Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “Nate, what the hell are you doing?” Deb Rausch asked from behind him.

  He held his stare on the dead man’s face for a beat before he looked over his shoulder at the FBI SAC from Minneapolis. “I think the stuff from the wellhead that Dr. Lipton’s people are working with was created by this guy. He’s either an Iranian or a Pakastani scientist and whatever he cooked up is just as important as why he was shot by his own team. By Barry Egan. If we can figure out those two things we might be able to find out where General Forester’s leak is.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, and that’s an order,” Nettles said. “This isn’t your county.”

  “Shut up, Captain,” Rausch said, almost offhandedly. “Have you seen this guy before?” she asked Osborne.

  Osborne turned back to the dead man and shook his head. “No, but I think I recognize the type. Outside Peshawar.”

  “I thought you were stationed in Afghanistan,” Rausch said. “Peshawar is across the border in Pakistan.”

  “Yeah, so is Karachi,” Osborne said absently. A few beats later he got to his feet with some difficulty because of his peg leg. “Did you bring a forensics team with you?”

  “They’re on their way.”

  “Be my guess that the tire prints will match the ones we lifted south of Donna Marie, and I suspect that the guy in front and this one, were shot with the same six-by-thirty-fives, the Knight PDWs I encountered in the station. Ought to be able to trace who purchased them.”

  “We’re waiting for the results of your forensics report from Bismarck. What else?”

  “Some of the cabinets forward are loaded with electronic equipment—none of which I recognized—but I smelled it. Might answer why communications for the entire facility went down, and maybe this stuff’ll be easier to trace than the PDWs.”

  “I’ll have a full team from Washington within twelve hours,” Rausch said. She turned to Nettles. “Do you have the manpower to secure this site as well as the power station?”

  “Yes,” Nettles said.

  Rausch turned back to Osborne. “Well, Nate, I guess you’re right in the middle of it now.”

  “Yeah. And I guess this isn’t the last of it.”

  Nettles started to say something, but Rausch held him off. “How do you see that?”

  “Too much money, too much inside intel. The Posse may have supplied some of the personnel, but the rest came from someone well-heeled. Someone high up on the food chain. Someone with a purpose.”

  25

  STANDING OUTSIDE THE door to the main control center on the first floor of the Administration and Research-and-Development Center at three in the afternoon, Whitney Lipton was taken by the silence here and over at Vomit Valley and even Henry’s, which had been all but deserted at noon. She’d e-mailed everyone to show up for a LF briefing at three sharp. Her Looking Forward staff meetings had always been free-for-alls; by Whitney’s dictums, no subject, no matter how fringe, was off the table. There was no order of speakers. Nor was there any control over volume, though it was usually the one with the best idea rather than the loudest voice who won the floor. But she wasn’t sure just now how it would go this time.

  She loved the staff at this moment more than ever before, because she felt responsible for their well-being—both physical and mental. She wanted with everything in her power for them to feel safe, to trust her and the science, and to trust in themselves and their own abilities, including the facility to spring back in the face of a horrible adversity.

  In the rush to put things together over the past week Whitney had not had the time to sit her people down and properly explain what had happened and what they were facing. Nor had she been able to give them a choice—considering the personal danger—of stay or go. She was going to do that this afternoon; and she would be disappointed, but wouldn’t be surprised, if all of them quit on the spot.

  Especially Susan, who’d seen the gore in the control room over at Donna Marie before the FBI people had allowed the cleanup to begin. She’d been weepy, unable to concentrate on working out what the delay in introducing the gadget to the coal seam already infected with the bacteria might have for the outcome. Only a few of the models she’d come up with made any sense, in a large part because she’d been so distracted that she’d entered a lot of objective-oriented predictive points that made no real sense, or in some cases were superfluous.

  No one else on the team had been able to help her, because they, too, were distracted by the presence of the armed Air Force personnel who seemed to be everywhere and kept streaming in along with FBI agents.

  Forester had refused to take the time to speak with them because they were her people, and it was she who could speak their language, and it was she whom they trusted. And, as he explained to her, he had a lot of what he called “fires” to put out in Washington and a leak to plug before it sunk them all.

  She glanced at her watch and at three sharp she opened the door and went inside. Dominating the room were four large flat-screen monitors, blank now, mounted along one wall in front of which were a dozen workstations with their own computer monitors and keyboards. A pair of electronic document tables flanked the room on either side, and normally some kind of music played from someone’s iPod attached to a speaker system—country and western or classical mostly—but this afternoon the center was silent. Nor were her six people busy at their various workstations as usual. They were clustered, as if for comfort, seated facing one another in a circle, a shabby Charlie Brown Christmas tree behind them. They looked up when she came in and pulled a chair over to join them. No lectures this time, no discussions at first, only some unvarnished past, present, and future truths.

  Barnhart Stein, her lab coordinator, and Alex Melin, her assistant microbiologist, both started to speak at the same time, but Whitney motioned them off. No free-for-alls this time.

