Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  And upon hearing Barry Egan’s report, D. S. Wood knew what had to happen next, along with the why and the how, because he clearly understood the real value of people, always had ever since he’d been a kid of fourteen working in his father’s hardware store in Ames, Iowa.

  In the first months his father had been determined to teach Donald the business from the bottom up, starting with sweeping the floors, washing the plate glass windows, and dusting the shelves. It led of course to learning about their regular customers who were the self-styled handymen, who needed the most advice, and especially those to whom expensive tools could be sold. It also led to running the cash register and doing the books each evening, keeping the ledger that showed expenses on one side and receipts on the other.

  By the time he was fifteen he had discovered the stock market quotes in the Des Moines Register, and he began to plot stocks, settling at one point on the stock of the fast-food chain McDonald’s. He got a social security number, different from his own, by sending for the birth certificate of a baby who’d died at the age of one and who was buried in the Catholic cemetery. Using that, he rented a post office box down in Des Moines, getting there and back on a Greyhound bus. One week later he opened a checking account at a bank one block from the post office and began buying his first McDonald’s stocks using money he embezzled from the hardware store.

  The problem was that the bank in Ames held the mortgage to his parents’ house as well as the revolving line of credit that kept the hardware store open.

  Two years after Donald first began buying his stocks, branching out to other corporations that he felt were up and coming, the bank audited the hardware store’s books and found that nearly eight thousand dollars was missing. The blame, of course, was placed squarely on Donald’s father. And although the old man denied everything, he was found guilty of embezzlement and was sent to jail. The house was lost, and within three months Donald’s mother accidentally overdosed on the Valium she’d been prescribed for her depression.

  By then Donald was on his way to becoming, if not exactly wealthy, at least well-off for a seventeen-year-old, and without looking back he went east to get his degrees in business and finance, though he didn’t think he really needed those pieces of paper. But they would look nice on his office wall, and the people who came to him with their money would be impressed.

  His philosophy then as now was never to look back. Guilt and especially remorse were for weaklings. If his father had kept his eye on the ball, he would never have been robbed.

  Nor was he angry that he’d been forced to make his mark the hard way. And he wasn’t angry now that the attack on the Initiative had been a failure, because Egan had shown them a better, more elegant solution. All he needed was time.

  “Time for what, exactly?” Bob Kast had asked this afternoon when Egan had gone inside to grab a bottle of cognac.

  But it wasn’t until this evening, four hours later, when Wood could come up with an idea that made any sense. Audacious, and maybe in the end impossible to achieve let alone sustain long enough to make a difference, and yet a solution.

  The problem was that one hundred dollars per barrel was a sort of tipping point for oil versus alternative energy research. The more oil cost delivered to U.S. refineries, and the higher the prices rose at the gas pumps across the country, the greater the national will became to find something else. Wind farms were being constructed all over the country using huge blades and other parts built in China, but coming online in the U.S. nevertheless. Work was steaming full speed ahead on geothermal sources, hydroelectric energy from the rivers and seas, solar power in Florida and the desert southwest, and nuclear plants. Plus coal at the Dakota Initiative.

  Below eighty dollars, however, when gas prices at the pump were well under four dollars per gallon, people began to lose interest. Voters started not to care so much. The national will began to erode, people forgot.

  “How does a buck ninety-five a gallon strike you?” he asked.

  Kast smirked. “For regular?” he asked.

  “Premium,” he said, playing the other man’s sarcasm back at him. “Give me one year—delay the Initiative for that long—and I can almost guarantee oil prices well below fifty dollars per barrel.”

  Kast laughed. “Even if you could engineer something like that, it wouldn’t last. Couldn’t last. And you’d be losing money by the carload.”

  “I make money on the way down as well as up. I’m just asking for one year.”

  “And then what?”

  “By then the presidential election will be less than twelve months away. A new agenda, new problems because the energy issue would have been resolved. The public’s focus will have changed.”

  “You can’t be suggesting that the Initiative will be abandoned?”

  “Not abandoned, exactly,” Wood said. “But put on the back burner at least for a few years until the situation once again reverses itself.”

  And suddenly seeing what D. S. was driving at, Kast threw his head back and laughed out loud from the bottom of his heart. “Christ, you’re a devious son of a bitch.”

  They were on the long veranda looking out over the valley. Wood poured another cognac as he gathered his thoughts. “I’m getting old, Bob.”

  “You’re young. Not even fifty.”

  “If I’m lucky I have thirty years left. Maybe twenty quality years. And I’m damned if I’m going to spend all that time as a pauper, or worse yet end up sharing a cell with guys like Madoff.”

  Kast gave him a sharp look. “At all costs?”

  “Of course,” Wood answered without a moment’s hesitation, because he had given the situation—his situation—a lot of thought over the past few years. Especially since some of his derivative positions had begun to seriously slip.

  Kast poured a cognac for himself. “Which is why you’re here, which is why you wanted Mr. Egan to join us.”

  “He’s a perfect fit, don’t you think?”

  “He is if you’re suggesting what I think you’re going to suggest. Another attack in North Dakota. He’s expendable.”

