There was only one person in the camp who understood pressure and machinery better than the drunk mechanic. “Stop the transfer!” Bailey shouted, grabbing the phone. “Bring Walker to me. Now!”
Alex was pulled out of line seconds before he was shoved into the truck. Half frozen, he was rushed into the boiler house, where the noise was deafening. The main gauge needle trembled in the red zone, pressed against the stop.
The pipes shook so hard plaster fell from the ceiling. The air was hot and wet. Bailey stood in the doorway, too afraid to go farther, and shouted over the roar.
“Want to live, Walker? Keep it from blowing. You’ve got ten minutes.”
“If you fail, we die together.” Alex was left alone with the dying metal beast. He took in the situation at once.
This wasn’t an accident. The safety valve had been welded shut, and the steam release wheel was jammed. Someone had stripped the threads on purpose. It was sabotage.
Someone wanted the camp commander blown sky-high along with his office. And Alex had a pretty good idea who. The Count.
The boss had decided to remove the major using physics, while also destroying the camp records in the blast. But the Count had overlooked one important fact. Alex was standing at the center of the explosion.
Think, he told himself. Boyle’s law: pressure and volume are linked. There was no way to vent the steam, so he had to cool the system fast and drop the reaction temperature.
He ran to the cold-water feed pumps. They were dead. The power was off. Alex grabbed a sledgehammer from the corner.
The only chance was to smash the cold-water return line before it entered the boiler. That would trigger a hydraulic shock. The boiler might crack, but it would prevent a gas explosion. Steam would burst out, but the pressure would fall.
He swung with everything he had left. His muscles, starved and frozen, answered with a flash of pain. “Come on,” he shouted at himself.
The first blow rang off the pipe. Metal held. Pressure in the boiler had already reached the critical point, and the steel plates of the housing began to bulge with a terrible groan.
He drew back for a second strike. Then, from the corner of his eye, he caught movement in the shadow of the coal pile. A man stood there with a knife.
It was Sly. “Don’t bother, college boy,” he hissed over the roar. “The Count ordered this concert. Everything burns, including you.”
“You know too much about the gold.” In that instant Alex understood the Count’s plan. Cause a catastrophe, write it off as an accident, and in the confusion move the gold, which Sly had already re-hidden.
Alex had been nothing but a tool—useful for opening the safe, now ready to be discarded. “You’ll burn with me,” Alex shouted, shifting his grip on the sledgehammer. Now it was a weapon.
“I’ll make it out,” Sly said with a grin and stepped forward. It was a deadlock. Behind Alex stood a boiler ready to burst at twenty atmospheres. In front of him, a killer with a knife.
There were only seconds left. Alex remembered the lesson from the woods: vectors. Sly was standing directly beneath the welded emergency release pipe.
The valve itself was sealed, but the pipe was held by a rusted bracket. Alex didn’t swing at the man. He turned and brought the sledgehammer down on the support above the killer’s head.
He put all his hatred for the place into that blow. Physics responded the way it always did. The vibration from the strike was the final stress the metal could take.
The rusted bracket snapped. The heavy cast-iron pipe, full of boiling water and steam, crashed down. Sly didn’t even have time to look up.
A cloud of white, scalding vapor swallowed him as the iron slammed down. His scream vanished in the hiss of steam. The pipe ruptured, and a blast of superheated vapor shot into the wall, knocking bricks loose…
