Power Down (14 page)

“You heard right. Sound the alarm.”

“I’ll need an explanation.”

“How’s this for an explanation, asshole: there’s a bomb in the fucking dam.
Now sound the alarm!
”

Suddenly, above the din of the dam, piercing sirens cut the air. They rang out from every siren and speaker across the small town as red halogens started to flash.

Savoy dropped the phone and went to the street, which had already begun to fill with people. Workers, wives, children.

“Follow me!” Savoy yelled, waving his arms and running toward the administration building. “Everyone, up to the safe zone!”

Inside the dam, the sound of the evacuation alarm roared through the turbine column. Mijailovic winced despite himself.
Terry had found something. Thank God.

What he saw next caused him to shudder. There, at the end of the turbine column, the two Arabs stood. In front of them, four large oil drums stood in a row, linked by a spiderweb of thick, multicolored wires. Mirin was cutting one of the wires as Amman watched.

“No!” Mijailovic yelled as he climbed into the small enclosure.

Amman turned around and charged at him. Mijailovic ducked and delivered a furious series of punches to the young man’s face. He felt the boy’s nose shatter under the vicious left hook.

“Hurry!” screamed the boy as he fell to the ground. His cohort reached for the red toolbox next to the oil drums and pulled out a hammer. He missed Mijailovic with the first swing, then hit him squarely in the mouth. Mijailovic’s jaw shattered, but he maintained his footing, wrestling the man to the floor. But the terrorist swung the hammer again, this time striking Mijailovic on the ear, and he lost all sense of time and place.

Outside the dam, as sirens blared, a stream of people ascended the cement stairwell to the safe area above the dam.

Savoy stood at the top of the cement stairs and yelled encouragement to the workers, children, and wives as they climbed.

“Come on!” he yelled to the stream of people climbing up the stairs. His eyes moved between the stream of people, climbing the stairs, and the dam to his left.

Mijailovic crawled as if drunk, his only thought the steel drums full of explosives. The blow to his ear had done something to him, and he understood that he would die regardless of what happened next. Still, he crawled on.

“Stop,” he slurred.

The man with the hammer kicked him down, then moved to the oil drums. He let the hammer drop and looked Mijailovic squarely in the eye.

“Praise Allah,” he said as he moved two wires together until they touched.

The last memory Mijailovic would have would be of heat and white light.

The explosion slashed through the first-floor turbine like a torch through tissue paper. At the dam’s outer wall, the cement and steel breached, a section of the dam two hundred and fifty feet high torn away from the main structure.

Savage Island Project had been built to withstand a loss of such a section with a crosshatch of steel layered like madras vertically and horizontally throughout the dam. But it had not been built to withstand the heat that followed the explosive force, an inferno that soon made all metal meaningless.

Outside, Savoy watched in horror as the dam was consumed in fire. Screams penetrated the air from the safe area above the dam.

The heat climbed upward through the infrastructure, ripping out the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth-tier turbines. With them came the gale walls of the dam and soon the outtake walls. Within a minute of
the explosion, fully six hundred feet of steel, cement, and granite had been decimated, opened once again to the violent sea.

As the heat rose skyward and the pressure from the cold sea violated the breach, an otherworldly marriage of water and fire took out the inner core of the dam, weakening it so that it collapsed inward upon itself.

At this point the destruction went from rapid to sudden. The half-mile-high wall of granite and steel disappeared with a cataclysmic explosion. Frigid, untamed seawater swept away the small town of cinderblock houses. Dark water crashed over the side of the hill and climbed violently up the stairwell. Workers, children, and women who had not made it to the top of the stairs were cleaved from the stairs by the whitecapped deluge. A new round of screams echoed up the hill.

The angry sea reclaimed its own. Savage Island Project was no more.

