Three Minutes to Midnight (14 page)

“Then keep calling,” Mahegan said. He took a step toward Griffyn, towering over the reedy man. Mahegan's sheer bulk dwarfed Griffyn's rail-thin presence. A slight wind blew a few wisps of hair on top of the detective's balding head. Sweat beaded and began to trickle. Mahegan sensed he had won this brief chess move, but the match was far from over.

“I'll do that. Next time I'll have a warrant. I promise,” Griffyn said.

Mahegan looked over his shoulder at Griffyn's Crown Victoria, the pickup truck, and the road that stretched beyond. Then he looked over Griffyn's head at the empty road stretching in the other direction, like an unused runway. His anger began to boil. Whether this was an intentional effort to block his pursuit of justice or merely a bureaucratic machination, Mahegan didn't have time for a modern-day Javert chasing his Valjean.

“Tell you what, Detective. I'll come in and participate in your investigation, even answer your questions, once you get clearance from the Army.”

It was exactly the opposite of what he wanted to say, but he chose to play nice given his time constraint.

“I'll see you soon,” Griffyn said. The detective gave Mahegan a confident nod and stepped into his Crown Victoria.

Mahegan watched Griffyn drive along the lonely stretch of road and wondered how the detective had tracked him there. Or if Griffyn had been tracking the EB-5 commandos.

He stashed that information as he climbed back into his Cherokee and drove past the entrance of the Gunther and Sons construction site where he had pinned Maxim Petrov to the ground with a posthole digger.

Parking his Cherokee a mile away to the east, Mahegan decided to walk through the waist-deep swamp to approach the property. The day before, Petrov had disappeared over the eastern ridge for some time. Trudging through the swamp, Mahegan saw water moccasins coiled tight, basking in the morning sun. Two foxes eyed him warily, and a small herd of deer splashed through the water.

Emerging from the water, he stood up tall and saw a construction crew working on the northeast corner of the fence they had been installing. The outer fence with all the security sensors did not reach the eastern side of the hill yet. It appeared that Petrov, or whoever, had secured the necessary labor to continue the job. Mahegan wanted to see inside the bowl where he had seen the fracking drill, the water and chemical tanks, and the pipes.

There was a small ridge that gave him cover if he stayed to the south side as he worked his way west. Mahegan stayed low for two hundred yards and then caught another anomaly. It was a flat surface against the rounded shape of the hillock. Inspecting it further, Mahegan saw that it was a wall, painted with the camouflage colors brown, tan, and green. It was a respectable job, but not great. He noticed two locked hasps and suddenly got hopeful.

Cassidy had been kidnapped ostensibly to perform some type of fracking mission. Was this her cell or just an equipment shed?

Mahegan found a rock the size of his palm and approached the wooden structure. The sun was up now, almost 9:00 a.m. The work crew was about four hundred yards away, doing the posthole and cement job for the fence. He smelled the new paint and the fresh wood and got even more hopeful. If she was in the cell, he could extract her and retreat quickly to the woods. Her rescue would allow him to transition back to his Gunther mission.

But the warrior in him told him it wasn't going to be that easy. With a couple of powerful swings, he smashed the rock on the hasps, and both of them swung free. Pushing the door inward, he climbed into the structure, still holding the rock high as a defensive measure. He found a blanket, some combat rations, and a few bottles of water. After a quick search, Mahegan found a standard issue army wristwatch and a piece of cloth stuffed in the corner on the floor behind the piss bucket. He instantly recognized the cloth as a Velcro-backed Army combat uniform nametape.

It read
CASSIDY
.

CHAPTER 13

T
HE BATHROOM DOOR BURST OPEN BEHIND THE WEIGHT OF
J
IM
Gunther's considerable frame.

Maeve Cassidy felt the sharp edge of the jagged icicle of glass she had snatched from the shattered remains of the mirror. Her weapon was about eight inches long and three inches wide. In all, she couldn't have hoped for a better result.

She had weighed the possibility of waiting until Jim wasn't present to create the weapon and then using it on him when he was distracted. She didn't know, however, the reality of the threats against Charlotte and Wilmington, much less the threat posed by the other liquefied natural gas container ships, and didn't want to take any chances. If she slowed the pace of the drill or left the controls long enough for it to deviate, would she trigger the threats that Jim had described? Maeve wasn't willing to take that chance, and so she took the only real chance she saw.

Plus, she knew the threat against Piper was real and visceral. That shouldn't have been part of the bargain.

“What the hell happened?” Jim shouted. Maeve was pleased to see that his face was distorted with surprise and perhaps with that 1 percent of knowledge that he had allowed this to happen. He had let her go into that bathroom unattended.

Maeve staggered, took a footstep toward him, and muttered, “I just fell from the drugs. Overcome.” She gasped for air, her hand wielding the glass knife, which was discreetly tucked behind her back.

