Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [237]
“Too late for that.”
Dominic shot him in the forehead.
He found Brian sitting on the ground behind the barn, his back resting against the slope. He saw Dominic and raised his hand in greeting. “Get ’em?”
“Every last one. How’re you doing?”
Brian gave a wobbly shake of his head. His face was ashen and glistening with sweat. “Got a confession to make.”
“What?”
“Bullet missed my ribs, went clean through. It’s in my liver, Dom.”
“Jesus, are you sure?” He moved to open Brian’s shirt, but Brian waved him off.
“The blood’s really dark, almost black. Hollow-point probably shredded my liver. I can barely feel my legs, too.”
“I’ll get you to the hospital.”
“No. Too many questions.”
“Fuck you. Zuwarah’s ten miles away.”
Dominic knelt down, grabbed Brian’s opposite arm, and pulled him across his shoulders. He got his feet under him and straightened up. “You okay?”
“Yep,” Brian grunted.
The slog back up the hill took ten minutes, then ten more minutes for Dominic to pick his way down the opposite slope. When he reached the quarry floor, he started jogging toward the Opel. “You still with me?” Dominic asked.
“Uh-huh.”
He reached the Opel, then dropped to his knees and lowered Brian to the ground. From the backseat, Bari called, “What happened?”
“He’s shot. Is there a hospital in Zuwarah?”
“Yes.”
Dominic opened the back door and used his pocketknife to cut Bari free. Together they lifted Brian into the backseat.
“You know where it is?” Dominic asked Bari, who nodded. “Then you drive. Take one wrong turn and I’ll blow you away, understood?”
“Yes.”
Bari climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Dominic ran around the car and got into the backseat with Brian. “Go, go!”
70
THEIR TARGET was not in São Paulo proper but eighty miles north of the city and the center of Brazil’s exploding petro-economy. The largest refinery in all of Brazil, the Paulinia REPLAN facility processed nearly 400,000 barrels of oil per day, some twenty million gallons. Enough, Shasif Hadi had read, to fill more than thirty Olympic-sized swimming pools. Of course, as Ibrahim had told him during their initial briefing, sabotaging such a facility was no easy task. There were myriad safety redundancies to be considered, not to mention the physical security measures. Getting onto the refinery grounds would be no hurdle at all (the highest perimeter fence was ten feet tall), but once inside, there was little they could do. Explosives could destroy collection tanks, but these were spaced too far apart to hope for a domino effect. Similarly, the facility’s hundreds of control valves (officially known as ESDs, or emergency shutdown devices), which regulated the flow of chemicals to the labyrinth of distillation columns, fractionation towers, cracking units, and blending and storage tanks, were virtually invulnerable, having been recently refitted with something called a Neles ValvGuard system, which was, in turn, regulated from the refinery’s control center, which from their earlier reconnaissance trips they knew was belowground and heavily fortified. Shasif understood none of these particulars, but the essence of Ibrahim’s point was clear: The odds against causing a catastrophic leak within the Paulinia REPLAN were astronomical. But that word—within—Shasif reminded himself, was pivotal, wasn’t it? There were other ways to start the dominoes falling.
As planned, each of them had his own separate hotel, as well as his own rental car. Leaving at staggered times throughout the morning, each man took the SP-348 Highway out of São Paulo and drove north to Campinas, twenty miles south of Paulinia. At noon they met at a restaurant called the Fazendão Grill. Shasif was the last to arrive. He spotted Ibrahim, Fa’ad, and Ahmed sitting in a corner booth, and made his way over to them.
“How was the drive?” Ibrahim asked.
“Uneventful. And you?”
“The same.”
“It’s good to see all of you,” Shasif said. He looked around the table and got nods in return.
They’d been in country for five