Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “What about the ATV and trailer?” Grafton asked.

  “Lots of photographs and dust them both for prints.”

  “I can bring them back here.”

  “Okay, but put them out in the county road maintenance shed. And tell Eric and his people to keep their hands off.”

  “I’m on it,” Grafton said.

  Osborne phoned Novak at her office in Bismarck and she answered on the first ring.

  “What the hell is going on out there, Nate?” she demanded.

  She and Osborne’s mother had been school chums in Fargo. And she had once babysat him while his parents had gone on a rare vacation down to the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, and Vegas. “Somebody attacked the Initiative last night, some serious damage and a number of casualties. The Air Force is up from Ellsworth and they’ve taken charge until General Forester shows up sometime today.”

  “We were told it was an industrial accident.”

  “Looks like the Posse,” Osborne said.

  The Commerce commissioner was silent for a long beat. “So where do we stand here? It’s your county.”

  Osborne explained everything that he’d been involved with including his confrontation with Captain Nettles out on the gravel road south of the facility.

  “President Thompson phoned Stuart first thing this morning, asked if we’d stay out of what was going on over there as much as possible.” Stuart Howard was the second-term governor, and he and his wife, Toni, were very well liked in the state. “Now you’re telling me that you’re right in the middle of it? Not good, Nate.”

  “Too late for that. Anyway, Bob Forester wants to talk to me right away. What do you and Stuart want me to tell him?”

  The commissioner chuckled. “Thought you’d say something like that,” she said. “You always were a brat, Nathan, and still are. But tread with care this time. Please?”

  “I’ll try, Miss Dottie.”

  * * *

  A pair of armed Rapid Response Team airmen in a Hummer blocked the gravel road past the main gate to the Initiative’s Administrative and Scientific Center, and Osborne had to turn around and drive to the armed guards at the entrance. He had to wait several minutes before Jim Cameron could give word to let him through.

  “Everyone’s at Donna Marie, sir,” the young man in white camouflage BDUs told him. “Do you need an escort?”

  “I know the way,” Osborne said, and when he was through he took the dirt road northwest to the power plant.

  This was a different place on the ground than from the air; in some ways the countryside was more barren, certainly a lot less majestic, yet open, even limitless. He’d once tried to explain to a couple of friends at Recon school what western North Dakota was all about. One of them was from the woods of rural Pennsylvania who thought that the Badlands and the prairie were too wide open and vastly lonely, to which Osborne had explained it was just the opposite of the claustrophobia of the deep forests where a man couldn’t see much farther than a dozen yards in any direction. The other was from California’s Big Sur who thought that the ever-changing sea was as comforting as the ever-changing flames in a fireplace on a cold evening, to which Osborne had countered that his horizons were ever unchanging, something comfortable that could be counted on.

  Donna Marie was a beehive of activity. Three dark blue semis with USAF markings were parked along the east side of the generating building about twenty or thirty yards from where the MASH tent had been set up this morning. Three of the four helicopters were on the ground, and approaching a large tent that had been erected after he’d left, and Osborne could hear the other gunship patrolling the perimeter a mile or so out. A half-dozen Hummers and a canvas-covered troop truck, also with Air Force markings, were parked near the big tent, and a second truck was pulled up in front of the double-wide from which bodies in zippered bags were being carried out. A lot of serious-looking people in uniforms, several of them in hazmat suits, came and went from the station. Already debris was being loaded aboard one of the semis, and the light from welding torches sputtered from the open doors.

  An airman with a military police armband just outside the main tent flagged Osborne down. “General Forester and the others are expecting you, sir.”

  Forester stood in front of a map table listening to Whitney Lipton, who towered over him, telling him something with passion. He was a slightly built man in his late fifties with thinning gray hair, mussed now, his military parka open, his bearing erect, obviously the man in charge. And Osborne could see the resemblance between him and his daughter Ashley, who stood a few feet away looking at a blueprint spread out on the table.

  Jim Cameron was on the other side of the table with several men Osborne did not know. They were listening to what Dr. Lipton was saying.

  Captain Nettles, who was at Forester’s elbow, was the first to notice Osborne, and he turned to the general. “The sheriff is here.”

  Forester turned and Whitney and everyone else looked up. “Sheriff, glad you could make it,” the general said. “We’ve been going over the situation and trying to work out something that makes sense for what happens next, and I need your input.”

  “My friends call me Nate. And what happens next is figuring out why the Posse wanted to put this place out of commission, and why they did it last night.”

  He and the general shook hands. “Posse Comitatus?” Forester asked. Nettles started to object, but the general motioned him off.

  “We have an ID on the woman we found at the back door,” Cameron said. “She’s Posse and one of her last known associates was a guy named Barry Egan, also Posse in Montana.”

  Something lit off in the general’s eyes. “You sure about that?” he asked Cameron.

  “Reasonably.”

  “If Egan was a part of this it would fit,” said a pleasant-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties in jeans and dark blue FBI parka. “It was his dad who tried to hit Baytown a few years ago.”

