The Omicron Legion (40 page)

Inside the control center, which filled an oblong room at least fifteen hundred square feet, everything was chaos. Red lights flashed in so many places that a dull haze seemed painted over the white fluorescents.

“What’s going on?” Tunnel demanded of a man behind a central console who was feverishly pushing buttons.

“We lost the main pump to the cooling system.”

“What do you mean lost?”

“Valve blew. We’re losing a hundred gallons of flow a second.”

“A hundred gallons? How the fuck did we end up at Code Red so soon?”

The man at the console swallowed hard. “Because it’s been spilling for hours, even though all warning systems are running green.”

“Sabotage,” Jack Tunnel muttered, looking at McCracken. “Okay, seal the pipe and run a bypass.”

“I can’t, sir. The whole circuit board in the shaft must be down. Nothing’s responding.”

“
Twenty minutes to critical stage,”
blared the mechanical voice.

“What’s that mean?” Blaine asked Tunnel.

“It’s like this, friend. The secondary loop sends water to the primary—to cool the core and prevent the whole mess from going critical. Take away the cooling and the core superheats its way down until it hits ground water, which then blasts upward as a steam cloud. With the early warning system malfunctioning, we’re coming up on that now.”

“Meltdown,” Blaine concluded.

“
The China Syndrome,
to be precise.” Tunnel turned back to the console operator. “Okay, trigger the emergency core coolant and take us off line. Frank,” he called behind him, “order immediate evac of all nonessential personnel, and I do mean everyone.”

“Roger,” Frank said as he rushed away.

“
Nineteen minutes to critical stage.
…”

“Sir,” blared the console operator, “emergency coolant release not responding!”

Jack Tunnel leaned over the monitor board in disbelief. He swung back to McCracken with sweat pouring down his face.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

“You know better than I do.”

“But you knew before I did. What else? Tell me what else!”

“I don’t know. The saboteur could have anticipated every one of your possible responses and planned accordingly.”

“Oh, yeah? We’ll just see about that….” Tunnel grabbed a headset and pressed it to his ear and mouth. “Come in, Purdy.”

Yankee’s chief engineer came on the line, the sounds of men charging from the scene providing backdrop for his words.

“Read you, Jack.”

“We’re flat busted on this end. We been fucked and good. Valve circuits are down. Gonna have to run a bypass manually.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Got any volunteers?”

“Just one asshole down here stupid enough to even consider the job. I’m going remote. Give me forty seconds—then talk to me about what’s gotta be done.”

All of the forty seconds passed before the chief engineer’s voice came back over Tunnel’s headset. “Okay, Jack.”

Tunnel consulted the computer screen again. “It’s Valve 1275 that’s been blown. You gotta close it down and open 1374 in its place.”

“I’m almost suited up. Sounds simple enough.”

“
Seventeen minutes to critical stage.
…”

“It ain’t,” Tunnel said, his eyes on McCracken.

Thirty seconds elapsed before Purdy spoke again. His voice came into the control room over the main speaker now, accentuated by a slight echo.

“Okay, Jack. I’m opening Hatch 8B of the secondary loop. Got three other volunteers with me to provide backup if I need it. I’m leaving them up top for the time being…. Okay, I’m on the ladder and descending. I can see the water spewing from way up here. It’s already getting god-awful hot. Jesus Christ, I’m scared.”

“You’re doing fine, Purdy.”

“Okay, I’m down fifteen rungs, another twenty to the cat-walk above your blown valve. Piece of—”

A roaring blast cut off the rest of his words.

“Purdy!” Jack Tunnel yelled.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

The chief engineer’s scream was all Tunnel heard.

“What the hell’s happening down there? That sounded like a gun—”

“The chief was shot!” replied one of Purdy’s assistants. “Somebody down there shot the chief!”

“Jesus Christ! Can you see who did it?”

“Negative, but we will. Descending now.”

“Stay where you are, goddammit!”

“The chief may still be alive. We’re going down. Son of a bitch can’t get all three of us before we reach those valves.”

