Blowout (11 page)

ASHLEY FELT NO
pain in her right hip, which she didn't think was right. Jim Cameron was lying half on and half off her and Dr. Lipton, the woman who wasn't supposed to be here, was sprawled on her side under some piping, their faces inches apart.

“I think we need to get out of here before the place comes down around our heads,” she said, but she was whispering and Whitney shook her head.

Cameron rolled away, his pistol in hand and he fired off two shots toward a section of the upper part of the furnace that was still intact.

The turbine was still running and the high pitched whine louder at this end made any conversation all but impossible. Ashley was sick to her stomach, her head spinning, and it took her a moment to realize that she might be in shock.

“Can you move?” Cameron shouted. “Can you at least crawl?”

“Yes!” Ashley shouted and nodded.

Whitney scrambled on all fours over to where Cameron was crouched behind a piece of machinery that looked something like an oversized water heater, and started shouting something, but Cameron shoved her back a split second before a bullet pinged off the side of the machinery.

Cameron reached around the feedwater heater and fired back once, then he dropped his pistol, which skittered out across the floor, and fell backwards, his head bouncing off the concrete floor, a crease in his right shoulder.

Ashley had once listened to her father describe a firefight he'd been involved with in Bosnia. He'd been a lieutenant colonel at the time, a UN observer outside of Sarajevo, when his group of five men, two of them Canadian, one Australian, and two South Africans, had come under intense fire from what turned out to be a Serbian ethnic cleansing squad. The gun battle had gone on for only four minutes before the Serbs had withdrawn.

“Longest and shortest four minutes of my life,” her father had admitted.

That was in the late nineties after everything was over, and she'd listened to his story not just as a daughter, but as a budding journalist, and she'd read between the lines that he'd been frightened. It was then that she'd come to respect him as a man and not just love him as an iron man father. He'd become a vulnerable human being to her.

Capable of the same fear she was feeling now, and admitting it.

“There was no place to dig in, so we had to stay two steps ahead of them, firing over our shoulders as we bugged out,” he'd explained.

In her mind it was just like that now. They needed to get the hell out of here.

Ashley crawled over to where Whitney was dragging Cameron back behind the machinery and lent a hand as two more shots ricocheted off the floor.

But there was nowhere to go now without exposing themselves to the shooter. And there would be more explosions because they could no longer reach the plastique.

“Go!” Cameron shouted at them. His complexion was pale. He was obviously in a lot of pain but he wasn't out of it. “This shit's going to start coming down around your heads.”

“We're pulling you out,” Whitney said.

“No.”

“Yes!” Ashley shouted, getting her voice. But she honestly didn't know if she could move ten feet on her own, let alone drag Cameron out even with Dr. Lipton's help.

“Jesus!” Cameron shouted, rearing back.

Ashley looked over her shoulder as a large figure suddenly loomed out of the smoke and dust. He was wearing a dark brown jacket, some kind of a billed cap on his head, a big pistol in his right hand, and he was limping but moving fast. Her first impression was that the shooter had somehow gotten around behind them and right now they were just seconds way from being blown away.

Whitney started to scramble toward Cameron's pistol, which lay about ten feet way completely exposed, when the figure shouted something like, get back, and Ashley suddenly knew who he was and she grabbed Whitney's leg and held her back.

“It's okay!” she shouted.

“About time you civilians got off your butts!” Cameron shouted. “How'd you get in?”

“Your visitors left the back gate open,” Osborne said, dropping down beside Cameron. “You okay?”

“I'll live. We've got one shooter somewhere about fifty feet away, high, damned good. And we still have one or more C4 or Semtex charges set on a timer. Should go off any moment now.”

“Just the one detonator by the turbine?”

“So far as I know.”

“I shut it down,” Osborne said. “Dr. Lipton, you okay?”

“Everybody at the rec center is dead.”

“Have you been injured?”

“No.”

“Ms. Borden?”

“I feel like I've been kicked in the butt.”

