The edifice was built in an inverted L shape with the sixty foot tower serving as the base and the observation room extending dramatically over the cliff. The elevator was glass on the cliff side and afforded a spectacular view during ascent and descent. The outer surfaces of both the concrete tower and the observation room had been covered with native limestone and gave the impression that the whole facility was part of the natural landscape. There were restrooms just right of the elevator along with a small kitchen and storage area. To the left of the elevator was the observation room. This room was encased in glass from floor to ceiling and provided a panoramic view of one hundred and eighty degrees and one could see from the bottom of the canyon to the sky directly above.
The electric powered vans of Blackwater Canyon Resort lined up in front of the hotel at 5:15 pm and began loading passengers for the half mile trip to the Observatory. Twenty minutes later all of the passengers departed and stood in line to catch the elevator to the observation room. By 5:50 pm everyone was present in the observation room and partaking of the wine and hors d’oeuvres that had been placed about the room. It would be casual and self-serve since Bella wanted no resort staff to be present when she spoke to her senior management. The vans had departed and were scheduled to return at 10:00 pm. The sunset at 6:25 pm was as beautiful as promised with the sun reflecting off the gorgeous fall foliage of the hardwoods. The guests were awed by the scenery and in a festive mood as the wine flowed freely. Conversations were animated and cheerful. The Regional Administrator of EPA Region 8, a large woman dressed in a beige pant suit that was at least two sizes too small for a proper fit, was regaling her colleagues with a story of a small farmer in Wyoming who had built a stock pond and not received permission from her office. “The guy actually had the nerve to contact me personally and whine about my decision directing him to remove the pond. He thought that since he had obtained the State of Wyoming’s approval that he was home free. He claimed that it would cost him twice as much to remove the pond than it cost him to build it. I replied that it just wasn’t his day.” This story was met with roaring laughter from the small group EPA managers crowded around the wine station.
The sun had set and the view to the west had become a dramatic light show as a front moved in with lightning and loud thunderclaps. At 8:30 pm Bella asked everyone to be seated around the comfortable chairs and sofas.
The EPA Administrator began: “Thank you all for coming here and I hope that you have found the time spent worthwhile. As you know the last six weeks have been a major challenge to all of us. With all of us getting together in a setting away from our offices, I had hoped that we might get to know each other better and develop a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect. Despite our differences and past hard feelings, we must focus on the real challenges and not be distracted by resentments in pursuing our goals. We are not each other’s rivals and it is imperative that we pose a united front against the people who would undo all of our progress. Today I wanted you to see firsthand the natural beauty that we are preserving. We cannot preserve the environment unless we can control industry and commerce. Industry and commerce can best be controlled by not writing regulation after regulation but by controlling the blood supply. The blood supply that I am talking about is finance. I have been meeting with several Senators and the Attorney General over the last few months and we have developed a working plan to bring the five biggest banking companies under environmental regulation. Industry can be controlled by allocating their credit. Simply control the big banks and you can control industry and commerce both within the United States and abroad. We will achieve this by putting an environmental marker on bank loans that will make the banks maintain extraordinary large reserves for loans that we at the EPA deem to be environmentally undesirable. The Comptroller of the Currency is charged with monitoring the solvency of banks and through that executive department we can exert our demands. This is the preliminary legal opinion of the Attorney General and has the concurrence of the Secretary of the Treasury. The biggest challenge will be getting the Federal Reserve Board to go along. A number of Senators have pledged to help us in that regard by putting some strong pressure on the Fed such as threatening to reduce their power to regulate the financial markets and passing a bill that would shorten the terms of the Fed Board of Governors and the Chairman. Consider my remarks as highly classified and for your ears only. We still have a tremendous amount of work to do.”
The reaction of the audience was stunned silence and then thunderous applause. Bella deferred taking questions and encouraged everyone to discuss her remarks among themselves for the remainder of the evening. As of tomorrow the subject would be forbidden until the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Treasury made public announcements after the upcoming elections. The gathering became very animated and giddy with excitement as the bureaucrats from the EPA fanaticized about their potential new powers. The EPA had become a typical Federal bureaucracy in that having achieved most of the objectives outlined in their original charter, such as reducing air, land, and water pollution, they mutated much like a disease organism and sought survival and growth above all else. The public be damned, our organization must grow and prosper had become the cause.
Bella Rasmussen stood with her back to the glass windows looking out over the Blackwater Canyon. With the lightning and thunder as a backdrop she looked powerful and invincible. It was an impression that she reveled in creating. She was standing beside the overweight woman in the beige pant suit when the explosion went off. At first everyone thought a lightning strike had hit nearby until the room began to shudder, shake and violently tilt towards the thousand foot abyss. The woman standing next to Bella was flung through the glass windows into the thousand foot drop. An observer could be forgiven for concluding that a two hundred pound Parker House roll had fallen off of the Jolly Green Giant’s dining table as she screamed towards her demise. It just wasn’t her day. The rest of the Observatory and its occupants followed the fat lady into the canyon. All were dead within seconds. By 9:01 pm the EPA as an organization had been decapitated. The big plans outlined by the now deceased Bella Rasmussen would have to wait.
