The Moonpool cr-3

by P. T. Deutermann

  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 h
ave 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.

  “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.