The Vulture Fund

by Stephen W. Frey

  The old man shook his head. So the guards at the gate had been caught unaware again, and as a result, he had been caught sleeping again. It would mean a written warning this time, and a possible suspension. Liam groaned as he leaned forward in the wooden desk chair. “Please don’t use the ether again. It made me sick to my stomach for days last time,” he mumbled. “Just tie me up and leave me here. I won’t scream or yell or anything.” He held his hands together in front of his face. “Well, go on. Do it.”

  Suddenly one of the intruders lifted the AK-47 to Liam’s forehead and fired. The old guard’s body crashed backward with the chair into a corner of the tower room. The men nodded at one another, then turned and moved quickly back down the way they had come.

  Vargus was waiting for them at the bottom of the long stairway, grasping the little boy roughly by the back of his neck. “Done?”

  “Yes,” the first man back down the stairs grunted.

  “Good.” Vargus thrust the boy at him. “Take him and follow me.”

  Three minutes later Vargus stood before the huge chrome door guarding the control room. Behind him were thirty of the two-hundred-man invasion force—and the boy. Vargus turned toward the man clutching Bobby by the neck. “Bring him here.”

  The man pushed Bobby to Vargus.

  Vargus smiled widely as he patted the boy gently on the shoulder.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Bobby whimpered, knowing he could take no comfort in the dark man’s smile. “Please.”

  Vargus patted the boy on the shoulder again, then abruptly forced Bobby Dolan’s mouth up against the metal speaker just to the side of the control room door. At the same time he pushed the young boy’s left wrist almost up to the back of his neck.

  “Dad, help me! Please!” the boy screamed.

  There was no reaction from within, no sounds from the speaker next to the door, nothing to indicate that anyone inside the control room of the Nyack Nuclear Generating Facility had heard the boy’s cries.

  Vargus’ expression turned suddenly sour, and he jerked the boy’s wrist up above his head. There was a loud pop as Bobby’s shoulder separated.

  The boy began to scream again, reacting to the intense pain.

  “What do you want? Don’t hurt him. Please, for God’s sake, don’t hurt my boy!” a voice suddenly crackled through the speaker.

  Vargus pushed the boy’s face roughly across the polished wire mesh of the speaker, which also served as the microphone for those outside the control room. Bobby’s upper lip snagged momentarily on a loose piece of the mesh, causing a deep cut on the inside of his mouth.

  “Keep screaming,” Vargus snarled.

  Bobby cried pathetically, directly into the microphone.

  “What do you want? Please!”

  “You know damn well what I want,” Vargus growled into the speaker. “Open the damn door!”

  “We can’t. God, the bars already slid into place! They aren’t retractable for twenty-four hours at this point.” Jim Dolan glanced back over his shoulder at the other engineers huddled around him. They did not want him to open the door. They did not care that Dolan’s son was being tortured a few feet away. They cared about themselves, and they knew what opening the door meant.

  “Bullshit. I haven’t touched the lock. You can open this thing if you want to.” Vargus paused. “If it’s your close friends in there that are getting in the way, tell them I have a message for them as well. Every one of them has a loved one out here, and if you don’t open this door immediately, I’ll start chopping them up slowly so that everyone in there can hear them dying.” It was a lie. Vargus held no other family members, but there would be no way for them to know that. “If you open the door now, I promise things will go a great deal easier.” Bobby Dolan collapsed on the floor beside the door as Vargus let him go.

  For several minutes there was no sound over the intercom. Then the huge chrome doors began to hum. The terrorists brought their guns down before them as the crack between the huge doors widened. But there was no reason to wield the weapons in such a way. The engineers inside were defenseless. The Nyack Nuclear Generating Facility was now securely in the hands of two hundred terrorists.

  They poured into the control room as the doors stopped rumbling, Vargus leading the way. “Round them up,” he yelled, pointing at the engineers. “Take them all down to the core and tie them up. We may need them later.”

  While seven of the terrorists laid their weapons down on desks and began to man the most critical positions in the control room—these men had had extensive training in the operations of a nuclear power plant—the remainder of the force jostled the engineers out of the control room and into the hallway outside toward the bowels of the plant. Vargus watched the group of prisoners shuffle away. It had gone so well. The man in Washington would be happy again.

  “Sir!”

  Vargus glanced at Tabiq. His forehead bore a long bloody scar, evidence of yesterday’s early-morning battle with the intruder in West Virginia. “Well?” He spoke to Tabiq curtly. He was still furious at the man for allowing the intruder to escape.

  Tabiq motioned toward the door. “He will not leave.” Jim Dolan sat on the floor of the control room near the open doorway, cradling his unconscious son in his arms. “What should we do with them?”

  The leader’s eyes narrowed as he stared into Tabiq’s face. “You need to toughen up, my friend.” Vargus grabbed the man’s gun, pointed it at the father and son, and unleashed a burst of fire. Instantly the man collapsed onto the boy. Both were dead. “Take them and throw them in the spent fuel pool.”