The guests and workers at the hotel had heard the explosion and concluded that it was just one of the many huge thunderclaps brought on by the storm. Soon the hotel had its own problems as the intense storm knocked out the power. The power line that connected the hotel to the local grid had been severed by falling trees and the solar power that the resort was so proud of was of little use. The backup generator that used biofuel was fired up and it lasted all of twenty minutes before it sputtered to a stop. It seems that generators using biofuel had to be run frequently or risked being clogged.
Apparently no one at the resort was aware of this maintenance requirement and the result of months of biofuel sitting in the generator had achieved a less than desirable result.
At 9:50 pm the resort’s electric vans headed towards their appointed pickups at the Observatory. At least the batteries on the vans were charged up and the headlights gave off some illumination in what was becoming a very nasty evening. Creeping along the gravel road and around the wooded hill between the hotel and the Observatory the drivers of the three vans were horrified to find that the Observatory had completely vanished. Instead of the magnificent sixty foot structure there was just a blackened hole in the ground. They scurried back to the hotel and reported to the general manager who immediately attempted to call the emergency authorities. His attempts failed because the same trees that had knocked out the power lines had also claimed the telephone landlines. The Federal Communications Commission, in concert with the EPA, had blocked every request for erecting a cell phone tower so there was no cell phone communication either. The general manager drafted one of the van drivers to take one of the vans to the nearest town, Davis, and summon help. The driver made it halfway to his objective when the underpowered electric vehicle got stuck in high water and shorted out. There were no other vehicles on the
resort property since both guests and workers normally parked in a lot halfway between the resort and the town of Davis and were transported to the hotel via the shuttle service provided by the electric vans. It was now raining harder and the creeks and rivers were beginning to fill.
By 11:30 things took a turn for the worst as the storm system stalled and continued to dump rain into the swollen creeks and rivers near the Blackwater Canyon Resort. The temperature had dropped to forty-two degrees and guests were beginning to complain about the chill. The hotel had several large fireplaces but they were just for show since the “green” resort had no capacity to burn wood and thereby pollute the pristine wilderness. By 2:20 am over five inches of rain had fallen on the area and showed no signs of letting up. Rainwater had penetrated the fissures caused by the explosion at the Observatory and big chunks of limestone began to slide into the canyon from the lubricated ground.
With this rock and mudslide went any forensic evidence that could have been retrieved and analyzed from the site of the explosion. The Collective had not planned on Mother Nature’s help, but appreciated it nonetheless.
The storm system did not move until 6:30 am on Sunday morning. Over nine inches of rain had fallen in less than ten hours and the widespread flooding had wiped out roads and bridges in the area of the Blackwater Canyon Resort. Emergency crews were not able to gain access to the area of the Observatory until late afternoon on Sunday. The recovering of human remains would be a grim task in the coming days. Scavenging bears, coyotes, and vultures complicated recovery operations. At least the vultures gave the searchers some idea of where to look along the river and creek banks. An inquiry would be made into the causes of what the press was now calling the “Blackwater Canyon Resort Disaster.” It would be concluded that there must have been some structural flaw that became fatal with the high wind and perhaps a lightning strike.
Monday, October 20, 2014
10:30pm
Mountain and Meadow Ranch, Wyoming
Peter Wallis had just finished watching the evening news as newscaster after newscaster bemoaned the tragic loss of the EPA people. There were the usual stories of how great these people had been and their dedication to public service …. ad nauseum. A cynical person could observe that the EPA executive retreat did remove about thirty-nine thousand pounds of carbon dioxide annual emissions from the atmosphere since a human emits about one thousand pounds of carbon dioxide per year and now there were thirty-nine less of them. Pete thought to himself, “Just wait until April and you’ll see what a real disaster looks like.” The plans for Operation Falling Star had been carefully and thoroughly laid. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
CHAPTER 12 - CATCH A FALLING STAR
Sunday, November 15, 2014
10:15 pm
The Stone Cabin at the Mountain and Meadow Ranch in Wyoming
Pete Wallis sat around the roaring fire with Sara, Niko, and Mordecai. The three amigos always loved a trip to the Stone Cabin and Pete enjoyed the solitude from human contact. He had been here for two days and used the time to reflect on the events of the last fourteen months since the death of his friend, John Ross. So far things had gone according to plan and the results were:
The two members of OSHA that had that, had harassed his friend into a premature grave were now in prison.
OSHA had rescinded the despised 2011 directive that had made life miserable for small farms.
The Attorneys General of six states, with the support and advice of the Pike and Wasserman law firm, had filed suit against seven Federal agencies.
The IRS still had not recovered from the attack on its Cincinnati operation and the subsequent vandalism throughout the country.
The BLM was under attack from Congress and being sued for their confrontation with the religious groups of the Convocation of Interfaith Understanding. Rabbi Silver and his organization had retained Jake Wasserman to go after the BLM in court. Pete sent Pike and Wasserman another check for a million dollars to help with Rabbi Silver’s legal costs. Elder Maxwell Jonell was well supported financially by the Mormon Church in his legal actions against the BLM, and Pastor Henry Jefferson of the Association of African-American Baptist Clergymen asked his organization for and received protest demonstrations outside the BLM’s Washington DC headquarters.
