by Chuck Logan
Broker heard a second siren. A Red Wing police cruiser skidded through the gate, then fishtailed, knocking down a section of fence. The cruiser slid to a stop, and a young copper jumped out, eyes like shiny ball bearings staring out of his haunted face.
He knew.
Without a word, he jumped forward to help Broker and Yeager thread the thick cable around the bucket arm of the 644. Yeager showed them how to set the pin. Staining shoulder to shoulder they wrestled the cable. Close in. Faces in hell-a local cop, Yeager, the guy with the beer gut and the big arms and the faded Corps tat. He hadn’t bothered to give a name. He just started driving the dozer.
Where the hell was Holly? Then Broker spotted him running back from the dirt pile.
The driver pulled back on his controls, stood up in his seat, and inspected the cable rigged to the Deere bucket. He nodded his approval, sat back down, reeled in his cable, and then raised the blade on the dozer. Everyone on the ground stepped back as the driver hoisted the bucket until the cable was taut. Hydraulics screamed, black smoke spewed, and he raised the blade some more until the front wheels of the Deere 644 came off the ground.
They all braced. Nothing happened.
Holly reappeared, climbed up, and had a shouted back-and-forth with the driver. Then he leaped down, briefly took Yeager aside, and then came up to Broker and the cop.
“Me and the driver got it. Everybody else get outta here,” Holly ordered as he reached in his jeans pocket.
Broker stared at him. “What do you mean, out of here? Where we gonna go? What the fuck is danger-close on a nuclear meltdown?”
Holly pulled a bundle of tiny chain from his pocket, clapped it in Broker’s hand. Closed his hand over it.
“What this?” Broker said.
“Nina’s dog tags. Hang on to them.”
Broker stared at the silver wafer of metal on the beaded chain, shook his head.
Holly narrowed his pale eyes to slits in a mask. Doing one of those fucking warrior-statue numbers. “Listen, asshole,” he yelled. “Kit may be down to one parent. I ain’t gonna leave her with none. Now move out.” A plume of dark smoke framed Holly as the bulldozer trundled on, dragging the dangling loader on its back wheels toward the ditch.
Broker stuck the tag and chain in his pocket. “You need a ground guide,” he shouted.
“I’m guide,” Holly shouted back. He motioned, signaling to someone. Stabbing his finger.
Broker moved to protest, then the back of his head exploded-star-bursts fading to black. Going down, he tried to call their names: Nina, Kit. But no sound came.
Chapter Forty-five
First Dale took the 500 mg of Prussian blue. Then he took the potassium iodide. Just in case the wind changed on him. But he didn’t think it would, because it had been holding steady all day.
He was driving due west on a back-roads two-lane blacktop, holding a steady hundred yards behind George’s Lexus. The surrounding farmland was more populated than he was used to back home. Holstein cattle. Dairy farms. Big barns with Dutch gambrel roofs. It was hard to see very far in this rolling landscape, the way everything was close in. He’d lost the sky.
He crossed I-35, the main north-south corridor in lower Minnesota, and continued driving west on the solitary road. Almost half an hour since they left. How much longer? He picked up his cell, tapped in George’s number, connected, and said, “Hey, George, let’s flip the switch.”
“A little more. When we turn south on 169,” George said.
Dale put the phone down, sucked his teeth, looked around briefly, then concentrated on the road ahead. The way the land was, they’d never see it go off. Might not even hear it. But it should rattle the windows a little. He turned and looked back at the drawn curtain.
And then…
Nina, drenched in sweat, was thankful for sick favors. Dale’s excitement had distracted him from sticking her with the ketamine again. She had a lucid window. She listened to the weather report on the radio updating the day’s forecast: Current conditions, sunny; 85 degrees Fahrenheit; dew point 64 degrees Fahrenheit; humidity 49 percent, visibility unlimited; pressure 30.00 inches and steady…
Wind from the north northwest at 9 mph.
So he must be driving west, into the wind, just like he’d told her. How much room did they want between themselves and the…Her mind balked at the image of a nuclear plant erupting in a radioactive fire.