“
Fifteen minutes to critical stage.
…”

“Ten rungs covered,” the chief engineer’s assistant reported.

And then Blaine cursed himself for not seeing it from the start. “Tunnel, pull them back! Get them the hell out of there!”

Tunnel didn’t bother to question McCracken’s order. “Hold your position! Do you hear me? Stay where you are. That’s a goddamn order! Hold up and climb back the hell out of there!”

“Fifteen rungs,” the climber closest to the bottom called out.

A series of blasts sounded this time, rapid thumps sifting through the hiss of static. Screams and shouts followed, then a drawn-out wail.

“Benny’s hit!”

“He’s going down. Jesus Christ!
I’m hit!
Oh, god, I’m hit!”

“Get the hell out of there! Can anybody still hear me?
Get the hell out of there!
”

“This is Burt, Mr. Tunnel,” came a panicked voice trying desperately to compose itself. “Lost Benny, lost Sims. I’m hit in the leg. Climbing back up now.”

“Did you see anyone? Did you see who was doing the shooting?”

The only reply came from McCracken. “No one’s down there, Mr. Tunnel.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“Our saboteur rigged a motion sensor to the trigger of an automatic weapon.”

“Christ!
Who
did all this?”

“
Thirteen minutes to critical stage.
…”

“Bypass that blown valve and we can still avert meltdown, though, right?”

“Sure, if there was a way to reach it in time.”

“Any other approach we can use?”

“Nothing direct, and direct’s all we’ve got time for.”

“Then that’s the way it’ll have to be.”

“I’m fresh out of volunteers, in case you didn’t notice.”

Blaine shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

The skeletal steel superstructure of the unfinished skyscraper made for perfect cover for Abraham. The high steel-workers normally manning its top floors, which were five hundred feet off the ground, were down on the sidewalk waiting for the presidential motorcade to pass along Boylston Street. This gave him freedom of movement in an area the sweep of helicopter surveillance would never think to investigate. The girders were all he had to move on, but they were enough, the shell providing his camouflage.

Abraham had chosen this viewpoint for effect more than anything. His sole weapon was the black transistorized detonator in his pocket. He had known from the outset that routine clearing of the streets would make a car bomb unfeasible. He also knew that blasting upward from the sewers below was dramatic but unreliable. Options eliminated, though, are often options gained, and out of what remained, he found the best one of all.

The yellow line painted down the center of the street, the one marking the lanes, was too good to be true, in his estimation. He had retrieved the C-12 plastic explosives, twenty times more potent than the common C-4, from the drop point and melted them down into a liquid form. Then, while the city slept the previous night, dressed in the garb of a public works official, he had gone over a twenty yard section of the line. Affixing the six ultrathin detonators, disguised in the same colored paint, into position was the only part Abraham had hurried through. He did not even have to inspect his handiwork to know it was perfect. Upon detonation, the
plastique
would reduce the road within its sphere to rubble, in the process blowing apart anyone and anything riding above. Even the president’s tank of a car would be reduced to shrapnel.

That car would be approaching any minute now.

Abraham had not slept in a very long time now. Since his rebirth, time had held a different meaning for him. It passed not in terms of days and hours, but in tasks and accomplishments. Behind him was the visit to the nuclear plant yesterday. Ahead of him was the murder of the president. Beyond that there was nothing.

He had gone to Pennsylvania Yankee in a disguise prepared for another disciple long before. He had descended into the bowels of the reactor’s secondary loop on a surprise inspection, watched only cursorily from the hatch above. He had reached the valve in question and affixed C-4 plastic explosive fully confident it would not be removed, even if discovered. Then he tacked on a sign:
DO NOT REMOVE
!
ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION.

Anybody who got close enough to see the charge would read that sign. From there, he quickly located the main conduit that linked the computers to the thousands of valves and controls in the labyrinth of multicolored pipes. He placed another, smaller charge across it to cut off computer control as well as the early warning system. The valve charge would blow, and it would be well over an hour before anyone knew; by then the plant would be at the critical stage.