“Are you okay?” Jim asked. He looked around at the shattered glass and perhaps a second too late understood.

“I fell. Looking for aspirin—”

The shiv was arcing upward into Jim's gut. Maeve felt the blade slice through his shirt, then gain purchase in the hardened muscles of his abdomen. She placed the bottom of her left hand beneath the butt of the blade, cushioned by her T-shirt, and used it to propel the sharp leading edge forward while her right hand guided it into his abdomen. Her left shoulder muscles screamed with agony as she pulled upward with all her might, like in a dead lift, trying to drive the glass fully into him. Rewarding her efforts was the presence of blood soaking his cotton shirt.

The momentum shifted, though. Jim's hands were pushing her elbows down. He had the leverage of height and strength, but she had determination. Her progress, measured by the growing plume of blood, slowed and then stopped immediately.

She kneed him in the balls as hard as she could. It wasn't the first time she had performed that maneuver on him. He gasped with an audible “Oomph” and released a bit of the pressure on her arms. The shiv had come free of his abdomen as his arms pushed and he backed away. When his head lowered in pain, she head butted him with her forehead, then high kicked him in the throat. He stumbled backward into the door and landed with a thud. His arms were splayed outward, as if he were lying on the ground, making snow angels.

Maeve charged him with the shiv and raised it high, going for the throat. She thrust downward with the ferocity of a baying animal. The bloody tip of the mirror shard stopped inches from Jim's throat. His hand clasped her wrist with the quickness and force of a rattlesnake. He peeled her arm away, and she knew the tide had shifted again. One of his hands controlled her wrist; the other was around her throat. She was gasping for air as she felt her wrist being bent backward, almost to the point of snapping. Jim lifted her by the neck against the bathroom wall so that her feet were inches off the floor. She felt herself losing consciousness from a lack of oxygen to her brain.

“Please,” she whispered into his ear. His face was directly in front of hers. She could see the thick eyebrows and the dark beard. The menacing brown eyes, which had gone half lidded, the way they always used to do in Afghanistan.

“Just like Afghanistan, dear Maeve. Always liked it rough.”

Her bloody T-shirt fell to the floor with the shiv, making a soft click.

“I would absolutely satisfy you right now, but I'm sorry,” he said. “We've got a mission to complete. We need to get to work.”

Jim lowered her to the floor, keeping one vise grip hand around her neck and the other around her wrist. He had closed the distance between them so that she could not get any leverage to knee or kick him. He leaned over and kissed her full on the mouth, his tongue braving a quick dart into her mouth before she could bite it, though she tried. A hollow click of the teeth mirrored her despair.

“You are going to sit down, and you are going to move that drill bit the way you moved it in Pakistan. You are going to take it farther than you have ever taken it before, and on the second hole you will perform an unprecedented second kickoff point. Then you are going to submerge the perforating charges, and you will detonate when and where you are told. Is that clear?”

Maeve nodded. Her throat was so constricted that she couldn't speak just yet.

“And then, if you behave, you just might see your family again.”

The hollow pit in her stomach grew as she thought about Piper. Her only hope was that her young child was being well cared for by the Asian woman and that Piper would soon forget this experience, as if it were a vacation gone wrong that she would never understand.

Maeve limped to the chair in the control room. She placed her bloody hands on the joystick that controlled the drill. She looked up at the monitors. The McGuire and Brunswick nuclear plants were on a split screen. The drill path was etched in 3-D on another screen, and it showed the drill bit turning from the current point and passing under Jordan Lake for almost two miles at an azimuth of 298 degrees, northwest by north.

Deep breaths weren't enough to calm her nerves. She pushed back from the controls and looked at Jim, who had removed his shirt and was dressing his wound with her T-shirt.

“Close,” he said, nodding.

“You're an asshole,” she said. “And you've gotten yourself in way over your head.”

“Nobody's as bad as people want them to be, and nobody's as good as they hope they can be. We're all about the same, dear Maeve. Maybe one degree of difference, but that's not so much, is it? Your line in the sand is just a notch higher than mine. Does that make you a much better person than me?”

“You shot me . . . and did other things to me. Yes, I would say that makes you a bad person.”

“You just stuck a broken mirror in my gut. If it wasn't for my rock-hard abs, you might have succeeded. Good thing I didn't miss my Pilates workout this week. So are we really that different?”

Maeve said nothing. Her mind was cycling through ways she could beat him. The starting center for the NC State soccer team during her college days, Maeve had an unapologetic drive to be the best at everything she did. Her competitive nature was overshadowed only by her genuine love of her family and her country.

“We all do what we have to do when we are backed into a corner, Maeve. You saw that in Afghanistan as well as anyone else. You participated in it. I know you're not proud of what we did over there, but we did it, nonetheless.”

