by Chuck Logan
“One phone call,” Broker said, barely recognizing his own voice.
“Yeah,” Holly said. “Question is, how big is his comfort zone? How far upwind is he going to travel before he punches in the numbers?”
“We’ll…just…take it apart,” the manager said carefully. “We’ll disconnect the wires.”
“That call is beyond my training,” Holly said. “And we can’t wait for the bomb squad.”
“This can’t happen.” Slowly the manager lowered himself to the ground as his knees failed. He put his hands in his lap, swallowed, and recited, “An attack on the cooling pool is not a credible event.”
Broker and Holly turned their backs on the confused manager. “So let’s move this thing,” Broker said.
“What if it’s booby-trapped to blow if it’s tampered with?” Holly gritted his teeth.
“We got no choice,” Broker said.
“Agreed. Clear everybody out,” Holly said.
Then the siren started. The high-pitched wail galvanized the numb gawkers still standing around the machine. Instinctively, they started to move away.
“Everybody get back,” Fuller yelled. His knees had begun to shake and he started to fade away. The plant manger was crawling on all fours. One of the guards helped him to his feet and he joined the exodus, breaking into a jerky run. All over the plant grounds people were starting to walk rapidly toward the gate. The beginnings of an orderly evacuation.
A drill.
Then one of them started to run.
And they all began to run.
“IT’S A BOMB! IT’S A BOMB!” the running workers carried the cry into the parking lot.
Broker took a breath. The air had turned to mush; the old hot and cold fight-or-flight willies ran up and down his spine. It was a strange moment. Broker, Holly, and Yeager were caught up in the momentum and they, too, stepped back, as if swept up in a powerful undertow that sucked them toward the warmth and comfort of the other fleeing bodies.
Hundreds of people in motion now. They watched a guard drop his rifle and run. Not a good omen.
Broker located Fuller a hundred yards away at the edge of the fenced area. Fuller had his hand to his forehead, stooped over like he had a lot of weight on his back. He was talking to three, four of his crew, men in hard hats. They were straining in the bad body language of men caught in a riptide.
Further out, it looked like a big neon sign had crashed down on the parking lot. Horns blared and brake lights sputtered in a snarl of traffic, a building wail of approaching sirens and flashers added to the melee, coming off the highway.
“Yeager, get Fuller over here. We need some of his crew to help us. Gotta rig some chains, fire up those machines, something.” Broker flung his arm at the line of tractors and bulldozers.
Holly was dancing back and forth, looking over the area. “Where do we put it?”
“We need Fuller,” Broker yelled.
So they watched as Yeager sprinted across the wide lot and started an animated discussion with Fuller and his men. After precious seconds of arm waving, Fuller and the other men retreated. One man joined Yeager in a dash back toward the machine. They made a lonely sight, just the two of them doubling back while hundreds ran the other way.
“Jesus,” Holly said when he saw their grim faces as they approached. “Hope we don’t look that bad.”
“Not us,” Broker said. He skipped trying to grin. His lips were shaking too bad.
“What exactly is it you want to do?” the big guy with Yeager shouted over the bedlam of honking horns and the siren. A long blond ponytail stuck out the back of his hard hat. He had fatalistic Nordic blue eyes, a square jaw, and the stubble of yellow beard.
“The counterweight and wheels are full of explosives. It’s designed to blow out the back,” Broker yelled. “We gotta redirect the blast away from the pool and the reactors. Drag the fucker away.”
Panting, eyes wide, gushing sweat, the chunky hard hat wore dirty Levis, and a torn T-shirt pushed out in a beer belly; his forearms were the size of Broker’s thighs. A faded Marine Corps insignia was tattooed on the left one. Hadda be Norwegian, Broker thought. The guy fixed his eyes on the parked machines, pointed to one. “That D-8 dozer should do ’er,” he said in a trembling voice.
“Can we drag it to the river?” Holly asked.
