Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “Jimmy, go back there and check on Ting and Chun. Blow the door with C-four if you have to,” James Gunther directed. “I’m gonna take this knife and go cut up the Indian.”

  Mahegan walked back to the control room, where Maeve appeared more alert and was playing with the controls.

  “I have an idea,” she said.

  “I’m open,” he said. “Talk.”

  “This channel is very narrow from the base of the pool to this second kickoff point. It’s three thousand feet below ground level but only about two feet wide, maybe eighteen inches in some places where I was more precise. The volume is pi times the radius squared times the height, which, like I said, is three thousand feet. One cubic foot is seven-point-four-eight gallons, so you’ve got to get word to the nuclear plant that they have to replace 281,990 gallons of water if I can block it at this kickoff point.”

  “You can collapse it at the kickoff point?” Mahegan asked, pointing at the display, which showed the vertical channel from the pool to where it made a horizontal turn, the kick off point.

  “I can try. Had to do this once in Pak. It would be better if I had the perforating charges down there, but I can chew at it with the drill and try to block it. At least I can slow down the loss of water. I’ll have to come about fifty yards back into the pipe to build a decent rock pile.”

  “And if we can’t make that happen?”

  “The pools drain, they’re all connected, and we’ve got a nuclear explosion on the East Coast.”

  “If that’s our best play, do that. I’ll try to get word to Shearon Harris,” Mahegan said.

  He had no idea how he was going to contact the nuclear plant, but then a thought occurred to him. He heard Jim, he presumed, pounding on the door.

  “Open up, Ting. Let’s go. This is our operation, too.”

  Jim’s hammering sounded like gunshots echoing down the long hallway. Mahegan looked at Maeve, who was staring at him with wide eyes. She needed him to buy her some time to collapse the channel, or they would have radioactive water spewing like a geyser into the wellhead in fifteen minutes or less.

  Sam Blackmon stared at the image of the drill bit retracting into one of the many holes it had created in the bottom of the cooling pool. Red lights were flashing and sirens were wailing, as if a bombing raid were inbound.

  “Stix, we’ve got to open the floodgates on the lake and fill the pools faster than they drain.”

  “I’m working it, boss. We haven’t rehearsed that in a year, and there’s some rust welding the door shut.”

  “Get down there with a crowbar and pry that puppy open if you have to,” Blackmon said calmly in his commander’s voice.

  “Roger that,” Stickman said. He punched a small button at the base of his ear that controlled the radio in his ear canal. “How we coming on opening the dam?” His voice was calm, like Blackmon’s. They had operated together in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, among other combat zones, and one thing they knew was that while the pressure was building, they had to react inversely, as they had trained themselves to do. The more pressure you had, the calmer you had to be.

  “I’m heading down there,” Stickman said.

  “Boots on the ground. Can’t beat it,” Blackmon nodded as Stickman dashed through the command center doors.

  The cooling pools were located in the basement of the nuclear reactor facility. A steady stream of water from the lake circulated through the facility, and some of it was diverted for the pools after extensive filtration and chemical testing. There would be no time for that, Blackmon thought. They would just need to bum-rush the lake water in like a flood. The idea would be to replace more than they were losing. But how the hell would they ever stop the loss with five holes in the bottom of the pool?

  Blackmon could think of one way. He was a trained frogman, a certified military diver who could swim for miles underwater. There wasn’t much Sam Blackmon couldn’t do from a combat perspective, and if saving his country meant possibly sacrificing himself at the bottom of a highly radioactive pool, then that would be a risk worth taking.

  He thought about his three daughters and his wife, who had endured their fair share of deployments and his absence from the home front. They lived in Holly Springs, North Carolina, just around the corner from the nuclear facility. Only in passing had they ever considered a nuclear catastrophe wiping out the Triangle region. It was the kind of jokey talk that he and Stickman and the rest of their buddies slung around during backyard barbecues.

  “Let me just hold this burger up. All that radiation will cook it in a minute. . . .”