Assume the worst. He’ll blow the plant. Unless I can get off this bed…
And do my job.
She needed to get at least one hand free. She needed him within striking distance of that hand.
The last self-defense course Nina had taken was conducted by an affable Green Beret at Fort Bragg. He began his class with an observation from the current fad of no-holds-barred Ultimate Fighting. He pointed out how there were only two rules in Ultimate Fighting matches: no eye-gouging and no blows to the throat.
In his first class, therefore, he taught Nina how to gouge out an opponent’s eyeball. She lay on her back, blindfolded. An instructor straddled her. He wore heavy safety glasses and he held two oranges tight against the goggles, to simulate eyes.
Nina’s job was to struggle up, find his head, locate the eyes, and drive her thumb through the orange peel, into the pulp and dig it out. The minute her thumb touched the orange the instructor started screaming and thrashing wildly. The idea was to overcome the normal human resistance to making contact with the visceral fluids and matter of the eyeball. Once you got past the aversion…the eye socket being a fertile nest of nerve endings, not only blindness but unconsciousness was a certain result.
She pictured Dale’s flat blues eyes as targets.
No problem.
Time to get to work. She visualized the muscles of her arm and shoulder. Angles, leverage, the structure of the bed. Okay. This time for real. Painfully, she rotated her right hand counterclockwise in the tightly wrapped cords, encountered the sharp edges of the crimped hooks, and wrenched past them, ripping her flesh to the bone.
Now her palm had turned 180 degrees, so it lay flat along the sideboard. She raised her shoulder, thrust down, and hooked her fingers on the bottom of the board.
Okay.
She had to perform two separate operations. The first was gymnastic, a matter of timing. Slowly, she diagramed the physics involved. She’d brace her left hand and both feet on the sideboards, push down and vault her body up, taking pressure off the mattress and springs. During the split second her weight was in the air she would have to jerk upward with her right hand, dislodging the slotted sideboard as she heaved her head back against the headboard. She had been practicing this move and had felt the sideboard almost come free.
The test would be the second operation, which involved sheer muscle strength. When one end of the board was free, the bottom end would still be anchored in the footboard. She had to drag her right hand, which would still be tightly lashed, along and then off the free end of the detached board. Which meant exerting tremendous pressure to the side and to the rear. Again, she visualized the muscles of her right arm: triceps, the teres major, teres minor, rear delt. They were small muscles and were not structurally suited to perform this unusual movement.
Lubrication would not be a problem. In the process of rotating her wrist against the cord hooks, she had ripped her wrist to shreds. Her right hand was now bleeding freely.
On top of everything else, she had to do it quietly. She couldn’t alert Dale before her right hand was free.
Nina blinked sweat from her eyes. Took a deep breath.
Now she focused back several years, on the Russian trainer she’d met in Kosovo. He’d been on loan from the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces. He promoted a concept called “hyper-irradiation,” which argued that rigidly flexing all the muscle groups of the body simultaneously was a force multiplier.
She knew her muscles were designed with protective mechanisms-spindle cells and Golgi tendon organs. Their purpose was to prevent dam
age due to overload by stopping function. Getting free would involve tearing her right rotor cuff to pieces. It would also involve overriding the protective mechanisms, the lactic acid buildup, going past the breaking point.
There was fear, which she was riding like a wave.
And then there was pain.
Which was the shark inside the wave ready to bite.
Go.
Nina poised on the bed, felt her fingers, slippery with blood, hook firmly on the sideboard. She pressed down with her feet and her left hand, took a deep breath, and stopped thinking. Her body knew.
She thrust up her torso and yanked up with her right hand.
Yes.
As the slots came free she extended her right arm to keep the board from tangling in the headboard. The bed slewed to the side as the sideboard thumped on the carpet.
Did he hear? No, the radio covered it.
Now let’s see if that Russian knew what the hell he was talking about.
