become second nature to him. He’d carried the habit with him even though he was outside the walls. Being within arm’s length of enough explosives to blow him to atoms as he now was only intensified this habitual trait.
Weld said, “Get with the program and shake a leg, Al.”
Graham said, “Reb, please— ”
“Shut up.”
Al Baranco stopped what he was doing, namely attaching a wire to one of the terminals on the timing device. The device was the size and shape of a paperback book. It had a matte black plastic casing. Its face had a digital display slot screen and a numerical keypad with some additional buttons. Twin terminals protruded from the top of the case above the readout screen, small brightly polished metal knobs with little caps that screwed on or off.
Baranco held a pair of needle-nose pliers that he was using to strip the insulation off the end of one of the wires leading to a packet of blocks of C–4 plastic explosives that had been taped together.
He paused but did not look up. He said, “It’s unwise to distract a man when he’s setting a bomb timer, Reb.”
The mansion at Sky Mount had two underground levels that were officially in use. The one nearer to the surface held storerooms of various types. Food supplies, an extensive wine collection, glassware, table settings, and the like were only a few of the commodities that were resourced there, along with a treasure trove of paintings, statuary, antiques, and other art objects that had been removed from permanent display upstairs and put in storage on Level One.
Level Two, the subcellar, housed the vitals of the mansion, the all- important mechanisms and support systems that kept it going. Here were the banks of fuse boxes, meters, dials, and relays that monitored and controlled the countless miles of electrical wiring that made up the great house’s nervous system. Here were the hydraulic pumps and pipes that kept the plumbing running smoothly everywhere from the sinks in the custodians’ supply closets to the outdoor Olympic-sized swimming pool — as well as the slightly smaller indoor heated pool.
Here were the boilers and furnaces and fuel tanks that gave the mansion its heat and hot water. This last was the target of Reb Weld and his associates. Sky Mount was equipped with three fuel storage tanks, each the size of a railroad freight car and filled to the brim with heating oil. They stood lined up in a row in a sunken area at one end of the subcellar.
Each tank rested on its own cradle, an intricate webwork of cross-braced metal beams and struts that held them suspended above the floor to allow workmen access to their undersides.
Reb Weld, Graham, and Baranco were grouped alongside the tank in the middle. The other two tanks flanking it had already been rigged with explosive charges. The middle tank had been gimmicked like the other two with blocks of C–4 plastic explosives in the critical junction points that would rip their bellies open and ignite their contents into a colossal firestorm of holocaust proportions.
It was a laborious, time-consuming process. The blocks of plastic explosives and the detonators had previously been stored in the fallout shelter below, an abandoned area whose existence was known only to a few. Reb and his crew had spent the night hand-carrying the blocks up the stairwell and through a secret door near the fuel tank area.
They’d been planted on the undersides of the tanks.
All three sets of charges were separately wired to a single master detonator-timer.
This had been done to save time that would have been eaten up by fixing each load with its own individual timing device and to limit the exposure time of Weld’s team in the Level Two area.
Three sets of wires fed into a trunk cable. Baranco was wiring the cable to the twin terminal posts of the master timer. It was set to go off at three o’clock in the morning, when an electric charge would pulse down the trunk cord and along the three separate sets of wires whose detonator tips would simultaneously explode all charges and blow the tanks and the great house above it to kingdom come.
Once Baranco was done wiring and setting the master timer only one final task remained: to switch on the timer on a smaller charge attached to a crate holding the remaining BZ gas grenades. They’d been placed near a ventilator intake grille at the base of a metal conduit duct air shaft. The bomb would be set last but would go off first, at 2:50 a.m., ten minutes before the oil tanks blew.
The green gas would be sucked into the ventilator intake shaft to circulate throughout every room in the mansion, spreading madness and chaos. The pandemonium would have time to reach a crescendo of artificially induced psychotic frenzy among guests and staffers alike before the bombs on the oil tanks blew. The sequence was designed to maximize the body count.
The bombs would ignite a firestorm of volcanic proportions, spewing a flaming geyser upward that would scour the underground levels before rupturing the ground floor and fountaining a white-hot inferno throughout the great house.
The devastation would be awesome, the casualties immense, and the repercussions catastrophic to the nation and the economies of the world.
Reb Weld was looking forward to it. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to view the spectacle firsthand. Chaos and destruction were his delights. Why? Because that’s the way he was made.
It wouldn’t be smart to stick around and watch the show, though, much as he’d like to. Or healthy, either. Not with that crazy green gas heralding the apocalyptic hellstorm.
Baranco was the demolitions expert. That action was out of Weld’s league. He had to stand by, watch, and wait while Baranco worked his black art.
It was necessary but Weld didn’t have to like it. He wasn’t called “the Rebel” for nothing. He resented taking a backseat to anybody, especially the so-called experts who knew more about a subject than he did.
He’d always been that way, it was his singular defining trait. That and a mean streak as wide as a sixteen- lane superhighway.
He couldn’t resist needling Baranco even as the bomb man was engaged in the tricky and delicate work of rigging the last fuel tank bomb. He did it because it was risky and pushed the edge, giving him a fresh jolt of the adrenaline he so inordinately craved. He was an adrenaline addict.
He’d even considered pilfering a BZ grenade from the crated cache to take with him as a souvenir. It’d be a kick to get a taste of the gas itself and see what the head was like. The survival instinct reasserted itself, overpowering that compulsion for crazy kicks. A BZ grenade would be his ticket to the execution chamber should he be caught with it, especially after tonight.
Baranco said, “I’ll get on with my work now if that’s all right with you, Reb.”
Sarcastic bastard! Maybe there’d be a chance to cut him down to size later when his tasks were done. But not now.
Weld said, “Go ahead, nobody’s stopping you.”
Baranco kept pushing it. He was a needler in his own soft-spoken way, too. “I’d appreciate a little quiet while I’m fixing this last connection. If my hand should slip…”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence.
Weld said, “I’ll be quiet as a mouse. Not a peep out of me, Al.”
“Thank you very much, that will be deeply appreciated.”
Baranco set the pliers down in his pocket tool case and began unscrewing the knob at the top of the terminal, preparatory to winding the hooked end of the exposed copper wiring at the base of the post.
And then his head exploded. Jack Bauer had been standing on the top landing of the fallout shelter stairway with one hand gripping the back of the collar of the shirt that he’d scrounged up at the Mountain Lake substation to replace the garments that Griff had cut off Pettibone. Pettibone had to look normal to deceive his accomplices, or as normal as he could look even when fully clad. Jack’s other hand gripped the SMG.
Griff and Rowdy crouched a few steps below him, ready to spring into action. Rowdy had been convinced of the inadvisability of bringing along the riot gun and had stowed it aside at the bottom of the stairwell for retrieval later. The bikers were armed with SMGs and a few handguns and knives were also tucked away on their persons.
Jack said, low- voiced, urgent, “Go!” He prodded Pettibone in the kidneys with the tip of the weapon to reinforce the command.
The door opened outward onto the landing. Pettibone gripped the doorknob, turned it, and pulled it toward him. The door accessed a tiny vestibule with another door at the opposite end. That door opened on to a Level Two
