Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  “I know Jake. What’s he want? I’ve got a situation on my hands.”

  “So that’s his real name? Jake?” Grace murmured.

  “Jake Mahegan. What’s he want?”

  “A fracking drill has bored a hole in the bottom of your pool,” Grace said.

  “Actually, it has bored five holes,” he said. “Tell me something I don’t know, or I’m off the phone and going in to plug the gap.”

  “He’s got someone in control of the drill, and he’s having her block the hole at three thousand feet. That means you need to get two hundred eighty-two thousand gallons of water into the pool. The hole will consume that much, at least.”

  “Okay. That’s useful. Who am I talking to?”

  “Grace Kagami. I’m with the Raleigh Police Department. I borrowed Detective Griffyn’s phone.”

  Blackmon did the math in his head. It would be an hour before he got three hundred thousand gallons into the pool. Way too long. Even their best-case estimate was ten thousand gallons a minute, which would cut it to thirty minutes. Still too long.

  “Tell Mahegan we’ve got about five thousand gallons a minute coming in from the lake right now, but I’m trying to get it to ten thousand. We’re losing it faster than we can add it.”

  “Okay. We need to notify emergency management for the state,” Grace said. “That’s not quick enough.”

  “We’re working it. Is Mahegan taking care of whoever did this?”

  “Yes, as we speak,” Grace said.

  “I wouldn’t want to be them,” Blackmon said.

  “Roger that,” Grace said.

  Blackmon hung up and tossed the phone aside. It skittered away on the concrete. He pulled his mask over his face and flopped backward into the pool.

  Grace looked at the phone and then at Elaine. “Where do we get these guys? He is about to jump in a pool of radioactive water to plug the gap.”

  “Damn.”

  “Okay, so what do we have? Mahegan with Cassidy at the drill. Blackmon jumping in the pool. Maybe the Mexicans moving to the lodge. Us watching the Russian and other roughnecks and waiting on the call to kill them.”

  “About sums it up. Plus, your boss all tied up over there.” Elaine turned her chin in the darkness toward the muted lump about twenty yards away on the dirt trail.

  “When we first started watching these guys a few months ago, did you ever think it would come to this, Elaine?”

  “I knew it wouldn’t end well, but, no, nothing like this.”

  Grace and Elaine knelt behind the boulder, using night optics to look into the lighted pit below, where Petrov was screaming at five or six men. Through her optic, Grace saw one of the men shout at Petrov as he threw something over his shoulder toward the well. Immediately, Petrov scrambled toward the open hole. He wrestled the cap into place and then backed away, as if running from a crazed animal.

  They stared in amazement as the metal cap covering the well pipe blew into the sky like a Frisbee, chased by fire leaping hundreds of feet into the air.

  Mahegan let the smoke clear and walked into the large den of the lodge. He saw the Civil War–era knickknacks hanging from the fireplace mantel like trophies. He looked in every direction, only to see an open front door and headlights backing away. As the truck turned, the lights briefly highlighted the dead body of Sharon Throckmorton.

  Gunther was heading either to the wellhead or to the rear entrance of the Underground Railroad tunnel that connected to the lodge. Now that he was out of it, Mahegan could picture the layout of the entire tunnel. The tunnel opened to the north and connected at this location about a mile to the south. Runaway slaves would follow the streambeds that today formed Harris and Jordan Lakes. They would huddle at the base of the high ground, where Throckmorton would later build his lodge. An old copper mine, most likely, provided safe passage beneath the ridge and west of Raleigh to the road that led farther west toward the Piedmont. There Levi Coffin’s efforts had already paved the way for slaves to escape to the Northwest Territory, and away from Virginia, the cradle of the Confederacy.

  Mahegan walked past Sharon Throckmorton’s body and through the doorway, which was singed black from the explosives, and stepped over Jim Gunther’s body. He saw Maeve Cassidy working diligently in the control room.

  As he approached the door, she said, “I think I’ve got it.” She pointed at the monitor that showed the three-thousand-foot drop from the nuclear plant, then the right-angled turn that was collapsed a few inches from the bend.

