people do the wrong thing for the wrong reason.”
“How’d you know about Mossey?”
“I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Right now I need a drink, a hot shower, and a bed — in whatever order they come.”
“Drink first.” Andy grinned. “That I have in my office. But no matter what you did here today, I’m not sharing my bed with you.”
Mercer glanced at Aggie and smiled at the shy look on her face. Andy followed his gaze, forcing Mercer to make introductions. “Andy Lindstrom, this is Aggie Johnston, Max Johnston’s daughter.”
“I know your father.” Lindstrom shook her hand as he led Aggie and Mercer back to his office. “Listen, I don’t have time for that drink. I’ve got to get crews to the damaged sections of the line and start on the repairs. I can tell from the sensor panel where PEAL placed their nitrogen. There are miles of open pipe between the plugs, so we’re going to lose a shitload of oil. The leak on the Tanana Bridge is spilling something like five thousand gallons an hour. Every minute we wait is going to make this more of a mess than it already is.”
Lindstrom paused, then asked, “Listen, Mercer, can you stick around for a while? I need to get details of what happened at Pump Station 5. We still haven’t managed to get a team up there. The fire at the depot in Fairbanks is still raging out of control, tying up a lot of my people.”
“Eddie didn’t make it?” Mercer was stunned. He thought rescue crews would have found the fearless chopper pilot before his injuries claimed him.
“Eddie’s fine. He’s in a hospital in Fairbanks right now, but he’s been sedated since his arrival. An army chopper picked him up last night, but they didn’t return to the pump station. They’re still ferrying the injured out of Fairbanks.”
Somehow, knowing Eddie Rice had survived meant more to Mercer than preventing Kerikov from destroying the pipeline. But that was how he thought; human life always took precedent over all other concerns. In mine rescue work, he had spent millions to save one lowly worker, and to him it was a bargain. And whether it was money he was gambling or the environmental fate of an entire region, his decision was always the same. Life, anyone’s life, came first. Perhaps it was a superior attitude to take considering the new-world thinking, but it was the way he was.
“Andy, seriously, there’s nothing I can give you about your pump station. I never got within a hundred yards of the pump house before I was captured.” Mercer was almost asleep on his feet. “I’ll tell you everything I can tomorrow, but for now, I’m worthless.”
Lindstrom wasn’t even listening. He was already engaged in a discussion with an engineer, the two of them arguing about materials allocation for repairs. Mercer turned away, guiding Aggie into Lindstrom’s office and closing the door quietly behind them. The soft click of the door closing became a punctuation mark to what they had been through, an end to what had happened before and a beginning to what would now come between them. They both felt it, glancing at each other with both longing and trepidation, as if the adventures they’d shared had been a necessary distraction from what they now faced.
The air sizzled.
“Drink?” Mercer twisted himself away from her eyes, reaching into Lindstrom’s desk for the bottle he knew would be there.
“Yes, please,” Aggie said, acquiescing to Mercer’s desire to sidestep their emotions.
He poured Scotch into two paper cups, slopping each one nearly half full. Of all the morning drinks he’d had in his life, and there had been quite a few, Mercer believed that he and Aggie had actually done enough to warrant this one. He finished his in a heavy swallow, pouring another by the time Aggie had taken a first tentative sip. She found a pack of cigarettes on Andy’s desk and smoked one of them almost as fast as Mercer drank.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“You know, I think it really is.” They were standing close together, the top of her head well above his shoulder, her face tilted to his, her lips full and inviting. There was an unmistakable gleam behind her emerald eyes.
As he stooped to kiss her, the door to Andy’s office flew open, the matronly receptionist from the front office almost falling to the floor in her rush. She was about to speak, but when she saw that Andy wasn’t there, her face collapsed. Mercer realized she was really in distress, far more than the others dealing with the emergency.
Not recalling her name, he asked her if anything was wrong, and in a rush it came pouring from her so fast there was hardly a pause between words.
“There was a shooting at the main gate. Ralph, the nice older guard is dead, another person, I don’t know who, is lying in the street, blood all around his body. A man attacked them, shot up the booth with some sort of machine gun and stole one of the company trucks. Oh, God, poor old Ralph, he was just a nice man.”
She fell into a chair, overcome by everything that had happened, her doughy body pooling around the wooden chair, her rounded cheeks stained with fresh tears. Mercer shot a look at Aggie, who immediately understood that he wanted her to look after the receptionist, and then he was gone again, running out of the building, shouldering aside those already in a scurry over the crisis.
The air was bitter cold under a pewter sky as he raced toward his rented Blazer still sitting in the Op-center parking lot. Despite everything he had been through since the previous afternoon, he’d managed to keep his keys, transferring them to the deep pocket of the coveralls when he’d donned the garment in the escape pod. The engine roared with the first crank, and a second later the truck slashed through the terminal’s gates, threading nimbly around the people clustered near their fallen coworkers. As he sped from the facility, he hoped one of them had had enough sense to alert the authorities in Valdez.
The pistol he’d taken from Kerikov was lodged behind his back. He pulled it out and set it on the plastic console between the two front seats. He drove furiously, the heavy-duty tires screaming as he took corners fifteen or twenty miles faster than posted. He estimated that ten minutes had elapsed since the attack, factoring in the distance between the main entrance and the Op-center and the time it took witnesses to get themselves in motion after the initial assault.
If he had had his Jaguar, he could have made up that time effortlessly, but the Blazer was built for rugged off-road use, not high-speed pursuit.
He didn’t waste more than a second realizing who it was he was pursuing. With Kerikov dead in the harbor, only Abu Alam remained unaccounted for. It made sense that after triggering the explosives aboard the
The road uncoiled before the Blazer, the powerful Chevy engine roaring under the broad hood, the wheels reacting eagerly to Mercer’s guidance. As he drove, he shoved aside his exhaustion, knowing that he couldn’t push himself much farther or his body would simply fail to respond. This whole affair had all started here for him, at a test with Howard Small and his tunneling device, and he was going to see that it ended here too, probably no more than a few miles from Howard’s mini-mole site.
His mind cast back to that time only a few weeks before, recalling that the turnoff to the site was around a couple more bends in the road. Mercer didn’t realize his concentration had wavered until he rounded a sharp corner, and there, stretched across the two-lane road, was an overturned tour bus, glittering fragments of glass spread around the motor coach like handfuls of diamonds tossed onto the macadam. Dazed people milled around the scene, many of them stained by their own blood, others still struggling out of the destroyed vehicle.
Using both feet, Mercer ratcheted the brakes to the floor mat. Greasy black slicks burned off the tires, a sharp stench filling the confines of the Blazer. One elderly woman, her eyes owl-wide, stood transfixed as the truck careened toward her. Mercer yanked the wheel over, fishtailing the Blazer to a stop only feet from where she stood. Even as the body of the truck settled back onto its suspension, Mercer jammed the accelerator.
When he whipped his truck around to miss the woman, the Blazer lined up with a dirt track that forked off the Richardson Highway and climbed up to its right, heading straight to where the pipeline crossed over Thompson Pass. Mercer knew the track well. This was where he and Howard had been conducting their tests.
As the Blazer left the asphalt and the tires dug into the muddy road, he guessed at what had happened just moments before. Alam must have rounded the corner wide, directly into the path of the oncoming bus. Like Mercer just now, he would have hauled his truck to the right to get back into his lane and noticed the road leading up into
