Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  THE BATHROOM DOOR BURST OPEN BEHIND THE WEIGHT OF JIM Gunther’s considerable frame.

  Maeve Cassidy felt the sharp edge of the jagged icicle of glass she had snatched from the shattered remains of the mirror. Her weapon was about eight inches long and three inches wide. In all, she couldn’t have hoped for a better result.

  She had weighed the possibility of waiting until Jim wasn’t present to create the weapon and then using it on him when he was distracted. She didn’t know, however, the reality of the threats against Charlotte and Wilmington, much less the threat posed by the other liquefied natural gas container ships, and didn’t want to take any chances. If she slowed the pace of the drill or left the controls long enough for it to deviate, would she trigger the threats that Jim had described? Maeve wasn’t willing to take that chance, and so she took the only real chance she saw.

  Plus, she knew the threat against Piper was real and visceral. That shouldn’t have been part of the bargain.

  “What the hell happened?” Jim shouted. Maeve was pleased to see that his face was distorted with surprise and perhaps with that 1 percent of knowledge that he had allowed this to happen. He had let her go into that bathroom unattended.

  Maeve staggered, took a footstep toward him, and muttered, “I just fell from the drugs. Overcome.” She gasped for air, her hand wielding the glass knife, which was discreetly tucked behind her back.

  “Are you okay?” Jim asked. He looked around at the shattered glass and perhaps a second too late understood.

  “I fell. Looking for aspirin—”

  The shiv was arcing upward into Jim’s gut. Maeve felt the blade slice through his shirt, then gain purchase in the hardened muscles of his abdomen. She placed the bottom of her left hand beneath the butt of the blade, cushioned by her T-shirt, and used it to propel the sharp leading edge forward while her right hand guided it into his abdomen. Her left shoulder muscles screamed with agony as she pulled upward with all her might, like in a dead lift, trying to drive the glass fully into him. Rewarding her efforts was the presence of blood soaking his cotton shirt.

  The momentum shifted, though. Jim’s hands were pushing her elbows down. He had the leverage of height and strength, but she had determination. Her progress, measured by the growing plume of blood, slowed and then stopped immediately.

  She kneed him in the balls as hard as she could. It wasn’t the first time she had performed that maneuver on him. He gasped with an audible “Oomph” and released a bit of the pressure on her arms. The shiv had come free of his abdomen as his arms pushed and he backed away. When his head lowered in pain, she head butted him with her forehead, then high kicked him in the throat. He stumbled backward into the door and landed with a thud. His arms were splayed outward, as if he were lying on the ground, making snow angels.

  Maeve charged him with the shiv and raised it high, going for the throat. She thrust downward with the ferocity of a baying animal. The bloody tip of the mirror shard stopped inches from Jim’s throat. His hand clasped her wrist with the quickness and force of a rattlesnake. He peeled her arm away, and she knew the tide had shifted again. One of his hands controlled her wrist; the other was around her throat. She was gasping for air as she felt her wrist being bent backward, almost to the point of snapping. Jim lifted her by the neck against the bathroom wall so that her feet were inches off the floor. She felt herself losing consciousness from a lack of oxygen to her brain.

  “Please,” she whispered into his ear. His face was directly in front of hers. She could see the thick eyebrows and the dark beard. The menacing brown eyes, which had gone half lidded, the way they always used to do in Afghanistan.

  “Just like Afghanistan, dear Maeve. Always liked it rough.”

  Her bloody T-shirt fell to the floor with the shiv, making a soft click.

  “I would absolutely satisfy you right now, but I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ve got a mission to complete. We need to get to work.”

  Jim lowered her to the floor, keeping one vise grip hand around her neck and the other around her wrist. He had closed the distance between them so that she could not get any leverage to knee or kick him. He leaned over and kissed her full on the mouth, his tongue braving a quick dart into her mouth before she could bite it, though she tried. A hollow click of the teeth mirrored her despair.

