balance his running, aware that the big man behind him was not firing indiscriminately. He wanted to turn his face, if just for an instant, to see if the shooter was pursuing him, but he knew better than to slow down now, and then he was careening around the far corner of the first building into a side alley. He stopped just past the corner, spun around, and then ran full tilt back across the main street into the alley on the other side.
This should surprise the shooter and also give him a chance to look left, but the man was gone, the power plant door closed.
Kreiss stopped short in the alley, close to the corner, catching his breath, and wishing now that he’d brought a gun. To do what? he asked himself. Stand there and shoot it out with that guy? The man appeared the next instant at the end of the alley in which Kreiss was standing.
Kreiss jumped sideways as the .44 let go again, this time feeling a tug on his backpack. He bolted out into the main street, but with all those concrete walls, there was nowhere to hide, and the big man was pretty handy with that cannon. He ran left into the next side street, considered climbing a building, realized that would be a trap, and then saw the shooter’s shadow coming down the back alley. He jumped back into the main street and went left, all those blank concrete walls,
nowhere to hide, up the hill again, zigzagging as he ran, and then three more rounds came after him in quick succession, all low, but too close to have been anything but carefully aimed, building-steadied shots. He came to the big hole in the street and didn’t hesitate. He scrambled, almost fell down the steel rungs into the darkness of the big tunnel, dropping the stick and retrieving it again when he got down. Knowing that the shooter would be there in a few seconds, he made no attempt to be quiet as he scrambled down the steep slope of the tunnel, using his stick for balance, until he was well down into the darkness. Then he got flat and waited.
After a minute, he could hear the sounds of falling water over the thudding of his heart. Getting too old for this shit, he thought. Five shots. One left if the guy kept coming and didn’t stop to reload. And yet, so far, this guy hadn’t done anything amateurish with that .44, so: safe to bet he’d be reloading. Why not? If he knew anything about the tunnel, he would know Kreiss wasn’t going anywhere. Kreiss began to slide farther back down the tunnel, keeping his eyes on that cone of sunlight coming down through the hole in the street. When he thought he saw a change in the light, he stopped and grabbed the hooked end of his stick and twisted it sharply. It made a sound identical to a semiautomatic pistol’s slide coming forward to the cocked and locked position.
Kreiss waited. Assuming that sound had carried back up the tunnel, the other guy now had a decision to make. The moment he started down into the tunnel, he’d be silhouetted in that cone of light and be fair game for the gun he’s just heard Kreiss cock. Kreiss listened to his own breathing and then started sliding back down the tunnel some more, keeping very quiet this time. The tunnel grew increasingly steeper, until Kreiss was glad he was full length and not trying to stay upright like the last time. At last he felt the tips of his boots go over the ledge, at which point he stopped moving and then rolled off the centerline of the tunnel toward the side wall to his right.
He was now flattened on the concrete about three hundred feet from the cone of light. As he remembered from his little adventure with Carter, the ledge was below, and below that was a big water chamber. He pointed his finger over the edge and down, flicked it on, and thought he could see water. He had the rope in his pack; all he needed now was an attachment point up here, and then he could safely slip over the wall and down into the water below if he had to. He began exploring with his fingers, first to the right and then to the left, until he found a crumble of loose concrete underneath the steel coaming of the
lip. He used the steel point of the stick to dig at that until he had enough room to slip the end of the rope under the coaming and knot it to the stick. He let the rest of the rope out and over the ledge behind him.
Still no sign of his pursuer, so his rack-the-slide noise must have done its job. As it had a couple of times before, he remembered. Having something that could make a noise like a gun was almost as useful as having the gun. But now the guy might still put his gun hand into the hole and empty it down the tunnel in his direction just for grins. He secured the stick, then clipped his chest harness onto the rope and went over the edge until just his head was up over the edge, with the rope belayed around his right hip, leg, and ankle for support. He did this just in time. A volley of random rounds banged down the tunnel at him, the big slugs ricocheting in every direction, with some coming back at him off the tunnel wall behind him and whacking into the concrete above the ledge. It was noisy and scary, but in the end, harmless gunfire, and Kreiss just hung on his rope, his head down now, waiting for it to end.
