Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “I’m your mother,” Maeve said. “I was gone for a long time in the Army. I left when you were three, and now you’re four. Remember I came home and saw you a few days ago?”

  “I’m Barbie’s mama,” Piper replied. She stared her mother in her face, a dawning of recognition descending upon her. “Mama!”

  Piper’s arms were around her neck in a flash. From stranger to hero in an instant. It was nourishment for Maeve’s empty soul. The one thing worth living for had reconnected with her and given her a reason not only to live but also to thrive, to find a way out of this predicament.

  As she squeezed her child tightly, the lights went out, and everyone started screaming.

  James Gunther Sr. stood in the den of the hunting lodge, impatient and curious. He turned to Throckmorton.

  “What the hell them Chinese up to in there?” Gunther asked.

  “Something to do with the second cut,” said Throckmorton. “It’s not going how it should, apparently. You guys know anything?” Throckmorton turned to his wife, Sharon, who sat idly in one of the overstuffed leather chairs. She was smoking a cigarette and looking at Jim, who was chewing on a toothpick, his hat on backward.

  Looking back at her husband, Sharon said, “We caught the Indian. Isn’t that enough?”

  Throckmorton turned away from her caustic comment and looked at Gunther, who shook his head as if to say, “Can’t you control your own wife?”

  Jim shrugged and said, “Well, it’s true. We did. Good teamwork. Them roughnecks been trying for days. Sharon and me trapped him.”

  “I appreciate that, son. I do,” said Gunther. “But bringing him into the Underground was a bad idea.”

  “Why’s that, Dad? He don’t even know where he is. We kept him alive, like you asked. Everything will have his prints on it. We’ll let Griffyn take him in.”

  The elder Gunther nodded. “We sure it’s the same guy?”

  “He recognized me from the river, fifteen or sixteen years ago.”

  Gunther nodded again, then looked at the monitor that showed the wellhead. Men were kneeling over the cable and removing one basketball-sized object and adding another. Gunther recognized that they were replacing the drill bit.

  “Okay. I’ll go rough him up in a while,” he said. “In the meantime, they’re changing the drill bit now, and I see they’ve got double the explosives loaded for this blast. This is not good, Throck. I’m thinking we need to take charge of these guys, give them a little less rope.”

  “You have always worried too much, James. It has been the hallmark of your career.”

  “Worry is what has made me successful. I’ve got a construction enterprise over five states along the Eastern Seaboard. I employ over two thousand people. I get things done. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a bunch of Chinese and Russians tell me how to suck the egg. We were doing just fine until Mahegan showed up. Now that we’ve got him in the bag, we can cruise along, get the gas into the pipeline down to the port, and have Petrov sell it for us. What the hell we need the Chinese guys for?”

  “They have all the computer programming,” Jim said. “All the equipment.”

  “It’s more than that,” Gunther said. ”We’re going to have to duke it out with them here pretty soon. I can feel it. Get your weapons and get Griffyn. Let’s round up the crew after they change the drill bit and have us a powwow.”

  Throckmorton stared at Gunther. “You’re serious. You think this is going to hell in a hand basket?”

  “I don’t think it is. I know it is. I can feel it like I can feel a bad summer cold front. We’re going to have us a good old-fashioned shoot-out if we’re not careful. The only good thing, like I said, is that my son and your wife took that Indian off the playing field. One less thing to worry about.”

  Throckmorton walked to the door leading to the Underground operation. He tugged on it and looked at Gunther. “They’ve locked it.”

  “Well, get the key. Don’t we have it?”

  “No. What he’s saying is that they’ve locked it from the inside,” Jim said. “Only way in there is through the tunnel about a mile from here, where we dumped the Indian.”

  “Or to blow it,” his father said. “We got explosives.”

  CHAPTER 34

  MAHEGAN WHISPERED TO GRACE, “NO TALKING,” AND THEN they moved toward the gate, where Mahegan could get satellite reception.