She flexed both feet and her left hand, painfully orienting her soles and her palm against the tight cords. When she had a solid platform, she pressed down on the sideboards. Working up from this tripod, she contracted everything she had: legs and upper body fusing into core abs and glutes. She had to transform the tension into a mighty fulcrum to send more power into the rigid lever of her right arm.
Her breath rasped, panting now. She felt sweat and then veins pop up on her screaming right arm as she strained it back, back. Inch by inch the bloody bungee cord started to slide rearward, toward the open slotted end of the sideboard.
Her strength flashed, so much fire into smoke. All mind now. She visualized every man who ever told her all the things she couldn’t do. And some women, too. Every face. Every sneer. Every dirty joke.
She got two more bloody inches from the vivid memory of Johnny Majeski, who wrestled her out of her virginity when she was sixteen in the backseat of a perfectly restored ’49 Mercury. And then blamed her because it went too fast.
Good memories, too. Dad. For all the hours in the pool and on the track; for teaching her to throw and jump and climb. For giving her a dollhouse and a chin-up bar.
She had two more inches to go.
Willpower gone. Muscles frozen, past spasm into total failure.
C’mon. Must be a few more muscles to call up in this act of self-destruction. She had gone past aching pain to piercing pain to red-hot burning pain to nothing.
All gone.
Must be something, somewhere. Trembling. Arched up. Making the tripod. Squirting sweat. Then in one last surge…
Had Kit by C-section. Broker’s mom said I’d missed life’s main rite of pain. Tap into it now. Bear down. Push.
Her whole right arm began to tremble violently, spasm, overload, maybe torn ligaments.
But the hand was free.
Tears smeared her face, mucus, spittle. Blinking through the blur, gasping, hyperventilating…then…holy shit! She’d been so distracted by her ordeal that she didn’t realize the camper had stopped moving. Christ, not yet. But she heard their voices. Heard the door opening.
No, please…
Immediately, she hauled her right arm in tight, tested her fingers. Christ, her shoulder was burning, feeling loose and disconnected.
The curtain swept aside; Dale swiveled his seat and stared at her. “Aw, jeez, George, lookit this. She broke the bed.”
“First things first. Let me show you something,” George said as he glanced at her, unconcerned. Nina watched him raise the satellite phone in his left hand. He held a clear plastic cup in his right hand that was half-full of water. He placed the cup carefully on the dashboard and motioned for Dale to turn around. “Now watch the water in that cup,” George said. “When I set it off we should see the water level jump, huh?”
“Cool,” Dale said, spinning to the front. George eased behind the driver’s seat, extending his left arm over Dale’s shoulder so the phone was to the left of Dale’s head. Nina, way past horror, watched George’s right hand slip into the pocket of his shorts and remove a small automatic pistol. It looked like a.32-caliber. A hideout gun. He kept the pistol low against his right thigh. “Here we go,” George said as he started thumbing in the numbers.
No, goddammit. No. Nina lurched up and tried to reach for them with her right hand but she was tethered by her left hand. She flung her hand to the left and clawed at the bungee, broke her fingernails.
She heard Dale’s awed voice: “No shit. Look…”
Then she saw George sweep the pistol up smoothly, stick it pointed up under Dale’s chin, and pull the trigger. The gunshot rolled inside the confined camper, knifed her eardrums, as Dale’s shoulders and head jerked once and he slumped forward. A spray of red dotted the inside of the windshield.
Efficiently, George withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the gun down. Then he placed it in Dale’s limp fingers. For a moment he cocked his head, looking out the driver’s side window. As he listened he mopped sweat from his brow with the hanky, then put it back in his pocket.
Then he turned to Nina. She glared back at him, pulled herself up by yanking on her fastened left arm; sitting now on the slanting bed, she cocked her right hand.
George grimaced at her. “It’s done. I could hear it, you know. Just a faint bump. And the water in the glass did jump a little bit.” He bent over the passenger seat, and when he straightened up, he was holding one of Dale’s Epipens in his right hand like a dagger. He stared at her for a moment. “Look at you, you’re all covered with blood. I’ll make this easy on you,” he said.