  “Good. Can you pull the drill out and shoot more fracking fluid down the hole?” Mahegan asked. “If we push fluid down, it will help stop the flow of the radioactive waste.”

  “I don’t control that from here. Those guys do,” Maeve said. She pointed at the monitor that showed Petrov waving his arms wildly at the other men near the wellhead. “Someone would have to put the hose they have into the pipe and shoot the fracking fluid in. Then I can modulate the flow.”

  “Okay. I’ll go down there and get it in. Which hose?”

  Maeve moved the camera and showed Mahegan the fracking fluid hose system fifty feet from where Petrov was standing. “That one,” she said, pointing at the screen again.

  “Okay. Give me ten minutes.”

  As he turned to leave the tunnel, he heard Maeve say, “Oh, no.”

  Looking over his shoulder at the monitor, he saw Petrov arguing with a roughneck who was smoking a cigarette. The man was openly defiant toward Petrov and, gearing up to fight him, tossed the cigarette, perhaps without realizing that it might land in the well. The flaming ember flew into the open hole and down the pipe. Seeing the danger, Petrov quickly hefted the cap on the wellhead and backed away, shouting at his men, eyes wide with fear. The cap blew off the wellhead, and flame erupted into the night sky, beyond the top of the HD monitor.

  “How did that happen? I thought you said the real vein was blocked,” Mahegan said.

  “It was. There’s always leakage, though. You can never get it airtight. And you can’t smell the gas like in your home. The power companies put that smell in there to avoid liability if there’s a leak.”

  “I don’t guess you’ve got any experience with or opinion on what this will do to the nuclear waste.”

  “Well, the fire will carry the radioactive isotopes up with it. You can’t burn the neutrons, but you can spread them, so instead of destroying radiation, fire rearranges it, spreads it. That’s why Chernobyl was so bad. Look at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Same thing.”

  “You’re pumping me full of confidence here, Maeve. How do you shut down the fire?”

  “There’s a shutdown valve at the wellhead, and the wheel to it is about fifty yards in the other direction from the fracking fluid hose. You’ve got to turn the big wheel, and it caps the well about a hundred yards below the ground.”

  “Either way, I’ve got to go down there.”

  “Yes.”

  Mahegan turned and ran through the burned-out door, avoiding the dead bodies, and scrambled through the den until he reached the lodge’s front door. He wheeled around the side of the building and followed the trail to the wellhead. The fire illuminated his path, the shadows dancing like black ghosts. He remembered there was a fence, one he had helped build several days ago.

  The gate was open, most likely because of the chaos of the evening. All Mahegan could think about was the fire collecting the invisible nuclear waste and spreading it like pollen through the crystalline night air, poisoning everything and everyone for possibly thousands of years.

  Rounding the corner beyond the roughnecks’ trailers, Mahegan could feel the heat licking at his skin. He saw five men backing away but staring at the fire, unaware of the lethal blend that was about to spew forth. He pulled out his cell phone and called Grace.

  “I’m coming up on the wellhead. Shoot Petrov and the others. Just don’t shoot me.”

  “We see you,” Grace said. “Be careful.”

  Mahegan put the silenced phone in
his pocket and paused, giving Elaine a moment to hit a few of them. Moving toward the fracking fluid system, he found the hose, which looked like a giant flexible tube. He secured the nozzle to the frame of the rig so that the spray would be generally in the direction of the wellhead. After studying the system, he texted Maeve and told her to shoot the fracking fluid when she saw him moving toward Petrov on the monitor.

  She replied, Roger.

  Grace spotted for Elaine.

  “Okay, Petrov is the prime target. He’s the one facing the other five guys. See if you can hit him.”

  A few seconds later the rifle coughed, and Petrov slapped at his arm, as if he’d been stung. He looked up in their direction. Grace heard another cough from Elaine’s gun, and Petrov went down to one knee.

  “This sight is good,” Elaine said.