  Picking through his duffel bag, Mahegan secured a flashlight, his government cell phone, a burner phone, two pistols with four magazines, and his knife. He gave a pistol and a flashlight to Grace, who already had her burner cell phone. They sat against the wall of the musty tunnel, listening to dripping water that sounded like sonar or radar pings in the distance. The gray relief that marked the opening to the tunnel was too far in the distance to be discernible. Mahegan’s secure government-issued phone showed one message from Savage. He read it and digested it as it disappeared before his eyes in usual Zebra message fashion.

  The attacks on Brunswick and McGuire were decoys. The natural gas ship had no explosives and a confused captain. The drone that had been launched at McGuire was impotent, a mere test of the facility’s defenses. Mahegan figured that Throckmorton could say that they were running defensive maneuvers to ensure that their security status was up to par. Meanwhile, though, the energy markets had crashed, except for natural gas and oil, which had acted inversely to the companies with large nuclear holdings.

  Mahegan typed a note back to Savage, giving him an update on his status and what he believed to be the real threat. To his surprise, Savage responded immediately. Savage’s message was ominous.

  No time to lose. Drive on.

  It was exactly what he had thought and said to the watchers. He powered down his government cell phone and tossed it in the bag. If someone tried to open the phone with the wrong password, the device would completely zero out its contents and become a useless piece of plastic.

  With the knife strapped to his calf, he placed a pistol in each front pocket of his black cargo pants, and two magazines in each of the rear pockets. Brandishing the flashlight like a saber, Mahegan moved cautiously deeper into the tunnel, inspecting the walls, looking for doors and hidden passageways. Grace followed quietly. The tunnel had been used to support the Underground Railroad, an escape route for slaves migrating north as they attempted to flee the ravages of their masters. Mahegan had felt hash marks on the walls of his cell, and the tunnel that showed signs of hope and despair beneath the weakening beam of light. A diagonal slash through a set of four vertical hash marks indicated that someone had counted and waited for their fate to change.

  Instead of escaping from the tunnel, though, Mahegan was walking into its darkest depths. Evil had existed here before—slaves had been trapped and murdered for attempting to escape—and a foreboding surrounded Mahegan, like a python slowly wrapping itself around his body, squeezing his lungs, dimming his senses, and stripping him of his sensory powers.

  He was on his hands and knees now, the tunnel rapidly closing in on all sides. He found another gate, half the size of the first one. On his knees, he wrestled with Theresa’s key, and it worked. As he pushed the gate, it squeaked on rusty hinges. The tunnel walls began to close in again, and he was wondering if he had missed the entrance to the drilling operation. It had to be somewhere along this azimuth.

  He had studied the compound from his position in the front seat of Griffyn’s vehicle as he had performed the spoiling attack, memorizing it like a battle plan map. The house was the centerpiece, and the tunnel spanned beneath it and to the left, when he looked at the house from the front. That would put north to his back, as it was now. He was moving south, toward the tornado shed doors on the side of the house. His mind mapped out where he thought he should come out in the house, which was about one-third on the left-hand side, the side that he believed Gunther had been watching from the window when he had conducted the spoiling attack.

  He looked back at Grace, who nodded in the
darkness. She was good to go.

  Then he found it. Looming before him was a small ladder, and it led to a door on the tunnel’s ceiling that looked like a manhole cover. He could sense people above him, milling about. Feet padded quietly, as if the floor was insulated. He heard the low rumble of voices speaking unintelligible words. Some were shouts, and some were whispers. He could hear the hushed tones of those trying to stay safe, along with the harried pitches of those who were worried about something. Stampeding boots and shoes loosened dirt from above him, the grains dancing along his back like thousands of tiny spiders.

  He could find no light at the gaps in the manhole cover and thought he heard the words, “Power out!” The watchers, Elaine and Brandy, must have shut down the electricity, their first task. While he suspected that any respectable industrial operation would have backup generators, shutting down the power lines coming into the Throckmorton property would give their enemies one more thing to do while he tried to find a way to stop the drill and the rest of the operation.

