Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover (6 page)

T
he drive took thirty minutes, west and back toward Pittsburgh, roughly following the Monongahela. I had the wipers on, then off, then on again—the clouds just wouldn’t make up their mind.

I wasn’t saying much, distracted by Zeke’s news. I don’t mind the usual riffraff populating my line of work, but another team of professionals was different. Intimidating white-collar executives is one thing; shooting it out with high-powered mercenaries quite another.

Dave leaned his seat back.

“I tried to find our mother,” he said.

“Uh.” I looked over at him.

The change of topic was abrupt. Or maybe hearing it like that—
our
mother—threw me.

Of course I’d thought about doing the same when I was young. The middle years were rough. I got a new family every year or two—some of it my fault, but mostly it was the adults’ bad luck and money problems. I imagined the same thing I figure all foster kids do, the ones who were put up as infants:
They’re European royalty. Or supersecret spies. Or Bill Gates!—he wants me to grow up normal before he gives me a billion dollars.

My last folks were okay, though. They stuck with me all through high school. After that I was in the world, and my origins were ancient history. The desire to go back faded away, not worth it.

“That’s what got me started, right?” Dave looked out his window. “Never imagined I’d find a brother. I just wanted to know who my mother and father were.”

“Yeah.”

“Or really just mother. My family, as I got older they said things once or twice—not meaning to, just little things that slipped out. But you know how it is. You pay attention.”

Yes, you
do
pay attention. Growing up like Dave or me, you’re never on sure ground. Every clue, every hint matters, trying to figure it out.

If you don’t know where you came from, it’s so much harder to know where you’re going.

“They didn’t like our father. Or had heard bad things about him. I don’t know what, exactly, but I just picked up the idea he was worthless.”

“He gave us away,” I said.

Surprising myself. Some buried emotion had surfaced there, just for a moment.

“That’s right.” Dave was silent. “Anyway, I thought maybe I could find Mother. The adoption registries, sometimes they’ll let you send a letter or something. But it didn’t work.”

A small puzzle. “This was all in New Hampshire?”

“Only a year. My adoption family moved here when I was two. The old man was following steel work, can you believe it? I don’t know what he was thinking, like they were knocking down all the mills just so they could put up new ones.”

“I thought everybody went bankrupt in the eighties.”

“A few hung on.” Dave yawned. “Not forever, though. In fact, that’s what we’re doing today.”

“What?”

“Helping take down the last blast furnace in Pittsburgh.” He laughed. “In
America,
for all I know. Some shit, huh?”

The mill was a small one. That’s what Dave said, but it was hard to believe, looking at the huge complex of towers and ironwork and massive buildings. A bright sign at the entrance had a swoosh logo and “FerroCorp” in a modern, purple font, but everything else looked like 1935. Rusty train tracks switched in amid heaps of clinker and slag. A vast parking lot, mostly deserted, just a handful of vehicles up by the main gate.

The gloomy drizzle didn’t help.

I parked next to a Ford 350 with a bed hitch and an empty gun rack in the cab window. Dave was on his phone—“Yeah, sorry, got held up this morning, where are you?” He clicked off and pointed at the largest tower. “Over there. We have to walk in.”

He carried the bucket of tools. A guard in a dark blue jacket nodded us past the gate.

“Sad day,” he said.

“Guess so,” Dave said. “You work here long?”

“Ten years.” He looked beyond retirement age. “In the cast house mostly. That furnace was hot for eighty years, until just a month ago.”

“Bet it’s
still
hot.”

The man grimaced. “Damn sure.”

Inside, the natural world disappeared. No trees, no hills visible, no birds, just cracked paving in a landscape of rust and broken metal.

Like every postapocalyptic video game brought to life.

We found a half-dozen men in flannel and Carhartt standing at the base of the cylindrical furnace. It was a broad chimney, fifty feet high, made of oversized, black-glazed refractory brick. A low, dark building grew from one side; a conveyor slanted up the other, and various pipework and scaffolding seemed to run everywhere.

At five points around the base, crude platforms had been set up: a pallet on a pair of sawhorses, two fifty-five-gallon drums placed together, a stack of wooden crates. On one a man stood precariously, swinging a sledgehammer to drive a long pipe into the heart of the furnace.

