Chapter 7 - The Grain Terminal Breach
The wind coming off Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Pike River was thirty knots out of the northeast, carrying sleet that turned the concrete aprons of the Kenosha terminal into a sheet of gray, black-ice glass.
Dante backed the F-350 into the dark, cavernous interior of the abandoned railroad loading shed eighty yards south of the primary elevator towers.
The heavy corrugated iron doors of the shed had rusted off their tracks decades ago, half-buried in mounds of dry, petrified grain and discarded brake shoes from old boxcars.
"Elena," I said, stepping down from the high cab into the ankle-deep dust of fifty-year-old corn chaff.
The woman looked at me, her face pale, her hands holding the three younger boys tightly against the wool blanket on the seat.
"Stay inside the cab with the engine off," I commanded, pulling two spare thirty-round magazines for the HK416 from my coat pocket and sliding them into my belt. "Dante has the twelve-gauge under the seat. If anyone touches the door handle who isn't wearing my coat... Dante knows where to aim."
"Alejandro," Elena whispered, her fingers reaching through the open window to touch my wrist. Her eyes were wide, filled with an ancient, terrifying dread that went back forty years to the day my father brought an infant home to Lake Forest in a wicker laundry basket. "Don't listen to Marco's words. He will tell you things about your mother. He will tell you things about the laboratory in nineteen eighty-four. He will try to make you believe that you are not a man... that you are only an instrument."
I looked down at the old woman who had washed my school clothes, cooked my Sunday dinners, and kept four identical copies of my soul alive in the frozen woods of Wisconsin for five years.
"Elena," I said softly, my voice level as a carpenter’s rule. "A man is not what he was made from. A man is what he chooses to destroy."
I turned toward the silos.
Dante stepped out of the truck, carrying the short-barreled Benelli twelve-gauge tactical shotgun low against his thigh, his pockets bulging with three-inch magnum copper-plated lead slugs.
"The service gantry on the north side, boss," Dante whispered, nodding toward an enclosed steel conveyor bridge that spanned the gap between the concrete headhouse of the silos and the abandoned harbor administration office seventy feet above the dock. "The main doors at ground level will have magnetic trip-switches tied to the ship’s radar. But the conveyor bridge was built for bucket elevators. It doesn't have an alarm circuit because the city declared the structural steel unsafe in nineteen ninety-nine."
"Then we take the steel," I said.
We moved through the shadows of the grain towers, keeping low behind the concrete footings, our boots crunching softly over the frozen slag and broken beer bottles left by thirty years of trespassers.
The sleet whipped our faces, freezing the moisture on my eyebrows, but beneath my wool coat, my pulse sat at a steady, clinical sixty-two beats per minute.
We reached the base of the exterior steel ladder that climbed the vertical flank of Silo No. 4.
The iron rungs were slick with black ice, four inches from the freezing concrete wall, rising one hundred and twenty feet into the howling gray gloom of the lake wind.
I climbed first, my gloved hands wrapping around the rusted iron, the carbine slung flat against my back on a two-point tactical harness. Dante followed twelve feet below, his heavy breathing swallowed by the roar of the diesel generators on the research vessel moored at the pier.
We reached the maintenance catwalk at the top of the silos.
The view from the catwalk was terrifying in its scope: below us, the harbor was a black, churning cauldron of ice water; to the east, the sixty-foot research ship was tied to the bollards, its deck lights illuminating six men in civilian tactical gear unloading heavy, refrigerated aluminum storage containers from the rear hold; and to the south, the city of Kenosha was an expanse of cold, gray residential rooftops stretching toward the prairie.
I moved along the catwalk to the inspection door of the headhouse.
The door was heavy sheet metal, painted industrial orange fifty years ago, secured with a four-inch brass Master Lock that had rusted into a solid block of green oxide.
I didn't use a lockpick.
I pulled my Kimber .45 from my holster, pressed the muzzle directly against the shackle where the hardened steel entered the brass housing, turned my face away into the collar of my coat, and squeezed the trigger.
BANG.
The heavy two-hundred-and-thirty-grain hollow-point sheared the rusted shackle in two with an explosive, concussive ring of tortured metal.
I kicked the door open with the heel of my boot, stepping across the threshold into the pitch-black interior of the bucket elevator gallery.
The air inside the concrete headhouse was warm.
Not forty degrees.
Seventy-two degrees.
It smelled of commercial hospital disinfectant, circulating Freon, and the distinctive, ozone-heavy tang of an industrial biological filtration array operating under negative atmospheric pressure.
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From the dark depths of the central silo shaft—two hundred feet down, where the grain bins met the bedrock foundations beneath the harbor water—came a sound that had no business existing inside an abandoned agricultural terminal:
The rhythmic, electronic chiming of an automated fetal heart monitor, pulsing through the darkness with the steady, synthetic cadence of a hospital that had never closed its doors.
