Free Blowout by Byron L. Dorgan

the Initiative. Like most SEALs he was slightly built, a little under six feet, with short-cropped hair and an even, sometimes bland demeanor. But anyone who’d ever met him immediately saw something in his eyes, the way he carried himself, the quietness of his voice, that was somehow impressive, even comforting in a way. When Jim Cameron walked into a room, heads turned and just about everybody breathed a sigh of relief; he’s here, everything will be okay now.
    But everyone back in the rec center was dead, and the vision of their shot-to-hell bodies would never leave him. He’d been crawling around beneath the double-wide, chipping away ice from a frozen toilet discharge pipe when the shooting had begun, two of the shots from what he figured were light caliber automatic weapons hitting him from an oblique angle. The two shooters had been somewhere outside the rec room, but close. And the hell of it was that he’d left his weapon in the office at the rear of the trailer. His people were having a party, not preparing for an invasion.
    By the time he had scrambled out from under the double-wide the gunmen had already left, and he’d gone inside knowing exactly what he’d find, and knowing exactly why the shooters were here.
    He’d retrieved his Glock 33 that fired hollow point .357 SIG ammunition, hesitated for just a second back in the rec room—they had become his friends—before he’d checked to make sure one of the killers hadn’t stayed behind and then had raced on foot over to the power station as he tried to call out on his cell phone.
    He stopped and looked at it now. The battery was up but there were no signal bars. They had their own cell phone tower atop the power plant’s one-hundred-and-fifty-foot chimney, and from where he stood the thing seemed intact to him.
    Which made no sense.
    He’d wanted to reach the Air Force’s Special Forces Rapid Response team from Ellsworth down in Rapid City, which was on call 24/7, or at the very least Whitney to warn her to stay away. But he was getting nothing.
    Easing the heavy arctic door open Cameron stepped into the narrow confines of the cold room designed to keep the below-zero winter winds from following someone inside the control room, and hesitated again to listen. In the far distance, below, he could hear the low-pitched hum of the turbine spinning on maintenance power to keep the shaft from sagging, but nothing else. No shooting, no one crying for help. The normalcy was ominous, and he got the terrible feeling that he was too late, that just like in the rec room everyone here was already dead.
    He opened the inner door and rolled inside, keeping low and moving fast to the left, his pistol in both hands out front and low, and he stopped before he got five feet. Tim Snow was crumpled in a bloody heap at the side of his desk, the telephone still in his hand, and Mike Ridder was slumped on his knees, his head on the floor as if he were praying like a Muslim, his blood splattered all over the plate-glass window that looked down on the turbine floor.
    This was a military-style operation. Cut the communications and then eliminate the personnel. Problem was that Pete Magliano was here with General Forester’s daughter who had stormed the gates.
    Still keeping low, Cameron made his way around the control console to where the window ended, flattened himself against the wall, and took a quick look down at the floor.
    Pete was nowhere to be seen, but a slightly built man in white coveralls scurried from around the air preheater and disappeared beneath the economizer mechanism at the base of the furnace, as another much larger man, also dressed in white, pointing a short carbine weapon at something or someone above him, made a “come here” gesture.
    A slightly built woman in jeans and a dark blue windbreaker crawled out of a narrow space beneath the furnace about ten feet off the floor, and made her way slowly down