Three Minutes to Midnight Read Online Free PDF

climbing over it. In either direction. He also saw one-inch ribbons of sensors running through the fence links. Mahegan knew that these were motion detectors and that they were probably connected to cameras that provided surveillance twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. If the fence moved, a camera zoomed in on the location.
    Mahegan felt the vehicle turn back toward the north, and he noticed they were entering a terrain feature called a saddle. It was the low ground between two hilltops. It was a small-scale version of a valley. Mahegan’s mind visualized the contracting contour lines indicating the hilltops and the expanding lines between the hilltops, indicating flatter and lower ground.
    The saddle probably ran a mile from south to north, Mahegan estimated. He craned his neck, as if checking for snipers and potential ambush locations. The hilltops on both sides were vegetated but not heavily wooded. Sparse trees dotted the high ground. Looking above the cab, a luxury provided by his long torso, he saw the ridge that connected the two hilltops in the far distance. They were isolated. In the center of the small valley were the pieces and parts of a huge industrial operation.
    As the truck bounced through a gravel parking lot, they passed into another fenced-in area, an inner cordon, this one with a small sign that read JAMES GUNTHER AND SONS CONSTRUCTION, INC .

CHAPTER 3
    M AEVE C ASSIDY WAS INJURED.
    Well, at least she was not dead, she thought. The general rule in combat had been that wounded was better than dead. Usually. It all depended on what came next, and right now she was in this barren cube of a room. No. It wasn’t a room. It was a shelter. It was too rustic to be a cabin and too new to be a previous residence. She searched for the term. Bungalow? No, that didn’t seem right. A bungalow was a home, and this certainly wasn’t a home. Compartment? No, not that, either. It didn’t seem to be a part of something else.
    Then it came to her. Detention. She remembered seeing a few detention cells in Afghanistan. They were about this size and equally barren. Five steps across in each direction. Solid plywood screwed into studs, most likely two-by-fours. A plywood box, like a large coffin. Coffin. That was about right. And she was here against her will. She was confined at a detention site, as the infantry called them in Afghanistan.
    Maeve leaned back against the wall and assessed her injury. She was dressed in her Army combat uniform pants, tan combat boots, and a tan, bloodstained Nomex T-shirt. Her ACU jacket lay crumpled on the floor, as if it had been tossed into the cell. Her left arm was in a blue sling that was, she guessed, made out of a table napkin. She had a laceration on her left bicep that had skimmed her triceps. Not exactly a graze, but neither was it a life-threatening wound, barring infection, she surmised. Someone had done a respectable job cleaning, flushing, and bandaging the wound.
    Regardless , she thought, too close for comfort .
    She looked up at the wooden structure that surrounded her. Being held captive, she figured, suggested the intentionally wounded theory. Someone wanted her in this small room, dungeon, cave, coffin, prison, detention cell, or whatever they wanted to call it. For what reason, though, she wasn’t sure.
    A long-distance runner, Maeve had stamina, though twelve months in combat had lessened that some. The cumulative effects of battle, she knew, had weakened her physical condition, even if that same time period had strengthened her mettle. She caught herself growing emotional and shunted the surge, like a tourniquet on a wound. No time for feeling sorry for yourself, Cassidy. “Assess and act”—that was her credo.
    She couldn’t stop the reflection, though, of her time at war and the decision twelve months ago to step away from her position as a professor of geology at North Carolina State University. The chancellor there had