Three Minutes to Midnight (19 page)

“That's the hard part. We're seeing some new equipment on the field where they're drilling. And we know that the natural gas pipeline from Louisiana cuts through North Carolina, with an offshoot into Raleigh. The party at Throckmorton's was to celebrate the state's completion of a pipeline along the railroad from Durham to the coast, that is, to Morehead City.”

“Where there's a port.” On Mahegan's several military deployments, he'd sometimes had to use the roll-on, roll-off facility at the Morehead City port.

“Which would mean exporting the gas. Oh my God. You're a frigging genius.”

Mahegan nodded, then looked up, concerned. He rose from the bed and pulled on his black cargo pants and a black Under Armour T-shirt. After gathering all the phones, GPS devices, and identification cards on the table, he sat down in front of them.

“I need you to stand watch. Just sit in the chair over by the wall, where you can see east out of that window,” he said, pointing at the opening where he had rested his sniper rifle to shoot the two EB-5 commandos that morning. “And you can look south out of that window.”

Grace positioned herself perfectly so that she could see but would not be seen by anyone from the ground.

“You can see the house. You might see the Robertson family coming or going. That's normal. Anything else isn't.”

“Why the sudden security?” she asked.

“I shot two men down there this morning. I told you that. Even though I've pulled the batteries and SIM cards from every phone, they may just be looking for their two men at their last known point.”

“You sure everything's off?”

“Yes. Remember, they're after you, not me,” Mahegan said.

Mahegan stood and tossed all the stolen weapons and some of his own personal equipment into a duffel bag, calculating what he would need for the evening's mission. He placed the SIM cards from each of the phones into a Baggie, which he would give to Savage's guy. He then began using a mini USB port and cable attached to his government-issued smartphone to upload SIM cards that would show text, call, and location data of the EB-5 commandos. The information would automatically transfer via a secured wireless connection to Savage's team, which was the part Mahegan was worried about. Despite the encryption, the information carried identifiable ping data, which active scanners could recognize. He was tempted to do the link analysis himself, but Mahegan figured they had about an hour, maybe less, before one of two groups appeared: Griffyn and the Raleigh Police Department, or the EB-5 commandos. Both would be hostile, but only one overtly so.

He had the eight phones arrayed on the table, all of them similar models except the older BlackBerry. Two were from the Turks he'd injured while they were invading Grace's home. Two were from the Russians he'd shot this morning on the Robertson property. Two were from the Serbs who had come looking for them at the pub and who were very much alive and could most likely identify him. The last two were from the first Russian, Petrov, with the scar on his face. He was wounded and probably lethal.

He retrieved his government-issued smartphone, opened the Zebra app, and typed a message to Savage, relaying everything he knew about the case. His big thumbs caused multiple typos and errors, and he lost time by going back and correcting them.

“Okay, ready?”

Grace had managed to get fully dressed in her jeans, T-shirt, and pullover sweater, which she had brought in her backpack. She wore hiking boots and looked ready for whatever Mahegan threw her way.

“Yes, sir,” Grace said. She saluted Mahegan.

Mahegan shook his head and said, “Let's get out of here.”

He swept all of the phones into his duffel bag, which he clasped in his large hand, as they exited his flat, and Mahegan spun the combination lock on the door.

“This way,” Mahegan said. He gripped her hand and pulled her down the steps, into the barn room below his apartment. After sliding an iron bar through the barn door handles, he turned and guided Grace through the back door.

They stepped lightly into the woods, close to where the Russians had been that morning. Mahegan still smelled the blood on the ground. He stopped behind a fallen oak, its root base providing ample cover, like a firing port in a castle. As they knelt, Mahegan could feel the soft pine straw and the deadfall beneath his kneecap. His senses were alive as he listened to the distant rustle of a squirrel in a tree. He heard water from a rill running toward Jordan Lake. He thought he recognized the sound of a deer rubbing its antlers—a constant
scrape, scrape, scrape
—against a hardwood, probably an oak. The hooves were on the ground; the antlers, against the tree. The buck was marking his turf as mating season began.

“Snakes?” Grace whispered.

“Animals are your friends,” Mahegan said, meaning it.

“Snakes aren't animals. They're reptiles.”

