Power Down

by Ben Coes

  Dewey grabbed the stick, but it was no use. Even if he knew how to fly a helicopter, it wouldn’t have mattered. The machine was out of control. It gyrated and dropped uncontrollably downward in a storm of smoke.

  As the chopper dropped, it careened toward a smaller, half-constructed building, a skeleton of steel girders tarped in bright orange construction web and debris netting. Its row of girders punctured the air like steel teeth. The chopper continued soaring in a sideways bender, smoke coughing in plumes behind it, toward the corner of the girders. Dewey held on to his seat for dear life as the impact came. The chopper struck down violently into the building. The sound was deafening as steel met steel. The destroyed chopper wedged upside down into a row of girders, one of which stabbed a line through the engine block like a knife through butter. Soon, the smoke was joined by flames, which burst out from a fissure of the main fuel tank.

  Dewey quickly scanned the scene. In the aftermath of the crash, the helicopter hung like a Christmas ornament on an extended girder at the edge of the half-constructed building, at least twenty-five stories above the crowded streets of Cali.

  The front of the helicopter was aimed skyward. The cabin glass was shattered and for the most part gone.

  Dewey looked for his gun and found it beneath the seat. He belted it and felt for his knife. Still sheathed at his calf.

  He stood on the back of the seat. The chopper swung precariously back and forth on the steel axis. He lifted himself up. He pulled himself onto the steel girder, out of the helicopter cabin.

  The cars directly below him looked like toys.

  Dewey knelt atop the steel bar and looked up. A line of gunmen peered down at him from the taller skyscraper, training their weapons. Suddenly, shots rang out. A bullet dinged the girder just in front of his outstretched arm. He had to move. He shimmied away as quickly as he dared and didn’t look down.

  Then, like a hard kick, a bullet hit him in the left shoulder. It nearly sent him careening off of the steel beam. But he held on. The girder was the only thing separating him from a free fall to his death. The bullet had punctured the top of his left bicep near the shoulder joint. The wound, which seemed to have missed bone, now bled freely. Dewey lay on the girder for a moment, testing the strength left in his arm. With a groan he resumed his shimmying, leaving a trail of blood behind. Finally he climbed down onto a cement floor and found the construction area was deserted. He grabbed a filthy rag from the ground. He tied it around his arm to stem the bleeding.

  Dewey looked back one last time. The gunmen were out of sight, but they’d soon be hunting for him in the streets. He turned and walked into the abandoned building, past piles of steel girders and pallets of lumber, toward the stairwell that would deliver him to the anonymous streets of Cali twenty-five stories below.

  14

  MARKS’S SKI HOUSE

  ASPEN, COLORADO

  Teddy Marks sat in the leather armchair, staring at the flames burning in the stone fireplace in front of him. In his right hand he held a glass half filled with eighteen-year-old Talisker single malt, a thick Cohiba cigar in his left. Plumes of gray smoke wandered up softly toward the ceiling.

  A winter snowstorm blew hard outside, the snow accumulating like a white blanket across the dark Colorado mountains. Marks pulled the leather hassock closer and rearranged his feet on top of it. The song “Jessica” by the Allman Brothers played softly in the background. He took another sip of his scotch, quietly contemplating the perfection of the moment.

  On a large, dark red chesterfield in front of the fireplace, Nicholas Anson sat with his wife, Annie. Each held a glass of red wine.

  “You sure you don’t mind the smoke?” Marks asked.

  “Not at all,” said Annie Anson. “I kind of like it. Nick used to smoke cigars. I’m glad he quit, but I miss the smell sometimes.”

  Marks nodded. “This place sits empty ninety-five percent of the time. Drives me crazy. I’m glad you could come this weekend. We deserve some R and R, don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do,” Anson said, smiling. He took a sip from his wineglass.

  Marks had bought the place five years before, a sprawling old farmhouse in the foothills above Aspen. The place had cost him nearly seven million dollars. Tonight, sipping the peaty-flavored scotch, puffing on a cigar, he could only think it had been worth every penny.

