Hunting Season

by P. T. Deutermann

  The car was perched on the edge of a monstrous hole, which was already filled to the brim with shimmering black water as the tunnel system refilled. There was nothing holding the car back from ripping over into it;

  only the turbulence around the siphon drain had probably kept it from going over in the first place.

  She exhaled nervously and went back into the trunk, where she retrieved a soaking-wet blanket, a second flashlight, the first-aid kit, and a plastic bag of green ChemLights. She gathered up her treasures in the blanket and followed the bright white beam of the light back to the ladder.

  She would climb up to the ledge, which would keep her out of the rising water. If that ledge ran all the way back to the intersection with the main tunnel, she could then follow that back to the point where her car had crashed through the street. Assuming the ledge was high enough for her to get back into the main tunnel.

  But first she would have to rest. Her legs barely supported her, and her upper body was beginning to tremble. She knew she was close to exhaustion, as much because other immersion in the cold water as from the fear, and she wasn’t sure she could make the climb back up to the ledge. But even wet, that blanket would be warmer than nothing. She could use the ChemLights to provide ambient light and save the flashlight batteries for later. The main thing was that she could see. That made up for damn near everything. The water rising to her shaking knees reminded her that she need to get a move on. She walked over to the ladder rungs and began the long climb up.

  Browne McGarand pulled his truck through the barrels just after sundown.

  He was still furious that Jared had gone chasing skirt when they were so close to finishing the hydrogen project. The intruder was an unwanted complication, but Browne wasn’t willing to forgo another day.

  There was pressure in the truck tank now, which meant he was getting

  close. The target wasn’t going anywhere, but if someone was snooping around, his setup here on the arsenal might be in jeopardy. He drove up the entrance road toward the main gates, slowed when he got there, turned off his headlights, and then turned onto the fire-access road as usual. And then he stopped. Something about the main gates was different.

  He put the truck into reverse, backed up in the direction of the gates, stopped, set the hand brake, and got out. He left it in reverse so that the glow of the taillights illuminated the guard shed and the rolling chain-link gates. They were closed and locked as usual. No, not locked. That was it.

  The padlock and its chain were hanging on the center post of the gates.

  That’s what had caught his eye.

  Now what the hell? Were those security twerps in there? At night? He stared at the padlock. Then he went up and tested the gates, which, in fact, rolled back when he tugged on them. He walked over to his truck, shut it completely down, and listened for the sound of their truck, which he could usually hear when it was in the industrial area. There was nothing but the sounds of occasional traffic out on Route 11. Had they come in and then left, leaving the place unlocked? Not likely—he had never seen them do that.

  The intruder? He got his flashlight and examined the padlock, but there were no signs of damage. Whoever had opened it had known the combination, and that had to mean the security people. Logically, then, they were in there. He looked down the main road inside the arsenal. It led through dense trees for about two miles before getting to the industrial area. The road curved as soon as it got into the trees, so there was no way to see headlights. For that matter, they might be on their way back to the front gate right now, having gotten a late start on their tour, or had trouble with their truck. He decided to go in this way and save himself a long walk up the rail line. He really wished Jared was here.

  He went back to his truck, got the food for the girl and his night pack, and brought the stuff through the main gate, where he stashed it out of sight. Then he drove his pickup as quietly as he could back down the access road to the main gate, through the barrels, and out onto Route 11.

  He drove a mile south on Route 11 to a Waffle House, where he parked his pickup at the far end of the diner’s parking lot. Waffle Houses were open twenty-four hours a day, so there were always vehicles in the lot.

  Then he walked back along Route 11 to the arsenal, waited for all

  traffic to disappear from sight, and turned back up the main access road. If anyone was in there, listening, and they’d heard his truck, they should now think he had come up to the gates and then gone away.

  He walked to the gate and let himself through, rolling the gates shut again as quietly as he could. He hefted his pack and started walking down the side of the main road, stopping every few minutes to listen for any signs of the security truck. He still couldn’t believe they were in here at night, but he would have to be careful, especially if they suspected intrusion and were waiting to see if anyone showed up. He thought about going back home, but that would mean admitting Jared had been right about waiting awhile to let the place cool off. He was damned if he was going to wait. He’d do a thorough look around the main street of the industrial area and then—he stopped dead.

  Jared had left a trap.

  Damnation, he thought. Those fools might have driven their little pickup truck over that steel plate and gone down into the Ditch. Great God, he thought, now that would be a real complication. They’d made their required weekend tour the previous weekend, so they should not have been here yesterday. But there was no getting around that padlock. And that would certainly account for their still being here, dead or injured in their little pickup truck at the deep end of the siphon chamber. He would have to check it out as soon as he went in, and then he might have to move the whole operation the hell out of here, like tonight. If the security patrol failed to report in, there would be a mob of cops and maybe even federal people out here pretty quick. Or would they? It was early Saturday night. He might have twenty-four, thirty-six hours. Appalled, he hurried down the dark road.