“Reptiles are animals. Now be quiet. Look,” Mahegan said, pointing.

A single car raced into the long driveway, passed the Robertson house, which was dark, and pulled all the way up to the barn. This was not the EB-5 commandos. It was Griffyn.

Grace's tight clutch on his arm indicated to Mahegan that she understood what they were seeing.

Detective Griffyn, tall and balding, with tiny eyes, stepped from his car and looked around the unfamiliar, dark expanse, trying to find his way. Mahegan could see him thinking,
A barn
? He could also see the pistol in Griffyn's hand. It had the square, boxy look of a Glock, but he couldn't tell for sure at thirty meters. Mahegan put his hand on Grace's shoulder, silently communicating for her to stay calm.

He was thinking,
Two options
. One, he could take down the detective and question him to determine his role in the scheme, if any. The downside was that Griffyn might have no role, and Mahegan would then be charged for assaulting a police officer. Who knew? There could be some kind of charge for attacking the man with the closest bloodline to Sir Walter Raleigh. Mahegan's second option was to steal Griffyn's car and drive some distance toward the fracking site and carry on with his original plan. Both options provided some element of risk and reward.

Mahegan's style was to gain as much operational intelligence as he could and then to move swiftly, staying inside the enemy's decision cycle. He believed Throckmorton wasn't aware of him yet, but that could change very quickly. Like military dead space, the enemy knew you were out there; they just could not see you. Throckmorton was missing valuable men, and if Gunther was involved financially, if the man had anything on the table at all, Mahegan knew that Gunther would do whatever it took to stop the bleeding.

Mahegan decided his most valuable play was to detain Griffyn, question him, and then carry on with his mission. He watched the man survey the barn doors, which Mahegan had locked from the inside after Grace and he had parked their cars. Griffyn looked over his shoulder at the Robertson home and then looked back at the doors. He pulled on them without success.

Griffyn slowly began walking directly toward Mahegan and Grace, then turned left, toward the back of the barn. When he made the next left and headed toward the back door, Mahegan took Grace's hand and they moved toward Griffyn's car, gingerly avoiding twigs and branches and making as little noise as possible. He opened the front passenger door of Griffyn's Crown Victoria and whispered to Grace, “On the floor,” as he handed her the duffel bag. She would fit better in the compact space.

He slid into the backseat, then eased the door closed with a click. Mahegan did his best to hide his large frame in the foot well on the passenger side. Griffyn was a relatively tall man and had the driver's seat racked back a good distance. Fortunately, the Crown Vic was a large car. He noticed Griffyn was not an exceptionally neat man. There were food wrappers and newspapers on the floor and on the backseat. Those would make it harder to keep quiet when he sprang, so he adjusted them while he could, sliding some of the wrappers into the other foot well. He risked a peek up over the middle console and saw that Grace was tucked in a tight little package, like a kid doing a cannonball off a diving board.

He heard Griffyn walking quickly, feet crunching on the drainage gravel Mahegan had placed around the barn to help with some of the water issues Andy Robertson had discussed with him. The gravel was also an early warning system for him. Griffyn stormed into the Crown Vic, opening the door with fury and then slamming it with equal counterweight. Mahegan heard something thud onto the passenger seat, and he guessed it was the gun.

He felt more than heard Griffyn's weight shift to the passenger side as he inserted the key fob into the slot. There was also the sound of metal clicking, like a handset being removed from a sleeve. He heard the tick of a dial being turned and then the random voices of police chatter.

“We have a ten-twenty-three and need a ten-nine immediately. . . .”

“Wilco. Address please . . .”

He was listening to the chatter, and wondering why Griffyn wasn't making his call, when he heard, “What the hell?”

Mahegan came up quickly with his pistol to the back of Griffyn's head and wrapped his arm around the man's thin neck. Looking to his right, he saw that Grace had Griffyn's pistol and was aiming it at him. She had taken a scarf from her pocket and had draped it across her head and face, making her look like a Muslim terrorist.

“Start the car and drive,” Mahegan said. “I've killed two people in the past twenty-four hours, and I've got no problem with a third.”

“Hawthorne?”

“I said to drive, Griffyn.”

“Where to?”

“You know where I want to go. Show me where Maeve Cassidy is being held.”