“Yo, Dave.”

“Hey, man.”

The guy with the sledge hammered the pipe end flush with the brick. Holes had been drilled above each platform, and the others had their pipe already installed. He admired his work, then hopped down, hammer on one shoulder like John Henry. His Tractor Supply boots slipped a bit on the damp ground.

“That’s it. Ready to go.” He had two missing teeth in front but long mutton chops to make up for it.

“All right then.”

“Where’s the dynamite?”

Dynamite?

So here’s how their mad plan was going to work. The furnace was full of slag and waste, topped off from decades of use. Even a month after the last steel had been poured, the huge thermal mass of the tower kept the heat trapped—as much as five hundred degrees at the core. If they knocked the tower down in a conventional way, the white hot remnants would scatter everywhere, damaging equipment and injuring workers.

Explosive demolition, done professionally, could handle it: set charges, establish a perimeter, get the right paperwork and inspections done, on and on. But that would cost more money than FerroCorp wanted to spend.

Instead, Dave’s friends had offered a simple alternative. They put a stick of dynamite in each pipe, sticking halfway out. Five guys were going to take position, standing on the platforms with sledgehammers ready. On the count of three, they’d slam the dynamite into the core, drop the hammers and run like hell. A few moments later heat would detonate the charges, the base would blow out and the furnace would come down.

“That’s insane.” I couldn’t believe they were serious. “What if somebody trips or something? What if the dynamite goes off two seconds early?”

“Naw, we done it before.” The evident leader had several inches and maybe fifty pounds on me. “OSHA ain’t in favor, but hell, this is how the flatheads been doing it for a hundred years.”

“Blowing up furnaces?”

“Clearing the scrag inside.”

I didn’t think anyone even used actual dynamite anymore. Water-gel explosives like Tovex are easier, less toxic and so much safer that only a moron would do so.

The U.S. military gave me as thorough an education in small explosives as you can get anywhere, and we never
once
detonated a stick of dynamite.

This argument met with complete indifference. “You got a hammer?” the chief asked Dave.

“Two.”

“Two? Don’t sound like he’s interested.” Looking at me. “But that’s all right, we’re good.”

Dave shrugged, an odd expression on his face. Embarrassment? I felt an unfamiliar emotion ripple through me.

It took a moment: I was letting him down.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“No problem. Brendt, we ready?”

They were like a bunch of third-graders.

“Don’t you fuck up and hit it
early
.”

“Yo, Brendt, on three or five?”

“Three. Can you count that high?”

“Who’s got the video?”

I backed away, not taking my time. Out in the parking lot seemed like a minimum safe distance. A sixth guy, who I hadn’t noticed before, stood behind a slag car on one of the railroad sidings, holding a camera at ready, and he called as I passed.

“You can stand here. Best view.”

I looked over. “That’s not even two hundred yards. Wouldn’t you be happier farther away?”

“Better shot from here. We’re gonna put it on YouTube.”

The slag car had a massive, bell-shaped iron tureen suspended between two pivots. It probably weighed several tons. Maybe the videographer was more cautious than I thought.

Still.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but we should call 911 right now. Give them a head start.”

“Don’t worry about it. Brendt knows what he’s doing.”

“I don’t see any company bosses standing around.”

“It’s Saturday.”

Oh, yeah, I’d lost track. No doubt a weekend was all the better for slipshod, regulation-violating, totally illegal demolition jobs.

“I’m going to watch from over there.”

“Okay.” He shrugged and raised the camera to his eye, shielding the lens from a gust of light rain. “Won’t be more’n another few seconds though.”

Sure enough, a loud shout came from the base of the furnace.

“Go!”

I looked over in time to see the hammers all swing simultaneously. They struck the furnace walls in silence—the sharp cracks arrived a second later, while the five men were leaping and stumbling and sprinting away.

Fuck. I jumped to land behind the slag car, covering my head with both arms and crouching in the shelter of the iron vat.

BO-O-O-O-M-M-MMM!

The explosion was a deep, roaring blast. I glanced out, peering past the railcar’s frame, to see the base of the tower balloon outward in a cloud of dust and smoke.

