The Lightning Stones

6

Mercer pulled his cell from his back pocket and slammed down on the accelerator once again. He tossed the phone to Jordan. “Call 911.”

“About the fire?” Jordan asked, her fingers poised.

He knew the consequences would be dire if he was wrong, but he couldn’t take the chance. “No. Tell them they need to lock down Hardt College. There are armed men on campus.”

With so many school shooting tragedies in recent years, it was a threat law enforcement would not take lightly.

She hadn’t yet spoken to a police operator when Mercer drove through the campus gates. There were few students out, thankfully most were in class, but a few people were walking the paths between the stately buildings. The structures were an odd assortment of clapboard and brick, Federal style and classical, built not so much to blend with each other but to showcase architectural taste at the time they were erected. One dorm had the glaze of blued glass and orange-dyed anodized aluminum popular in the late 1960s, while another was simple unadorned brick that had likely gone up during the austere war years.

Mercer saw a sign for the Lauder Science Center with an arrow pointing off around the imposing plantation-style mansion that had once been the entirety of the college. The roads were plowed enough so that Mercer couldn’t tell if the green Honda was already here, but he felt certain it was. The road curved past some neglected gardens and around several more academic and administrative buildings, the largest of which was labeled Nichols Gymnasium — Home of the Brown Boars.

Mercer couldn’t imagine a more uninspired name for a sports team. To add insult to injury the mascot on the sign looked more like a South American tapir than a European boar.

They rounded a hill and continued following the signs for the science building. It had to be one of the school’s newest construction projects. It stood four stories and was sheathed in dark glass with modernist touches including a grand atrium held up with struts like a giant Erector set. Inside they could see a large mobile in the shape of the solar system. Rather than traditional internal stairs, enclosed glass ramps looped along the outside of the building like the handles of an Etruscan vase. Jordan and Mercer watched students inside the ramps bustling along, and it reminded them both of gerbils in those elaborate plastic Habitrail cages.

Without warning, the students near the entry started running in panic. An instant later, Mercer saw beyond the large windows that the green Honda was racing into the building. It slipped right through the main doors and was careening across the tiled atrium, headed for the main ramp up to the second floor. The tube was more than large enough to accommodate it, but students either had to flatten themselves to the curved glass walls or try to race ahead of the car.

Mercer watched it speed up the ramp. Two students, a male and female, were struck and hurled against one of the tube’s large curved windows. The coed left a smear of blood on the glass as she slid to the floor. Two more alert students who had pressed themselves flat to avoid the hurtling car quickly crossed the tunnel to help.

Mercer didn’t yet know the driver’s intention. But now that the other man knew he was being pursued, he would have no choice but to change his original plans. If Mercer had to guess, and he’d been thinking about little else during his long drive, the gunmen were here to steal anything pertaining to what they had already taken back in the mine. If that failed, their next priority would be to destroy any remaining evidence. The car might have been used to haul away material like notebooks or geological samples, but the eight or ten gallons of gasoline in the fuel tank could also ensure a fire of epic proportions.

There was a wide plaza in front of the science building. Some students were still running out the main doors, while others stood and stared after where the little Honda had vanished. They all reacted when Mercer ground his fist into the SUV’s horn and steered the truck up the four steps onto the plaza. He now saw marks in the snow where the Honda had sped up a handicapped access ramp that was too narrow for the big GMC. Students scattered and Jordan was beginning to scream. Mercer ignored it all and guided the truck toward the entrance doors, slowing enough to give stragglers time to get clear before he rammed the truck into the opening. Though there were double doors, the entry was too narrow for the SUV. Aluminum jambs buckled and glass shattered when Mercer rammed the vehicle through.

More people reacted to the pandemonium. One hysterical woman stood with her hands clutched to her mouth and shrieked maniacally. Others ran for a set of internal stairs. The last of the students who’d been in the ramp made it to the atrium and scattered.

“What are you doing?” Jordan yelled.

“Not sure,” Mercer told her.

The ramp was too narrow for the SUV, but following the Honda wasn’t Mercer’s intention. The sides of the truck were scraped down to raw paint, and both mirrors had been torn off by the entry doors. There was little additional damage Mercer could do to the SUV by slamming its nose into the tunnel entrance. The four-by-four actually made it deep enough that the front fender wedged against where the ramp began to curve out and up. There was no way the Honda could make it past them. Nor could he open either his or Jordan’s door. He fumbled for a button to hydraulically open the rear gate.

“Go,” he told Jordan. “I’m right behind you.”

She needed no further prompting and quickly wriggled between the two front seats and legged over the back bench seat. In the rearview mirror Mercer saw her jeans stretched tight across her backside before his attention was grabbed by a new rush of frightened students running down the ramp, casting panicked glances behind them.

