As the Old Man walked out from behind the boiler, Marti almost jumped at seeing another person in the room with me. She was clearly on edge.
“Hi Marti! Nice to meet you,” the Old Man said with a smile as he extended his hand to her.
I could tell she wasn’t sure about what to do as she tentatively reached for his hand to return the gesture. She gripped his hand lightly but didn’t actually shake it. She looked at him as if studying him, trying to find what made him look familiar to her.
Then it was like she came back to reality and remembered this was a secure nuclear power plant… or supposed to be anyway. She looked at the Old Man now as if inspecting him. She knew me but she didn’t know him. I assumed she was looking to see if either of us has a security badge or a thermo-luminescent dosimeter, or TLD.
“Who are you, and how’d you get in here?”
“Hey, we’re the good guys,” the Old Man said. “We’re friends of Prichard’s.”
“I’m not sure I can let it go at that.”
The Old Man looked deep into her eyes, “Look, Marti, Nick told me we can count on you. I hope that’s true. Right now, we need your help. We need to move around the plant.” Knowing what was probably going through her mind, he added, “As you can see, we have no security badges.”
Marti looked from the Old Man to me. “Yes, I noticed that. You clearly didn’t get in here through the front door. You care to explain how you got here?”
I could sympathize with her. She was in a very compromising situation and it was a stretch for her to blindly trust people she really didn’t know, but we needed to get moving. So with a stern tone, I said, “We really don’t have time for this right now, and how we got here is irrelevant. We’re here and we’re on your side. So let’s move past that.”
I could see that Marti was still a bit defiant from her run-in with the security officer. There was no point in continuing to discuss our security status, so I changed the subject and asked her, “Did you get the information to Pete like I asked?”
This caught her off guard, which is what I’d hoped to do.
“Um, yes, I did,” she said, after a short pause. “I got him all the information I could on what the FBI has on the location of Dave’s family. I did that over an hour ago.”
“Good job. Thank you.” Then, I gently took her by the elbow and led her off a couple of feet, as if to an area that’s further away from the door. There was no reason to do this other than to make physical contact with her again. I needed her on our side, and I knew this would help define and strengthen the connection between the two of us.
“We need to get to someone in Security. Who’s the security supervisor tonight?”
Marti inadvertently looked down at my hand on her elbow. I detected some color in her cheeks.
“I’m not sure,” she answered. “I think I saw Hector on my way in earlier, but I don’t know if he’s still here. I have to assume he is, given that the shift change isn’t until morning.”
She was softening and staring at me. I smiled slightly at her, which caused her to turn her eyes away from mine.
The Old Man came over to us and asked, “What’s the security supervisor’s phone number?”
Marti looked at the Old Man as if jolted back into reality again. “You don’t plan to call him, do you? The Security Department has been compromised. Isn’t he a bad guy?”
The Old Man said, “Likely as not, he’s okay. Rob has been turned, but all of these guys can’t have been compromised. We’re going to have to risk that. We need to talk with him.”
“I really don’t know his number, but wouldn’t it be better if I contacted him for you, just in case he is a bad guy? Maybe it would be best if you didn’t tip your hand right away.”
The Old Man smiled at me, and then turned back to Marti. “Good thinking, Marti! I think I’m gonna like you!”
I looked at my watch as a signal. The Old Man understood. He turned to Marti and said, “Okay. Go back to your office and give him a call. If you think you can trust him, tell him to meet us here. But he needs to hurry. We’re time crunched here.”
Marti paused and looked as if she could think of a few dozen reasons why she should object, but she was getting worn down and just opted to do as requested. “Okay,” was all she could say, then turned and headed to the door. Just before she opened it, she glanced back at me, as if searching for some confirmation that what she was about to do was correct, as silly as that may have seemed. So I nodded ever so slightly to her. She nodded back, and strode out of the package boiler room, leaving us standing there, wondering what she was going to do.
CHAPTER 47
Out in the hills behind the power plant, the fog was moving inland now and with it came the cold. Nick’s team was trying to stay warm and in a ready condition. They were about to be asked to do something that gave them pause. When they’d done this kind of thing before, they were in the military and the bad guys were of a different nationality. Now, they were all civilians and working for a company that provided industrial security assessments.
Their boss was inside and in harm’s way, and they’d do their best to protect him. They were all indebted to Nick for their lives through a bond with him that was forged in far-away places, on missions that didn’t officially exist. They were thinking men but were fiercely loyal to Nick and to each other. None of them had a problem with this job, but it had crossed a few minds that they were likely as not going to kill some people. It was possible that they may have even trained with some of these guys at some point in their careers.
It was this thoughtfulness that made the people on his team valuable to Nick. But thoughtfulness didn’t equate to hesitation. The time for discussion was in the briefing, not in the field. The team knew that and was fully prepared to do what they came to do, and do it quickly and efficiently. The men weren’t mercenaries, like the members of Jansen’s team. They were patriots, and they would do what they had to do to preserve the peace. Even though they weren’t wearing the uniforms anymore, if you cut them they’d all bleed olive drab green — the color of all things Army.
It was 0200; the time Red One gave them to begin. The Red Two team leader looked at his watch and then gave two quick squawks on his comm as a signal to his team that they were go for take-back. He and five others were already positioned in the brush well behind Jansen’s team, but close enough to be in position to breach the fence should that be necessary.
Meanwhile, the two-man sniper/observer team was in a hide site one hundred meters uphill and behind them. Their scopes had special optics for use at night, allowing them to see Jansen’s team while remaining hidden themselves, keeping a low profile and ready to move. The sniper/observer team had to move into position quickly when they got the go order earlier in the day and didn’t have time to set up the hide site a day in advance as they normally would have done. They moved into a position Nick had described as a likely spot to view Jansen’s team. When they’d arrived an hour ago, they found the bad guys right where they were supposed to be.
They checked the weather one last time. The air was heavy with moisture, but this was mostly irrelevant at this relatively short distance. The spotter got his final wind speed based on the swaying of the plants halfway to their targets as well as close up to the targets, using their Leopold spotting scope. Wind direction was based on a variety of factors, including the direction of the waves and surface ripples on the nearby ocean. They determined distance information with a laser finder. They assumed the men they were going against today were well trained and armed, and so they would not take this lightly. One slip could give them away, and they didn’t intend to let that happen.