by Jon Land
“Get the hell out of there! Can anybody still hear me? Get the hell out of there!”
“This is Burt, Mr. Tunnel,” came a panicked voice trying desperately to compose itself. “Lost Benny, lost Sims. I’m hit in the leg. Climbing back up now.”
“Did you see anyone? Did you see who was doing the shooting?”
The only reply came from McCracken. “No one’s down there, Mr. Tunnel.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“Our saboteur rigged a motion sensor to the trigger of an automatic weapon.”
“Christ! Who did all this?”
“Thirteen minutes to critical stage.…”
“Bypass that blown valve and we can still avert meltdown, though, right?”
“Sure, if there was a way to reach it in time.”
“Any other approach we can use?”
“Nothing direct, and direct’s all we’ve got time for.”
“Then that’s the way it’ll have to be.”
“I’m fresh out of volunteers, in case you didn’t notice.”
Blaine shook his head. “No, you’re not.”
The skeletal steel superstructure of the unfinished skyscraper made for perfect cover for Abraham. The high steel-workers normally manning its top floors, which were five hundred feet off the ground, were down on the sidewalk waiting for the presidential motorcade to pass along Boylston Street. This gave him freedom of movement in an area the sweep of helicopter surveillance would never think to investigate. The girders were all he had to move on, but they were enough, the shell providing his camouflage.
Abraham had chosen this viewpoint for effect more than anything. His sole weapon was the black transistorized detonator in his pocket. He had known from the outset that routine clearing of the streets would make a car bomb unfeasible. He also knew that blasting upward from the sewers below was dramatic but unreliable. Options eliminated, though, are often options gained, and out of what remained, he found the best one of all.
The yellow line painted down the center of the street, the one marking the lanes, was too good to be true, in his estimation. He had retrieved the C-12 plastic explosives, twenty times more potent than the common C-4, from the drop point and melted them down into a liquid form. Then, while the city slept the previous night, dressed in the garb of a public works official, he had gone over a twenty yard section of the line. Affixing the six ultrathin detonators, disguised in the same colored paint, into position was the only part Abraham had hurried through. He did not even have to inspect his handiwork to know it was perfect. Upon detonation, the plastique would reduce the road within its sphere to rubble, in the process blowing apart anyone and anything riding above. Even the president’s tank of a car would be reduced to shrapnel.
That car would be approaching any minute now.
Abraham had not slept in a very long time now. Since his rebirth, time had held a different meaning for him. It passed not in terms of days and hours, but in tasks and accomplishments. Behind him was the visit to the nuclear plant yesterday. Ahead of him was the murder of the president. Beyond that there was nothing.
He had gone to Pennsylvania Yankee in a disguise prepared for another disciple long before. He had descended into the bowels of the reactor’s secondary loop on a surprise inspection, watched only cursorily from the hatch above. He had reached the valve in question and affixed C-4 plastic explosive fully confident it would not be removed, even if discovered. Then he tacked on a sign: DO NOT REMOVE! ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION.
Anybody who got close enough to see the charge would read that sign. From there, he quickly located the main conduit that linked the computers to the thousands of valves and controls in the labyrinth of multicolored pipes. He placed another, smaller charge across it to cut off computer control as well as the early warning system. The valve charge would blow, and it would be well over an hour before anyone knew; by then the plant would be at the critical stage.
If that wasn’t enough, Abraham had taken precautions against manual interference as well. Besides the explosive charges, his tool satchel had held a 9-mm submachine gun complete with extended sixty-shot clip. Rigging it to fire upward—in the direction of the nearest access ladder—was no problem at all. Neither was affixing a motion sensor to its trigger mechanism. The device was no bigger than a small tape recorder and was nothing more than a sophisticated version of the one used on home security alarms. The final fail-safe element of his plan: Abraham had left the power plant confident in the knowledge that it would blow at the very instant he detonated the explosives beneath the president’s car.
His outfit, typical of a high steelworker, had helped him gain access to one of the elevators when no one had been paying much attention. He crouched now on a horizontal steel support beam halfway to the front of the structure, in clear view of the road below. He found this setting to be slightly ironic in that he had a lot in common with the steel shell. After all, that was what his entire existence had been reduced to in the Amazon. All the covering conscience and sensibility had been stripped away. What remained had been hardened into tungsten and rendered impenetrable.
Abraham rose to his feet and pulled off his helmet. He had not brought binoculars along, but he could see the motorcade making its way through the downtown Boston streets well off in the distance. He fingered the detonator through the fabric of his pocket and counted the minutes before the time would come to use it.
Money might not be everything, Patty Hunsecker reckoned, but it sure helped. It was money that had allowed her to hire a private Learjet to fly her across the country to the Utah Salt Flats the previous night. She could only hope to arrive at the bunker ahead of Sal Belamo and his killers, yet knew that hope had nothing to do with it. Blaine McCracken had let her go, which meant he was giving her time. Why, she could not say. His code of honor was a constant enigma. She hated him for some parts of it, loved him for others. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for what he had to do, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to save her father first.