  “Yes, he is, but not in the way you think,” Wood said.

  And Kast laughed again as Egan came outside.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re going back to North Dakota,” Wood said.

  Egan was suddenly on guard. “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea. Worked once, but they’ll have that place sealed up tighter than a gnat’s ass.”

  “You’re not going after the power plant, not directly.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’re going to kidnap someone. A woman.”

  Egan grinned. “Okay, I gotcha. What’ll the ransom be?”

  “The ransom won’t matter,” Kast said, fully understanding what Wood was proposing. “As soon as you take the woman, you’re going to kill her and dispose of the body. That way you’ll have freedom of movement when they come looking for you.”

  “All the time in the world to negotiate,” Wood added before Egan could object.

  After a few beats, Egan nodded. “Okay, so if I pull this off, what’s in it for me?”

  “Pick a number and it’s yours,” Wood said.

  “I know some pretty big numbers,” Egan said.

  “I’ll just bet you do,” Wood said.

  PART TWO

  EARLY GAME

  Before Christmas

  22

  THE MOOD IN the White House Situation Room first thing in the morning was tense to the point of being surreal, and when President Robert Thompson arrived, his advisers, including Air Force General Robert Blake, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, shot up from their chairs.

  Thompson, a short, slender, undistinguished-looking man from Ohio who’d risen to the rank of four-star admiral in the navy was in the last two years of his second term, and in those six years nothing quite like this had been handed to him.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” Walter Page, director of the CIA, said
as Thompson took his seat. “The feed is ready.”

  Thompson, who looked like a man barely in control of his anger, nodded, and Page clicked a button on a remote control.

  The image of Paul F. Fay, U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, came up on one of the ultra-high-definition flat-panel monitors on the far wall. He was leaning against a desk in a small, white-tiled room, and he looked up, his bulldog features drooping as if he had all the cares of the world on his shoulders and hadn’t slept for several nights.

  “Good morning, Mr. President. I’m sorry to have to bring you such terrible news.”

  “There’s no mistake?” Thompson asked, his voice stiff, tightly controlled.

  “I’m afraid not, sir. Mr. Mann’s body was found yesterday afternoon in a packing crate in an abandoned factory just outside of the city. We’d been given an anonymous tip where to find him, but it wasn’t until a couple of hours ago before we were able to make a positive identification.”

  “From DNA?”

  “No, sir. From dental records.”

  “Then why the overnight delay?” Thompson demanded.

  The ambassador was obviously uncomfortable. “It took us that long to find his head. The pathologist here said it had been severed, probably by a chain saw.”

  “Good Lord Almighty,” Thompson said softly, but the microphone was sensitive enough to pick up his voice.

  “Yes, sir,” the ambassador said. “Rupert was a personal friend of mine from Boston. Same club.”

  “Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

  “No, sir. He met with Rafael Araque, the Minister of Energy, and Andres Luzardo, PDV’s president downtown at the oil company’s headquarters, and afterwards he disappeared. Caracas police along with SEBIN conducted what appeared to be a full-scale investigation, but it wasn’t until yesterday before his remains were found.”

  Thompson’s gut was tight. “It was a message,” he said. “The bastards sent us a message, and it couldn’t be clearer.”

  “Mr. President?” the ambassador said.

  The others around the table included his secretary of state, Irving Mortenson, his adviser on national security affairs, Nicholas Fenniger, and—except for the vice president—most of his National Security Council—the secretaries for Defense and Treasury, his chief of staff, and the attorney general. They were looking at him, waiting, it seemed, for the ax to fall.

  “I want you to bring his body home. We’ll have a state funeral. He was a good man.”

  “The best,” the ambassador said. “I’ll send Joanna.” Joanna Riggles was the deputy chief of Mission.

  “You personally, Paul. I want all of your nonessential personnel out of there within twenty-four hours, and then I’m officially recalling you.”

  The ambassador was clearly alarmed. “Mr. President, considering the reason that you sent Mann down here was to negotiate a reduction in the oil price increase, or at least gain a delay, recalling me would be nearly the same as declaring a state of war. Or it certainly could be misinterpreted that way.”

  The media had been on Thompson’s case since the beginning of his second term about being the wishy-washy president, the chief executive who’d caved in to special interests. Hell, even his own party had begun to question his resolve after a G7 plus one meeting in Brunei when it had seemed that he was apologizing for the U.S. not signing the Kyoto Treaty. Ironically the one positive thing he had done in the first year of his presidency—create the Dakota Initiative—was of necessity so secret that nothing political could be made of it. At least not until the results were proven.

  Two days ago there’d been the attack on Donna Marie and now this brutal beheading of his special envoy to an OPEC nation, at least in Thompson’s mind, had the possibility of a connection. A Saudi minister of oil had warned George W. that the U.S. had to tread carefully in its quest for alternative energy sources lest it suffer some serious unintended consequences. Perhaps even a protracted energy war—the oil-producing nations against the U.S., or any other major consumer nation that wanted to break free.

  In this case it amounted to a tin pot dictator attempting to intimidate the U.S.

