Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “Text both of them and tell them to get to the room now. I don’t want them roaming around to be kidnapped,” Mahegan told Grace.

  Grace used her burner phone’s voice command. “Get up here now!”

  He heard the beep and the whoosh of the text leaving the device. Within a minute, Mahegan heard the women’s footfalls outside the door.

  “Stay low and watch the hallway!” Mahegan shouted. Then he crawled to the door, opened it, and let them in.

  “Stay down,” he said. He watched their faces as they saw Ted the Shred dumped on the floor like a store mannequin, but with his head blown apart. Sniper fire continued to pock the walls at a steady rhythm. Mahegan counted as every five seconds a shot blew more of the wallpaper off the drywall, with bits and pieces of wood, chalk, and paper creating a growing cloud in the room. It was suppressive fire.

  Bad news, Mahegan thought.

  The shots were measured in time to keep them from leaving the room, which meant that there was another element at play. Most likely the commandos had zeroed in on Ted’s phone, put the sniper in place to prevent him from revealing secrets, and moved another team in to either kill or capture all of them. Either Brand Throckmorton was a very hard man to have his son killed, or Gunther had made this call.

  He looked at the women, all silent, all staring at him, awaiting direction. They had never been under fire, he was certain. Now the bullets kept coming. Some were hitting the door, a kinetic exclamation point denying their exit. The clock kept ticking.

  What now, Ranger? He visualized his crusty Ranger instructor laughing at him as he waded neck deep in the Yellow River swamps of north Florida, with a ragged line of tired and hungry Rangers filing behind him, as he led the patrol to a distant objective.

  He heard feet running along the hallway, but they were going in the opposite direction and were too light and hurried to be the EB-5 commandos. Probably hotel visitors becoming aware of the situation. Even silenced sniper rifles made a loud whisper as the bullets cut through the air and a thump when they smacked into the walls.

  Mahegan was waiting on a cue. He knew it would come in one of two forms. Footsteps, heavy and thundering, would signal an assault force that would breach their hotel door, maybe toss a grenade in. That was a bad-case scenario.

  What happened, though, was the second cue he’d been listening for.

  It was a siren.

  Griffyn.

  This was a smoother operation than the other commandos had tried on him, for sure, but it still had flaws. The sniper rifle and the suppressive fire were tactically sound. Even bringing Griffyn in to conduct a faux arrest was a good idea. But to have Griffyn come in with sirens and his Kojak light flashing was a mistake. Maybe they had to make it seem official, but it would give him enough time. It was a well-synchronized operation, but he had a small window of opportunity.

  “Okay, ladies. Follow me.”

  Mahegan grabbed his duffel bag, tossed his knife in it, and stayed low as he slowly opened the door. Grace had a backpack, which Elaine had brought from the watch site. The ladies had whatever they had come with—phones and backpacks. The shots kept coming, pinging into the wall just above his head. He cleared left and right and stayed low as he watched the sniper bullets punch through the wall and into the opposite side of the hallway. He crawled to the next hotel room door and then farther, checking every few seconds to see that each of the women was beyond the steel rain of the sniper fire. When he sensed the time was right, he stood, jogged to the exit, and entered the stairwell.

  The fire exit took them to the back side of the hotel, which was a parking lot surrounded by a wood fence taller than Mahegan, probably eight feet high. A few random cars were parked in the lot, but nothing that concerned Mahegan. The siren was growing louder, though. It was maybe less than a half mile away.

  Mahegan tossed his bag over the fence and cupped his hands. Backpack strapped to her shoulders, Brandy was the first to put her boot into Mahegan’s stirrup and let him lift her so that she could clumsily scramble over the top of the fence and fall on the far side. She landed with a loud crash, and Mahegan hoped his gear was okay.

  The siren was now directly in front of the hotel, loud and obnoxious.

  Elaine had already scaled the fence by herself, backpack and all. Mahegan heard her whispering to Brandy. Something about “hauling ass ASAP.”