  Kreiss listened to the vehicle noise on the access road and rechecked his position. There was a small concrete switch house just inside the interior rail-line gate, and he had set up shop behind it. The night was dark and clear, with decent ambient starlight. He planned to take the guy down right after he came through the interior rail gates, probably while he was occupied with looking at the electric-eye counter. When the vehicle noises subsided, he became still and listened hard. The sounds had stopped short of where those two had been parking their truck before.

  Now what the hell were they—no, not they anymore—what was he doing?

  He waited for fifteen minutes. He was dressed out in the same crawl

  suit rig he’d used on his first reconnaissance of this place. He’d thought about bringing Jared’s .45, then decided against it. Guns were just extra weight, and he shouldn’t need any firearms once he took this guy down, especially since he knew there would be only one of them this time. If Jared did show up, Kreiss thought with a grim smile, it would definitely be time to get the hell out of here. He closed his eyes to concentrate on what he was hearing. There were the usual night sounds coming from the forest outside the arsenal fence, but no more manmade sounds. Was this guy taking extra precautions because of the counter hits? Or had he discovered Jared? Kreiss wanted to go up the rail line into the industrial area. He decided instead to wait some more, and he concentrated on the rail line outside the gates, from which direction he expected the man to come.

  Assuming he hadn’t changed his mind and driven away.

  Janet crawled to the intersection of the main tunnel and the siphon chamber by the faint green light of a ChemLight stick, only to discover that the ledge was at least ten feet below the lip of the main tunnel. There were no ladders visible, nor any other apparent way to climb up to the main tunnel. She sighed out loud and lay down on the ledge, wrapping the soggy blanket around her. Below, the water, invisible several feet down, was rising again. She hoped it stayed down there.

  After what seemed t
o her like a few minutes, she looked at her watch and found it was almost 7:00 P.M. Her eyes opened wide—she must have slept for almost two hours. She shivered at the thought: What if she’d rolled off the ledge? The trusty ChemLight was still going, so she held it out over the siphon chamber, and gasped. There was the water, right there, perhaps two inches below the ledge. The surface was smooth, but the great cold bulk of it felt as if it were compressing the air around her.

  She switched on the flashlight and pointed it to the left. The water level was almost up to the top of the siphon chamber, which should mean it would not rise all the way up to the ledge. Should mean.

  She switched off the flashlight, shed the blanket, and got to her hands and knees. Holding the ChemLight in one hand, she crawled along the ledge, past the intersection with the tunnel up above, looking for any way to get up there. Fifty feet beyond the tunnel intersection, she found a single vertical pipe anchored to the concrete wall. She held up the ChemLight to try to see where it went, but it simply disappeared into the darkness above. She grabbed it. It was maybe two, three inches in diameter and seemed pretty solid. Could she shinny up this thing? To go where?

  It wasn’t anywhere near the main tunnel.

  Just then came the deep rumbling sound she’d heard before as the siphon pressures equalized and the chamber began to drain. She breathed deeply in relief, knowing that the water was going down now. The rumbling grew louder and louder, and the air pressure changed in the chamber, making her ears pop a little. She looked at the pipe again, and had an idea.

  Browne stepped into a clump of trees when he got to the edge of the industrial area. The main road from the front entrance went straight down the hill into the main street of the building complex, but there was an open space of perhaps three hundred yards between the tree line and the buildings. He wanted to wait and watch before crossing that space.

  The buildings were slightly downslope from his position. Their normal way in, along the rail line, came from his left front as he looked down on the complex. The majority of the buildings fell away on a broad hillside that ended up in the tree line above the creek, almost half a mile away.

  All those white concrete buildings looked like a ghost town in the starlight, and, of course, that’s what it was now, ever since the government had shut it down with no warning. Were those security boys waiting down there, parked in a dark alley? Or had they driven into Jared’s trap and were now dead or injured down in the Ditch? He kicked himself mentally for not anticipating that possibility; he should have told Jared to set up a different trap. He well remembered the Ditch. Each of the eight main chemical-processing buildings had a twenty-four-inch emergency drain main leading from the batch machinery to the Ditch, which in reality wasn’t a ditch at all, but an enormous concrete dump channel built under the main chemical complex. He remembered the night he had ordered six thousand gallons of nitro-toluene dumped into the Ditch after the night run manager lost temperature control of the TNT process. That was back before the days of all this environmental sensitivity, when the nation’s armaments took clear priority over its air and water quality. The Ditch had been designed to flush any spills into a second tunnel, designed as a siphon chamber, which led to a natural cavern under the hillside. The cavern’s depth was shown as being over five hundred feet on the plant’s schematics, so where the spill ultimately went was anyone’s guess. It went “away,” as one of the company’s managers had told him when he first started working there.

  He concentrated on listening. He closed his eyes and let the night sounds sweep over him, searching for any noises that didn’t belong. If

  those security people had gone into the Ditch, he had, at best, thirty-six hours. Was that enough time to finish pressurizing the truck? If he worked straight through Sunday night, it might be enough. Then he’d drive the truck out those front gates, take it to Jared’s place. Then to the target. At least that part of the operation was already planned out.

