Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  They came to the inner security fence, but Daley drove right through it, never slowing down, the gate slamming off its hinges, the second Hummer driving over it.

  Nettles did not reply.

  “All this is about money,” Egan said. “It would be too bad for those women to die and for us to blow the power station straight to hell. But listen to me, you son of a bitch, if we’re cornered here, if we end up having no way out, I’ll personally shoot the bitches and push the detonator button myself.”

  “I’ll pass it on to General Forester. He’ll want to talk to you on this frequency, so keep it open.”

  “Indeed I will, Captain,” Egan said, and he brayed.

  63

  JIM CAMERON LAY prone on the concrete floor just inside the control-room corridor, Whitney right beside him. They’d been harried for the last hundred yards from the R&D building, but for some reason the firing had stopped as they approached the generating hall and clambered up the stairs.

  A couple of minutes ago shots had been fired from downstairs into the control room; they’d heard the shattering glass, but then it had abruptly stopped and there were no other sounds except for the constant whine of the turbine.

  The outside door they’d come through was open a couple of inches but so far as he could see nothing moved, nor was anyone on the way up the stairs.

  “Do you see anything?” Whitney asked.

  To this point Jim Cameron had always thought that he’d had a fairly easy life. Never any problems in high school because of his low-key laid-back attitude. None in college where he’d studied criminal justice, and not even in SEAL training—that he’d actually found stimulating. But he’d been a loner for the most part. Except for his fire team, he’d never had to take responsibility for anyone else. Until now.

  He looked over his shoulder. Whitney was frightened, but determined. “Nothing,” he said.

  “I don’t understand. Why’d they stop shooting at us?”

  “Probably because we ended up exactly where they want us,” Cameron said. He glanced over to the control-room door. “Be my guess that Nate and Ashley made it this far, too, and Egan’s people are just going to hold all of us right here. No way out through the generating hall, and no way back down the stairs.”

  “They wanted us as hostages, and now they have us. So what are we going to do?”

  “First of all find out if I’m right about Nate and Ashley,” Cameron said. He eased back from the door, an intense pain shooting down his left side and he grunted involuntarily.

  Whitney reached out and tried to help him crawl back, and her hand came away covered with blood. “My God.”

  “There’s a first aid kit in the control room,” Cameron said when his head cleared. For a moment he was swimming in glue. “Watch the stairs. Anything moves, shoot it.”

  Whitney had the pistol he’d taken away from the contractor. “Okay, but I’ve never shot a gun in my life.”

  “Just point it in the general direction of whoever you see and start pulling the trigger. It’ll kick a little, but don’t stop until you run out of bullets.”

  She nodded uncertainly, but took her place at the door.

  Cameron got to his feet and held a hand against the wall to steady himself for just a moment before he lurched down the corridor to the narrow balcony that opened to the generating hall and cautiously peered around the corner, making himself as small a target as possible.

  Nothing moved below, and he turned and lurched back to the control room where he put his ear to the door, but he couldn’t hear a thing over the distant turbine whine.

  Stepping aside out of the line of fire in case he was wrong, he knocked softly with the muzzle of the carbine. “Nate?”

  He looked over at Whitney, who glanced over her shoulder at him and then turned back to watching outside.

  “Nate,” he called again when the door suddenly opened and the muzzle of a SIG-Sauer was jammed into his face before he had a chance to react, his reflexes shot because of his loss of blood.

  “Jim,” Osborne said, withdrawing the pistol and opening the door the rest of the way. “Dr. Lipton with you?”

  “By the outside door, watching my back,” Cameron said.

  Osborne stepped out and Whitney looked over her shoulder. “Anyone behind you?” he asked.

  “At first, but they backed off when we made it this far. I think they’re herding us.”

  “They know we’re up here, too, and they want to keep it that way, but we’ve got another, bigger problem,” Osborne said. “Both of you’d better get in here, but keep low.”

  Whitney came down the corridor to the control room. “We need the first aid kit, Jim’s been shot,” she said, and keeping low and away from the shattered window went to a niche in the wall marked with a Red Cross and pulled out the big first aid kit next to which was a portable defibrillator.

  Ashley rose from where she’d been crouched behind an overturned desk. “We heard shooting.”

  “I’m okay, but Jim was hit.”

  Cameron took one of the chairs from behind a desk and rolled it out into the corridor to the door, where he tipped it up on its side and propped it under the handle. If someone opened the door the chair would fall forward, making enough noise to give them an early warning that they were being attacked from the rear.

  When he came back Whitney made him take off his blood-soaked jacket and shirt, pulled her scarf out, and wadded several big gauze pads together that she placed over the seeping bullet wound just below his shoulder. She held them in place as Ashley wrapped an Ace bandage around his chest to hold the pads in place.

  It hurt like hell, but Osborne brought the detonator receiver over and showed it to him, taking his mind off the pain.

  “Radio-controlled,” Cameron said. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Semtex on one of the control desks. And there’s probably more just like it down on the turbine and other equipment.”

  “Won’t do them any good. It’s got too short a range. Have to be trigger signal from right here in the generating hall.”

