a very threatening sound made her stop abruptly. ‘Get back!’ she shouted, turning and diving to the ground—
The damaged pump exploded.
Shattered sections of pipe were thrown hundreds of feet into the air as a pillar of fire blasted skywards like an erupting volcano. The entire facility shook, the noise of burning gas a jet-engine roar as it sucked in air to feed the conflagration. The explosion was powerful enough even to jolt the helicopter as it took to the sky and wheeled away.
Eddie’s slowly recovering hearing had been obliterated again – but that was the least of his worries. The new geyser of flame was forty feet away, but he didn’t need to touch it to be burned. The combined heat from it and the ruptured pipe below was horrific. He could feel his exposed skin stinging, his hair scorching.
But worse was to come. The walkway juddered, joints snapping—
The world suddenly rolled around him, a whole section of catwalk giving way like a giant hinge. He fell, hitting the guardrail – which broke. Nothing below but the blazing gas—
He jerked to a painful stop as one of the severed rail’s stanchions speared through his flapping leather jacket, almost wrenching his shoulder from its socket. Six inches to the side, and it would have gone through his chest. Eddie hung helplessly, dangling only feet above the line of flame . . . then with an agonising effort managed to twist and claw the fingers of his right hand into the grated floor.
The catwalk was tilted at a seventy-degree angle. Eddie pulled himself higher, shrugging his left arm out of his ruined jacket and finding a secure hold with that hand before tugging the other sleeve inside out to free himself. Something dropped from one of the pockets.
His father’s business card, still in its evidence bag. It landed in the fire and was instantly incinerated.
He would go the same way if he didn’t move fast. The grillwork cutting into his fingers, he hauled himself up until he could stand on the support, and looked round. An intact section of the walkway was six feet away in one direction; in the other . . .
Kit hung from the catwalk’s edge, his feet closer to the flame jet than Eddie’s had been. He struggled to climb, but couldn’t get a firm enough grip.
His panicked eyes met Eddie’s.
The Englishman hesitated, looking across to the nearby catwalk, and safety . . . then he stepped across to the next stanchion to reach Kit.
Ears ringing, Nina sat up to see a spear of fire at least a hundred feet high roaring into the dark sky. Smaller blazes were already spreading across the pumping station as debris fell all around like burning hailstones.
She heard a shriek, and whipped round to find Macy clutching her thigh where she had been struck by a piece of smouldering shrapnel. ‘Macy, get out of here!’ Nina shouted, waving towards the gate – where she saw the taxi rapidly making a skidding turn as the driver fled.
‘What about Eddie? And Kit?’
‘Just go!’ She stood, flinching as another chunk of pipe smacked down nearby, then started back towards the ladder.
To her horror, she saw that a section of catwalk had partially collapsed – and someone was hanging from it over a searing fire. Kit. A moment of sickening fear – where was Eddie ? – then she made out her husband through the broken walkway’s gridwork floor.
He was moving towards Kit. Was he going to rescue him, or. . .
She scurried up the ladder, recoiling from the heat at the top. A security camera watched her. The pipeline’s operators had to know by now that something was badly wrong, and be trying to stop the flow of gas.
Unless they couldn’t.
The fires were spreading, getting closer to the gas tanks. If one exploded, it would take the others with it, obliterating the entire area.
‘Eddie!’ she cried. But he didn’t hear. ‘Eddie!’
Kit finally got a firm hold on the grating. He dragged himself up, looking for anything that would assist his climb.
A small pipe to one side, connecting two larger conduits running from the pump. He shifted his weight towards it, finding a foothold – and something else.
Stikes’s gun was wedged between the two main pipes, just within reach.
Despite the danger, he was thinking one step beyond immediate self-preservation. He still had to protect his cover. Which meant he still had to deal with Eddie—