They reached the stuck SUV but paused at the obstruction for only a moment. Like lemmings, the students climbed over the hood and on top of the roof, forcing down the rear tailgate before Jordon could escape the trapped vehicle.

“Mercer,” she cried from the cargo area.

The last student leapt onto the truck’s hood, looking goggle-eyed at Mercer before scrambling up the windshield and onto the roof. Seconds later he slid down the back of the SUV and vanished across the science building’s atrium.

Mercer was just reaching for the tailgate button again when the Honda came roaring down the ramp. There was a passenger sitting next to the driver this time. It was the team leader. He was in his forties with weathered lines around his eyes and a strong jaw. Any woman would have considered him handsome. His hair was just a little longer than a military buzz cut, and under a dark coat and thick sweater his chest and shoulders appeared broad.

That was all he saw of the gunman. Mercer might have thought he had trapped the killers in the building by blocking their escape, but the Honda’s young driver was nothing if not adaptable. He cranked the wheel to the left, and the nimble car smashed through a laminated wood handrail and then the ramp’s curved glass wall. The panes exploded in an eruption of shards that dusted the ground below. The car chased after the glittering avalanche. It had been doing less than twenty miles per hour and yet flew a remarkable distance before crashing to the ground in a dustup of white powder that cushioned the eight-foot drop. The driver kept the momentum going, the front wheels spinning wildly as the vehicle grabbed and fought to find traction.

Mercer swore. He hadn’t anticipated that. While the Honda reached a shoveled pathway and its tires found purchase, he dropped the GMC into reverse and pulled the SUV free of the ramp with the piercing whine of nails on a chalkboard.

He threw the Yukon into a tight K-turn, knocking over an abandoned reception desk and a bunch of ferns in a concrete planter.

“Hold on!” His warning came too late to prevent Jordan Weismann from being tossed around like the marble in a can of spray paint.

He jammed the gas pedal again and laid on the horn. By now all the students had wisely sought cover away from the chaos, and he had a straight shot for the main doors. Mercer misjudged slightly, and the big truck pinballed through the tight opening, breaking more glass and leaving behind curls of chrome trim on the floor.

The shooters were pulling away, but not too quickly. Their crazy stunt of launching the car off the ramp must have damaged the Honda somehow. It was going nowhere near its top speed. Mercer and Jordan had a chance. He took off after the gunmen, his eyes slitted against the glare of a newly shining sun. The Honda was headed for a back gate out of the fenced campus, and Mercer calculated angles and speeds and felt he had a good shot at catching them before they reached it. Jordan wedged herself back into her seat next to him, her expression as determined as his. It took just a few moments for the rampaging V8 to close the gap. Mercer felt the comforting weight of the P-38 still nestled in his jacket.

He hadn’t taken any professional driving courses, but he’d talked to enough law enforcement to know how to spin out a car while in pursuit. The maneuver had more to do with momentum than the relative weights of the cars, but here, with a GMC SUV versus the little Japanese import, the advantage was all Mercer’s.

Until the Fit’s sunroof slid open and the team leader emerged, cradling a wicked-looking black machine pistol with a thick silencer. Just the day before Mercer had faced a full-on assault of four such weapons while driving a massive bucket loader. The shooters couldn’t miss, then. Here, the ground was even rougher, there was only one gun, and despite its size, the Yukon was tiny compared to the Caterpillar 990 loader.

Mercer was confident that in the most vulnerable seconds before they rammed the car, the gunman’s aim would be thwarted by his weapon’s inherent inaccuracy, his bouncing gun platform, and the fact his target was hopping and jouncing as well. Mercer was just about to commit to his attack when he studied the small weapon’s barrel and not the hurtling car and realized the 9mm aperture was rock steady. The shooter was so well trained and so proficient in this, the most difficult of shooting situations, that he had a dead bead on his pursuers.

“Down!” Mercer shouted, reaching across the center console to haul Jordon below the dash while he cranked the wheel sharply left, hurling the Yukon through a split-rail fence.

Half of a thirty-round magazine emptied into the SUV in as much time as it took Mercer to yell his warning, but his driving reflexes had been quicker than both his mouth and the gunman’s finger, because the bullets stitched a trail across the top of the SUV’s windshield and peppered a line down its flank. None of them hit where the shooter had been aiming — a tight slashing burst across the windscreen that would have decapitated driver and passenger alike.

While the Honda wove through a small forest of pines, its taillights growing more distant, Mercer fought to regain control as the Yukon fishtailed wildly in the middle of what appeared to be an open meadow. Having never been to the school before, he didn’t understand the significance of the split-rail fence they had blasted through and didn’t know something was seriously wrong until he heard the first moaning cracks of ice giving way under the truck’s nearly three tons of steel. The open field was a pond surrounded by a fence so students didn’t wander too close. Mercer chanced a look into the rearview mirror and saw that the ice in their wake was bobbing in great broken slabs that had dark water lapping at the back wheels.

