Callsign: King II- Underworld

King hadn’t forgotten about the sludge pond, but as the Humvee bounced twice more, traveling another fifty feet down the hill even though he now had the brake pedal pressed to the floor, he realized that he might have been a little too eager to reach it. After the third bounce, the wheels remained in contact with the ground and the truck slid forward several more yards before finally coming to rest with its front end jutting out over the toxic pool.

There wasn’t even a second to waste on a sigh of relief. King threw the gear selector into ‘reverse,’ cranked the wheel forty-five degrees, and brought the truck around so that it was facing up hill at an angle. He had just shifted back into ‘drive’ when the chasing Humvee erupted off the crest of the hill.

He caught a glimpse of the other vehicle’s headlights, shining out through the dust cloud like spotlights searching the sky, but then the beams dipped down to illuminate the sludge pond. King’s Humvee rolled forward, traversing the slope diagonally, as the pursuing vehicle bounced and skidded straight into the sulfur dioxide tainted pool. King didn’t hear the splash, but knew that the truck had failed to stop in time when the headlights vanished.

As he sped along the edge of the bowl, King half expected to see more Humvees taking up the chase, but that was the least of his worries. He kept one eye on the GPS display, watching as the dots moved closer to each other, but he stopped checking his watch. He didn’t need it to tell him that he had probably made the wrong decision by going to retrieve Pierce. He wasn’t going to make it back to Bluelight in time.

Then, as if in answer to his prayers, the cinder block building appeared in the distance as he crested a hill. The beam of his headlights revealed a lot more than he had glimpsed earlier. Just beyond the structure, a ragged edge cut across the landscape in either direction, further than the eye could see. The Bluelight facility was perched on the edge of the abandoned open-pit mine.

Beyond that hill, the remaining distance was relatively flat, and after about two hundred yards, the Humvee crossed the rutted dirt that led directly to the fenced compound. The moment the tires transitioned onto the road, the ride instantly smoothed out, allowing Nina and Pierce to emerge from their huddle.

King looked over at them. They both looked like they had been trapped in a tumble dryer. “Still with me?”

Pierce gave a half-hearted laugh. “Let’s not do that again.”

“No more off-road,” King promised. “You have my word on that. We’re almost there.”

“How much time do we have?” Nina asked.

King glanced at his watch, knowing that he wouldn’t like what he saw there. The chronometer had just ticked past 46:15. “Not enough.”

Maybe not enough to stop Bluelight from activating, but if he could get to Copeland and convince the physicist to shut it down…

The thought slipped away as the headlights lit up the building, and he saw that they had another problem. Arrayed in a semi-circle, just beyond the fenced area, were half a dozen M1026s, bristling with M240B and Browning M2 .50-caliber machine guns.

The Army had come to protect Bluelight.

King kept driving forward, but his foot eased off the accelerator. Fancy driving wasn’t going to get him past this obstacle. At about a hundred yards, he braked to a stop and shut down the vehicle. As if waiting for that cue, a team of soldiers, advanced on foot, keeping their carbines trained on the new arrivals.

“Shit,” Nina whispered. “What do we do now?”

King didn’t have an answer. After all they had gone through to get back, he wasn’t about to be stopped at the finish line, but he had no idea how they were going to overcome this last hurdle. He was still trying to think of something inspiring to say when the area just behind the cinder block structure lit up with a blue glow.





FUSION





30.


East of Phoenix, Arizona — 1026 UTC (3:25 am Local)



After five minutes of fruitless searching, Sokoloff knew that he had lost his prey. In the maze of hills and valleys, there were any number of possible paths, and it was evident that King had taken one and he had somehow wandered down another. Only pride had prevented him from contacting his employer to ask for assistance—specifically, the GPS location of George Pierce’s cell phone—but he wasn’t foolish enough to let pride stand in the way of finishing the job and earning his ten million dollars.

He was a little dismayed to discover that he’d received three text messages, presumably sent during the time he’d been underground with Pierce. The first was an almost polite request for an update. The second was more direct, almost demanding in tone, but essentially a repeat of the first, with an urgent appeal to execute the contract as soon as possible. The third, now almost ten minutes old, was a variation on the blackmail threat that had been used to draw him out of retirement. If the message was to be believed, Interpol was already hot on his trail.

Sokoloff sighed. He didn’t think his employer was that rash, and he couldn’t imagine why, all of a sudden, it had become critical to rush the job to completion, but if that was really how it was going to play out, then so be it. He had eluded the authorities before, and he could do it again if necessary.