Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  To his left, Mahegan saw a bank of lights, like a baseball field lit at night. In the middle he saw the newly erected rig, looking like a small Eiffel Tower. He heard the crunch of turning gears and the hiss of hydraulic pistons. Indeed, the operation was under way. Somewhere close by Captain Maeve Cassidy was steering a drill toward the Durham shale and was ready to pump new chemicals into the land so that Throckmorton could steal what the people of North Carolina rightfully owned.

  Driving in the darkness without headlights, he felt the curve of the road and knew they were climbing a hill. He looked at Grace and saw that her eyes were wide with anticipation. She still had the pistol in her hand and was fumbling with it nervously. As they crested the hill, he was instantly upon a guarded checkpoint with minimal lighting. He slowed the vehicle, thinking perhaps that there was an electronic signal the Crown Vic would emit to lift the gate arm.

  If there was one, it didn’t work. From either flank, two men emerged from the woods with long rifles drawn on them. Mahegan turned on the high beams to see if he could ram the checkpoint. It didn’t appear so. He did see, however, that Maxim Petrov was standing in the middle of the road.

  The Russian was holding a baseball bat.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE JOYSTICK TREMBLED IN HER HAND.

  “We’ve got a guy,” Jim had said. Someone besides Jim was in charge. The man she had come to know in Afghanistan was evil, but would he design attacks on nuclear facilities? She didn’t think so.

  Someone else had developed this elaborate plan.

  We’ve got a guy.

  Maeve took a few deep breaths and continued to navigate the drill through the earth.

  Just get through this, Maeve. Do what you have to do. Anything and everything to save Piper.

  The drill had bit through two miles of earth and into the Durham sub-basin. She hated violating this unspoiled resource. As a geologist, Maeve was conflicted about tapping the land for hydrocarbons. Was she a hypocrite for not worrying so much about it when her vehicle fuel was coming from the Middle East? It was a definite conflict. She understood the earth’s texture and fragility. What she had endured in Afghanistan had only made her more convinced that the human race had to find a different way to provide energy. There was a balanced menu of options—solar, wind, sea, electric, nuclear, and fossil fuels—and they should collectively power the economies of nations. Right now Maeve didn’t like that 80 percent of the world’s energy came from hydrocarbons.

  That introspection caused her to think about the small percentage of energy derived from nuclear power, which spiraled her right back to her dilemma. The threat that her mistake could ignite an attack on Wilmington or Charlotte was horrifying to Maeve. Wasn’t holding Piper captive enough to get her to commit to doing what they need her to do? She was motivated 100 percent. Anxiety circled her throat like a snake tightening its grip. Her hand started shaking. She felt the initial onset of panic coming at her from two directions. First, the nuclear plants. Second, they had Piper! They had kidnapped her daughter, the only thing that mattered to her in this world!

  Her eyes blinked, and she felt the slow nod of her head as she began to fall asleep.

  Indeed, she was dreaming. Stop it! Wake up! she told herself.

  She watched as her hand overcorrected and the stick jumped, causing the beeping red dot that represented the drill bit to bounce against the edge of the designated path. A loud siren erupted in the room, like an air raid warning.

  Jim came barging into the room, shouting, “You know what that means, right? Damn it! What happened?”

  Maeve stared at the screen and saw that the red dot was back within the boundaries and was moving forward on the designated path. Jim flipped a switch to display the drone at an undesignated airfield in Gaston County. The drone must have had a thermal camera in its substructure, because Maeve could see that its propeller was spinning and it was rolling along a grass runway.

  To Maeve, the sight was unbelievable. She had triggered this through a subtle error. How could she have been so careless? She was watching an aircraft that was no bigger than a small Cessna airplane but that looked like a small F-117, the stealth fighter with the extended bat wings. She knew what it was. Military defense contractor BAE Systems had made a prototype called the Corax, which was a stealth unmanned aerial vehicle. It carried a payload, such as bombs. She knew that much. What was this one carrying? she wondered.

  “What is that?” she shrieked. “I didn’t do that. It was just one little mistake!”