  “You are going to sit down, and you are going to move that drill bit the way you moved it in Pakistan. You are going to take it farther than you have ever taken it before, and on the second hole you will perform an unprecedented second kickoff point. Then you are going to submerge the perforating charges, and you will detonate when and where you are told. Is that clear?”

  Maeve nodded. Her throat was so constricted that she couldn’t speak just yet.

  “And then, if you behave, you just might see your family again.”

  The hollow pit in her stomach grew as she thought about Piper. Her only hope was that her young child was being well cared for by the Asian woman and that Piper would soon forget this experience, as if it were a vacation gone wrong that she would never understand.

  Maeve limped to the chair in the control room. She placed her bloody hands on the joystick that controlled the drill. She looked up at the monitors. The McGuire and Brunswick nuclear plants were on a split screen. The drill path was etched in 3-D on another screen, and it showed the drill bit turning from the current point and passing under Jordan Lake for almost two miles at an azimuth of 298 degrees, northwest by north.

  Deep breaths weren’t enough to calm her nerves. She pushed back from the controls and looked at Jim, who had removed his shirt and was dressing his wound with her T-shirt.

  “Close,” he said, nodding.

  “You’re an asshole,” she said. “And you’ve gotten yourself in way over your head.”

  “Nobody’s as bad as people want them to be, and nobody’s as good as they hope they can be. We’re all about the same, dear Maeve. Maybe one degree of difference, but that’s not so much, is it? Your line in the sand is just a notch higher than mine. Does that make you a much better person than me?”

  “You shot me . . . and did other things to me. Yes, I would say that makes you a bad person.”

  “You just stuck a broken mirror in my gut. If it wasn’t for my rock-hard abs, you might have succeeded. Good thing I didn’t miss my Pilates workout this week. So are we really that different?”

  Maeve said nothing. Her mind was cycling through ways she could beat him. The starting center for the NC State soccer team during her college days, Maeve had an unapologetic drive to be the best at everything she did. Her competitive nature was overshadowed only by her genuine love of her family and her country.

  “We all do what we have to do when we are backed into a corner, Maeve. You saw that in Afghanistan as well as anyone else. You participated in it. I know you’re not proud of what we did over there, but we did it, nonetheless.”

  “Shut up,” Maeve whispered. “We swore we would never discuss that.”

  “And we shall not. It would be troublesome for all of us and our country if word leaked of our transgressions.”

  “I said, ‘Shut up.’ Stop it. I’ll do what you need me to do. Steal some gas. No big deal.”

  “Now we’re talking.” Jim had tied her T-shirt in the knot around what amounted to a deep flesh wound. He had staunched the bleeding for the most part. He stood next to her and pointed at the drill screen. “The water is ready. The power is ready. The kickoff point has been prepped. Now you need to guide us to this shallow but very rich gas field.”

  “It’s just below Jordan Lake? Aren’t you worried about the aquifer?”

  “We are not concerned in the least about the aquifer, because we have the very best drill handler doing this job,” Jim said. “We waited for you, and now you’re here. So let’s get to work. Once I flip this switch, the nuclear threats go live. Ready?”

  Maeve looked at the screen that was showing the 3-D view of the drill path, like a slice of c
ake with its different layers. She saw the shale formation that they were going to rob. It looked dense and rich, full of gas deposits and maybe even oil. The Durham Triassic Basin was notorious for its shallowness and proximity to drinking water. Something about the map did not seem right to her, but she couldn’t place it. She felt as if she was looking at a satellite shot from the wrong angle, and it was challenging to get her bearings. Her drilling in Afghanistan had always had a certain rhythm to it.

  Then she looked at the live streaming video of the crew at the drill location. Maeve had no concept of whether she was on location or miles away. The remote drill techniques they had perfected in Afghanistan could place her up to fifteen miles away from the actual drill. Oddly, she didn’t notice any pipe for the natural gas once it surfaced. Certainly, they could seal the wellhead, but with the number of veins they were talking about tapping, the pressure would be enormous, too much for any single wellhead to handle. It would burst, and the gas would be lost. She had heard murmurs at the party about celebrating a new pipeline to Morehead City, but her camera angle did not show where that might connect to the wellhead.

