Undercover - Steam Power - Book 5

Part 22 - Explosives!

In the middle of the night, I was fast asleep and dreaming about messages from my armband when I realised that it was no dream. Yonnie and Treeka were telling me to get up; someone was trying to wreck Oppy.

 'But she is already wrecked,' I grumbled sleepily.

'No, no and no,' Yonnie snapped urgently. 'They are attempting to destroy the hardware and you have to stop them.'

I crawled out of bed, took Grandma's cell phone from her purse in the kitchen and called Licia. After about ten ring tones she answered.

 'Are you awake?' I asked. 'I think so . . . or I'm dreaming you called me.'

'Look out your window. Can you see anything suspicious at the school?'

A minute dragged by before she replied. 'A black SUV is backed up to the loading dock doors . . . for a quick get-away . . . Why don't you join me for a closer look?'

I jumped into my clothes, threw on my parka and boots and ran to Licia's place. She was shivering on the porch waiting for me. We crossed the road to Silverwood School's loading dock doors where Licia checked the SUV. 

'They left the power on!' she remarked.  'We could steal it.'

'Don't you need a key?'

 'No . . . you can drive it away even if the key is removed from the car but it won't restart if you switch the power off.' 

'But the engine is not running.'

'Because this is a hybrid and it is running on battery power at the moment.' 

We slipped through the door and crept close enough to hear two men talking.

Licia hissed in my ear. 'Stop here. I can hear what they are saying and they are speaking Cantonese. I think they are arguing about where to put the explosives.' 

'Explosives! They are going to blow up the school? We have to stop them.'

'How are we going to do that?' Licia asked. 'I could maybe take down one but the other one is too big for you . . . Why don't we just steal their get-away car? . . . We should have time to hide the SUV and get back here if we are quick . . . I'll leave my phone to record their conversation while we are gone.'

Licia put the SUV into drive so that it moved very slowly and without noise down the street until we reached a house with a long driveway on one side. Licia steered the SUV quietly alongside the house and turned the lights off but didn't switch off the power. 

 We ran back to Silverwood School just as two men came through the loading dock doors. I pushed Licia behind a cedar hedge before they saw us.

The two men looked around frantically and argued in terse whispers for a few seconds before marching quickly down Sumac street toward Bank street. They had not bothered to close the loading dock door behind them, so we recovered the cell phone and returned to Licia's basement where we listened to the recording.

I couldn't understand what they were saying but Licia translated some of the conversation. 'Most of it is inaudible but it seems they had picked up a box with minimal instructions and they were angry that their boss had set them the task of destroying Dr Zhang's equipment.'