Ill Wind Part 24

Mitch jabbed his finger at the columns of numbers. She could see it for herself. The figures were simply placeholders, taking up s.p.a.ce; Kramer had jotted down the square root of two, pi, and others. Branson's eyes widened, and Mitch wondered if she was going to fly into a rage or break down and cry.

Before she could react, the sound of an exploding natural gas tank shook the room. The thwump thwump came first, loud enough to rattle the other window in Kramer's office. Booms echoed around the refinery complex. came first, loud enough to rattle the other window in Kramer's office. Booms echoed around the refinery complex.

Branson dropped the notebook and pushed toward the window. "What the h.e.l.l is going on out there?" she said.

Outside, a towering ball of blue-orange flames roiled to the sky. Flaming, molten shards of metal clattered to the ground. One of the fractionating towers buckled from the explosion.

A crowd roared below. Tiny forms, people, scrambled on the gasoline reservoirs and the crude oil storage tanks. Were they going to burn those, too?

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h! Peasants bearing torches, can you believe it?" Branson said. "Come on, we've got to get back to the Admin building. I've still got my own private guards there."

Fl.u.s.tered, Mitch said, "Yes, Ma'am."

He followed, leaving Alex's doors open. Gunshots rang out as Branson's guards responded to the a.s.sault, but their guns fired only a few times before the weapons seized up. The shouts grew louder.

Before he and Branson made it down the three flights of stairs, they heard breaking gla.s.s below. "Oh, s.h.i.t!" Mitch's voice wavered.

Branson looked ready to dive into the fray herself and start tearing the saboteurs limb from limb. "Up the stairwell. We'll go to the second floor and down the back. Maybe we can get out the emergency exit."

Mitch ran after her, pursued by the sounds of smashing and yelling. When they reached the other stairwell and hurried down, the bottom door burst open. Four people charged in.

Mitch froze, hoping the intruders wouldn't look up. But his luck didn't hold. One of the women glanced up the stairs, spotting both of them. Her face ignited with glee. "There they are! Two of them!"

Mitch whirled and scrambled up the stairs, leaving Branson behind. The old woman came panting after him.

Mitch's mind whirled. He had seen plenty of those stupid suspense movies where the victims continued to run up the stairs while being chased. But what other choice did they have? The people were below, swarming up.

"Floor four," he said. "There's the vault! I think it's open-I cracked it this morning to get at Alex's records. If we get in there, they'll never be able to reach us."

Branson stumbled beside him. Below, the attackers had reached the second-floor landing.

By the time he got to the fourth floor, Mitch had gained a good lead on Branson. He ran down the corridors, ducked through an open typing-pool complex of dissolving cubicles, toward the doc.u.ment vault in back. The heavy steel door stood partway open.

He glanced behind him and saw Branson turning the corner, her arms outstretched, gasping. Her hair had come undone, and she had flung off both shoes as she stuttered forward. Fewer than ten steps behind her, came the roaring mob.

Mitch ducked into the vault; a dim, battery-powered emergency lamp flickered from the ceiling. If he waited for Branson, he would never get the heavy steel door closed before the others wrenched it out of his hands. He couldn't hesitate. He tugged at the handle and hauled the door closed, digging his feet into the floor.

Emma Branson reached the vault just as it shut. She screamed at him through the tiny gap before the pursuers grabbed her shoulders. Mitch jerked the vault door closed with the last of his strength. The combination would reset itself automatically, and none of these people would ever get inside. He heard m.u.f.fled screaming, but he could make out no words.

He didn't want to know what was happening to Emma Branson.

Mitch slid down the back wall and sat in the corner, spilling confidential doc.u.ments marked PROMETHEUS around him as he shivered uncontrollably. Finally, he began to laugh as he realized that he was safe. He had found the papers.

Jake Torgens's face stung. His eyebrows and much of his hair had been singed in the monstrous natural gas explosion. At least fifteen people had died, their flaming rag-doll bodies flying through the air, spraying droplets of smoking blood.

But the strike force would do what had to be done, regardless of casualties. This fire was going to be an environmental catastrophe of its own, but at the moment Jake considered that concern secondary. Some of the environmentalists had even cheered the petroplague as a final solution to the worldwide problems of industrial pollution. Jake figured they might eventually be right, but for the moment they had their heads up their a.s.ses.

