Three Minutes to Midnight (35 page)

“Shut up, you bastard,” Throckmorton thundered.

Smoke still hung in the air like a dense fog. Mahegan could see that Jim was focused on the lights coming from the control room. He heard him whisper, “Dear Maeve,” and was reminded that they had worked together in Afghanistan and that she had been abused in the worst possible way by him.

Now he really needed to take Jim quietly to avoid a rush from Gunther and Throckmorton. After slipping his knife from its calf sheath, he quietly opened the blade as he moved, stepping silently onto his heel, rolling against the side of his arch, and then pushing off the ball of his foot, as he had learned from his mother in Frisco in the happy days of his childhood. Each step was a deliberate imitation of the way his forefathers had hunted for centuries. He and his mother would practice with a bow and arrow and a bale of hay as a makeshift circular target. First, the exercise was static, and he would just sit there. Next, she had him stalking “game,” which was the target. She would reset the targets every day and have Jake walk from a different direction. The hay bale would be covered with tarps, to which she had tied ropes, and his mother would pull the tarps from the bale, which was Mahegan's signal to stop, aim, and shoot.

He thought of his mother as he watched Jim Gunther, the son, step three feet in front of him, within arm's reach. Mahegan could tell that Jim's radar was up, that he knew something was not right. But to Mahegan's advantage, Jim was moving slowly. In all of Mahegan's days of wrestling in high school and hand-to-hand combat training in the Army, he had learned that the best takedowns were always from the rear. Surprise and shock were at a premium.

Jim turned his head over his left shoulder, away from Mahegan, and said, “Something ain't right. It's just Cassidy down there in the control room.”

Mahegan needed to act swiftly and with lethal force. Again, as always, his emotions were pushing against his rational thought. He needed logic, not passion. He was less than two feet from Jim's back, the knife firm in his right hand. In one rapid motion Mahegan looped his arm around Jim's neck and squeezed it like a vise, shutting down his vocal cords, and rammed the knife into Jim's right kidney. As he felt his hand touch Jim's back, he retracted the knife and brought it around to the front and into his gut, where he made a deep, long laceration that opened Jim's stomach, blood and intestines spilling over his hand. For good measure, after sliding the knife into the sheath on his calf, Mahegan reached up with both hands and snapped Jim's neck. Lowering him to the floor, Mahegan slid the body of his first true rival behind the unhinged door.

He looked up and saw Maeve staring at him through the glass observation window, her mouth wide open in a silent scream.

Then, in the wafting smoke, he turned and waited for James Gunther, fifteen years of anticipation surging through his veins like an electrical current.

CHAPTER 39

G
RACE SNATCHED THE SHOTGUN FROM
G
RIFFYN'S HANDS, SLAMMED
the stock into his stomach, and then chopped downward, striking him in the back of the head. She then performed an acrobatic twirl to sweep his legs out from underneath him with a forceful kick.

Remembering Elaine and her ready gun, Grace called over her shoulder, “Don't shoot him, Elaine. He needs to make a phone call.”

“You were always a good faker, Grace,” Elaine said. Grace could hear the smile in her voice. “I'm good, though. Love it when a plan comes together. Just squeeze him, okay? He broke my nose.”

Griffyn was on the ground, with Grace on his back, tying his hands behind his back. Mahegan's ropes were coming in handy. The sounds were crisp and distinct in the cool night air: Griffyn's “Oomph” from Grace's back kick that had landed him on the ground; Grace's voice, clear and authoritative; Elaine's nasal wheeze as she adapted to breathing through her mouth alone. Locally, they were isolated out at the boulder that had been their hiding place for the past several weeks, as they monitored the fracking operation. In the bigger picture, their noises were drowned out by the industrial operation going on three hundred yards below them. Grace and Elaine had worked out a plan to implement if Griffyn ever compromised them. Grace would act as if she were with him, on his side, and Elaine would take the punishment, up to a point.

“Where's the phone?” Grace asked Griffyn.

“You'll never get away with this, Grace,” he said. “You'll never live to tell about it.”

“Means a lot coming from you, Griff, with you all tied up and everything.”

“They'll kill you. You know that, right?”

“I know they'll try.” Searching him, she found his iPhone tucked away in the inside of his North Face jacket. “Got it,” Grace said. She took Griffyn's hand and pressed his thumb against the fingerprint sensor, activating the touch identification to open his phone.

“You ungrateful, insubordinate slut,” Griffyn muttered when he realized what she was doing.

“That's one word for it,” Grace said.

She began scrolling through the contacts and found the name Mahegan had given her, plus another that she thought might be useful. She called the first.

 

Sam Blackmon was staring at the backlit fuel rod cooling pools as the water level approached the tops of the racks fifty feet below the surface of the connected pools. The water looked a mint blue, he thought. They almost looked like those high-end swimming pools in the chic hotels that dotted sandy, white Caribbean beaches. His reality, though, was very different than the images running through his mind.

In a few minutes he would either burn to death or radiation would eat through his body. At his feet were five sheets of plywood, which he intended to drag into place over the holes in the damaged pool. He had had his crew drill holes in the center of each sheet of plywood using the tools from the reactor maintenance room. Then he had had them thread nylon cord through the holes in the plywood and tie it around the barbells they had scrounged from the weight room. The barbells would serve as sinkers, holding the plywood in place over the drilled holes.

He bent over and lifted a fifty-pound barbell and tossed it into the pool. The barbell pulled the four-by-eight-foot sheet of plywood to the bottom of the pool quickly. That was its purpose: to hold the plywood in place against the pool floor and keep the plywood from floating to the surface. The plywood had fluttered like a giant bass lure until the barbell reached the bottom of the pool. Now the sheet of plywood was suspended vertically, as if desperately trying to reach the surface.

He threw the remaining four barbells into the water, and they all landed in generally the same area, their respective sheets of plywood looking like arms raised, signaling for help. He adjusted the oxygen tank on his back and began to reach for his mask and regulator. In his reinforced Kevlar frogman dive suit, he carried a pistol in a watertight compartment and his cell phone in a vertical zipper pocket above his left breast. He felt the phone vibrate and considered not answering it, figuring it was probably just Stickman calling to tell him one last time not to go into the pool.

He fumbled the phone in his gloved hands, managed to press the green
ANSWER
button, and growled, “Hello.”

“Colonel Blackmon, I was told to call you by someone who calls himself Manteo Six. He said you would know what that meant.”

Blackmon listened to the female voice, fear hanging off her words like jagged icicles. The only Manteo Six he knew was a former Delta Force operator called Chayton Mahegan, whose unit had been known as the Warriors. General Savage had adopted him as a protégé until a mission went badly in Afghanistan. Blackmon had met Mahegan a few times and knew he was legit. If Mahegan was having someone call him, it most likely was important, but he had pressing matters directly in front of him as he watched the lake water swirl into the pool too slowly.

The brown tint indicated that Stickman had turned off the filtration system in an effort to accelerate the flow of water into the pool. They were fighting some laws of gravity, he knew, as the holes in the bottom of the pool followed a channel straight down, while the lake water flowed horizontally from the valve in the dam to the pool, like a stream. The math wasn't working in his favor. He examined the five sheets of plywood, knowing he had to get to work.

“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.