  It was one of the Posse’s legendary stories that Osborne had read about in an e-Guardian bulletin, which was the bureau’s online system to counteract possible terrorist activities. “Might help if I was briefed on what’s actually going on out here, because from where I stand it seems like you and Exxon might share a common enemy, or at least enemies with a common purpose.”

  Forester and the woman exchanged a look.

  “We’re thinking the same thing,” the woman said. “I’m Deb Rausch, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Minneapolis office. We actually met at a regional LE conference right after you got elected. Had a drink with you and your wife that evening.”

  Osborne remembered. “You’d just been assigned from somewhere out west as assistant SAC.”

  “Salt Lake City, by way of army intel at Baghdad Central Prison.”

  “Welcome to Billings County,” Osborne said. “Assuming for the moment that this does turn out to be a Posse operation, I have to believe that something else is going on. No reason for them to hit a facility like this one. Unless you have a serious leak in security.”

  “We don’t need to hear this,” Nettles said.

  “I’m listening,” Forester said.

  “The Posse hit Baytown to make a statement against big oil and the corporations who are screwing up the air for a profit. But this is nothing more than an ELF facility. The protests against the installation in Wisconsin never panned out. No one got brain cancer from the radio waves. So no one would be interested in attacking this place, unless they knew what was actually going on here.”

  “Which is?” Forester said. The tent was silent enough for them to hear the whine of the still-spinning turbine in the power station.

  “It’s an experiment having something to do with the coal deposit you’ve tapped into and microbiology, which is Dr. Lipton’s specialty.”

  “And the purpose?”

  “I’m guessing that you want to produce methane to power the generator. Use the coal we have to make electricity without the massive
dump of carbon dioxide. Something like that.”

  Forester glanced at Whitney again, and she shrugged. “What you suggest has been tried before,” he said. “Too expensive.”

  “Excuse me, General, but you retired from DARPA and went to work for ARPA-E, a fair sum of money has been spent here, security is tight, and your project director is a chief scientist with the CDC. So from where I sit the Posse may have attacked last night but I think it’s a fair possibility that big oil might have been calling the shots.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “This place is a threat. What I don’t understand is why they chose to attack last night?”

  “An important experiment was to be conducted this morning,” Forester said.

  “Then you have a leak.”

  “It would seem so. But the timing was wrong, and we’ll be back up and running within a week to ten days.”

  “In the meantime you still have a leak, and the threat still exists.”

  Forester took only a moment to digest what Osborne was saying. “The experiment will go as planned. The Air Force Rapid Response Team will work with Jim to heighten our security needs. And we’ll look for the leak starting in Washington, because I don’t think it’s someone here. In the meantime I’d like it if you would agree to work with Agent Rausch in finding this Mr. Egan and whomever he works for. Would you do this?”

  Osborne took just as long for his decision, which as far as he was concerned was a no-brainer, and he nodded. “I don’t like bad things happening in my county.”

  “Oh, shit!” Ashley suddenly shouted, and everyone turned to her. “I just remembered something.”

  “Yes?” Forester said.

  “When I was hiding I saw two of the terrorists unscrew some sort of plate near the rear of the plant, and pour in something from a gallon jug.”

  “Where?” Whitney demanded.

  “I can show you,” Ashley said.

  Christmas, Michigan

  BARRY EGAN WASN’T so drunk that he would make a mistake and say something incredibly stupid; screw the pooch with the big mouth of his that had gotten him into trouble plenty of times before, but he was celebrating. His share of the money—twenty-five thousand—had been paid into his Big Sky Western Bank account in Bozeman. He’d taken out five hundred from a couple of ATMs over the past twenty-four hours, didn’t want to leave a serious money trail, and already he was up nearly seven fifty at the Kewadin Indian Casino working the five-dollar slots.

  The unincorporated township of about four hundred people, in the Upper Peninsula, was right on Lake Superior and in the old days the primary industry was iron smelting, twenty tons of pig in a day picked up by Great Lakes steamers. These days the primary industry was tourism, and during the Christmas season covers and postmarks, plus the occasional outlaw—which was what Barry thought of himself as—on the lam.

  His uncle Fred, dead three years ago, had a single-wide trailer on a gravel road in the woods a couple of miles out of town beyond the end of Evergreen Drive that in the summer he’d used it as a fish camp and during the fall as a deer-hunting base and in the winter for snowmobiling. Barry used to come up here with his dad, so he was known around town, but the Yoopers—the year-round residents—mostly minded their own business and never bothered him whenever he showed up, opened the trailer, and bought a bunch of groceries and beer from Munising four miles east.

  It was a weeknight, out of the summer tourist season, the lake hadn’t frozen yet, so the ice fishermen weren’t here, and it had been too warm lately, so the snowmobile season hadn’t begun. Goddamn environmental shit was screwing with the seasons so that nothing was dependable anymore.

  The casino was mostly empty; even so it took forever to get a drink girl to bring him a Bud and he could feel the old anger building up in him. There’d been no reason for him to have to shoot Ada and Dr. Kemal, but they’d gone crazy on him, wanting to go back for nothing.

  And in the end it just made sense to take the kid down: “Loose lips sink ships,” his daddy used to say all the time, quoting his own daddy, a man Barry had never met. But from what his mother told him, the old man was just as bugshit as her husband had been. It was a tough old world.