“How would I know that?”

“You've got two weapons aimed at you right now. You really want to play poker? I'm the stable one here. That one in your front seat . . . Who the hell knows?”

“I'm out here on official Raleigh Police Department business. You have no business—”

Mahegan had had enough. He rose up and struck the man on his temple, knocking him unconscious. He dragged the man over the front seat and into the back, then pulled some plastic flex cuffs from his duffel bag and used them. He used Grace's scarf to gag Griffyn, securing it tightly enough to make him appear as if he was grimacing constantly. With the man's hands secured behind his back and his mouth gagged, Mahegan climbed into the front seat as Grace unwrapped the scarf from her face and sat in the passenger seat. She looked over the headrest at Griffyn.

“You don't know how many times I wanted to do that,” she said.

“What? Aim a weapon at him, knock him out, or handcuff him?”

“Pick one. He's such a frigging douche.”

Mahegan started the car and then drove the route to the fracking site, only he turned sooner and followed the stream on the east side, sticking to the improved dirt and gravel road that led to the hilltop where he had heard a vehicle driving during his earlier reconnaissance. The forest on either side of the road was thick, making navigation without headlights a challenge. He was trading the idea of stealth for the concept that Throckmorton and Gunther would be expecting Griffyn's vehicle. They would look out the window and see his car and then would go back to drinking whiskey or whatever they were doing.

To his left, Mahegan saw a bank of lights, like a baseball field lit at night. In the middle he saw the newly erected rig, looking like a small Eiffel Tower. He heard the crunch of turning gears and the hiss of hydraulic pistons. Indeed, the operation was under way. Somewhere close by Captain Maeve Cassidy was steering a drill toward the Durham shale and was ready to pump new chemicals into the land so that Throckmorton could steal what the people of North Carolina rightfully owned.

Driving in the darkness without headlights, he felt the curve of the road and knew they were climbing a hill. He looked at Grace and saw that her eyes were wide with anticipation. She still had the pistol in her hand and was fumbling with it nervously. As they crested the hill, he was instantly upon a guarded checkpoint with minimal lighting. He slowed the vehicle, thinking perhaps that there was an electronic signal the Crown Vic would emit to lift the gate arm.

If there was one, it didn't work. From either flank, two men emerged from the woods with long rifles drawn on them. Mahegan turned on the high beams to see if he could ram the checkpoint. It didn't appear so. He did see, however, that Maxim Petrov was standing in the middle of the road.

The Russian was holding a baseball bat.

CHAPTER 17

T
HE
J
OYSTICK TREMBLED IN HER HAND
.

“We've got a guy,” Jim had said. Someone besides Jim was in charge. The man she had come to know in Afghanistan was evil, but would he design attacks on nuclear facilities? She didn't think so.

Someone else had developed this elaborate plan.

We've got a guy
.

Maeve took a few deep breaths and continued to navigate the drill through the earth.

Just get through this, Maeve
.
Do what you have to do. Anything and everything to save Piper.

The drill had bit through two miles of earth and into the Durham sub-basin. She hated violating this unspoiled resource. As a geologist, Maeve was conflicted about tapping the land for hydrocarbons. Was she a hypocrite for not worrying so much about it when her vehicle fuel was coming from the Middle East? It was a definite conflict. She understood the earth's texture and fragility. What she had endured in Afghanistan had only made her more convinced that the human race had to find a different way to provide energy. There was a balanced menu of options—solar, wind, sea, electric, nuclear, and fossil fuels—and they should collectively power the economies of nations. Right now Maeve didn't like that 80 percent of the world's energy came from hydrocarbons.

That introspection caused her to think about the small percentage of energy derived from nuclear power, which spiraled her right back to her dilemma. The threat that her mistake could ignite an attack on Wilmington or Charlotte was horrifying to Maeve. Wasn't holding Piper captive enough to get her to commit to doing what they need her to do? She was motivated 100 percent. Anxiety circled her throat like a snake tightening its grip. Her hand started shaking. She felt the initial onset of panic coming at her from two directions. First, the nuclear plants. Second, they had Piper! They had kidnapped her daughter, the only thing that mattered to her in this world!

Her eyes blinked, and she felt the slow nod of her head as she began to fall asleep.

