Tyler’s eyes were still adjusting to the dark as he moved past the barrels. He stopped when his foot bumped into something pliant.
Grant pointed behind one of the drums. A body. Tyler recognized the face from a photo at the research center. It was Professor Stevens. Another limp figure lay next to him. He didn’t recognize the man, but it had to be the student, Milo Beech.
Tyler knelt and felt for a pulse. They were both alive. He lightly slapped Stevens’ face, but the professor didn’t move. Same for Beech. Tyler put two hands together at the side of his head to indicate to Grant that they were out cold, probably drugged.
Now that his eyes had adjusted, Tyler could see the truck’s interior past the drums. Stacked floor-to-ceiling were twenty-five-pound bags full of pink ANFO pellets. Enough space to hold all forty tons of it.
Grant examined the wires from behind one of the barrels so he wouldn’t block the dim light coming from the warehouse.
“Doesn’t look like it’s booby-trapped,” he whispered. “But I don’t see a timer or receiver for a radio-controlled detonation.”
“When Bedova’s got the place secured, we can—”
Shouts inside the warehouse interrupted Tyler. The man who’d been guarding them took cover behind a forklift. Tyler and Grant edged out the rear of the trailer where Tyler spied Bedova and the rest of her men surrounded by Colchev’s operatives.
She spoke to Colchev in soothing Russian that suggested a history between them. Colchev shook his head and answered in English.
“Remember what my note said, Nadia?”
Bedova nodded, but she didn’t lower her gun. “I can’t let you do this, Vladimir.”
“And I can’t let you leave.”
“You can’t go back to Russia. Not ever.”
Colchev slowly shook his head. “In four days they will welcome me with open arms after they see what I’ve achieved.”
The operative behind the forklift, the last of Bedova’s men still hidden, stood to shoot, but one of Colchev’s operatives spotted him and hit him with a three-round burst to the chest. The man fell backward, his finger on the trigger of his weapon. Automatic fire spewed toward the ceiling, the suppressor muting the shots so that they weren’t much louder than the pings of the bullet impacts.
In response silenced gunfire erupted from every direction. Bedova’s team scrambled for cover, blasting away as they ran, but they were caught in a crossfire. Two of Colchev’s men had perfect sightlines on her team and cut down their targets with lethal precision. Within seconds, Bedova’s three other men were dead.
Bedova showed no fear as she returned fire, dropping to one knee and taking aim at Colchev in a textbook stance. She got off three rounds, but Colchev was too quick. He rolled to the side as bullets pinged off the metal walls behind him. He came to rest in a prone position and pulled his trigger just once. Bedova’s head snapped backward, and she crumpled to the floor.
“Cease fire!” Colchev shouted. He got to his feet and walked over to Bedova’s corpse, where he knelt beside her, softly caressing her hair. Tyler saw no satisfaction, only remorse.
Tyler was about to suggest they make a break for it when Colchev stood and started to turn toward the open trailer. Tyler and Grant scrambled behind the barrels before they were spotted.
“Close everything up and take the bodies into the office,” Colchev said. “We are leaving now.”
Footsteps pounded toward the trailer, and Tyler and Grant tried to make themselves as small as possible. Any attempt at escape would be suicidal.
Still, the alternative wasn’t much better. The trailer door was slammed shut and latched from the outside, leaving Tyler and Grant in total blackness with an 80,000-pound bomb.
EIGHTEEN
Jess checked her phone again to make sure it was getting a signal. Tyler still hadn’t called. She wasn’t worried just yet, but she thought it shouldn’t have taken this long to do his reconnaissance.
“What do you think they’re doing in there?” Fay said. Since the gray-haired man walked back from the van to the warehouse, they’d seen no movement at all.
“I don’t know. Maybe Tyler and Grant will be able to tell us.”
They went silent, waiting for the cell phone to buzz.
Fay turned to Jess. “You haven’t spoken to Tyler much since we left New Zealand.”