CAPITANA TERRITORY

Dewey climbed the steel ladder, knowing that every minute left him and his surviving crew closer to the detonation of the bomb below. In his attempt to scale more than six hundred rungs, his legs and arms became fatigued quickly. His muscles burned. The weight of the suit, tank, and helmet seemed to grow with every step. He’d been climbing for ten minutes, through the darkness, interrupted only by a dim halogen every ten yards on the nearby elevator shaft. He focused on his secondary goals: learn who was behind it all, then kill Esco.

He watched for signs of decompression in his suit. It would be pressure in his eyes that he would feel first, then pain in his inner ear. If that happened, he would have to stop and let the unit acclimate to the depth, a delay he couldn’t afford.

The water grew lighter. He glanced at the depth markings on the ladder. He was within fifty feet of the surface. He kept climbing, breathing hard and coughing. At twenty feet, he could see the geometric outlines of the platform above.

He climbed quickly, energized by the sight of the surface. He could see the letters “AE” on the bottom of the derrick. Seven or eight feet from the surface, Dewey stopped and unclasped the hinges on his steel boots, then pushed them off. They sank like bricks. Now barefoot,
he reached to his shoulder and unsealed the suit. The icy water rushed in, soaking his body. He took one last breath of bottled oxygen, then popped the helmet latch. The suit fell away from his body and sank, followed by the helmet.

Still underwater, Dewey unbuttoned his Carhartts and took them off, perched now on the ladder in only his underwear and a T-shirt. He dived away from the ladder and swam as far from the rig as he could, then toward the surface, until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. Even then, he swam farther through the chill Pacific water. Another fifteen seconds, then farther, until he thought he would burst. He aimed for the surface and breached into the warm sunshine. He was at least a hundred feet from the rig.

Looking back, he saw half a dozen men standing on the deck, staring down at the platform riser, training their weapons at the surface near the ladder. Dewey treaded water, fortunate in more ways than one: They were looking at the ladder and little else.

Unfortunately he couldn’t return to the rig. Yet what choice had he? His limbs ached. Worse, hypothermia would claim him in minutes, not hours, even here in the ocean near the equator.

Dewey swam back toward the rig in a long, circuitous arc, keeping his head low to the waterline, until he was behind the terrorists. The rig stood on top of six massive steel girders that ran to the seafloor. He swam to the girder farthest away from the gathered terrorists. When he reached it, he grabbed hold of the edge and hoisted himself up. After several minutes of steady climbing, he reached the marine deck. He was now below and to the right of the conspirators. Any noise would alert them to his presence. He peeked through the grating. There he saw six men, still waiting, all with machine guns trained on the surface.

He noticed something to the left. Through the deck grating, fingers dangled down. Blood dripped from the end of the motionless fingertips. It was one of his foremen.

He could hear the faint din of voices. It emanated from the hotel, where his men were still imprisoned.

Then voices, closer, above.

“Where is it?” asked someone.

“Calm down,” said Esco. “It’ll get here.”

“What if he doesn’t come?”

“Then we die. But we’re heroes. We’ve done our job.”

Dewey spotted Esco and another Arab, Ali, the cook. Esco paced the deck above. He stepped to a spot almost directly over Dewey’s head.

“He’ll be here in five minutes. Until then, we keep our eyes out for the Chief.”

“You think he’s alive?” asked Ali.

“No, I don’t, you stupid fuck,” said Esco. “But if he is, I want to be ready.”

Dewey waited motionlessly. He moved his eyes and glanced down the length of the marine deck to the lifeboats. Above the lifeboats, he knew, was his office and adjoining cabin. Esco remained above him for more than a minute, not moving, not looking down. Finally, one of his men called to him and he stepped away. Dewey began crawling beneath the deck. His fingers gripped the steel grate as he crawled, and he pulled himself along as quietly as he could. When he finally reached the edge of the platform, he climbed onto the hull of a lifeboat. Directly above was the window to his cabin. He inched his way to the outer edge of the boat’s hull. One slip would plunge him back into the sea. The resulting splash would be followed by gunfire as Esco and his men filled him with lead. He gripped the outer piping. He hoisted himself up by his fingertips to the window of the cabin, and, grabbing the sill beneath the open window, pulled himself into his room.

