Blowout

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “What else?”

  “Apparently the two Wall Street types may have met with a Venezuelan intelligence agent in Havana just a few days ago, which could mean that they’re planning another attack. But it’ll take some time to put it together, and by then it could be a moot point if the experiment actually works. I’m going to ask the doc what she thinks her chances are and how soon we’ll know one way or the other. But my dad says that time is of the essence. We need to get it right and soon.”

  “If that’s the thinking in Washington, why the hell was the Air Force pulled out?”

  “That’s just the thing. Nettles’s security people along with a couple of jets down at Ellsworth are standing by twenty-four/seven. They actually want another attack. If they could catch someone with their hands in the cookie jar—someone from Venezuela—it would help solve the diplomatic problem we’re in.”

  “And get a lot of innocent people killed in the doing.”

  “Exactly,” Ashley said. “Which is why I needed to come out here tonight. If they’re ready to do the experiment soon, I want Dr. Lipton to not tell anyone outside of the Initiative. Especially not my dad’s office. If there is a leak in Washington, and they find out that the experiment is going ahead in the next week or so, the attack could come. I want her to lie to my father.”

  51

  THE LAST OF the contractors filed out of the generating station’s side door prodding Jim Cameron, his hands tied behind his back, to where Egan, Daley, and the others waited by the two Hummers.

  “Barry Egan, I recognized your stench from all the way inside,” Cameron said. The side of his face was cut open and blood ran down his chin.

  “Lieutenant Commander, not a very impressive man for all your SEAL training,” Egan said, enjoying himself. He’d always hated officers, most of whom had no earthly idea what they were doing, giving orders that half the time made absolutely no sense. Every battle and every war had been lost not by the blood and guts of the grunts, but by the bad decisions made at the top.

  “If you’ve cut the phone service or any of the data links like last time, Air Force jets down at Ellsworth are already scrambling. Means you have twenty minutes tops to cover your ass before the shit starts raining down on you.”

  “Actually I expect it to take a little longer, because we’ve only disrupted your cell service, and of course disabled the four satellite phones. Your data links are still streaming. I’d give Ellsworth one hour to get its shit in one sock and show up here.”

  Cameron glanced over his shoulder. “Your people are wiring the place to blow, but it won’t matter, you know. If you destroy the plant it’ll just be rebuilt. Maybe delay us by a few months.”

  “You will have lost access to your coal seam.”

  “Not the only coal in the country, or even nearby. We’ll drill another well. And another, and another, if need be. You and the Posse are out of your league.”

  “But you’re forgetting something,” Egan said. “All the coal seams and wells won’t mean a thing without your chief scientist and her team. But especially her.”

  Cameron’s facial muscles tightened. “She’s not the only scientist who can do the work. Anyway her methods and her formulas have all been set down. No need to kill her because if you did someone else would just pick up where she left off.”

  Egan suppressed a laugh. “Romance in the Badlands between the scientist and the SEAL? Officers like you are like bags of shit, a dime a dozen. In any event you’re right about us destroying this place, but we’re not going to kill her. We’re going to hold her as hostage.”

  “For money?”

  “Just for a little delay,” Egan said. “But you’ll see for yourself if you don’t cause us trouble.” He stepped aside so that Cameron could be loaded in the back of the Hummer, two of Daley’s men bracketing him, their drawn pistols jammed into the side of his head.

  Four of his men had already relocked the rear gate and had taken up defensive positions with night vision oculars. They would easily spot anything heading their way either by ground or by air. The others were inside the plant setting the explosives this time with radio-controlled detonators. No matter what happened this place was going to come crashing down, the well permanently capped. They would rebuild, if not right here, someplace close, but it would take time, and that’s all Bob Kast and the spic who’d briefed him were interested in. “Buy us the time, and you’ll get your reward.”

  Daley got behind the wheel, his other three men climbing to the middle just behind the front seats, and Egan hesitated for just a moment at the front passenger door. “Post one, team lead,” he spoke into his lapel mike.

  The designated squad leader at the rear gate came back immediately. “Team lead, post one secure. No perimeter movement.”

  “Keep your eyes open,” Egan radioed back. “Post two, team lead. Report your status.”

  “Team lead, post two. We’re about halfway home. Ten minutes.”

  “Assemble at your designated fire points when you’re finished, and report.”

  “Roger that. Post two, out.”

  Egan wore a standard issue Beretta 9mm semiauto loader in a holster strapped to his chest beneath his camos. He took the pistol out, checked the load, and climbed up into the Hummer and they took off, passing through the interior gate and heading up toward the compound, the big, knobby tires crunching on the hard snowpack in the below-zero temperature.

  “Who else out here tonight will be armed?” Egan asked.

  “Just the three Air Force cops, one of whom will be manning the main gate,” Daley said.

  “What about the other two?”

  “Should be getting some rest, but this is New Year’s Eve so they’ll be at Henry’s.”

  “Good, it’ll make it easier to take them down,” Egan said.

  “You said you weren’t going to kill anyone,” Cameron protested from the back.

  “If he says another word, shoot him,” Egan said without turning around.

