Charon's landing m-2

by Jack Du Brul

  “Shut the program down! Now!”

  “I can’t,” Mossey stammered, saliva and blood dripping from his mouth onto the computer station. “I was locked out as soon as Kerikov triggered the nitrogen.”

  Mercer snicked back the hammer of the pistol, the small click sounding very final in the quiet confines of the room. “That’s too bad. You’ve had the program for a couple of months. I’d thought you’d have broken into it and set up a back door. Last mistake you ever made, pal.”

  He was willing to let the bluff go for a few seconds before knocking Mossey unconscious, but it wasn’t necessary. Mossey folded instantly. “Wait, please. God, don’t kill me. There is a back door. I put it in soon after Kerikov hired me to reinstate his old program.”

  “Use it now, you little ferret, and stop the pumps from coming on-line or, so help me Christ, I’ll pull the trigger and use your brains as finger paint.” Mercer let Mossey back up but kept the pistol screwed into his ear. The younger man started working on the terminal, his fingers blurring across the keys.

  Aggie stood in awe at the back of the room, fascinated by the absolute control Mercer showed of both the situation and Ted Mossey. It wasn’t the gun that gave Mercer power, it was the man himself. His conviction and his unwavering belief in himself held her rapt. As unpredictable and wild as his actions had seemed to her, once the resolution became clear, his was the only logical course. Standing as he was, grim-faced and tensed, Mercer was the most desirable man Aggie had ever seen. The sight of him gave her a delicious thrill.

  “I’m in,” Mossey said at last. “Just a minute more.”

  “I blow your skull apart in thirty seconds.” No one, not even Mercer, knew if he was still bluffing or not.

  Andy Lindstrom had followed Mercer and Aggie to the computer room and, after watching the drama unfold for a moment, crossed to a terminal next to Mossey, the computer screen before him indicating pump and pipeline status. Though the program had been installed by a mole at the height of the Cold War, only now was it active. All ten pumps had spooled up to full power, building a tremendous back pressure against the solidified oil plugs. Mercer had been too late to stop that from happening, but pipe integrity was still holding. If they could shut down the pumps in time, the line wouldn’t blow apart as Kerikov had planned.

  “Internal pressure?” Mercer demanded without taking his eyes off Mossey.

  “Twelve hundred pounds per square inch within the pipe casing at nearly every sensor,” Lindstrom cried. “We’re over the maximum rating. The whole thing’s going to let go at any second. Pumps are still in operation. This isn’t going to work.”

  “Someone already told me that today.” Mercer stole a glance at Aggie, who smiled at him in response.

  Mossey pushed himself from his keyboard computer, his slight frame spent. “That’s the most I can do.”

  “Status?” Mercer barked.

  “Twelve hundred twenty-five psi. It’s thing is going to burst.” Lindstrom screamed. “Massive pressure drop at one of the sensors, pipe blowout. Pumps are still… Wait, pumps are off-line. They’ve stopped.” Lindstrom’s voice trailed off as he watched fearfully. The internal pressure sensors placed within the line continued to climb higher and higher, now 15 percent beyond their rated maximum tolerance. Finally he spoke again, filling the thick silence, excitement crowding his words together. “Pressure going down across the board, steady drop. My baby held together. Oh, thank you, God, and thank the union welders for making this bitch stronger than we ever thought.”

  Mercer looked over at him in relief, his face and body showing the extent of the battering he’d been through since last night. “What about the steel mills that rolled the pipe sections?”

  “Fuck ’em, it was a Japanese firm.” Lindstrom laughed, emotion bubbling over. While still facing a major disaster — there were three huge leaks belching out thousands of barrels of oil — the extent had just been reduced to manageable levels. With Mossey as a witness, Alyeska would be found blameless for the entire affair.

  “Human error,” Mercer said, as if reading Andy’s mind. “Not the negligent kind, but the type found when people do the wrong thing for the wrong reason.”

  “How’d you know about Mossey?”

  “I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Right now I need a drink, a hot shower, and a bed — in whatever order they come.”

