With a growing tightness in my throat, I asked, “Does anyone know where the Old Man is right now? Did he come out with Hector?”
“I don’t really know. I assume… wait one…”
Nick heard some activity in the background over the phone. People were talking in excited tones, and Dave was asking questions. Nick didn’t like what he’s hearing.
Dave came back on line. “I have to go. I don’t know what happened, but we just got a pressure spike in the Unit 1 containment.”
“Pressure spike? As in a loss of coolant accident?”
“I don’t think so. We’d be seeing that on a variety of other instrumentation. The reactor is still on line. This is containment pressure only. It was a blip on pressure, but we got it on all four channels of our instrumentation. It looks real, not an instrument problem. Something isn’t right here.”
Nick could hear Dave talking as if to one of the control room watch-standers, “George, what’s that protection set bi-stable that just came in?” Then, back to me, he said, “I gotta go” and hung up. There was a hint of panic in his voice.
Sonofabitch! A separate, unexpected door alarm, the Old Man unaccounted for, and now a pressure spike in containment. If it weren’t from a loss of coolant accident, then what would have caused it? What could cause a pressure wave in containment? A bomb exploding? Shit! Two bombs in containment! They’d brought one out, the second one detonated in containment? But what kind of damage did it do? And where was the Old Man?
CHAPTER 64
As I was going over all this in my head, the door to the room I was standing in opened and an armed responder walked in. I ducked behind a breaker cubicle before the guy noticed me. He walked into the room and headed across it, as if to leave the room by a door near where I was standing. He seemed nervous or pre-occupied and walked quickly as if he was going somewhere or meeting someone. Given what was going on, maybe that wasn’t all that unusual. He had a knapsack slung over one shoulder, which struck me as a bit odd for a mobile security officer on duty, especially under these conditions. Had to be one of Jansen’s men. This could be the break I needed. I was worried about what was going on in containment but there was nothing I could do about that right now. My mission was in front of me.
The man moved quickly through the door, glancing nervously from side to side. Careful not to be noticed, I moved over to the door after it closed behind him and cracked it open so I could watch where he was going. Sure enough, he headed directly to the end of the admin building, not to the main door where everyone else went in and out. I saw him stop, look around, then disappear inside the building. That must be the back door to Rob’s office that Dave told me about.
Pushing open the door, I walked quickly out of the turbine building and followed the man’s route, hoping not to draw attention to myself. It was dark and I was counting on the fact that the security force was busy at the intake or where my guys came through the fence. As I rounded the corner of the admin building, I saw the door the other man must have gone through. It seemed reasonable that someone unlocked it so others could get in, especially if Jansen was in there.
I stood by the door and listened for sounds on the other side, but couldn’t hear through the heavy metal door. As carefully as I could, I tried the doorknob and found it unlocked. I breathed out, opened it, and moved quickly inside. I found myself in a short hallway with offices to one side, a fax machine in the hallway, and a shredder with shards of paper on top of the machine and on the floor around it.
Getting my bearings, I looked at the first office door on my left and recognized it as Rob’s, though I’d come in last time from the opposite direction. The door was closed, but as I recall, on the other side was the secretary’s office, which in turn opened to Rob’s office. Fortunately for me I’d been in there before, or the way the office was setup would’ve caused me confusion. This time, I heard voices on the other side, though I couldn’t make out what was being said.
Readying myself, I opened the first door, gun at the ready, found the secretary’s office deserted, and saw the next door into Rob’s office already open. The men who were talking immediately went quiet. It was literally no more than two steps to his office and I moved into it quickly and saw two armed responders jump up and go for their weapons as soon as they saw me. There were knapsacks on the floor near their chairs, and one of them was the guy I just followed over there. The way they were going for their weapons left no doubt in my mind that they intended to use them on me if they got a chance. I triple tapped the first guy, and then put two, center mass, in the next guy. Both dropped to the floor dead. I looked around the small office. Jansen wasn’t there!
Just then, I heard a noise a short distance away, outside the office I was standing in. All my senses were heightened now. My mind and my consciousness turned first toward the direction of the sound. I could literally feel the bullet coming my way at subsonic speed. Maybe it was the shock wave that preceded the bullet. My world and everything in it slowed down. My mind was processing this new information at an incredible rate, but much faster than my body could respond. My instincts were telling me to drop, which I immediately started to do. But it wasn’t nearly soon enough. The bullet struck me in the fleshy part of my right shoulder, knocking me backward, causing me to drop my weapon. I stumbled and fell to my knees and saw a man I didn’t know standing there, looking down at me, with a pistol pointing at my face.
“Well, Sergeant First Class Connor. How the hell did you get in here?” Stone asked. He kept his weapon on me as he moved closer. He assumed an air of complete confidence, assuming that he had the upper hand.
For the moment, he might have been right. I was down, had a hole in my shoulder, had no weapon in my hand, and this guy had a gun on me. I needed to engage him and get him talking, which would slow him down and give me the minute that I needed to rest and improvise a plan.
I looked up at him. He was dressed in street clothes, not in the black security uniform. “I don’t know who you are, but you have no chance now,” I said, with a searing pain in my shoulder. “You know that, right?”
Stone let out a short laugh. “From my perspective, seems like I’m on top and you aren’t.”
He stepped over the two dead men on the floor, moved around so his back was to the window and the door remained in his field of view. He glanced down at the members of his team. “I should have been the one to take you out at The Tavern.”
“Those two assholes friends of yours?” I asked sarcastically. “They aren’t going to be doing much but limping the rest of their lives.”
“Keep talking, prick. I’ll just enjoy this all the more.”
I wasn’t nearly as drained as this guy thought. Certainly not as drained as I wanted him to think I was. My shoulder hurt like hell, but the wound was far from life threatening. He was close now and I worked my way up to my knees, leaning over, pretending to be very weak, trying to get him to close the distance between us.
“So what’s your plan to get out of here?” I asked. “The FBI is probably massing in the parking lot you know.”
Stone just smiled. “The FBI is our ticket out of here. You didn’t think we’d come in here without a way out, did you?
“I don’t know. I just assumed you were stupid.”