Jess sighed. “Not much to say.”
“Did you talk to him about Andy?”
Jess shook her head. “Not yet.”
“I’ll leave that to you.” Fay took a deep breath. “Are you ready to tell me why you broke up with Tyler?”
“We didn’t have the same priorities at the time.”
“Were you in love with him?”
Jess hesitated. “I suppose I was.”
“And now?”
“Of course not.”
“Liar.”
“I haven’t seen him in over fifteen years.”
“I can see it when you look at him. The chemistry is still there.”
“Well, I can tell you this is just a job for him. He’s a professional and it’ll stay that way. I wish you’d told me you were going to call him.”
“You are a pill, Jessica,” Fay said.
“I know.”
“I just want to see you happy before I die.”
Jess’s heart sank. She squeezed Fay’s hand.
“I know, Nana. But you’re a tough lady. You’ll be around for a long time.”
Fay smiled with a tinge of sadness. “I only wish your parents could see what a lovely woman you’ve become.”
Jess was about to reply when she saw movement in the parking lot of the warehouse. Two men went to the CAPEK truck. One of them got in while the other stood behind it.
They watched as the truck backed up to one of the trailers and was hooked up by the man behind.
“Is this what Tyler wanted to see?” Fay asked.
“I don’t know.”
When the tractor and trailer were attached, the rig moved around until it was directly in front of a second trailer. Then the rig backed up, and the second trailer was hooked up. They continued this choreographed hookup process for ten minutes until all four trailers were attached in a line.
“What did Tyler say that was called?” Fay said.
“A road train.”
They’d seen a dozen of them on their way out to the CDU facility and back. Tyler had told them they were the longest street-legal trucks in the world. With minimal rail service in the Australian interior and huge distances to cover, road trains were the most economical means to transport goods between remote outposts.
The two men who’d been attaching the truck got into a white Ford sedan and sped off. Jess and Fay ducked so they wouldn’t be seen. When they sat up, Jess saw the gray-haired man and a companion getting into the van.
Jess was surprised to see the CAPEK truck start and rumble forward. She gawked at the sight of the massive vehicle roaring off with no one in the driver’s seat.
The truck turned at the end of the road. A few minutes later, the van drove off, leaving the warehouse lot empty. All the loading bays were open.
“What in the world is going on?” Fay said. “Where are Tyler and Grant?”
Jess called Tyler’s phone but got no answer. She started the engine. “We’re going to find out.”
She sped over to the warehouse. It was unlikely anyone was still inside with all the vehicles gone and the warehouse interior exposed.
She got out but left the Jeep running. Fay joined her.
Jess pushed herself up onto the raised loading platform and stood. Fay, who was an experienced rock climber, clambered onto the ledge without assistance.
The cavernous space was still. Surely Tyler and Grant would have called by now if they were watching the warehouse from outside.
“Hello?” she called. No one answered.
As she tiptoed into the open space, her heart thudded. She hoped the worst she’d discover would be that
Tyler and Grant couldn’t respond because they were tied up and gagged. But then something Jess saw in a side room made her freeze.
Two boots. A woman’s. Jess could only see the lower part of her legs. They were motionless.
“Wait here,” she said to Fay.
“Why?” Fay spotted the legs. “Oh, my God!”
“Stay here!”
Jess moved forward until she was standing in the doorway. Now the whole body was visible.
The woman was dead, her eyes staring unfocused at the ceiling, a dime-sized hole in her forehead.
The sight was made all the more horrifying by the bullet-riddled bodies of four other men piled behind her, the smell of blood thick in the air. They couldn’t have been dead for more than fifteen minutes.
Jess only got close enough to see that none of the corpses was Tyler or Grant. She ducked out and caught her breath, trying not to hyperventilate or vomit.
“Call the police,” she gasped to Fay.
“Is she dead?”
“Yes. Tell them there’s been a murder.”
As Fay made the call with her cell, Jess took out her own phone and dialed Tyler.