  Theresa grabbed the fence, took the stirrup, and nimbly flipped over the top, full of athletic elegance. Mahegan watched Theresa with suspicion, noticing the outline of two cell phone–size rectangles pressing against her tight spandex. But Grace was next, and he had to continue to focus on the fluidity of the situation. Mahegan lifted her with his cupped hands. Her backpack shifted under the weight of her computer, which held the video files he’d taken from the Throckmortons’ backyard. Quickly, she was weightless in his hands as she grabbed the top of the fence and pulled herself over it.

  The siren grew louder. Out of his periphery he saw two police cars, one from each direction, bearing down on him. They were different makes and colors. One would be Griffyn, and one would be from either the sheriff’s office or the Apex town police. Grace was over the fence. He would not make it, he thought. They would shoot him. He had spent the past ten years of his life making split-second decisions about life and death. He chose life this time, because he knew that Maeve Cassidy didn’t stand a chance if he wasn’t there to provide her one. “Live to fight another day,” as the saying went.

  Mahegan said, “Run!”

  Grace said, “Not without you.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Go!”

  Mahegan made it easy for Grace to quit arguing. He turned and saw four weapons drawn on him. They looked like military-grade Beretta pistols, nine millimeter. The black pickup truck with the topper cruised along the road slowly in the distance. Mahegan raised his hands as he watched a head turn in the window of the pickup. It looked like Petrov. Smiling.

  “On the ground. Now!” Griffyn barked.

  Mahegan kept his hands up as he knelt. The pavement crunched into his knees, and he felt vulnerable, but he couldn’t imagine that the sheriff’s officers would be in on the fracking conspiracy, as well. No, Griffyn had taken a calculated risk. Have a partner from the county sheriff’s office, keep the town police out of it, and use a bogus warrant to take him into Raleigh Police Department custody. Griffyn’s risk was that the sheriff’s office would either want to take control or would see the lie in Griffyn’s actions.

  Griffyn approached from twenty meters away, brandishing a pair of handcuffs as if they were a medieval mace, twirling them around a long, extended finger. To his ten o’clock, Mahegan saw a sheriff’s deputy on either side of the dark brown car, doors open, and weapons drawn and steadily aimed. The Raleigh Police Department cruiser was at Mahegan’s two o’clock. Griffyn had been in the front passenger seat. The driver was behind an open car door, with a weapon aimed at Mahegan.

  Griffyn circled behind him and grabbed each of Mahegan’s hulking arms, pressed his hands together behind his back, and ratcheted the bracelets on his wrists as tightly as they would go. Mahegan had tried the trick of flexing his wrists to prevent the cuffs from being supertight, but Griffyn had obviated that tactic. Plus, Mahegan had felt the scar tissue around his left shoulder and deltoid burn as Griffyn used his knees to bend Mahegan’s elbows in toward one another. Leaning over and acting as if he was checking Mahegan for weapons, Griffyn whispered, “You will pay, you know that, right?”

  Griffyn found the ankle pistol Mahegan carried and held it up like a trophy bass, saying, “Let’s make sure we get this on the video, guys!”

  “Video is running, Detective,” his driver called out.

  Mahegan had thankfully left his Spec Ops knife in the duffel bag. He hated to lose the gun, but he had so many in the bag that once he got out of this jam, it would be irrelevant. The knife had been with him in combat. It had saved his best friend’s life, and so it meant something to him. He would cons
ider using it on Griffyn if the opportunity presented itself.

  Griffyn said, “Get up.”

  Mahegan struggled but stood, kept his balance, and stared straight ahead, like a proud convict might. He didn’t move. He made no threatening gestures. He gave no reason for Griffyn to do anything except steer him toward the Raleigh car. The county guys were window dressing, unknowing participants in Griffyn’s scam.

  Once in the back of the car, he relaxed. He heard Griffyn say, “Thanks, guys. You might want to call the town police and get them to help you with whatever went down in that room with the broken glass.”

  “Roger that, Detective,” replied one of the sheriff’s deputies.

  Griffyn slid in the backseat with Mahegan and said, “Drive me to my car.” Then he slid the steel mesh and Plexiglas window shut and leveled his pistol at Mahegan.