“Looks like you're going to get a good story this time,” Osborne said. He eased over to the edge of the feedwater heater and took a quick peek.

The shooter fired once, the bullet grazing the side of the pump inches away from Osborne's head and he ducked back. “Determined,” he said. “What's back there that can hurt us, other than the one using us for target practice?”

“Only one?” Whitney asked.

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “The furnace, but there's no gas feed to it until morning. Nothing's pressurized, no steam. If they blow up anything else, a lot of steel girders, pipes, and some serious machinery could come down on our heads. Lubricating oil reservoirs could catch fire, but most of the microbes have already been injected into the seam. All that's left is the gadget in the morning.”

Osborne had a general idea what she was talking about, and so far as he knew it was all strictly classified, on a need to know basis, and someone would have to have to talk to Ashley Borden before she got out of here. The details weren't ready for the media. The attack would be reported as against the ELF project.

A lot of black smoke was roiling out from the far end of the generating hall, some of it extremely noxious, and it was starting to make breathing difficult.

“We're going to have to get out of here before we choke to death,” Ashley said.

“Not without help,” Whitney said. “The bastard has us pinned down.”

“I tried to call for backup, but all of our communications are down,” Cameron said.

“I figured as much,” Osborne said. “I had State Radio call Ellsworth about ten minutes ago, so help should be on its way.”

“I don't know where the hell you got the protocol, but I'm sure glad you did,” Whitney said. “So how do we get out of here?”

“Create a diversion,” Ashley said. “I'll go for the Glock.”

She started to move out from behind the feedwater heater but Osborne grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “You'll get yourself killed that way. Whoever is doing the shooting has the high ground and they're damned good. Anyway you need to come out of this in one piece, your father would never forgive me otherwise. And I can't go out for dinner and drinks with a corpse or a cripple. Deal?”

Ashley looked up at him, and after a moment she managed a tight smile. “Deal,” she said. “What's your plan?”

“You and Dr. Lipton are going to help Jim out of here,” he said. He handed his 9mm SIG-Sauer and spare magazine of ammunition to Cameron. “Do you have a spare?”

“No,” Cameron said, seeing what Osborne had in mind. “But I've only fired three times, and I loaded a fifteen-round mag.”

“Then we're about even for now,” Osborne said. His SIG was also loaded with a fifteen-round magazine. “Ready?”

Cameron checked the pistol and nodded. “I owe you one.”

“What?” Whitney demanded.

“We don't have time, Doc,” Cameron said as he managed to get to his knees, steadying himself with one hand.

Whitney, realizing what was about to happen, started to protest, but Cameron reached around the feedwater heater and pulled off two shots that were immediately returned as Osborne dove out from behind the machinery, rolling as he moved, snatching the Glock with one hand while levering himself to the right with his other, and pulling off four shots in rapid succession toward where he figured the lone shooter was hiding about fifty feet above the floor.

A half-dozen shots ricocheted off the concrete floor following just behind him as he made it to the relative safety of a broad steel beam supporting the ceiling.

Ashley and Whitney helped Cameron to his feet. They looked across to where Osborne was holed up and Cameron nodded.

Osborne reached around the beam and fired two shots high and to the right. Almost instantly the shooter fired back, the bullets plinking against the beam, and Cameron reached around the feedwater heater and fired two shots.

There was no immediate return fire and Cameron and the two women stepped out from around the machinery and hobbled as quickly as they could go toward the back door.

Osborne's attention was focused on the upper portions of the boiler steam drum atop the aft sections of the furnace when he caught a slight movement and he fired three shots before ducking back.

The shooter returned fire on his position, but then realizing the mistake switched aim toward Cameron and the women but it was too late, they'd already reached the safety of the towering deaerator device.

Something about the sound of the weapon was slightly bothersome to Osborne. He was sure he knew it from somewhere. More than a semiautomatic as it had been fired to this point, because the rounds had been pulled off too easily. But it was just a feeling.

