“Hey, I resent that!” Eric said with an even bigger grin.
“Anyway, we suspected that there’d be an insider but didn’t know who to trust. So we had to play this pretty close to the vest.”
“You were taking a pretty big chance with those bombs, weren’t you?”
Eric said, “Not really. At least, not initially. I provided the detonators for the bombs and made sure they wouldn’t work. But Stone was a wild card. He was bent out of shape because they didn’t put him in charge of this mission. He was suspicious of me from day one. I suspected that he’d try something, but didn’t have time to figure out what it was. I actually just found out that he somehow swapped out the phony detonators with ones that worked. So the bombs were live.”
I was starting to get tired but wanted information on what else was going on. “My men?”
Hector paused for a minute. “Most of your men are accounted for. No injuries.”
“Most?”
“I understand that Hays and Pak are missing. They came out of containment with us but stayed behind to defuse the bomb we brought out. Just haven’t seen them since. We’ll find them. In the meantime, tell me again, just how did you get in here? What the hell am I going to tell the FBI? Are you and that other guy ghosts or what?”
“Something like that. Maybe some…”
“…other time…,yeah, I know,” Hector said as he finished my sentence with dripping sarcasm.
Two of my men missing. Not good, but not confirmed lost, just unaccounted for. I’d been putting off the inevitable — a question I needed answered but was afraid to ask.
“What about the Old Man,” I asked anxiously. “Is he okay?”
Hector frowned. He didn’t know quite what to say or how to say it. “He went back inside containment after we all came out. We thought there might be a second bomb and he went back in to find it. Haven’t heard from him since then. Sorry, man.”
I knew it! The unexplained containment door alarm. It all made sense. Damn it!
Just then, the paramedic arrived and looked around at the crowd that had gathered. I could see the guy appeared a little shaky, so I looked at him kindly and said, “Hi, my name’s Nick.”
It was clear by the look on his face that he was intimidated by what was going on and the fact that there was a guy in front of him with a gunshot wound.
The young paramedic said, “I’m Steve,” as he set his bag down and took off his jacket.
“Not the kind of wound you expect to see at a nuclear power plant, eh Steve?”
“First one for me, that’s for sure,” Steve said, getting things out of his bag. “Can I ask how it happened?”
“Maybe Hector will tell you some time. For now, just do your best and patch me up. I have to leave and go find someone.”
Hector looked at me. “No you don’t! You are not going into containment to look for anyone. I won't allow it. I’ll talk to Dave and we’ll get a search-and-rescue team out. But we’ll do this by the book. Do you understand?”
All business now, Steve was in the process of cutting off my shirt to get a good look at my shoulder. He looked worried. “I don’t know if this is bad or not,” he confessed. “I’ve never treated a gunshot wound before, but it looks like it went all the way through. You’ve got an exit wound on the backside of your shoulder. I’ll clean it up and put a dressing on it for you. You may have lost some blood, though. You need to have a real doctor check this out as soon as you can.”
“Yeah, he’s heard that before,” said Eric, who was sitting in a corner. Hector still wasn’t so sure about him.
I looked at Hector. “I know you have your procedures. But if it was one of your team, would you leave a man behind, Marine?”
Hector knew he was being played right now, but he also knew what needed to be done.
“All right,” he acquiesced. I’ll go in myself.”
Eric stood up. “I’m going with you.”
Hector looked at him. Ten minutes ago, he wanted to kill this guy. Now he was on a search-and-rescue mission with him. But by the looks of him, he’d be an asset to any team. Hector nodded.
Before they could leave, and as the paramedic worked on me, Prichard walked in. He looked at me and didn’t say anything. Then he looked at Eric with the same skepticism Hector had.
“Jeff Prichard, meet Eric Jansen. He’s a plank owner of NeXus. Eric, meet the VP of this station.”
“Eric Jansen, as in the terrorist Jansen who was orchestrating this for the other side? Jansen, as in the guy who had a member of my staff killed and who tried to have you beat up? That Jansen?” Prichard asked, dumbfounded.
“For the record, sir, I did not have Brenda killed,” Eric said. “That wasn’t my doing. Happened before I could stop it. Those were Waxman employees who did that.”
The look on Prichard’s face was hard to read. It was as if he knew something we didn’t know but he still wasn’t sure about all this. It was coming at him fast.
“As for beating up Nick, here… sending two guys after Nick was not a serious threat, I can assure you. That was just to put the fear of God into the Waxman boys. I really did want to watch it, though. Good to meet you, sir,” he said, extending his hand to the VP.
Prichard took his hand and shook it as he looked at me.
“Remember, things are not always as they seem,” I told him.
“Indeed, they’re not.”
Just then, Hays walked through the door.
“I found this guy trying to get out of the turbine building. Seems security wanted to detain him,” Prichard said.
I looked at Hays with a question in my eyes.
He said, “We defused the first bomb we pulled out, in some kind of deserted boiler room over by the transformers. It’s still there and needs to be picked up but it’s inert now. Then we hauled ass back to containment to help the Old Man. When we went to open the equalizing valve on the door, we could smell the combustion from exploded ordinance. Must have happened just before we got there. We were able to get the door open, went in and assumed the Old Man would be down on the bottom level, as before. That’s where we started our search. Found him lying on the floor bleeding from his ears, but otherwise mostly okay. Got him out of there and called the shift manager. He sent out a couple of guys from the fire brigade who are paramedics. We didn’t know they had a hospital here!”
I looked at Hays. “I owe you man.”
“Ain’t no big thing, boss.”
“So where is he now?”
“The paramedics got him somewhere. They just didn’t want him moving around for a while until they could pump him full of antibiotics and fluids. He looked pretty dehydrated. I left Pak with him to make sure they didn’t kill him!”
An hour went by as Steve worked on me. He patched up the hole in my shoulder, gave me a shot of something or other, and put on a clean dressing. When he was done, he sat back and looked at me.
“I couldn’t help but notice you have some significant scars up and down your torso. What happened to you?” he said as he stood back as if afraid to come near me again.
Prichard put a hand on the paramedic’s shoulder, and said, “I think the less we ask him, the better off we’ll all be.”
CHAPTER 67
Prichard didn’t know quite what to think about Eric, NeXus, the Old Man, and certainly not me, but he knew what he wanted to say to Hector. He turned to him and shook his hand.
“Excellent work tonight, Hector. You did a great job, and under trying circumstances as well. I’m sure there’ll be a report on all of this, right?” he said with a wink to me.