  Less than a quarter mile away, a solitary dark figure slipped methodically through the Colorado woods. He’d snowshoed in from a logging road more than ten miles away, tracking across a deserted swath of old growth on the backside of Snowmass. The dark black celluloid of his coat blended against the surrounding pines like camouflage, rendering the man virtually invisible to anyone who might be looking for him there. No one was. Jutting out from his head, ATN PS15-4 night-vision goggles allowed him to see the snow-shrouded landscape as in daytime, but with an apocalyptic green hue behind everything.

  The storm had been unexpected, but it made his concealment all the more complete. Otherwise, it was neither a benefit nor a distraction. Simply another factor in a mission he’d been planning for more than three years.

  At the edge of the pines, he saw the first sign of the Marks estate, the old barn. Beyond that, he knew, he would find the big stone farmhouse.

  The man moved to the corner of the barn and removed the snowshoes, leaving them at the western corner of the barn. Without the snowshoes, the snow now surrounded him up to his waist. But that didn’t matter.

  As he climbed through the drifts, he ran one last time through the file on Marks.

  Marks had spent most of his career at KKB, beginning as an oil futures trader with the company at age twenty-five. He did his undergraduate work at Ohio State in only three years, then got an MBA at night from the University of Chicago. His rise at KKB had been rapid.

  The relevant part of Marks’s career for the assassin had occurred before Ohio State. In 1969, at the age of eighteen, Marks enlisted in the Navy after reading about how badly America was losing the battle in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. After basic training at Naval Station Great Lakes, he was asked to join the Navy SEALs, a program of elite fighters who received training in all-terrain warfare: sea, air, and land. After a year of brutal training, Marks and the rest of his team were sent to Vietnam. His team ran infiltration, exfiltration, and search-and-destroy missions deep in the Cambodian jungles.

  The assassin removed the night-vision goggles and clipped them to his belt pack. He pulled a pair of wire cutters from a coat pocket and at the side of the red barn opened a small door on the front of a gray metal box. Reaching in, he quickly clipped the phone lines to the house.

  The terrorist reached into his coat and removed his weapon, a heavily customized Taurus Cycle 2 semiautomatic handgun with a small, hand-forged custom snubnose black silencer screwed to the end. He moved from the barn through the waist-high snowdrift. At the corner of the home, he inched to the window. Inside, a fire blazed warmly; near it sat his target, Marks, plus a tall man with a receding hairline in a denim shirt and a woman with sandy-colored hair holding a wineglass. They would be collateral damage.

  Marks and his guests couldn’t have arranged themselves any more conveniently. The intruder took a step back from the window, lifted the gun, and aimed at Marks’s head.

  It may have been something as insignificant and fleeting as a reflection off the side of his crystal glass. Or perhaps it was the faint whisper of movement in the snow outside the window. Maybe it was just instinct. But in that one instant, as the killer raised his weapon and prepared to fire, Marks felt fear in his heart the likes of which he hadn’t felt in years, not since Cambodia; terror he’d known, hated, worked every day since to put behind him and forget about. It was the terror of the hunted.

  Marks reeled forward. Like a deer lurching from a hunter, he threw himself out of the leather armchair at the same moment the window behind him shattered. He landed chest first on the hard pine floor, but one slug had found its mark, striking him sq
uarely in the shoulder.

  Nicholas and Annie Anson barely had time to react to the gunfire. They watched, stunned, as Marks leapt to the ground. Blood arced from Marks’s shoulder and splattered across their laps before they had any notion of what had happened. By that time, the killer had targeted them. Two shots to Nick Anson’s head, two more into Annie Anson’s chest.

  Marks had felt the searing burn of a bullet before. He was hurt, he knew, but he could still move. His premonition had bought him time. He registered the Ansons’ deaths peripherally as his instincts raced ahead of his thoughts. He would have to kill this one, he knew, if he wanted to live.

  Outside, the assassin moved quickly around the corner of the house. He couldn’t tell if he’d killed Marks. He pushed through the snowdrift as fast as he could, inserting another clip into his Taurus.