  A hundred yards from the R&D control building across from which were clustered the barracks, dining hall, and Henry’s, the snow-covered gravel road split off left to the compound and right to the guard shack at the main gate. Egan motioned to the right.

  “How do you want to play this?” Daley asked. “The gate is equipped with a panic button direct to Ellsworth special ops.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Egan said. “I’ll want one of your people to take over, just in case someone else shows up.”

  Daley pulled up at the guard shack, and Egan hopped out and went around the front of the Hummer as the lone guard came out. He’d left his M4 carbine inside, and when he saw Egan’s face—which he did not recognize—he started to reach for the pistol at his hip. But then he caught sight of the single star and he came to attention.

  “Sorry, sir, I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Your mistake,” Egan said, striding directly to where the guard stood. He raised his pistol from where it was concealed behind his right leg and fired one shot at point-blank range into the man’s forehead, knocking him off his feet.

  One of Daley’s men got out of the Hummer and came over. “Are we expecting anyone?” he asked.

  “No, but you can never tell. If someone does, let me know on your tactical radio, and I’ll give you instructions.”

  “Yes, sir,” the contractor said. “I’ll hide the body and clean up the mess, just in case.”

  “Do that,” Egan said, and he fired another round into the side of the dead guard’s head. “Insurance,” he said, and he laughed, holding back a full bray. But God how he loved this shit.

  Back in the Hummer he glanced in the rear and Cameron glared back at him, wanting to say something, but holding his tongue. Biding his time. The chief of security was almost certainly the most dangerous man here tonight, and Egan had no real idea why he didn’t just kill the bastard, except that he wanted to have a little fun first.

  Daley turned around, the Hummer easily bulling
its way through the snow piled up at the sides of the gravel road and headed the three hundred yards up to the compound. The two-story R&D building was flanked by the living quarters and dining hall on one side and a machine shop and a low-slung concrete block building that contained the level-five clean room where Lipton had conducted her critical on-site microbial control experiments on the other.

  From what little Egan understood of the doctor’s work, the bugs she had created could talk to each other, as wild-ass impossible as that seemed, but they were no real danger to people. They preferred to munch on coal and shit out methane. The clean room was just in case she was wrong.

  Which she was, Egan thought. But probably not about her bugs, just about the people she’d pissed off because of her work.

  Henry’s, the transplant bar and restaurant from New York’s Upper West Side, housed in a ramshackle-looking plywood-sheathed structure covered with tar paper, was directly across from the R&D building. The tall narrow windows on either side of the door were lit up and as Daley parked in front Egan could hear the thump of loud music and the sounds of laughter even over the Hummer’s engine noise with the windows rolled up.

  “They’re supposed to run the big experiment tomorrow or Monday,” Daley said. “Everybody thinks that they’re home free.”

  “Well, they’re wrong,” Egan said. “Is there a back door?”

  “Just the fire door,” Daley said. “But even if they got out they wouldn’t get far.” He nodded, the movement almost imperceptible.

  One of Daley’s key instructions was that sixty minutes prior to the takeover the fire doors and emergency exits from every building in the compound were to be jammed from the outside. He’d just indicated that the job had been done. It meant that he, too, had a good deal of respect for Cameron.

  “Then let’s rock and roll,” Egan said.

  52

  IT WAS AT times like these that Bob Forester missed his wife the most. She had died when Ashley was young and afterwards he’d never had the inclination to make himself available to try again. Somehow the dating scene seemed superfluous with all that the military had given him to deal with. But now, alone in his home at Fort McNair on New Year’s Eve, he suspected that he had made a terrible mistake. Not exactly a wasted life, but a lonely one.

  The television in the family room was on ABC with the crowd in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop, the sound muted; he wasn’t up for noise tonight. He sat on the couch, his feet propped up on the coffee table with a snifter of very good Armagnac Cames, the bottle on the lamp table beside him.

  The Initiative had survived, by a bit of luck, a bit by the Rapid Response Team up from Ellsworth, and in a good measure by the efforts of Jim Cameron and Nate Osborne. More was coming their way, of course, especially after the experiment in the next few days when the president would make a formal announcement of what they’d accomplished. OPEC would make some move, but they’d expected as much and the president had ordered more stockpiles of oil, and had been in negotiations with Canada and Mexico to increase their outputs if the Saudis cut back deliveries to the U.S. as the Venezuelans had already done.

  There’d be more trouble of geopolitical nature from Russia and just about every other oil-exporting nation that would be dampened somewhat by the president’s announcement that Dr. Lipton’s discoveries, including the breakthrough quorum-sensing gadget, would be made available to any nation who wanted it.

  But the main threat, as Forester understood it, would be from the oil hedge fund and derivative managers who would stand to lose billions. They would fight back with the only weapon at their disposal—money. In the top secret briefings he’d attended at the start more than six years ago, the president had warned them all that the Initiative could very well send this country into an economic tailspin that would be much worse than the meltdown over the housing mortgage market and truly rival the Great Depression.

  “We’ll have to do more than tighten our belts,” the president had told them in the White House Situation Room.

