Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  He felt like hell, still light-headed from the blow to his head and the loss of blood from the wound in his back. But he was in no real pain, and Whitney had staunched most of the blood by wadding up her scarf and stuffing it under his shirt. But he no longer had his legs and most of his stamina was gone.

  The man in the hall said something else, and cocking his head Cameron was certain he heard them walk in opposite directions down the corridor—away from the stairs. They were going to search the entire building room by room, starting with the ground floor.

  A few moments later a door crashed open downstairs, and Cameron backed up. “Your office,” he whispered. “The computer connection might still be up.”

  They turned and headed down the corridor careful to make absolutely no noise, Cameron in the lead. But he pulled up short at the door to the conference room and again held a finger to his lips.

  A lot of cold air was coming from under the door. A window was open. He put his ear to the door but so far as he could tell nothing moved from within. No sounds. Nothing but the intense cold.

  He cautiously tried to open the door but it moved less than a quarter of an inch. It wasn’t locked, but something heavy was jammed against it.

  Osborne, the thought crystallized. He and Ashley had shown up for the party, but something had spooked them and they had taken off. It’s what the shooting back at Henry’s had been all about. They’d made it this far, and probably cornered, Nate had blocked the conference-room door, probably with a table, broken out a window, and he and Ashley had made their escape.

  To Donna Marie to try to disarm the explosives. The magnificent son of a bitch hadn’t tried to run, tried to get lost out in the hills until the Rapid Response Team showed up. Instead he and Ashley had taken the fight to Egan and the contractors.

  Something crashed downstairs, sounding like a lot of breaking glass. “They’re in the control room,” Whitney whispered. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You’re right,” Cameron agreed, and the two of them went next door to Whitney’s office where she powered up her computer, while he closed and locked the corridor door, and opened the connecting door to the conference room.

  The big table was jammed against the door as he thought it might be, and the arctic cold air came through the window that Osborne had broken out. He went across and looked outside, but so far as he could see nothing moved in the darkness. Egan’s people were overconfident, he thought, sloppy.

  “I’m in,” Whitney said excitedly.

  Cameron came back to her office. “Get the duty officer, tell them what’s going on,” he said.

  She pulled up the Rapid Response Team’s duty officer down at Ellsworth. A second later the camera light came on, and the image of the OD came on screen.

  “I’m Dr. Lipton, do you recognize me?” Whitney said, keeping her voice low.

  The sergeant was startled. “Holy shit. I mean yes, ma’am. Are you in a secure location?”

  “No,” Cameron said over her shoulder. “We’re in the R and D building, but we’re going to have to get out of here within the next minute or two. Is the team on its way?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Nettles and two Blackhawks were in the air, but they’re in contact with the incursion force, and were ordered to land ten miles out. They’re on the ground right now.”

  “Can you patch us over to them?”

  “Yes, sir. Stand by.”

  A full half minute later Captain Nettles’s image came up on the screen, and when he realized who he was looking at on his monitor he pursed his lips. “What’s your situation?” he demanded.

  “We’re in the R and D Center but we’re going to have to get out of here in about two mikes,” Cameron said. “As you can see Dr. Lipton and I are not under the incursion force’s control. Neither are Nate Osborne and Ashley Borden.”

  “Never mind about Borden, but I want you to keep your heads down, we’re getting airborne right now. Whatever you do make damned sure that Dr. Lipton is not recaptured. You copy?”

  “What do you mean, never mind about Borden?” Cameron demanded.

  “It’s not important. Just find a secure place and hang on. We’ll be on top of you within about nine minutes.”

  “I asked you a question, Captain.”

  “The general’s daughter has been identified as the probable leak.”

  “Bullshit,” Cameron said. “And I’d bet my life on it.”

  “If you get in her way you just might lose.”

  “I think that she and Osborne are on their way down to Donna Marie to find and disarm the explosives. And we’re going to help out.”

  “Goddamnit, listen to me, Jim, Dr. Lipton is your only consideration.”

  Someone came pounding up the stairs.

  “We’ll be at the power station, and we’ll certainly have company, so mind what you shoot at,” Cameron said.

  He hit the escape button, and he and Whitney slipped into the conference room and closed the door. Whoever had come up the stairs had started down the corridor in the opposite direction.

  “We’re going out the window,” he whispered to her. “And I can stash you in the crawl space under the building.”

  “My facility, my experiment, and no one’s going to screw with it if I can help,” Whitney said. “I’m coming with you.”

  Cameron helped her out the window feetfirst, and held her dangling at arm’s length until she let go and dropped to the ground.

  He waited and watched for several beats, sweeping the carbine left to right ready to take down anything that moved. But it didn’t happen.

  Dropping the M4 to Whitney below, he levered himself out the window and as he dropped to the trampled snowbank someone started hammering on the conference-room door.

  61

  TRYING TO MAKE as little noise as possible climbing the outside stairs on the west side of the generating hall, Osborne’s left knee slipped in its titanium socket and he went down hard, blinding pain shooting up to his hip, slamming into his back.