  “Went fishing in the lake the other day. All the fish weighed ten pounds and had three eyes. . . .”

  That kind of thing. Meanwhile, their children would be playing in the expansive backyard, on the swing set or in the tree fort. It was about as apple pie as you could get, Blackmon thought, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  Stickman returned, breathing heavily. He knelt over in the doorway to the command center, with his hands on his knees.

  “Boss, we got it open about a foot. Damn thing is rusted bad. But water’s flowing into the holding pool.”

  “We need to make it a straight pass,” Blackmon said. “No time for chemicals or cleansing. Just need the cold water on the racks and the rods that are now lying on the bottom of the pool.”

  “Roger that.”

  Blackmon grabbed his dive suit.

  “That ain’t what I think it is, is it?” asked Stickman.

  “Depends on what you think it is.”

  “You will fry with those open racks and fuel rods down there. Ain’t nothing you can do.”

  “I can plug the gaps,” Blackmon said.

  “With what? That damn thing punched five holes in the floor. It’s all funneling out fast.”

  “I’ll try to slide some of the casks over the holes. That’ll slow it down.”

  “And then what?” asked Stickman.

  “Have the pressure washer and the soap ready for me when I get back. It’s the best we can do. Everyone needs to put hazmat suits on now.”

  Blackmon’s friend and combat buddy stared at him for an eternity, eyes locked onto his. Stickman shook his head and said, “There’s another way.”

  A security guard ran in, panting, as Stickman had before him.

  “We’ve got the valve to the lake water open more. We’ve got a hundred gallons a second coming in from the lake. We’re losing about that much, so it’s going to be close.”

  “Your dive can wait, sir,” Stickman said. “We’ve got this.”

  Blackmon suited up, walked to the air-lock chamber, and opened it with a swipe of his identification card.

  “You know me. I’ve got to be where the action is,” Blackmon said. He then stepped into the pressurized chamber, waited until the command center door closed, and pressed a button, opening the door to the stairwell that led down to the cooling pools.

  Mahegan watched Maeve maneuver the joystick.

  “I can buy you ten minutes, maybe,” he said.

  He quietly undid the locks that the Chinese had evidently put in place to keep Gunther and Throckmorton out of the control room as the mission moved into its final phase. Looking over his shoulder, he could see Maeve manipulating the drill bit as she reversed its course through the channel it had just scoured. She cursed a few times as her hand worked the joystick. Then he stepped out of the command center, into the hallway, and walked toward the door that led to the lodge. He leaned against the wall, steadied his breathing, and thought about his next move.

  The rock wall pressed into his back as he listened to footsteps scrape along the dusty cement and dirt floor that led from the lodge to the door behind which he was hiding.

  “Little bit of C-four never hurt anybody,” Mahegan heard Jim say. “Not anybody that I cared about, anyway.”

  Mahegan tucked himself into the corner of the hallway where the doorjamb was located. The blast would be on the doorknob side
of the door frame opposite his position. The door would blow outward, and the hinges next to his shoulder would either hold or be the last to give.

  Mahegan looked at Maeve through the observation window of the control room. He could see on the display that the drill bit had reached the three-thousand-foot bottom kickoff point and that she was retracting it to her fifty-yard point. He saw her angle the drill upward to try to get enough rock to fall and block the water.

  “Stand clear, Dad,” Jim said on the other side of the door. Then, from a more distant vantage, he added, “Fire in the hole!”

  The explosion was about the right size to knock a door down, Mahegan thought. The door flew open, mostly because Mahegan had removed the locks, and it still hung from the top hinge. He had braced for the blast, which landed directly on him, but his left shoulder took another hit that it didn’t need to take. In a combat situation he didn’t worry about it, but he made a note that he needed to do more swimming.

  As the smoke settled, he heard Jim say, “I’ll go in and find the Chinese. You go kick the Indian’s ass.”

  Jim stepped into the hallway. The blast had knocked out the emergency lights, which the generator had been powering. The ambient glow of the monitors cast enough light for Jim to step past Mahegan without noticing him.