  Marks’s shoulder spasmed in agony. As he lay on the hardwood floor, he looked down at his shoulder, concerned by the unabated flow of blood. It spilled onto the ground like water.

  He knew that to survive, he couldn’t dwell on his injury, and he couldn’t stay still. Whoever was out there was a professional. He would not leave until he’d completed his job.

  Marks looked up at the fire. His eyes roamed to the wall next to the large stones of the fireplace. There, he saw the big bay window that looked out on the mountain. From behind that window, the killer would have a perfect line of fire. Marks crawled out of the room.

  By the time the killer moved through the deep snow around the corner of the house, a minute had passed. When he reached the bay window, the target was gone.

  The killer knew the mission bore risk; Marks was not a soft target. Paranoia crowded his mind. He knew the importance now of acting quickly to end this. He couldn’t allow Marks the time to react.

  He punched his gloved hand through the window. Reaching up, he unlatched the lock and raised the window. Holding the gun in his left hand, the killer placed both arms through the window to pull himself through.

  As he pulled his torso over the windowsill, the killer looked suddenly to his right. Marks, covered from neck to waist in blood, was coming at him. Marks’s left arm was immobile, bleeding profusely. His right swung the iron poker from the fireplace with brutal force onto the killer’s skull. The killer heard himself cry out. As the assassin wriggled the rest of the way in, Marks swung the poker again. Shoulder. The gun fell out of the killer’s hand and slid across the hardwood floor and into the fireplace, resting atop the hot coals near the grate.

  Marks raised the iron poker again. He stepped forward, anticipating the final blow to his attacker, and swung with fury. But Marks’s foot suddenly slipped in the pool of blood on the ground. His balance shifted, the slice of the iron through air came down awkwardly, slower, and the killer anticipated it. He reached up, tore the iron from Marks’s hand as it came down.

  Marks recovered his balance. He moved forward and sent his right foot squarely into the killer’s face. Blood suddenly poured from the killer’s nostrils, but he swung the poker’s grip up at Marks’s hurt shoulder. Marks fell to the ground, blinded by the shock of his pain. The killer stood and raised the poker, only to watch in surprise as Marks rolled swiftly away.

  Marks crawled like a crippled dog, pulling himself along the ground with his good arm through a pool of his own blood, inching to the fireplace’s edge. Desperately, he reached his hand toward the smoldering fire and stretched for the gun that lay atop the burning coals.

  The intruder came from behind him, blood flowing freely from his broken nose and gashed neck. The killer sent the iron shattering down, a crushing blow onto Marks’s shoulder. He screamed out in agony.

  In front of him, Marks could see the gun resting within the fireplace. He knew that what he was about to do was his only hope of survival. He reached into the hot coals and grabbed the gun.

  The metal stuck to his hand like glue, branding itself into the flesh of his palm. Bolts of pain seared through his hand and shot up his arm. The hot metal burned the skin and muscle. But Marks swallowed the pain, wheeled around, and aimed the gun at the killer above him, firing once as the killer struck with the poker again. This time the poker struck squarely across Marks’s skull, but he got the shot off. It hit the killer in the neck. It would be Marks’s last salvo. The blow from the iron poker was too much, too direct, too damaging.

  The killer was bleeding profusely now, but Marks’s shot had only grazed him. He raised the poker above his head again, Marks now powerless to defend himself.

  Marks struggled to open his eyes. He wanted to see the man who was about to kill him. Mustering the last remnants of his strength, he looked up at the young man.

  “Why?” he whispered.

  The killer said nothing, only swung the iron poker in a brutal strike at Marks’s skull. The killer dropped the poker and stood bloody and exhausted. Only luck had left him alive, not dead alongside Marks, or instead of him. He’d never seen such a will to survive, nor such strength. For a moment, he felt admiration for the man he’d just defeated in battle. But only for a moment.

  He reached down with his glove and lifted the still-hot gun from the ground near Marks’s hand. He placed it in his pocket. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a small red canister. He sprayed Marks and the Ansons with the canister. He then sprayed a small stream into the fireplace. The flames coursed along the ground to the bodies.

