Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (42 page)

“Well, hell, Colonel,” I said. “If we’re going into the disposal, you can at least tell us what this is all about, can’t you?”

“Just dying of curiosity, are you, Lieutenant?” Trask said.

“It would appear so,” I said.

“Billy, I think you have the right idea, and I’m even going to let you do the honors.” He turned back to me while he started the vehicle. “You see, Lieutenant, I can use Dr. Quartermain here, but I don’t need you—I just needed film of your intrusion. At the appropriate time, I’ll inject that back into the surveillance system, which hopefully will pulse the
reaction team to come out here and run around in circles while we’re in there, doing our thing. Neat, hunh?”

“Sounds like a good diversion,” I said. Neither Tony nor I had been cuffed, and I knew Tony wasn’t going to just sit there and eat a round or six. Billy was watching both of us like a hawk, though, and he looked entirely ready to shred the both of us and the backseat. “But diversion for what, exactly?”

“The moonpool, Lieutenant. The moonpool. I’m going to show this decadent society what the future will look like once we cut and run over there in the Middle East. Give them a little taste of real twenty-first-century terrorism.”

“You’re going to drain it? Cause some kind of meltdown?”

“No, Lieutenant. That’s much too messy. Why spoil a perfectly good atomic power plant? No, this has to do with a vulnerability they haven’t thought about. That’s why Dr. Quartermain there is looking so glum.”

He put the Bronco in drive and turned back out onto the perimeter road.

“You have some more inside help, don’t you?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking, Lieutenant. I have somebody by the balls, and, as usual, when you have people by the balls, their hearts and minds tend to follow. The best part is, he won’t know what he’s done until it’s much too late. But Dr. Quartermain here—he knows. Why don’t you tell them, Ari?”

Trask turned the Bronco off the perimeter road and began a slow descent toward the tailrace. Any camera would see a security vehicle resuming its patrol. The booming of the water jets grew louder, even inside the vehicle.

“The water supply for the moonpool isn’t river water,” Ari recited. “It’s municipal water. The pool loses water due to evaporation, so there’s a connection between the pool’s refill system and the municipal water system. He’s going to reverse it.”

Holy shit
, I thought. “Municipal as in the county water supply?”

“Better than that, Lieutenant,” Trask said patiently. “Municipal as in county
and
city water. Wilmington City, to be precise. The county produces more water than it needs, so they share. You remember what happened to your Ms. Gardner, don’t you? Expand the scale just a bit and you’ll get the picture.”

I was impressed, all right, but, at the same time, I didn’t think it would work. Trask must have read my thoughts.

“I can see you’re skeptical,” he said. He turned the vehicle to the right onto a side road, leading us away from the tailrace. The regular patrol, driving a random pattern, like they were supposed to. I shrugged, and the muzzle of Billy’s weapon rose and fell with my shoulders. No genius there, but the boy certainly could focus.

“Well,” I said, “I thought the idea was a wake-up call, not mass murder.”

“I don’t expect the hot stuff to actually get to people’s water taps, Lieutenant. I just need to force it back along the mains to a water tower or three. Then I call the appropriate people and tell them the city water supply is radioactive. They laugh, say, sure, Snake, that’s a good one. I invite them to test, even provide the equipment. I call the media, let them know where the tests will be done. Then the fun will begin. Of course, they’ll want to know where it came from.”

“From Helios.”

He kept driving away from the tailrace, and now I wasn’t sure why, except that each streetlight on the perimeter road clearly illuminated the Bronco for any watching cameras.

“Yes, from Helios,” he agreed. “Not as the result of any Communist plot, either. Just a horrible mistake, an operational accident.”

“Until they investigate.”

“Exactly so,” he said. “The investigation.
That
will be the wake-up call. And if they try to cover it up, well, there’ll be leaks of a different kind.”

“But where are the thirty-something Islamic males scrambling the gates and yelling
Allahu Akbar
?”

He grinned, and for the first time that lunatic gleam in his eyes was fully uninhibited. He suddenly reminded me of Mad Moira.

