Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  Forester looked away for a long moment and when he came back he seemed resolved, while at first he had seemed nonplussed as if he’d received a nasty, totally unexpected shock—which in fact he had. “Priority one is getting back up and running. The experiment must be carried out as soon as possible.”

  “I’m going to have to explain this to my people, and we’ll need to bring in replacements for Snow and Ridder, and the generator crew,” Whitney said.

  “I’ll see to it tonight,” Forester said. “The second priority is finding the bastards who did this to us, and why—though I have a fair idea as to the latter.”

  “Care to fill me in, sir?” Osborne asked.

  “Not tonight, but I’m going to fly out first thing in the morning. We need to get some things on the table. In the meantime I’ll have the FBI send people to you, but, Nate, it’s your territory. You know it better than any outsider, so these guys will be working for you, not the other way around.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “And our third priority is containing the leaks,” Forester said. “No leaks. Your PA Pete Magliano will have to hold down the fort until I can get someone out there to lend a hand. But this has got to be low-key. And I mean low-key.”

  “Pete is dead,” Cameron said. “But we have another problem, sir. He was shot to death by the terrorists inside the plant while escorting your daughter on a tour.”

  Ashley stepped into camera range. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

  Forester didn’t seem surprised. He just shook his head and smiled. “What are you doing in the middle of this?”

  “Trying to get a story.”

  “Are you okay? Have you been hurt?”

  “I got shot in the butt, but I’ve been in worse shape.”

  “Nothing goes in the paper or on the wire until you and I talk. I’m serious about this.”

  “Nate Osborne gave me the same lecture. I’m going to keep my eyes and ears open, but I won’t publish anything until I get your okay.”

  “Good enough for me,” Forester said, but Nettles was right there.

  “Sir, we need to contain any and all leaks.”

  “I said her word was good enough for me. I want a complete sweep through Donna Marie as well as the research center and the entire perimeter fence. And I’ll expect your report no later than oh eight hundred.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nettles said. It was obvious he didn’t like it, but he turned back to his people and gave his orders, and went to his chopper where he got on the radio.

  “The media are going to be here soon, how do you want me to handle them?” Whitney asked.

  “Use your conference room at the center, but keep them away from Donna Marie, and no mention of a terrorist incursion.”

  “Casualties?”

  “I’ll let you handle names, but for now it was nothing more than an industrial accident.”

  “Someone will have taken notice of the Air Force helicopters,” Ashley said.

  “It’s an ELF experimental station,” Forester said. “Military.”

  “I’m in the middle of this, Dad, and I sure as hell know all about military SOP and something about journalists, so I’ll make you a trade. I’ll hang around as a media spokesman tonight.”

  “In return for what?”

  “Exclusivity,” Ashley said. “I want to be here with Dr. Lipton and Nate Osborne for your debriefing. You tell me everything and I promise to write nothing—not one word, not even a hint—until I get the green light from you personally.”

  “This is more important than you can possibly guess.”

  “Then you need me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Forester said.

  18

  NOTHING HAD BEEN put on the police radio so none of Osborne’s three deputies had heard about the business at the ELF, which for now was just fine. Less complicated at least for tonight, though sitting alone in his office on the first floor of the Billings County courthouse in Medora, he didn’t know if keeping his people out of the loop for now was the right thing to do.

  An Air Force medic had put two stitches in his neck wound, given him a shot of antibiotic, and told him to go home and get some sleep. And definitely no alcohol for at least twenty-four hours.

  It was four in the morning, his prosthetic leg popped up on the open bottom file drawer of his desk, a glass of Jack Daniel’s neat, the bottle on the desk, as he tried to sort out the conflict between good police work and the need for secrecy at the ELF station. Billings was a sprawling county of two thousand square miles with a population of only a little more than eight hundred people, down more than 7 percent in the last few years, and still dropping. Medora, the county seat, was home to less than one hundred people, that number dropping as well.

  “What are you running from, Nate?” his wife Carolyn had asked three days after he’d moved her and their three-year-old daughter to the ranch he’d inherited from his parents.

  It was late like now, and Elizabeth Anne was asleep in bed, and they were sitting on the front porch looking up at the crystal clear sky filled with a billion stars. He pointed up.

  “It’s clean out here. Uncomplicated. No smog, no freeways, no drive-by shootings, no nine-elevens.”

  “That’s because the tallest building in one hundred miles is a grain silo,” Carolyn had shot back.

  They were on their second bottle of Chianti and he’d had the start of a buzz, but not her. No matter how much she drank she would never allow herself to act drunk, where he, after Afghanistan, welcomed the little release from his nightmares. And he’d just wanted to go to bed and make love to his wife, but that had been another problem between them; she couldn’t stand to see him without his prosthetic leg on, and the few times they’d made love after the hospital, had been almost chaste, with the lights out and her legs spread wide so that she didn’t have to feel the stump against her thigh.

  “I need this for just a little while,” he told her. “Maybe a couple of years tops. Can you give me that much?”

  “You grew up with these people. Went to school with them. Football star, homecoming king—with your queen, who’s now married and has two kids.”