Indeed, she was dreaming.
Stop it! Wake up
! she told herself.

She watched as her hand overcorrected and the stick jumped, causing the beeping red dot that represented the drill bit to bounce against the edge of the designated path. A loud siren erupted in the room, like an air raid warning.

Jim came barging into the room, shouting, “You know what that means, right? Damn it! What happened?”

Maeve stared at the screen and saw that the red dot was back within the boundaries and was moving forward on the designated path. Jim flipped a switch to display the drone at an undesignated airfield in Gaston County. The drone must have had a thermal camera in its substructure, because Maeve could see that its propeller was spinning and it was rolling along a grass runway.

To Maeve, the sight was unbelievable. She had triggered this through a subtle error. How could she have been so careless? She was watching an aircraft that was no bigger than a small Cessna airplane but that looked like a small F-117, the stealth fighter with the extended bat wings. She knew what it was. Military defense contractor BAE Systems had made a prototype called the Corax, which was a stealth unmanned aerial vehicle. It carried a payload, such as bombs. She knew that much. What was this one carrying? she wondered.

“What is that?” she shrieked. “I didn't do that. It was just one little mistake!”

“You did that, dear Maeve. The McGuire Nuclear Station will be melting down pretty soon. Hope you don't have any friends in Charlotte. We're safe, though. Three hours away,” Jim said. He had leaned over the back of the chair and had whispered this in her ear. She wished she had a lighter to ignite the air every time he breathed the noxious whiskey fumes onto her neck. She wanted to burn him. To kill him. She wanted to put him on that airplane, which had just taken off from the grass runway.

“Dear God.”

“Watch this,” Jim said, flipping a switch and showing a split screen on the monitor to the left of her drill path monitor. Despite the frightening sight of the Corax taking off, she kept the drill moving forward within the boundaries of the path, for fear of igniting the second threat, the liquefied natural gas container ship by the Brunswick Nuclear Plant.

“What is that?” But she knew what it was. Someone had placed another thermal camera on the fence surrounding McGuire and had aimed it at the cooling towers. In the greenish hue of the camera, she could make out spotlights crossing the sky above the cooling towers, like for a used car sale advertisement. On the other half of the screen was the image being fed back from the Corax in flight. It was sailing smoothly through the sky, then darting like a bat, perhaps responding to radar stimuli. Maeve wasn't sure.

Soon the static camera that was focused on the two cooling towers showed a black object piercing the spotlights and aimed directly at the top, in an almost vertical suicide attack down the pipe.

“No. This can't be happening,” Maeve said.

“It's happening, dear Maeve. Trust me.” As Maeve listened to Jim, he sounded as if he might not believe it himself.

“Who put you up to this? You're a bastard, but you're not a mass murderer,” Maeve demanded.

They watched both images. The darting bat was now in a complete nosedive, and the image of the cooling towers was growing larger. The ground camera showed the black speck in the sky becoming a larger, recognizable object. It was like a slow-motion fastball coming to home plate, initially barely visible and then suddenly upon the batter in full dimension.

Then something happened that neither of them could have predicted.

Two oval objects the size of small water towers flipped open, revealing what looked to Maeve to be large machine guns, like on the Aegis cruisers in the U.S. Navy. The weapons spat at the diving jet, tracking it as it approached in its rapid descent. A fraction of a second prior to impacting the dome of one of the cooling towers, the plane shredded into small pieces, and a large airburst ignited.

To Maeve, the plane was nothing more than confetti in the sky, while the airburst was an orange and black demon boiling above the nuclear plant.

She clasped her mouth with her left hand, her right continuing to push the red dot forward.

Jim seemed to ease back away from her. She felt him sigh and relax. That was good information. This was not his plan. Perhaps he hadn't even believed that the threats were real.

“Don't mess up again, is all I've got to say,” Jim said. He departed the room.

But Maeve's mind was spinning. She had just inadvertently launched an attack on a nuclear facility. She was aiding and abetting terrorists.

And they were holding her daughter ransom.

She had to find Piper, but how could she leave the joystick and the control room? Where would she even begin to look?

Maeve stared at the computer monitor and saw that the sky around the nuclear facility was littered with chunks of the drone burning brightly in the camera's thermal retina.