  Vargus pushed the gun back into Tabiq’s hands and turned away.

  * * *

  —

  It was just after the opening nine-thirty bell, and the New York Stock Exchange was a beehive of activity. Two separate hostile tender offers had been announced during the night, and the floor was frenetic in its pace. The arbitrageurs wanted in on the takeover action, and they had to execute orders immediately if they were going to make any money. Share prices of the two target stocks were rising rapidly. Both had already surged well past the initial offer prices laid out in press releases to the news services early this morning by the hostile bidders.

  Men and women in brightly colored jackets crisscrossed the floor, searching for their traders to convey a multitude of buy and sell orders; investors who had owned the shares for some time were selling out immediately. They weren’t going to be greedy. They were going to take their gains now and run, letting the professional arbitrageurs risk their precious capital to lay claim to the last few dollars of profit.

  Traders formed chaotic semicircles in front of the specialists—the men and women who made the market in a specific security on the New York Stock Exchange—some frantically screaming buy and sell orders at the specialists. Most of the older, more experienced traders simply gestured wildly at the specialists without speaking, using hand motions to convey information.

  Then an odd silence slowly overtook the great room. Even trading at the posts where the specialists making the market in the two takeover stocks resided ground to a halt. Everyone in the room watched the ticker—actually a moving liquid crystal display—and held their breaths, reading what they hoped was simply somebody’s idea of a sick joke. The brief announcement rolled across the screen.

  Flash—the Nyack Nuclear Generating Facility, located approximately fifteen miles north of New York City on the Hudson River, has been taken over by terrorists. The attack occurred at approximately four-thirty this morning.

  The assembled throng on the floor of the Exchange continued to gaze at the ticker for a few moments even after the last words had disappeared. Slowly people began to move around the floor again. Some began trading again. Some laughed, not choosing to believe what they had just read. Others quietly left the building.

  And while the share prices
of the two takeover targets continued to be bid up in trading throughout the morning, the overall indices did not fare as well. At noon the Dow Jones 30 Industrials had tumbled more than three hundred points. Lewis Webster’s prediction was coming true, as he had known it would.

  * * *

  —

  Kyle Mcyntire, commander of the one thousand Wolverines to be deployed at Nyack, leapt from the passenger side of the helicopter onto the frozen ground of the field, then ran, bent at the waist, out from under the rotating blades toward the uniformed man standing before a grove of trees at the edge of the field. Leaves and twigs whipped chaotically about his body for several moments as the chopper rose, turned down at the nose, then sped away just thirty feet above the ground. Then suddenly it was quiet, noises effectively absorbed by the foreboding winter cloud cover.

  “Sir!” The Wolverine had moved out from the grove of trees to a spot directly before Mcyntire. “Captain Thomas Ellet.” The young man saluted sharply.

  “At ease, soldier.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ellet nodded smartly toward the farmhouse behind him. “We’ve evacuated the residents and are using the house as a command post. It’s close, but not too close.” Ellet glanced toward the far end of the field.

  Mcyntire followed the captain’s gaze and caught sight of the nuclear facility’s huge cooling towers looming up from behind the tops of the leafless trees. “How far?”

  “Just over three miles.”

  Mcyntire looked away from the plant and back at the younger man. “Give me a status report, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ellet’s posture stiffened. “There are approximately eight hundred Wolverines deployed, with another two hundred on the way from Fort Dix. They are expected here within the hour. We have the facility surrounded to the north, west, and south. On the east side there isn’t enough room between the facility and the edge of the cliffs to position men without making them vulnerable to fire from the terrorists. But we do have boats out on the river.”

  “How about the intake and exhaust pipes?”

  “Sir?”

  “Upstream pipes bringing water from the river to cool the core water and pipes downstream sending warm water back out. I suggest we put cameras down there if we haven’t already, just in case anybody tries to go in or out of the facility that way.”

  “Yes, Commander.” The younger man was disappointed he hadn’t already thought of that.

  “How many of them are there, Captain?”

  “We estimate several hundred.”

  “On what do you base that estimate?”

  “Two security guards managed to escape through the woods during the initial attack. We’ve got them waiting for you in there.” The captain nodded back at the farmhouse again.

  Mcyntire sighed heavily and shook his head. “They’ll be useless. They were running for their lives. I doubt they could have seen much, and whatever they did see, they won’t remember accurately.” The commander paused. “How many hostages?”

  “At least a hundred.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just this.” Ellet reached into his pocket, withdrew an envelope, then thrust it at Mcyntire.

  “What is it?” The commander took the envelope without opening it.

  “Correspondence from the terrorists.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “They let one of the hostages go about an hour ago. Had her deliver it.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It says they want a billion dollars. It says they want the release of certain imprisoned terrorists around the world, a list of whom they will provide later. And it says they want to be guaranteed safe passage to North Yemen, at which point they will free the hostages.”