Now it would be stalemate, he thought. The guy knew he couldn’t safely climb down into the tunnel without risking being shot. And he had probably just used up all his carry ammo. Kreiss’s only regret was that he hadn’t been able to get the jump on this bastard, because this was definitely the man he wanted to interrogate. On the other hand, if this was the other McGarand—and there was a definite resemblance to Jared there—Kreiss knew where he lived. It would have been better out here, but he’d go wherever he had to in order to find out what the hell they’d done with Lynn. He waited, his eyes just back up over the edge, watching the cone of light. Unseen water below him coiled in the siphon chamber, compressing the air around him.
Browne stood up in the street and jammed the empty gun into his waistband.
The barrel was still warm from that last volley. He looked down at the line of steel rungs illuminated in the growing sunlight and knew he couldn’t go down there. That guy was a cool customer, running like that and never once turning around. So it would be just like him to be sitting down there in the Ditch, drawing a bead on the ladder and waiting for Browne to screw up. Well, he wasn’t going to do the intruder any favors.
He looked both ways and then walked up the street to where they had piled the pipes from Jared’s trap. He dragged three of them back to the hole in the street, where he placed them quietly over the hole nearest the ladder rungs. Then he got three more pipes and extended
the grid, keeping the spacing at about eight inches. Then he rolled two of the heaviest pipes down and laid them crosswise on the grid, anchoring it. Now when the guy tried to crawl out of the tunnel, he’d find a barrier. He couldn’t move those pipes without making noise, and Browne would hear him.
Meanwhile, he had work to do.
He went back to the power plant and hooked up the electric motor on the leftmost garage door to the power strip and raised the door, revealing the truck. He had worked all night. He was sweaty and dirty and sand eye- tired.
He had brought the hydrogen pressure in the truck to just over four hundred psi. It wasn’t the five hundred he wanted, but it would do, it would do. With those security guards going down the hole and now this lone ranger trapped down in the Ditch, the arsenal was blown as a base of operations. He had to get out of here and begin the final phase, Jared or no Jared. Goddamn kid, going through life with his brain hard-wired to his pecker. There’d be police and probably feds all over this place by morning, but by then he’d be on his way. Jared had painted the truck in the color scheme of a Washington fuel company a month ago from a picture Browne had given him, so now it was just a question of getting it out of here with no witnesses. He wasn’t really worried about Washington; he knew those smug bastards would never see this one coming.
He had hauled the generator out of the boiler housing an hour before dawn and gathered all the other equipment into the control room with the retort. The generator fuel gauge showed it was one-quarter full.
Good. Then he had gone around the boiler hall and sealed as many air inlet points as he could find, including all the boiler fuel-burner registers and the ventilation-duct outlets. It had taken him nearly two hours, but he’d kept the retort chugging, letting the highpressure gas pump squeeze the last bit of hydrogen into the propane truck. Then he closed all the interior doors in the power plant except the one leading from the control room into the boiler hall. He went to the truck, cranked it, and breathed a sigh of relief when it started up. Now all he had to worry about were the tires, but they seemed to be all right. He drove the truck out through the big door and stopped it out in the street, letting its diesel warm up. He checked the pipe grid on the hole in the street, but nothing had been disturbed.
Good. Then he had an idea.
He went back into the control room, where he reloaded his .44 from a box of ammo he kept there. Then he ran a last flush on the retorts and added all the copper he had left in the room. He disconnected the pump piping from the tops of the retorts and recharged them with a double
load of nitric acid. The reactions began immediately and he decided to add one more jug of water to their cooling tubs. Then he walked to the door, took one last look around, closed it, and duct-taped it. He went into the garage bay and taped the door leading back into the control room. He left the generator running and hit the switch to lower the heavy garage door.
Then he ducked out under the descending door and went to the truck.