He walked across his room and stood in front of the mirror. He was a mess, soaking wet, face, chest, and arms bruised. The wound above his eye had opened up. Blood coursed down his cheek.

He dried himself off with a towel. He took a Band-Aid from the first-aid kit and stuck it above his eye to stop the bleeding. He put on a pair of dry underwear, T-shirt, jeans, socks, and a pair of boots.

Dewey removed the mirror from the wall. Behind it was a safe. He turned the dial. He reached inside and removed all of the money he had. Five million Colombian pesos, worth about $2,500, and more than $10,000 in U.S. currency. He grabbed his passport.

Next he went to the dresser, opened the middle drawer, pulled it out,
and flipped it over. Taped to the underside of the drawer was undoubtedly the most important possession he owned at that moment: a Colt M1911A1 .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun. He stuffed six extra clips into his pocket, then, from the top drawer, retrieved the leather calf sheath to his Gauntlet knife. The knife was missing; he remembered the confrontation with Esco, before they dragged him away. He got down on his knees and looked beneath his desk. There, against the wall, lay the knife. He picked it up, then stood up, slipped the knife into the sheath, then strapped it around his calf.

Quietly, he cracked the door to his cabin. Just outside the room, Pazur, the scum who’d murdered Jonas Pierre, stood watch, pistol in hand. Dewey gently shut the door. Then he heard a noise. It was barely perceptible at first, but it grew. A distant rhythm patted the air. He looked out the window. As small as a fly on the horizon, a Bell 430 helicopter came into view.

Dewey watched the chopper grow larger in the blue sky, black, hightech looking. It began its descent toward the platform.

Dewey opened the door. Suddenly bathed in sunlight from the room, Pazur turned to look. For a split second he seemed startled. Then he moved, wheeling his gun at Dewey. But he was too late. Dewey fired one shot into the boy’s head, a single tap just above his right eye. The shot cracked loudly, echoed down the hallway. The bullet shattered the terrorist’s tanned skull into a dozen pieces and splattered his brains on the metal grating behind him.

Dewey knelt, reached down, and pulled Pazur’s pistol from his hand just as the deck door at the end of the hallway opened. In the doorway, a gunman suddenly registered the sight of Pazur on the ground, then Dewey. A moment of shock as he looked at the blood-splattered wall behind Pazur, and Dewey, now moving the Colt toward him. The killer turned to run, screaming in Arabic, just as Dewey aimed and fired. The bullet struck the terrorist in the back of the head, felling him onto the deck just as the door swung shut.

Dewey walked quickly down the hallway. He heard footsteps and frantic words in Arabic, just outside the doorway. At the door, where the terrorists would expect him to emerge, he took a sharp left and shimmied along the piping axis. It was barely wide enough to squeeze through.
Behind him, he heard the sound of automatic weapons being fired at the door. The steel of the door blocked the slugs, but the gunmen continued, trying to shoot a hole in the door.

Dewey stepped more than thirty feet, then angled toward another entrance to the deck, directly across from the door where the men were watching. As he peered out the slat, he saw seven men, weapons drawn. They had stopped firing. They were waiting for him to come out. But waiting at the wrong door.

Overhead, the sound of the chopper grew louder as it descended toward the rig.

Dewey felt a familiar rush, like a drug. All sense of fatigue, all pain from his injuries, simply melted away.

He kicked the door open and walked into the brilliant sunshine of the marine deck, emerging quickly and without hesitation. The loud rhythm, the din of the descending chopper, cloaked the sound of his entrance. He was thirty feet from the doorway where the conspirators thought he would be.

Dewey let his controlled fury, his instinct to survive, and his desire to kill all coalesce in a clarifying moment.

He scanned the scene; seven killers in a loose line outside the far doorway, Kalashnikovs and Uzis out, trained at the door where they thought he would emerge; left, Esco lifting a duffel bag, running to the stairwell that would bring him to the chopper pad. The chopper’s wind and din blanketed the platform in chaos.