He hauled Claude up the stairway to the back entrance of the control-room complex. Opening the door just as another blast came, this one even greater than the one that took down the cooling tower. An explosion so immense it sent currents of hot wind roaring between the structures and hammered the concrete building, rattled its steel joints, and continued to rumble for half a minute after the blast, shaking loose cement panels from the walls and sending tiles tumbling from the roof, and setting off more screams and more sirens and more turbulence in the air than Frank had ever before witnessed in a long life of turbulence.
FORTY-THREE
THORN OPENED HIS EYES TO the blue iridescent glow.
Rubbed the lump on his forehead, as large and rough as a peach pit, then felt his nose, which was numb and felt a few degrees off center.
He wiped the blood from his lips, came to his feet. Picked up the flashlight from the ramp a few feet away. Went to the rail and leaned out to scan the big room. It was so cluttered with cranes and tanks and control panels draped with plastic tarps and a jumble of other exotic equipment that Thorn made one pass after another without seeing any sign of Pauly. He leaned out to peer below him, but no one was there either.
As he shuffled down the ramp, heading toward the metal stairway to take a closer look at the floor below, he caught sight of Pauly, crouched on the ground floor at the far end of the pool, half-shrouded by a yellow tarp, some kind of canvas safety barrier stretched around the sides of the pool.
He seemed to be working inside a manhole, the metal cover flipped open behind him. The small bunker was hardly larger than a phone booth, cut into the cement floor, maybe five feet deep.
An access cubicle for plumbing or refrigeration repairs or perhaps an entry point for a network of crawl spaces that led into the subterranean realms of the spent fuel pool. He was bent to his work, hands making adjustments.
The physics of what he was attempting was clear. He was setting the charge as deep below the surface of the structure as possible to do the greatest damage to the uranium racks and drain the pool in an instant, along with creating the maximum likelihood of spraying those irradiated pellets into the upper zones of the atmosphere.
But after what Thorn had witnessed at the cooling-tower blast, Pauly’s work seemed a pointless precaution. The explosive he was using was so devastating, no matter where he planted it near the spent fuel pool, it would almost certainly pump a mushroom cloud into the Miami sky, poison the air for years, and guarantee endless days of blood rain.
Maybe it was Pauly’s SEAL training and that he was a compulsive purist who wouldn’t settle for anything less than perfection. But Thorn no longer gave two shits about motives. This was down to meat and bones.
He circled the room the long way around. Picking his way across the obstacle course of grates and cables and metal tubing so he could come at Pauly from behind. The water shimmered as if it were alive, as if it were exposed to the wind and the sun and the random elements, as if it were filled with fish and crabs, lobster and white darting shrimp, as if the water were real water, the stuff of life, the stuff that kept Thorn afloat in every way water could accomplish that. But it was not. It was none of those things. In this room water was simply a chemical necessity, a slave. A perversion of water, a liquid hostage in this cellblock, held in isolation until it was used up, then it was shipped back into the world, a different thing from what it had been.
Ten feet from Pauly, Thorn stopped, surveyed the surroundings, deciding on his final approach. Diagramming the path, not the shortest, but the one with the best chance for him to fling himself on the man’s back, coming down hard with the flashlight.
He believed he’d have one decent shot. With a solid skull-crusher, things might even up. If he missed that first strike, it was as good as over. Pauly wasn’t just strong and quick. He had death-stroke training. A military efficiency. No wasted movement sizing up his enemy, no thrust and parry, no feeling out. Zero reaction time.
Thorn choked up on the flashlight, cocked his arm, took two steps—and the upper door slammed open and Flynn Moss and Cameron Prince barreled onto the observation ramp. Flynn with a pistol. Cameron empty-handed.
“You in here, Thorn? Hey, it’s me, Flynn. You in here?”
Eyes on the intruders, Pauly had begun a slow ascent from his manhole. Flynn and Prince hadn’t yet seen him, though from the direction they were taking down the observation ramp, his position would be exposed in a few seconds. Flynn leading the way, searching the cluttered floor for any sign of them.
Thorn’s injured leg made a sprint impossible, so he edged closer to Pauly, keeping his eyes upward to spot Flynn and Prince. Unless Thorn reversed course, ducked behind a nearby electrical panel right away, Flynn would notice Thorn in a few seconds. A word of recognition, a shift of eye in Thorn’s direction, would alert Pauly.