Power Down

by Ben Coes

  Mechanically, he walked back to the pumping station, through the alcove, past the spiderweb network of pipes and cables, to the locker in back, reaching it as his vision blackened. He took the emergency oxygen tank and screwed it to the air valve at his waist. A sharp hiss, then a quieter flowing sound followed. He breathed in. It was the sweetest breath he’d ever taken. For several minutes, he simply breathed, like a starving man at an unending feast.

  Finally, he walked out of the pump station. He walked to the bomb; a padlock held the steel cap in place. He moved back to the dead terrorists and searched each one for the key, finding nothing. He moved from the divers to the ladder and began his ascent. Up top, he knew, Esco and the terrorists would be waiting for the elevator, having lost contact with their men. Waiting for him. He began climbing the rungs of the ladder, plotting his response.

  12

  SAVAGE ISLAND PROJECT

  Savoy exited the dam and walked down the hill, past the administration building. After the small grocery store, the houses for Savage Island’s workers started, row upon row of squat cement capes.

  He walked down the street until he came to number twenty-two. On the side of the small house, a basketball hoop was attached to a makeshift pole made out of the shucked log of a pine tree. Savoy knocked on the front door. No answer. He knocked again. Still no answer. He paused for a moment, looked around, took a step back, then kicked the door in.

  After removing the metal plate, Mirin and Amman climbed inside the small opening at the base of the section of dam that housed the turbine. Once inside, they crawled through the rotors toward the end of the cylinder that housed the turbine. The smell grew stronger as they got closer. After a few more feet, the two men climbed into the enclosed chamber at the face of the turbine. This was the cavity through which water would have been coursing, were the turbine open to the sea.

  They could stand now. Mirin walked to the end of the turbine. Against the wall stood four large oil drums, connected by a thick white cable.

  On the side of the steel drums, in red paint, read the word: OCTANITROCUBANE-9.

  At the first turbine row, Mijailovic realized he’d forgotten his headlamp. The floor was dimly lit by a halogen light on the side of the elevator. He walked to the wall and felt for the auxiliary light switch. He opened a small steel box and flipped the switch. The floor lit up brightly, revealing a pair of bright yellow parkas piled on the floor near the elevator. He glanced at them, then walked a little more quickly toward the turbine row.

  The turbines were all shrouded in bright blue tarps. Beneath each tarp lay a collection of ladders, tools, and equipment. Pulling aside the tarps, he found each turbine in some state of dismemberment and repair.

  At the last turbine, the tarp had already been removed. He smelled a faint but pungent smell. It seemed sour, acrid, chemical. It reminded him of something. What?

  I know that smell, he thought.

  Savoy moved quickly through the small house. Inside the front door, a television flickered. On the screen, a blond female read the news. The room had a small table stacked high with books and magazines. Savoy flipped through them. Time, Newsweek, Match, Playboy, and some sort of political magazine in Arabic. Behind the table stood two large reclining yellow Naugahyde chairs.

  He walked into the first bedroom and found a neatly made bed. A dresser held a photo of an older, dark-haired Middle Eastern woman.

  He walked across the hall. This bedroom was the polar opposite of the first. The sheets were off the bed, piled in the corner of the room. The mattress was pulled off of the bedsprings. He stared for a moment. Then he walked back to the other bedroom and to the neatly made bed. He reached down and pulled the mattress away from the bedspring and threw it onto the floor.

  Laid out on top of the boxspring was a set of engineering drawings. A chill ran down his spine as he studied them. He recognized the arrangement of the turbines. The plans had been hand-drawn but were precise. Arabic script filled the margins. They were schematics of the dam. He searched for the first-tier turbine row. Several large red marks were drawn on one of the turbines.

  Savoy ran to the kitchen and pulled the phone from the hook. He dialed Mijailovic’s satellite phone and let it ring.

  Outside the fourth turbine, Mijailovic shone his flashlight on a slat of metal lying on the ground. Above it was an opening in the turbine. He climbed inside the opening. He moved slowly ahead on his hands and knees, his hands navigating the edges of the dimly lit tunnel. There, inside the turbine column, the smell grew stronger.

