“These people were unarmed. There was no need to kill them,” Misty whispered as they kept moving, stealthily heading in the direction Sawyer hoped would take them to the facility’s main security office. “Yegor’s men could have locked them up in a room.”
Sawyer didn’t say anything. They’d caught sight of some of the armed men herding whole groups of people into various room and locking them in, so he wasn’t sure why the three they’d just passed had been killed while others hadn’t. Maybe because people like Yegor didn’t need a reason to kill. They did it simply because they could.
It had taken Sawyer and the rest of the joint STAT-MI6 team less than fifteen minutes to get to the plant after they’d gotten the call, but in that time, Yegor’s crew had taken control of the power plant, including the two hundred or so people who normally worked the night shift. As far as Sawyer could tell, no one had been able to get away and no one had been able to get a call out for help. In this age of cell phones and smart watches, that was saying something.
They moved through the large complex quickly but carefully, avoiding both people and security cameras. It was actually harder to get past the people than the cameras, since it seemed like Yegor had brought a small army with him.
“We’re almost at the security offices,” Sawyer whispered over his radio. “The place is crawling with Yegor’s men and they’re all heavily armed.”
He, Rory, and Misty had to duck into a supply closet to avoid a group of armed men—five of them moving fast toward the front of the building. As hard as it was to resist the urge to take them down, Sawyer wasn’t there to engage. It was his job to get Misty to the facility’s security offices without Yegor knowing they were here. Once there, they’d take control of all the facility’s cameras, so Harley and the others could slip in more easily. After that, hopefully, Misty would be able to jump from the security computers to the system that controlled the reactors. If she could take all the reactors offline before Yegor got around to doing whatever the hell it was he had planned, they’d be halfway home. Then it would simply be a matter of taking down Yegor and his crew.
Sawyer hesitated as he reached the open door of the facility’s security room, his nose picking up four distinct scents. He turned to Rory and Misty, holding up four fingers before motioning Rory to the right and Misty to the left. Then he pointed at himself and held up two fingers. Rory and Misty nodded, then stepped forward at the same time he did.
Misty might be a technopath, but she could pull the trigger when she had to. All four of the bad guys in the security room went down without a sound.
“The security room is clear,” Sawyer said into his mic, taking in the twenty monitors covering the far wall, each showing a different part of the facility and flipping through scenes that changed every few seconds. “You’re good to move.”
“Roger that,” Jake replied. “We see lots of movement outside one of the containment bunkers—reactor five, I think. Can you confirm that’s where Yegor and his people are headed?”
“Give me a second to figure out what I’m seeing on all these monitors,” Sawyer said. “There are a lot of them.”
He scanned the images on the screens, noting the labels positioned to the lower left of each one. Unfortunately, they were meaningless words and numbers to him. It wasn’t hard to understand what he was seeing when a large room full of nervous-looking people popped up on one of the monitors, though. There had to be sixty or seventy of them, some bleeding from cuts across their faces and heads, others bruised and battered.
As the monitors continued to flip through other cameras, he saw more captives locked away in other windowless rooms.
“Misty, can you get control of these monitors?” Sawyer asked. He was tired of watching the pics flip through so fast he couldn’t understand what he was seeing. “Maybe figure out where Yegor and his crew are and what they’re up to?”
“I’m already on it,” she said.
Pulling out a chair by one of the desks in front of the monitors, she quickly sat down. But instead of clicking on the keyboard, she reached out and put her hand on the closest mouse. Then her eyes went white. Her face went completely still, too, like she simply wasn’t there anymore. If Sawyer hadn’t heard her heart beating, he’d swear Misty was dead.
It was beyond weird. And more than a little unsettling.
Within seconds, the camera views changed to scenes of armed men walking around and vehicles moving outside. One camera froze on what Sawyer knew had to be the reactor room. There was a number 5 on the lower left of the screen, meaning Jake had been right. The place didn’t look nearly as menacing as Sawyer thought it would. There weren’t any glowing pools of blue water or red strobe lights flashing to warn people of the proximity of dangerous radiation material. Instead, there were multiple levels full of pipes, gantries, railings, a few stainless steel tanks, and a floor full of black tiles with numbers and symbols all over them. The only thing that stood out were the men in tactical gear scrambling around the room, wheeling in fifty-five gallon drums with wires coming out of the tops. He didn’t have a clue what an electromagnet looked like, but something told him that’s what they were.
As bad as the scene on that monitor was, the one on the next was worse. A large cargo truck was parked outside the building, the back doors of the vehicle opened to reveal what had to be hundreds of cases of high explosives, the orange Class 1 hazard labels on the boxes clear as day. As he watched, men jumped in with wires and pry bars in their hands to open the crates, rigging them to blow. He remembered Brielle saying Yegor wanted to take down the walls of the containment structure around the reactor, so the radiation from a meltdown would spread even farther.
He started to fill Jake in on what he was seeing when another monitor lit up, freezing him. Yegor, Seamus, Batu, and about a dozen other men were standing in a room full of computers. Behind them was a wall of panels covered in buttons, dials, and LED displays. Adriana and Kristoff were off to one side, one of Yegor’s goons holding a gun to the blond man’s head. Adriana looked terrified and there were blue sparks already sparkling across her skin.
Shit.
“Jake, reactor five is definitely the target,” Sawyer said. “But we need to move fast. They’re already setting up the electromagnets atop the reactor core, rigging a truckload of explosives outside the containment bunker, and Yegor has Adriana starting to spark in the control room. Misty is inside the computer system, but I’m not sure if that’s going to help now. By the way, both Seamus and Batu are in the control room with Yegor.”
Jake cursed. “Erin, Caleb, Harley, and I will head for the control room. Forrest, Elliott, and Jes will take care of the truck. That leaves the reactor room for you, Rory, and Misty, if you can get her out of that damn computer. You need to make sure those magnets don’t get turned on.”