He didn’t pick up. She was about to hang up and try again when she heard the buzz of a vibrating cell phone coming from the office.
Jess steeled herself to walk back into that charnel house, phone in hand.
At the door Jess listened for the sound and her stomach lurched when she realized why Tyler hadn’t picked up her call.
The buzz was coming from the pocket of the dead woman.
NINETEEN
Rummaging around in the pitch-black through an unconscious man’s pockets was not Tyler’s idea of fun, but it was the only reason he was now holding a cell phone, courtesy of Professor Stevens. Colchev must have been expecting it to be incinerated in the blast. Unfortunately, the phone was more useful as a meager light than as a communications device.
While Tyler focused the light on the C-4 explosive in Grant’s hands, he checked the phone for a signal. No bars. The few times he’d gotten a signal, it dropped before he could complete a call to the police. Tyler didn’t know Jess’s email address or phone number, so he’d sent a short email to Fay: This is Tyler. We’re in the truck that just passed you. Call the police. Bomb inside the truck. He could only hope that it would be sent in the miniscule gaps in the blockage.
Grant, cursing under his breath, pressed the plastic explosive into the door panel where the external latch would be.
“How’s it coming?” Tyler said.
Grant glanced up at him. The whites of his eyes were like beacons next to his brown skin. “You know, when I said I was looking for some thrills during our trip, this wasn’t what I had in mind. More light, please.”
Tyler angled the phone so that Grant could see while he inserted the detonator.
“Just be thankful it’s not summer. It’d be a hundred and twenty degrees in here by now.”
“It’ll be two thousand degrees if you don’t give me some more light.”
Tyler shifted the phone closer. “Better?”
Grant nodded and unspooled the wire to attach it to Milo Beech’s identical phone. “If we die, just remember that this contraption was your idea.” He deftly crimped two wires together using Tyler’s Leatherman. “Any signal yet?”
Tyler looked at his phone’s display. “Still nothing. And we could be only a few minutes from the target.”
“Yeah, but what’s the target?”
That was the million-dollar question. They had no idea where the truck was headed, so there was no way to know how much time they had left.
When it had been clear they weren’t going to get a signal, Tyler decided that they’d have to take matters into their own hands to stop the truck. And the first order of business was making an exit for themselves.
With the rear door locked from the outside, the C-4 they’d scavenged from one of the barrels had been the only option for escape. The truck-bomb design consisted of detonators inserted into four blocks of C-4 buried in the barrels full of ANFO. The blast from the plastic explosive would set off the barrels of ANFO, causing a chain-reaction that would blow up the whole truck. Cutting the wires had disabled the bomb, but they’d found no timer or receiver to set off the weapon. It had to be somewhere on the truck, but tracing the wire to its source proved impossible.
Although they had dealt with the bomb, they still needed to find a way out of the truck. When the explosive didn’t detonate, Colchev would open the trailer to find out why.
“That should do it,” Grant said. He gave the C-4 putty one last pat and stood. “You sure you can’t think of something better than this?”
Tyler forced a smile. “Would you rather wait in here until the truck comes to a full and complete stop?”
“Not really. But it feels like we’re going about sixty. Gonna be a bumpy landing if we jump.”
“Then we’ll have to stop the truck.”
Grant raised a finger. “One teensy problem with that plan—”
“It’s more of a goal than a plan.”
“The guys operating this thing have guns and we have persuasive verbal skills. Oh, and they have enough ANFO to divide Australia in two.”
They both turned toward the stacks of explosive. Tyler estimated that the truck carried a destructive power equal to the payload of a B-2 bomber. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, used seven thousand pounds of ANFO to take out half of the Alfred P. Murrah building. A truck filled with eighty thousand pounds of the same material would level a city block.