  Mcyntire shoved the envelope into his pants pocket, then removed a pack of cigarettes and lighted one. “And?” His experience told him there would be one more piece of information.

  “It says they have surrounded each core with five two-thousand-pound bombs and will detonate them if these demands aren’t met.”

  “What’s the deadline?” the commander asked calmly.

  “There isn’t one yet.”

  Mcyntire took several puffs from the cigarette.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Ellet?”

  “If they were to detonate the bombs…”

  “New York City would be uninhabitable within about two hours. Of course we wouldn’t care. We’d already be dead.”

  30

  Leeny watched carefully as Webster moved back and forth in front of his office window, pausing every so often to stare down at Wall Street. When he stopped to gaze down at the Street, still teeming with activity despite this morning’s takeover of the Nyack plant, he would rest his chin in one hand and shake his head, mumbling something unintelligible into his crusty palm. He seemed distracted, showed a nervousness Leeny would not have thought him capable of. To be nervous, one had to possess feelings, and this man was the coldest human being she had ever met.

  Perhaps Webster’s agitation arose from the knowledge that together with the man in Washington, he had engineered the takeover of the Nyack nuclear plant and was therefore responsible for the havoc the terrorists had already wreaked upon New York City. Wire services were reporting above-average numbers of fatalities caused by heart attacks and strokes, particularly among the elderly, which medical professionals were attributing to the terrible stress brought on by the events unfolding at Nyack. Looting had begun to occur in areas where people had decided to desert the city.

  But the thought that Webster really cared about any of those things was ludicrous. He was a callous man who didn’t care about another’s ills, no matter who he was, unless those problems directly affected him. The cause of his agitation had to be of a personal nature.

  Leeny reclined on the comfortable leather couch of Webster’s office. The plan was working. Exactly as they had anticipated. Manhattan real estate owners she and Mace had talked to were calling of their own accord, “just to touch base,” they claimed. Just to see if the recently initiated Broadway Ventures was still in business or if it was in a holding pattern until the trouble at the power plant had been resolved—one way or the other. They tried to seem calm about what was going on just north of Manhattan—just north of their precious real estate—but she heard in their voices the panic lurking just under the surface. Though each investor was in no physical danger—they lived and worked in cities well away from New York—they still feared for their lives. Because their buildings—their net worths—sat directly in harm’s way. Vulnerable and immovable. At the mercy of the terrorists who might detonate bombs at any second and rain deadly radiation down onto Manhattan.

  They tried to project calm and confidence to her through the telephone, but they could not. At the end of the conversation they kept her on the line with idle chitchat, something they typically had no time for, as if they hoped that at the last minute she might make an offer on their buildings. They could not make the first offer because it was not in their nature. Savvy real estate investors never opened the bidding but waited for the other party to open up first, so they were certain not to leave anything on the table.

  She did not accommodate them. She merely said a pleasant good-bye. Knowing they would call back. Knowing that when they did, it would indicate that they were beaten, that the pressure had become too much for them to bear.

  She was already beginning to receive the second calls. And she was playing with their minds, making them grovel and still not giving them concrete bids, giving them no indication of what, if anything, she might offer for their properties. She was playing God again—and loving it this time.

  “What’s the matter, Lewis?”

  The old man turned toward her, chin still resting in one hand. “Nothing.”

  The fire in the dark eyes seemed to be burning low, she thou
ght. Something was definitely wrong.

  The telephone buzzed loudly, interrupting the silence of the office.

  “Hello,” Webster whispered.

  Leeny watched his face as she listened. Clearly the information he was receiving was not good.

  “Yes.” Webster nodded several times as he listened, then put the phone down. He stared at her intensely for several moments but said nothing.

  “Lewis, what is it?” She swallowed hard. “Tell me!” The slow leak had become a torrent.

  “It’s Mace McLain,” he hissed.

  “What?” Leeny recoiled at the mention of Mace’s name.

  “We think he broke into the training facility in West Virginia just before the task force left for Nyack.” Webster tilted his head forward ominously.

  Leeny shook her head from side to side. “That’s not possible. Mace McLain is dead. You told me he was to be killed last Friday night.”

  “He wasn’t at his apartment when the assassin broke in. He was gone. And he hasn’t returned,” Webster whispered almost inaudibly. The accusatory glare became more pronounced.

  “What?” Dazed, Leeny sat back slowly on the couch.

  Webster’s eyes narrowed. He watched her closely, searching for any clue that in fact she had tipped Mace off about the assassin. There was nothing in her face except shock. And he knew that while she was aware that the task force was training somewhere in West Virginia, she did not know the exact location. She would not have been able to guide him to Sugar Grove. Therefore it was illogical to assume that she had tipped him off. Because that was clearly why he had left New York: to go to Sugar Grove. “He isn’t dead,” Webster said.

  “But how? How did he find out about West Virginia?” she asked, a feeling of desperation suddenly surging through her body.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But the people at the West Virginia facility must have caught him.” She was reaching for anything that would prop her up again.