McCracken tossed his hostage aside on the way to the control room, and a number of guards converged on him immediately.
“Leave him alone!” Tunnel ordered. “He’s on our side.”
Inside the control center, which filled an oblong room at least fifteen hundred square feet, everything was chaos. Red lights flashed in so many places that a dull haze seemed painted over the white fluorescents.
“What’s going on?” Tunnel demanded of a man behind a central console who was feverishly pushing buttons.
“We lost the main pump to the cooling system.”
“What do you mean lost?”
“Valve blew. We’re losing a hundred gallons of flow a second.”
“A hundred gallons? How the fuck did we end up at Code Red so soon?”
The man at the console swallowed hard. “Because it’s been spilling for hours, even though all warning systems are running green.”
“Sabotage,” Jack Tunnel muttered, looking at McCracken. “Okay, seal the pipe and run a bypass.”
“I can’t, sir. The whole circuit board in the shaft must be down. Nothing’s responding.”
“Twenty minutes to critical stage,” blared the mechanical voice.
“What’s that mean?” Blaine asked Tunnel.
“It’s like this, friend. The secondary loop sends water to the primary — to cool the core and prevent the whole mess from going critical. Take away the cooling and the core superheats its way down until it hits ground water, which then blasts upward as a steam cloud. With the early warning system malfunctioning, we’re coming up on that now.”
“Meltdown,” Blaine concluded.
“The China Syndrome, to be precise.” Tunnel turned back to the console operator. “Okay, trigger the emergency core coolant and take us off line. Frank,” he called behind him, “order immediate evac of all nonessential personnel, and I do mean everyone.”
“Roger,” Frank said as he rushed away.
“Nineteen minutes to critical stage.…”
“Sir,” blared the console operator, “emergency coolant release not responding!”
Jack Tunnel leaned over the monitor board in disbelief. He swung back to McCracken with sweat pouring down his face.
“What the hell’s going on here?”
“You know better than I do.”
“But you knew before I did. What else? Tell me what else!”
“I don’t know. The saboteur could have anticipated every one of your possible responses and planned accordingly.”
“Oh, yeah? We’ll just see about that….” Tunnel grabbed a headset and pressed it to his ear and mouth. “Come in, Purdy.”
Yankee’s chief engineer came on the line, the sounds of men charging from the scene providing backdrop for his words.
“Read you, Jack.”
“We’re flat busted on this end. We been fucked and good. Valve circuits are down. Gonna have to run a bypass manually.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Got any volunteers?”
“Just one asshole down here stupid enough to even consider the job. I’m going remote. Give me forty seconds — then talk to me about what’s gotta be done.”
All of the forty seconds passed before the chief engineer’s voice came back over Tunnel’s headset. “Okay, Jack.”
Tunnel consulted the computer screen again. “It’s Valve 1275 that’s been blown. You gotta close it down and open 1374 in its place.”
“I’m almost suited up. Sounds simple enough.”
“Seventeen minutes to critical stage.…”
“It ain’t,” Tunnel said, his eyes on McCracken.
Thirty seconds elapsed before Purdy spoke again. His voice came into the control room over the main speaker now, accentuated by a slight echo.
“Okay, Jack. I’m opening Hatch 8B of the secondary loop. Got three other volunteers with me to provide backup if I need it. I’m leaving them up top for the time being…. Okay, I’m on the ladder and descending. I can see the water spewing from way up here. It’s already getting god-awful hot. Jesus Christ, I’m scared.”
“You’re doing fine, Purdy.”
“Okay, I’m down fifteen rungs, another twenty to the cat-walk above your blown valve. Piece of—”
A roaring blast cut off the rest of his words.
“Purdy!” Jack Tunnel yelled.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The chief engineer’s scream was all Tunnel heard.
“What the hell’s happening down there? That sounded like a gun—”
“The chief was shot!” replied one of Purdy’s assistants. “Somebody down there shot the chief!”
“Jesus Christ! Can you see who did it?”
“Negative, but we will. Descending now.”
“Stay where you are, goddammit!”
“The chief may still be alive. We’re going down. Son of a bitch can’t get all three of us before we reach those valves.”
“Fifteen minutes to critical stage.…”
“Ten rungs covered,” the chief engineer’s assistant reported.
And then Blaine cursed himself for not seeing it from the start. “Tunnel, pull them back! Get them the hell out of there!”
Tunnel didn’t bother to question McCracken’s order. “Hold your position! Do you hear me? Stay where you are. That’s a goddamn order! Hold up and climb back the hell out of there!”
“Fifteen rungs,” the climber closest to the bottom called out.
A series of blasts sounded this time, rapid thumps sifting through the hiss of static. Screams and shouts followed, then a drawn-out wail.
“Benny’s hit!”
“He’s going down. Jesus Christ! I’m hit! Oh, god, I’m hit!”
“Get the hell out of there! Can anybody still hear me? Get the hell out of there!”
“This is Burt, Mr. Tunnel,” came a panicked voice trying desperately to compose itself. “Lost Benny, lost Sims. I’m hit in the leg. Climbing back up now.”
“Did you see anyone? Did you see who was doing the shooting?”
The only reply came from McCracken. “No one’s down there, Mr. Tunnel.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“Our saboteur rigged a motion sensor to the trigger of an automatic weapon.”
“Christ! Who did all this?”
“Thirteen minutes to critical stage.…”
“Bypass that blown valve and we can still avert meltdown, though, right?”
“Sure, if there was a way to reach it in time.”
“Any other approach we can use?”
“Nothing direct, and direct’s all we’ve got time for.”
“Then that’s the way it’ll have to be.”
“I’m fresh out of volunteers, in case you didn’t notice.”
Blaine shook his head. “No, you’re not.”
The skeletal steel superstructure of the unfinished skyscraper made for perfect cover for Abraham. The high steel-workers normally manning its top floors, which were five hundred feet off the ground, were down on the sidewalk waiting for the presidential motorcade to pass along Boylston Street. This gave him freedom of movement in an area the sweep of helicopter surveillance would never think to investigate. The girders were all he had to move on, but they were enough, the shell providing his camouflage.
Abraham had chosen this viewpoint for effect more than anything. His sole weapon was the black transistorized detonator in his pocket. He had known from the outset that routine clearing of the streets would make a car bomb unfeasible. He also knew that blasting upward from the sewers below was dramatic but unreliable. Options eliminated, though, are often options gained, and out of what remained, he found the best one of all.
The yellow line painted down the center of the street, the one marking the lanes, was too good to be true, in his estimation. He had retrieved the C-12 plastic explosives, twenty times more potent than the common C-4, from the drop point and melted them down into a liquid form. Then, while the city slept the previous night, dressed in the garb of a public works official, he had gone over a twenty yard section of the line. Affixing the six ultrathin detonators, disguised in the same colored paint, into position was the only part Abraham had hurried through. He did not even have to inspect his handiwork to know it was perfect. Upon detonation, the plastique would reduce the road within its sphere to rubble, in the process blowing apart anyone and anything riding above. Even the president’s tank of a car would be reduced to shrapnel.