The chimney swayed and collapsed in on itself. The noise deafened, a long thundering crash of masonry and metal. Our view was cut off as a debris cloud engulfed the entire area. Before everything disappeared into the maelstrom I saw the very top of the furnace fall and the conveyor’s heavy scaffold start to collapse.

I hunched down again, trying to press my ears shut with my fingers while keeping my forearms crossed over my face. Video Guy laughed and shouted, barely audible over the roar. Standing unprotected, his video might end up like one of those avalanche films, a sudden rushing tumble then black.

It was over in a minute, maybe more. The noise eased and the smoke began to clear. I stood slowly, blinking at the sharp dust in my eyes.

“Whoo-
hoooo
!” The other lunatics emerged from different places around the furnace. Or where the furnace used to be, rather. Now it was a huge smoking pile of rubble.

Dave came over. “How about
that,
little brother!” Everyone seemed overadrenalized, slapping each other on the arms, pointing, laughing. Video Guy had his camera on review, watching the screen. They all looked grimier than five minutes ago, dust in their hair and black dirt on their clothes. In the mist the smudges turned to muddy smears.

“Everyone lived,” I said, surprised.

“Well, yeah.”

“Now what happens?”

“Now?”

“If the idea was to clear the site, you actually haven’t made much progress.”

Brendt walked up. “Now the slag can cool, that’s all,” he said. “Stopped up inside, it would of taken months. This way they start hauling it away next week.”

Cleaning up and collecting tools shouldn’t have taken long, but somehow they stretched it out an hour. Three sledgehammers were lost, abandoned and buried under the falling masonry. Dave still had his bucket, though. When we finally finished up, he dropped his gloves in.

“Here, take these,” said Brendt. He held out two more sticks of dynamite. They looked just like the cartoons—not much shorter than a paper-towel tube, wrapped in red paper. Splotches on the paper suggested that nitroglycerine had begun to destabilize and leak out. I stepped back.

“You don’t need them?”

“Naw. You can use them to take out that stump you was talking about.”

“Thanks.” Dave added them to the bucket.

“When we gonna get paid?” Video Guy asked.

“Monday.” Brendt brushed grit from his beard. “I’ll collect from the office.”

“Hope they don’t decide to fuck around—sixty-day terms, that kinda bullshit.” All of them had probably done 1099 work and knew how slow big companies could be.

“Nuh-uh.” He flipped his sledgehammer in his left hand, like it was a juggling club. “They’ll see right here what we can do. I don’t think they’ll want us
angry
with them.”

He threw the hammer twice more, then tried to catch it in the other hand. He missed and it flew out of control, bouncing onto the ground inches from my foot.

“Oops, sorry.” He picked it up. “Hey, Dave, I forgot—might have another job next week. You interested?”

“What is it?” I said. “Blowing up a dam? Setting the national forest on fire?”

He laughed like I was kidding. “Construction. Temporary structure for a party or something. Easy.”

“Maybe.” Dave picked up his bucket. “Give me a call.”

We walked out to the parking lot. The guard saluted us. “Nice clean job, fellas.”

“Thanks.”

“Glad to see everyone coming out what went
in
.”

“You got that right.”

At the car, I popped the door locks with the remote. Dave pointed at the trunk. “Can you open that up?”

I looked at his bucket, with the two sticks of explosive poking out. “No way.”

“It’s safe enough.”

“Not for me.” Maybe I’d just seen too many vehicles demolished when I was in the service.

“Okay, no problem. Listen, we thought we might go out,” he said. “Get a beer. You want to come?”

“I’ll pass.” I closed the trunk. “Some things to do.”

“Sure. I’ll go with Brendt, then. He’ll drop me off at the shop later.” Dave hesitated, oddly reticent. “You, uh, you want to come over tomorrow?”

“Yeah.” I realized it was true, and not just because New York was apparently a no-go-home zone at the moment.

My brother. I felt a pull.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

“Awesome.” He grinned, grabbed my hand for a moment, then jogged off to Brendt’s car. The other guys were already moving, trucks turning and squealing tires and barreling out to the exit. By the time I got my car started, only one other vehicle was left—probably the guard’s.