  “You did that, dear Maeve. The McGuire Nuclear Station will be melting down pretty soon. Hope you don’t have any friends in Charlotte. We’re safe, though. Three hours away,” Jim said. He had leaned over the back of the chair and had whispered this in her ear. She wished she had a lighter to ignite the air every time he breathed the noxious whiskey fumes onto her neck. She wanted to burn him. To kill him. She wanted to put him on that airplane, which had just taken off from the grass runway.

  “Dear God.”

  “Watch this,” Jim said, flipping a switch and showing a split screen on the monitor to the left of her drill path monitor. Despite the frightening sight of the Corax taking off, she kept the drill moving forward within the boundaries of the path, for fear of igniting the second threat, the liquefied natural gas container ship by the Brunswick Nuclear Plant.

  “What is that?” But she knew what it was. Someone had placed another thermal camera on the fence surrounding McGuire and had aimed it at the cooling towers. In the greenish hue of the camera, she could make out spotlights crossing the sky above the cooling towers, like for a used car sale advertisement. On the other half of the screen was the image being fed back from the Corax in flight. It was sailing smoothly through the sky, then darting like a bat, perhaps responding to radar stimuli. Maeve wasn’t sure.

  Soon the static camera that was focused on the two cooling towers showed a black object piercing the spotlights and aimed directly at the top, in an almost vertical suicide attack down the pipe.

  “No. This can’t be happening,” Maeve said.

  “It’s happening, dear Maeve. Trust me.” As Maeve listened to Jim, he sounded as if he might not believe it himself.

  “Who put you up to this? You’re a bastard, but you’re not a mass murderer,” Maeve demanded.

  They watched both images. The darting bat was now in a complete nosedive, and the image of the cooling towers was growing larger. The ground camera showed the black speck in the sky becoming a larger, recognizable object. It was like a slow-motion fastball coming to home plate, initially barely visible and then suddenly upon the batter in full dimension.

  Then something happened that neither of them could have predicted.

  Two oval objects the size of small water towers flipped open, revealing what looked to Maeve to be large machine guns, like on the Aegis cruisers in the U.S. Navy. The weapons spat at the diving jet, tracking it as it approached in its rapid descent. A fraction of a second prior to impacting the dome of one of the cooling towers, the plane shredded into small pieces, and a large airburst ignited.

  To Maeve, the plane was nothing more than confetti in the sky, while the airburst was an orange and black demon boiling above the nuclear plant.

  She clasped her mouth with her left hand, her right continuing to push the red dot forward.

  Jim seemed to ease back away from her. She felt him sigh and relax. That was good information. This was not his plan. Perhaps he hadn’t even believed that the threats were real.

  “Don’t mess up again, is all I’ve got to say,” Jim said. He departed the room.

  But Maeve’s mind was spinning. She had just inadvertently launched an attack on a nuclear facility. She was aiding and abetting terrorists.

  And they were holding her daughter ransom.

  She had to find Piper, but how could she leave the joystick and the control room? Where would she even begin to look?

  We’ve got a guy.

  Maeve stared
at the computer monitor and saw that the sky around the nuclear facility was littered with chunks of the drone burning brightly in the camera’s thermal retina.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE TWO MEN WITH THE WEAPONS CLOSED QUICKLY ON THE VEHICLE Petrov remained motionless, save the slapping of the bat into his left hand. Mahegan listened to the thunk, thunk, thunk of the bat and visualized what Petrov might have in mind for him, maybe even for Grace.

  The Crown Vic likely had bulletproof glass, Mahegan thought, and its weightiness indicated some type of ballistic protection. Mahegan said, “Hang on.”

  He slammed the gearshift into reverse, held the brake a fraction of a second, floored the accelerator, and performed a perfect Rockford, spinning the car 180 degrees, slamming the gear back to drive, and aiming the car down the hill like a bobsled.

  Mahegan then slammed on the brakes, slapped the gearshift back into reverse, and used the higher gear ratio to gain traction and power for the short punch through the metal arm blocking the road. He could hear the unconscious Griffyn bouncing around in the back and didn’t feel bad about it one bit.

  “What the hell are you doing!” Grace shouted, hanging on to the dashboard while ducking at the sound of gunfire.

