Power Down by Ben Coes Page A

gunmen threw Dewey to the floor. One of them had a chain and he took it and fastened him to the steel pole at the edge of the room, so that he couldn’t get away or even move. They left the room and closed the door.
    Dewey sat in a daze. After several minutes, he was able to spit the rag from his mouth. He could taste blood.
    Only once in his life had he ever been in a situation worse than this. That was in Panama. He’d been one of the ones in early, sent to kill Manuel Noriega more than a year before Operation Just Cause. They’d gotten trapped in an apartment building down the street from where they knew the dictator was sleeping with one of his mistresses. Some kid in the building tipped off Noriega’s men and what was supposed to be a surgical infiltration turned into a shitstorm. Noriega’s goons surrounded the apartment building and slowly worked their way concentrically inward, moving in and slowly strangling off Dewey and the four other Deltas on his team. They were saved by the Navy and a pair of F/A-18 Hornets, which came in at four hundred feet and leveled the buildings on either side of the one they were in with AGM-65s. Two Deltas survived, including Dewey.
    The Navy wasn’t going to save his ass this time.
    Dewey closed his eyes and tried to think. Is this what Mackie had tried to tell him? Whatever Esco had been planning had taken years. And for some reason, a living and functioning Dewey Andreas mattered to their plan.
    The pumping station.
The seabed. The key to Capitana. They needed Dewey to access the main pumping station. This was the most vulnerable part of Capitana, the link to the oil reservoir.
    There were two ways to access the pumping station. One was to usea code generated in Dallas upon orders from the CEO of the company. The other was by having Dewey’s eyes read by the iris scanner at its entrance at the seafloor.
    Something told him they wouldn’t be calling Dallas for the code.
    Dewey had spent months learning how to be a prisoner, how to survive, how to escape. When you’re a prisoner, what’s most important is patience and a willingness to seize opportunities when they present themselves. The amount of risk a prisoner should take in trying to fight or escape is directly proportional to the degree of likelihood you’ll be killed once you’ve served your purpose to your captors. If you’re being held for political reasons and will likely be released someday, it’s best to be patient and wait. If there’s no doubt you’ll die, then you find a way to act at the first opportunity. If opportunities don’t arise, create them.
    He reached up and wiped the blood from his eyes. He wasn’t dead yet.
I don’t want to die—not here, not now.
He thought of his wife and son, both long dead. He had to live. He had to make his son, wherever he was, proud of him.
    He leaned back and waited for the gunmen—or rather, the terrorists—to return.
    After an hour, three of them came to retrieve him. Two trained their Kalashnikovs on him as the third unchained him from the pole.
    They led him out of the infirmary and across the deck. Bodies were strewn everywhere. As they walked past the hotel, he could hear voices. There were still men alive. One of the gunmen opened the hotel door. They let Dewey inside. Hundreds of his men sat in rows on the floor, hands behind their backs. In front of them, half a dozen gunmen stood with rifles and machine guns at the ready.
    From the back, a voice called out.
    “Chief,” a man yelled. “Don’t believe a fucking thing they say!”
    “They’re going to kill us!” another voice yelled out.
    From the side of the room, Esco approached. He looked at Dewey. His left eye had a bandage on it now. Dewey’s swing had done serious damage.
    “If you want these men to live, we need your help,” Esco said.
    “Fuck yourself,” Dewey said.
    Esco nodded at one of the gunmen. He pointed his Uzi at one of the workers seated in the front row. He pulled the trigger