  “You’re a dead man, Jake Mahegan.”

  CHAPTER 24

  MAEVE CASSIDY HAD PUSHED THE DRILL BIT DEEP INTO THE second vein that had been charted for her.

  We’ve got a guy.

  She was tired, hungry, worried, and pissed off. Plus, she smelled as bad as she had at any time during her combat tour, possibly worse. With her hand that was not pressing the joystick forward, she ran her fingers through hair as greasy as lard. She had no concept of time. Was it daylight or nighttime?

  To her front were the same damn monitors she had been staring at for the past forty-eight hours. To her right was a solid rock wall. To her left was the door with the silent guard standing there like a statue in her olive uniform. She had gone from holding the shotgun at the ready to leaning it against the wall. And to her rear was the bathroom. The only downtime she had was when they removed the drill and inserted the perforating charges. That was a sum total of two hours.

  For the first vein, she had persistently steered the drill almost perfectly through the challenging virgin shale formation. She had blown the perforating charges, and she had injected the chemical-laced solution into the three miles of rock at a rate of five thousand gallons a minute, creating three thousand pounds of pressure. It was too much for this fragile shale, she knew.

  She wasn’t sure whether to be thankful or not that Jim had somehow shipped back the radioactive drill bits and had been able to re-create the toxic fracking fluid formula. It certainly made her job easier, but she was growing more uncomfortable by the minute. Her sense of dread hung over her like a lingering storm cloud.

  Now Jim was in the room, sweating and yelling at her, “Faster, Maeve. We’ve got to move that drill faster. We’re running out of time.”

  “Jim, I’m two miles from the kickoff point. Within twenty-four hours I’ll be at the perforating point. But I don’t understand the upward kick at the end. The first vein was standard, and that one is capped perfectly and ready to go, but this one is different. Makes no sense,” Maeve said. She was stressed beyond belief but maintained her outward cool.

  This new cut was strange. The joystick and the map were saying one thing, but her feel and intuition were telling her that the drill azimuth was not what was being reflected on the monitor. She initially chalked it up to being tired and worried, but then she saw a granite formation on the screen, and the drill just kept going like a knife through butter. No way that should have happened.

  “I’m sure it’s just the different equipment. Now keep drilling.”

  Jim stood there with his permanent half-grown beard and his baseball cap turned backward. He wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans with hiking boots. Maeve noticed that the boots had fresh mud caked around the soles like icing.

  “Look at the map here,” Maeve said. She pointed at the map of the twenty-mile area surrounding the fracking field. “I’m on this azimuth, going three-point-seven-four miles from the kickoff point. I’ve been through six depleted-uranium drill bits, doing God knows what harm to the environment, as I bore through the Triassic Sub-basin. I’m actually drilling between Jordan Lake here and Shearon Harris Lake here. The entire Triangle—Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, which includes two million people—gets its drinking water from Jordan Lake. Shearon Harris is the nuke plant, so they don’t use that lake. Plus, the shale’s over here, beneath Jordan.” She pointed at spots north and west of the wellhead as she talked, bypassing Shearon Harris Lake, which was south and east of the fracking field.

  She went on. “Now you’ve got me going on this azimuth, slightly offset from the first one by about ten degrees. We will use another five or so depleted-uranium drill bits, will destroy more of the environment, and will drop down more of the perforating charges. We will blow more holes in the shale and damage the aquifer.”

  “And you will keep doing that,” Jim said. “Until we’re done. Our timeline has moved up considerably. Drill faster. I have an entire stockpile of drill bits for you. Just keep moving. You saw the drone attack on McGuire. The liquefied natural gas boat is still out there in front of Brunswick.”

  “I need a break, Jim. I need a break, and I need to see Piper. For real. Not on some TV screen. I need to touch my baby. I will drill this, and I will get it there fast, but I need to see my baby girl first.” Maeve tried not to have her voice sound pleading, though she was desperately doing so.