  And what about that girl? Leave her? Take her? He hadn’t thought that one through well. She was insurance, but against what? A getaway hostage after he completed the attack? He had a vague plan of taking her to the target with him in the truck. If things went wrong, he would have something to bargain with. At least up to the point where the bomb went off.

  After that, all those very special agents would probably be in something less than a negotiating mood. The ones who were still alive, he thought, a savage grimace covering his face. He’d decide about the girl when the bomb was finished. And when he saw what, if anything, was down in the Ditch. He listened some more.

  After half an hour, Kreiss decided to move up into the industrial area.

  Either the guy wasn’t coming after all or he was coming in a different way.

  It had sounded as if that vehicle had stopped closer to the main gates.

  They had been operating on the arsenal for some time; it was conceivable they had cracked the front gates. He would move as quickly as he could up to the main complex of buildings, beyond the place where the pipe trap had been set, and climb a building. That would give him a vantage point from which to listen. This time he would stay off the main street and move through the alley behind the largest buildings. He checked his packs and then moved out, walking quietly but quickly up the rail line, past the first switch points, toward the cluster of the biggest buildings.

  When he got into the alley behind the first building, he stopped to listen.

  There was some creaking and cracking going on as the buildings and the nests of pipes above the street contracted in the cool night air. The by-now-familiar chemical smell rose up from between his feet. He flattened himself against the still-warm concrete side of the building and crept around to the front corner to take a look-and-listen into the main street. He tried to remember where the main road from the front gates entered the complex, but then he realized he didn’t know. He did remember a building that looked like it was more administrative than industrial.

  Probably the front road led to that building first. The main street appeared to be empty. It was much darker between the buildings, and he wished he had his cone set up. He could barely make out the big steel

  plates interspersed at regular intervals along the dusty white concrete surface of the street. Except—were his eyes playing tricks on him? Down toward the power plant, about a third of the way up the hill in his direction, it looked like there was a massive hole in the street. He remembered Jared’s description of the trap: second plate up from the power plant. Step on it and fall twenty feet into some ditch. Break your legs. Sweet people.

  Who are holding Lynn. Well, he was holding one of them now, wasn’t he, in a manner of speaking?

  He slipped back away from the corner and found the ladder to the roof.

  He stopped to listen again, then climbed swiftly to the top of the building.

  This roof was flat and covered in graveled asphalt. There were steel ventilator cowlings spaced randomly around the top, with guy wires anchored into the asphalt. He made his way through the maze of guy wires to the front of the building, rigged the cone, and conducted a quick acoustic sweep of the main street. There was a single, very faint sound coming from the direction of the opened plate in the street, some hundred yards away. He concentrated but could not identify it. Whatever it was, it was steady and not rhythmic. He repositioned the cone, but he still could not identify the noise. He sat back, then trained the cone in the opposite direction, hoping to catch the second man coming up from the rail line. But there was nothing. He swung the cone back toward the hole in the street. The noise was still there. What the hell was that? If it’s not a human walking up the street, he told himself, disregard it and focus on finding bad guy number two. And Lynn. He dismantled the cone and put the apparatus back into his pack.

  Janet stood at the bottom of the siphon chamber, listening to the water drip off the concrete walls, while she worked the section of pipe back and forth in a slow, tedious arc. She had waited for
the water to drain out before going down the ladder and then coming all the way back to the pipe, which terminated, as she had hoped, on the bottom of the chamber.

  Some kind of instrument conduit, she assumed. She’d torn the bottom of it loose from its rusted bracket and was now attempting to break off a section by causing metal fatigue. It appeared to be working. Each arc was getting a little bigger. She was working by the light of her trusty ChemLight, which was plenty bright down here in the absolute darkness of the tunnels. She actually felt as if she knew her way around the siphon chamber now, and the cold, clammy air swirling around her bare legs felt almost normal. Better air than water, she realized.

  The Sig was still hanging in her shoulder rig, and she giggled when she thought what she must look like, half-naked, with that big automatic under her arm. Despite its awkwardness, she was glad she still had it. Because if this worked, and if she got out of here, there was no telling what or who was up there in the ammunition plant complex.

  She felt water around her ankles as the siphon chamber began to fill again, and she realized she did not have all night. She pushed harder on the pipe, putting her legs into it now, and felt it giving way somewhere up there in the darkness. Then suddenly, the weight of it was in her hands and she jumped back as she lost control of it. The pipe clattered to the floor of the chamber with a huge ringing noise of steel on concrete, barely missing her feet. She picked one end up and found she was able to move it. She put the end down and took a rough measurement. About twenty feet. Good. It had broken off about where she had intended it to. Now, she had to get it to the ladder, haul it up to the ledge, and then see if she could position it somehow on the ledge and shinny up the damn thing to the main tunnel. The trick was going to be locking the bottom end into something long enough for her to make the climb. She began dragging the pipe down the siphon chamber toward the ladder rungs.