Striding toward his shiny black, chrome-trimmed Silverado parked outside the hangar, Tenny pulled the phone out of his pocket again and pecked out the number for the motel where Passeau was staying. An automated answering voice asked him for the name of the guest he was trying to reach.
“Passeau,” Tenny snapped. Then he spelled it.
The phone beeped four times. Five.
“The person you are trying to reach is not answering the phone. If you would like to leave a voice mail message, press one.”
Tenny thumbed the keypad. When the automated voice gave him the cue, he said, “Claude, it’s Joe Tenny. I’ve got proof that the bird was sabotaged and I know who did it. Call me as soon as you get this message.”
Fuming about people who didn’t answer their goddamned phones, Tenny opened the door to his Silverado and climbed up into the driver’s seat. He turned on the ignition and the engine growled to life. Then he saw the orange warning on the dashboard fuel gauge.
Near empty? he asked himself. Couldn’t be; I filled the tank yesterday and I haven’t gone anywhere except from here to home and back.
Nettled, worried that the hydrogen tank might be leaking, he put the truck in gear and headed through the night for the hydrogen storage facility on the other end of the airstrip. The Astro base was dark, except for pale lamps spaced along the roadways that connected the various buildings. Glancing out his side window, Tenny saw that the clouds that had been piling up since late afternoon had blotted out the stars. Dan’s gonna have to land at the commercial airport, he thought. It’s gonna be pouring rain here pretty soon.
The damn fuel tank shouldn’t be leaking, he fumed as he drove across the base. The hydrogen bonds to the metal chips in the tank, nice and solid. Maybe some of it baked out of the chips, though; the pickup’s been sitting out in the sun all day. Hydrogen gas leaks out the tank’s cap, he knew. Sneaky stuff in its gaseous phase; seeps through almost any kind of seal.
He shrugged. No real danger. Hydrogen gas just floats up into the air, doesn’t drip and spread and make puddles like gasoline would. Still, Dan insisted that the hydrogen facility had to be stuck out in the middle of noplace. Worried it might blow up like the old Hindenburg. No matter how I tell him the stuff is safe, he still worries about hydrogen. Him and everybody else. NASA’s been using liquid hydrogen for rocket engines for more’n fifty friggin’ years and people are still scared of the stuff.
Shaking his head at human obstinacy, Tenny pulled to a stop at the wire fence that surrounded the hydrogen facility. In the darkness he groped in the glove compartment for the automatic door opener, clicked it once, and the gate rattled open on its metal wheels. He drove in, passed the low building that housed the electrolysis equipment that separated water into hydrogen and oxygen, and pulled up next to the huge spherical hydrogen tank. Bigger than a two-story house, the tank dwarfed Tenny’s Silverado. Both it and the smaller oxygen tank next to it had enormous NO SMOKING signs painted across their curving flanks in Day-Glo red.
Tenny climbed down from the truck, grumbling to himself that he would have to check the fuel tank in the morning. Not at the house, though, he decided. I’ll drive back out here and park it in the far corner of the parking lot. Maybe I’ll have to build a carport to protect the truck from the sun.
“Who’s there?”
Tenny jerked with surprise at the sound of a man’s voice. Then he saw one of the uniformed security guards walking up to him. Big guy. His shirt stretched, too small for his muscular frame.
“It’s okay,” he told the rent-a-cop, fishing his ID badge from his shirt pocket. “I work here.”
The guard flashed his light on the card, then into Tenny’s face. Tenny squinted, frowned.
“Okay, Mr. Tenny. Just doing my job.”
“Yeah, fine, but get the light outta my eyes.”
“Yessir.” The light winked out.
Blinking, waiting for his night vision to return, Tenny stepped around his pickup to find the fuel hose. The big hydrogen tank held liquefied hydrogen, cooled to more than four hundred degrees below zero. To power his truck, Tenny had built a small assembly that tapped liquid hydrogen from the tank, allowed it to warm to a gas, and then pumped the gas into his pickup’s tank.
“I didn’t know you guys were patrolling out here,” Tenny said, as he peered at the dimly lit gauges in the darkness.
“The boss thought we out to check the facility every shift, since the accident,” said the guard.
Overreacting, Tenny thought Scared of hydrogen. Shit, this facility’s as safe as the file cabinets in Dan’s office.
He found the fuel hose as his eyes readjusted to the darkness of the cloudy night. As he turned back to his truck, the guard smashed the butt of his pistol into Tenny’s head, knocking him unconscious. He sprawled on the ground, the hose still gripped in his right hand.
Swiftly, the guard unlatched the safety valve on the hose. Invisible, odorless hydrogen gas began pouring out of it. The guard could hear the pump chugging behind him. He ran out to the wire fence at the hydrogen facility’s perimeter, dashed through the gate and raced to his own car, parked up the road. Ducking in behind the steering wheel, he popped the glove compartment and pulled out a small flat metal box. Inside it was a length of ordinary white string that smelled sharply of the oil it had been soaked in.
For a moment he hesitated. He clicked the box closed again and started his car’s engine. He wanted to be moving away when the shit hit the fan. He jumped out of the car, uncoiling the oil-soaked string as he ran back to Tenny’s Silverado. The engineer was still facedown, moaning, his legs scrabbling feebly. The man pushed one end of the string into the still-hissing hydrogen hose, then uncoiled the string to its full length and lit its other end. He sprinted back to his car, slammed it into gear, and peeled away with a screech of rubber on the tarred roadway.
The hydrogen facility blew up in a massive red fireball, hotter than the pits of hell. The roar of the blast shook the guard’s car so badly he nearly drove off the road. As the fireball soared into the night sky, turning the clouds coppery red, the guard drove off and headed for Houston, where his money was waiting for him.
Over Goose Island State Park, Texas
Dan saw the fireball as he flew over the state park.
He had just ducked the Staggerwing below the thickening cloud deck, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to land at the airstrip at the Astro headquarters. He was receiving landing instructions from the airport at Lamar, on the other side of the bay that separated Matagorda Island from the mainland when the hydrogen facility blew up.
“What the hell was that?” yelled the air traffic controller in Dan’s earphones.
The Staggerwing lurched, whether from the explosion’s shock wave or Dan’s startled response he didn’t know. Or care.
“Explosion at my headquarters on Matagorda,” he said into the pin microphone that almost touched his lips. “I’m diverting over there to take a look.”
Dan felt bile inching up his throat. He knew that the only thing on Matagorda that could create a fireball that immense was Astro’s hydrogen facility.
“Christ, not another one,” he groaned. First the spaceplane and now this: I’m ruined. They’ve ruined me.
Circling over the blazing remains, Dan saw that his worst fears had come true. Flickering flames broke the darkness where the hydrogen facility had been. The grass was burning now; a spreading brushfire had already reached beyond the sagging wire fence that surrounded the facility. There’s nothing down there but burning wreckage, he saw. Must’ve broken windows for miles.