  He held up a hand in front of Grace’s face, indicating for her not to follow him. This was her position, and he would come back to her. She nodded in understanding. Mahegan leaned forward and placed his back against the manhole-sized door and pressed against it, as if pushing up from a power-lifting squat. He felt the cover give, heard it squeak, and finally felt it lift free. It must not have been opened recently, as rust flakes fluttered in front of his eyes. He immediately saw feet darting in both directions. Chaos was brimming, which was always a good time to make an entry.

  Mahegan pushed up from the tunnel and into the blackness. There still was no ambient light. Shouts echoed back and forth, mostly cries of concern from women. These must be the sex workers, Mahegan thought. He had seen eleven female names on Ted the Shred’s EB-5 list. His guess was that Piper was located somewhere with this group and that one of the women was in charge of the child. The men were animals, but Mahegan didn’t think they had it in them to kill a child.

  The bulk of the shouts were coming from his right, so he moved to his left, where he figured the child might be. In the darkness, he was just another confused denizen roaming the labyrinth, seeking safety.

  According to Mahegan’s last hearing test, he ranged in the top 1 percent of humans, putting him near the range of the owl he had spotted the other evening. In elementary music class his teacher had told him he had perfect pitch, meaning he could recognize any musical tone without having heard it before. He also could distinguish between the slightest differences in tones. Mahegan’s ability to discern pitch and tone explained his later ease with Asian languages, such as Mandarin. Since it featured differing pitches and inflections, Mandarin was a challenge for the most earnest student, yet Mahegan had mastered it easily.

  Knowing that part of combat was leveraging his innate abilities to his advantage and to his opponents’ disadvantage, he listened as he walked. Listening was a skill, one requiring him to shut down other stimuli. His mind locked in on his audible capabilities, and he listened for tonal differences, listened for the cry of a child. He brushed past smaller people, mostly women moving in each direction, some with purpose and some without.

  One woman stopped him and grabbed him, asking, “Where should we go?” in a thick Russian accent.

  Mahegan said nothing and guided her slightly in the opposite direction.

  After he had taken exactly twenty-four steps from the manhole-cover door, he heard the distinct whine of a young girl.

  “Mommy, I’m scared!”

  The voice was coming from his two o’clock, at a distance of about fifteen yards. It was muffled, and most likely, the child was behind a door or a wall.

  “Please, Mommy, don’t leave me.”

  “It’s okay, baby. I’ll be back. I love you.”

  Mahegan knew intuitively that the voices belonged to Maeve and Piper Cassidy. It was a stroke of timing that he had found them together.

  From a distance to his rear came an Asian male voice.

  “Bring Cassidy back! We have generators up in five minute.”

  Mahegan placed the dialect as from either northeastern China or Beijing, but most likely Beijing.

  “Come. Now!” This was the voice of a woman about ten yards ahead of Mahegan. He determined that Maeve most likely had a guard or an escort if she was visiting with her child.

  Task number one, then, to Mahegan, was to kill the guard. He pulled his Duane Dieter Spec Ops knife from its sheath as he walked toward a shape in the darkness. In stride, Mahegan clasped his hand over the woman’s mouth as he pulled the knife across her throat. He didn’t relish killing a woman, but she was not on his side. Lowering the dying guard to the ground, Mahegan distinguished an open door.

  “Bring the child,” Mahegan said to Maeve, who was inside a room.

  There was a pause. Then, “Mommy. Yes. I want to go with you.”

  Then, “Who is that?” in another female voice.

  Mahegan stepped into the room, immediately doing the friend-or-foe calculation. Two friends, the mother and child to his right, and a possible bogey to his left. He reached out to the one he believed was Maeve Cassidy, placed his hand on her arm, and said, “Bring Piper. Now.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Who are you?” the third voice asked. Mahegan detected an East European accent, most likely Bosnian.

  “No time. Let’s move, Captain,” Mahegan said, pulling rank.