  The killer moved to the broken window and climbed back into the cold air. The snow continued to fall in great plumes from the Colorado sky. The blood flowed freely from the assassin’s neck, nose, and skull, leaving patterns in the snow. He turned to look inside one last time at the bloody scene. The Ansons’ corpses were on fire. The flames engulfed them and soon spread to the carpet. Marks’s corpse would be next. Soon, the house would be gone.

  The killer plowed through the drifts toward the corner of the barn and the snowshoes that would deliver him back to the waiting sedan, ten miles through the dark Colorado woods.

  15

  SAVAGE ISLAND PROJECT

  Bitter cold wind made the safe area miserable for those who had managed to make it up from the town. The wind off the Labrador Sea crossed the great plain of water that now rushed as it was meant to, as it had for eons before. The pale gray of the horizon grew dark; soon, the arctic night would fall.

  Savoy walked among the survivors, searching for Mijailovic. Of the six hundred people who lived at Savage Island, he guessed that less than half stood before him now. The rest had either been caught inside the dam during the explosion, or drowned afterward. Having passed through the crowd several times, he knew Mijailovic was dead.

  A strange silence surrounded the survivors, interrupted only by the occasional crying of children. The adults appeared to be in shock.

  The cold worsened with each passing minute.

  Savoy’s mind boiled the situation down to its bare elements. First, the people before him would all freeze to death if help didn’t arrive soon. Second, terrorists had struck; they might be targeting other KKB facilities at that very moment.

  George Kimball, KKB’s pilot-in-command, ran into the crowd, looking frantically around.

  “George!” Savoy yelled.

  “Terry. What—”

  “Did you bring your sat?” interrupted Savoy.

  “Here. What happened?”

  Savoy looked at Kimball, then stared for a moment at the second-in-command, Aslan.

  “Let me talk to you for a second,” he said to Kimball. He walked away from the crowd, and from Aslan.

  “What is it?”

  “The dam was destroyed by a bomb. Terrorists.”

  Savoy dialed the phone.

  “Spinale,” the voice on the other end of the phone said.

  “Thank God you picked up,” said Savoy.

  “Terry?”

  “I don’t have time to talk. I’m at Savage Island. A bomb was set off. The dam’s been destroyed.”

  “What? ‘Destroyed’?”


  “Yes, you heard me. Destroyed. It’s gone. Wiped out. Hundreds were killed.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “I need you to order a lockdown of all KKB nuclear facilities. Then call Jessica Tanzer at the FBI. Tell her Savage Island was destroyed by terrorists. Tell her we’ve ordered a lockdown and she should do the same on all U.S. nukes and LNG facilities.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Yeah. Arnie’s dead. Jake White must have suspected something. That’s why they killed him first.”

  “What about—”

  “After you talk to Jessica, I need you to get the Canadian authorities up here immediately or the survivors will freeze to death.”

  “Got it.”

  “They need to fly something in here. There’s a large landing strip. If you have to, have Jessica call someone at DOD and get a military transport up here. It’s five degrees out. The wind is ripping off the ocean and night is coming.”

  “Got it.”

  “Tell Jessica I’m flying to D.C. tonight. I’ll call her in a few minutes. But right now, securing the nukes and getting help up here have to be your top priorities.”

  “Okay. Take care, boss.”

  Savoy hung up the phone. At the far corner of the safe area, he saw a trailer.

  “Follow me,” he said to Kimball.

  The two went to the trailer. Inside, heavy blankets were stacked in piles against the back wall. On one side of the trailer, more than twenty large kerosene heaters were lined up. Boxes of food were stacked in the corner. The safe area existed for emergencies, for a catastrophe such as the dam failing. But surviving a disaster would be moot if there weren’t a way to stay warm for the hours it would take help to arrive.

  Savoy walked out of the trailer. “Listen!” he yelled to the crowd. “I need everyone to listen to me.” He paused a few moments while people moved in closer.

  “My name is Terry Savoy,” he said. “I work for KKB. Help is on the way. I need able-bodied men over here immediately. Now. Let’s go.”