To make an exit out of the trailer, Tyler and Grant would have to blow up four small wads of C-4 within five feet of the truck’s deadly load. Grant had taken the C-4 and detonators from the ignition barrels to form the crude breach charges. Because Stevens’ and Beech’s phones could also function as walkie-talkies, Grant rigged one unit to send the detonation signal when it was contacted by the other. He’d attached two arm’s-lengths of wire from the phone’s speaker to the detonator so that the cell wouldn’t be destroyed by the explosion.
“We’ll be okay,” Tyler said as much for himself as for Grant. “As long as we don’t get any fires started in here, the ANFO should be stable.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Look on the bright side. We should be out of the city by now. If it does blow, we’ll only take out a few kangaroos at most.”
“And us.”
“And some terrorists.”
“You are just a positive guy, aren’t you?”
Tyler grinned. “I try. Now let’s do this before I decide it’s moronic.”
He followed Grant behind one of the barrels and crouched down. Even if the load didn’t detonate, the shrapnel from the blast could be deadly.
Grant nodded that his phone was ready to receive. Tyler closed his eyes, covered his ears, and hit TALK.
The explosion sucked Tyler’s breath away and assaulted his nose with the signature smell of burnt tar he always associated with C-4. He held his breath to wait for the smoke to dissipate through the new hole in the truck door.
He opened his eyes to see sunlight blazing into the trailer. He peeked over the barrel to look at Grant’s handiwork. The charge blasted a perfect hole in the bottom of the door, taking the external latch with it.
“Nicely done,” Tyler said.
Grant stood. “Well, we’re still here.” He went to the rear of the trailer and pushed the roll top door up on its tracks until it was wide open. Wind swirled into the truck, but the turbulence did little more than muss Tyler’s hair.
Except for the occasional scrub brush, the rusty outback consisted of nothing but dirt and rocks, with low mountain ranges in the distance. The rapidly receding asphalt pavement disappeared to a point at the horizon. Tyler didn’t like the idea of leaping out onto it. Unless they could clad themselves in bubble wrap, the impact wouldn’t be fun. Without helmets, they’d be lucky not to bash their heads in.
“They’
re not slowing down,” Grant said. “They had to have seen the explosion from the chase van.”
“They might be guiding the truck by GPS. I know I wouldn’t want to be this close to a truck full of ANFO.”
“I’ll see if I can find any landmarks.” Grant poked his head around the corner on the passenger side. When he pulled back, his expression was even grimmer than before.
“It’s worse than we thought.”
“Why?”
“Take a look.”
Tyler exchanged places with him and peered around the edge, squinting as the wind lashed his face. At first all he noticed was the white side of the trailer pasted with the name “Western Lines.” Then he blanched when he saw the source of all the bumping and clashing metal they’d heard before heading out on the highway.
They weren’t on just a conventional tractor trailer. They were on a road train. Instead of just a single trailer, there were three more identical ones hitched in front of it. That explained why the detonator’s receiver was nowhere to be found. It must have been in one of the other trailers.
Bedova was wrong about the amount of explosive Colchev had acquired. If the other trailers were as chock full of ANFO as this one, the road train was hauling 320,000 pounds of the stuff, enough to destroy not just a city block, but an entire downtown.
TWENTY
After the car carrying Kessler, Morgan, and Vince was cleared through the front gate of Pine Gap, it was just a short drive to the main part of the facility. Although Morgan had been expecting the dazzling white buildings she’d seen in the photos, the six spherical radomes housing the satellite uplink equipment were far larger than she thought they’d be.
They came to a stop in front of a two-story building that would have looked right at home in an American office park. The semi following them continued around the building.
“Welcome to Pine Gap,” Kessler said as he got out.
Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, run by both the US and Australian governments, sprawls across a dusty plain eleven miles southwest of Alice Springs. The National Security Agency station, shielded by mountains on all sides, is so secret that it’s the only facility in Australia designated as a “prohibited” flight area, meaning no aircraft flying lower than 18,000 feet are allowed within 2.5 miles of the base.
The Roswell Conspiracy Page 11