He stood up and, through the night goggles, examined the grating. It was much like a storm sewer grating, just as thick, but round and about three feet across. There was a noise from above him, and Jesse flattened himself against the mountainside, swiveling his head up and around. On the cliff twenty feet above him stood a man holding an assault rifle. He struck a match, lit a cigarette and tossed the match down the steep incline. It landed at Jesse’s feet.
Jesse stood, frozen, until the man moved on. He waited another half minute, then looked at the grate again. It was secured by two large bolts, and the heads were not slotted. He considered using a chisel on them, but that would be noisy; same with the electric drill. Finally, he went into the backpack and came out with the plastic explosive. He got out his pocket knife and cut a large chunk from the main piece; he carefully divided it, then shaped and packed it around the four bolts. It took another few minutes to wire all four charges to one timer, then he took the explosives mat out of the backpack and spread it over the grating. He taped it in place with some duct tape, and then he was ready.
But there was the matter of the guard above. Jesse put down the Uzi and very carefully, foot by foot, scaled the steep incline. He got a toehold just below the top, then stuck his head up and looked around. There were two of them, it seemed, and they were standing next to a shed nearly a hundred yards away, leaning on their weapons and smoking. Jesse thanked heaven for the night goggles. He turned around and slid the twenty feet down to the ledge where he had been working; he took hold of the timer and set it for thirty seconds, then quickly worked his way along the ledge away from the grating. He stopped, turned his head away and held his breath.
There was a muffled whump, and the explosives mat flew off and down the mountain. Quickly, he made his way back to the grating; it was hanging by one bolt. He tossed all his equipment into the pipe, climbed in and pulled the grating back into place. He sat that way, holding the grating, for half a minute before he heard the voices.
“What the fuck was that?” one man said.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“You were farting, that’s why.”
“Maybe that’s what you heard.”
“Naw, I heard a kind of, I don’t know, a—”
“It was probably an eighteen-wheeler backfiring down on the road.”
“No, it was more like a—”
“Well, everything seems to be all right, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You can log the noise, if you want to, but I’m not going to say I heard it.”
“Well, fuck you, then.”
The voices faded away.
Jesse waited for them to go, then gently let the grating hang on the one bolt again. He turned and, pushing his equipment ahead of him, started down the tunnel on his hands and knees.
There was so little ambient light in the pipe that not even the goggles were of much use, so he pulled them down around his neck and switched on a small flashlight. Holding the light in his mouth, he moved on down the tunnel until he came to another obstacle.
This one was nothing more that a piece of chainlink fencing that had been cut to size and welded to the steel pipe; he wouldn’t need explosives for this. He got out the bolt cutters and snipped his way through.
He was well inside the mountain now, and his next obstacle was a fan that nearly filled the tunnel. Suddenly, it came on, and there was a roar as air began to rush down the pipe. He got out his wire cutters, found the power cord and cut it. The fan slowly came to a halt. It took him half an hour to get the blade off and dismantle enough of the frame to get through. There was one last ventilator grate, but this one was of thin aluminum, and he was able to kick it out. He peered out into a long hallway; he was a good eight feet above the floor; about every fourth ceiling light was on.
He lowered his equipment to the floor, then jumped down, squatted and listened. It seemed unlikely that anyone was inside this place late at night, but he wanted to be sure.
Hearing nothing, he thought about his position and decided he must be in the north hallway on the first, highest, level. Then he remembered what was up the hall toward the main entrance. Leaving his tools where they lay he trotted up the hallway, turned a corner and opened a door. A small room was stacked to the ceiling with crates marked “ammunition: recoilless rifle.” He tried a couple more doors, checking labels until he found a single crate, marked “C-4 Plastique.” Perfect. The box held at least twenty pounds of the stuff. He got it open and took out two brick-sized blocks, wired a detonator to it and looked at his watch; one-twenty. He set the timer for one hour and forty minutes; it would go off at exactly 3:00 A.M. He took the crate and went back to where his tools lay, then he sat down and remembered what he could of the layout from his previous visits and from the plans.
By two-thirty, he had set more Plastique in half a dozen ammunition caches all over the complex. That would have been enough to keep anyone from using the facility any time soon, but it didn’t satisfy him. There was one more job to do. He picked up his gear and ran down to the generator room on the second level.
The door was locked, and he had no time to pick the lock. He got out the drill and went straight through the cylinder. Inside the room were two enormous generators; his guess was that one of them was enough to light the facility; the other was a backup. Above them, built into the mountain were two hardened twenty-five-thousand-gallon gasoline storage tanks. Thank God they were on the north side of the mountain, away from the town, he thought. His Plastique might not punch through the tanks, but there was another, simpler and more effective way to deal with it. He set his equipment on a workbench, got out the bolt cutters and stepped behind the machinery; using his flashlight, he located the two armored fuel lines; the bolt cutters made quick work of both of them. He turned two taps, and gasoline began to pour onto the floor, he guessed at the rate of about twenty gallons a minute from each line.
He picked up his gear and got out of there. He was soaked up to the knees with gasoline.
Early on, he had decided not to go out the way he came in. The tunnel was too close to the gasoline tanks, and if he made some miscalculation, and the place went up while he was still in the tunnel, he would be fired from it like the human cannonball at the circus — that, or the mountain would simply collapse on top of him. There was a better way out, he was sure of it.
He charged down the steps to the lower level and ran toward the rear of the structure, toward Jack Gene Coldwater’s offices. He realized that the hallways were all slightly inclined, and he could hear gasoline pouring down the steps behind him. He checked his watch; two forty-seven; thirteen minutes left. He didn’t like the number.
He ran through the suite of offices outside Coldwater’s and came to a stout set of doors, locked. He hadn’t counted on this, and he didn’t want to take the time to drill. He put on the night goggles for protection, aimed the Uzi at the lock and emptied a clip into it. The wood was splintered, but nothing had budged. He inserted another clip and tried again. Still holding. The final clip did it; the lock fell from its casing, and the doors swung open.
Jesse went straight to the false bookcase and moved it back; he found a steel door identical to the one in Coldwater’s study. He heard a trickling noise and looked down; gasoline was streaming into the room. Too late to use the Plastique; not the Uzi, either, even if he had had the ammunition. The lock was brass, though; it shouldn’t make sparks.
He got out the drill and started on the cylinder. It was tougher, though, than the lock to the generator room, and the drill began to falter. He looked at his watch. Six minutes to go. He dug in the tool bag for the spare battery for the drill, found it, ejected the old one and snapped in the new one. The drill came to life again. Half a minute later, the cylinder gave. He put down the drill and rammed the door with his shoulder. Apart from bruising his shoulder, nothing happened.