“Shut up,” Maeve whispered. “We swore we would never discuss that.”

“And we shall not. It would be troublesome for all of us and our country if word leaked of our transgressions.”

“I said, ‘Shut up.' Stop it. I'll do what you need me to do. Steal some gas. No big deal.”

“Now we're talking.” Jim had tied her T-shirt in the knot around what amounted to a deep flesh wound. He had staunched the bleeding for the most part. He stood next to her and pointed at the drill screen. “The water is ready. The power is ready. The kickoff point has been prepped. Now you need to guide us to this shallow but very rich gas field.”

“It's just below Jordan Lake? Aren't you worried about the aquifer?”

“We are not concerned in the least about the aquifer, because we have the very best drill handler doing this job,” Jim said. “We waited for you, and now you're here. So let's get to work. Once I flip this switch, the nuclear threats go live. Ready?”

Maeve looked at the screen that was showing the 3-D view of the drill path, like a slice of cake with its different layers. She saw the shale formation that they were going to rob. It looked dense and rich, full of gas deposits and maybe even oil. The Durham Triassic Basin was notorious for its shallowness and proximity to drinking water. Something about the map did not seem right to her, but she couldn't place it. She felt as if she was looking at a satellite shot from the wrong angle, and it was challenging to get her bearings. Her drilling in Afghanistan had always had a certain rhythm to it.

Then she looked at the live streaming video of the crew at the drill location. Maeve had no concept of whether she was on location or miles away. The remote drill techniques they had perfected in Afghanistan could place her up to fifteen miles away from the actual drill. Oddly, she didn't notice any pipe for the natural gas once it surfaced. Certainly, they could seal the wellhead, but with the number of veins they were talking about tapping, the pressure would be enormous, too much for any single wellhead to handle. It would burst, and the gas would be lost. She had heard murmurs at the party about celebrating a new pipeline to Morehead City, but her camera angle did not show where that might connect to the wellhead.

Then she saw the rest of the picture. In the corner were several containers. While natural gas usually required substantial refinement to eliminate impurities and liquids, her work in combat had resulted in the development of containerized natural gas processing plants. She recognized the mobile containers, mirror images of the ones they had perfected in Afghanistan. The only question now was, where was the pipeline? What did they intend to do with the gas? Maeve was an engineer, and these questions came to her naturally. Despite the stress she was enduring, her analytical mind calculated the end-to-end system and recognized that something was missing. Once refined, how were they going to get the gas to market? Not her problem, she knew, but the answer could provide insight into her predicament. Maybe it was the pipeline to the port of Morehead City, on the coast?

Jim flipped the switch. She continued to stare at the live feed of the work yard, where the drill cable and water lines went stiff. The drill head would spit out water to cool the bit and help with the drilling process. If he had stolen the equipment they had used in Afghanistan, there would be a five-pointed titanium-uranium mix drill bit connected to composite drill lengths, which made for faster and more accurate drilling.

Maeve sighed and focused. Nudging the joystick forward, she watched the icon on the screen move toward the vein. She eventually became one with the stick and the drill, moving along the path as if she were down there herself. Like a pilot, she began flying the drill bit around the obstacles represented in the 3-D image.

But she knew that she was not a pilot and that this was not a game.

“Don't stop. That's all I'm saying, Maeve. This is serious business. And in case you get any more ideas, I've got all my notes from Afghanistan. The ones where I overheard you speaking with our interpreter, plotting these terrorist attacks and stealing natural gas in North Carolina.”

“What!”

“Be quiet, please. I'm trying to protect you from yourself. You're in this neck deep, Maeve.”

Maeve controlled a sob as she pressed the drill bit forward. She closed her eyes and tried to feel the power, the way a fighter jock became one with his machine. She continued, seeking the best path forward toward the finishing point, staying within the margins of error calculated by Jim's “guy.”

What was going on? she wondered. Why all the secrecy? She imagined that Throckmorton Energy Company was out in front of the state regulations, probably didn't have their permits, and might not own any land with mineral rights. If she was reading the map correctly, Throckmorton's property was right on the edge of Wake County, and not in Chatham County, where the true reserves waited to be tapped.

Millions of dollars of gas lay below the surface, but was the juice worth the squeeze? Jim and his father were committing the felony crime of kidnapping a woman and a child for natural gas. Something didn't seem right. The crime was too small for the punishment that would surely come their way.

Staring at the monitor, she wondered about the conversation she had overheard when Jim drugged her. The Chinese voice had seemed to be the most authoritative of them all. Were the Chinese in charge of this operation? she wondered.

Since she had just returned from Afghanistan, geopolitics was not lost on her. She knew that the United States was nearly a trillion dollars in debt to China.

Was she the only hostage, she wondered, if China was indeed running this operation?