  Mahegan said nothing. He aimed the car at the metal arm, which broke easily at the point of impact under the combined weight and speed of the Crown Vic. The bulletproof glass designed to protect Griffyn was working just fine as Mahegan pulled another Rockford, this time aiming the nose of the car at Petrov, who dove out of the way, losing the bat but grabbing his pistol.

  Mahegan throttled the car, and it leapt up the hill inside the compound, three weapons firing small-caliber bullets at the now spiderwebbing rear window. The car actually gained some air as it crested the hill. Mahegan could see the distant lights of the hunting lodge, which looked to him more like a mansion the closer he approached. Sparks flew from the front bumper as the car came back toward the hill, smacked the gravel, and leveled out. In the rearview mirror, Mahegan saw the three men. They ran, stopped and fired, ran, stopped and fired, continuing in their pursuit but becoming smaller and smaller in the mirror.

  The front windshield looked okay, and Mahegan saw nothing to be gained by storming the compound any further. He saw two new muzzle flashes from the south side of the lodge and three from the north. Counting the three men at the gate, Mahegan placed their security at about eight people. Based on the numbers of men he had seen digging postholes and during his recon effort earlier, he guessed Throckmorton had about fifteen personnel on location. Of course, he had injured four and killed two, so the number might be less.

  “What. The hell. Are you doing?” Grace shouted.

  The closest defender was about a hundred yards away. Not close, but not far for assault rifles. The fire was not well aimed, but Mahegan knew that all it would take was one lucky bullet. He opened the driver’s door, stepped out, opened the back door, dragged the bound Griffyn from the backseat, and left him on the gravel, like a delivery.

  He shut the back door, heard the distinctive snap of supersonic bullets zipping nearby, and sat back in the car. The teams were closing to fifty yards from three directions. He spotted two weapons in the main window of the lodge, which put the number of guards at ten. Some of the commandos on rest cycle had been awakened, or these were rounds fired by Throckmorton and Gunther, if Gunther was there.

  He thought back to Petrov’s tactile BlackBerry, which had a calendar entry about Gunther’s visit that morning. Perhaps he was still there. Mahegan could feel the man the way a hunter could track an animal. Grace was screaming at him, but everything was in slow motion. He saw the men with the assault weapons closing on his position, but he remained motionless. He stared at the lodge window and saw a head staring back at him.

  And he knew it was Gunther.

  He could feel Gunther in that house, the same way he had felt the need to come home early on the day he walked in on his mother being attacked. He closed his eyes and visualized pulling Gunther away from his mother and tossing him through the sliding glass door. Gunther was not a small man, but Mahegan had been driven that day by the most primal emotion he had ever felt. He remembered watching a large chunk of glass stab Gunther in the back and thinking, Okay. He’ll bleed out, as he moved on to the next assailant.

  “Hawthorne!”

  Mahegan came back to the moment and opened his eyes. Quickly, he assessed the vehicles in the front driveway of the lodge: two pickup trucks and a Suburban. He calculated the response time of the guards and their general professionalism. Okay, but not great.

  Then he got the hell out of there.

  Mahegan heard the footsteps as the bullets continued to smack into the car windows. He reversed course and pulled another 180, this time catching one of the guards with the nose of the Crown Vic. Spitting gravel from the rear tires like a cigarette boat did a rooster tail, Mahegan sped past Petrov, who stood in a perfect shooter’s stance, his pistol jacking back in his hand, as the bullets thudded into the car windows, making it nearly impossible to see in any direction.

  Mahegan kept the Crown Vic between the ditches as he used his forearm to smash out the shattered driver’s side window. Slaloming down the winding gravel and dirt road, he hung his head out the window, watching the edge of the lighter road and keeping the car to the left of the black ditch.

  Soon they were near Route 1 and moving northeast, away from the county line. Mahegan drove to a shopping mall that was five miles from his apartment. He parked, grabbed a rag from the duffel bag, and wiped down the car.

  Grace stood in the parking lot and watched, her arms crossed, as if protecting herself from the cold. Mahegan knew that she wasn’t cold, but angry and afraid. Her boss was with the bad guys. He wouldn’t tell her how he knew. Not yet.