  The drink girl, not bad-looking, brought his beer and set it down beside the slot he was playing. “Want me to stick around for luck?” she asked.

  He was about to tell her to fuck off, but instead he looked up and managed a smile. “I think I’m going to bug out while I’m still ahead. Catch up on my z’s.”

  “I hear ya,” she said, and she walked off.

  Barry had come back here because he knew that he had some serious thinking to do, mainly about what was coming next for him. There’d been nothing in the papers or on television about the attack, which on the surface was not really surprising. Yet there was a niggling thought at the back of his head that something had gone wrong at the last minute. The one man missing who’d probably killed Moose and Brenda. Maybe he’d disabled some of the critical charges. Maybe Dr. Kemal’s biological soup had been discovered and neutralized. Maybe the mission had been a failure.

  He’d gotten the money, but nothing else. Nothing on the Posse’s Web site, nothing on Twitter or Facebook, nothing in his personal mailbox that Gordy had set up for him through something called a blind remailer that was totally untraceable.

  Cashing out he took his slip over to the cage and the woman crisply counted out twelve one hundred–dollar bills, two twenties, a five, and three ones. He left a twenty and the three ones for her and went out to the Ford Taurus he’d rented in Chicago using one of the three fake driver’s licenses he’d bought from a Posse contact at the Department of Justice in Helena for five hundred bucks apiece.

  A couple of years ago he’d began to think of himself as a fugitive on the lam who needed to muddy the trail as much as possible. James Bond had done the same thing, only he’d had help, while Barry was on his own. Wiley, he thought of himself, and he had to grin. Wiley Coyote.

  It had snowed a little this afternoon while he’d been at the casino and coming to the driveway back to his trailer he glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind him, then stopped on the paved road before he turned in. No tire tracks. No one had been here. No one had traced him yet. No reason for them to have done so, because he’d wiped down the motor home before he’d stashed it under cover back in one of the canyons a couple of miles off U.S. 85. Moose and Brenda had refitted the Newell in South Carolina and had it shipped up to a rental agency in Billings, not picking up the others until Cheyenne, so there was no connection to him.

  Eluding possible pursuit, Barry thought, and he’d always loved the sound of it, the concept.

  He drove the half mile through the woods to the clearing in which the fifty-foot-long trailer was backed up to a stand of pine. The day before yesterday he’d had a load of straw bales delivered and he’d stacked them around the skirt to help prevent the waste pipe from freezing up when it got windy. The physical labor felt good to him; he was a self-sufficient man, a hell of a lot better than guys like Dillinger and Capone who’d only known one trick because he understood manual labor and they hadn’t. He was a castle builder.

  It was too early in the season even here to need to plug in the car, anyway the Taurus wasn’t equipped with a block heater, which in another month would be necessary. But by then he would be long gone. Maybe somewhere in Mexico. Someplace warm. Which in a way was disappointing to him. He wanted more.

  Even though he was sure that he was alone out here, he took the Beretta from under the driver’s seat, switched the safety off, and holding the pistol out away from his right leg approached the trailer on a hair trigger, ready to shoot anything that moved.

  He’d left the front door unlocked; people up here mostly did the same, because no one stole each other’s shit and he really appreciated the law-abiding honesty. Pulling it open he jumped inside, moving fast, sweeping the pistol left to right as he sidestepped into the kitchen.


  “Hello,” he called out, pointing the gun down the narrow corridor that led past the living room to the two bedrooms and bathroom in the back.

  No one was here, but he felt really good for taking all the precautions. In his opinion there were old fugitives and bold fugitives, but never old-bold fugitives. It paid to take care.

  Switching the safety on, he laid the pistol on the counter, took off his jacket and laid it on the back of a chair, pulled off his boots, and in sock feet went back to the second bedroom where his laptop was plugged into the dial-up connection.

  He logged on to his Gmail account and other than spam there was only one message, this one from ktech1234@hughes.net, the same address from which Bob Kast had initially contacted him for the North Dakota assignment, and the same from which his payments originated.

  The computer was slow, but just now Barry had no need for speed as he hit the box in front of the message line. North Dakota had been a failure—maybe—even though the money had been paid. But there’d been nothing in the news. Not even a mention, which he thought would have been likely had real damage been done to the project. A lot of government people had been wiped out, someone must have taken notice.

  When the e-mail came up it was only one word: Come.

  Greenville, South Carolina

  Command Systems

  PEOPLE SHOULD BE more important than things. And sometimes even more important than mere ideas, which was true for the so-called North Dakota District Initiative, because actually at the core of the effort were two women of overriding importance. Dr. Whitney Lipton, of course, because the idea of talking the language of bacteria so that microbes could be taught to work in concert toward a specific goal was hers. And surprisingly, the young Ashley Borden, because her father, General Robert Forester, was in charge of the ARPA-E project, and like General Leslie Groves who’d ramrodded the Manhattan District Project in the forties, so went Forester so went the Initiative. Interfere with his family and the project would suffer at least until a change of leadership took place.