  “Not on my watch,” Thompson, who was deep in thought, mumbled.

  “Sir?” Ambassador Fay asked.

  “I want there to be no misinterpretation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you on a plane out of there within twenty-four hours.”

  “I’d like forty-eight—” the ambassador said.

  “I’m sending their ambassador home no later than this time tomorrow,” the president said, and he glanced at the others around the long table before he turned back to the monitor. “I’m tired of playing games with the Chávez government. It stops now.”

  “There will be consequences, Mr. President,” Fenniger said. He was a dour-looking man with a very bad haircut that gave him a faintly draconian air of unbending opinion.

  “Consequences indeed,” Thompson said. “Is there anything else, Paul?”

  The ambassador shook his head. “No, sir. I’m just sorry that I could not have been of greater service here.”

  “It wasn’t you. Bring Mann’s body home with you.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” the ambassador said, and Thompson motioned for the connection to be terminated.

  “Discussion,” the president said, he was the sort of president who was wide open to divergent views and actually listened to his advisers.

  “Venezuela supplies between ten and fifteen percent of our crude oil imports,” Nicholas Trilling, the secretary of defense, said. Energy supplies had become a matter of national defense several years ago.

  “I’ll ask Canada and Mexico to make up the difference. We get more than one-third of our crude oil from them.”

  “If they refuse?” Trilling pressed.

  “Then we’ll tighten our belts,” Thompson shot back. He was angry. “We will not be held hostage.”

  “If Canada and Mexico agree, the price per barrel will rise.”

  “We’ll deal with it.”

  “Your numbers will go down,” his chief of staff, Mark Young, said.

  But Thompson waved him off. “I’m the lamest of ducks, isn’t that what FOX calls me? “

  “There may be other consequences as well,” Secretary of State Mortenson said. His hair was a white lion’s mane that made him look like the genius he actually was. He’d come from Columbia where for years he’d taught philosophy and ethics of just governance at the graduate level. “Chief among them war.”

  “The Venezuelan military is not going to start shooting at us,” Thompson said. “Chávez isn’t that crazy.”

  “But we may have to shoot at them,” Mortenson said, and Thompson realized that the man in the room for whom he had the most respect was not speaking rhetorically.

  “You’re talking about the bureau’s speculation that Venezuelan intelligence might have been behind the attack on the Initiative.”

  Mortenson nodded. “As far-fetched as the notion may be, it’s something we have to consider.”

  A surgical strike against Venezuela’s nine air force bases, including their two forward ones at Santo Domingo and San Antonio del Tachira, had been in the planning stages for a number of years, ever since Venezuela had taken delivery of two dozen SU-30MK2 Flanker-C advanced fighter-interceptors from Russia, and announced that it intended to sell its twenty-one U.S. F-l6 fighters to Iran. More urgency had come to the planning when Chávez announced his nuclear ambitions in partnership with Brazil, Argentina, and especially with Russia and Iran.

  Operation Balboa, in fact, was just this air force base contingency plan. Deny them the use of their air strike and defense capability and an invasion—at least in the near term—would not be necessary.

  “This has nothing to do with their air force,” Thompson said.

  “No, Mr. President, but the threat of Balboa would certainly give them pause.”

  Thompson chose his words carefully. “Is that what
you advise?”

  “No, sir. I’m merely bringing it to the table.”

  “Discussion.”

  “I think we’d need concrete proof that Chávez was behind the attack,” General Blake said. “Certainly more than we had for Iraq’s WMDs. We don’t need another expensive debacle.”

  “Nor do we need a would-be nuclear power willing to make attacks on our alternative energy research facilities,” Thompson said. “It’s unacceptable, and Chávez needs to learn that our patience has limits.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Mortenson said.

  “Inform Mr. Alvarez of my decision before noon,” Thompson said. Juan Alvarez was the Venezuelan ambassador to the U.S.

  “Of course,” the secretary of state said.

  “In the meantime I’ll call Duncan and Molina and give them the heads-up.” James Duncan was Canada’s prime minister, and Ernesto Molina was Mexico’s president. “If its war Chávez wants, we’ll give it to him.”

  “I sincerely hope not, for all of our sakes,” General Blake muttered half under his breath.

  The president caught it, but made no reply because he agreed.

  23

  A SLENDER WOMAN with a narrow, pleasant face, dark eyes, and thin lips, but a little too broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, got out of a cab in front of the elegant old Hotel Saskatchewan in downtown Regina, Canada, a few minutes after four on a gloomy afternoon. She had reservations in one of the deluxe suites for ten nights, right through New Year’s Eve, under the name Beatrice Effingham from San Francisco and the bellman hustled to take her three large, surprisingly heavy bags inside while she tipped the driver a fifty-dollar bill for the ten-minute ride from the airport.

  She was dressed in a dark business suit with a white shirt, narrow tie, and simple silver hoop earrings with low-cut soft Italian leather boots on her feet. A classy woman, though on the mannish side, with a pleasant smile and direct manner. A ballbuster, the cabby thought, but he was glad for the biggest tip in his life.