Several protestors came to Jake with metal buckets and gla.s.s bottles of contaminated gasoline they had poured out of the sealed storage tanks. They had opened the valves and let the trapped fuel spill down the hill. Once his people got clear, Jake would order the whole thing blown sky high.

Polly ran up to him. A fat woman who described herself as "pleasantly plump," Polly had a mild manner; but when her anger got stoked, she was ready to kill. Grime streaked her face, and her eyes were bright.

"We found two of them inside the research building there. One locked himself inside a vault upstairs, and we can't get to him, but we caught the old witch, Branson. She's still alive. In a lot of pain. Should we bring her down?"

"No," Jake said. "Leave her upstairs, and make sure she stays there. Tie her to the vault door and get everyone else out of the building." He raised his eyebrows at Polly. "You know what to do with witches, don't you?"

Polly grinned. She took one of the buckets of gasoline and ran toward the building.

Black smoke poured in through the air vents of the vault. Mitch Stone coughed, then scrambled across the floor. The carpet itself was smoldering. The pages turned brown on the doc.u.ments lining the metal shelves.

The whole building would burn to the ground. Mitch would be trapped inside this vault like a roast in an oven. He had to get out. The thick smoke burned his eyes. He couldn't breathe.

When he grabbed the release bar, the metal was so hot it sizzled the flesh on his palms. He shrieked. Mitch fumbled with a roll of papers to shield his skin and pushed down on the release bar again. He forced the door open.

And the blackened clawlike arm of Emma Branson fell inside. The skin on her skeletal body was charred to paperlike ash. Her mouth still open, she slumped into the gap.

Mitch staggered backward. The doc.u.ments in the vault ignited with a flash all around him. The furnace flames blasted inside.

Chapter 51.

When Lieutenant Bobby Carron's eyes opened, he was fully awake but completely disoriented. Nothing familiar, just a big blank spot where he thought he should remember things. No longer in his Bachelor Officer's Quarters at China Lake, he lay in bed in a strange, dim room. In pain.

Bobby saw stark featureless walls, smelled antiseptic-clean bedding, felt a cottony ma.s.s in his mouth as his tongue ran over his teeth. Bad, flat, rancid-tasting mouth. The window blinds were drawn, and the little sunshine that diffused through looked as if it had been washed and sterilized. Where the h.e.l.l am I? Where the h.e.l.l am I? Somewhere outside the room came a muted chanting, like the throbbing of machinery. He couldn't figure out what it was. Somewhere outside the room came a muted chanting, like the throbbing of machinery. He couldn't figure out what it was.

His arms ached as he tried to move. He'd been taking a cross-country flight with Barfman Petronfi, on his way to the beach where he could bask in the sun and forget about the Navy. He'd climbed aboard his jet, taken off for Corpus Christi- Bobby tried to raise his head. He felt bandages, constraints. And then it came rushing back to him: losing power, electrical systems c.r.a.pping out, watching Barfman's plane break apart and drop away into a bright explosion. His own aircraft failing, straining to reach the Albuquerque airport. He had ejected, watching his own A/F18 plummet into the desert, as the rocky ground rushed up at him like a giant slapping hand . . . .

He had survived, but how badly was he hurt? His body shivered in waves of pain and numbness. Was he paralyzed? Where was Barfman? Where were the nurses? Why weren't they watching him? How long had it been?

He struggled to raise himself on an elbow. They didn't even have a monitor on him! If this was a real a hospital, then they should have diagnostics, air conditioning, not this d.a.m.ned silence. He grabbed the call b.u.t.ton by his bed, but found only bare wires.

Bobby drew in several deep breaths. In all his years in the Navy, he'd never even been in a hospital except for the "turn your head and cough" routine. He forced himself to relax back on the pillow. Listening, Bobby couldn't hear a cart creaking down a hallway or even a nurse going to check on a patient; he heard only muted crowd sounds outside the closed window.

His mind raced through the options. If he was in a hospital, something was definitely wrong. He should hear something something.

Bobby pushed back the sheets. Moving like he was in a room covered with broken gla.s.s, he lowered himself to the floor. He discovered several sore muscles and bruises that he hadn't had before. His right leg was wrapped with a cloth bandage, but he could put weight on it. Both ankles felt swollen. His head throbbed with the fuzziness of pain-killers and sedatives, and a ringing sound echoed in his ears.

His body struggled to remember how to walk. How many days had he been out? He grunted, trying to keep the pain away.

Bobby shuffled toward the window, one step at a time across the cold tile floor. A minute later he stood at the window, staring down at the crowd gathered below.

