Vance watched him, then growled, “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
He was right, Hollis knew. Whatever doubts he might have, they no longer mattered. They had all done too much to turn back. They had nothing left to lose. There was no alternative. He unbuckled his seat belt. “Troy? Do it.”
61
Peter
The dashboard clock read 3:17 when they rolled into the sleeping town of Grand Coulee and made the turn up the hill toward the main substation. After removing the tire chains and getting on the interstate, Lewis had pushed the Tahoe’s speed to a hundred and twenty, hoping they could make up some time.
There was no snow on the ground here in the high desert, but the temperature was well below freezing. As they rounded the curve and left the last modest homes behind, a line of eight transmission towers rose before them like sentries against the night, their high tops crowned with the same red flashing lights. The dam itself wasn’t visible because of the fall of the land. Lewis had already killed the headlights and pulled down his night-vision goggles so he could see the road.
“Slow it up,” Peter said, looking at the map on his phone. “It’s right on the other side of that hill.” He pointed through the windshield. “Pull up that little gravel drive a ways, maybe find some bushes to hide us.” If they had somehow passed the Messenger’s men, he didn’t wantthose assholes to roll up behind them parked on the side of the road. Hollis, Nickels, and Boxall knew the Tahoe. They would be sitting ducks for those armor-piercing rounds.
Lewis crept forward up the one-lane track, the ambient glow from the substation growing brighter. As he pulled into the waist-high scrub between two enormous metal lattice towers, the land fell away and the facility appeared in the distance, lit up like Santa’s workshop on Christmas Day. Peter rolled down his window and raised the binoculars Manny had left him.
The substation leapt into view, a vast array of transformers, switches, circuit breakers, surge arresters, capacitors, and myriad other equipment, much of it from the previous century. The technology itself was even older, but still remarkable. As a kid, Peter and his dad had often driven past a much smaller substation on the outskirts of the town where he’d grown up. His dad always called it the lightning farm. Because, as his dad liked to say, mankind had learned to harness lightning and put it safely to work.
The facility itself was a quarter-mile wide and maybe four hundred feet deep, with a deeper section facing the road where an electric entrance gate and a maintenance building stood. The whole thing was surrounded by a chain-link fence, eight feet tall with barbed wire on top. Outside the gate was a parking area with six vehicles standing nose out across the far side of the lot, three or four feet apart. They were blocking the gate. Peter could see the low shape of the light bars across their roofs.
Kitzinger had made contact with the sheriff. The deputies had made it.
—
Half a dozen men milled around, weapons slung, looking at the vehicles and at small heaps scattered on the blacktop. Peter’s binocularsweren’t powerful enough to see details. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
A pair of fat-tired pickups appeared, turning brazenly down the access drive and into the parking lot. One man got out of each pickup and joined the others. Then Peter realized none of them were in uniform. And the small heaps on the parking-lot surface were dead men.
Shit. “The deputies are down. The bad guys are already here.”
Lewis put the Tahoe in reverse but kept his foot on the brake. “If we come in hot, they’ll hear our engines before they see us. They’ll be ready. We’ve got no protection against those black-tips.”
Peter nodded. “Surprise is our only option. We should go on foot from here.” Cross-country to the parking lot, it was only a hundred yards.
“Works for me.” Lewis opened his door. They’d already disabled the dome light. “Saddle up, motherfuckers.”
Manny had left them most of his equipment. They geared up at the back of the Tahoe, keeping it light, just suppressed weapons, spare magazines, radios, flashlights, and night-vision goggles, in case they had to go hunting in the dark. The armor wouldn’t help, so they left it behind. Each man’s pack also had two rolls of duct tape and a first aid kit.
Peter was the first man ready. He raised the binoculars again, scanning the parking lot below. The Messenger’s pickups were parked nose out for a quick getaway. The men had gathered at the cargo beds and were busy unloading something. He recognized the spidery skeletons of the drones. “We need to go now.”
June grabbed his shoulder and turned him, then grabbed his ears and pulled him close.
He kissed her hard. The adrenaline burning in his veins. Alive, alive, I am alive. He looked at Lewis, who nodded his readiness. Then he turned and began to run, bent low in the knee-high grass andwaist-high scrub, toward the bright substation and the killers assembled in the parking lot.
Lewis and June ran beside him.
—
The ground was uneven and he was careful where he put his feet, not wanting to trip and fall or, worse, break an ankle. But he kept most of his focus on the Messenger’s men in the parking lot. One was the boy Peter had seen when they were loading the trucks at the compound. He was fussing around the drones now, bending to attach something to their undersides. Then two others each picked up a drone and held them above their heads. Red lights shone down from their fuselages, painting the men in a crimson glow.
The boy looked down at a dark rectangle in his hand and moved his fingers across it. As one, the black drones began to buzz loudly. Of course, Peter thought. The boy was the pilot.
The drones buzzed louder and slowly rose into the air. Something heavy hung between them, sinuous and gleaming, and Peter realized what it was. The motorcycle chains from the boxes in Reed’s apartment, linked together into one long unit. The drones would lay it over a pair of high-voltage lines, where it would conduct a massive jolt of electricity between them.
That would be the catalyst, the event that would set off the whole cascade. A city-sized short circuit. But because of what Reed would have done inside the computerized systems, the fail-safe breakers wouldn’t trip. The blast of electricity would shoot down the line, burning out switches and exploding transformers along the way. Which would in turn create new power surges that would propagate through the connected grids, doing more damage. The blackout would begin.
They were seventy yards out. “Take down the drones,” Peter called softly. “Shoot the fucking drones!” The muzzle flash might give awaytheir positions, but that couldn’t be helped. Peter was betting his life that this was the right thing to do.
He knelt behind a shrub, aimed over the iron sight, and fired deliberate single shots. The others did the same. But the drones were moving targets and the AK-47 was not an accurate weapon at this distance. He heard thewhangof stray rounds hitting the metal of the towers. If he had a decent shotgun, he’d have solved this by now. The red lights rose steadily higher, the drones growing smaller and harder to hit.