  Then she saw the rest of the picture. In the corner were several containers. While natural gas usually required substantial refinement to eliminate impurities and liquids, her work in combat had resulted in the development of containerized natural gas processing plants. She recognized the mobile containers, mirror images of the ones they had perfected in Afghanistan. The only question now was, where was the pipeline? What did they intend to do with the gas? Maeve was an engineer, and these questions came to her naturally. Despite the stress she was enduring, her analytical mind calculated the end-to-end system and recognized that something was missing. Once refined, how were they going to get the gas to market? Not her problem, she knew, but the answer could provide insight into her predicament. Maybe it was the pipeline to the port of Morehead City, on the coast?

  Jim flipped the switch. She continued to stare at the live feed of the work yard, where the drill cable and water lines went stiff. The drill head would spit out water to cool the bit and help with the drilling process. If he had stolen the equipment they had used in Afghanistan, there would be a five-pointed titanium-uranium mix drill bit connected to composite drill lengths, which made for faster and more accurate drilling.

  Maeve sighed and focused. Nudging the joystick forward, she watched the icon on the screen move toward the vein. She eventually became one with the stick and the drill, moving along the path as if she were down there herself. Like a pilot, she began flying the drill bit around the obstacles represented in the 3-D image.

  But she knew that she was not a pilot and that this was not a game.

  “Don’t stop. That’s all I’m saying, Maeve. This is serious business. And in case you get any more ideas, I’ve got all my notes from Afghanistan. The ones where I overheard you speaking with our interpreter, plotting these terrorist attacks and stealing natural gas in North Carolina.”

  “What!”

  “Be quiet, please. I’m trying to protect you from yourself. You’re in this neck deep, Maeve.”

  Maeve controlled a sob as she pressed the drill bit forward. She closed her eyes and tried to feel the power, the way a fighter jock became one with his machine. She continued, seeking the best path forward toward the finishing point, staying within the margins of error calculated by Jim’s “guy.”

  We’ve got a guy.

  What was going on? she wondered. Why all the secrecy? She imagined that Throckmorton Energy Company was out in front of the state regulations, probably didn’t have their permits, and might not own any land with mineral rights. If she was reading the map correctly, Throckmorton’s property was right on the edge of Wake County, and not in Chatham County, where the true reserves waited to be tapped.

  Millions of dollars of gas lay below the surface, but was the juice worth the squeeze? Jim and his father were committing the felony crime of kidnapping a woman and a child for natural gas. Something didn’t seem right. The crime was too small for the punishment that would surely come their way.

  Staring at the monitor, she wondered about the conversation she had overheard when Jim drugged her. The Chinese voice had seemed to be the most authoritative of them all. Were the Chinese in charge of this operation? she wondered.

  Since she had just returned from Afghanistan, geopolitics was not lost on her. She knew that the United States was nearly a trillion dollars in debt to China.

  We’ve got a guy.

  Was she the only hostage, she wondered, if China was indeed running this operation?

  CHAPTER 14

  MAHEGAN HELD MAEVE CASSIDY’S NAME TAG IN HIS HAND, A TANGIBLE clue that she had been there. It had been well hidden, as if she had purposefully left a sign.

  He followed the ridge to the swampy area again, noticing the workers had made decent progress. There would be no going back to the detention cell in the daylight. Sadly, Petrov, or whoever was in charge, would most likely blame the workers for breaking into the cell. Their fate would most likely not be good.

  Mahegan followed the stream north, walking parallel to the fracking location where the workers were completing the fence. He found an isolated spot about a quarter mile north of the saddle with the drill head, where he had fought Petrov, and noticed a full drilling rig was standing tall, like a mini Eiffel Tower. It took some effort to see it, but it was there. He saw the iron roughnecks connecting the drill pipe as the drill bored into the ground. The machinery lifted and fell in rhythmic grunts, guiding the drill into the ground. The operation was under way.