Outside, thousands of milling people filled a plaza, chanting: "String 'im up, string 'im up, string the b.a.s.t.a.r.d up!"

The crowd cl.u.s.tered around a platform like an angry river against an upthrust rock. Timbers had been erected in a crude gallows. Bobby blinked in shock. What the h.e.l.l?

Five men dressed in sand-colored camouflage uniforms stepped on stage. A lanky boy, no older then sixteen, staggered up from the ground, fighting against the ropes on his legs. Thrusting arms helped him along.

The boy was roughly led to the gallows at center stage where a burly man in uniform met him. Some of the people continued to chant, others seemed oddly subdued.

The uniformed man held his hands above his head, and silence fell like a blanket on the plaza. The boy kept struggling, shouting in terror. The uniformed man gave another signal, and one of the guards stuffed a gag in the prisoner's mouth.

Bobby leaned forward to hear the man's shouted words. He rested his numb fingers on the grille of the window. Had the world gone crazy? Was he hallucinating?

"-a chain that depends on the strength of one link. And whenever a bad link threatens the good of the whole, it must be removed! I don't like what circ.u.mstances have forced me to do, but now more than any other time in our history as a nation, we must adhere to the law without question. The president has given us explicit instructions. The rules are just. Our future depends on strict obedience." The man looked grim as he surveyed the crowd. No one cried out, murmurs ran through the periphery.

One of the men in camouflage threw a long rope over the gallows arm. Another quickly stepped up and secured the noose over the neck of the young boy who whipped his head back and forth in panic; his hands were tied behind his back. The burly officer stepped back as the airman tested the noose.

"My sworn duty is to protect the people of this city. The odds are stacked against us, but I will not allow looters to make things worse. Any person who refuses to work with us is a threat to everyone." He jerked a thumb behind him.

Immediately, three men stepped forward and grasped the rope. On the count of "Ready, ready, now!" they pulled the rope, jerking the young man off his feet.

The boy dangled in the air, kicking his feet and swaying back and forth as he struggled. His body arched, his elbows spread out to strain against the ropes binding his wrists. His chin jerked from side to side as he twisted his head. Within minutes, his face swelled into a dark, bruised purple. A dark wet stain spread from his crotch.

Bobby stumbled from the window. He felt his stomach tighten as he tried to vomit on the floor, but he heaved only sour saliva.

He shook his head to clear it. The entire scene seemed like a morality play in h.e.l.l. He eased himself back onto the edge of the bed, stunned. With this brutal frontier-style justice, he must be in some Third World banana republic!

The door of his room swung open, and a grim-faced staff nurse stared at him. She raised her eyebrows. "You're awake, Lieutenant. You had a terrible concussion, and we didn't have our usual facilities to treat you. I hope you're feeling better?"

"I-don't know." Bobby blinked his eyes in shock.

The nurse glanced at the window and strode over to close the blinds. "You'd think the d.a.m.n kids would know by now that the curfew's serious. Makes you wonder how many more times they have to set an example before it finally sinks in." She came over and inspected the wrapping on Bobby's legs. "It's good you're moving around. I need to contact the military liaison."

"And he just happens to set up his gallows right outside the hospital?" Bobby couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Why here?"

The nurse shook her head, scowling toward the window. "No, he's get several stations all around the city. If the general's going to make a good example of it, he has to make his punishments visible to a lot of people, and these days communication is very more difficult. Can't just pick up a newspaper or turn on CNN anymore, you know. Getting word out about the curfew was tough enough."

Things were moving too fast. Bobby swallowed, still tasting sour dryness in his throat. "But why is there a curfew at all? And why hang anybody who breaks it?"

"The general's enforcing martial law against looters and rioters. No one likes it, but without those drastic measures, the VA hospital would of been taken apart for drugs and equipment. We got guards stationed at every entrance."

"But why is there martial law? What's happened?"

She smiled and patted his shoulder. "You got a lot to catch up on, don't you? You're lucky the general wants to meet you."

Part III AFTERMATH.

Chapter 52.

The Cabinet Room in the White House was filled for the morning staff meeting in a desperate attempt to pretend at normalcy, but few of those present actually held cabinet rank. It was too difficult to a.s.semble the remaining high-level officials every morning. Instead, the White House staff served as conduits for the rest of the Executive Branch, relaying information to and from President Jeffrey Mayeaux by any means available-wireless, messengers, hand-written instructions. In an effort to ensure continuity, the new Vice President and his staff were being heavily guarded at his residence in the Naval Observatory.

