Chapter Eighteen

Hun stepped away from the curb into the middle of the street and into the oncoming lights of the sec wag. She waved her arms over her head for the vehicle to stop.

The driver of the wag must have been fooled by the uniform cap she was wearing and the bloody Kevlar vest, because he hit the brakes. The vehicle’s front end dipped low to the road as it screeched to a halt.

Hunaker gave the driver and his passenger the thumbs-up sign. “Perfect!” she said as she started to walk toward them.

From either side of the street, at almost the same instant, two blastershots rang out. The wag’s windshield quivered as if sledgehammered, caving in as the pair of heavy slugs passed through it. Inside the wag, the sec-man driver and his sec-man passenger were slammed back against their seats, both of them head shot. They bounced forward onto the dash and steering wheel, respectively.

The wag’s horn blared as the dead driver collapsed over it. His foot had to have slipped off the brake pedal because the vehicle started to creep slowly forward.

Hun hurried around to the driver’s door, opened it and, grabbing the corpse by the arm, hauled it off the seat and out into the street. She reached in and took the engine out of gear. On the other side of the wag, Poet was evacuating the other dead guy. While the two of them stripped the sec men of all identifying clothing and gear, Ryan lugged the three, fifteen-pound gunnysacks of C-4 and J.B.’s detonator bag over to the wag’s trunk. He popped the trunk lid and put the plastic explosive inside; the detonator bag he kept. Poet and Hun tossed the sec men’s clothing onto the floor in the back of the wag. To the right of the vehicle, the two corpses lay where they’d been dragged, facedown in the gutter. A pair of bodies left naked by the roadside, both with grievous blaster wounds to the head, wouldn’t draw attention from anybody in Virtue Lake, except maybe the street-cleaning crew.

“Don’t smell too good up here in front,” Hunaker commented as she slipped behind the wheel of the still-idling wag. The headliner was a bloody mess, and the inside of the passenger compartment was peppered with bits of flesh and bone, and twinkling fragments of safety glass.

“Smells worse back here,” Poet said from the rear seat.

“Then let’s air the place out,” Ryan said. He sat in the front passenger’s seat. He lifted his boots above the dash and, with three brutal kicks, crashed the crazed windshield onto the hood.

“That’s better,” Hun said as she pinned the accelerator and cut a savage U-turn. The rapid maneuver sent the window glass sliding off the hood and into the street. She roared off in the direction of the refinery. Neither Ryan nor Poet suggested that she slow down. Both knew it wouldn’t have done any good. Hunaker was in kill mode.

As she approached the looming structure, Hun cut the headlights and took her foot off the gas. The wag coasted to a stop next to the curb two blocks away from the plant, which was lit up bright as day, inside and out. Through the open hangar doors, they could see workers moving about, lugging oil drums, lengths of pipe. Some were in chains; some weren’t.

There was a sec-man presence outside the refinery. Three guards manned a little hut at the entrance to the grounds, and two men were at the giant doorway, checking the workers as they entered and left. More guards stood inside the structure, and they traveled in squads of five and six, enforcing the order of the men in pinstriped overalls, the crew bosses, with clubs and bull whips.

“Getting in isn’t going to be so easy,” Hun said.

“Getting out, either,” Ryan added.

Poet leaned forward between the seats and started to say something. His words were drowned out by the mind-rattling screech of the factory whistle. The single piercing note stretched on and on until they thought the thing had stuck. Then silence. Then another awesome blast.

Shortly after the second shriek ended, refinery workers started to file out the hangar doors. Only those without chains, it seemed. The sec men stationed there looked over ankles and necks for collars and manacles. Those with chains didn’t leave the plant.

“Must be the shift change,” Poet commented.

“Replacement workers will be coming in soon,” Ryan said. “That’ll be our chance to get inside.”

While they waited for the graveyard shift to appear, Hun took off her sec-man bill cap, thumb-wheeled open her SOG one-hander and started to saw off the brim. In a few seconds, she had turned it into a skull cap, which mostly hid her alarmingly green hair.

While she was thus occupied, Poet was rummaging through J.B.’s detonator gear in the back seat. “J.B.’s got some real sophisticated stuff in here,” he said. He held up a handful of devices for Ryan to look at. “Check the hazard symbol on the back. These babies are nuke powered. Range on the signal has got to be a couple of miles or more.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Those are all motion-vibration sensing detonators, with mercury switches. J.B. didn’t make them. He traded for them. Those are predark, state-of-the-art.”