  “The cell phone repeater is down, how about a signal from a sat phone?”

  “Wrong kind of antenna.”

  “Egan’s going to try to get out of here with a few hostages, but he’ll use the threat of triggering the charges from somewhere.”

  “He’s probably asked for a jet to pick him and his people up at Dickinson. It’ll work, too, if he can get his hands on Whitney or Ashley. But he’ll still need a way to reach the detonators.”

  “He’ll use a sat phone signal to a booster antenna right here,” Osborne said, and Cameron saw it at once.

  “The son of a bitch planted it outside on top of the stack the same time his people were cutting the cell phone repeater.”

  “Right,” Osborne said. “The problem will be getting to it if he has people watching the door you came through. No way we’d make it down the stairs and back to the stack without getting spotted.”

  “I hope they are keeping a close watch on the door to make sure none of us gets out of here. But we don’t have to go that way.”

  Whitney saw it, too. “The cable run?”

  “Exactly,” Cameron said, and he got up and with Whitney’s help pulled on his shirt and jacket. “It’s right here, in the floor.” He went to a fine-meshed metal grate about three feet wide that ran like a straight path across the floor and pulled up a four-foot section of it, revealing a trough about two and a half feet deep. Cables, some of them bundled in thick strands, ran along the bottom of the trough.

  “Where do they lead?” Osborne asked.

  “Some of them across the hall to the repeater room, but others along the entire length of the generating hall to the monitors and controls on all the gear down there.”

  “And the smokestack?”

  “We’re connected here with sensors in the stack so we can monitor the composition of the exhaust gases. Depending what it looks like we’ll adjust the carbon-eating
microbes we’ll inject at the base,” Whitney said.

  Cameron laid his carbine aside, took the Beretta pistol from Whitney, and checked the load before he stuffed it in his belt.

  “You’re in no condition to go out there,” Osborne said.

  “And you are with that peg leg of yours?” Cameron countered. “I won’t be long. In the meantime you can hold the fort until help arrives.”

  “I hope it’s on the way,” Ashley said.

  “We heard the choppers, they’re close,” Cameron said. “Deal?”

  Osborne nodded reluctantly.

  “Come back,” Whitney said. “To me.”

  Cameron grinned. “Count on it,” he said.

  He ducked down into the cable run, and crawled toward the north side of the generating hall about one hundred feet away, where the cable run finally exited right next to the smokestack, his head swimming, nausea threatening to incapacitate him.

  64

  EGAN’S HUMMER WAS backed up to the generating station’s south exit, his door open despite the cold as the last of the eight hostages were hustled inside. The helicopters had landed somewhere out beyond the fence, he’d heard that much over the dull whine of the turbine. He couldn’t see them in the darkness, but he could feel them out there. Feel eyes on him, Nettles’s people watching through infrared detectors and night vision goggles.

  Rodriguez came around the corner of the building and hurried over at the same moment General Forester called on the Rapid Response Team’s tactical frequency.

  “Mr. Egan, do you copy?”

  “Yes, I do, General. So good of you to get back to me. Perhaps now we can defuse this situation to everyone’s satisfaction and your staff can resume their important work here.”

  “Work that you and the people who have hired you aim to destroy.”

  “Those were the old days, General. I’m my own boss now, and I have a new plan that involves making money. Have you been told what we want?”

  “A Gulfstream is en route to Dickinson right now, should be touching down in a couple of hours, before dawn I think. And two troop transport helicopters will arrive at your location just prior to that.”

  “I wanted a Chinook, one chopper to carry us all.”

  “None at Ellsworth, so you’ll have to take what we can send up.”

  “Fair enough. What about the gold?”

  “That’d have to come from the fed in New York. We can get it, but not until ten this morning, after which it would have to be trucked out to LaGuardia for the flight west. Might be sometime this afternoon before you’d have it.”

  Egan controlled his rage. It was something he should have thought through. Something that Rodriguez, looking at him, should have envisioned.

  “We want to be done with this operation sooner than that. What do you propose?”

  “I figured as much, therefore I managed to come up with five million in cash, all small bills. It’s on a small plane right now heading for Dickinson from Minneapolis. Should arrive within the hour.”

  “That’s acceptable,” Egan said. The bills would be traceable, of course, but it didn’t matter. The five million would go to however many of Daley’s and Rodriguez’s men survived, and it was small change compared to the twenty-five million Kast had promised.

  “Let me talk to my daughter or to Dr. Lipton,” Forester said.

  “That’s not possible at the moment.”

  “Listen up real close, you son of a bitch. Unless I talk to them there will be no helicopters, no Gulfstream, no money. You and the fanatics you’ve surrounded yourself with will come out of Donna Marie in body bags.”

  “And so will your daughter and Dr. Lipton!” Egan shouted into the mike. “At this moment they’ve barricaded themselves inside the control room along with Sheriff Osborne and Lieutenant Commander Cameron.”

  Forester didn’t reply.

  Egan slammed the mike into the dashboard then catching his breath keyed it again. “We’ve planted enough Semtex throughout the generating hall—including the control room—to bring this place down ten times over, and kill every living soul anywhere inside the walls.”