In the Oval Office, Mayeaux stared out the window at the motionless tanks and armored personnel carriers on the south White House lawn. Military showoffs! The reinforced vehicles served more as a Maginot Line than as a practical mechanism to stop the rioting around Washington, D.C. After the petroplague had swept across the capital city, the tanks stood frozen in place. They could not move, could not operate the turrets, nor swing their heavy gun barrels around. But Mayeaux still thought they looked d.a.m.ned impressive-if he happened to be afraid of the commies marching down Pennsylvania Avenue! As it was, it made the White House lawn look like an old junk yard.

Mayeaux sipped a cup of weak chicory coffee, a completely inept attempt at cafe au lait cafe au lait. White House coffee had always been extravagant and rich, made with dark-roast gourmet beans. Now, the best the kitchen could manage was a muddy, boiled brew that tasted bitter no matter how much sugar he added. Mayeaux stirred it, staring down at the swirling dark liquid.

He hated getting up so d.a.m.ned early in the morning, but there just wasn't time for enough rest. He had heavier responsibilities now that he held the Chief Executive job. He hadn't even gotten laid in three days! His own plans for a bright future had swirled right down the toilet, gurgling loudly as they went. A million people supposedly dreamed about becoming president of the United States-how did he get to be so d.a.m.ned lucky? It was like reaching into a new box of Cracker Jacks and pulling out a brand-new, shiny bear trap as his prize!

Stuck inside the White House compound, Mayeaux had no opportunities to blow off steam. He knew about Kennedy sneaking in the babes . . . but JFK only had the Bay of Pigs, the Commies, and the Cuban Missile Crisis to worry about. Under the Mayeaux administration, the petroplague had messed up every little detail of daily life. He couldn't even slip off to Camp David for a break from this d.a.m.ned place. He was being asked to cope with a turn-of-the-21st-century world, but given only the technology available to Thomas Jefferson!

"Mr. President, everybody's here." Franklin Weathersee stood at the door to the Cabinet Room. He seemed to be rubbing it in every time he said the words 'Mr. President'-he wouldn't put up with that att.i.tude from anyone else, but Weathersee . . . well, he owed Weathersee a few favors. More than he could remember.

Mayeaux set down his cup. "So what's on the agenda today, Frank? Visiting dignitaries? Trips to Acapulco? Business as usual?"

Weathersee answered bluntly without looking at the handwritten agenda. He never seemed to have any sense of humor. "The Joint Chiefs have an update on martial law enforcement. They're being pretty tight-lipped until you get in there."

Mayeaux turned from the view of the south lawn. "Let's get this over with. These guys make my skin crawl, and if they aren't going to support me, we'll get someone in there who will."

The halls were dim, lit by sunlight trickling through office windows. Metal sculptures, given as presents from foreign governments, sat on tables lining the hallway. Most of the carpet had deteriorated down to the bare wood floors, leaving only stains of residue.

Weathersee lowered his voice as they approached the Cabinet Room. "It's not so easy to replace them, Mr. President-"

Mayeaux stopped outside the door and snorted. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about, Frank? I didn't ask for this job-I should be back in New Orleans fishing right now. If I'm going to be anything more than a placeholder, I've got to have a team that works with me."

Weathersee held Mayeaux back. Several people had already noticed them and stood. Two Secret Service agents waited at the end of the hall, studiously watching nothing.

"These people are military types, Mr. President-they're not political hacks. They aren't 'yes' men. They don't have an agenda. Their allegiance is to the U.S. Const.i.tution."

Mayeaux scowled. "Don't kid yourself, Frank. Everybody's Everybody's got an agenda, including these tin pots. They just have different b.u.t.tons to push. They still serve at my pleasure, don't they?" got an agenda, including these tin pots. They just have different b.u.t.tons to push. They still serve at my pleasure, don't they?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then they'll support me-or find another job, petroplague or not. I have enough to worry about."

He stepped through the door, smiling his best media smile as the others stood to greet him. Mayeaux headed for his high-backed chair. He dispensed with shaking hands. "So, what do we have?" he asked. "Give me the slicked-down version."

The four military officers sat directly across the table, next to the Secretary of Defense. Bra.s.s plates on the backs of the chairs identified each cabinet member. The chairs were arranged around the table in the order the office had been elevated to cabinet level.