“Got a bunch of standard contact detonators in here, too,” Poet said as he rummaged through the bag. “How do you want to play this?”

Ryan looked over the seat at the older man. “You’re the war captain,” he said, “you tell me.”

“I want to hear how you’d do it.”

The one-eyed man didn’t have to think about it. He already knew. “Be nice to use those motion sensors. That way, we don’t have to be around to trigger the big boom.”

“Might not even be alive to do it,” Hun said.

“The way I see it,” Ryan went on, “we need a small, conventional, remote-detonated charge, and we need to set it someplace on the edge of the refinery. We use it to prove to Zeal that we mean business, that we’ve been inside his plant, and we’ve laid our mines. After we blow up the sample charge, we tell him to evacuate the plant. And after he does that, we remote-arm the motion sensors. We show him one we haven’t rigged with C-4 to let him know what he’s up against, that if anybody sets foot inside, the whole place will blow. Then we sit down and make a deal for Trader and all our wags. And we don’t disarm the mines until we’re over the top of the farthest rise.”

“Boy, is that gonna piss the bastard off,” Hun said. “Zeal’s gonna be tap dancing in those high heels of his.”

“And assuming your plan works,” Poet said, “assuming that we get the crew and the wags back, what then? Do we just roll off into the sunset like none of this ever happened?”

“That’s up to Trader,” Ryan said. “He’s the boss. And he’s the one who’s been put through the mill by Zeal. If it was up to me, I think you know what I’d do.”

“Stop on the way out of town and lob one 2.75-inch rocket into the plant?” Poet said.

“You got it.”

As the first graveyard-shift workers started to shuffle past the sec wag, Poet and Ryan began to sort the detonators for rigging. Hun exited the vehicle and moved around to the trunk. She opened the lid halfway, carefully shifted to one side the scoped Remington, the CAR-15 and her 10-gauge, and pulled out the gunnysacks loaded with C-4. Because of the sec men posted at the plant’s entrance, they couldn’t take their longblasters inside with them, only their handblasters. Her own current side arm of choice, a compact 9 mm Beretta 92-SB-C, rode in a ballistic nylon clip rig concealed under her T-shirt at the small of her back. Of course, if they got stopped with the three gunnysacks on the way in, the shit was going to hit the fan anyway.

With the bags of explosives clutched in her hands, she rounded the side of the wag. She slid the gunnysacks into the back with Poet. “Looks like the biggest bunch of workers is coming up the street toward us now,” she said. “They’re about six blocks away, and they don’t seem to be in any hurry. Better get ready to move in four or five minutes, though.”

Poet dumped out the contents of one of the sacks. Working as fast as he could, he cut down the big blocks of plastic explosive with his dagger and passed the resulting one-pound chunks over the front seat to Ryan, who fitted the detonators and then slipped the finished bombs back into the sack. Not a Dix-quality job, for sure, but good enough for demolition work.

When they finished the last charge, Hun opened the door and pulled the loaded bags out into the street. A mob of workers was passing on either side of the wag.

“I’d better take the biggest gunny,” Ryan said as he exited the wag. “It’ll give me something to hide behind. I tend to stand out even in a crowd.” He grabbed the heaviest sack and slung it over his left shoulder. By holding the burden close to the side of his head, he figured he could conceal his eye patch and scar.

The three companions melded in with the silent, grim-faced flow of humanity. Like zombies, the workers shuffled along, eyes bleary, arms barely swinging. Ahead of them was the guard hut.

The sec men seemed much less interested in the people going in than they had been in those going out a few minutes before. It was understandable. These weren’t potential chain gang escapees. These poor bastards were meekly arriving, ready to accept whatever fate dealt them. The sec men had their backs to the crowd, discussing something of importance, as Ryan, Poet and Hun moved by.

Ryan could see he was going to have a problem at the hangar door. The guards there were actually doing their job, looking over the incoming workers with what passed for professional interest. On top of that, Ryan was the only person he could see who was carrying anything with him. Why would a worker bring something into the plant? If anybody was going to get hassled, it was going to be him.

He swung the gunnysack from his shoulder and carried it in one hand by his leg.

At his side, Poet saw what he’d done and nodded his approval. Then he looked at Ryan’s face and frowned.

There was, of course, still the matter of the eye patch, which could also draw unwanted attention. It was possible that the sec men might recognize Ryan from the earlier encounter at the gaudy.

Ryan stripped the thing off and wadded it up in his hand. Head lowered humbly, after the fashion of his fellow laborers, he passed not ten feet from the guards at the hangar door.