“No, Lieutenant,” he said. “No whirling dervishes. Worse—much worse. An
American
. The scariest kind of terrorist—an American sympathizer. A computer expert. A genu-wine feminazi, who blames America first for all the evils in the world and who will happily help the poor, oppressed Islamic hordes defeat the Great Satan.”

“Fucking Mad Moira,” Tony said softly.

“Bingo.”

“Moira’s here? In the plant?”

“Hell, no, Moira’s on the Web, where she lives like the subversive little spider she is. Only I’ve given her some codes and software. She’s going to get us in while keeping the cavalry out at just the right moment.”

“She’s okay with this deal of poisoning the city of Wilmington?”

Trask laughed again. “She might not actually know the full extent of what she’s going to be helping me with,” he said. Billy snickered.

“She’ll point at you when she figures out what you’ve done,” I said.

“If she’s still alive, right, Billy?”

Billy’s grin grew. He was apparently warming to his new line of work. It occurred to me that perhaps Mad Moira might have an agenda of her own in Trask’s little plot. The major had said she’d been using me. Was she using Trask, too? And how had Trask gotten her away from that angry major of Marines?

Trask glanced at his watch again and casually swung the Bronco around. Now I knew why Ari Quartermain looked like a condemned man. He was one. If Trask was going to kill his helper, he’d surely kill any additional witnesses. Like us. I needed to keep him talking.

“So who was the body in the moonpool?”

“One of those derelicts from over there in the container
junkyard. Easy to come by with a bottle of Ripple and a C-note.”

He certainly knew where to look; I wondered if anyone else had ever gone downstairs to face a snake.

“Why’d you put the knife on his boot?” I asked.

“Shit in the game, Lieutenant,” he said with a laugh. “Just throwing a little more shit in the game. That’s my specialty: confusion to the enemy. If I have no specific objective other than chaos, it’s pretty hard for the cops to figure out what I’m up to.” He glanced back in my direction. “That’s how the real bad guys see it, too,” he said. “That’s why you hear so much about ‘no credible and specific threats.’ ”

We were now pointed back toward that boiling tailrace. I kept looking out the windows for the shepherds, but all I saw was those open fields between the perimeter fence and the protected area of the plant buildings. The roar of those high, arching plumes grew as we neared the part of the channel where all that water thundered down into the canal. An enormous cloud of mist boiled up out of the channel now, and that maelstrom seemed to be our destination. Once there, Trask’s vehicle would be obscured from the cameras.

Keeping one hand on the wheel, Trask flipped open a cell phone, punched a speed key, and waited. Billy was bumping around in the front seat as Trask drove the Bronco over increasingly rough ground. That big cloud of spray and mist was now only about fifty yards away. I felt Tony tense up beside me, and tried to figure out what we could do, and when. Or even if, because Billy’s hold on that gun was rock solid, its muzzle pointed right between us and carefully held back out of our reach. Trask spoke into the phone.

“About five minutes,” he said. “Remember: stage one, then stage two. Once I give the go for one, two happens on the timeline, right? I won’t call again.”

He listened and nodded his head. Then, unwittingly, he gave us our chance. With his attention divided, he steered the Bronco into a hole, causing it to veer down and hard left. He swore, dropped the phone, and twisted the wheel, but not
before Billy was thrown off balance and into Trask’s right shoulder. The stubby muzzle of the submachine gun came over the back of the front seat for just an instant.

Tony moved with the speed of a snake. He grabbed the muzzle of Billy’s gun and pushed it toward Trask with his left hand while punching Billy in the eye with one knuckle extended and some adrenaline-powered intensity. Billy yelled but did not let go of the gun. I jacked open the right rear door and bailed out. As I went, my ears were assaulted by the roar of the submachine gun as Billy reflexively pulled the trigger. I could hear glass shattering in the Bronco. The next moment Tony was rolling on the ground in front of me, and then we were both up and running for the tailrace.