A moment later something metallic clattered down from above, And Osborne heard the characteristic snap of a magazine being slapped home, and he instinctively hunched back behind the steel beam, making himself as invisible as he possibly could.

It came to him all of a sudden that the gun was a Knight Personal Defense Weapon. He'd learned about it in Afghanistan during an intensive briefing on American, British, and Australian contractors hired to act as guards for VIPS in the entire theater, including Iraq. Almost to a man their automatic weapon of preference was the Knight. It fired a 6x35mm round that was considerably larger and more powerful than either the standard 9mm Para or .45 ACP with twice the muzzle velocity and a theoretical cyclic rate of seven hundred rounds per minute. Plus it was extremely compact with a length of less than eighteen inches when the stock was retracted and an empty weight of only four and a half pounds.

An instant after the shooter reloaded they fired a full thirty rounds on full auto, the bullets slamming into the steel beam, off the concrete floor, and into the wall behind Osborne, sending chips and bullet fragments everywhere, one of them nicking the side of his neck just below his right ear.

Osborne waited for the sound of another magazine being ejected and discarded, but for several long seconds there was nothing except for the whine of the turbine, until a tremendous explosion somewhere behind and below the shooter's position blotted out all sounds and sights, and it seemed as if the entire installation were caving in on top of him and he started to run.

 

16

OSBORNE FIGURED THAT
the shooter had managed to manually fire one of the remaining blocks of Semtex as a last-ditch suicide mission, which made them crazy, most likely some Islamic militant. But that didn't make a lot of sense. Why hit a research facility?

Something was on fire at the front end of the generating hall, and the noises of machinery and metal beams collapsing, concrete breaking up, and the roof coming down blotted out just about everything except for the high-pitched whine of the turbine still spinning.

A tall, slender man in white coveralls, a bullet hole in the side of his head, lay on the floor, his arms flung out as if he were trying to give up. Osborne had seen him on the way in, and now he recognized it was Pete Magliano, who was the Army Public Information officer for the project. It would have been him who escorted Ashley over here and he'd given his life for it.

Pocketing Cameron's pistol, he scooped up Magliano's body and carried it the rest of the way to the rear door and outside, the night air dry and the wind bitterly cold. He gently laid it down next to the body of a woman dressed in white coveralls and armed with a PDW. She'd been shot several times in the back.

Whitney was with Cameron, who'd managed to climb into his Hummer and was on the radio with someone, and in the distance to the south Osborne could hear several helicopters incoming. When he had them located he spotted their lights, low and fast, up from Ellsworth one hundred and fifty miles away.

Ashley was leaning against her pickup and she was pulling out her cell phone, but when she saw Osborne she came over. “You made it,” she said, and looked at Magliano's body. “We had no idea what was going to happen. He had just explained to me about the turbine and I ducked under it to get a better look when they shot him. I don't think he knew what hit him.”

“Probably not,” Osborne said, and he held out his hand. “Give me your cell phone.”

“Doesn't work in here,” she said. But then she realized what he meant and she stepped back. “No way in hell, Sheriff.”

“I don't want to arrest you after all of this, but unless you give me your phone I'll turn you over to the Air Force team who'll be here any minute.”

“Goddamnit, this is my story.”

“Not yet. Maybe never. But certainly not until we find out who's behind this mess and why.”

“Terrorists.”

“Probably. But there was no reason for them to hit an ELF station, there've been no protests out here like in Wisconsin.”

“This is no ELF facility and you know it,” Ashley said. “It's a power station all right, but the antennas out there are fake. Dr. Lipton is a microbiologist not an electronics expert and Lieutenant Magliano told me something about microbes being injected into the coal seam. Plus my dad is involved out here and he used to be DARPA. Heavy-duty shit.”

The helicopters were much closer now, and Osborne counted four of them by their lights. “Tell that to the Air Force and you'll start off in the brig at Ellsworth, and then probably a federal penitentiary somewhere, and your father—if he is involved—would most likely sign the order.”