  “Let me know what you got in there, son, before I drag my ass down there. Throck’s up here, moaning about his old lady.”

  “You killed my wife!” Throckmorton was repeating from beyond the hole in the wall where the door once was.

  “Shut up, Throck,” said Gunther. “I have to think of every damn thing. I’m going to go put this gun in the Indian’s hands, let him shoot it a few times against the wall so he gets some gunpowder residue on him, and then stick it in his mouth. Problem solved. I’ll even drop your wife down there with him. Make it look like a fight of some sort. Hell, she was boning everybody else. Why not the biggest guy around?”

  “Shut up, you bastard,” Throckmorton thundered.

  Smoke still hung in the air like a dense fog. Mahegan could see that Jim was focused on the lights coming from the control room. He heard him whisper, “Dear Maeve,” and was reminded that they had worked together in Afghanistan and that she had been abused in the worst possible way by him.

  Now he really needed to take Jim quietly to avoid a rush from Gunther and Throckmorton. After slipping his knife from its calf sheath, he quietly opened the blade as he moved, stepping silently onto his heel, rolling against the side of his arch, and then pushing off the ball of his foot, as he had learned from his mother in Frisco in the happy days of his childhood. Each step was a deliberate imitation of the way his forefathers had hunted for centuries. He and his mother would practice with a bow and arrow and a bale of hay as a makeshift circular target. First, the exercise was static, and he would just sit there. Next, she had him stalking “game,” which was the target. She would reset the targets every day and have Jake walk from a different direction. The hay bale would be covered with tarps, to which she had tied ropes, and his mother would pull the tarps from the bale, which was Mahegan’s signal to stop, aim, and shoot.

  He thought of his mother as he watched Jim Gunther, the son, step three feet in front of him, within arm’s reach. Mahegan could tell that Jim’s radar was up, that he knew something was not right. But to Mahegan’s advantage, Jim was moving slowly. In all of Mahegan’s days of wrestling in high school and hand-to-hand combat training in the Army, he had learned that the best takedowns were always from the rear. Surprise and shock were at a premium.

  Jim turned his head over his left shoulder, away from Mahegan, and said, “Something ain’t right. It’s just Cassidy down there in the control room.”

  Mahegan needed to act swiftly and with lethal force. Again, as always, his emotions were pushing against his rational thought. He needed logic, not passion. He was less than two feet from Jim’s back, the knife firm in his right hand. In one rapid motion Mahegan looped his arm around Jim’s neck and squeezed it like a vise, shutting down his vocal cords, and rammed the knife into Jim’s right kidney. As he felt his hand touch Jim’s back, he retracted the knife and brought it around to the front and into his gut, where he made a deep, long laceration that opened Jim’s stomach, blood and intestines spilling over his hand. For good measure, after sliding the knife into the sheath on his calf, Mahegan reached up with both hands and snapped Jim’s neck. Lowering him to the floor, Mahegan slid the body of his first true rival behind the unhinged door.

  He looked up and saw Maeve staring at him through the glass observation window, her mouth wide open in a silent scream.

  Then, in the wafting smoke, he turned and waited for James Gunther, fifteen years of anticipation surging through his veins like an electrical current.

  CHAPTER 39

  GRACE SNATCHED THE SHOTGUN FROM GRIFFYN’S HANDS, SLAMMED the stock into his stomach, and then chopped downward, striking him in the back of the head. She then performed an acrobatic twirl to sweep his legs out from underneath him with a forceful kick.

  Remembering Elaine and her ready gun, Grace called over her shoulder, “Don’t shoot him, Elaine. He needs to make a phone call.”

  “You were always a good faker, Grace,” Elaine said. Grace could hear the smile in her voice. “I’m good, though. Love it when a plan comes together. Just squeeze him, okay? He broke my nose.”