“Peter Pan!” Tony yelled, recalling that wonderful comment by Tommy Lee Jones in the latest film issue of
The Fugitive
. We didn’t bother to look back, but simply ran right off the edge of the concrete side and plunged into the channel, chased by fragments of dirt and cement as Billy or Trask did his best to ventilate us before we disappeared.

Disappear we did. The tailrace, which had been a calm, cold, and not very deep pond before the jets opened up, was now a surprisingly warm cauldron of Class 99 whitewater. We’d had to climb the terraces of the channel before. Now the channel was full right up to the top terrace. I went ass over teakettle several times as we were swept down toward that fence. I thought I heard the chatter of the submachine gun briefly between periscope observations, but that was now the least of my worries.

We’d gone in about fifty yards below the impact point of the twin plumes of water, which was good news and bad news. The good news was that we wouldn’t be rolling around like bags of wet laundry in the rotor until the end of time. The bad news was that the tremendous current was carrying us into that reinforced chain-link fence spanning the final exit channel. I say “us” although I’d seen no sign of Tony since making that flying leap into the unknown.

I hit the fence upside down and with my back, and it was a good thing I’d taken a deep breath on the last tumble because
damn near every bit of it was knocked right out of me. The force of the current pinned me against the heavy wire like a butterfly on a corkboard. I fought hard to get turned around and back to the surface. Then something dark and heavy thumped into the fence right alongside, which just for a second eased the pressure of the current on me as the wire rebounded. I scrambled, clambered, clawed, and kicked my way up the wire until the growing pressure in my ears told me I was going precisely the wrong way. Did I mention that it was really dark down there?

I reversed course as best I could, my lungs burning now, and my injured right arm becoming less useful by the moment. Without light, I couldn’t be sure if I was going up or sideways, but the noise of all that turbulence seemed to be getting louder, and then my head popped into cold air, even as the current pressed my cheek into the chain-link. Realizing that the current had me pinned, I stopped struggling and concentrated on breathing again, which made for a nice change. The hank of chain-link wire pressing against my right cheek actually felt reassuring.

I looked around for Tony, but couldn’t see him. There was light up here on the surface, bright enough to obscure the plant, whose lights were still blocked by the cloud of condensation and flying spray upstream. I scanned the banks for Trask and his ace helper, but didn’t see anyone. He’d said five minutes, presumably to Moira, who I assumed was standing by to inject her own version of shit into the game remotely via the Internet. The federal host was probably not yet aware that they were in a deadly game.

Hopefully Trask had decided to cut his losses and get his plan under way. I tried to move sideways, toward the bank, but that current had me nailed to the fence. A moment later, Tony surfaced next to me like a Polaris missile and then went right back under as he, too, was smacked into the fence and held. I reached down into the black water and hauled on his shirt, managing to get his head above water, but just barely.

He hung there like a dead man, and for a horrible second I
wondered if I was holding a corpse, but then he coughed, threw up, went back down, and came up again spewing water everywhere. He grabbed on to the wire, saw me, and grinned. He mouthed the words “Hi, Wendy,” and I snorted out a desperate-sounding laugh.

It took us twenty minutes to claw our way across the bulging fence wire and onto the concrete side of the channel, where we flopped like a couple of belly-hooked catfish.
Cue the shepherds
, I thought. This was when they were supposed to appear out of the darkness and lick my face. That didn’t happen, though, and I couldn’t avoid a pretty bad feeling. They were probably either trapped in the rotor or pinned down on the bottom of the channel, right below where we were recovering. Fuck.

“Who we gonna call?” Tony asked from his supine position on the wet concrete.

“Fresh out of cell phones,” I said. “Did Ari get hit?”

“He might have,” Tony said, propping himself up on one arm. “I had it pointed out the window, but Billy was shooting up the whole backseat, so . . .”

Then I remembered what Trask had said, about planting the video of our coming through the fence to distract the guard force. They’d be coming right here, and very soon, if that five-minutes business was accurate. Tony realized the same thing.