“Too much in the way. How about the ditch by the fence, behind that pile of dirt? Dump it in.” The hard hat pointed again, this time at the earth bulwark that had been started about a hundred yards away.
“That’s it. Let’s go,” Broker yelled.
Without pause, the hard hat ran toward the huge bulldozer. Broker, Yeager, and Holly chased after him. The guy jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “The Deere 644 goes around fifteen ton. This big Cat dozer here goes around forty. Piece of cake.”
He vaulted up into the seat and in a moment the dozer belched black smoke and its wide treads executed a mechanical pirouette, facing it in the direction of the Deere. He motioned Holly and Broker out of the way. Yeager ran in front of the dozer, stabbing his finger at something, then making a looping gesture. The driver vigorously nodded his head.
Broker and Holly joined Yeager, who yelled, “I spent some time around this shit. Best thing is to use the choker cable on the front.” He pointed to a reel of steel cable with a pin clasp on the end. They danced aside while the driver lined up his dozer in front of the Deere, blade to bucket.
Broker heard a second siren. A Red Wing police cruiser skidded through the gate, then fishtailed, knocking down a section of fence. The cruiser slid to a stop, and a young copper jumped out, eyes like shiny ball bearings staring out of his haunted face.
He knew.
Without a word, he jumped forward to help Broker and Yeager thread the thick cable around the bucket arm of the 644. Yeager showed them how to set the pin. Staining shoulder to shoulder they wrestled the cable. Close in. Faces in hell—a local cop, Yeager, the guy with the beer gut and the big arms and the faded Corps tat. He hadn’t bothered to give a name. He just started driving the dozer.
Where the hell was Holly? Then Broker spotted him running back from the dirt pile.
The driver pulled back on his controls, stood up in his seat, and inspected the cable rigged to the Deere bucket. He nodded his approval, sat back down, reeled in his cable, and then raised the blade on the dozer. Everyone on the ground stepped back as the driver hoisted the bucket until the cable was taut. Hydraulics screamed, black smoke spewed, and he raised the blade some more until the front wheels of the Deere 644 came off the ground.
They all braced. Nothing happened.
Holly reappeared, climbed up, and had a shouted back-and-forth with the driver. Then he leaped down, briefly took Yeager aside, and then came up to Broker and the cop.
“Me and the driver got it. Everybody else get outta here,” Holly ordered as he reached in his jeans pocket.
Broker stared at him. “What do you mean, out of here? Where we gonna go? What the fuck is danger-close on a nuclear meltdown?”
Holly pulled a bundle of tiny chain from his pocket, clapped it in Broker’s hand. Closed his hand over it.
“What this?” Broker said.
“Nina’s dog tags. Hang on to them.”
Broker stared at the silver wafer of metal on the beaded chain, shook his head.
Holly narrowed his pale eyes to slits in a mask. Doing one of those fucking warrior-statue numbers. “Listen, asshole,” he yelled. “Kit may be down to one parent. I ain’t gonna leave her with none. Now move out.” A plume of dark smoke framed Holly as the bulldozer trundled on, dragging the dangling loader on its back wheels toward the ditch.
Broker stuck the tag and chain in his pocket. “You need a ground guide,” he shouted.
“I’m guide,” Holly shouted back. He motioned, signaling to someone. Stabbing his finger.
Broker moved to protest, then the back of his head exploded—star-bursts fading to black. Going down, he tried to call
their names: Nina, Kit. But no sound came.
Chapter Forty-five
First Dale took the 500 mg of Prussian blue. Then he took the potassium iodide. Just in case the wind changed on him. But he didn’t think it would, because it had been holding steady all day.
He was driving due west on a back-roads two-lane blacktop, holding a steady hundred yards behind George’s Lexus. The surrounding farmland was more populated than he was used to back home. Holstein cattle. Dairy farms. Big barns with Dutch gambrel roofs. It was hard to see very far in this rolling landscape, the way everything was close in. He’d lost the sky.