  Grace heard the selector switch click and was momentarily confused, thinking Elaine was placing the weapon on safe. But then she heard three successive coughs in a row. Elaine had put the weapon on semiautomatic. She was firing into the group of men.

  Grace’s phone buzzed again. It was Mahegan.

  “Tell her to stop. I’ve got it from here. If she sees someone coming after me, she can try to hit them, but she damn well better not shoot me.”

  “He said good job, but cease fire,” Grace said to Elaine. “Shoot if someone gets near him.”

  Elaine looked up. “I heard him.”

  Grace looked through the goggles and saw Mahegan barreling toward the wounded Petrov. Then she saw a solid stream of fracking fluid disappear into the fire.

  Mahegan took in Petrov’s condition. The man appeared to have two wounds, one in the shoulder and one in the leg. Not bad, Elaine, Mahegan thought. Three of the other men were down, also, and two of them appeared dead. Another man, who was not wounded, had run toward him and past him without stopping.

  He didn’t waste any time on Petrov. Mahegan removed his pistol from his pocket and shot Petrov in the head. The Russian died, backlit by a fire that might kill them all, anyway.

  Mahegan felt the spray from the fracking fluid slap into his back like pellets shot from an air rifle. He angled away from the fire and found the apparatus that controlled the shutdown valve that Maeve had described. There it was before him, a giant wheel, like a ship’s helm. The temperature had to be at least 150 degrees where he was standing. His clothes were hot to the touch. He removed his shirt and wrapped it around the hot metal of the wheel, forming a barrier. Using his body to pivot into the device, he turned the wheel, felt it give, and pushed some more. He dug his heels into the dirt and pulled down on one of the spokes, trying to move the wheel in a clockwise direction. He felt it give, exerted more pressure, and felt it give again.

  Sweat streamed from every pore of his body, only to evaporate in the intense heat. The hairs on his arms were singed. As he leaned forward, his metal belt buckle pushed into his abdomen, searing the skin beneath his navel. Again he pulled, and again the wheel responded, this time with less resistance. So he pulled with everything he had, his own lightning bolt scar screaming at him with pain, and he finally felt the wheel turn freely. The heat lessened as he pulled again. He felt something click into place and turned to see that the fire was gone.

  Then he heard gunfire about a half a mile away, to the east of the lodge. It wasn’t the watchers. They were to the west.

  He walked toward the trailers, exhausted, and sat down against a blown-out tire on one of the big trucks. He watched the fracking fluid, which was mostly water, spray the entire gravel and dirt area that had been charred by the fire. The real issue now was at the nuclear plant. Could they get water into the pool quickly enough? His phone buzzed with a call from Grace.

  “Yes?”

  “Damn bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Did you get in touch with Blackmon?”

  “Yes. He was going into the pool to cover the holes.”

  Mahegan thought a minute. Made sense. Then, remembering the shots just fired, he asked, “What’s that shooting?”

  “We saw some flashes at the lodge. My guess is the Mexicans are in a gunfight while everyone is trying to leave.”

  “Try calling them on that cell phone. Then call me back.”

  Within a minute Grace called him.

  “Gunther answered.”

  CHAPTER 40

  AT SIXTY FEET DEEP IN THE SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL ROD COOLING pool, Sam Blackmon’s handheld gamma-ray spectrometer was pegging off the chart. The device looked like a flashlight with a handle, except it read the type and amount of radioactive material present. Through his diver’s mask he could see the darkened lake water rushing past him, while his legs felt the tug of the water being sucked into the drilled holes in the bottom of the pool.

  Figuring he was already fried, Blackmon went to work. He let the spectrometer hang from its tie-down on his wet suit and moved the fifty-pound barbells and plywood as close to the holes as possible. The idea was to have the weights dangle in the holes. That, coupled with the force of the water, would hold the plywood in place, staunching the flow of water out of the pool. At least that was the theory.

