by A. J Tata
Nodding, she sat down and began to assess the situation. As the Chinese men leaned forward and their shirt collars slid lower, she saw dark ink triangle tattoos with lines and curling notations covering about four inches of both their necks. Triad, she thought. These men belonged to the Chinese underground mafia called Triad. So this was an attack by Chinese terrorists?
“We at last concrete sleeve. You can drill at same time. Now start.”
Ting stood over her. She pushed the stick forward, then backed it up, tilting the drill bit perpendicular to the horizontal drill line. This path would take her six hours, maybe eight if she stalled. Once the drill bit began to churn through the reinforced concrete and into the cooling pools, the nuclear attack would begin. She presumed that they all felt safe down here in the Underground Railroad habitat, but she couldn’t see why. The death and destruction would be severe within twenty miles of the nuclear power plant and significant within forty miles. Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh were going to be under the dome of the radioactive meltdown. Two million people.
The Chinese men have a way out, she thought. They had to have an escape plan.
Then she thought, I can get you to Piper.
If she and Piper were going to die in a nuclear meltdown, then she would be holding Piper. What she had learned in Afghanistan was that no one ever beat the system. If this was her penance for her one-time misdeed with Jim, then it was a heavy price to pay. Maybe she still had some element of control. She was, after all, the one pushing the drill. Could she disable it and snatch Piper before they were able to accomplish their underground attack? Six hours, maybe more, maybe less.
Would the vigilante save their lives? She inexplicably visualized him as a distant, silent hawk soaring above the terrain, searching for his prey, ready to pounce once he spied his quarry.
CHAPTER 29
MAHEGAN STOOD, READY TO MOVE. HE HAD OVERSTAYED HIS welcome. Looking at Sharon Throckmorton, he saw something register in her eyes, like an acknowledgment, but not in a good way.
“Big, strong man responds to tears every time,” she said, removing a small pistol from her purse. “You’d be amazed. I had a speaking role in one of those comic book movies filmed down in Wilmington. Ted actually helped me get the part. He was always so connected.”
Looking at the gun aimed at him, Mahegan considered his options. It was a baby Glock 27, efficient enough at ten feet, which was the approximate distance between them. She was talking like a woman possessed. Either she was an adept actress, which she had just acknowledged, or she was a tough woman, used to moving from one bad situation to the next. He felt the weight of the Taurus in his pocket, as if it were urging him to use it. If this had all been a play, then he was certain the Taurus was not loaded, which left him the Russian Glock in his other pocket.
“I know about your mother. Dead mother, loving son. Loving mother, dead son. We’re not so different. I knew you would let your guard down, especially after I gave you the password. Who cares what Ted has on his computer? It’s going to burn.”
“So Ted the Shred, your son, was just another pawn in your own personal retirement plan?”
“I loved Ted. Him dying wasn’t part of this scenario. We were splitting the two hundred fifty million dollars. Half of that’s enough for anyone, don’t you think?”
Mahegan first thought about the $250 million, trying to push away the thoughts of his mother. That money would have been Ted’s cut. Then there was Brand, James Gunther, and Jim. A billion total. To do what? Siphon gas from the Durham shale and pump it where? Overseas for the Russians? Lots of logistics. Lots of risks and empty promises, in Mahegan’s view. Perhaps that worked for the Russians, but where would they get a billion dollars?
He continued to consider his options. Did she have the guts to shoot him? He wasn’t interested in finding out. She seemed just crazy enough to shoot if he made a quick movement.
“So what’s your endgame here, Sharon?”
“Me? There’s a big-ass bounty on your head. Anyone with information leading to the arrest of Jake Mahegan, former Army officer, will receive a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward. I don’t care about the reward, but I am interested in removing you from the equation.”
“So take me to this Underground,” Mahegan said. “If you don’t prevent what is really happening, that two hundred fifty million dollars is meaningless.”
Mahegan heard a truck stop outside, its engine a low rumble in the quiet night.