  He guided Maeve and Piper from the room and into the diminishing chaos. The disorganization following the power outage had led to the almost acceptable rhythm that, Mahegan had noticed, followed all chaotic situations. The fear led to people seeking and finding some type of certainty, which led to calm, which eventually gave way to forward thinking and momentum.

  “Where Cassidy?!” It was the same voice that had been behind him before, but it was closer this time. Definitely, a Beijing dialect of Mandarin.

  “Wait. Take me,” the female East European voice called out from behind.

  Mahegan had Maeve, who was holding on to his arm while she was tugging on Piper.

  “Mommy, where are we?”

  Mahegan whispered to Maeve, “Tell him you’re coming.”

  “I’m on the way,” Maeve shouted to the Chinese voice up ahead.

  “Hurry up, Cassidy. Where Kosovic?”

  Mahegan figured Kosovic was the guard he had just killed. He picked up his pace until he was five yards in front of the Chinese man. Still holding the knife in his hand, he flipped it into the broadest area he could distinguish in the dark and heard the blade penetrate the man’s chest. Mahegan closed the distance quickly and snapped his neck, then quietly laid the man on the ground. He noticed the man was fleshy and overweight. Not especially tall, the dead man was either an accountant or a programmer for the operation. Mahegan figured it was either Ting or Chun, as Ted’s list had only two Chinese names. The dead man was different than the hired muscle Mahegan had been fighting for days. Mahegan retrieved his knife with a wet, sucking sound.

  He turned to the second woman, who was still with Maeve. “You have five minutes to round up every one of your friends, including the wounded in the beds, and lock them in that room where Piper was being held. If you do that, you can come with me.”

  “Not my friends, but I do it.” There was a hint of desperation in her voice. She moved swiftly back into the tunnel, barking commands, “Everybody. Emergency. Into baby room. Now!”

  Satisfied that the woman was making progress, Mahegan stepped up to the manhole cover, raised it, fed Piper down the hole, felt Grace take her, and then stopped Maeve.

  “I don’t know how deeply you are involved in this scheme, and I don’t really care. What I do need to know is how bad the situation is,” he said.

  Maeve hesitated. He saw her look over her shoulder. “Not here,” she said. “In the hole. Wherever that goes. With Piper.”

  Mahegan lowered Maeve into the hole, and Grace was quickly upon her, placing
a strip of tape across her mouth and a pair of flex cuffs from Mahegan’s bag around her wrists.

  Remaining on one knee above the manhole cover, Mahegan counted in his head to five minutes, but he never reached the number before the woman returned.

  “Done,” she said. “I go with you now.”

  “Why?” Mahegan asked.

  “I’m not like the others. I want freedom in America.”

  That was good enough for Mahegan.

  “Got another one,” Mahegan said as he lowered the East European–accented woman into the hole. Mahegan followed her and closed the manhole cover.

  “You’ve got five minutes to give me the layout and tell me how to stop this nuclear attack.” He removed the tape from Maeve’s mouth, but left the cuffs in place for the moment.

  “So, you know?”

  “I know everything except for how far you’ve gotten,” he said.

  “The drill bit burned out. I was torqueing it at the highest RPMs, trying to buy some time. I’m not in on the nuke thing. I was in it for the money, but it’s not what you think.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Not so great. But I can make amends.”

  “In part. If you tell me. Now talk,” Mahegan urged.

  “You need me to do this. I can go back in there and act like I’m going to finish the job. The two Chinese guys locked everyone else out. They’re in the final phase. They have an airplane waiting to take them out of RDU before the radiation happens. They’re Triad.”

  “I know who they are.”

  Maeve paused. “You’re the guy. The Indian.”

  “That’s me. How does the drill work? Can anyone do it?”

  “It’s at a point where a chimp could get in there and push the drill forward until it breaks through the concrete pools. I’m sure that’s what’s happening. It’s all electronics. The Chinese have wired it, and I’m sure they have backups. They also made it look like I was drilling northwest, when the drill was actually going southeast. But they’ve got to either change the worn drill bit or override the sensor that automatically prevents the bit from exploding. They’ve got perforating charges ready to go, also.”