“Jesus,” Holly said when he saw their grim faces as they approached. “Hope we don’t look that bad.”
“Not us,” Broker said. He skipped trying to grin. His lips were shaking too bad.
“What exactly is it you want to do?” the big guy with Yeager shouted over the bedlam of honking horns and the siren. A long blond ponytail stuck out the back of his hard hat. He had fatalistic Nordic blue eyes, a square jaw, and the stubble of yellow beard.
“The counterweight and wheels are full of explosives. It’s designed to blow out the back,” Broker yelled. “We gotta redirect the blast away from the pool and the reactors. Drag the fucker away.”
Panting, eyes wide, gushing sweat, the chunky hard hat wore dirty Levis, and a torn T-shirt pushed out in a beer belly; his forearms were the size of Broker’s thighs. A faded Marine Corps insignia was tattooed on the left one.
“Can we drag it to the river?” Holly asked.
“Too much in the way. How about the ditch by the fence, behind that pile of dirt? Dump it in.” The hard hat pointed again, this time at the earth bulwark that had been started about a hundred yards away.
“That’s it. Let’s go,” Broker yelled.
Without pause, the hard hat ran toward the huge bulldozer. Broker, Yeager, and Holly chased after him. The guy jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. “The Deere 644 goes around fifteen ton. This big Cat dozer here goes around forty. Piece of cake.”
He vaulted up into the seat and in a moment the dozer belched black smoke and its wide treads executed a mechanical pirouette, facing it in the direction of the Deere. He motioned Holly and Broker out of the way. Yeager ran in front of the dozer, stabbing his finger at something, then making a looping gesture. The driver vigorously nodded his head.
Broker and Holly joined Yeager, who yelled, “I spent some time around this shit. Best thing is to use the choker cable on the front.” He pointed to a reel of steel cable with a pin clasp on the end. They danced aside while the driver lined up his dozer in front of the Deere, blade to bucket.
Broker heard a second siren. A Red Wing police cruiser skidded through the gate, then fishtailed, knocking down a section of fence. The cruiser slid to a stop, and a young copper jumped out, eyes like shiny ball bearings staring out of his haunted face.
He knew.
Without a word, he jumped forward to help Broker and Yeager thread the thick cable around the bucket arm of the 644. Yeager showed them how to set the pin. Staining shoulder to shoulder they wrestled the cable. Close in. Faces in hell-a local cop, Yeager, the guy with the beer gut and the big arms and the faded Corps tat. He hadn’t bothered to give a name. He just started driving the dozer.
Where the hell was Holly? Then Broker spotted him running back from the dirt pile.
The driver pulled back on his controls, stood up in his seat, and inspected the cable rigged to the Deere bucket. He nodded his approval, sat back down, reeled in his cable, and then raised the blade on the dozer. Everyone on the ground stepped back as the driver hoisted the bucket until the cable was taut. Hydraulics screamed, black smoke spewed, and he raised the blade some more until the front wheels of the Deere 644 came off the ground.
They all braced. Nothing happened.
Holly reappeared, climbed up, and had a shouted back-and-forth with the driver. Then he leaped down, briefly took Yeager aside, and then came up to Broker and the cop.
“Me and the driver got it. Everybody else get outta here,” Holly ordered as he reached in his jeans pocket.
Broker stared at him. “What do you mean, out of here? Where we gonna go? What the fuck
Holly pulled a bundle of tiny chain from his pocket, clapped it in Broker’s hand. Closed his hand over it.
“What this?” Broker said.
“Nina’s dog tags. Hang on to them.”
Broker stared at the silver wafer of metal on the beaded chain, shook his head.
Holly narrowed his pale eyes to slits in a mask. Doing one of those fucking warrior-statue numbers. “Listen, asshole,” he yelled. “Kit may be down to one parent. I ain’t gonna leave her with none. Now move out.” A plume of dark smoke framed Holly as the bulldozer trundled on, dragging the dangling loader on its back wheels toward the ditch.
Broker stuck the tag and chain in his pocket. “You need a ground guide,” he shouted.
“I’m guide,” Holly shouted back. He motioned, signaling to someone. Stabbing his finger.
Broker moved to protest, then the back of his head exploded-star-bursts fading to black. Going down, he tried to call their names:
Chapter Forty-five
First Dale took the 500 mg of Prussian blue. Then he took the potassium iodide. Just in case the wind changed on him. But he didn’t think it would, because it had been holding steady all day.
He was driving due west on a back-roads two-lane blacktop, holding a steady hundred yards behind George’s Lexus. The surrounding farmland was more populated than he was used to back home. Holstein cattle. Dairy farms. Big barns with Dutch gambrel roofs. It was hard to see very far in this rolling landscape, the way everything was close in. He’d lost the sky.
He crossed I-35, the main north-south corridor in lower Minnesota, and continued driving west on the solitary road. Almost half an hour since they left. How much longer? He picked up his cell, tapped in George’s number, connected, and said, “Hey, George, let’s flip the switch.”
“A little more. When we turn south on 169,” George said.
Dale put the phone down, sucked his teeth, looked around briefly, then concentrated on the road ahead. The way the land was, they’d never see it go off. Might not even hear it. But it should rattle the windows a little. He turned and looked back at the drawn curtain.
And then…
Nina, drenched in sweat, was thankful for sick favors. Dale’s excitement had distracted him from sticking her with the ketamine again. She had a lucid window. She listened to the weather report on the radio updating the day’s forecast:
So he must be driving west, into the wind, just like he’d told her. How much room did they want between themselves and the…Her mind balked at the image of a nuclear plant erupting in a radioactive fire.
Assume the worst. He’ll blow the plant. Unless I can get off this bed…
She needed to get at least one hand free. She needed him within striking distance of that hand.
The last self-defense course Nina had taken was conducted by an affable Green Beret at Fort Bragg. He began his class with an observation from the current fad of no-holds-barred Ultimate Fighting. He pointed out how there were only two rules in Ultimate Fighting matches: no eye-gouging and no blows to the throat.
In his first class, therefore, he taught Nina how to gouge out an opponent’s eyeball. She lay on her back, blindfolded. An instructor straddled her. He wore heavy safety glasses and he held two oranges tight against the goggles, to simulate eyes.
Nina’s job was to struggle up, find his head, locate the eyes, and drive her thumb through the orange peel, into the pulp and dig it out. The minute her thumb touched the orange the instructor started screaming and thrashing wildly. The idea was to overcome the normal human resistance to making contact with the visceral fluids and matter of the eyeball. Once you got past the aversion…the eye socket being a fertile nest of nerve endings, not only blindness but unconsciousness was a certain result.
She pictured Dale’s flat blues eyes as targets.
