Blowout (10 page)

“Not yet,” Cameron said, and he turned back to the detonator. An LED counter was passing the eight-minute mark, and another smaller number in the lower right-hand corner of the display blinked nine.

Nine what? he asked himself as he frantically studied the device. His first instinct was to yank the wires that had to lead back to the plastique explosive Ashley had seen the terrorists plant, but he stopped. The device was vaguely familiar to him, but different from anything he'd remembered from his BUDs (Basic Underwater Demolitions) evolution. In the end his expertise had been mostly as an intel officer, but he'd taken the basic course as everyone else in SEALs had. And this thing looked like something he'd seen before. Fail-safe. Pull the wires and a disconnect signal was sent to the detonators, which sparked, blowing the explosives.

But there was a way to disarm the thing. A code, a shut-off switch, a safety. Something simple if you knew it. But studying the thing he knew that he didn't, and he was going to have to start taking chances if there was any hope of saving the station.

“Get the hell out of here!” he shouted without looking over his shoulder.

“Where to?”

“I don't care! Anywhere. Just get out.”

“No!” Ashely shouted. “Tell me what to do to help!”

The LED counter passed the 7:45 mark, and for a long second or two he felt completely lost, helpless. He didn't know what to do. Acrid smoke poured from somewhere in the vicinity of the methane furnace five hundred feet away. But no fuel was coming up from the seam; this was at least one break in their favor. Whoever had planned this had come twenty-four hours early. By this time tomorrow any explosion back there would have cascaded into an all-out conflagration that would have obliterated the entire plant.

“I don't know how to disarm this thing,” he admitted. He looked up. “I need to pull the wires out of the plastique, and you'll have to tell me where they are. It'll be faster.”

Ashley could see the LED counter. “I'll show you!” she shouted over the turbine noise. “I'll show you!”

Cameron wanted to argue, but she was right. He got to his feet. “We're running out of time.”

The detonator control box was positioned just below the generator less than twenty feet from the rear door. Ashley turned and sprinted to the front of the unit where a ten-inch-in-diameter shaft protected by a reinforced and tempered steel case was connected to the turbine and pulled up short, searching for something.

She ducked beneath the generator and scrambled to a spot between it and the boiler feedwater pump directly ahead of the turbine.

“Here!” she cried, and she moved aside to let Cameron squeeze into the small space.

A gray lump of Semtex smelling faintly of vinegar and looking something like ordinary plumber's putty had been molded on to the shaft case. There was a lot of it, probably three or four kilos. Enough, Cameron knew, to not only destroy the shaft case and the shaft itself, but to just about vaporize anyone within ten feet of it when it blew.

“Get back,” he told Ashley.

“I'll find the next one,” she said in his ear and she was gone.

Semtex plastic explosive was extremely stable. It would not explode if it were dropped on the floor or hit with a hammer or even if it were shot with a bullet or tossed in a fire. Only an acid fuse or in this case an electrical charge could set it off. The problem was the electronic detonator unit back by the door. Disturbing any part of the circuit, including the wire coming out of the plastique, might initiate a momentary current surge enough to set it off.

Cameron smiled. In for a penny in for a pound, his pragmatic grandmother who'd raised him used to say. She'd emigrated from Ireland with her husband, who'd died of cancer three months after he'd been sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Six months later her unmarried daughter, eight months pregnant, had committed suicide by slitting her wrists. The premature baby—Jim Cameron—had been taken by paramedics, and never once had his grandmother burdened him with any sort of sadness, or some dour Irish philosophy of life's travails. In for a penny in for a pound had been the worst of it.

He reached up and eased the wire out. And for just an instant he was back in SEAL Hell Week, the toughest training evolution in any special ops service in any military anywhere in the world ever—even tougher than the old Soviet Spetsnaz regimen. The unknown was as common as the unexpected. Pain was constant. If an operation was going well you were probably running into a trap. Murphy's Law. That and incoming rounds had the right of way, something he'd been reminded of at the rec center.