  “Drink first.” Andy grinned. “That I have in my office. But no matter what you did here today, I’m not sharing my bed with you.”

  Mercer glanced at Aggie and smiled at the shy look on her face. Andy followed his gaze, forcing Mercer to make introductions. “Andy Lindstrom, this is Aggie Johnston, Max Johnston’s daughter.”

  “I know your father.” Lindstrom shook her hand as he led Aggie and Mercer back to his office. “Listen, I don’t have time for that drink. I’ve got to get crews to the damaged sections of the line and start on the repairs. I can tell from the sensor panel where PEAL placed their nitrogen. There are miles of open pipe between the plugs, so we’re going to lose a shitload of oil. The leak on the Tanana Bridge is spilling something like five thousand gallons an hour. Every minute we wait is going to make this more of a mess than it already is.”

  Lindstrom paused, then asked, “Listen, Mercer, can you stick around for a while? I need to get details of what happened at Pump Station 5. We still haven’t managed to get a team up there. The fire at the depot in Fairbanks is still raging out of control, tying up a lot of my people.”

  “Eddie didn’t make it?” Mercer was stunned. He thought rescue crews would have found the fearless chopper pilot before his injuries claimed him.

  “Eddie’s fine. He’s in a hospital in Fairbanks right now, but he’s been sedated since his arrival. An army chopper picked him up last night, but they didn’t return to the pump station. They’re still ferrying the injured out of Fairbanks.”

  Somehow, knowing Eddie Rice had survived meant more to Mercer than preventing Kerikov from destroying the pipeline. But that was how he thought; human life always took precedent over all other concerns. In mine rescue work, he had spent millions to save one lowly worker, and to him it was a bargain. And whether it was money he was gambling or the environmental fate of an entire region, his decision was always the same. Life, anyone’s life, came first. Perhaps it was a superior attitude to take considering the new-world thinking, but it was the way he was.

  “Andy, seriously, there’s nothing I can give you about your pump station. I never got within a hundred yards of the pump house before I was captured.” Mercer was almost asleep on his feet. “I’ll tell you everything I can tomorrow, but for now, I’m worthless.”

  Lindstrom wasn’t even listening. He was already engaged in a discussion with an engineer, the two of them arguing about materials allocation for repairs. Mercer turned away, guiding Aggie into Lindstrom’s office and closing the door quietly behind them. The soft click of the door closing became a punctuation mark to what they had been through, an end to what had happened before and a beginning to what would now come between them. They both felt it, glancing at each other with both longing and trepidation, as if the adventures they’d shared had been a necessary distraction from what they now faced.

  The air sizzled.

  “Drink?” Mercer twisted himself away from her eyes, reaching into Lindstrom’s desk for the bottle he knew would be there.

  “Yes, please,” Aggie said, acquiescing to Mercer’s desire to sidestep their emotions.

  He poured Scotch into two paper cups, slopping each one nearly half full. Of all the morning drinks he’d had in his life, and there had been quite a few, Mercer believed that he and Aggie had actually done enough to warrant this one. He finished his in a heavy swallow, pouring another by the time Aggie had taken a first tentative sip. She found a pack of cigarettes on Andy’s desk and smoked one of them almost as fast as Mercer drank.

  “Is it over?” she asked.

  “You know, I think it really is.” The
y were standing close together, the top of her head well above his shoulder, her face tilted to his, her lips full and inviting. There was an unmistakable gleam behind her emerald eyes.

  As he stooped to kiss her, the door to Andy’s office flew open, the matronly receptionist from the front office almost falling to the floor in her rush. She was about to speak, but when she saw that Andy wasn’t there, her face collapsed. Mercer realized she was really in distress, far more than the others dealing with the emergency.

  Not recalling her name, he asked her if anything was wrong, and in a rush it came pouring from her so fast there was hardly a pause between words.

  “There was a shooting at the main gate. Ralph, the nice older guard is dead, another person, I don’t know who, is lying in the street, blood all around his body. A man attacked them, shot up the booth with some sort of machine gun and stole one of the company trucks. Oh, God, poor old Ralph, he was just a nice man.”

