Blowout by Byron L. Dorgan Page A

still intact.
    The turbine was still running and the high pitched whine louder at this end made any conversation all but impossible. Ashley was sick to her stomach, her head spinning, and it took her a moment to realize that she might be in shock.
    â€œCan you move?” Cameron shouted. “Can you at least crawl?”
    â€œYes!” Ashley shouted and nodded.
    Whitney scrambled on all fours over to where Cameron was crouched behind a piece of machinery that looked something like an oversized water heater, and started shouting something, but Cameron shoved her back a split second before a bullet pinged off the side of the machinery.
    Cameron reached around the feedwater heater and fired back once, then he dropped his pistol, which skittered out across the floor, and fell backwards, his head bouncing off the concrete floor, a crease in his right shoulder.
    Ashley had once listened to her father describe a firefight he’d been involved with in Bosnia. He’d been a lieutenant colonel at the time, a UN observer outside of Sarajevo, when his group of five men, two of them Canadian, one Australian, and two South Africans, had come under intense fire from what turned out to be a Serbian ethnic cleansing squad. The gun battle had gone on for only four minutes before the Serbs had withdrawn.
    â€œLongest and shortest four minutes of my life,” her father had admitted.
    That was in the late nineties after everything was over, and she’d listened to his story not just as a daughter, but as a budding journalist, and she’d read between the lines that he’d been frightened. It was then that she’d come to respect him as a man and not just love him as an iron man father. He’d become a vulnerable human being to her.
    Capable of the same fear she was feeling now, and admitting it.
    â€œThere was no place to dig in, so we had to stay two steps ahead of them, firing over our shoulders as we bugged out,” he’d explained.
    In her mind it was just like that now. They needed to get the hell out of here.
    Ashley crawled over to where Whitney was dragging Cameron back behind the machinery and lent a hand as two more shots ricocheted off the floor.
    But there was nowhere to go now without exposing themselves to the shooter. And there would be more explosions because they could no longer reach the plastique.
    â€œGo!” Cameron shouted at them. His complexion was pale. He was obviously in a lot of pain but he wasn’t out of it. “This shit’s going to start coming down around your heads.”
    â€œWe’re pulling you out,” Whitney said.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYes!” Ashley shouted, getting her voice. But she honestly didn’t know if she could move ten feet on her own, let alone drag Cameron out even with Dr. Lipton’s help.
    â€œJesus!” Cameron shouted, rearing back.
    Ashley looked over her shoulder as a large figure suddenly loomed out of the smoke and dust. He was wearing a dark brown jacket, some kind of a billed cap on his head, a big pistol in his right hand, and he was limping but moving fast. Her first impression was that the shooter had somehow gotten around behind them and right now they were just seconds way from being blown away.
    Whitney started to scramble toward Cameron’s pistol, which lay about ten feet way completely exposed, when the figure shouted something like, get back, and Ashley suddenly knew who he was and she grabbed Whitney’s leg and held her back.
    â€œIt’s okay!” she shouted.
    â€œAbout time you civilians got off your butts!” Cameron shouted. “How’d you get in?”
    â€œYour visitors left the back gate open,” Osborne said, dropping down beside Cameron. “You okay?”
    â€œI’ll live. We’ve got one shooter somewhere about fifty feet away, high, damned good. And we still have one or more C4 or Semtex charges set on a timer. Should go off any moment