Nina’s breathing was still ragged from exertion. No time to think about anything else. She concentrated on his left eye. C’mon, just bring it closer.
He twisted the injector, exposing the needle. Then he gestured. “So where do you want it?” His left hand snaked out and pinched at her right inner thigh. “How about somewhere nice?”
“No!” Nina screamed, rearing up, bringing up her free hand.
George laughed, ducked back, and feinted to the right, then changed direction and jabbed the needle into her right calf muscle. As the dose of ketamine entered her bloodstream, Nina started counting, hoarding her strength. C’mon, you fucker, don’t just stand there.
But he did, he just stood watching. And Nina could feel the first wave of coldness like icy gloves and slippers on her hands and feet. But then he leaned forward and extended his hands, palms out toward her face. “This won’t hurt,” he said, “I promise.”
When he was within her reach she launched her right hand at his face. But the damaged muscles failed, the bloody, rigidly extended forefinger merely slapped his temple weakly and fell away.
George laughed. “See? It was a mistake to send a woman.”
As he leaned forward to smother her she put everything into one last explosive surge. She missed again but on the way down, her fingers snagged in the chain around his neck.
The muscles that extended her arm were shot, but she discovered that the contracting muscles still worked. Her bloody fingers found purchase on a medal attached to the end of chain, clamped tight, and yanked. George pitched forward. Immediately, she whipped her bloody arm around his neck, locked her elbow, and jerked him down.
Her biceps and parts of her forearm still worked. George wasn’t laughing anymore. Methodically, then desperately, his strong hands clawed to break the hold.
Nina tasted salt and copper and bile as she reached down deep to where the lizard lived. Pure primal instinct now, she embraced him, smelling his minty Binaca breath, the Vitalis in his sleek hair. Their faces almost touched. His dark brown eyes were no longer amused, or even angry.
Fucker’s scared.
Good.
Sobbing with exertion, she tightened her arm and drew him close enough for her parted lips to press against his throat. Almost erotic, she hunted for the pulse. Found it. Gauged the depth and bared her teeth.
She relished his scream, the frantic spasm as he tried to pull away. A
fter the powerful bite, with the last of her strength, she tried to rip and gnaw. But her jaw went slack. The ketamine…
George’s scream ended in a wet slobber as he clamped one hand on his ragged neck. Triumphantly, Nina saw the blood pumping through his fingers. Spurts of it. Streams. But he still had the strength to grab at her encircling arm with the other hand. She was on empty and he stripped her arm away. His stiff hand came down on her throat and she tried to lower her chin, raise her shoulders.
But he was too strong. He shoved the powerful arc formed by his thumb and first finger down into her throat.
Cold bubbles filled her body with floaty pressure. She lost air. She lost light. Her extremities went numb as her chest filled with ice water. She was choking outside, drowning inside. Distinctly, she looked down on a last image of her own body locked in a death hug with George Khari.
Far away.
Chapter Forty-six
Broker woke up in the process of being bodily thrown into the backseat of the Red Wing cop car. His head throbbed, a knee slammed down on his chest as the car’s rear tires threw dirt, accelerating. He looked up. Yeager. Scrambling in on top of him.
“Sorry,” Yeager gasped. He was goggle-eyed, panting, shutting the door, looking out the rear window. Broker winced and felt the lump on the back of his head. Yeager held up an old-fashioned braided leather sap. “Me and Holly did a number on you to get you outta there.”
There.
Broker lurched up. The cop was hunched over the wheel, flooring it. Broker twisted. His vision spun, frantic activity to the front, the Black Hawk was airborne, gaining altitude. Everybody had their mouths open, one long yell. Him, too. He looked out the rear window as they fishtailed through the cyclone fence perimeter. Screened by the silver mesh, Broker saw the deserted site: the black billowing smoke of the dozer, Holly standing at the edge of the excavation pit, vigorously waving his arm next to the Deere and the bigger dozer. The gray domes loomed over the struggling yellow machines, dwarfing them.