  He suddenly recognized the smell that was coming from in front of them, down the turbine cylinder. It was the small of the burning wells. The infernos.

  The Gulf War. Desert Storm. 1993. The well fires. Kuwait. Long before Mijailovic had joined KKB, he worked for Hulcher Company, one of the private contractors brought in by the Department of Defense to help put the fires out.

  The memories raced in Mijailovic’s head. Smoldering infernos fueled by chemicals that wouldn’t go out. The chemicals were so destructive they contaminated the oil, then devoured the steel of the oil derricks and tubing that ran down into the ground.

  “My God,” he said to no one. “I missed something.”

  He heard the sound of metal banging against metal, a door opening or a latch being shut.

  Someone was ahead.

  Should he leave? Could he get out in time to warn everyone? He felt for his sat phone. He’d left it in his parka.

  He started to crawl back toward the opening. The first step was to evacuate the dam. No, not the first. The first was to run like hell until he was on safe ground.

  Then Mijailovic heard another sound. Voices. Two of them. He closed his eyes; he knew what he had to do. He turned around and moved toward the noises.

  Less than fifty feet away, Mirin continued his furious work. He lifted a small box from the side of the barrels. He pulled the top off.

  “I hear something,” Amman said, panicked.

  Mirin said nothing. He continued his work. Inside the box was a rainbow of wires. Carefully, he pulled the green wire from the bunch.

  “Hurry, brother.”

  “Relax,” Mirin replied. “Almost done.”

  He cut the plastic coating from the end of the wire and peeled it back.

  Back at unit twenty-two, Savoy gave up on Arnie and dialed a new number.

  “Operations,” answered a voice.

  “This is Terry Savoy. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Al Durant.”

  “Is Arnie with you?”

  “No. He hasn’t been back.”

  “Okay. Listen to me. I want you to order an evacuation of the dam, immediately.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding. Hit the facility evacuation alarm. Get everyone out of there immediately. Do you hear me? Sound it now. I want to hear it before I hang up this phone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Savoy listened as Durant dropped the phone on the desk in front of him. He heard some voices mumbling in the background. Suddenly, a new voice came on the line.

  “Terry, this is Bob Hauser, foreman in charge over here. Did I hear right? You want an evacuation?”

  “You heard right. Sound the alarm.”

  “I’ll need an explanation.”

  “How’s this for an explanation, asshole: there’s a bomb in the fucking dam. Now sound the alarm!”

  Suddenly, above the din of the dam, piercing sirens cut the air. They rang out from every siren and speaker across the small town as red halogens started to flash.

  Savoy dropped the phone and went to the street, which had already begun to fill with people. Workers, wives, children.

  “Follow me!” Savoy yelled, waving his arms and running toward the administration building. “Everyone, up to the safe zone!”

  Inside the dam, the sound of the evacuation alarm roared through the turbine column. Mijailovic winced despite himself. Terry had found something. Thank Go
d.

  What he saw next caused him to shudder. There, at the end of the turbine column, the two Arabs stood. In front of them, four large oil drums stood in a row, linked by a spiderweb of thick, multicolored wires. Mirin was cutting one of the wires as Amman watched.

  “No!” Mijailovic yelled as he climbed into the small enclosure.

  Amman turned around and charged at him. Mijailovic ducked and delivered a furious series of punches to the young man’s face. He felt the boy’s nose shatter under the vicious left hook.

  “Hurry!” screamed the boy as he fell to the ground. His cohort reached for the red toolbox next to the oil drums and pulled out a hammer. He missed Mijailovic with the first swing, then hit him squarely in the mouth. Mijailovic’s jaw shattered, but he maintained his footing, wrestling the man to the floor. But the terrorist swung the hammer again, this time striking Mijailovic on the ear, and he lost all sense of time and place.

  Outside the dam, as sirens blared, a stream of people ascended the cement stairwell to the safe area above the dam.