“Over here!” Ashely shouted as Cameron scrambled out from beneath the shaft.

The shock from the impact of the bullet in his right thigh was wearing off, and he was limping as he reached where she was crouched beneath the forward end of the feedwater pump, above which was the turbine case, where another lump of Semtex had been molded.

She started to move aside. “You've been shot,” she said.

“I'll live,” Cameron said. “Let me in there.”

“No, I'll do it,” Ashley said, and she reached up for the wire and started to pull, but Cameron grabbed her wrist and held it in place.

“Easy,” he said. “No sparks.”

Their faces were inches apart, and when she realized exactly what he was telling her, she blanched and released the wire.

“You do it,” she said. “I'll go find the next one.”

At that moment another massive explosion rocked the power plant, this one much closer, but higher up toward the top of the furnace nearer to the forward end of the wellhead, and debris was falling back there, twisting metal and what sounded like piping.

Cameron steadied himself against the feedwater pump case and gently eased the wire out of the explosive.

“We need to get out of here,” he said, turning, but Ashley was already gone, and as he ducked out from beneath the pump he saw her disappear beneath the steam control valve assemblies, as even more debris rained down from the towering furnace structure less than one hundred feet away.

He leaned up against the pump, which was about the size of an SUV, his head swirling. He'd lost a fair amount of blood, and although his wounds were only seeping now, he was having trouble keeping on track. But help wasn't coming. It was just him and the boss's daughter, a brassy woman with more balls than just about every civilian he'd ever met.

Pushing away from the case he limped twenty feet farther along the power chain to where Ashley had crawled up beneath a series of large diameter steel pipes coated in a carbon fiber heat jacket. He could only see her feet and her legs from the hips down about fifteen feet up.

“Wait!” he shouted.

A second later she ducked out from beneath the maze, a seriously nervous look on her face, but then she smiled. “I did it!” she shouted, climbing back down.

A third explosion came, this one near the base of the furnace and practically on top of them, so close that the air danced in front of Cameron's eyes and he was thrown to the floor, his ears ringing, the hum of the turbine blotted out.

Ashley had fallen to her knees and she was just scrambling to her feet when Whitney was suddenly there, a stricken look on her face, and she was saying something, shouting it seemed to Cameron, but he could barely make out her words.

The two women helped him to his feet, and he managed to get his voice.

“Too late. We have to get out of here right now. The ceiling is about to cave in.”

“They're all dead in the rec room, Jim. What's going on? Who's doing this?”

Cameron grabbed her arm. “I don't know, but Mike and Tim are dead up in the control room, and we have to go right now!”

Ashley suddenly spun around as if she'd been hit in the leg or hip, and blood suddenly erupted from a long gash just below the waistband of her jeans.

Cameron hadn't heard the shot but he knew damn well that they were taking incoming fire from at least one of the terrorists left behind. He pulled Whitney to the right and slammed into Ashley, knocking her off her feet, the three of them dropping to the floor behind a steel beam supporting the deaerator casing as two more bullets ricocheted off the concrete floor, just missing them.

 

14

AS FAR AS
Egan was concerned stealth was no longer an issue nor were comms with his team, because the explosions had already started and all that was left were Dr. Kemal riding pillion and Gordy manning the electronics in the motor home. There was just about zero chance that anyone was coming to the rescue and no one inside the power plant was going to survive.

They topped the last rise and raced down to the Newell parked in a shallow bowl as Gordy appeared at the open door, and started to hop from foot to foot, the same thing he said that a computer genius he'd heard of did whenever he was excited.

“You son of a bitch, you did it!” he shouted as Egan pulled up, shut the ATV down, and dismounted.

“Time?”

“Fifty-nine, thirty-one.”

“Start up, we're getting out of here.”

Gordy looked back up toward the rise. “Where're Moose and the girls?”

“Dead,” Egan said. “Now, start up.”