  Griffyn was on the ground, with Grace on his back, tying his hands behind his back. Mahegan’s ropes were coming in handy. The sounds were crisp and distinct in the cool night air: Griffyn’s “Oomph” from Grace’s back kick that had landed him on the ground; Grace’s voice, clear and authoritative; Elaine’s nasal wheeze as she adapted to breathing through her mouth alone. Locally, they were isolated out at the boulder that had been their hiding place for the past several weeks, as they monitored the fracking operation. In the bigger picture, their noises were drowned out by the industrial operation going on three hundred yards below them. Grace and Elaine had worked out a plan to implement if Griffyn ever compromised them. Grace would act as if she were with him, on his side, and Elaine would take the punishment, up to a point.

  “Where’s the phone?” Grace asked Griffyn.

  “You’ll never get away with this, Grace,” he said. “You’ll never live to tell about it.”

  “Means a lot coming from you, Griff, with you all tied up and everything.”

  “They’ll kill you. You know that, right?”

  “I know they’ll try.” Searching him, she found his iPhone tucked away in the inside of his North Face jacket. “Got it,” Grace said. She took Griffyn’s hand and pressed his thumb against the fingerprint sensor, activating the touch identification to open his phone.

  “You ungrateful, insubordinate slut,” Griffyn muttered when he realized what she was doing.

  “That’s one word for it,” Grace said.

  She began scrolling through the contacts and found the name Mahegan had given her, plus another that she thought might be useful. She called the first.

  Sam Blackmon was staring at the backlit fuel rod cooling pools as the water level approached the tops of the racks fifty feet below the surface of the connected pools. The water looked a mint blue, he thought. They almost looked like those high-end swimming pools in the chic hotels that dotted sandy, white Caribbean beaches. His reality, though, was very different than the images running through his mind.

  In a few minutes he would either burn to death or radiation would eat through his body. At his feet were five sheets of plywood, which he intended to drag into place over the holes in the damaged pool. He had had his crew drill holes in the center of each sheet of plywood using the tools from the reactor maintenance room. Then he had had them thread nylon cord through the holes in the plywood and tie it around the barbells they had scrounged from the weight room. The barbells would serve as sinkers, holding the plywood in place over the drilled holes.

  He bent over and lifted a fifty-pound barbell and tossed it into
the pool. The barbell pulled the four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood to the bottom of the pool quickly. That was its purpose: to hold the plywood in place against the pool floor and keep the plywood from floating to the surface. The plywood had fluttered like a giant bass lure until the barbell reached the bottom of the pool. Now the sheet of plywood was suspended vertically, as if desperately trying to reach the surface.

  He threw the remaining four barbells into the water, and they all landed in generally the same area, their respective sheets of plywood looking like arms raised, signaling for help. He adjusted the oxygen tank on his back and began to reach for his mask and regulator. In his reinforced Kevlar frogman dive suit, he carried a pistol in a watertight compartment and his cell phone in a vertical zipper pocket above his left breast. He felt the phone vibrate and considered not answering it, figuring it was probably just Stickman calling to tell him one last time not to go into the pool.

  He fumbled the phone in his gloved hands, managed to press the green ANSWER button, and growled, “Hello.”

  “Colonel Blackmon, I was told to call you by someone who calls himself Manteo Six. He said you would know what that meant.”

  Blackmon listened to the female voice, fear hanging off her words like jagged icicles. The only Manteo Six he knew was a former Delta Force operator called Chayton Mahegan, whose unit had been known as the Warriors. General Savage had adopted him as a protégé until a mission went badly in Afghanistan. Blackmon had met Mahegan a few times and knew he was legit. If Mahegan was having someone call him, it most likely was important, but he had pressing matters directly in front of him as he watched the lake water swirl into the pool too slowly.

  The brown tint indicated that Stickman had turned off the filtration system in an effort to accelerate the flow of water into the pool. They were fighting some laws of gravity, he knew, as the holes in the bottom of the pool followed a channel straight down, while the lake water flowed horizontally from the valve in the dam to the pool, like a stream. The math wasn’t working in his favor. He examined the five sheets of plywood, knowing he had to get to work.