  His shirtsleeves had been rolled up to indicate that he was willing to dig in and get to work. And Forester remembered thinking at the time that it had been a bit of unnecessary theatrics. But it had worked. Everyone had at least figuratively rolled up their sleeves, and agreed that if the Initiative worked, if they could come up with a means of producing cheap, relatively green energy, sharply cutting the dependence on foreign oil, the risks would be well worth the rewards.

  The television zoomed in on a dozen or more couples, the women in wedding dresses, the men in tuxedoes, apparently waiting to get married as the ball dropped, looking giddy, probably already half drunk, he thought. But happy, and it made him think of Ashley back with her sheriff in North Dakota. A good match, he thought. A strong man to backstop her, and a strong woman at his side to give life meaning. In that at least he was content. It was enough, and whatever else the Initiative brought he was proud that he’d had a hand in it.

  He finished his drink and poured another, his third. For a moment he sat staring at the television set, but then put down his glass and speed-dialed Ashley’s cell phone. He was being maudlin, he supposed, but he had the sudden urge to connect with her. Wish her a happy new year.

  A mechanical voice advised that the person being called was temporarily unavailable.

  Forester sat up, the first tingling of an alarm in his stomach, and speed-dialed again with the same result. Ashley almost never turned off her cell phone. She’d once explained that as a journalist she couldn’t afford to be out of contact. Never. Or almost never.

  He went back to his study, powered up his iPad, and found the phone number for the night duty center at the FBI’s cybercrimes unit and called it. A night duty officer answered on the first ring with only the telephone number.

  “This is General Bob Forester at ARPA-E, I need a little favor this evening.”

  “What can we do for you, sir?” the officer asked. Because of the Initiative, Forester’s name had been put on a wilco list at a number of agencies in and around the metro area, including the Pentagon. If he asked for assistance it was to be given.

  “I’m trying to reach a cell phone in the Medora, North Dakota, area without luck. Check the availability of service in the vicinity, would you?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Forester pulled up the number for the special operations unit at Ellsworth while he waited.

  The officer came back on the line. “All the towers in a hundred-mile radius of that location seem to be in working order, sir. Except for the one at the Initiative installation. Are you declaring a possible incident?”

  “Not yet, thanks for your help,” Forester said. He phoned Ellsworth, and the number was answered immediately.

  “Special ops night duty Sergeant Crowley. May I help you, sir?”

  “This is General Bob Forester, I want you to check on something for me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There may be a problem with the cell phone service at the Initiative. I couldn’t reach a number when I tried a minute ago.”

  “Stand by, sir.”

  For just a moment Forester could not bring up an image of his daughter’s face in his mind’s eye, and it frightened him and he glanced at her framed graduation photograph on his desk.

  Sergeant Crowley was back. “The cell phone tower up there is definitely down, but from what I’m seeing here, all the data links are streaming.”

  “What about the hotline to the main gate?”

  “Checking, sir,” Crowley said.

  Forester could hear the sergeant talking to someone for a half minute or so, before he came back.

  “I got through, sir, everything seems fine up there.”

  But it wasn’t fine. Batttlefield instincts, he told himself. Trust your inner voice, trust your gut.

  “Does anyone up there have a sat phone?”

  “Yes, sir. I have four numbers listed.”

  “Call them,” Forester said. He
had Whitney’s sat phone number but he wanted someone at Ellsworth to make the calls, to hers as well as the others.

  This time it took a full minute, and when the sergeant came back he was fully engaged, crisp. “None of them are in service.”

  “I’m declaring a likely incident. Get your people alerted, and have Captain Nettles call me as soon as he’s airborne. But make sure he understands from the get-go that if an attack is actually in progress, it wouldn’t be the same smash-and-grab as before. This time it’ll be more sophisticated and the incursion force will likely be better informed, trained, and equipped.”

  Forester headed upstairs to get into uniform as he phoned his own special operations night duty officer and ordered an aircraft to be prepped for him at Andrews and a chopper to pick him up at his home within twenty minutes.

  Next he telephoned Edwin Rogers at his home, and the FBI director answered immediately.

  “I thought that you would call. I just got the heads-up from my cybercrimes unit. Said you tried to reach your daughter but couldn’t get through.”

  “Ellsworth confirms that the cell tower at the Initiative is out of service.”

  “Do you think that she’s at the Initiative?”

  “I think that it’s a good possibility. Ellsworth special ops tried to reach Dr. Lipton via sat phone but couldn’t get through, so I declared an emergency. They should be airborne in less than twenty minutes. I’m going out there myself tonight.”

  “I want you to listen to me, Bob, and make sure that you understand exactly what I’m telling you. We know that there is a leak somewhere, and we naturally assumed that it was inside either the project itself or somewhere in your staff.”

  The second part was news to Forester, though he wasn’t surprised. “Who is it, do you know?”

  “Not for sure, but our confidence was fairly high,” Rogers said. “And it’s even higher now.”

  “I don’t understand,” Forester said, his gut tight. “Who is it?”

  “Your daughter.”