He crossed I-35, the main north-south corridor in lower Minnesota, and continued driving west on the solitary road. Almost half an hour since they left. How much longer? He picked up his cell, tapped in George’s number, connected, and said, “Hey, George, let’s flip the switch.”
“A little more. When we turn south on 169,” George said.
Dale put the phone down, sucked his teeth, looked around briefly, then concentrated on the road ahead. The way the land was, they’d never see it go off. Might not even hear it. But it should rattle the windows a little. He turned and looked back at the drawn curtain.
And then…
Nina, drenched in sweat, was thankful for sick favors. Dale’s excitement had distracted him from sticking her with the ketamine again. She had a lucid window. She listened to the weather report on the radio updating the day’s forecast: Current conditions, sunny; 85 degrees Fahrenheit; dew point 64 degrees Fahrenheit; humidity 49 percent, visibility unlimited; pressure 30.00 inches and steady…
Wind from the north northwest at 9 mph.
So he must be driving west, into the wind, just like he’d told her. How much room did they want between themselves and the…Her mind balked at the image of a nuclear plant erupting in a radioactive fire.
Assume the worst. He’ll blow the plant. Unless I can get off this bed…
And do my job.
She needed to get at least one hand free. She needed him within striking distance of that hand.
The last self-defense course Nina had taken was conducted by an affable Green Beret at Fort Bragg. He began his class with an observation from the current fad of no-holds-barred Ultimate Fighting. He pointed out how there were only two rules in Ultimate Fighting matches: no eye-gouging and no blows to the throat.
In his first class, therefore, he taught Nina how to gouge out an opponent’s eyeball. She lay on her back, blindfolded. An instructor straddled her. He wore heavy safety glasses and he held two oranges tight against the goggles, to simulate eyes.
Nina’s job was to struggle up, find his head, locate the eyes, and drive her thumb through the orange peel, into the pulp and dig it out. The minute her thumb touched the orange the instructor started screaming and thrashing wildly. The idea was to overcome the normal human resistance to making contact with the visceral fluids and matter of the eyeball. Once you got past the aversion…the eye socket being a fertile nest of nerve endings, not only blindness but unconsciousness was a certain result.
She pictured Dale’s flat blues eyes as targets.
No problem.
Time to get to work. She visualized the muscles of her arm and shoulder. Angles, leverage, the structure of the bed. Okay. This time for real. Painfully, she rotated her right hand counterclockwise in the tightly wrapped cords, encountered the sharp edges of the crimped hooks, and wrenched past them, ripping her flesh to the bone.
Now her palm had turned 180 degrees, so it lay flat along the sideboard. She raised her shoulder, thrust down, and hooked her fingers on the bottom of the board.
Okay.
She had to perform two separate operations. The first was gymnastic, a matter of timing. Slowly, she diagramed the physics involved. She’d brace her left hand and both feet on the sideboards, push down and vault her body up, taking pressure off the mattress and springs. During the split second her weight was in the air she would have to jerk upward with her right hand, dislodging the slotted sideboard as she heaved her head back against the headboard. She had been practicing this move and had felt the sideboard almost come free.
The test would be the second operation, which involved sheer muscle strength. When one end of the board was free, the bottom end would still be anchored in the footboard. She had to drag her right hand, which would still be tightly lashed, along and then off the free end of the detached board. Which meant exerting tremendous pressure to the side and to the rear. Again, she visualized the muscles of her right arm: triceps, the teres major, teres minor, rear delt. They were small muscles and were not structurally suited to perform this unusual movement.
Lubrication would not be a problem. In the process of rotating her wrist against the cord hooks, she had ripped her wrist to shreds. Her right hand was now bleeding freely.
On top of everything else, she had to do it quietly. She couldn’t alert Dale before her right hand was free.
Nina blinked sweat from her eyes. Took a deep breath.
Now she focused back several years, on the Russian trainer she’d met in Kosovo. He’d been on loan from the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces. He promoted a concept called “hyper-irradiation,” which argued that rigidly flexing all the muscle groups of the body simultaneously was a force multiplier.