  Grabbing his duffel bag, he turned to Grace. A parking lot light was shining on her like a stage beam. “That was called a probing attack. I hadn’t planned on it, but I hadn’t ruled it out. When I saw Griffyn come looking for us, I knew he had either tracked my signal to my boss, which is next to impossible, or talked to the people who had originally tracked your phone to mine. It’s the only way he could have known where we were. Period. He’s a bad seed. So I left him with his comrades. This isn’t the end of it. Probably just the beginning. But I know enough now to find Maeve Cassidy and her daughter. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the drilling, other than the nuke thing. That bothers me. I know you’re freaked out, and I don’t blame you. Now, walk with me while I get us a hotel room.”

  “A probing attack?”

  “Yes. It’s an Army term of warfare. When you don’t know anything about your enemy disposition, you probe his defenses and see how he responds.”

  “They shot at us.”

  “Which is important information. In fact, there were eight guards outside and two inside. That makes ten, which I put at about half of their entire force, based on the number I saw the first day I was out there, digging postholes. I’ve hurt or killed six, seven if you count the guy that went flying across the hood. I don’t think he’s going to be okay. There are three main objectives of a probing attack. First, you want to avoid decisive engagement, meaning you need to be able to get out of there.”

  “But we almost didn’t.”

  “Almost is the operative word. We made it out. Second, you want to gather as much intelligence as possible. They had three vehicles, a house, eight people outside guarding, a darkened entrance below the house and on the east side, like a tunnel or a storm shelter. And the house is stuck out on a peninsula of land that falls away to the fracking site below it, which is about a half a mile away.”

  “You saw all that?”

  “And more. They are seriously invested in this.”

  “The third objective?”

  “It’s a bonus if you can injure or kill the enemy on the probing attack. One guy isn’t much, but it’s better than no guys. We did okay. Plus, we left them your boss.”

  “W
hat about my job?” Grace was still shaken, still standing in the same circle of light, like a Broadway performer with stage fright.

  “What about your life, Grace? Griffyn wasn’t at my place to bring you flowers. He was there to kill you. For some reason, you’re a liability. I need to know what you saw at that house.”

  Grace nodded. “There’s a Holiday Inn up the road about a mile, on the other side of the mall. Let’s walk and I’ll tell you what I saw.”

  She had somehow gathered her composure. Perhaps the reality of Griffyn’s duplicity had sunk in. He didn’t know. She stepped toward him, unsure initially, but then clasped his arm, with the cup of her hand around his biceps.

  They started walking, and Grace Kagami, the beautiful mirror, told him everything.

  CHAPTER 19

  JAMES GUNTHER STEPPED OUT ONTO THE SLATE-ROCK PORCH OF Throckmorton’s elaborate compound and hideaway. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air like a malodorous ghost. The volume of assault weapon and pistol fire rivaled anything Gunther had ever heard, save a few bird hunts Down East, where they had slaughtered anything that moved. Rabbits, squirrels, foxes, red wolves, gators, doves, quails, and coyotes were all fair game, and all decent eating if prepared properly.

  He took a step down from the slate porch to the stone steps that led to the circular gravel drive. He saw that his Ford F-150 pickup truck had a few nicks from amateur gunfire. The Keystone Cops had been shooting into a circle. He had never been in the Army, but he knew enough not to form a circle jerk and shoot one another. Clearly, these EB-5 guys were not well trained, and he and Throckmorton were pushing them beyond their limits. He had certainly believed they were quality staff when he hired them. They had had to prove themselves in a rigorous shooting skills test, a course on handling fracking equipment, and a test of their familiarity with Chatham and Wake County topography.

  All of that had gone smoothly. He managed the roughnecks, the field laborers who were doing the construction and fracking on the graded valley below the compound. Throckmorton dallied with the women, which was fine, but he didn’t have the time or the desire for that anymore, given what had happened at the Indian’s house years ago. Though, one of the concubines down below was his. That was all he wanted. In the partnership with Throckmorton, Gunther could do almost everything he wanted. But while the main shard of glass had sliced into his back, another, smaller wedge had cut his scrotum and everything it held. He had not been protected by pants when Mahegan heaved him through the glass door all those years ago, and now he was essentially a eunuch.