Grant Blackwood - Dead or Alive

“Where’re we going?” he asked.

Jack said, “Northwest. When you reach Highway Ninety-five and Three seventy-three, head northeast.” He gave Marty the latitude and longitude.

“That’s restricted airspace, man,” Marty said. “That’s Nellis Range and the Nevada Test Site. We can’t-”

“Sure we can.”

They were airborne eight minutes later. Clark called Hendley and said, “We’re up.”

“Rick Bell’s on the line, too. More shoes are dropping. CNN, MSNBC, Fox are all over it. An explosion of some kind at a church in Waterloo, Iowa; they’re talking about fifty or sixty dead, maybe twice that many wounded. Something in Springfield, Missouri, too. A local news station was there, covering a statue unveiling; it looked like goddamned Omaha Beach. Some town in Nebraska… Brady… Someone walked into a high school swim meet and rolled grenades beneath the bleachers. Christ almighty.”

“They’re doing what they do,” Clark said. “Terror. The Losan, the Paulinia fire, these attacks. The URC is sending a message: Nobody’s safe anywhere.”

“Well, there’re gonna be a lot of believers after this.”

“It’s worse than that,” Bell said. “Remember the dive the economy took after Nine-Eleven. Multiply that by a thousand, and that’s what we’re looking at. The Emir and the URC’s trying to finish the job: to get our economy to devour the country from the inside out. They hit our new oil import source, they tried to hit a major port, they killed God knows how many in the heartland, and now they’re trying to go nuke. People are the economy. Paralyze one, you paralyze the other. Add to that Kealty, who was already screwing the pooch, and we’ve got a big goddamned problem.”

“It makes sense,” Clark replied. “Nothing this guy does is one-dimensional.”

Hendley asked, “What’s your ETA?”

Clark asked Marty, “How long?”

“Twenty-two minutes.”

FIFTEEN MILES from the 373 junction, Highway 95 appeared below the EC-130, a straight gray line cutting through the brown desert. “How close is the Nellis Range?” Clark asked Marty.

“Reach out your window and you’re almost touching it. That’s what I’m telling you: As soon as we cut northwest, we’re gonna light up radar screens. These folks don’t fuck around.”

“We need to get to Yucca.”

“Shit. Please tell me you’re not terrorists.”

“We’re the good guys.”

“What kind of good guys?”

“Hard to explain. Can you get us there before they chase us down?”

“Which entrance, north or south?”

“South.”

“If I’m balls to the wall I can get a hundred ninety miles an hour out of her, and if I put it on the deck… Figure four minutes after we turn off the highway. Do me a favor, huh?”

“What’s that?”

“Threaten me again. When they slap the cuffs on me, I want some kind of defense.”

Five minutes later, they saw through the windshield another gray line intersect 95 from the south. “Three seventy-three,” Marty announced. As they swept over the junction, he banked to the northwest and began descending until they were thirty feet off the desert.

A ridge up before them. “Busted Butte,” Marty announced, pulling up, then leveling out. “Three miles. Sixty seconds.” He banked again, first left, then right, and dropped into a shallow valley.

A two-acre-square gravel lot appeared through the windshield. On the lot’s far left side a keyhole shape had been cut into the hillside; at its center, an enormous tunnel entrance.

“Company,” Jack called.

On the north side of the lot, a road extended into the desert. A flatbed truck carrying what looked like a giant stainless-steel dumbbell was pulling into the lot.

“What the hell is that?” Dominic shouted.

“GA-4 cask,” Jack replied. “For transporting spent fuel rods.”

“Thought this place wasn’t open.”

“It isn’t.” Jack scanned the binoculars north up the road to the white phone booth-sized guard shack. He could see two figures lying on the pavement. “Men down at the checkpoint,” he called.

Clark asked Marty, “Can you put down in-”

“Not with that truck in there. I’ll clip a rotor. Down the road about fifty yards I can.”

“Do it.”

“Coming around.”

Marty banked sharply, spiraling back the way they’d come before stopping in a hover over the road. In the lot, the truck had stopped. Men were piling out of the cab.

“I count five,” Dominic called.

As they watched, two of them sprinted down the length of the flatbed toward the EC-130. Still running, the men raised AK-47s and started firing.

“Shit!” Marty shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Those are the bad guys,” Clark told him.

Marty slid the helo to the right, away from the road and behind the hill.

“This’ll do,” Clark said.

Marty brought the EC-130 down in a one-bump landing. Clark and the others climbed out. Clark leaned back through the door and shouted, “Find cover and set down. Stay off the radio, and be here when we get back.”

“Ah, come on-”

Clark pointed his gun in Marty’s general direction. “That help?”

“Yeah!”

Clark slammed the door, then sprinted to where the others had clustered thirty feet away. Sand peppered them as Marty lifted off, then banked left and headed down the road, where he turned again behind a low hill. After twenty seconds, the chop of the rotors faded.

“Listen,” Jack said.

Over the hill, the flatbed truck was moving.

With Chavez in the lead, they charged up the slope. They were ten feet from the ridgeline when they heard the chatter of automatic weapons. Controlled three-round bursts. Voices shouted, echoing off the canyon walls. Chavez dropped to his belly and crawled forward. After a moment, he signaled the others forward. Below, the flatbed was pulling into the notch in the hillside. As they watched, a man in a yellow hard hat sprinted across the lot, heading for the road. There were three overlapping pops, and the man pitched forward and went still.

“I count four others,” Dominic said. “Don’t see any of them moving. You guys?”

No one answered.

They sprinted down the slope to the concrete lip at the edge of the lot, then followed it up the opposite slope toward the edge of the entrance notch. They crept up to the edge, peeked over, and were met by the sounds of wrenching steel. The cab of the truck was disappearing into the mouth of the tunnel. The cask slipped into the entrance, scraping along the upper rim. The truck ground to a stop, lurched forward a few feet, then stopped again. The engine died.

A man appeared around the rear of the flatbed, his AK at his shoulder. Bullets thunked into the dirt at their feet. They backpedaled and dropped down. Chavez wiggled forward, peeked up, then rose to one knee, snapped off three shots, and dropped down again. “One down,” he said.

“Do we know how big this thing is?” Jack asked.

“No bigger than a footlocker, I’d imagine,” Clark replied. “Two men could carry it. Come on, let’s move.” They picked their way back along the concrete rim, then rolled over the edge one by one and dropped to the ground. Ahead, along the concrete wall, were stacks of crates, coils of wire, rolling tool chests, acetylene cutting rigs, and arc welding units. Beyond them, the corner leading to the notch.

They moved toward it in pairs, leapfrogging one another until Clark could see around the corner. He turned back, pointed to Jack, gestured him forward, then Dominic, then Chavez. At the entrance, nothing was moving. The flatbed was wedged tightly, both sides pressing against the walls and the cask against the roof.