“Would you look at that one!” one of the sec men said, pointing at Ryan’s ruined face.

“Man, is he ever fucked up!” the other guard exclaimed.

“Hey, Scarface!” the first sec man shouted at him. “Come on over here, and we’ll fix the other side for you!”

“Yeah, we’ll fix it so it matches.”

Ryan kept on walking. The sec men catcalled to his back.

They were too busy looking at his face and mocking him to notice that he was carrying something.

Once he was inside the refinery, Ryan immediately replaced his eye patch. He had worn it so long that he felt naked without it. Beneath its cover, his healed-over wound was truly horrendous—the missing eye, shrunken lids and socket, and the jagged white scar that divided brow and cheek like a lightning bolt contrasted shockingly with his brutally handsome undamaged side. A wound to his soul that all could see.

Ahead of them, a group of men in pinstriped overalls had climbed up on gantries on either side of the main thoroughfare. As the mass of workers filed past this reviewing platform, they shouted and pointed at individual laborers.

Ryan didn’t understand what was going on at first. He saw the group of sec men standing beneath the gantry push into the crowd and yank those the bosses had indicated out of line.

“Slow down, Ryan,” Poet hissed a warning behind him. “They’re pulling people to replace the dead ones from the previous shift. You don’t want to be up at the head of the line when they’ve still got places to fill.”

Ryan could see that he was right. After they’d dragged the workers to one side, the sec men were clapping leg irons on them. And he remembered what the runaway slave Paste had said about how they always chained the workers in pairs if the job was extra dangerous. The sec men were doing just that, linking the workers, ankle to ankle.

The bosses had to have filled their quota because they stopped yelling and pointing and just stood there on the platforms, looking very pleased with themselves.

With Poet in the lead, the companions moved out of the flow of foot traffic. They angled around and between the bases of the rows of two-story-tall holding tanks, and were soon out of sight of the plant’s main concourse.

Ryan put his bag on the concrete, opened it and took out one of the charges. “This one with the green wire,” he said, showing the others the bomb, “is the demonstration mine. We’ll set that last, on our way out.” He took a small black oblong box from his trouser pocket. “This is the detonator. I’ll stash the both of them here, behind the tank support, just in case

“

He didn’t have to finish the sentence. Poet and Hun knew what he meant. With all the sec men wandering about, there was no guarantee that any one of them would make it back to the rendezvous point.

They split up without saying goodbye. Goodbyes were bad luck. They each carried a sack of prerigged charges. Ryan headed for the north end of the plant, figuring that if the idea was to totally destroy the refinery, then the best place to start was the storage area for full gas drums.

Ryan made his way down the concourse and entered the long, adjoining shed without being challenged. Though he passed bosses and sec men, no one seemed to notice him in the chaos and noise. Inside the metal-walled-and-roofed shed, the fuel drums were on pallets stacked three high. Because the barrels were so heavy, the workers used a ceiling crane and pulley system to do the stacking. Ryan moved around behind the tiers of drums, then reached in and stuck one of the charges between two barrels at floor level.

He worked his way down the length of the shed, leaving behind five more of the deadly little packages. He spaced them and placed them so the explosions would begin at the wall that connected the shed to the plant, and so that the subsequent blasts from the igniting gas drums would sweep toward the dry lake, taking out the entire north side of the refinery.

When he was finished, he returned to the factory proper, looking for other demolition sites. He mined the sides of the crude-oil holding tanks and stuck his C-4 charges on the beams that held up the three-story walls.

After the fact, as he waited in the shadows for Hun and Poet to return to the rendezvous point, it seemed like they were using a whole lot of high-ex for the job. Because he wasn’t an expert like J.B. he didn’t really know what it would do. He’d never worked with so much plastique before.

Poet appeared around the side of the tank; Hun returned a moment later. She went straight to the place where Ryan had hidden the conventional charge and reached in for it.

“Can’t set that yet, Hun,” Poet said.

She rose up, empty-handed.

“We can’t leave here until the next shift change,” Poet explained to her. “Not without getting hassled, mebbe snatched up by the sec men.”

“How long until the change?” Hun asked.

“Four hours.”

“Man

” Hun groaned.

“I don’t know about you two,” Ryan said, stretching his arms, “but I could use a few winks.” He started to scoot his legs in under the massive holding tank, in the gap between its bottom and the floor. “Figure the shift-change whistle ought to wake me up,” he told them. “Damned thing’s loud enough to wake the living dead.”