He had killed or injured several of the commandos, and now a fifty-something woman was pointing a gun at him, holding him in place, like a bishop checking a king’s move. She might not be a great shot, but then again, she might be an expert. Mahegan’s rule was to always give the enemy credit. He realized that his Achilles’ heel was his memory of his mother and his desire for revenge, but he needed to find a way to embrace that memory as fuel, instead of viewing it as kryptonite.
“Well, enlighten me. You said ‘terrorist attack,’” Sharon said. “What’s that mean?”
“You’re dealing with international terrorists. Chinese Triad. The Russian just wants to get the natural gas and sell it on the market. The Chinese guys are terrorists. Your deal is probably with the Russian. Right? The others are terrorists.”
“And what kind of ‘terror’ are they bringing our way?” Sharon mocked.
“My guess is that it has something to do with all these nuclear reactors. There was a drone attack on McGuire. There’s a giant bomb sitting outside of Brunswick. And nobody knows, except maybe two people, what’s going to happen to Shearon Harris.”
“Who’s that?”
“I’m sure they will make me and Maeve Cassidy good for it.”
“Then we’ve got no worries.”
“You’ve got plenty to worry about,” Mahegan said. “Unless you’re leaving the country in the next hour or so.”
What he had seen in Ted’s notes had clarified the entire mission. He had found an Excel spreadsheet filled with names and countries of origin. The only two from China were Ting and Chun. They were direct investors to the tune of a million apiece, which gave them visas. The others were the children of investors, which was the original intent of the program. Jim and Ted had been careful as they flew around the world with their shopping list. They needed young men and women who could run a fracking operation, as well as do the things Brand Throckmorton wanted done. As Mahegan had clicked down the list of names, he had noticed that each of the men had prior experience in oil or gas extraction. The women, too, had useful skills. Some were nurses, auto mechanics, or interpreters. There were eleven women, not ten, as Ted had said during his interrogation. Why had Ted lied? Or did he mean there were ten in the Underground?
Immediately he thought about Grace.
And Theresa. As in Theresa Kostrzewa, whose name was listed on the Shred’s spreadsheet. If Theresa was a double agent, this was a slicker operation than Mahegan had suspected.
Also, according to his notes, Ted had grown suspicious of the Chinese investors. In his notes, he referenced a split between him and Jim over the plan to threaten nuclear power to make the commodity price of gas rise.
“It’s one thing to steal the natural gas from the Durham shale, but entirely another thing to even hint at threatening the nuclear power plants,” Ted had written in what he’d thought were secure e-mails. And Ted had written something about Maeve Cassidy that had piqued Mahegan’s curiosity. “Jimmy and Maeve have issues.”
It got him thinking about the bonds he had forged in combat and the talk that had sometimes buoyed the spirits, lifted hope. He thought about the time that he and his friend Colgate had planned to take some of their combat pay and buy a house together in the Outer Banks. They had wanted to make an investment not only in real estate, but also in their lives and in their partnership as combat buddies. War begot isolation. It caused people to seek solutions, to find partnerships and friendships, and to unlock possibilities that had previously seemed impossible.
“Hey, Jimmy. ’Bout time you got here. Look what I found,” Sharon said gleefully.
“Had to work through some issues,” Jim said. “Good find.”
A few nights ago these two individuals had aimed weapons at Maeve Cassidy, and now they were aiming at him. Had Jim really shot her? he wondered.
“So you two are a couple?” Mahegan asked. “Teammates?”
“You might say that. She’s older, but she has some endearing qualities, don’t you think, Mahegan?”
“Certainly is a beautiful woman, if you like plastic surgery,” Mahegan said.
“You don’t remember me, do you? You was down there, about to pet that damn cottonmouth, and we shot it.”
“I remember.” It was the incident that had forever changed his life’s direction. He visualized the three kids approaching him, taunting him, slinging racial slurs like they were arrows intended to wound him.
