hunks of C-4 plastic explosive. Plus a couple of hammers, jammed in the rookies’ belts.
In Commander Hunter’s opinion they would have to fight to take control of the power station, probably killing everyone who stood in their way. They knew from the television screens in the guardhouse that there were at least four, and possibly more, engineers on duty, but as it was a civilian installation that would probably be all. The problem with an assault like this was that anyone who got in the way had to die. There was no question of stunning, or disabling or even drugging with chloroform. What if the victim suddenly awakened and sounded an alarm. The stakes were too high for such a risk. Any risk, for that matter.
Outside the power station, 20 yards into the rough ground, Buster and Rattlesnake would man the big machine gun, covering the door and the approach road. The rookies would be deployed as lookouts on the near corners of the building. At 0255 the seven-man SEAL assault force set off toward the raised door of the geothermal generating plant. It was pitch-dark, the moon having vanished behind low rain clouds, and there was just one dim bare bulb lighting the eight steps up to the doorway.
The SEAL leader opened it carefully, but did not enter. No one moved, and certainly no one came to find out who had opened the door. One by one the team slipped into the building, weapons poised to cut down any opposition. If it was just one man or two, they would use knives. Any more, they would simply take them down with submachine-gun fire: noisy, and slightly risky, but the only option. They shut the steel door hard behind them, trying to contain any noise they might make inside the reinforced walls of the building.
They knew what they were looking for. The engineers at Coronado had sketched it for them several times over — one massive shaft with a giant cast-iron valve on top, the kind of heavy-duty machinery that might feasibly be holding back a volcano, powered by the core of the earth.
The room they now stood in was pure concrete, with a square exit into a room in which the noise was all- embracing. They could see huge turbines, with 10-foot-high wheels, spinning at a steady speed, plainly generating the electricity. The Coronado guys had said they should immediately look for a kind of mezzanine floor below, because the steam power was upwardly powerful. It would surge up the shaft and then find itself guided by the valve system, just below the turbines.
What Rick Hunter sought was steps, downward steps, and the seven men fanned out walking through the turbine room, hesitating as they came out from behind the giant machines, treating the room as if they were clearing a block in a conquered city.
They moved stealthily, their MP-5s held out in front, trying to listen, trying to catch any additional sound above the hum of the machines. Up ahead they could see another opening in the thick, cast-concrete walls. And right in the center of that gap was a wide flight of stone steps, 10 of them, leading down, Rick thought, to the main geothermal shaft.
So far the place seemed deserted. But no one imagined it could be, with millions of dollars of machinery working ceaselessly, apparently unsupervised. There had to be a team of guys in charge somewhere. But where were they? That’s what Commander Hunter wanted to find out.
And the answer was not long in coming. Right at the bottom of the steps leading to the main shaft, three Chinese engineers suddenly appeared. In absolute shock, they stared up at the black-faced hooded giants who towered above them on the upper steps, armed with submachine guns. No one knew quite what to do, certainly not the engineers. One of them helplessly raised his hands, another called out loudly, a third shouted something in Chinese. And then Bobby Allensworth stepped in front of Commander Hunter and hit the trigger, firing from the hip, four short bursts. No one was as fast as Lt. Allensworth. In another life he’d have been at the OK Corral.
Bullets from his MP-5 slammed into the three men, each of whom took at least three shots, either to the head, throat or heart. It was a whip-crack reaction from a trained professional killer. And no sooner had the bodies slumped to the ground when a fourth man came running around the corner, stopped dead in his tracks, then stopped dead in his life as the MP-5 held by Rick Hunter’s bodyguard spat a single round into his heart.
Even the SEALs were shaken at the speed at which it had happened. Commander Hunter turned to Bobby, whose prime task it was to protect the SEAL leader, and he just nodded, confident the noise from the turbines had suppressed any possibility of the shots being heard outside.
Lieutenant Allensworth said, “Sorry I had to do that, sir. But I was afraid one of them might have had a button or an emergency beeper. Just didn’t wanna give ’em no time. No time. Nossir.”
