Harlan turned, following her gaze to find a convoy of news vehicles approaching the capitol grounds.
“Get your game face on,” Stacy muttered. “We’re about to be TV stars.” She spotted the EMT returning with a hard hat and hurried to meet him, clearly eager to get to work.
Harlan dragged his attention away from her to watch the approach of the news crews. This whole mess was about to get a thousand times messier.
Right now, he thought, I’d rather be in Iraq.
You can do this, Stacy. It’s just like a cave.
If a cave were made of twisted steel poles and splintered slabs of wood, that was. And if she were really executing a cave rescue, the hard hat on her head would have a carbide lamp attached, enabling her to see more than three or four feet ahead of her. Instead, it just pinched the scrape on her temple that the EMT had patched up for her before she entered the remains of the dais.
“You okay in there?” Harlan McClain’s gravelly drawl sounded as if he were standing a quarter mile away, even though she’d crawled no more than a few yards into the debris field.
“So far,” she called back, wincing as her palm pressed down onto something sharp-a piece of metal, she saw, bent out of shape and unrecognizable.
Of course, those adjectives could describe almost everything that lay in crumpled heaps around her. If she hadn’t seen the dais in all its bunting-draped glory beforehand, she’d never have recognized what it was in the aftermath of the bomb.
Carefully moving aside several twisted pieces of metal frame blocking her path forward, she called out to Lila. “Still hanging in there with me, Governor?”
“You bet, sugar!”
Stacy smiled. “I’m about ten yards from your position, Governor. You just get ready for your close-up.”
“Damn, I left my lipstick in my other purse.”
Atta girl, Stacy thought. That’s the woman who’s going to be the next President of the United States.
Carefully, she carved a twisting path for herself through the debris, keeping a mental map in her head. Forward about four yards, then left another three. That should put her in reach of the large chunk of tangled metal pinning Lila in position. If she could clear enough of that mess to free the governor to move around, she could get her out to safety.
“I need a little more line,” she called to the EMT holding the safety rope biting into her waist. The line slackened and she moved gingerly forward. Finally, she spotted the governor’s wavy blond hair, now ashy from the dust and debris caused by the bomb’s destruction.
“I see you, Governor.”
“I’m a mess, aren’t I?”
Stacy chuckled. “Never.” She edged around a pole that leaned at a precarious angle, barely holding up a large piece of the stage that could crash down on top of them at any moment. She cleared the hazard and took a sharp left as planned.
Then she froze.
Strapped to the large chunk of steel that formed the obstacle between her and the governor, an electronic device blinked ominously, its smooth facade attached by colorful wires to what looked like pumpkin-colored bricks.
“Governor, don’t move. Not one inch.”
“What is it?” Lila asked.
Stacy spotted movement outside the fallen dais, jeans-clad legs moving toward the governor’s position. Harlan McClain’s rugged face came into view as he hunkered down to get a better look at what was happening. His dark eyes met hers. “Is something wrong?”
Stacy licked her lips. By now, she knew, there must be scores of reporters outside. Whatever she said next could create chaos if she let her rising panic show.
Lowering her voice, keeping the tone as calm as possible, she said, “I think there’s a second explosive device. And it looks big. You need to start clearing the area. Now. But try not to start a panic.”
Harlan moved quickly, disappearing from her sight. A few seconds later, she saw a rush of movement outside the steel-and-lumber cocoon as the EMTs and bystanders responded to whatever Harlan had told them.
“You need to get out of here,” Lila urged, her voice low and serious. “Zachary needs you a hell of a lot more than I do.”
“I can’t go, Governor,” Stacy answered, wishing it weren’t true. Lila was right. Zachary needed her, even more than most kids his age. She was his biggest advocate and his most devoted fan. But what she wanted didn’t change the facts on the ground. “The bomb squad is going to need me.”
“Now you’re an explosives expert?” Lila retorted tartly. “Any other hidden talents I should know about?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Stacy answered bleakly. “There’s a support beam between here and there that’s about thirty degrees shy of falling over and bringing this whole pile of junk raining down on us. I was barely able to get around it without jarring it out of place.”
“What are you saying?” It was Harlan McClain’s voice, not Lila’s, that answered her. Stacy looked up and found him staring at her with wide, worried eyes.
“I’m saying that maybe the governor and I are small enough to crawl out of here without bringing this pile of junk down, but I don’t think a man could make it through safely-certainly not wearing a bomb-resistant suit.” She tamped down the panic rising in her throat. “I don’t think there’s going to be any way to disarm this bomb without me.”
Chapter Two
Stacy Giordano was right about one thing, Harlan decided, peering up at the slab of wood and steel propped up precariously by the tilting support beam Stacy had described. There was no way anyone bigger than a medium-size woman would ever get through the narrow gap between the beam and another pile of teetering debris without bringing everything crashing down on top of the whole pile.
She appeared in the space ahead of him, considerably grimier than she’d looked when she entered. As she reached him, she held out her cell phone. There was a photo called up on the phone’s small display window. “This is the device.”
He took care not to touch the teetering support pole as he took the phone from her and looked at the image on the display window. He tried not to react as he saw the orange bricklike cakes of material attached to the bomb. “Semtex,” he said aloud. “Industrial grade-not that it makes much difference.”
“That’s bad, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Bomb squad’s on the way. They’ll have some ideas about what to do.”
Her dark eyes met his. “Get out of here, Mr. McClain. The last thing the rescue team needs is one more person to have to dig out of here.”
“You need to get out of there, too.”
She shook her head. “If there’s any way to defuse the bomb, they’ll need me to do it. And the more we move around in here, the more likely we are to dislodge something that’ll bring everything crashing down around us. Just go back outside and make sure Mr. Bellows is okay.”
“Bart’s fine. One of our guys is here-Parker Mc Kenna-you know him?”
She nodded. “He and Bailey just got engaged.”
Poor fool, Harlan added silently. Marriage was a sucker’s game. “He got Bart and Bailey out of here.” Bailey Lockhart hadn’t wanted to leave her mother, but Parker had convinced her that the governor would be a lot less stressed out if she knew her daughter was safe.
“Good. Now you get out of here, too,” Stacy said.
“Mister, you need to clear out of here and let us do what needs doing,” a man barked from somewhere behind Harlan. He turned and saw a uniformed police officer peering through the maze stretching out a few yards behind him.
“You can’t go past this spot,” Harlan called back to the officer, tersely explaining the problem. “I think anything you try to do to shore it up will just bring it down.”