  Savoy stood at the top of the cement stairs and yelled encouragement to the workers, children, and wives as they climbed.

  “Come on!” he yelled to the stream of people climbing up the stairs. His eyes moved between the stream of people, climbing the stairs, and the dam to his left.

  Mijailovic crawled as if drunk, his only thought the steel drums full of explosives. The blow to his ear had done something to him, and he understood that he would die regardless of what happened next. Still, he crawled on.

  “Stop,” he slurred.

  The man with the hammer kicked him down, then moved to the oil drums. He let the hammer drop and looked Mijailovic squarely in the eye.

  “Praise Allah,” he said as he moved two wires together until they touched.

  The last memory Mijailovic would have would be of heat and white light.

  The explosion slashed through the first-floor turbine like a torch through tissue paper. At the dam’s outer wall, the cement and steel breached, a section of the dam two hundred and fifty feet high torn away from the main structure.

  Savage Island Project had been built to withstand a loss of such a section with a crosshatch of steel layered like madras vertically and horizontally throughout the dam. But it had not been built to withstand the heat that followed the explosive force, an inferno that soon made all metal meaningless.

  Outside, Savoy watched in horror as the dam was consumed in fire. Screams penetrated the air from the safe area above the dam.

  The heat climbed upward through the infrastructure, ripping out the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth-tier turbines. With them came the gale walls of the dam and soon the outtake walls. Within a minute of the explosion, fully six hundred feet of steel, cement, and granite had been decimated, opened once again to the violent sea.

  As the heat rose skyward and the pressure from the cold sea violated the breach, an otherworldly marriage of water and fire took out the inner core of the dam, weakening it so that it collapsed inward upon itself.

  At this point the destruction went from rapid to sudden. The half-mile-high wall of granite and steel disappeared with a cataclysmic explosion. Frigid, untamed seawater swept away the small town of cinderblock houses. Dark water crashed over the side of the hill and climbed violently up the stairwell. Workers, children, and women who had not made it to the top of the stairs were cleaved from the stairs by the whitecapped deluge. A new round of screams echoed up the hill.

  The angry sea reclaimed its own. Savage Island Project was no more.

  13

  CAPITANA TERRITORY

  Dewey climbed the steel ladder, knowing that every minute left him and his surviving crew closer to the detonation of the bomb below. In his attempt to scale more than six hundred rungs, his legs and arms became fatigued quickly. His muscles burned. The weight of the suit, tank, and helmet seemed to grow with every step. He’d been climbing for ten minutes, through the darkness, interrupted only by a dim halogen every ten yards on the nearby elevator shaft. He focused on his secondary goals: learn who was behind it all, then kill Esco.

  He watched for signs of decompression in his suit. It would be pressure in his eyes that he would feel first, then pain in his inner ear. If that happened, he would have to stop and let the unit acclimate to the depth, a delay he couldn’t afford.

  The water grew lighter. He glanced at the depth markings on the ladder. He was within fifty feet of the surface. He kept climbing, breathing hard and coughing. At twenty feet, he could see the geometric outlines of the platform above.

  He climbed quickly, energized by the sight of the surface. He could see the letters “AE” on the bottom of the derrick. Seven or eight feet from the surface, Dewey stopped and unclasped the hinges on his steel boots, then pushed them off. They sank like bricks. Now barefoot, he reached to his shoulder and unsealed the suit. The icy water rushed in, soaking his body. He took one last breath of bottled oxygen, then popped the helmet latch. The suit fell away from his body and sank, followed by the helmet.

  Still underwater, Dewey unbuttoned his Carhartts and took them off, perched now on the ladder in only his underwear and a T-shirt. He dived away from the ladder and swam as far from the rig as he could, then toward the surface, until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. Even then, he swam farther through the chill Pacific water. Another fifteen seconds, then farther, until he thought he would burst. He aimed for the surface and breached into the warm sunshine. He was at least a hundred feet from the rig.

  Looking back, he saw half a dozen men standing on the deck, staring down at the platform riser, training their weapons at the surface near the ladder. Dewey treaded water, fortunate in more ways than one: They were looking at the ladder and little else.