“Thanks, Bobby. There was no alternative. I agree. Come on, let’s get after that main shaft.”
And still their luck appeared to hold, and they located the shaft two minutes later at exactly 0310, at which precise time the telephone was ringing forlornly in the guardhouse out on the fence.
Lieutenant Bo Peng, an engineer in the moored destroyer, was trying to call his brother Cheng who was on duty on the perimeter. He usually called him when they were both on the midnight watch, and they sometimes shared tea in the ship’s wardroom when the watch was over. Lieutenant Bo could not for the life of him understand why Cheng was not replying, or alternately, why the answer-and-automatic-relay machine was not connected. It was a golden rule among the guards, and Bo was baffled by the silence out on the boundary guard-house.
He was a persistent and ambitious young man of 24, and he called the duty officer of the base, reporting that there was no reply to the telephone in the guardhouse. And why was that? There was not even a way to leave a message, and that was disgraceful in a military complex.
The duty officer was not altogether crazy about Bo’s tone, but he was also wary that a warship officer with a serious complaint about the shore personnel would be listened to. In a few minutes he could be on the line to the destroyer’s CO, a chore he was not prepared to deal with.
So he answered crisply, “I’m sorry about that, Lieutenant. I have no idea what could be wrong, but I’ll play it by the book, and send a full night guard-patrol down there, right away.
Three minutes later, a complement of six Naval guards, all armed with Russian Kalashnikovs, was piling out of the accommodation block and boarding a waiting jeep. It was the first time they had ever been summoned to do anything after dark, and they almost went the wrong way.
Rattlesnake and Buster watched them leave, burning rubber outside the building and then making a U-turn, heading wrongly for the dry-dock inlet. At the end of the first throughway between the buildings, they swung right, down between the power station and the main workshops. They shot through the gap between the warehouses and the ordnance store, and then made a corrective right turn along the jetties. Lieutenant Bo, high above on the upper deck of the warship, watched them go roaring down the blacktop toward the guardhouse.
And there, of course, they discovered that the place was strangely empty. No duty guard. No duty night engineer. All six men jumped out and began to look around outside, spending several minutes calling out for the missing men. However, the patrol leader, Lt. Rufeng Li, went back into the little outpost’s control room and took a look at the television screens.
And at that precise moment in the power station, Rick Hunter, noticing a scanning camera in the corner of the steam-entry room, took it out with a volley of bullets at 25-foot range. Lieutenant Rufeng was thus watching the screens when one of them just blanked right out. It did not even fizz, or show interference. It just blacked into nothing.
The Lieutenant, however, did not suspect something drastic was happening. He just thought instantly that the two missing men were working wherever that screen had failed. And he took a close look at the wording below, which told him the camera was located on the upper southwest corner of the main shaft room in the power station.
He walked outside and summoned his patrol. He took his time, and lit a cigarette and told them laconically that he had solved the mystery: the two missing men had gone to attend to some kind of machine failure in the power station, and while it was irregular to leave the guardhouse unmanned, the problem may have been quite serious. They had obviously gone to deal with it together. After all, no guard had ever been called to deal with a prowler of any kind since the base had opened six months ago. He, Lt. Rufeng, understood those kinds of priorities, which was only to be expected.
He held his cigarette in his front teeth, an affectation just learned from a tobacco commercial on the Internet. He smiled languidly. It was a smile that said, “Don’t worry, gentlemen. The reason I have achieved a position so superior to your own is my natural penchant for using the little gray cells rather than running around in a frenzy.” At this particular moment, Lt. Rufeng, in his own mind, was the Hercule Poirot of the Orient.
It was 0325, and Rick and his team were working furiously in the shaft room, trying to shut off the lower valve, the one three thousand feet down, right above the boiling steam lake. They had located a control board and made the switches, three big ones, which Rick and Dallas believed had shut down all three valves.
