Charon's Landing (62 page)

He didn’t waste more than a second realizing who it was he was pursuing. With Kerikov dead in the harbor, only Abu Alam remained unaccounted for. It made sense that after triggering the explosives aboard the
Hope
, Alam would leave Prince William Sound as fast as possible. Because of the heavy traffic around the town caused by emergency vehicles headed toward the harbor, there would be no way for him to get to the airport. His only other option was the Richardson Highway and Anchorage a couple hundred miles north. Once there, he would be lost forever.

The road uncoiled before the Blazer, the powerful Chevy engine roaring under the broad hood, the wheels reacting eagerly to Mercer’s guidance. As he drove, he shoved aside his exhaustion, knowing that he couldn’t push himself much farther or his body would simply fail to respond. This whole affair had all started here for him, at a test with Howard Small and his tunneling device, and he was going to see that it ended here too, probably no more than a few miles from Howard’s mini-mole site.

His mind cast back to that time only a few weeks before, recalling that the turnoff to the site was around a couple more bends in the road. Mercer didn’t realize his concentration had wavered until he rounded a sharp corner, and there, stretched across the two-lane road, was an overturned tour bus, glittering fragments of glass spread around the motor coach like handfuls of diamonds tossed onto the macadam. Dazed people milled around the scene, many of them stained by their own blood, others still struggling out of the destroyed vehicle.

Using both feet, Mercer ratcheted the brakes to the floor mat. Greasy black slicks burned off the tires, a sharp stench filling the confines of the Blazer. One elderly woman, her eyes owl-wide, stood transfixed as the truck careened toward her. Mercer yanked the wheel over, fishtailing the Blazer to a stop only feet from where she stood. Even as the body of the truck settled back onto its suspension, Mercer jammed the accelerator.

When he whipped his truck around to miss the woman, the Blazer lined up with a dirt track that forked off the Richardson Highway and climbed up to its right, heading straight to where the pipeline crossed over Thompson Pass. Mercer knew the track well. This was where he and Howard had been conducting their tests.

As the Blazer left the asphalt and the tires dug into the muddy road, he guessed at what had happened just moments before. Alam must have rounded the corner wide, directly into the path of the oncoming bus. Like Mercer just now, he would have hauled his truck to the right to get back into his lane and noticed the road leading up into the hills. Ignoring the swerving bus, he would have made a quick escape toward the testing site, while below him, the driver of the bus lost control of his heavy charge.

Mercer could not allow himself to consider that Alam had managed to squeak past the bus and continue toward Anchorage.

The access road twisted sharply in hairpin switchbacks, and almost immediately Mercer noticed fresh tire tracks in the hardened dirt, darker sprays of soil churned up from the wheels of a speeding vehicle. With Howard dead and the site shut down until people from UCLA came to get the mini-mole and all the other equipment, there would be no reason for anyone to be here. Alam was just ahead and this was a dead-end road. Mercer grabbed the automatic pistol and set it on his lap.

The road was narrow, trees and greenery scratching the side of the Blazer as it powered upward. When he finally burst into the site itself, the thick forest gave way to a huge field at the base of a solid wall of rock towering two hundred feet above the tallest trees. A steel cyclone fence had been erected around the area and where it crossed the access road, the gate was smashed back, hanging limply from one hinge.

The scene looked exactly as it had when Mercer and Howard had left for their celebratory fishing trip. Two enclosed trailers sat side by side, cement blocks placed under their integrated jacks keeping them level. A flatbed eighteen-wheeler was parked a little way off. Minnie herself sat at the base of the cliff under a tarp, heavy cables running from her to spools that were attached to large portable generators. She was still lined up to the main test-boring hole in the mountain, a perfectly round aperture that was so black it seemed to absorb light. A red Alyeska pickup truck sat next to one of the travel trailers Howard and his team had used as an office.