  She fell into a chair, overcome by everything that had happened, her doughy body pooling around the wooden chair, her rounded cheeks stained with fresh tears. Mercer shot a look at Aggie, who immediately understood that he wanted her to look after the receptionist, and then he was gone again, running out of the building, shouldering aside those already in a scurry over the crisis.

  The air was bitter cold under a pewter sky as he raced toward his rented Blazer still sitting in the Op-center parking lot. Despite everything he had been through since the previous afternoon, he’d managed to keep his keys, transferring them to the deep pocket of the coveralls when he’d donned the garment in the escape pod. The engine roared with the first crank, and a second later the truck slashed through the terminal’s gates, threading nimbly around the people clustered near their fallen coworkers. As he sped from the facility, he hoped one of them had had enough sense to alert the authorities in Valdez.

  The pistol he’d taken from Kerikov was lodged behind his back. He pulled it out and set it on the plastic console between the two front seats. He drove furiously, the heavy-duty tires screaming as he took corners fifteen or twenty miles faster than posted. He estimated that ten minutes had elapsed since the attack, factoring in the distance between the main entrance and the Op-center and the time it took witnesses to get themselves in motion after the initial assault.

  If he had had his Jaguar, he could have made up that time effortlessly, but the Blazer was built for rugged off-road use, not high-speed pursuit.

  He didn’t waste more than a second realizing who it was he was pursuing. With Kerikov dead in the harbor, only Abu Alam remained unaccounted for. It made sense that after triggering the explosives aboard the Hope, Alam would leave Prince William Sound as fast as possible. Because of the heavy traffic around the town caused by emergency vehicles headed toward the harbor, there would be no way for him to get to the airport. His only other option was the Richardson Highway and Anchorage a couple hundred miles north. Once there, he would be lost forever.

  The road uncoiled before the Blazer, the powerful Chevy engine roaring under the broad hood, the wheels reacting eagerly to Mercer’s guidance. As he drove, he shoved aside his exhaustion, knowing that he couldn’t push himself much farther or his body would simply fail to respond. This whole affair had all started here for him, at a test with Howard Small and his tunneling device, and he was going to see that it ended here too, probably no more than a few miles from Howard’s mini-mole site.

  His mind cast back to that time only a few weeks before, recalling that the turnoff to the site was around a couple more bends in the road. Mercer didn’t realize his concentration had wavered until he rounded a sharp corner, and there, stretched across the two-lane road, was an overturned tour bus, glittering fragments of glass spread around the motor coach like handfuls of diamonds tossed onto the macadam. Dazed people milled around the scene, many of them stained by their own blood, others still struggling out of the destroyed vehicle.

  Using both feet, Mercer ratcheted the brakes to the floor mat. Greasy black slicks burned off the tires, a sharp stench filling the confines of the Blazer. One elderly woman, her eyes owl-wide, stood transfixed as the truck careened toward her. Mercer yanked the wheel over, fishtailing the Blazer to a stop only feet from where she stood. Even as the body of the truck settled back onto its suspension, Mercer jammed the accelerator.

  When he whipped his truck around to miss the woman, the Blazer lined up with a dirt track that forked off the Richardson Highway and climbed up to its right, heading straight to where the pipeline crossed over Thompson Pass. Mercer knew the track well. This was where he and Howard had been conducting their tests.

  As the Blazer left the asphalt and the tires dug into the muddy road, he guessed at what had happened just moments before. Alam must have rounded the corner wide, directly into the path of the oncoming bus. Like Mercer just now, he would have hauled his truck to the right to get back into his lane and noticed the road leading up into the hills. Ignoring the swerving bus, he would have made a quick escape toward the testing site, while below him, the driver of the bus lost control of his heavy charge.

  Mercer could not allow himself to consider that Alam had managed to squeak past the bus and continue toward Anchorage.