The EPA had almost been shut down in its entirety. The task of correcting the computer records so that each region could access its own records had been indefinitely delayed by the deaths of all of the regional Chief Technology Officers at the Blackwater Canyon Resort. The death of the rest of the entire senior management paralyzed the agency and new management would require Presidential nominations and Senate confirmations. The recent mid-term elections dictated that this process would not begin until late January, 2015, at the earliest.
Pete curled up on the large double bed with his usual sleeping companions in their preferred spots. Mordecai had staked out a spot on one of the pillows, Sara was curled up next to Pete, and Niko flopped his one hundred and twenty-five pounds at the foot of the bed. Anyone meaning to harm Pete while he slept would face a formidable row of teeth from an eighty-five pound Golden Labrador and a domesticated timber wolf. As usual the fifty caliber Smith and Wesson revolver was holstered and looped around the bedpost next to Pete’s pillow. Wallis would return in the morning to the main house and begin the preparations for the Thanksgiving holiday at the ranch. Thanksgiving was a great feast at the ranch with all of Pete’s kids, grandkids, and the Mountain and Meadow Ranch staff and families attending. It would offer Pete a nice respite from the rather unpleasant activities that had required much of his attention over the last year.
November 19, 2014
11:30pm
Rest Area on I-70, eighty miles from St. Louis
Two white cargo vans pulled up to the immediate right and left of the semi-trailer truck marked “East St. Louis Recycling.” The cargo vans had the logo of “Missouri Fencing Company.”
The van on the left was empty and soon two men began filling it with sixteen pipe sections from the semi-trailer. These sections measured nine feet long and had a combined weight of seven hundred and twenty pounds. This van departed within ten minutes and began the ninety minute drive to the “Farm.” The men from the van on the right transferred seven hundred and twenty pounds of common drilling pipe from the van into the trailer.
The second van departed to the “Farm.” The East St. Louis Recycling semi then proceeded to a truck stop twenty miles east on I-70, spent the night, and continued its journey to East St. Louis in the morning. The weight of the pipe to be recycled exactly matched the records of the warehouse of the Wallis Technologies’ Mole Works as well as the recorded weights at the three commercial vehicle weigh stations encountered on the trip from Kansas. The transportation specialists in the Collective had been very thorough.
January 9, 2015
10:45am
The Stone Cabin, Mountain and Meadow Ranch
Hawkins and Snyder sat across from Pete at the roughhewn wooden table in the kitchen and suggested a major change in the plans for Operation Falling Star. The date of April 15 would be moved to April 4 and the use of the TAMES would be changed to another place and purpose. Pete approved the change in plans immediately and did not ask for any operational specifics. The details would be left in the capable hands of Mr. Hawkins and executed through his people in the Collective. The original plans for the April 15 operation would not change significantly and would simply be executed eleven days earlier than had been proposed. The dramatic change would be in diverting the TAMES unit to an operation that would be sure to bring a lot of extra heat from the Federal Government. Hawkins thought that the best time to deploy the Drama Club in their dealings with the St. Louis miscreant would be immediately after the April 4 activities since the Feds would be busy, very busy. The Dogcatchers would secure the miscreant no later than noon on April 4 and no earlier than 10:00 pm on April 3. The observation and recordings of his activities predicted t
hat this would not present any major problems.
After a hearty lunch Snyder and Hawkins rose to leave and Hawkins asked Pete, “What can I tell our friends in Tel Aviv about the TAMES and the Broomsticks?”
“Just tell them no problem, if DOD blocks an export license, I’ll come to Israel on a vacation and build the units myself in their labs,” was Pete’s reply. Hawkins and Snyder grinned because they knew that is exactly what Wallis would do if he encountered any roadblocks. They collected their special briefcase and another duffle bag containing five million in cash and joined Pete in his pickup for the twenty-five minute ride to the ranch’s airport where their corporate jet was waiting. As usual there was no conversation and only a nod as they climbed aboard the jet. The corporate jet of Snyder Security Services was going to be busy in the next several days with a trip to Detroit and a trip to Tel Aviv on the agenda.
January 12, 2015
2:00pm
The Greek Town section of Detroit, Michigan
“So Mikos, do you think that you’ll have any problems in Hamtramck passing as a local Yemeni?” Hawkins asked of the swarthy man sitting next to him in the basement of the Greek restaurant owned by Mikos’ brother. “None at all,” replied Mikos Sofios, one of the most reliable operatives in the Collective, “I know my way around that area pretty well and wearing the right clothing will make me look like just one of the local transplants.” Hamtramck was a city that was surrounded by Detroit and had a strong Polish ethnic component that in recent years had been supplanted by a huge influx of immigrants from Yemen. Gone were the Catholic churches and in their place were mosques. Hawkins left the computer and the two disks that would be used at the appropriate time as well as a payment of twenty-five thousand dollars, another twenty-five thousand would be paid upon completion of the assignment.
Patriots Versus Bureaucrats Page 13