She knew her muscles were designed with protective mechanisms—spindle cells and Golgi tendon organs. Their purpose was to prevent damage due to overload by stopping function. Getting free would involve tearing her right rotor cuff to pieces. It would also involve overriding the protective mechanisms, the lactic acid buildup, going past the breaking point.
There was fear, which she was riding like a wave.
And then there was pain.
Which was the shark inside the wave ready to bite.
Go.
Nina poised on the bed, felt her fingers, slippery with blood, hook firmly on the sideboard. She pressed down with her feet and her left hand, took a deep breath, and stopped thinking. Her body knew.
She thrust up her torso and yanked up with her right hand.
Yes.
As the slots came free she extended her right arm to keep the board from tangling in the headboard. The bed slewed to the side as the sideboard thumped on the carpet.
Did he hear? No, the radio covered it.
Now let’s see if that Russian knew what the hell he was talking about.
She flexed both feet and her left hand, painfully orienting her soles and her palm against the tight cords. When she had a solid platform, she pressed down on the sideboards. Working up from this tripod, she contracted everything she had: legs and upper body fusing into core abs and glutes. She had to transform the tension into a mighty fulcrum to send more power into the rigid lever of her right arm.
Her breath rasped, panting now. She felt sweat and then veins pop up on her screaming right arm as she strained it back, back. Inch by inch the bloody bungee cord started to slide rearward, toward the open slotted end of the sideboard.
Her strength flashed, so much fire into smoke. All mind now. She visualized every man who ever told her all the things she couldn’t do. And some women, too. Every face. Every sneer. Every dirty joke.
She got two more bloody inches from the vivid memory of Johnny Majeski, who wrestled her out of her virginity when she was sixteen in the backseat of a perfectly restored ’49 Mercury. And then blamed her because it went too fast.
Good memories, too. Dad. For all the hours in the pool and on the track; for teaching her to throw and jump and climb. For giving her a dollhouse and a chin-up bar.
She had two more inches to go.
Willpower gone. Muscles frozen, past spasm into total failure.
C’mon. Must be a few more muscles to call up in this act of self-destruction. She had gone past aching pain to piercing pain to red-hot burning pain to nothing.
All gone.
Must be something, somewhere. Trembling. Arched up. Making the tripod. Squirting swea
t. Then in one last surge…
Had Kit by C-section. Broker’s mom said I’d missed life’s main rite of pain. Tap into it now. Bear down. Push.
Her whole right arm began to tremble violently, spasm, overload, maybe torn ligaments.
But the hand was free.
Tears smeared her face, mucus, spittle. Blinking through the blur, gasping, hyperventilating…then…holy shit! She’d been so distracted by her ordeal that she didn’t realize the camper had stopped moving. Christ, not yet. But she heard their voices. Heard the door opening.
No, please…
Immediately, she hauled her right arm in tight, tested her fingers. Christ, her shoulder was burning, feeling loose and disconnected.
The curtain swept aside; Dale swiveled his seat and stared at her. “Aw, jeez, George, lookit this. She broke the bed.”
“First things first. Let me show you something,” George said as he glanced at her, unconcerned. Nina watched him raise the satellite phone in his left hand. He held a clear plastic cup in his right hand that was half-full of water. He placed the cup carefully on the dashboard and motioned for Dale to turn around. “Now watch the water in that cup,” George said. “When I set it off we should see the water level jump, huh?”
“Cool,” Dale said, spinning to the front. George eased behind the driver’s seat, extending his left arm over Dale’s shoulder so the phone was to the left of Dale’s head. Nina, way past horror, watched George’s right hand slip into the pocket of his shorts and remove a small automatic pistol. It looked like a .32-caliber. A hideout gun. He kept the pistol low against his right thigh. “Here we go,” George said as he started thumbing in the numbers.
No, goddammit. No. Nina lurched up and tried to reach for them with her right hand but she was tethered by her left hand. She flung her hand to the left and clawed at the bungee, broke her fingernails.