  He lifted one barbell with each hand, tugging two sheets of plywood behind him. He found the holes and had to stand about fifteen feet away from the closest one to prevent himself from being sucked into the vortex. Even then, he was challenged to fight the pull of the rushing water into the five holes, which by now had collapsed into about three. He fought the undertow as if he were fighting a riptide at a North Carolina beach, feeling the water sweep between his legs and around his body. The plywood caught the current when he held his arms out, as if he were performing the iron cross on gymnastics rings. He let go of the barbells, and one sheet of plywood slapped onto one hole, covering it perfectly, the suction centering the rectangle. The other piece of plywood got caught sideways in one of the combined holes and was sucked into the channel, reminding Blackmon that something four feet wide could vanish into the abyss.

  He fought his way back to grab two more of the barbells and had more success this time, covering the larger crevice with one sheet and then another smaller hole with another sheet, which left one more vacuuming hole to his left. Bernoulli’s equation kicked in, though: the narrower the gap, the greater the acceleration of the fluid. He returned to the edge of the pool, where he had dropped the plywood and the barbells, and hoisted the remaining barbell and sheet of plywood. He trudged through the swirling water. He felt himself becoming weak and dizzy. His strength was ebbing as he felt the floor of the pool begin to tremble, as if the massive suction from beneath was going to cave in the entire structure.

  Struggling over the spent fuel rods, which had been pulled toward the remaining hole, he felt his leg hit one as he tripped. His face smashed into the bottom of the pool, fracturing his mask. Water was running through the cracks. The rushing water pulled at the plywood, and he lost his grip on the barbell, which immediately wrapped around one of the fuel rods. He removed his knife from its ankle sheath and cut the nylon cord as he gripped the plywood in his other hand. Holding the sheet of plywood above his head, Sam Blackmon ran in slow motion through the swirling water toward the black hole. Upon finding it, he leapt directly into the abyss, assisted by the flowing current, and felt his fingers being crushed beneath the weight of the board as it was sucked onto the pool floor. He thought of his wife and children and the country he had served in combat as his hands eventually slipped free.

  He was unconscious by the time he was pulled three thousand feet into the core of the earth.

  CHAPTER 41

  MAHEGAN FOUND THE KEYS IN ONE OF THE BLACK FORD F-150 pickup trucks that had been the standard vehicle for the EB-5 commandos. He turned the ignition and slammed the truck into gear, then bounced past the terrain scorched as black as midnight. He stopped the truck when he saw a figure about a hundred yards away walking through the smoke, like a fighter pilot emerging from a blazing crash.

  Smoke still billowed from things burning
: rubber tires, gasoline engines, and some of the trailers. To Mahegan, it looked exactly like a combat zone, which, of course, it was. He called Maeve on his cell phone as he stared at the figure walking toward him.

  “Sitrep,” he demanded. Mahegan knew that a soldier like Maeve would understand the acronym for “situation report.”

  “I’ve collapsed the parallel channel about sixty yards out. My drill bit is done, but I think we’re okay so far. The fire actually helped underground. It melted some of the junk down there and helped firm up the stopgap I created.”

  “So we’re okay?”

  “I think so. Good job on the fire.”

  “Have you seen Gunther or Throckmorton?” Mahegan kept his eyes on the man walking steadily toward him from between the burning trailers.

  “No. Place is like a ghost town. I don’t hear anything except the wailing banshees down in the tunnel, where you stashed them. If they escape, I could be toast.”

  “I need you to stay with the drill in case the team inside the reactor needs you. And turn off the fracking hose.”

  “No problem. I said I’d make amends. Plus, I’ve got this pistol you left me.”

  “I can’t make any promises, but I’ll do what I can,” Mahegan said.

  “How’s Piper?”

  “She’s with the watchers, so she’s good.”

  Mahegan hung up the phone. He had a decision to make: stay here and fight whoever was coming at him or go to Throckmorton’s house, to which he believed Gunther and Throckmorton would ultimately return. Watching the outline of the hulking figure wade through the smoke, he thought back to that first time he had stepped into Brand Throckmorton’s house.