Stuart Woods: Heat

Coldwater suddenly embraced Jesse. “We’re going a long way together,” he said. Then he stood in the door and watched Jesse walk toward his truck.

“Not as far as you think,” Jesse muttered to himself.

Jesse drove slowly down the long driveway, and, at the road, he stopped. He switched off the headlights, reached into the backpack behind the seat and extracted the night goggles. He slipped them on, then, instead of heading down toward town, he turned right and drove slowly up the mountain a few yards. He had no trouble seeing the road.

Coldwater’s house was nearly at the top of the mountain; only one thing lay in the fifty yards between the house and the gates. When he was nearly at the top, he turned right, down the dirt road, and a minute later stopped at the firing range. He got out and looked up. A hundred feet above the earthen bank that received the bullets, he saw what he wanted. The full moon came out from behind the clouds for a moment, and in the bright light the goggles were almost too much.

He changed his shoes and got into his warm jacket, then retrieved the backpack and the tool bag from the truck and checked his equipment. He stuck the pistol into his belt and the spare clips into his pocket, then slipped on the backpack, slung the tool bag over one shoulder and the machine gun, an Uzi, over the other and started climbing the mountain.

It was tough going with only one free hand and so much gear, but he made it in twenty minutes. He sat down beside the ventilator grate and rested for a few minutes. He checked his watch; just after midnight; he had plenty of time, he hoped.

He stood up and, through the night goggles, examined the grating. It was much like a storm sewer grating, just as thick, but round and about three feet across. There was a noise from above him, and Jesse flattened himself against the mountainside, swiveling his head up and around. On the cliff twenty feet above him stood a man holding an assault rifle. He struck a match, lit a cigarette and tossed the match down the steep incline. It landed at Jesse’s feet.

Jesse stood, frozen, until the man moved on. He waited another half minute, then looked at the grate again. It was secured by two large bolts, and the heads were not slotted. He considered using a chisel on them, but that would be noisy; same with the electric drill. Finally, he went into the backpack and came out with the plastic explosive. He got out his pocket knife and cut a large chunk from the main piece; he carefully divided it, then shaped and packed it around the four bolts. It took another few minutes to wire all four charges to one timer, then he took the explosives mat out of the backpack and spread it over the grating. He taped it in place with some duct tape, and then he was ready.

But there was the matter of the guard above. Jesse put down the Uzi and very carefully, foot by foot, scaled the steep incline. He got a toehold just below the top, then stuck his head up and looked around. There were two of them, it seemed, and they were standing next to a shed nearly a hundred yards away, leaning on their weapons and smoking. Jesse thanked heaven for the night goggles. He turned around and slid the twenty feet down to the ledge where he had been working; he took hold of the timer and set it for thirty seconds, then quickly worked his way along the ledge away from the grating. He stopped, turned his head away and held his breath.

There was a muffled whump , and the explosives mat flew off and down the mountain. Quickly, he made his way back to the grating; it was hanging by one bolt. He tossed all his equipment into the pipe, climbed in and pulled the grating back into place. He sat that way, holding the grating, for half a minute before he heard the voices.

“What the fuck was that?” one man said.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“You were farting, that’s why.”

“Maybe that’s what you heard.”

“Naw, I heard a kind of, I don’t know, a—”

“It was probably an eighteen-wheeler backfiring down on the road.”

“No, it was more like a—”

“Well, everything seems to be all right, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You can log the noise, if you want to, but I’m not going to say I heard it.”

“Well, fuck you, then.”

The voices faded away.

Jesse waited for them to go, then gently let the grating hang on the one bolt again. He turned and, pushing his equipment ahead of him, started down the tunnel on his hands and knees.

There was so little ambient light in the pipe that not even the goggles were of much use, so he pulled them down around his neck and switched on a small flashlight. Holding the light in his mouth, he moved on down the tunnel until he came to another obstacle.

This one was nothing more that a piece of chainlink fencing that had been cut to size and welded to the steel pipe; he wouldn’t need explosives for this. He got out the bolt cutters and snipped his way through.

He was well inside the mountain now, and his next obstacle was a fan that nearly filled the tunnel. Suddenly, it came on, and there was a roar as air began to rush down the pipe. He got out his wire cutters, found the power cord and cut it. The fan slowly came to a halt. It took him half an hour to get the blade off and dismantle enough of the frame to get through. There was one last ventilator grate, but this one was of thin aluminum, and he was able to kick it out. He peered out into a long hallway; he was a good eight feet above the floor; about every fourth ceiling light was on.

He lowered his equipment to the floor, then jumped down, squatted and listened. It seemed unlikely that anyone was inside this place late at night, but he wanted to be sure.

Hearing nothing, he thought about his position and decided he must be in the north hallway on the first, highest, level. Then he remembered what was up the hall toward the main entrance. Leaving his tools where they lay he trotted up the hallway, turned a corner and opened a door. A small room was stacked to the ceiling with crates marked “ammunition: recoilless rifle.” He tried a couple more doors, checking labels until he found a single crate, marked “C-4 Plastique.” Perfect. The box held at least twenty pounds of the stuff. He got it open and took out two brick-sized blocks, wired a detonator to it and looked at his watch; one-twenty. He set the timer for one hour and forty minutes; it would go off at exactly 3:00 A.M. He took the crate and went back to where his tools lay, then he sat down and remembered what he could of the layout from his previous visits and from the plans.

By two-thirty, he had set more Plastique in half a dozen ammunition caches all over the complex. That would have been enough to keep anyone from using the facility any time soon, but it didn’t satisfy him. There was one more job to do. He picked up his gear and ran down to the generator room on the second level.

The door was locked, and he had no time to pick the lock. He got out the drill and went straight through the cylinder. Inside the room were two enormous generators; his guess was that one of them was enough to light the facility; the other was a backup. Above them, built into the mountain were two hardened twenty-five-thousand-gallon gasoline storage tanks. Thank God they were on the north side of the mountain, away from the town, he thought. His Plastique might not punch through the tanks, but there was another, simpler and more effective way to deal with it. He set his equipment on a workbench, got out the bolt cutters and stepped behind the machinery; using his flashlight, he located the two armored fuel lines; the bolt cutters made quick work of both of them. He turned two taps, and gasoline began to pour onto the floor, he guessed at the rate of about twenty gallons a minute from each line.