Chapter 48 - The Phantom Convoy
The drone of diesel engines outside grew deafeningly loud. Headlights flooded through the rusted gaps in the station's corrugated doors, turning the cavern into a cage of crisscrossing beams.
Thomas had arrived.
"Surround the facility," Thomas’s voice boomed through an external megaphone. "Thermal indicates three signatures inside the turbine hall. No one leaves until the primary drive is recovered."
Vance’s grin vanished, replaced by an expression of raw, unadulterated terror. "He’s going to burn it," Vance whimpered, crawling backward toward the shadow of the turbine intake pipe. "He brought the incinerator trucks. He never leaves physical evidence. That’s how he cleaned up the laboratory in '08!"
I didn't lower the gun. My mind raced through the blueprints I had memorized during the brief seconds Harris’s tablet was unlocked. The hydropower station had been decommissioned in the seventies, but the intake pipes didn't just carry river water—they connected directly to the old underground spillway that ran three miles down the mountain, emptying behind the state troopers' weigh station on the interstate.
"Get up, Vance," I ordered.
"You're going to kill me," he muttered, shaking his head, his hands slick with his own blood.
"If I wanted to kill you, I would have pulled the trigger when you were standing over Harris," I snapped, grabbing the tablet, tearing the rugged drive from the port, and kicking Harris's primary rifle into the drainage trench where the water would ruin its action. "You're getting up because you're the only one who knows the manual bypass code for the intake hatch. If Dad burns this place, we both die in the oven."
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Vance looked at the dying investigator on the floor, then at the glowing headlights piercing through the metal walls. Self-preservation, the only instinct the Sterling men truly understood, flickered back into his eyes.
"The hatch is behind turbine three," Vance rasped, dragging his wounded leg as he pulled himself up using the rusted iron railing. "The override is mechanical... but it takes two people to turn the balance wheel."
