"No phone set," she told them. "The only hookup runs through the modem."
Annie shrugged. "Good enough. We'll just sign on and text message Roadrunner, who is probably out of his mind by now." She jiggled the mouse impatiently and waited for the screen to wake up.
"Don't you need a password or something?" Sharon asked, and Annie chuckled.
"Oh, child, we have so much to teach you." She sat down in the cracked vinyl chair, frowned at the nonsense appearing on the monitor, then lifted her hands to the keyboard.
"ANNIE, STOP!"Grace shouted suddenly.
Annie jerked her hands up and back and froze. Sharon's eyes were wide, following Grace's terrified gaze around the side of the monitor to a rectangular box of the same color. Only it wasn't exactly a box, just a whitish brick of something that looked like modeling clay, with wires that led to the back of the computer.
"Oh, shit," Sharon whispered.
Annie was still frozen in position with her hands up by her shoulders. "Can I move?"
Grace's voice was shaking. "Just don't touch the keyboard or click the mouse."
Annie pushed well away from the desk and rolled the chair to the side to see what Grace and Sharon were looking at. She didn't trust her legs yet. "Oh, Lord in heaven, that's not Play-Doh, is it?"
Grace actually thought about it, but it didn't make sense. Why would anybody set up a dummy explosive and conceal it?
Sharon was coursing through her memories of the bomb squad demonstrating plastic explosives in her Academy class. "It looks like the real thing."
Annie laid a hand over her heart, as if to hold it in.
"Did you see this clock?" Sharon asked.
"What clock ?" Grace moved to get a better look at the monitor. Red numbers were blinking at the top of the screen, counting down. Three hours, thirty-seven minutes, forty-two seconds, forty-one seconds. . .
"This thing is counting down the time until ten, when the other two trucks are supposed to blow."
Grace was staring at the monitor, speed-reading through the lines of text, taking quick, shallow breaths. "Look at those names halfway down the screen."
Annie and Sharon scrolled down with their eyes and saw the words that had caught Grace's attention.
Schrader-off-line Ambros-target acquired Ritter-target acquired
Grace hugged her stomach and whispered, "Oh, Christ, not that," then broke down and ran toward the trucks. She jumped up on a running board, peeked in the window, then ran to the next truck to do the same thing, then disappeared around the other side.
Annie and Sharon found her on the far side of the trucks, staring at the three empty spaces right next to the big rolling door. She was still clutching her stomach, but now she was rocking back and forth. "Every one of these trucks has a small computer unit on the dash. The ones in here are turned off, but there are three trucks missing. See the tread marks? Three sets, going right out the door. Back at the lake, that soldier said the Four Corners thing was an accident-truck number one. But he was waiting for two others to get where they were supposed to be, and according to that computer, they're on target. That computer is the control. It sends the signal for the other trucks to blow, and unless we find somebody who can disable that bomb, we can't get into it to stop them."
In the next second, they were all running back toward the little door, out onto the grass, and toward the cars.
"If we can't find any keys, a couple of those look old enough to hotwire," Sharon panted.
"We don't have time." Grace veered back toward the patrol car. "There are already keys in this one."
Sharon closed her eyes.
HARLEY HAD THE RV pushed up to forty on a road that any sane man wouldn't have tried to negotiate on foot. Where it wasn't washhoard, the dips in the hardpan were so deep that a few times, the rear wheels almost left the ground. An enormous rooster tail of dust followed them.
Everyone was holding their jaws open to keep their teeth from clattering together, hands grasping whatever was nailed down. Bonar had Charlie next to him on the sofa, one beefy arm wrapped around the dog's wriggling body to keep him from flying into space. No one told Harley to slow down. They had tied the thinnest of threads together in an impossible tapestry of hope, every one of them willing to believe at that moment that everyLassie episode they had ever seen was real, and that Charlie was even more amazing than Lassie had ever been, because without believing that, they had no hope at all, and no idea where to go.
Roadrunner was clutching the back of the driver's seat, angled like a Tinkertoy man to peer out through the windshield, breathing lime over Harley's shoulder. "Okay! You're almost there! Slow down, then take a right," he shouted over the noise of the big rig. The washboard jittered his voice, making him sound like Porky Pig.
Harley slowed long enough at the intersection of dirt and tar to make sure there were no fire trucks coming, then slammed the accelerator to the floor when rubber hit asphalt and found some traction.
"Two miles, maybe less," Roadrunner said, as Halloran, Magozzi, and Bonar all stood, jamming into the space closest to the door, every heart beating fast and hard.
Charlie was weaving between their legs, whining, tap-dancing, tongue dripping doggy sweat. He gave one short howl, which frightened Magozzi. Once you started to believe in any kind of dog magic, you had to consider it all, like those stories about dogs howling when their masters had died, long before anyone else knew it.
"There it is! See it? See it?!" Roadrunner shouted. "That dirt track into the field! Slow down! Slow down!"
Harley slammed on the brakes and cranked the wheel hard to the right, fishtailing the fifty-foot rig as if it were one of his Porsches. It wasn't really a road, just two tracks through the grass of an overgrown field, and this time he had to slow down.
They all saw it at the same time. Some kind of big building at the back of the field with a bunch of cars parked around it. One of them was a patrol car with the driver's door open. Three filthy, haggard people were tugging a bloody body out of the front seat. One of them straightened and turned to look in their direction, and Magozzi felt a vise tighten around his heart. He moved his lips, but no sound cameout:Thanks you.
"LORD ALMIGHTY, I don't believe it," Annie murmured as she watched the RV lumbering toward them.
"What is it?" Sharon asked, gaping at what surely had to be a mirage, or else a Rolling Stones tour bus.Special engagement, one nightonly, right here in this Missaqua County farm field. . .
"The Monkeewrench coach," Grace said, bloody hands hanging at her sides, refusing to believe what she was looking at until the rig stopped and Charlie shot out like a soaring, hairy meteor to race toward her, smiling like he always did. She wiped her hands on her jeans and caught Charlie, all eighty pounds of him, in midair. During the few seconds that she permitted this disgraceful display, she saw the men clambering out of the rig.
Her breath caught when she saw Magozzi, and then, oh my God, Gino, Halloran, and even Bonar, right there with Harley and Roadrunner. She glanced over at Sharon and saw her lips quivering and her eyes threatening to fill, staring at Halloran like he was the only thing in the world to see, and she had to look away fast.
Goddamnit. This was totally bizarre, just like all those stupid fairy tales when the men come riding in to save the women in the nick of time and the women cry and throw their arms around them.
Too bad they didn't have time for any of that.
The women sprinted toward the bus, and the men stopped as a unit, startled. Grace didn't look in any faces-she wouldn't have been able to stand that-as she raced past them up into the rig, and down the long aisle to the office. Apparently Sharon and Annie hadn't stopped, either, because they were right beside her when she grabbed the headset for the sat phone and punched frantically at the buttons.