  “Not bad.”

  “I’m not saying it is, Nathan. But you’re home, and a couple of years from now you won’t want to leave. And I don’t blame you. Hell, they’ll probably even put up a statue to you downtown. Nathan Osborne, hometown hero who gave his leg for his country.”

  Osborne looked at her and smiled sadly as her face dropped.

  “I’m sorry, Nathan. I didn’t mean that the way it came out, and you know it.”

  Not darling or sweetheart or even just plain Nate. But Nathan proper. He nodded.

  “I can’t stand the isolation. I’m going insane.”

  “Maybe you should fly down to Orlando, spend a week or two with your sister and the kids. Might do you some good to get back to the world.”

  She’d looked away for a longish time, but then turned back a slight smile all the way up to her eyes. “My place is here with you, for however long it takes.”

  Which was about six months, Osborne reflected, before she just packed up one morning and asked if he could drive her and Elizabeth Anne over to the airport at Dickinson. And that was the end of that. Here today, gone tomorrow. For good, because the divorce petition came by registered mail one year later.

  That was five years ago, and it still hurt, though every year she sent Elizabeth Anne up for two weeks in the summer and he could see and hear the ex-wife in their child; a little too stiff and proper, and little too much of a young lady who didn’t appreciate getting dirty, and who this last summer talked a lot about Robert, “Mother’s new friend from the Guggenheim in New York.”

  Jim Cameron in fresh jeans and a “Go Army” sweatshirt came in through the back way, limped across the small squad room, and knocked on the open door. He’d brought a bottle of Jim Beam, which he held up. “A libation for the conquering hero?”

  “Screw you,�
�� Osborne said good-naturedly. He and Cameron weren’t particularly close, but they’d been introduced during Osborne’s briefing on the ELF facility a few years ago, and he’d seen the man around town every now and then.

  “A man of few words, that’s good,” Cameron said. He pulled up a chair and sat across the desk. “Got an extra glass, or am I supposed to drink out of the bottle?”

  Osborne handed him a coffee cup. “Best I can do for the moment.”

  “Dirty,” Cameron said, looking at the cup, but he poured a healthy measure of whiskey and drank it down.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Actually like shit. This happened on my watch, and if it hadn’t been for you I don’t know how it would have turned out.”

  “I got lucky.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Cameron said, and he poured another drink.

  “What’s next?”

  “We had the media briefing at the research center around midnight, or I should say the general’s daughter ran it. She was pretty good. Knew just what to say, and whenever she got in over her head she turned it over to Whitney. They put on a hell of a dog and pony show.”

  “The press still out there?”

  “Nope. Just another industrial accident, not big enough to rate a front page even in Bismarck. They bought the story hook, line, and sinker. How about you?”

  “I’m doing a fly-over first thing in the morning.”

  “I meant what do you think?”

  “Terrorists, but I can’t do much good until I find out their motive because what happened was no random strike by some pissed off local ranchers.”

  “Posse Comitatus,” Cameron said. “We managed to get a probable ID on the woman who’d been shot in the back. Name is Ada Norman, forty-two, born in Fairbanks. She’s on the bureau’s persons of interest list. Skinhead, raging neo-Nazi, last known address a fire lane number outside Kalispell, Montana. The same number as another nut job named Barry Egan. Both of them disappeared about six months ago.”

  Osborne didn’t know either name, but he was familiar with the Posse, just about everyone west of the Missouri River was. “That was fast.”

  “We have a watch list.”

  “Do you want to share it with me? Might make my job catching these people a little easier.”

  “Well, that’s the problem until the general gets here sometime around noon. The FBI wants to handle this on their own, the Air Force thinks it has the brief to protect the Initiative, and although the White House hasn’t weighed in yet, when it does things might get a bit interesting out here. Adds up to nobody wants you sticking your nose into our business.”

  “I know something about how the government, especially the military, operates.”

  “Everyone’s aware of that fact,” Cameron said. “But your Medal of Honor makes you way too high-profile. You can’t fart on Main Street without someone sitting up and taking notice. And the question on everybody’s mind is what the hell you’re doing out here when you could go anywhere and do anything you want.”

  Osborne raised his glass and drank. “Thing is I’m where I want to be, doing what I want to do.”

  Cameron nodded, raised his glass, and took a drink. “Exactly what I told them,” he said. “But they brought up your daughter and your ex.”

  Osborne held himself in check from lashing out. “Who is the they?”

  “The DIA—Defense Intelligence Agency. Soon as Nettles briefed his people they started looking over your shoulder. Asked me if you had abused your wife or daughter, if you were a drunk, if you were some pissed off war hero with a grudge. Shit like that.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “That you were certifiable, of course,” Cameron said with a straight face. “Who the hell else would want to live out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  Osborne had to laugh. “Is it that bad?”

  “These guys sometimes have a little problem understanding real people. But it’ll be okay when Forester gets out here.”

  “I hope so, because a lot of a people lost their lives last night. In my county. And I want to nail the bastards who did it.”

  “I’m with you. But your brief will be up to the general and no one else.”