  “Some really bad things happened to us,” Whitney began. “And I can’t guarantee that whoever did this won’t try again.”

  “But who?” Susan Watts asked. She was a Harvard Med School Ph.D. in microbial genetics, who was as naïve as she was funny. She was deadly serious now.

  “Someone who doesn’t want us to succeed.”

  Susan didn’t look away. “Why?”

  And Whitney had asked herself that question a dozen times since last night and she gave the only answer that made any sense to her. “Money. Coal provides almost fifty percent of all the electrical power generated in this country. That’s a lot of money.”

  “But we’re not changing anything, except we won’t have to dig the coal out of the ground, and we’ll produce almost zero carbon dioxide.”

  “That’s the point. There’s big money in mining the coal, processing it, transporting it to the stations, and processing it again. Lots of people, and not just the fat cats, depend on the process to earn a living.”

  “But don’t they know about the Keeling curve?” Susan asked earnestly. “We’re on the way to becoming another Venus. Runaway greenhouse heating. Rivers of molten lead. Nobody will survive, and making a living won’t make a fucking bit of difference.”

  She had never used the F-word, and she was exaggerating, of course, but not by much. Dr. Charles David Keeling, an environmental scientist from San Diego, began to worry about carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere in the late forties and early fifties and he designed a machine to measure carbon dioxide concentrations. The nearest cleanest place he could think of to install the machine was the top of Mauna Loa more than eleven thousand feet above sea level in Hawaii.

  The first readings showed 310 parts per million of the gas, which meant that every million liters of air contained more than three hundred liters of carbon dioxide. It was a base level, not really significant in itself at the time. But, as he suspected, most of that gas was caused by human activities. By 2005 when he died, the concentrations of carbon dioxide had risen to 380 parts per million. Some of the rise could be explained by natural causes—such as erupting
volcanoes—but a great deal of it had to do with the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal.

  The ppm were expected to top 400 soon, and reach 560 by the end of the century, which was nowhere near the atmosphere of Venus, which was 96 percent carbon dioxide, but high enough that almost every reputable scientist agreed that a great deal of harm would be done to our planet, including but not limited to massive changes of weather patterns—more intense crop and animal life extinctions caused by heat waves and more intense tropical storms and tornadoes.

  The Keeling curve, which graphed the ominous rise, was considered so important it was inscribed on a plaque at the Mauna Loa observatory and on a wall in the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C., which also showed Darwin’s finches and James Watson’s double helix.

  “The science doesn’t matter to them. Only money does.”

  It was as if Susan and the others were hearing a foreign, even heretical language; their faces went blank and the room fell silent.

  “They failed,” Whitney said.

  “What are you talking about?” Stein shouted, unable finally to contain himself. “Failed? Donna Marie is a morgue!”

  “They didn’t shut us down.”

  “All but.”

  “They’ll try again,” Whitney said. And this time the silence was so profound it almost made a noise of its own. A ringing in the ears, she thought. “So you—we—all of us have to make a choice. Do you want to continue with the project, or would you rather leave now?”

  “You mean get out of the damage path?” Frank Neubert, one of her postdocs who was the project’s prophet of doom, asked.

  And Whitney cringed. “Under the circumstances, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  Neubert looked around at the others. He was a tall, impossibly skinny man with an Ichabod Crane Adam’s apple. “What about you, Doc? Are you quitting?”

  “I’m the project director.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not what I asked,” he said, and he sounded more angry than frightened.

  She shook her head and was about to say she would have to stay, but suddenly changed her mind. These were her people, after all. And they needed the unvarnished truth. “Hell no,” she said. “The bastards aren’t going to beat me!”

  Neubert smiled, and all of a sudden everyone was talking at once, some of them shouting, laughing like little kids at a birthday party.

  Whitney wanted to quiet them down in part because she wasn’t sure that they really understood what they were facing, because sooner or later the Air Force and FBI would have to leave if any science were to get done, and in part because if their decision was to stay, a lot of work had to take place before they were up and running again.

  In the end, however, she let them have their blowout. It was, she thought, better than champagne for them.

  26

  PRESIDENT THOMPSON WAS working at his desk in shirtsleeves, a thick file perched on his knee, when National Security Adviser Nicholas Fenniger brought General Forester and FBI Director Edwin Rogers back to the Oval Office.

  He put the file down and got to his feet. “I hoped the peace would last a bit longer,” he said, coming around the desk.

  “So did I, Mr. President,” Forester said, and the two men shook hands.

  “How’s the cleanup proceeding?”

  “We should be back up and running in a week, maybe ten days.”

  “The gadget wasn’t damaged?”

  “No, and Dr. Lipton tells me that we caught a bit of luck. Her microbes in the coal seam haven’t splintered as she thought they might. So it looks as if we won’t have to start from scratch.”

  Thompson turned to Rogers. “Any progress on finding who did this to us and why?”