If that wasn’t enough, Abraham had taken precautions against manual interference as well. Besides the explosive charges, his tool satchel had held a 9-mm submachine gun complete with extended sixty-shot clip. Rigging it to fire upward—in the direction of the nearest access ladder—was no problem at all. Neither was affixing a motion sensor to its trigger mechanism. The device was no bigger than a small tape recorder and was nothing more than a sophisticated version of the one used on home security alarms. The final fail-safe element of his plan: Abraham had left the power plant confident in the knowledge that it would blow at the very instant he detonated the explosives beneath the president’s car.

His outfit, typical of a high steelworker, had helped him gain access to one of the elevators when no one had been paying much attention. He crouched now on a horizontal steel support beam halfway to the front of the structure, in clear view of the road below. He found this setting to be slightly ironic in that he had a lot in common with the steel shell. After all, that was what his entire existence had been reduced to in the Amazon. All the covering conscience and sensibility had been stripped away. What remained had been hardened into tungsten and rendered impenetrable.

Abraham rose to his feet and pulled off his helmet. He had not brought binoculars along, but he could see the motorcade making its way through the downtown Boston streets well off in the distance. He fingered the detonator through the fabric of his pocket and counted the minutes before the time would come to use it.

Money might not be everything, Patty Hunsecker reckoned, but it sure helped. It was money that had allowed her to hire a private Learjet to fly her across the country to the Utah Salt Flats the previous night. She could only hope to arrive at the bunker ahead of Sal Belamo and his killers, yet knew that hope had nothing to do with it. Blaine McCracken had let her go, which meant he was giving her time. Why, she could not say. His code of honor was a constant enigma. She hated him for some parts of it, loved him for others. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for what he had to do, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to save her father first.

She rented a helicopter at the airport where she had landed and asked the pilot to fly her over the flats, where she hastily reconstructed the bunker’s location in her mind. She had trouble with her bearings, was almost ready to give up, in fact, when a narrow one-story building appeared out of nowhere.

“What the hell?…”

“This is where I get off,” she told the pilot.

There should have been security. They should have been met along the perimeter and warned off. Patty feared that Belamo and his men had gotten here ahead of her after all, but that seemed impossible. No, something else was to blame, and she could not possibly say what.

A hefty bonus convinced the pilot to wait for her, and Patty entered the building through its single unlocked door. The inside was lined with counters and shelves, an outpost abandoned to the elements, complete with layers of dust. It took her a few minutes before she found the false door in the wall that led into a closetlike cubicle. It was dark and she fumbled for a light switch; a fluorescent came on and illuminated a simple control panel, a single arrow pointing up and another down.

Patty pressed the down one.

Instantly the elevator began its whirling descent. With speed impossible to judge, she had no way of telling how deeply she was descending into the bowels of the earth. Several seconds passed before the compartment ground to a halt and the single door slid open.

Before her was a long corridor, the white floors indistinguishable from the walls and ceiling of the same shade. The sudden brightness stung her eyes and it took them a few seconds to adjust. She started down the rounded hall with the
clip-clop
of her boot heels the only sound.

Where was everyone?

Perhaps the Children of the Black Rain had abandoned the bunker when the scope of their failure became known. It seemed logical. Return to the surface and disappear until another day dawned down the road in the future. After nearly a half century of waiting, surely the makers of the plan could wait a little longer. Video surveillance cameras dotted the hallway at regularly spaced intervals, but she could not tell if they were on or not.

Her heart was starting to sink. If her father wasn’t here, she would never see him again. And, yet, if she did find him, she had no idea what she would say. He was still her father; whatever else he was made him no less than that. But she knew she wasn’t doing this for him. She was doing it for herself. She had to know, had to understand, wanted to prove Blaine and the others wrong.

An open doorway beckoned her, the first she had seen so far. Stepping through it brought her into a sprawling meeting hall. A huge conference table was centered on the floor. One of the walls was dominated by a map of the United States showing a dozen glowing red lights. And set before that wall was a darkened figure facing her. Although the figure’s face was cloaked in shadows and half-light, she could still see he was an Oriental. He sat there immobile and expressionless, as if waiting for her to approach.