything, the implications, the risks. “The engineer will have to jump after he gets it rolling.”

  “Well, then, tell him to get ready to jump,” Margaret said, “because we can’t let those hazmat cars blow.”

  “Alright,” Albert agreed at last. “I’ll call dispatch and get an engine en route.”

  77

  “Say again?” Glenn tapped the button on his radio. “Can you repeat that?”

  “We’re sending another engine toward you on your line,” the dispatcher told him. “You need to jump before you get to the Cathouse Signal.”

  He knew M343 wasn’t braking like it should, but—

  He checked, and, to put it lightly, at the speed they were going, it was going to be a rough landing.

  But it was better than hitting another engine, derailing, or blowing up.

  “Just a little slower,” he told Louis, “and then we need to go for it.”

  + + +

  I watched as an engine started out of the rail yard and entered the line that paralleled the stadium.

  My pilot swiveled the helicopter around, and I could see M343 coming from the other direction. From here I couldn’t tell its speed, but it obviously wasn’t going to stop in time.

  Two men were standing on the sides of the engine as it traveled along the tracks. One leapt off, hit the ground, and rolled. Moments later, the other jumped, hit the ground. And lay still.

  + + +

  As he drove, Kurt Mason had been monitoring the breaking news on the radio.

  The news anchor seemed baffled. “It appears there is now another engine on the tracks, heading toward M343. I have no idea what’s . . .”

  Kurt pulled over and stared at the skyline as he realized what they were trying to do.

  + + +

  We radioed to get paramedics over to help the two men who’d leapt from M343. The engineer who’d started the solo engine in the rail yard had also jumped. He looked fine.

  His unmanned engine passed the stadium toward the pressure-release mechanism and then crossed it.

  And that’s when the tracks blew.

  78

  The initial explosion sent debris flying hundreds of feet into the air and initiated a ripple of other explosions underground, causing a section of earth the size of two football fields to collapse.

  As the mineshafts and tunnels of the Saint Catherine Mine blew, they swallowed that unmanned engine and the tracks behind it.

  Black, bottomless-looking holes opened up at various places in the fresh wound marring the city as the long-abandoned shafts that had been capped off in the 1900s broke open.

  The tracks in front of the engine that had vanished into the earth bowed and rippled as the shock wave rolled through the ground; then M343 hit the fractured section of tracks and its three lead engines derailed. The first two dropped into the rift and exploded, sending a thick, black cloud erupting into the sky.

  The coupling of the third engine snapped and the engine plowed off the tracks, causing a pileup of the cars behind it. First, the buffer cars slid sideways, accordion style, as they jumped the tracks one by one. Then the tankers began to derail, colliding with the cars in front of them. Two tank cars smashed sidelong into each other.

  One tanker rolled and sheared off the valves inside the protective housing, and immediately a cloud of thick white vapor spewed from it in a quickly expanding plume. The wind caught hold of it and carried it toward the stadium.

  More freight cars folded up alongside the anhydrous ammonia tankers, tipping sideways off the track.

  The overpass didn’t crumble immediately, but seemed to do so in slow motion as its concrete supports shuddered and then cracked apart as the ground under their foundations broke open.

  Since traffic had been stopped on both sides of the overpass, no cars were on top of it when it fell, but it smashed down violently onto a couple of M343’s freight cars. A huge cloud of dust and debris billowed up from the impact.

  Scores of people were trying to get out of the path of the dense vapor cloud. Thousands were covering their mouths as they rushed to get out of the way.

  “Take us back to the hospital,” I told the pilot soberly. “You’re going to be needing this helicopter.”

  79

  We landed, I stepped off the chopper, and the pilot immediately took off again to be available to transport victims back here to the hospital.

  The wind from the rotors rushed past me, and then, as the sound of the helicopter’s motor faded, the whine of emer
gency-vehicle sirens from all across Charlotte’s Uptown filled the void.

  Fire-suppression units, paramedics, police.

  All en route.

  I stood there for a long moment on the landing pad, listening to them.

  Within minutes, the first victims would be starting to come in.

  My phone vibrated: a text from Ralph: 8 pounds, 7 ounces. 20 inches long. Name: Tryphena. Mom and baby are doing fine. There was an attached photo of Tryphena in her pink hat.

  Tryphena.

  Delicate.

  Hmm. Eight pounds, seven ounces of delicate.

  I wondered if Ralph knew what had just happened in Charlotte. The last I’d heard he was in the OR with Brin, and now, based on his text, it didn’t appear he was aware of what was going on here.

  I texted him congratulations and asked him to let Lien-hua and Tessa know that I was alright. I ended the message by telling him to turn on the news.

  Taking a deep breath, I attempted to relax the tension in my chest, to get rid of the twisted feeling I had in my gut, but it didn’t work.

  I tried telling myself that we’d stopped this, that we’d acted in time, that we’d avoided the worst possible outcome, but I wasn’t happy about the one we’d ended up with.

  Undoubtedly, the vapor cloud was much smaller than it would have been if we hadn’t taken action. We’d been able to get people out of harm’s way, no cars were on the I-277 overpass when it gave way, and no one was on any of the engines when they derailed—although I was concerned about the man I’d seen jump from M343 who’d landed and then lay unmoving by the side of the track.

  However, despite what we’d accomplished, Kurt Mason was still free; Richard Basque had slipped through my fingers; and, by agreeing to leave him alone with Mason, I felt like I’d compromised the very thing Lien-hua had exhorted me not to—my integrity.

  Additionally, Mason had told me the climax was coming tonight. So if he was telling the truth, there was still something waiting on the horizon.

  I walked to the edge of the landing pad and, watching the rising vapor cloud envelop the stadium, I listened to the cacophony of emergency-service vehicles racing to the site.