Pocketing the keys to his truck, Mercer dashed to the cover provided by the huge flatbed semi, ducking under the low trailer and training the pistol over the wide expanse of the site. He quickly ran through Alam’s options in his mind. Alam hadn’t had enough time to pick the lock on one of the trailers and hide inside, nor did it seem he was using the rig to hide behind because he could have easily gunned down Mercer as he ran toward it. The surrounding field was mostly alpine grass and offered no protection, so Alam wasn’t running on foot, nor did he appear to be climbing the cliff, a difficult task for even an experienced climber. That left Minnie, the generators, or the couple of pallets of gear clustered near the entrance to the test hole. The four other holes nearby were no more than a couple of feet deep, dug as calibrating bores before Minnie’s main hole, and he could clearly see that Alam wasn’t lurking in any of them.

Instinctively, Mercer knew Abu Alam was trying to make his escape through the mountain in the four-foot-wide tunnel. But just in case he was wrong, he crawled the fifty yards to where the generators sat, his body tensed for a shot that never came.

Mercer worked the controls with one hand while the other held his pistol leveled at the tunnel entrance, and the generators, big Ingersol-Rands powered by eight-cylinder diesels, fired after only a second. Once they were running, he stripped off Minnie’s cover, revealing the ugliest machine he had probably ever seen.

The miniature boring machine operated much the same as its larger cousins but refined to near perfection. The cutting blade, a four-foot-diameter disk, was composed of carbon fiber polymer and diamond chips held together with the recently discovered carbon molecule called buckminsterfullerine. It could turn the hardest bedrock into microscopic dust in an instant. The body of Minnie was a rounded box that housed the sophisticated pumps and valves for the hydraulics and a third-generation global positioning system that gave her more accuracy than the American navy’s nuclear submarines. For propulsion, two hydraulic legs, rams designed much like the legs of a grasshopper, were mounted on either side of the machine’s body. They provided enough holding power and forward pressure for the cutting blade to core through granite at the unheard-of pace of two feet per minute. An enormous fan mounted on the very back of the machine blew the dust and debris created by the disk back down the tunnel it had created.

“Alam, I know you can hear me,” Mercer shouted at the tunnel, his voice booming down the length of the shaft. “That noise you hear is the boring machine that dug the hole you are running through.”

Abu Alam ran doubled over along the pitch-black passage, but he paused at the voice. It was distorted as it ricocheted off the walls, but he caught just enough to force him to stop. He recognized the voice as the person Kerikov had captured during his attack at the pump station. He had no desire to turn back and finish off the man. Philip Mercer was Kerikov’s enemy, not his. All that mattered to him was getting out of this hole and escaping. Behind him, the tunnel opening was only a pinhole, while ahead, there was only blackness.

“It was built by the man you killed in California,” Mercer continued as he readied Minnie, checking connections and making sure the cutting wheel was freely turning on its shaft. “He was testing it here just before you murdered him. Unfortunately for you, Alam, we never finished this hole before deciding the test was a success. It ends about five feet from the other side of the mountain.”

Alam went white.

Mercer engaged the ram/legs and stepped aside. Like a tired beetle, Minnie started forward, the cutting head spinning at fifteen thousand rpm. Without having to cut through rock, Minnie could travel about twelve feet per minute with its peculiar lurching gait. It would take an hour for it to reach Alam. Mercer couldn’t afford to wait until the end, so he programmed the machine to automatically shut itself down after boring through two additional feet of rock at the shaft’s terminus. He turned away and started back to his Blazer. “Die hard, motherfucker.”

Abu Alam, Father of Pain, would cower until the last possible second at the end of the shaft, curling himself into a ball against the rough stone before Minnie reached him. His body was liquefied by the cutter head. Days later, when the mini-mole was pulled from the hole, the largest piece of him found could have been squeezed through a toothpaste tube.

Back at the base of the access road, Mercer took on three of the most seriously injured of the bus passengers, none of whom were in any real danger. He deposited them at the Valdez hospital but left before anyone could detain him with questions about anything other than the crash’s location. It was only after the Blazer was rolling into the terminal facility that he remembered something Ivan Kerikov had said the night before on the
Petromax Omega
.

“Shutting down the pipeline is only one tine in a three-pronged attack.”

Mercer was about to find out that the second prong of Kerikov’s plan was as sharp as, and even deadlier than, the first.