Even farther behind he saw a bursting eruption of red and orange flame leap out of one of the science center’s second-story windows, followed immediately by a rolling cloud of black smoke that climbed the side of the building toward its flat roof. Moments later came the jarring sounds of the detonation, the dull boom of the initial ignition, and the follow-up blast of overpressure powdering glass and concussing the cold winter air.

For now, all Mercer could do was curse again and concentrate on steering them out of this mess.

The far side of the pond, if the fence line was to be trusted, was a solid three hundred yards away. Knowing that ice near the shore is thicker than ice toward the center of a body of water, Mercer was sure that at the rate they were traveling, they were going to crash through. Their only chance was the frozen-over stream that fed the pond. The tiny lake’s discharge was too well hidden by the snow, but he could see the silver husks of rushes sticking up where the feeder entered the pond. As gently as possible he turned the wheel, dropping his speed ever so slightly. As he’d experienced while working in the Canadian Arctic for DeBeers, too much speed on an ice road could build a sine wave of water under the truck and split the ice even before the front wheels hit it. He couldn’t speed up, and with the ice breaking in their wake, he couldn’t slow down either. It was a delicate balance.

Jordan finally realized their predicament and went ashen. “Mercer, we’re on a pond.”

“I know,” he said tightly, easing off on the turn when the Yukon’s nose was pointed between the two stands of water plants. He had been so easy on the wheel that the back end didn’t so much as twitch on the grease-slick surface. The stream was about eight feet wide and would be shallow enough for the truck to remain in the clear should they crash through its crust of ice.

And as he neared the stream, the ice beneath the truck grew thicker. It still cracked under the SUV’s crushing weight but didn’t shatter. Snow lay deep around the edges of the pond, windblown into drifts of inestimable height. The front of the SUV plowed into one such drift just as they were exiting the pond and entering the feeder stream. Again, Mercer’s lack of knowledge about the campus was his downfall. The pond was an artificial construct, the stream a man-made channel that fell into the usually bucolic water body from a three-foot-high brick-and-mortar waterfall that currently lay hidden under a mantle of powdery snow.

The wall was just high enough to catch the underside of the front bumper, and they were traveling hard enough to accordion the Yukon midway down its hood. Airbags deployed with explosive efficiency. Mercer just managed to keep from having his nose broken by one, while a still unbuckled and discombobulated Jordon bounced into hers with a shoulder and tumbled to the passenger-side footwell. The collision was enough to break the ice under the truck, and frigid water quickly began seeping in around the doors and rear gate, which had popped open once again.

Mercer’s first concern was his passenger. “Jordan, are you okay?”

“Jesus, this water’s cold.” She quickly hauled herself up onto her seat. “And your driving sucks.”

He almost smiled. That she could complain was a sign that she indeed was all right. “You wanted to come with me. Remember?”

Her dark eyes hardened. “You could have warned me you were nuts.”

“You should have figured that out the moment you met me.” Mercer lowered his window and flattened the already deflated airbag against the steering wheel. He pushed his body out of the truck and onto the door, making sure Abe’s pistol was still tucked into his jacket. The front tires were fully submerged and had grounded on the bottom. The SUV’s lighter back end still floated amid the broken chunks of ice. He swung up and out onto the hood.

The Honda continued to race for the back gate, probably unaware that the chase had ended, the sound of its trick exhaust diminishing with every passing second.

“Give me my phone,” he said to Jordan as she climbed over the center console and made ready to join Mercer on the Yukon’s wrinkled hood.

“Remember when I said the water was cold?” she asked. “Yeah, well, I had my hand in it as I tried to rescue your phone from a watery grave.”

“What about yours?”

“A melted puddle by now. I left it charging in Abe’s kitchen.”

It really didn’t matter now. Mercer could make out the Doppler whine of approaching sirens. The authorities knew something had happened at Hardt College and were racing to investigate. Even if he somehow got a cop’s attention and reported the fleeing Honda, the local authorities didn’t have the manpower to secure the campus and go after the gunmen. Besides which, in the next ten or so minutes the shooters would steal another car and be making their way anonymously out of Killenburg, Ohio.

Mercer helped Jordan climb onto the hood. The metal was warm under their bodies, and he could hear the engine hissing and bubbling as it bled heat into the stream still trickling under all the ice and snow. He looked over at the Lauder Science Center expecting to see the wing where Abe Jacobs must have kept his office fully engulfed in flame.

Instead he saw wisps of white smoke coiling out of some shattered windows and icicles forming on the outside of the sills from the sprinkler system’s discharge freezing against the cold metal framework.

There was hope of salvaging something from this mess after all. He yanked Jordan off the truck. “Come on. We’re not done yet.”