  He lost his grip on the carbine, but before it clattered away Ashley managed to grab it. Her face was marble white with the extreme cold, and her expression was tight-lipped and grim, but determined.

  Using the railing he pulled himself up, and managed to grin. “Nice catch, Ash.”

  “You okay?”

  He glanced over his shoulder toward the south gate. Nothing moved. “Good to go,” he said. “Except my left foot itches like crazy.”

  A short burst of gunfire came from the general direction of the R&D Center, and Osborne immediately thought of the hostages they’d left behind. They were being murdered and he was suddenly very afraid that he and Ashley were not going to be in time to avert a major tragedy.

  “It’s not Whitney,” Ashley said as if reading his thoughts. “They’re dead without her.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” Osborne said, though he had his doubts. Egan was a nutcase and there was no telling how he would react if cornered.

  Putting his pain aside he managed to climb the rest of the stairs, Ashley right behind him with the Ithaca, and at the top he eased the heavy metal door open just a crack and looked inside. The short corridor that went past the control room to the right and the room with the electronic repeaters to the left was empty. No guard. Twenty feet ahead the corridor opened to a narrow balcony from which the inside stairs led down to the generating hall fifty feet below.

  The noise from the turbine being electrically rotated to make sure the bearings remained lubricated and the shaft didn’t sag grated on the nerves; loud enough to mask other sounds and high enough pitched to make Osborne’s back teeth tingle.

  They slipped inside, crossed to the control room that was also unguarded, and Osborne went immediately to the big plate glass windows, keeping to one side so he couldn’t be spotted from the floor.

  From this angle he couldn’t see any of Egan’s people, nor at first could he spot anything out of order. But they were down here,
or had been, he was certain of it.

  “Here,” Ashley said, at the same moment he spotted something that looked like a bundle of small packages all wrapped in olive drab paper or plastic. Semtex. They had set the place to blow, just like they had the first time. Only he couldn’t spot any wires trailing across the floor like before.

  He turned, and went to where she was hunched over one of the control desks. “What do you have?” he asked.

  She pulled a brick of plastic explosive about the size of a carton of cigarettes from the underside of the desk, and laid it beside a small plastic box from which a pair of wires were attached to a fuse that she eased out of the explosive. “It’s a remote-controlled detonator, I think,” she said, looking up. “Keyed either by a radio transmitter, or maybe a cell phone or sat phone from just about any distance.”

  “I don’t see an antenna.”

  “Probably inside the box. But it’s small.”

  “The cell phone tower here has been shut down, so this would have to be triggered at short range, somewhere inside the compound.”

  “Either that or by a transmitter of some kind, even a sat phone,” Ashley said. “But I’m not an electrical engineer, so I’m not sure.”

  Osborne glanced back at the windows. He shook his head. “We’ll have to find as many of them as we can and pull the wires.”

  Ashley looked at the windows. “Did you see anyone down there?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean a thing. We’re on the loose and they’ll have to suspect this is where we’ll come.” He straightened up, but then another thought struck him.

  He laid the carbine aside, and pulling out his penknife opened the small screwdriver blade and quickly undid the four screws holding the top plate on the detonator box.

  “What?” Ashley asked.

  Inside was a small circuit board to which were attached a number of components, one of them a computer chip, a nine volt battery, and another long narrow circuit board on which was etched a series of X patterns in gold.

  Osborne pulled it out of the detonator box, ripping the single wire from the larger board. “This is no radio or sat phone antenna, too small. Unless I miss my guess it’s meant to get a signal from right here inside Donna Marie.”

  “They’re not going to stay here, it’d be suicide,” Ashley protested.

  “They’ve planted a booster antenna somewhere. They’ll take Whitney as a hostage and once they’re on their way they’ll send a signal, which the booster antenna will pick up and relay to all the detonators.”

  “But why take the chance that once they’re out of here Nettles’s people will find the explosives and disarm them?”

  Osborne stared at the circuit board. He was no electronics engineer, either, but he’d seen a lot of this sort of stuff—most of it cruder—in Afghanistan. The Taliban fighters, along with their brothers in Iraq, had practically written the book on IEDs. If something could explode they could figure out a way to make it happen at just the right moment and under any kind of circumstance.

  And they knew about booby traps.

  “There’s some kind of a timer in the circuit,” he said. “Maybe once the trigger signal is sent the countdown clock starts. Gives them enough time to get out.”

  Ashley was shaking her head. “Once this place goes up they’d be left with only Whitney to guarantee their safe passage to wherever they’re planning to run.”

  “It’s enough—”

  “No,” Ashley said. “They want to bring this place down. Maybe there’s a timer here, but I think that once the trigger signal is sent these fuses will be switched into some active mode. As soon as someone tampers with one of them, they’ll all blow.” She looked up. “That’s the way I’d do it.”

  “We need to find the booster antenna.”

  “On the roof,” Ashley said.

  “No,” Osborne told her, and he knew for certain exactly where the booster antenna would be and how and when it got there.

  The plate glass windows shattered under a sustained round of automatic weapons fire, and Osborne dragged Ashley to the floor as bullets slammed into the opposite wall and glass flew everywhere.

