“Orders from General Kilpatrick!” Mariella shouted, as Tommy had done. “We have to destroy the base before it falls into enemy hands!”
The guard gaped at her, then nodded, as if this somehow made sense to him amid the confusion and gunfire.
“Open this door!” she shouted at him. The guard raised his machine gun, and she winced as he blasted at the door and padlock. There might have been helicopter fuel inside the shed, which made shooting it up a fairly unwise decision. It worked, though, and Mariella kicked in the door.
She ran inside, looking past the small selection of tools for light helicopter repair. She was disappointed in what she found. She’d reasoned that, since the base was remote, there might be spare fuel on hand for the helicopters that came and went. She’d hoped for some kind of portable tank in which she could carry a few gallons, but there was nothing like that. There was only a single enormous tank, mostly embedded in the ground, with a giant hose on a spool, all of it much too large-scale for her purposes. She looked around desperately for any kind of container, but there was only a bucket with no lid.
She shook her head and glanced outside the shed to see whether it was safe to leave. She saw her crazed guard standing at attention, protecting her, heedless of the stray bullets that hurtled back and forth across the yard. It gave her an idea.
Mariella took the end of the hose and walked to the door with it, and the huge spool creaked forward behind her. She told the guard to come inside.
“I’m taking this,” she said, nodding at the heavy nozzle and hose in her hands. “You stay here. When I yell, I want you to turn on the pump.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard said.
“But not until then. I’ll yell ‘Now!’ Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir!” The guard saluted her. He must have been an actual soldier at some point before joining the mercenary outfit that provided the base’s guards. Hale Security, Mariella had heard someone call it.
Mariella took the hose and ran across the yard, crouched as low as she could. A spotlight crossed her, but at this point she was just one more patch of crazy in the middle of a riot.
She reached the vent intake from which they’d all emerged, which was almost as tall as she was. She jammed the nozzle of the fuel hose into her belt, then took a running start and jumped, grabbing onto the lip of it, then scrambling her feet up the side, praying the guy didn’t throw the switch too soon, or that he didn’t get distracted or shot before she called to him.
She lay next to the large fan that she’d disabled, took the nozzle from under her belt, and dropped it into the vertical duct. She kept feeding the hose in as fast as she could, but it was heavy, and so was the spool turning at the far end. When she had a several meters of hose dangling inside the duct, she screamed “Now! Now, now now!”
The hose instantly fattened as it filled with helicopter fuel. Mariella climbed her way down between the fan blades, then wrapped her arms and legs around the thick hose and slid down it like a fireman’s pole, traveling down several stories in less than a minute, friction burning her hands and peeling away the skin. She grimaced through the pain, hoping that her weight was helping to unwind the hose from the spool.
She landed hard on her ass inside the metal cavity from which the array of fans sucked fresh air away into different rooms inside the base. She climbed out of the access panel, which they’d left open, pulling the heavy, full hose with her. She peeked out the maintenance door, then dragged the hose into the hall with her, sweating and straining with the effort.
She walked along the hallway in the direction of the northeast quadrant, where the administrative offices and private apartments were. When the hose would go no further, she opened the nozzle all the way.
It jumped out of her hands like an enormous live snake, snapping back and forth among the walls and ceiling as it gushed out fuel, filling the hallway with an acrid petroleum odor. The fuel flooded the narrow back corridor, rising high enough to glug away through low vents near the floor, spreading through the ducts of the facility’s air system.
Mariella, dripping with fuel, cautiously made her way out to the front of the clinic and looked over the bleeding bodies left from the firefight Tommy had set off among the guards. She took a heavy automatic rifle from one of the bodies, thinking she might need it.
With no one to touch, she couldn’t see into future, but it sounded like most of the facility had evacuated. Occasionally, she heard incoherent shouting and screaming, as if she were deep inside some amusement-park haunted house. The voices drew closer and closer.
Her heart pounding, she reached the administrative quadrant and made her way to the lowest level. Here, the fuel poured out from the air vents and had already pooled ankle-deep on the floor, since it could drain no lower.