W
hen Mercer got back to the Operations Building, Andy Lindstrom was in his office, one phone clamped to his head and another one lying off its cradle on a pile of papers, a tinny but strident voice calling from it like an irate Lilliputian. Two workers stood in front of the desk, their heavy utility clothes streaked with crude. Andy saw Mercer standing at the threshold and waved him in. He barked an order into the phone, cut the connection, and scooped up the other, launching into a new set of commands before dropping that one too into its receiver. Instantly both started ringing again.

“Christ, this is nuts,” Andy said, lifting one of the phones. He shouted into the mouthpiece, “Give me a second, will ya?”

Without waiting for a response from the caller, he set the phone on the desk. Ignoring the other ringing telephone, he took a moment to light a cigarette. His ashtray was overflowing with half-smoked butts. He used the glowing cherry of the cigarette like a finger to point at the two workers. “Introduce an instrument pig from Pump Station 10. I need to know the condition of the line between us and the Tanana River. The on-site guys say there’s no external damage, no sign of tampering, but I need to be sure. If you run into a frozen section, cut the pump immediately and call me. I’ll try to scare up another jet heater from the Air Force.”

The two men nodded quickly and left.

“Mercer, I’ve got a problem even bigger than this mess. Go down to the communications room. They’ll fill you in.”

“Andy, I’m going to bed,” Mercer said flatly.

“I need you, man. Without Mike Collins, I’ve got no security chief. I heard that someone was shot at the main gates an hour or two ago, the local police are screaming about that PEAL ship exploding in the harbor, and already oil companies are demanding revised delivery schedules. Alyeska’s board is telling me that
I will
have the line back up in three weeks, and I don’t even know how bad it is yet. Shit, worldwide crude prices are up three dollars since this morning, and it doesn’t look like they’re coming down any time soon. Help me out, will ya?”

“All right,” Mercer breathed resignedly. He didn’t acknowledge Lindstrom as he strode from the room, his dulled mind thinking that Andy’s new emergency might be another of Kerikov’s fronts.

The communications center was a small office dominated by a built-in counter with several multiline phones, fax, and teletype machines, plus two powerful marine transceivers. Three people were monitoring the fax, the teletype, and the huge radio sets, while a fourth was deep in conversation at a desk phone. Aggie Johnston was standing over by the desk, a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. She ran to Mercer when she saw him enter, pressing herself tightly to him.

“What happened?” she said against his chest.

“Abu Alam is dead. You don’t want to know the details. What’s going on here?”

“A tanker has been seized by terrorists, but its captain escaped. He’s on the phone right now. He thinks the ship is going to be scuttled somewhere near Seattle.”

“Is this another PEAL operation?”

“Mercer, almost the entire active core of PEAL was on the
Hope
when it exploded,” Aggie said sadly. “All that’s left of the organization are the office workers and the fringe members who used us to be in with the smart European set.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” Mercer replied, shamefaced. Until yesterday she had believed in them and their cause, and this morning she had lost a great number of friends and her ex-lover. Under the circumstances, her response was much milder than it could have been. “This is something Kerikov must have planned with another group. What’s the captain’s name?” He directed the question at the woman on the phone.

“Hauser, Captain Lyle Hauser.”

“Has this call been verified? It could be some crackpot.”

“Authentication protocol has been used. Hauser is the captain of the VLCC.” She didn’t protest when Mercer took the handset from her.

“Captain Hauser, my name is Mercer. I’m the acting head of security here at Alyeska. I’m sorry, but I need you to run through what happened again.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Hauser shouted. “Those lunatics are going to sink the ship and cause a slick the size of Lake Superior.”

“Where are you now?”

“Victoria Island, British Columbia, a little town called Port Alice. I was dropped here by the commercial fishing boat that rescued me.”

“Was Seattle the destination of your vessel?”

“No, for Christ’s sake, how many times do I have to go through this with you people? We were headed to Long Beach when my First Officer and a group of terrorists masquerading as workers took over my ship. I managed to sabotage the engines and maybe delay them by a couple of days. The damage I caused forced them to change their plans, so rather than scuttle the
Arctica
in San Francisco harbor, they chose Seattle instead.”