  The access road twisted sharply in hairpin switchbacks, and almost immediately Mercer noticed fresh tire tracks in the hardened dirt, darker sprays of soil churned up from the wheels of a speeding vehicle. With Howard dead and the site shut down until people from UCLA came to get the mini-mole and all the other equipment, there would be no reason for anyone to be here. Alam was just ahead and this was a dead-end road. Mercer grabbed the automatic pistol and set it on his lap.

  The road was narrow, trees and greenery scratching the side of the Blazer as it powered upward. When he finally burst into the site itself, the thick forest gave way to a huge field at the base of a solid wall of rock towering two hundred feet above the tallest trees. A steel cyclone fence had been erected around the area and where it crossed the access road, the gate was smashed back, hanging limply from one hinge.

  The scene looked exactly as it had when Mercer and Howard had left for their celebratory fishing trip. Two enclosed trailers sat side by side, cement blocks placed under their integrated jacks keeping them level. A flatbed eighteen-wheeler was parked a little way off. Minnie herself sat at the base of the cliff under a tarp, heavy cables running from her to spools that were attached to large portable generators. She was still lined up to the main test-boring hole in the mountain, a perfectly round aperture that was so black it seemed to absorb light. A red Alyeska pickup truck sat next to one of the travel trailers Howard and his team had used as an office.

  Pocketing the keys to his truck, Mercer dashed to the cover provided by the huge flatbed semi, ducking under the low trailer and training the pistol over the wide expanse of the site. He quickly ran through Alam’s options in his mind. Alam hadn’t had enough time to pick the lock on one of the trailers and hide inside, nor did it seem he was using the rig to hide behind because he could have easily gunned down Mercer as he ran toward it. The surrounding field was mostly alpine grass and offered no protection, so Alam wasn’t running on foot, nor did he appear to be climbing the cliff, a difficult task for even an experienced climber. That left Minnie, the generators, or the couple of pallets of gear clustered near the entrance to the test hole. The four other holes nearby were no more than a couple of feet deep, dug as calibrating bores before Minnie’s main hole, and he could clearly see that Alam wasn’t lurking in any of them.

  Instinctively, Mercer knew Abu Alam was trying to make his escape through the mountain in the four-foot-wide tunnel. But just in case he was wrong, he crawled the fifty yards to where the generators sat, his body tensed for a shot that never came.

  Mercer worked the controls with one hand while the other held his pistol leveled at the tunnel entrance, and the generators, big Ingersol-Rands powered by eight-cylinder diesels, fired after only a second. Once they were running, he stripped off Minnie
’s cover, revealing the ugliest machine he had probably ever seen.

  The miniature boring machine operated much the same as its larger cousins but refined to near perfection. The cutting blade, a four-foot-diameter disk, was composed of carbon fiber polymer and diamond chips held together with the recently discovered carbon molecule called buckminsterfullerine. It could turn the hardest bedrock into microscopic dust in an instant. The body of Minnie was a rounded box that housed the sophisticated pumps and valves for the hydraulics and a third-generation global positioning system that gave her more accuracy than the American navy’s nuclear submarines. For propulsion, two hydraulic legs, rams designed much like the legs of a grasshopper, were mounted on either side of the machine’s body. They provided enough holding power and forward pressure for the cutting blade to core through granite at the unheard-of pace of two feet per minute. An enormous fan mounted on the very back of the machine blew the dust and debris created by the disk back down the tunnel it had created.

  “Alam, I know you can hear me,” Mercer shouted at the tunnel, his voice booming down the length of the shaft. “That noise you hear is the boring machine that dug the hole you are running through.”

  Abu Alam ran doubled over along the pitch-black passage, but he paused at the voice. It was distorted as it ricocheted off the walls, but he caught just enough to force him to stop. He recognized the voice as the person Kerikov had captured during his attack at the pump station. He had no desire to turn back and finish off the man. Philip Mercer was Kerikov’s enemy, not his. All that mattered to him was getting out of this hole and escaping. Behind him, the tunnel opening was only a pinhole, while ahead, there was only blackness.