  62

  EGAN STOOD AT the bar, snapping his carbine’s safety switch on and off, the hamburger and fries the cook had sent untouched, a sour dry taste at the back of his throat. He should have killed Cameron on the spot down at Donna Marie when he had the chance. And he should have ordered the sheriff and his girlfriend eliminated at the front gate, instead of letting them come up here.

  Should’ve beens, could’ve beens, would’ve beens … He’d heard that kind of shit most of his life and especially in the service when he’d been trained to become a noncommissioned officer: indecisiveness will jump up and bite you in the ass. Make a decision—the right decision—and stick with it.

  “Barry, Alessandro, switch to two,” Rodriguez radioed, and Egan could hear tension in the man’s voice.

  He looked at Daley and the other contractors who were eating what had been sent out from the kitchen, and just then the bartender and one of the kitchen workers brought out a couple of platters of sandwiches and chips and bottled water that they distributed to the hostages.

  Everyone was watching him, waiting for him to do something. There’d already been a lot more shooting than he’d planned for and at this point neither Dr. Lipton nor Forester’s daughter had been captured.

  The center wasn’t going to hold for much longer and he was almost afraid to hear what Alessandro was going to tell him.

  “On two.” He spoke into his lapel mike and walked to the door.

  “We’re concentrating on Donna Marie. You need to move your ass and get everyone down here now.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Have you got either of the broads?”

  “Not yet, but I think they’re somewhere in the generating hall.”

  “They were at the R and D Center,” Egan shouted. “You let them escape?”

  “Bring the radio, we’re going to have to make our stand down here.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “There’s been shooting inside the building,” Rodriguez radioed. “I’m on the north side just below the smokestack. I’ll coordinate from inside. But, Barry, you’re running out of time. Get down here with the radio and the hostages. It’s our only chance.”

  “What—?” Egan shouted, but then he heard the helicopters from a long distance to the south, and he suddenly realized what Rodriguez was talking about. The bastards had reneged on their promise.

  Everyone in Henry’s was hearing the choppers, too.

  “You stupid son of a bitch, you’ve gotten us all killed!” Daley shouted. And everyone else was clamoring at him.

  “Not yet!” Egan shouted him and the others down. “Load as many of these people into the Hummers as you can, we’re heading down to the power station.”

  “What the hell good is that going to do us?” Daley demanded. “We need Lipton, or at least the general’s daughter.”

  “This is who we have, so saddle up,” Egan ordered, and he looked at the civilians. Fear was a good thing. “If any of them resist, shoot them.”

  “You heard the man!” Daley screamed at what was left of the Initiative crew and he and the other contractors began hustling them to their feet and herding them out the door. “What about the cooks?”

  “Leave them,” Egan said. He keyed his lapel mike. “Rodriguez, we’re moving out in five.”

  “Make it three,” Rodriguez replied, a lot of machinery noise in the background.

  “Will do,” Egan said. He went back to the bar, grabbed the portable radio which was about the size of a six-pack of beer, and hustled to the door with the last of the hostages, leaving three of them plus the kitchen staff behind.

  Just before he went out he turned back to the others; all of them were totally subdued, and he had the almost overwhelming urge to shoot them all. And they could see it, because two of them raised their hands as if t
hey were trying to ward off the expected bullets. But he felt charitable all of a sudden, and he grinned.

  “Your best bet is to stay right here and keep your heads down. Anyone who pokes his head out the door will get it shot off. Capisce?”

  No one answered, but it didn’t matter.

  Outside, the choppers were not yet visible, but they were close. All the hostages were loaded in the two Hummers, and Egan climbed in the shotgun seat, Daley driving, and they took off toward Donna Marie.

  He keyed the radio. “Nettles, this is Egan at the Initiative, copy?”

  The radio was silent.

  “I can’t see them,” Egan said.

  Daley rolled down the window. “They’re just about on top of us, but they’re running without lights,” he said. “You’d better do something right now.”

  Egan keyed the radio again. “Nettles, this is Egan, you’d best listen up unless you want to get a lot more people killed.”

  A spotlight sharply illuminated them, making it all but impossible for Daley to see the gravel road, and he had to skid to a stop.

  “Exit the two vehicles with your hands over your head,” Nettles radioed.

  “We have hostages with us,” Egan said. “Turn off the goddamn light and back off, or I will kill one of them.”

  Keeping the push-to-talk switch depressed, he held the mike over his shoulder toward the rear seats.

  “Do as he says!” one of the technicians shouted. “The bastard means it.”

  The spotlight went out, and Daley headed south again.

  “You have to know that you’re not going anywhere,” Nettles radioed.

  “Just to Donna Marie where we’re going to wait with the hostages for our Chinook,” Egan said. “And for everyone’s sake I hope that you’ve relayed our demands to someone with more authority than you have.”

  “Let me talk to Dr. Lipton.”

  Egan laughed. “You know damned well that we don’t have her or Ms. Borden with us at the moment. But I can tell you that they’ve been herded to the power station and it’ll just be a matter of time—a very short time—before we kill Lieutenant Commander Cameron and Sheriff Osborne and capture one or both of the women alive.”