Jim approached Mahegan, careful to stay in between Sharon and Mahegan.
Over his shoulder Mahegan called to Sharon, “You really think he’s going to go for a woman your age? Think about what he was doing in Afghanistan and who he was doing it with.”
He heard Sharon Throckmorton rustling in her handbag, and as if on cue, he felt the bite of a Taser on his back and the thud of Jim’s Arma bean bag on his rib cage. They each struck him for a different reason, he figured. Sharon struck out of anger; Jim to shut him up. As he rode the electrical current to the floor, he was vaguely aware of Jim standing over him.
As Jim reared his foot, in a steel-toed boot, back, he said, “Fifteen years ain’t such a long time, buffalo jockey.”
The boot connected with Mahegan’s head, and everything went black.
Elaine handed Grace the high-powered night-vision goggles. “Look at that truck over there, lights out, winding up the road on the east side of the wellhead. I see three heat signatures. Confirm.”
Grace took the goggles and held them to her face, steadying her elbows on the boulder. She caught glimpses through the trees of three figures, two in the front seat and one lying down in the backseat of the four-door pickup truck. “Confirmed.”
“Looked like a big guy in the backseat,” Elaine said.
“No way they got Hawthorne.”
Grace looked at Elaine, who said, “Have to consider Pink, you know?”
Grace rolled her eyes. “Enlighten me.”
“Hit the town brass knuckles . . . I hope I don’t end up in jail, but then again I don’t really care.”
“What are you saying?”
“We’re going in if they got your man.”
Grace nodded. He had “gone in” for her several times. It was only right that she do the same for him. “I’m in. Wake the girls.”
“We’re awake,” Theresa said. “And we’re not going anywhere.”
Theresa held Brandy’s neck by the crook of her arm and had a pistol to her forehead. Theresa shoved her toward the other two women and tossed her a length of rope. “You did such a good job with Ted the Shred. Show me what you can do here. Tie them up, or you get the first bullet.”
CHAPTER 30
MAHEGAN AWOKE WITH HIS HANDS TIED BEHIND HIS BACK AND HIS feet taped together with what seemed like an entire roll of duct tape. There was no light. The room felt cold and musty, like an underground tunnel. Perhaps he was in the belly of the beast, which would be just fine with him.
He lay as flat as possible and then rolled across the floor until he hit a wall. His feet hit it first, so he laid his back flat against the wall and rolled seven times, until he hit another wall. His night vision had always been superb, but he couldn’t see any distinctions in the blackness. The doctors at Fort Bragg had found that his retinas were an anomaly, in that they had a microscopic layer resembling a hawk’s tapetum lucidum, which enhanced his night vision. Yet night vision required that at least some light reflect back through the retinas. He could safely assume he was in complete blackness.
Instead, he counted. One full roll was about five feet. His math put him in a room that was thirty-five feet wide. He moved his feet perpendicular to the wall and rolled until he hit another wall. Then he measured from that wall five complete rolls. The room was wider than it was deep. He reached out with fingers to assess the texture of one of the walls. It was stone. He was lying on dirt. He scooted until he had gone around the entire room. It seemed impossible to him, but there was no door that he could find.
He found a corner and used his shoulders to rock back and forth so he could raise himself. He stood awkwardly and pressed his hands into the stones where two walls came together. As he was extending his back and pushing off the balls of his feet, his head hit the ceiling before he was fully upright. Unfortunately, the part of his scalp with a laceration from Jim’s steel-toed boot hit the ceiling first. He winced at the pain. His ribs had taken a pounding from Jim and his high-velocity bean bag. Plus, Mahegan’s back had absorbed ten million volts of electricity.
He hopped around the cell for about ten minutes, using his head to feel for any type of opening or panel. In the far corner, he gained an extra two inches of height and could almost stand completely upright. He tapped the back of his head against the structure above him and determined it was a steel panel, perhaps a trapdoor.
