to toe. On the starboard side, he saw Clark’s head appear above the container’s rim.
Balanced on the front rim, Jack peered into each container, gun tracking for movement. Another pipe bomb arced through the air and clattered into a tank. Then another.
He leaped to the next tank, teetered, then regained his balance and leaped again. His foot slipped, and he slammed chest-first into the fourth container’s rim. On the starboard side, Clark was up on the rim and coming to meet him.
“Fuses are going, John,” Jack called.
He pushed himself up, hooked his leg on the rim, got to his knees.
“You see him?” Clark called, taking a step.
A torso popped up in one of the containers, fired a shot at Clark, then ducked out of sight again.
“Fuck it,” Jack muttered, and started running, arms extended like a tightrope walker’s. He was crossing the sixth container when Purnoma Salim appeared over the rim of the eighth tank and tumbled into the next. Then he was up again, turning toward Clark, who was in mid-leap between two rims. Purnoma raised his gun. Still running, Jack brought his own gun around, left arm still extended for balance, and started firing, trying to keep the sites on center mass. Purnoma went down. Jack stopped firing. Two containers behind him, there came a crump. The container stack trembled. Crump.
“John, get off!” Jack yelled, and kept running.
Crump.
The rim shifted beneath Jack’s feet, and he stumbled sideways into the container. He saw the white curve of a propane tank rushing up to meet him. He turned his body sideways and took the impact on his arm and shoulder, then slid down the curve and found himself pinned against the container wall.
Somewhere in the terminal, an alarm Klaxon sounded.
“Jack?” Clark yelled.
“I’m okay!”
He heard a hissing sound. Looked around. Directly below him, from beneath the bottom edge of the tank, he saw a yellow glow. Aw, shit.
“John, move, go!”
One tank over, another crump.
Jack rolled onto his back and sat up, then rolled again so he was straddling the tank. He stood up, looked around. Nowhere to go. Fifty-foot fall on all sides, the nearest ladder another twenty feet away. Pilothouse. Jack sprinted down the tank, then leaped. He grabbed the overhang, swung his leg up, hooked his ankle, then chinned himself and rolled onto the pilothouse roof.
Crump.
Jack rolled over, looked down. From inside the tank came the sounds of sloshing. The odor struck him. His eyes started watering.
“John!” he shouted.
“Yeah, port side!”
“You smell that?”
“Yeah. Move your ass.”
Jack got up, sprinted across the roof, found the superstructure ladder, then started down. Clark was waiting at the bottom. Jack asked, “What the hell is that?”
“Chlorine gas, Jack.”
Forty minutes later, wet and exhausted, they reached their car and headed back down Terminal Avenue. In the rearview mirror they could see clusters of flashing red and blue lights from one end of the terminal to the other. Knowing their presence would create more problems than it would solve, they’d gone over Losan’s side, stroked to shore a few hundred yards away, then picked their way back through the terminal, dodging fire trucks and cop cars until they reached the tank farm.
Clark got back on the 664 and headed northeast into Newport News, where they found an all-night diner. Jack dialed The Campus. Hendley answered. “This shit in Newport News ... That you?”
“It’s already on the news?”
“Every channel. What happened?”
Jack recounted the events, then asked, “How bad is it?”
“Could be worse. So far, only thirty or so terminal workers at the hospital. No deaths. What were they, what kind of tanks?”
“Propane, I think, about fifty of them. They only got off half a dozen pipe bombs, but we’re betting they had a lot more in their backpacks.”
“They’re both dead?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to head to the airport. We’ve got you booked on a three-thirty back here.”
“What’s going on?”
“We got word from Chavez and Caruso: They got Hadi, and he’s talking.”
84
HENDLEY AND GRANGER were waiting with a Suburban when they touched down at Dulles. “Where’re we heading?” Clark asked.
“Andrews. Gulfstream waiting,” Hendley replied. “We’ve got gear and clothes already aboard. First things first: the ship—Losan. You were right, Jack. The Salims had two dozen pipe bombs. On the manifest there were forty-six propane tanks listed, all defective and empty, and heading back from Senegal to the manufacturer, Tarquay Industries out of Smithfield.”
“Well, we know they weren’t empty,” Clark said.
“Right. They won’t be sure for a couple days, but the Hazmat teams out there are guessing there was