  “No can do, Maeve. I’m not in control of that boat. It is wired by bluetooth to the drill’s computer mechanism right there,” Jim said, pointing at the monitor. “If it stops other than to change bits or lower charges or shoot fracking water, then it will trigger that giant bomb of a boat by the Brunswick Nuclear Plant.”

  Maeve blew air out of her mouth like a shot. She felt her bangs lift with the mini breeze she created. “I gotta see my baby girl, Jim. She’s all I’ve got.”

  Jim shook his head. “Not yet. Meanwhile, drill, baby, drill, as they say.”

  Maeve stared at him. She felt her eyes start to water, but she kept it all in check, shutting down her emotions the way a fighter pilot shut down a flaming engine, immediately and without reservation. It was the only way to survive.

  She heard Jim leave and refocused on the line she was following. The drill bit was moving. She could feel the thrum of it through the joystick. She let her mind flow downward to the hole she was piercing through a layer of earth two hundred million years old. The shale had been formed after the first extinction event in the Triassic era, when dead reptiles created coal, oil, and gas. Fossil fuels.

  Piercing the crust of earth layered over eons, she wondered how she had gone from idealistic geology professor to petty natural gas thief. She had stolen Pakistani natural gas for her country, and now she was stealing North Carolina’s natural gas deposits, something tantamount to a bank heist.

  How did they believe they were going to get away with this crime? Even they couldn’t see what she had seen. No one was getting out alive, but then again, she had to hope. With every bite of the drill bit toward its next objective, she became even more convinced that the Gunthers and Throckmorton had no idea what they had signed up for. She wasn’t so much being held hostage with the attack drone on McGuire or the explosive-laden ship at Brunswick. Those nuclear plants were a gun to the heads of Throckmorton and Gunther, and she believed she knew whose hand was on the trigger.

  But, of course, hope was elusive, and she powered on through sheer determination. Part of shutting down her emotions required a heavy dose of optimism to take their place. Something had to fill the void. While Maeve’s wasn’t blind optimism, she was pragmatic and hopeful, even while understanding that hope counted for little when in the maw of an operational mission such as this.

  The only real question was, which of the men would be her executioner? Would she be shot and buried in a dirt hole somewhere on the property, worms and maggots soon eating her flesh? Or would she be dumped in the bottom of one of the two lakes she could see on the monitor? Whatever it was going to be, it wasn’t going to be pretty. Her only well-placed hope was that they wouldn’t hurt Piper, because she was too small to know anything other than the fact that she mis
sed her mother. The notion that Piper would never really know her mother was a heavy boulder on her chest, crushing downward and making it hard to breathe. After a year in combat and now doomed, Maeve would be nothing but a distant memory, fading as quickly as a shooting star as Piper aged. She prayed that Piper would find a good home with kind parents, like her.

  She felt the terror build from deep inside her soul and began to panic. She suddenly felt claustrophobic, surrounded by her doubts and fears, which were as tight as a cocoon. Her breathing became rapid and shallow. Her forehead was drenched with perspiration.

  She was going to die.

  And Piper would never remember her.

  Leaning over the control panel, she stood and gasped. Knowing that someone was watching her, she refused to care. Even better. Let them see her have a vicious panic attack on HDTV, or whatever the hell they were watching. She pulled at her hair with her one free hand, her wound biting her with pain, and she so desperately wanted to remove her right hand from the joystick so she could go into full theatrics. Her neck corded into tight, ropy knots as she screamed a primal wail that no one could hear.

  There was no one looking for her.

  She was going to die.

  And Piper would never remember her.

  What could be worse than that? she wondered. Her life would count for nothing. Piper would not feel a connection to her mother. No memories, no love passed through the generations. All she had ever wanted in life was to have a family and to be a good, productive citizen. To give more than she got. But now her life, and death, would be a soundless whisper disappearing into a black abyss, forever lost to history.

  Then, like a random lighthouse beacon appearing to a ship lost at sea, a notion occurred to her, giving her the slightest sense of direction . . . and hope.

  It was a simple thought.

  Trust your instincts.