I hit the fence upside down and with my back, and it was a good thing I’d taken a deep breath on the last tumble because damn near every bit of it was knocked right out of me. The force of the current pinned me against the heavy wire like a butterfly on a corkboard. I fought hard to get turned around and back to the surface. Then something dark and heavy thumped into the fence right alongside, which just for a second eased the pressure of the current on me as the wire rebounded. I scrambled, clambered, clawed, and kicked my way up the wire until the growing pressure in my ears told me I was going precisely the wrong way. Did I mention that it was really dark down there?
I reversed course as best I could, my lungs burning now, and my injured right arm becoming less useful by the moment. Without light, I couldn’t be sure if I was going up or sideways, but the noise of all that turbulence seemed to be getting louder, and then my head popped into cold air, even as the current pressed my cheek into the chain-link. Realizing that the current had me pinned, I stopped struggling and concentrated on breathing again, which made for a nice change. The hank of chain-link wire pressing against my right cheek actually felt reassuring.
I looked around for Tony, but couldn’t see him. There was light up here on the surface, bright enough to obscure the plant, whose lights were still blocked by the cloud of condensation and flying spray upstream. I scanned the banks for Trask and his ace helper, but didn’t see anyone. He’d said five minutes, presumably to Moira, who I assumed was standing by to inject her own version of shit into the game remotely via the Internet. The federal host was probably not yet aware that they were in a deadly game.
Hopefully Trask had decided to cut his losses and get his plan under way. I tried to move sideways, toward the bank, but that current had me nailed to the fence. A moment later, Tony surfaced next to me like a Polaris missile and then went right back under as he, too, was smacked into the fence and held. I reached down into the black water and hauled on his shirt, managing to get his head above water, but just barely.
He hung there like a dead man, and for a horrible second I wondered if I was holding a corpse, but then he coughed, threw up, went back down, and came up again spewing water everywhere. He grabbed on to the wire, saw me, and grinned. He mouthed the words “Hi, Wendy,” and I snorted out a desperate-sounding laugh.
It took us twenty minutes to claw our way across the bulging fence wire and onto the concrete side of the channel, where we flopped like a couple of belly-hooked catfish. Cue the shepherds, I thought. This was when they were supposed to appear out of the darkness and lick my face. That didn’t happen, though, and I couldn’t avoid a pretty bad feeling. They were probably either trapped in the rotor or pinned down on the bottom of the channel, right below where we were recovering. Fuck.
“Who we gonna call?” Tony asked from his supine position on the wet concrete.
“Fresh out of cell phones,” I said. “Did Ari get hit?”
“He might have,” Tony said, propping himself up on one arm. “I had it pointed out the window, but Billy was shooting up the whole backseat, so…”
Then I remembered what Trask had said, about planting the video of our coming through the fence to distract the guard force. They’d be coming right here, and very soon, if that five-minutes business was accurate. Tony realized the same thing.
“We gotta move,” Tony said. “We have to stop this thing.”
“Or,” I said, “we wait right here for the guards to find us, tell ’em what’s going down, and let them get in there and stop those assholes.” I didn’t say what was really on my mind: Then I can go look for my dogs.
“You think they’d take us seriously?” he asked. “Their boss is going to fuck with the moonpool? This from the two intruders they just saw on the cameras breaking into the protected area?”
“He’s supposed to be meeting with the feds across the river,” I argued. “Why isn’t he there instead of being in the spent fuel building?”
“Because the guards don’t know that, and besides, he’s Trask and they never know where he’s going to pop up. Plus, he’ll have Quartermain with him to make it look legit.”
“How the fuck do we get in there?”
“By evading the same guards he’s distracting. Hell, we’ll kick the damn doors down if we have to.”
“Then what?” I persisted. “There are at least three doors to get through, all keyed to plant security.” Trask had help. We had nothing.
I think Tony understood my real hesitation to go after Trask, but before he could respond, I looked over his shoulder at the blue strobe lights flickering through that big cloud of condensation. He saw where I was looking, swore, and then we were up and running down the perimeter fence, away from the tailrace channel.
C’mon, mutts, I thought: This is when you come running out of the darkness. But they didn’t, and I wondered if I’d ever see them again.
The ground sloped up from the tailrace for about a hundred yards, and then it fell off again. We made it to that low crest just about the time the security vehicles emerged from the spray cloud. If Trask had been telling the truth, they’d have seen us coming through his hole in the fence on their cameras, so that’s where they’d go first. Our problem, besides being soaking wet, unarmed, and very definitely unwanted, was that we didn’t know what other cameras might be reporting right now as we ran toward the industrial area surrounding the plant. Tony pointed toward some large steel tanks, and we zigged right to get in among them.
The three big buildings were right in front of us, with perhaps a hundred yards or so of open ground to cover before we could get to the middle one, home to the moonpool. There were light towers everywhere and absolutely no way for us to get close to the main buildings if anyone was watching for us. The lone, thin smokestack was blowing air and steam beyond the generator hall, and subdued red strobe lights pulsing along some of the buildings indicated that the reactors were running and that the plant was online. I was starting to shiver in the night air, even though my clothes had begun to dry out.
“Just run for it?” Tony said. He was staring across the open ground at some small outbuildings that were close to the moonpool building’s main entrance.
“Maybe walk for it, like we belonged here,” I said.
It was worth a shot, because time was ticking away and we couldn’t just stand out here in the dark for very much longer. We couldn’t see what was going on down at the tailrace, but the security people wouldn’t stay there forever, either. And Trask was already inside.
We stood up and started walking toward those small buildings. I hoped that we would look like two shift workers headed toward the building. We didn’t have hard hats, there were no ID badges dangling from our necks, and this wasn’t the time for shift change. All we could do was hope that no one in the security control room was reaching for the zoom controls.
It was a tense hundred-yard stroll, but we made it to the small buildings. We stopped in front of one of them. We were on a concrete sidewalk. Beside us the straight steel walls of the spent fuel storage building rose into the night. The even taller reactor containment buildings flanked us on either side, some two hundred yards apart. Steam pipes and other utility lines snaked overhead. The sign on the building in front of us said that it contained spill kits, decon suits, and firefighting equipment. Unfortunately, it was locked, or we might have been able to put on some suits and at least look like we belonged there.