  “It’s not an ELF facility,” Osborne said as a statement, not a question.

  “No,” Cameron said, and Osborne started to speak, but Cameron held him off. “That’s as far as it goes for now.”

  “I was going to say that I know the Posse Comitatus. They don’t believe in any government above the county level, or any higher law authority than the county sheriff. According to the common-law nutcases, if the sheriff refuses to carry out the will of the people the Posse is supposed to string him up at high noon downtown and leave his body there until sundown as an example.”

  “I didn’t know that part.”

  “A lot of them are over in Montana, and some in Michigan. Crazy people, just like some of the guys I knew in Afghanistan.”

  Cameron was silent for a long time. Finally he poured another drink in his cup, and one for Osborne. “Do you think if you push your investigation they’ll come after you?”

  Osborne drank the Jim Beam and smiled. “I hope so. Like I said, this is my county.”

  19

  A YOUNG, GOOD-LOOKING woman who’d introduced herself as Gabriela Mandina escorted Special U.S. Envoy Rupert Mann up the elevator to the executive level of the downtown Caracas headquarters of the state-owned petroleum company PDV, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. It was well after eight in the evening, and Mann, forty-eight, with a head that seemed to be too large for his body, wide expressive eyes, and salt-and-pepper hair parted down the middle, was getting hungry. It was past his normal dinnertime, though here the evening meal was usually taken as late as eleven.

  “I hope that you had a pleasant flight from Washington, Señor Mann,” the girl, who could have been a runway model, said. Her English was perfect, with a British cast.

  “It was, thank you. Is this a normal time for important meetings?”

  “Oh, of course, we often save the very best for last.”

  Mann, who had been a Harvard law professor before President Robert Thompson had tapped him to become an adviser on energy, had become something of a roving ambassador whose primary missions were to smooth over difficult problems with foreign governments not exactly friendly to U.S. interests. Besides his law degree he was fluent in Spanish, French, and German, knew psychology, had a fair grasp of philosophies from the Greeks onward—especially the philosophies of government and of justice—a little mathematics, and even poetry. The president called him “the Renaissance man.” And now with the pretty receptionist he recognized that he was being patronized and it irritated him, though he didn’t let it show.

  “You will be meeting with Rafael Araque, their minister of Energy and Oil, and with Andres Luzardo, the president of PDV,” Thompson had told him in the Oval Office yesterday afternoon. “The bastards are putting the squeeze on us and I want to know why.”

  In the three years Mann had worked for the president he’d learned to be patient. Learned when to speak and when to listen, especially when Thompson was angry, like now.

  “Chávez, on top of his cancer, is losing it financially. Worse than us, and he’s starting to pull some really crazy shit. Among other things he thinks he can get away with increasing the price per barrel of sweet crude by twenty-three percent.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mann had been moved to say. More than that, it was outrageous.

  “He’s just raised the bus fare by fifty percent, which has caused rioting all across Caracas, the same as in the late eighties and for the same reason.”

  Venezuela was the fourth-largest importer of crude oil and petroleum to the U.S. just behind Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, and raising the cost per barrel would be intolerable. People couldn’t afford it. Gas lines would become commonplace because most of the other importers were already operating nearly at capacity. That, as well
as the increasing pressure from China and India for oil, would put an impossibly difficult strain on the U.S. economy that was just now showing feeble signs of recovery. Wars had been started for a lot less, and the president said exactly that.

  “Find out what they want, but more important for all of us, what they’ll accept.”

  “I’ll do my best, Mr. President.”

  “I know you will.”

  Off the elevator the young woman led him down a plushly carpeted corridor with fabric-covered walls in beige, photographs of PDV operations around the country hung at tasteful intervals, to a well-decorated conference room. Two men were seated at the head of a long table and they both looked up with neutral smiles.

  Gabriela introduced them: Araque, short, with a thick middle and balding gray hair; Luzardo, strongly built with a square face and deep-set emotionless eyes that made Mann think of a shark just before it attacked.

  “Please, Señor Mann, have a seat,” Araque said.

  Mann sat to their left, and Gabriella sat next to him. “I’ll act as an interpreter if needed,” she said, her smile as dead as Luzardo’s and he thought of the remora that attached themselves to sharks.

  “As you wish,” Mann said.

  “I hope that you had no difficulty from the airport,” Araque said.

  “Not at all. In any event I’ve been in areas of civil unrest.”

  “Arrogant bastard,” Luzardo said in Spanish half under his breath. But Mann caught it.

  “Mr. Luzardo said that your reputation precedes you,” Gabriela translated.

  “Actually he seems to think that I’m an arrogant bastard,” Mann said in Spanish.

  Luzardo shrugged, and he motioned for the young woman to leave the room. She was no longer needed as an interpreter. When she was gone he came directly to the point. “Why are you here, Señor Mann?”

  “President Thompson has asked that I open a dialogue so that we can reach some agreement that might be beneficial to both our countries,” Mann began. He sounded pompous to his own ear, but these kinds of discussions usually followed a general pattern. Diplomacy happened when neither side knew what to say or how far to push things.