She rented a helicopter at the airport where she had landed and asked the pilot to fly her over the flats, where she hastily reconstructed the bunker’s location in her mind. She had trouble with her bearings, was almost ready to give up, in fact, when a narrow one-story building appeared out of nowhere.
“What the hell?…”
“This is where I get off,” she told the pilot.
There should have been security. They should have been met along the perimeter and warned off. Patty feared that Belamo and his men had gotten here ahead of her after all, but that seemed impossible. No, something else was to blame, and she could not possibly say what.
A hefty bonus convinced the pilot to wait for her, and Patty entered the building through its single unlocked door. The inside was lined with counters and shelves, an outpost abandoned to the elements, complete with layers of dust. It took her a few minutes before she found the false door in the wall that led into a closetlike cubicle. It was dark and she fumbled for a light switch; a fluorescent came on and illuminated a simple control panel, a single arrow pointing up and another down.
Patty pressed the down one.
Instantly the elevator began its whirling descent. With speed impossible to judge, she had no way of telling how deeply she was descending into the bowels of the earth. Several seconds passed before the compartment ground to a halt and the single door slid open.
Before her was a long corridor, the white floors indistinguishable from the walls and ceiling of the same shade. The sudden brightness stung her eyes and it took them a few seconds to adjust. She started down the rounded hall with the clip-clop of her boot heels the only sound.
Where was everyone?
Perhaps the Children of the Black Rain had abandoned the bunker when the scope of their failure became known. It seemed logical. Return to the surface and disappear until another day dawned down the road in the future. After nearly a half century of waiting, surely the makers of the p
lan could wait a little longer. Video surveillance cameras dotted the hallway at regularly spaced intervals, but she could not tell if they were on or not.
Her heart was starting to sink. If her father wasn’t here, she would never see him again. And, yet, if she did find him, she had no idea what she would say. He was still her father; whatever else he was made him no less than that. But she knew she wasn’t doing this for him. She was doing it for herself. She had to know, had to understand, wanted to prove Blaine and the others wrong.
An open doorway beckoned her, the first she had seen so far. Stepping through it brought her into a sprawling meeting hall. A huge conference table was centered on the floor. One of the walls was dominated by a map of the United States showing a dozen glowing red lights. And set before that wall was a darkened figure facing her. Although the figure’s face was cloaked in shadows and half-light, she could still see he was an Oriental. He sat there immobile and expressionless, as if waiting for her to approach.
Patty recalled Takahashi’s story of how he was the only overseer of the Children of the Black Rain to survive the onslaught of an unknown militant in their midst. It was this militant who had so drastically changed the rules, opting to expand Japanese revenge into the deadly nuclear scenario. And she knew that this must be that man. He regarded her with inexplicable indifference as she approached him.
“Where’s my father?” she demanded, fighting to sound strong and fearless. “Where’s Phillip Hunsecker?”
The Japanese just stared at her. Patty stopped, then came closer.
“I want to see my father. I want to—” Patty froze when she was close enough to see why the figure was so silent, so still.
The figure was an elaborate mannequin!
She had started to back dazedly away when a voice echoed through the hall’s gaping expanse.
“I’m here, Patty.”
And she turned to see a figure emerging from another section of the room into the light. The figure was her father.
“Eight minutes to critical stage.…”
Along the green, florescent-lighted corridor directly above the Pennsylvania Yankee reactor complex, the temperature was already in excess of a hundred degrees. Sweat poured from Jack Tunnel’s face as he helped Blaine fasten himself into the layered radiation suit.
“Gonna be close to a hundred and fifty at the bottom of the ladder—if you make it that far.”
“I’ll make it, all right.”
“Temperature’s rising a degree every five seconds—that’s gonna increase as we get closer to critical stage. Even in the suit you can take maybe three minutes down there. Probably less.”
“It’s all I’ll need.”
“The valves are clearly marked. I’ll stay up here and direct you to them.”
“That ring on your finger tells me you’ve got a family, Jack. Might be a better idea for you to hightail it out like everyone else.”
“And let you take all the credit for saving the greater Northeast? Not on your life, McCracken.”
Back near the hatch that led onto the ladder, two volunteers from the control room had finished stuffing towels and padding into another radiation suit. They were tying the rope under the filled-out suit’s arms when Blaine approached.
“Show time,” McCracken said as he eased the makeshift dummy through the opening. “You boys better stand back and cover your ears.”
And with that he began to lower the thing down, giving slack on the rope to match the pace of a man’s descent down the ladder. “Seven minutes to critical stage.…”
Just after the fifteenth rung, the firing began, the motion sensor having picked up the dummy’s descent. Bullets ripped through its suit and stuffed innards and clanged off pipes and ladder rungs, ricocheting off walls in all directions. The metallic echoing burned Blaine’s ears, and several times he flinched when bullets flew maddeningly close to the open hatch. Through it all, he continued to lower the dummy at a pace designed to draw continuous fire from the rifle Abraham had planted until its ammo was exhausted.
At last he heard a repetitive clicking sound that told him the firing pin was striking an empty chamber. McCracken let the dummy drop the rest of the way down the ladder and reached back for his helmet.