He used his neck muscles to press his head against the recessed panel. It was heavy, like steel, but it shifted slightly. The neck muscles weren’t the strongest muscles in the body, not by a long shot, but Mahegan’s were solid. As he flexed, his traps flared like a cobra’s hood. He pushed with the back of his head, avoiding the spot where Jim’s boot had connected with his scalp. After some effort, he pushed up on his toes and raised the panel enough to get one of its corners away from the lip of the opening the panel covered. He shuffled his feet and turned, using his neck and head to keep pressure on the metal panel, until he felt one of the other corners fall beneath the edge of the lip. He kept turning and then hopped out of the way as the heavy panel dropped into the darkness and landed with a muted thud on the dirt floor.
Light began seeping in from somewhere, perhaps three or four times removed from its original source.
As he sat next to the metal panel, his fingers felt sharp edges of cut steel. The edges had not been ground out and sanded.
He spent the next fifteen minutes maneuvering the steel panel to the farthest corner from the opening in the ceiling to minimize sound carry. He positioned the panel so that it was standing and leaning slightly into that corner of the room, thus forming a triangle with the juxtaposed walls and providing a sharp edge.
Using his left leg to hold the panel in place, he knelt, as if preparing to pray. He worked his wrists over the serrated edge of the metal, feeling the duct tape tear and loosen. His left shoulder gnawed at him, reminding him of the pain of Colgate’s loss and everything associated with losing people he loved. After a few minutes he had worked his hands free. He ripped the tape from his arms and then opened and closed his fingers to get the circulation going again. Next, he carefully unwrapped the tape from his legs, spooling it so that he could use it again if he needed to.
He stood and paced the length of the room several times to work out the soreness. The cut on his scalp was deep, but he could feel it drying. The blood was mostly caked, which he took as a good sign. Lifting the steel panel, he estimated its full weight to be over fifty pounds. He shoved it diagonally through the opening in the ceiling and then pushed it along the floor above him. Wedging his arms into the opening, he pushed himself upward until he had straightened them, as if he were performing a gymnastics stunt on pa
rallel bars. Sliding his buttocks onto the edge of the opening, he assessed his environment.
There was complete blackness in all directions, except directly ahead of him, which he calculated as north. There he could see a slight variation in the shade of black, like from midnight to onyx. It wasn’t so much that there was any light, but that there was a break in the pattern of complete blackness. Though he had escaped from the cell, he still was not outside.
He lifted the steel panel and eased it back into place. It was not an easy task, but he figured it was worth doing, as anyone checking on him would likely just inspect to make sure the panel was still intact. Mahegan walked to his right and his left, feeling the walls. They were curved and sloping. He was in a tunnel. The Underground.
Heading in the only direction that was not pitch black, after perhaps a hundred meters Mahegan found a locked iron gate at the end of the tunnel. It was shaped like the tunnel itself: half-moon at the top and straight down on the sides. The iron bars were sturdy and intact. He felt for a lock or a hasp and found a smooth metal keyhole on the exterior.
He heard the hiss of tires in the distance and the gurgle of a creek nearby. Stray noises, neither entirely woodland nor urban, clashed like the instruments in an off-key orchestra. A bird’s whistle was answered by a car’s horn. A frog’s croak by an emergency vehicle’s distant siren.
And then he heard a voice approaching. Whispers. One of the watchers.
CHAPTER 31
TING CROSSED HIS LONG LEGS AS HE WATCHED FROM THE OBSERVATION room. He noticed with amusement that Maeve Cassidy would occasionally look through the window at him with nervous eyes. He guessed that she knew what he was forcing her to do.
Drilling through the largest collection of spent nuclear fuel rods on the East Coast had been Chun’s idea, but Ting was the vanguard, the operations officer responsible for the mission. Chun was the mountain master, the leader of Triad’s U.S. division. Similar to a multinational corporation, the Chinese terrorist organization had its own organizational chart, complete with positions and duty descriptions.