  Still the radio remained silent and Egan could feel his sanity slipping away. But he tried again.

  “All of it, every single kilo is wired to a radio-controlled detonator. All I have to do is press the button and your precious daughter will disintegrate before she knows what’s happened. How do you like them apples, General?”

  The radio was silent and before Egan could key the mike again, Rodriguez reached in the Hummer and took the mike away.

  Egan’s rage spiked and he clawed the pistol out of the holster strapped to his chest, but Rodriguez didn’t step back.

  “Listen to me, comp, you and I have to get away from this place right now.”

  “What are you talking about?” Egan screamed, his finger tightening on the Beretta’s trigger.

  “The booster antenna is down. By the time we saw someone on top of the smokestack it was too late. One of Daley’s people took him out, and when we got to where he’d fallen, he was on top of the antenna.”

  “Fix it. Put it back.”

  “It’s gone. Destroyed.”

  “Impossible,” Egan screamed. “Bring the prick to me!”

  “He’s dead.”

  Bright flashes were going off behind Egan’s eyes and he was hearing the boom of a distant drum. “The center doesn’t hold?” he heard himself ask.

  “That’s right. Everyone’s inside now, except for us. The snipers will be moving into place any minute now.”

  Still Egan could not fully comprehend what had gone wrong. The plan was perfect. Even Kast himself had approved. Big money on the line. Prestige.

  He looked at Rodriguez, really looked at him this time. No fear. Only urgency. A steadiness.

  “Do you want to live, or do you want to die here this morning?”

  Rodriguez was right, and Egan pulled himself back from the brink. “We can storm the control room from both directions. All we need is one of the women.”

  “The hostages on floor would be enough to get us out of here. But even if they let us get to the plane and fly away, we would have failed here because we couldn’t destroy the place.”

  “Twenty-five fucking million dollars.”

  “Does it mean that much to you?”

  Egan nodded. “Yes.”

  “More than your life?” Rodriguez asked. “Think, comp.”

  “Then we’ll kill them,” Egan said, holstering his pistol. “what the fuck.” He grabbed his carbine and got out of the Hummer.

  “No time for that.”

  “I’ll make the time.”

  They went to the rear of the Hummer and slipped inside the generating hall. The hostages were seated on the floor between the generator and turbine, their hands clasped at the back of their necks. Daley and the rest of his people plus Egan’s had taken up defensive positions behind the machinery.

  “The Chinook is on its way,” Rodriguez told them. “We just have to sit tight until it gets here.”

  “What about the Gulfstream?” Daley asked.

  “It’ll be landing in Dickinson within the hour,” Egan told them. “And we’ll all be in Havana for sundowners on the beach. Five million goes a long way down there.”

  “Then what, goddamnit?” one of the others demanded. “We’ll be stuck there.”

  “I don’t give a flying shit!” Egan shouted. “You want to give it up, lay down your weapons, and walk out the door with your hands up? Well go ahead, but I goddamn well guarantee that the Air Force won’t treat you as good as the Cubans will.”

  “We need to check on the wellhead before the helicopter gets here,” Rodriguez said.

  “First we’re going to take care some business,” Egan said. He was calming down now that he saw what needed to be done. The money would came later, even if he had to put a bullet in Kast’s brain.

  “Hijo de puta,” Rodriguez said.

  Egan ignored
it. He pointed his carbine at Daley and two of his people. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Where?” Daley demanded.

  “Osborne has barricaded himself in the control room with Dr. Lipton and the general’s daughter. We’re going to smoke them out. All I want is one of the broads, our surefire ticket outta here. Fuck the rest of them.”

  “About time we get to kick some ass,” Daley said.

  65

  OSBORNE STOOD AT the edge of the shattered plate glass windows that looked down on the floor of the generating hall. Nothing moved, but a few moments ago he’d heard someone shouting something. He’d not been able to make out the words but the tone had been unmistakably angry.

  Earlier he and Ashley had shoved one of the desks up against the door, and overturned the other so that they would have a decent firing position. It was a foregone conclusion in his mind that Egan or some of his people would be coming up here to recapture at least Whitney and most likely Ashley, too. The project’s chief scientist and the daughter of the ARPA-E general in charge would be their tickets to ride.

  But someone had to be coming up from Ellsworth by now. Their only hope was holding out long enough for the Rapid Response Team to get here. But it also depended on Cameron managing to reach the remote booster antenna and disabling it. Because without that, they were all at Egan’s mercy. If the fanatic was backed into a corner, Osborne had no doubt the man would push the button without hesitation, bringing the entire place down on their heads.

  “She’s back,” Ashley called from across the room.

  Osborne turned as Whitney’s head appeared above the level of the floor. Her face was white and tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked devastated and Osborne knew exactly what had happened and what it meant for them.

  Ten minutes after Cameron had disappeared down the run, Whitney went after him, and nothing Osborne had tried to tell her did any good.

  “He could have run into trouble, got tangled up in the wires,” she’d argued in near hysterics.