Jack Tunnel touched his arm. “With the coast clear, I can get the job done better than you, friend.”
“Coast might not be clear, Jack. Might be more surprises waiting for anyone who goes down there. It’s got to be me.”
“Sounds like a song.”
“Hopefully a happy one.”
Tunnel tightened Blaine’s helmet into its slot, but didn’t clamp the faceplate down. “Look, if she goes to critical stage the rest of us will still be able to get out with limited contamination. But you, friend, are gonna get zapped by enough rads to make your skin glow.”
“Get to save on my electric bills then, won’t I?” Blaine said, flipping his faceplate down before disappearing into the rancid heat of the loop below.
“Six minutes to critical stage.…”
To Johnny Wareagle, this all had a shade of familiarity cast over it, as if he’d already been through it before. Perhaps he had. In the many dreams the spirits had sent to prepare him for his Hanbelachia, a battle with the greatest enemy he had ever faced, they had shown him all.
Abraham could have chosen anywhere along the motorcade’s route to strike at the president, but Johnny knew the spirits would guide him in the right direction. Suddenly Wareagle gazed up at a nest of buildings squeezed claustrophobically against one another on Boylston Street, five blocks away from the Ritz Carlton. The entire city seemed to be choking on its own progress. The beginning structure of yet another skyscraper was piercing the sky where a parking lot had been just months before. Gazing that high up from ground level, there was nothing that could be seen clearly.
But Johnny didn’t have to see. He felt a sudden chill pass through him. The high steelworkers were clustered on Boylston Street, where everyone was waiting for the motorcade to pass by. The steel skeleton was deserted.
Not quite.
Johnny could feel the presence quite clearly now, could feel it as clearly as if it were a yard away. It was something cold and vile, with a manitou as dark as the night itself. The stink of its spiritless soul reached him, assailing his senses.
The motorcade was coming.
Johnny jumped the fence enclosing the structure and rushed to one of the scaffold construction elevators.
“Stray Seven to Alley Cat! I’ve lost him! Goddammit, I’ve lost him!”
“Not again!” Arnold Triesman shouted, rushing down Boylston Street toward Stray Seven’s last reported position. In the streets around him a number of agents were doing the same on his orders. A nag had suddenly hit Triesman’s gut about this one. He probably should have ordered the motorcade back to the airport; it was in his power. But everything he had been taught advised against panic, and, if this proved to be a false alarm, he’d be finished.
“Wait a minute!” Stray Seven’s voice echoed in his ear. “I think I just caught a glimpse of him!”
“What’s the twenty?”
“Near the Commonwealth Insurance Building.”
Right along the motorcade route, Triesman thought. But he couldn’t reroute without taking the president into an unsecured area. And a slowdown or outright stoppage would subject Top Guy to more danger than letting him go on. The situation, in any case, was under control. They had their man sighted.
“Did he enter any building, Seven?”
“No way to be sure, Alley Cat.”
“Get sure! Do you hear me? Get sure by the time I get over there!” Triesman switched his communicator to all bands.” All Stray teams, converge on the area of the Commonwealth Insurance Building shell. Choppers, do you copy that?”
“Roger,” the three pilots replied in virtual unison.
“All buildings considered compromised. Let’s move! Everyone move!”
“Dad?” Patty asked tentati
vely, tremors rising through her stomach and chest.
“I’m sorry,” Phillip Hunsecker said.
“You should be,” Patty blurted out.
“Not for what I’ve done. Sorry that you came here. You should leave.”
“Not unless you leave with me.”
He kept approaching, shaking his head. “I can’t do that.”
Patty’s eyes flicked about the room. “This is more important to you than your family, your life?”
“This is my family, my life. Always has been.”
The man who had come to a halt a yard from her did not look like her father. Oh, it was him all right, but she barely recognized him. Part of her had envisioned herself running into his arms; now those arms might as well have been a stranger’s. Patty shivered.
“I can get you out of this,” she made herself say. “McCracken will help me. He can fix things.”
“It’s too late for that, Patty.”
“It’s never too late.”
“This time it is. We’ve failed. Our identities are known. Our plan is known. For our honor to be preserved, we must disappear, become the past.”
“What are you saying?”
Patty heard a second set of steps behind her just before the voice reached her.
“She must leave, Pierce. She must leave now.”
Patty turned and watched as a second figure emerged from the shadows in the front of the room, stopping next to the Japanese mannequin. It was a woman’s figure, a woman she had known almost all her life and loved like a mother: Shimada!
McCracken felt the incredible heat building in the loop as soon as he began his descent. Even through his radiation suit, his skin seemed to be burning. Sweat ran from his forehead into his eyes, steam misting across his faceplate. He had spent his share of time in steam rooms, and that was the only comparison that came to mind—a steam room still pumping heat long after the cycle should have ended.
Blaine passed the fifteenth rung, his breathing labored. He had considered the possibility that Abraham had set up a second firing apparatus to thwart precisely the strategy he had employed. At this point, though, dying from a bullet seemed preferable to radiation poisoning or being boiled alive, both of which were equally real possibilities.