  With afternoon clouds drifting lazily overhead, Mahegan decided to follow his unsuccessful assassins’ GPS to the address listed as “home.” He navigated his way through the forest lining the stream until he saw that he was approximately parallel to the GPS street address. There were no visible roads, but he was below any reasonable sight line. He knew some of this terrain from his runs to Jordan Lake along the firebreaks. Except for the stream to his rear, the land rose in all directions. The hilltop to his ten o’clock was large and, he suspected, the most likely candidate for an operation of this size.

  Stepping through the dense underbrush, Mahegan dodged a few timber rattlers and unsuspecting foxes. He was surprised at the number of quail he saw flocking near the edge of the forest. He spotted several doves that were darting low and fast, their angular bodies slipping through the air like stealth jets. No matter his domain, he fancied himself an apex predator, yet he maintained an immense respect for wildlife.

  It was usually the humans he had the most issues with. His mother had taught him to respect nature, which was consistent with his Native American lineage. Every animal was to be respected, even if he had to kill it for food. He thought about the red wolves with which he had bonded in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge when he first returned from combat. He missed them like he missed family.

  Hearing the rumble of a vehicle to his twelve o’clock, he followed the sound as it moved from his right to his left, toward the big hilltop. Never a good idea to conduct reconnaissance in the daylight, he thought again. He mentally recorded his location, then retraced his steps back to his vehicle. That trek took him an hour, putting him into the late afternoon as he drove back toward the town of Apex, where he lived.

  He pulled into a shopping center and placed the battery in the burner phone. He had three text messages from Grace.

  Need to talk asap.

  Where r u???

  Call me!!!

  Mahegan typed in a short note.

  Date booth. 5:00 p.m.

  Instantly Grace shot back a text.

  Okay!!!

  Mahegan plugged the directions to the Cassidy home into his classified smartphone GPS and followed them through multiple suburban neighborhoods. Mahegan was glad that he did not have a life that required living somewhere like this. He was too damaged to settle into such an everyday rhythm, though maybe someday he could.

  H
is goal now was to have a brief conversation with Maeve’s husband, Pete Cassidy, and then meet Grace to warn her about her phone. As he was following the last direction of the GPS, he noticed Griffyn’s Crown Victoria speeding past him, the tires smoking and squealing beneath the sharpness of the turn and the vehicle’s acceleration. He did not believe the detective had seen him, but he couldn’t be sure. Mahegan slowed his Cherokee and watched as the car snaked its way out of the neighborhood.

  Processing what he had just seen, Mahegan parked his vehicle in front of a respectable brick-veneer colonial in the suburban neighborhood. There were similar homes packed in tight around it. Yards were small but well kept. He noticed there were few trees and guessed this had been farmland at one time. The driveway was empty, but the windowless two-car garage door was closed.

  Walking up the driveway and stepping onto the brick and cement porch, Mahegan listened as if he was in combat, with a lull in the shooting, sensing what might come next. He couldn’t hear footsteps, a television, or a radio. The intermittent squeals of children playing in the neighborhood rang through the air like bird-calls. In contrast, this house was deathly quiet. Mahegan would have expected a police cruiser or ongoing protection, given Pete’s wife’s status and the fact that they had a daughter together. Maybe that was Griffyn’s duty. Or maybe he had driven by and noticed there was no protection, so he was racing off to coordinate a detail. But that didn’t make any sense to Mahegan, because the smart play would have been to remain in place and sync the detail over the radio.

  He pressed the doorbell, which chimed loudly. He heard no movement and pressed again. Looking down, he saw a seam between the door and the jamb. When he pulled open the storm door, it was obvious to him that someone had crowbarred the front door open. Mahegan immediately thought of the EB-5 home invasion teams. They were crude and basic. A crowbar would have been their tactic.

  Mahegan removed his captured Glock 17 from his coat and pushed his shoulder against the freestanding door. Looking left, he saw a dining room, which led to a kitchen. To his front was a stairway that led upstairs. To his right was a family room with a television. Nothing seemed immediately out of order, except the door that had been jimmied.