“He shot Ada!” Kemal screamed.

Egan looked at the scientist, nothing more than a raghead in his estimation. “It was necessary,” he said. He turned back to Gordy. “I'm going to disconnect the trailer and then we're going to drive away, unless you want to wait around for the cops or somebody to show up and arrest us all.”

Widell stopped hopping. “Right,” he said. “Loud and clear. We got miles to make.” And he went back inside the motor home.

Dr. Kemal was shaking with rage and fear. “They were our team. Our friends.”

“Get inside, I'll be right behind,” Egan said. He was beginning to lose his patience, but Kemal was the one person he could not leave behind. If his body was found and identified too soon, the eggheads across at the operations center might put it together and take a little extra care sifting through the debris once things cooled down. If that were to happen before the bacteria at the wellhead was released into the coal seam everything they'd done would have been for nothing. Repairs would be made, and Donna Marie would be back up and running within a month or two. Not part of his contract.

“There's still time.”

“No.”

“We can't leave them! For the sake of Allah and our prophet we must go back!”

The motor home's diesel rumbled into life.

“Go inside!” Egan shouted.

Kemal turned back to the ATV and climbed aboard, but the key was gone, and when he realized it he jumped off and pulled a pistol out from a pocket in his coveralls.

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life in jail, you stupid bastard?” Egan shouted. He pointed back toward the rise. “Moose is dead, you saw his body. And no one inside the power plant will survive.”

“You shot Ada.”

“The bitch would have died trying to find her friend. They were dykes. What does your religion say about that?”

Kemal shook his head in despair. “They were ready to convert. I gave them a Quran.”

“Go back and get them, if that's what you want,” Eagan said, and he tossed the key over. “But you'll die trying, and we won't wait for you.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Kemal said, and pocketing his pistol he turned to get back aboard the ATV.

Egan unslung his carbine and fired a short burst, catching Kemal low in the back, knocking him forward, the second and third shots taking the back of his skull off.

“It's a tough old world,” Egan mumbled.

Gordy came back to the door, his eyes wide. “Holy shit, you wasted the doc.”

“He was getting stupid on me.”

The two of them carried Kemal's body into the motor home and dumped it on the floor in the rear compartment. Egan went back outside and disconnected the ATV trailer from the hitch, undid the chains, and let the tongue drop to the ground.

He checked his wristwatch and looked up toward the crest of the rise. The next explosion, this one just behind the wellhead would occur within the next five minutes, and as much as he wanted to wait around to hear it, he wanted to be well away before the cavalry arrived—which would happen at some point this evening.

If the final phase of the operation went as he'd planned it, he would be drinking a cold beer he'd left in the mini-fridge in his room at the Radisson in Rapid City sometime before midnight. Tomorrow morning he would fly to Chicago aboard United 6190 at six o'clock. Just another businessman trading in coal futures. Which he thought was actually a good joke.

From Chicago he would lay low in Michigan's Upper Peninsula until the dust settled and he found out about his payment from Kast.

Gordy was behind the wheel when Egan climbed back aboard. “South,” he said. “Twelve miles to White Butte where we'll ditch the rig and pick up our Chevy. Remember the way?”

“Just the two of us now,” Gordy said nervously.

Egan grinned. “Yup, it's a tough old world out there, son, but look on the bright side. Now we just have to split the money two ways, not six.”

Gordy suddenly grabbed for something inside his white coveralls, but before he could turn in his seat, a pistol in his hand, Egan flipped his PDW off his shoulder and pulled off one shot at point-blank range to the side of the kid's head, slamming his body against the side window.

It took a couple of minutes to manhandle the kid out of the driver's seat and clean up the blood splatter before Egan got behind the wheel and headed south on the dirt road, twenty minutes or more before any communications to or from the Initiative would be possible.

And in the following confusion it might take an hour or more before the Air Force Rapid Reponse team made it up from Ellsworth in Rapid City.

 

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