CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Inside the vault, it sounded like an air raid. A distant rumble, growing louder, then an enormous crash, a shock wave rolling from the tunnel. Jake screamed. Dust flew out the opening, and he followed a moment later, dropping to the vault’s floor like he’d been kicked.
The lights flickered, once, twice. They came back on full, then went out completely.
Emergency lighting snapped on. Battery-powered LEDs hung in corners, next to the cameras. The vault’s interior turned black and white in their inadequate beams.
“Nicola? Corman?” Finn clicked his mic switch. Nothing. The repeater was dead, and their signal couldn’t penetrate the walls and earth.
“I’m okay.” Jake, groggy, being helped up by Asher. “I’m fine.”
Finn pulled himself up to the tunnel entrance and peered down it. Jake’s headlamp was on the pipe floor, still shining. He squinted, trying to see through the pinging cloud of dust.
“Shit.” He dropped to the floor. “The tunnel collapsed.”
“What?”
“Completely filled with dirt and rock.”
“Collapsed?” Jake, still dazed.
“From what?” Asher let Jake go. “It sounds like we’re being fucking bombed.”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we dig it out?”
“I don’t know.” Finn tried to think. “I don’t think so.”
“Then—”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re trapped!”
They stared at one another.
Nicola saw the train wreck as it happened, through her spotting scope. Despite the distance, she had perhaps the best perspective of any observer: from above, at some remove, and with more knowledge than anyone of exactly what was happening.
“Corman?”
“Yeah.” At least his radio connection still worked. “What—?”
“Big train just collapsed the tunnel pipe, right outside the vault.”
“Collapsed—”
It took all of Nicola’s self-control to keep her voice steady. “Disaster zone. Protesters everywhere, police moving in.” She hit a switch again, futilely. “I’ve lost radio contact.”
A moment while Corman took that in.
“Police,” he said.
“You can go out the back. Is the truck loaded?”
“Half. Two-thirds, maybe.”
“They won’t bother you.” She looked through the scope again. “Everyone’s focused on the wreck. There’s a crowd around the locomotive—they must be trying to get the engineers out.”
“What about Finn?”
“Working on that.” Nicola dropped to her chair and pulled the keyboard toward her. “I can see them on the monitor. I just don’t have sound or radio.”
“I don’t—” He stopped.
“Nothing you can do.” She pulled up the Stormwall feeds, checked her access again. “Just get the truck out of there.”
“Time?”
“What?” She looked up at nothing, then figured out what Corman meant. “Yes. Five, ten minutes. After that, they’ll start paying attention again.”
A moment. “I’m going to finish loading.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” Nicola heard it in his voice: Like her, he knew how to focus.
“Five minutes, max.”
“Uh-huh.”
Nicola went back to her screens. First: Were the Stormwall monitors still seeing the dummy feed, all normal in the vault? Yes. Lots of traffic on the monitor circuits, but it was all messaging and VOIP. No one had triggered an alarm.
Rapidly, she called up the vault’s maintenance panel. Stormwall had remote access not just to the cameras but to the fire alarms, HVAC, and electrical as well. Especially in case of a fire, someone needed to be able to shut down circuits that might contribute sparks and power to a blaze.
Nicola hadn’t spent much time studying the maintenance controls, but they weren’t hard to figure out. She opened a dialog box, scrolled through a matrix of options, and moused over a command.
Then she hesitated.
On the screen, she could see Finn and Asher helping Jake off the floor. Finn had already looked into the tunnel, then turned his back to it, which she took as confirmation that it was impassable. Now they stood, looking around, clearly not sure what to do.
Nicola clicked her mouse.
The vault’s emergency lights went off.
David wanted to help extricate the engineers, but more than enough younger, fitter officers were available. Instead, he policed the crowd. Most of the demonstrators had sensibly run the other way, but a few came closer, and he shooed them back.
The lead SD70 was on its side, the second nearly so. The rails had buckled underneath them, derailing both locomotives, and momentum had pushed them over. A pair of policemen wrenched open the cab door, lifting it up like a tank hatch. One disappeared inside.
Flames were rising in the engine area, and the excavator claw, thirty feet in the air, hung over them like imminent death. David called to Sean, and they began pushing people farther away.
“Is the engineer okay?”
“What?”
They could barely hear each other. Groaning and hissing and creaking from the wrecked train, wind whipping snow everywhere, and more and more vehicles arriving, including the first of the yard’s fire engines. Sirens wound down, but more rose in the distance. David could smell diesel and oil.
“Was it sabotage?” Sean shouted.
“Don’t know.” David shook his head. “See how the ground collapsed there? It looks more like, I don’t know, a culvert or something.”
“An explosion could have done that.”
“Maybe.” David didn’t think so, but he wasn’t an expert. Not much call for the bomb squad in railroad security.
“Hard to believe it wasn’t some black-bloc anarchist.”
“Maybe. I hate to admit it, but Boggs may have been right about the protesters.” The two engineers limped away, arms over the shoulders of their rescuers. They must have been worried about the possibility of fire, because normal protocol would have called for backboards. “Must be a hundred million dollars of equipment damage. I hope Boggs kept the insurance up to date.”
“I don’t feel like asking him.”
“No kidding.” David looked at the chaos around him. “What else might go wrong now?”
“Hey, Corman?” Nicola said into her mic.
“I’m not done loading the truck yet.”
“No, that’s fine, I know it’s going to take a few minutes.”
“What?”
“Does Finn know Morse code?”