  Unfortunately he couldn’t return to the rig. Yet what choice had he? His limbs ached. Worse, hypothermia would claim him in minutes, not hours, even here in the ocean near the equator.

  Dewey swam back toward the rig in a long, circuitous arc, keeping his head low to the waterline, until he was behind the terrorists. The rig stood on top of six massive steel girders that ran to the seafloor. He swam to the girder farthest away from the gathered terrorists. When he reached it, he grabbed hold of the edge and hoisted himself up. After several minutes of steady climbing, he reached the marine deck. He was now below and to the right of the conspirators. Any noise would alert them to his presence. He peeked through the grating. There he saw six men, still waiting, all with machine guns trained on the surface.

  He noticed something to the left. Through the deck grating, fingers dangled down. Blood dripped from the end of the motionless fingertips. It was one of his foremen.

  He could hear the faint din of voices. It emanated from the hotel, where his men were still imprisoned.

  Then voices, closer, above.

  “Where is it?” asked someone.

  “Calm down,” said Esco. “It’ll get here.”

  “What if he doesn’t come?”

  “Then we die. But we’re heroes. We’ve done our job.”

  Dewey spotted Esco and another Arab, Ali, the cook. Esco paced the deck above. He stepped to a spot almost directly over Dewey’s head.

  “He’ll be here in five minutes. Until then, we keep our eyes out for the Chief.”

  “You think he’s alive?” asked Ali.

  “No, I don’t, you stupid fuck,” said Esco. “But if he is, I want to be ready.”

  Dewey waited motionlessly. He moved his eyes and glanced down the length of the marine deck to the lifeboats. Above the lifeboats, he knew, was his office and adjoining cabin. Esco remained above him for more than a minute, not moving, not looking down. Finally, one of his men called to him and he stepped away. Dewey began crawling beneath the deck. His fingers gripped the steel grate as he crawled, and he pulled himself along as quietly as he could. When he finally reached the edge of the platform, he climbed onto the hull of a lifeboat. Directly above was the window to his cabin.
He inched his way to the outer edge of the boat’s hull. One slip would plunge him back into the sea. The resulting splash would be followed by gunfire as Esco and his men filled him with lead. He gripped the outer piping. He hoisted himself up by his fingertips to the window of the cabin, and, grabbing the sill beneath the open window, pulled himself into his room.

  He walked across his room and stood in front of the mirror. He was a mess, soaking wet, face, chest, and arms bruised. The wound above his eye had opened up. Blood coursed down his cheek.

  He dried himself off with a towel. He took a Band-Aid from the first-aid kit and stuck it above his eye to stop the bleeding. He put on a pair of dry underwear, T-shirt, jeans, socks, and a pair of boots.

  Dewey removed the mirror from the wall. Behind it was a safe. He turned the dial. He reached inside and removed all of the money he had. Five million Colombian pesos, worth about $2,500, and more than $10,000 in U.S. currency. He grabbed his passport.

  Next he went to the dresser, opened the middle drawer, pulled it out, and flipped it over. Taped to the underside of the drawer was undoubtedly the most important possession he owned at that moment: a Colt M1911A1 .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun. He stuffed six extra clips into his pocket, then, from the top drawer, retrieved the leather calf sheath to his Gauntlet knife. The knife was missing; he remembered the confrontation with Esco, before they dragged him away. He got down on his knees and looked beneath his desk. There, against the wall, lay the knife. He picked it up, then stood up, slipped the knife into the sheath, then strapped it around his calf.

  Quietly, he cracked the door to his cabin. Just outside the room, Pazur, the scum who’d murdered Jonas Pierre, stood watch, pistol in hand. Dewey gently shut the door. Then he heard a noise. It was barely perceptible at first, but it grew. A distant rhythm patted the air. He looked out the window. As small as a fly on the horizon, a Bell 430 helicopter came into view.

  Dewey watched the chopper grow larger in the blue sky, black, hightech looking. It began its descent toward the platform.