  “This is almost certainly the work of the Posse Comitatus, but they had help not only in terms of direction but of money,” the FBI director said. He’d been a first-string starting quarterback at Northwestern beginning in his freshman year, and at fifty-two he still had the combination of broad, muscular shoulders and narrow hips, as well as keen attention for detail.

  “Save the details for now, I’ll read your report, but how do you see the money? Who’s likely behind this and why?”

  “Well, it wasn’t a normal Posse shoestring operation. The motor coach they used was top-shelf—well over two hundred thousand. There was another quarter of a million in sophisticated electronic equipment aboard, plus the weapons they used were expensive and the Semtex plastic explosives and detonator mechanisms were U.S. military grade, possibly from a Saudi Arabian supplier—we’re still working on that aspect. Which brings up a number of interesting and delicate possibilities.”

  “You’re talking about motive?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. Oil futures traders. Derivative players. Credit default swap folks. People with more than a vested interest in stopping or at least seriously delaying any sort of a viable approach to big-scale alternative energy sources.”

  “Foreign or domestic?”

  “At this point I’d guess domestic. Organizations like Venezuela’s SEBIN don’t have the contacts with our homegrown groups such as the Posse.”

  Thompson was angry. “They’re willing to sabotage our efforts simply for short-term profits?”

  “Yes, sir. In the billions, maybe even trillions. These kinds of attacks are something we considered from the beginning of the Initiative. There’re people out there who don’t want us to succeed and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to stop us.”

  “Do we have names?”

  “The list is short, but finding the proof won’t be easy,” Rogers said. “And we have two other considerations. One of the bodies found in the abandoned motor home was that of Dr. Mohammed al-Kassem Kemal. His primary education was at the National University of Science and Technology in Rawalpindi, but he did his postdoc work in microbiology in Hungary at the University of Szeged under Laszlo Kredics.”

  “The Pakastani school mostly serves the military.”

  “Yes, sir, though not exclusively.”

  “And the second consideration?”

  “We have a leak.” Forester answered the president’s question. “Probably someone on the scientific side.”

  “Because of Dr. Kemal?”

  “We don’t have all the analysis finished, but it looks as if he created a microbial cocktail and poured it into an intake port on the wellhead that would have been released when the gadget was lowered into the seam. Dr. Lipton thinks the bacteria could have been designed to counteract our efforts, and produce a catastrophic amount of oxygen and methane.”

  “An explosive mixture.”

  “Worse, Mr. President. A blowout that would have rendered the entire coal seam totally unfit for production, and probably created a dangerous release of massive amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. But he would have needed the biological makeup—the blueprints if you will—of the bacteria we designed to produce the methane.”

  “He couldn’t have come up with the formula on his own?”

  “Not according to Dr. Lipton. She tells me that there’s nothing in the literature that ties everything together like she has. And that’s not hubris.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” the president said. “How is she holding up?”

  “Better than I would have thought possible. She’s a bright, dedicated woman. And right now she’s transferred her fear and the fears of her staff into anger and determination.”

  President Thompson sat back for just a moment. The situation in Venezuela was threatening to ramp up because of his recall of the U.S. ambassador and his expulsion of the Venezuelan ambassador over the still unpublicized beheading of Rupert Mann. The Chinese stubbornly refused to devalue their currency, pushing the balance of trade inequality to the breaking point. The Russians had started to play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek in the Atlantic with their nuclear missile submarines close aboard our Atlantic coast. Iran continued working on weaponizing its nuclear program, and both it an
d North Korea had nearly completed their development of three stage intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S. mainland as far as Denver. And the European Economic Union was still on the verge of imploding.

  And those were just the high points. Now this.

  “We’re not taking money out of anyone’s pockets,” Thompson said angrily. “If the shortsighted bastards bet their money on the future they would not only make a fortune but they would possibly save the planet.”

  It was the campaign rhetoric that some in the media had lambasted him for as impossibly naïve. “No one thinks that way any longer,” a talk show host had told him six months before the election, which he had won by a narrow margin.

  “Maybe they should,” he’d replied, for which he’d been branded the “Boy Candidate.”

  The embarrassed silence lasted only a moment or two before Thompson came back. “What’s next?” he asked.

  “Well, we certainly won’t back down,” Forester said. “We’re beefing up security, of course, but we’ll continue with the project while at the same time we look for the leak.”

  “And prepare for another attack?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, we have to consider that possibility.”

  Thompson turned to his FBI director. “Ed?”

  “We’re following the Posse back to the sources, including looking for who picked up the motor coach and where they acquired the electronics, the explosives, and the weapons. But our cybercrimes division is working on re-creating just how the Initiative’s communications systems were taken over. And I’ve appointed a special action squad to figure out who would have the most to benefit from sabotaging the Initiative.”

  “Don’t you need to uncover the money trail first?” the president asked.

  “Sorry, sir, but that’s too broad. First we identify who might benefit, then look at their ledgers.”

  Thompson’s heart hardened. The Initiative was his vision and his alone, like F.D.R.’s Social Security system. “Whatever you want, you will get. No questions asked. Do you understand?”