Quake: Shadow Zone

Book 5: Quake

by Jack Douglas

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Operation Underground In the fifth terrifying installment of Jack Douglas's six-part Quake, the survivors are forced to seek shelter from the devastation—in the pitch-black tunnels beneath the city. . . Before the earthquake destroyed New York City, the subway system provided fast, easy transport for every urban commuter. But now—buried beneath tons of concrete, rubble, and steel—the tunnels offer a very different kind of ride. Rats, sewage, and live electrical wires criss-cross the underground maze like a deadly web hungryfor new victims. Rotting corpses lay side by side in subway cars like dead-eyed fish. But for U.S. Attorney Nick Dykstra and a small band of survivors, the tunnels are the only route to safety—and their one last chance to get out of this alive. For Nick, the stakes are even higher. He's got to find his daughter at Columbia University—before a crazed escaped terrorist finds her first. . .. This is about more than survival. It's about revenge. And only one man will be left standing—after the QUAKE. 17,000 Words

Release date: July 1, 2014

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 53

Sample

The closer Jasper and Peterson came to the reactor building, the more the damage was increasingly evident. More and more fallen utility fixtures littered the walkway and the surrounding work areas. Birds’ nests of loose wiring hung suspended from the ceiling. Then the walkway itself that led them away from the cooling station had ended abruptly in a snarl of unadulterated wreckage, a shocking display of force that the earthquake must have unleashed in order to rip the iron structure from the concrete wall and upend it.

Adding to their general unease, the radio channel had been silent since leaving the cooling controls. Had the terrorists left Jeffries’s control room looking for a way down here and not even put on the radiation suits? If they were jihadists, maybe they wouldn’t bother with the suits, sort of like the 9/11 pilots who supposedly de-emphasized the landings portion of their flight training. Perhaps they weren’t aware that the suits contained radios? Jasper and Peterson had no way of knowing, but they maintained radio silence in case it was a ploy to get them to think no one was listening. Now they found themselves picking their way across a barely lit concrete floor crowded with machinery and equipment to the reactor—the container within a container where atoms were split in order to generate the heat that would boil water and spin a turbine.

Peterson pointed his light beam in front of them and Jasper followed its path with his gaze. Immediately he could see the problem. An iron staircase wound its way up and around the outside of the cylindrical concrete reactor building in a colossal spiral, but a section of it had come loose and fallen over the ground level doorway, obscuring it almost completely. In addition to the stairs, there were also numerous chunks of displaced concrete. Peterson waved an arm, indicating for Jasper to follow. They had to skirt around a downed tank of some kind in order to walk up to the blocked doorway.

Peterson handed Jasper the flashlight and he gripped the mangled stair ladder with both hands. He yanked on it several times with full strength but it did not budge. He rested a moment before moving his grip to different points of the broken structure and trying again. Still, the displaced stairwell held fast. Peterson looked at Jasper and shook his head. Then Jasper aimed the light toward the ceiling, tracing the stair ladder along its course up the reactor containment building. It was still there, but it dangled precariously in some sections and was outright missing in others, leaving gaps that would have to be climbed somehow in order to reach the top. And they couldn’t see from here what its condition was as it wound up the other side of the structure. One of the missing sections was at the bottom of the stairs, beginning just above the span that blocked the reactor door.

Jasper waved to get Peterson’s attention and handed him the flashlight. He opened the logbook to a fresh page and penned a message.

He pointed up the stair ladder to the top of the reactor containment structure, then followed with another note.

Jasper pointed around the side of the containment structure and traded Peterson the logbook for the flashlight. Peterson gripped the pen and wrote.

He paused his pen for a moment while he tipped his head back to look at the stair ladder’s condition along the length of the containment cylinder, then wrote again.

Jasper nodded agreeably, not at all liking the fact that they were even entertaining the notion of climbing the broken stair ladder. They set out to the left along the containment cylinder, toward what appeared to be the path of least resistance. Peterson led the way with his light, Jasper close behind. Both of their heads were on swivels, hyper-alert for threats not only due to the damaged nuclear facility, but also from the terrorists somewhere in the vicinity. Jasper hoped the intruders wouldn’t find a way down here that he and Peterson had missed.

As they worked their way around the reactor containment structure, they noticed cracks and buckling in the steel-lined concrete, though none was large enough to be actual openings to the inside. Jasper saw Peterson consult his dosimeter once, but he didn’t try to see the reading himself. He just kept putting one foot in front of the other, trooping toward that other door. He hoped that they would be able to get into the reactor somehow, that when they did, there would be a tech in there, and that whoever had shot Jeffries wouldn’t be able to get down here.

After a few more minutes of negotiating the industrial surrounds, Peterson waved his light around in a bid to catch Jasper’s attention. As soon as he could lift his . . .