Free Fire

by C. J. Box

  “And if I break through?” Joe asked.

  “Third-degree burns at the minimum,” Cutler said, busi nesslike. “Excruciating pain and skin grafts for the rest of your life. If you live, I mean. Worse, you’ll deface the thermal. But it would be nothing like if you actually fell into a hot springs or geyser.”

  “What would happen?”

  “You’d die instantly, of course; then your body would be boiled. I’ve seen elk and buffalo fall in over the years. Within a couple of hours, their hair comes off in clumps and the flesh separates from the bone. The skeleton sinks and the meat and fat cooks and it smells like beef stew. Sometimes, an animal body affects the stability of the thermal and it erupts and spits all that meat back out. Not pretty.”

  “Maybe I should stay up here,” Joe said.

  “Just step where I step,” Cutler said. “Not an inch either way and you’ll be fine. I’ve done this for years and I know where to walk and where not to walk.”

  Joe felt a thrill being allowed to go where millions of tourists couldn’t go, and stepped over the railing. He wished Demming—or Marybeth—could see him now.

  For the next hour, Cutler carefully removed coins and debris from the geysers and hot pools. Joe followed in his footsteps and gathered them and noted what was found in Cutler’s journal. Cutler explained how the underground plumbing system worked, how mysterious it was, how a geyser could simply stop erupting in one corner of the park and a new geyser could shoot up forty miles away as the result of a mild tremor or indiscernible geological tic. How the water that came from the geysers had been carbon-tested to reveal it was thousands of years old, that it had been whooshing through the underground works before Columbus landed in America and was just now being blasted into the air.

  CUTLER TOOK A quick turn off the road and pulled over to the side. Ahead of them was a hugely wide but squat white cone emitting breaths of steam. Joe was unimpressed at first glance.

  “What you’re looking at is Steamboat Geyser,” Cutler said. “It’s by far the biggest geyser in the world. When this baby goes—and we never know when or why—it can be seen from miles away. It reaches heights of four hundred feet, three times Old Faithful, and drenches everything around here for a quarter of a mile. The volume of boiling water that comes out of it is scary. Nearly as scary as its unpredictability. We’ve waited years for an eruption, and almost declared it dormant when it proved otherwise.”

  “When’s the last time it blew?” Joe asked.

  “A year ago, in the winter. Three times. No one was there when it went, but the evidence of the eruption was a herd of parboiled bison found a hundred yards away. It seems to be getting more active. The eruptions used to be up to fifty years apart, but last winter they were four days apart.”

  Cutler whistled. “I’d give my left nut to see it erupt.”

  THE FIREHOLE RIVER was on their left as they departed the geyser basin and drove north on the highway. Bison grazed along the banks and steamy water poured from Black Sand Geyser Basin into the river.

  Geyser Gazers, according to Cutler, numbered nearly seven hundred strong, although the hard-core, full-time contingent amounted to only about forty. They were all volunteers, and included scientists, lawyers, and university professors as well as retired railroad workers, laborers, and the habitually unemployed. The thing that brought them together was their love, knowledge, and appreciation for Yellowstone and the thermal activity within the Yellowstone caldera. Most showed up on weekends or took their vacations to help. Only a few stayed in or near the park on a full-time basis, like Doomsayer and George Pickett.

  “How many ascribe to Keaton’s philosophy that we’re all going to die?” Joe asked.

  “Maybe a couple dozen,” Cutler said. “The rest recognize the threat but choose to go on and live their lives normally, like me.”

  “What about Hoening and the other Gopher Staters? Were they Keaton disciples?”

  “No chance.”

  “Another theory shot down,” Joe said, and smiled at Demming. That’s when he noticed how introspective she was. She didn’t appear to be listening to Cutler explain about geyser activities.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She shook her head, indicating she would tell him later.

  CUTLER PARKED AT Fountain Paint Pots and grabbed his pole and slotted spoon. Joe said he’d meet up with him in a minute. As Cutler strode away on the boardwalk, Joe turned to Demming.

  “Ashby?”

  “Yes. He met with Chief Ranger Langston and they’re getting agitated and nervous. They want us to break it off here and come back up to Mammoth. Langston is quite adamant about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Ashby said they don’t like the direction we’re headed, going to the Bechler station, interviewing Mark Cutler. He thinks we’re going to open the Park Service to unwanted exposure.”

  Joe shook his head, felt anger well in him. “ ‘Unwanted exposure’? What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure, but they seem to think you have another agenda. And they don’t like your friend being up here.”

  “How do they know about Nate?”

  “I told them,” she said. “I had to. It’s my job.”

  Joe said, “How much time do we have?”

  “They want us back by tonight.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Joe said, wondering what they’d done to suddenly warrant Ashby and Langston’s concern, wondering if he’d need to call Chuck Ward to intervene, if possible. “I wish I knew what was going on here.”

  “Me too,” she said. “What really seemed to upset them was us talking with Cutler. Maybe it’s just a Park Service versus contractor thing, I don’t know.”

  “Or maybe Cutler knows something they don’t want us to find out,” Joe said.

  AS THEY DROVE, Joe noticed Cutler glancing more frequently in his rearview mirror.

  “That’s strange,” he said. “I noticed that pickup back when we left Fountain Paint Pots. He was the only other vehicle in the lot, parked way over on the far side. Now I see it behind us.”

  “Don’t turn around,” Joe said to Demming, not wanting her to reveal to the driver of the truck that they were aware of him. “Let’s check it out in the side mirror.”

  Joe leaned over Demming to see. The mirror vibrated with the motor, but he could see a glimpse of a pickup grille a third of a mile behind them. Over a long straightaway, Joe could see the truck better. Red, late-model 4x4 Ford. Montana plates. Single driver wearing a cowboy hat. As he looked, the pickup driver reduced his speed so it faded into the distance.

  When Cutler turned off the highway at Biscuit Basin onto a one-lane road, he slowed down and watched his mirror.

  “Don’t see him now,” he said. “He must have turned off. You guys are making me paranoid, I guess. I normally wouldn’t notice something like that, but there are so few visitors in the park the truck sort of stood out.”

  The road rose into heavy timber and broke through onto a wide, remote plain dotted with dead but standing trees and steam rising from cratered mouths. The trees had no leaves and were bone-white in color.

  “This is one of the hottest spots in the park,” Cutler said. “We’ve watched it get hotter over the past four years. That’s why the trees are dead; all of that hot mineral water got soaked up by their roots to fossilize them. There’s lot of activity here, and some really great hot pots.”

  Joe glanced at his list of questions.

  “What about Clay McCann?” Joe asked. “Did you ever meet him? Did they ever mention his name?”

  Cutler shook his head. “I saw his name around but I never met him. And no, the Gopher Staters never mentioned him.”

  “What do you mean you saw his name?”

  “On some papers, some bio-mining contracts.”

  Joe exchanged glances with Demming. “Bio-mining?” Joe said. “That’s twice today you mentioned it.”

  “What, you haven’t heard of it?”

 
“No,” Joe said. He asked Demming, “Have you?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” she sighed.

  THEY PARKED AT the end of a dirt two-track that culminated with a downed log blocking the road and a Park Service sign reading ACCESS PROHIBITED. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Joe noticed that despite the sign there were clearly tire tracks in the crusty dirt beyond the log where someone had driven. He asked Cutler about it.

  “Bio-miners, I’m sure,” Cutler said. “They have a permit. Follow me.”

  It was midday and the sun was straight overhead in a virtually cloudless blue sky and the day had warmed considerably into the mid-sixties. Joe was struck by the utter quiet all around them as they hiked up a footpath and over a gentle rise. The only sounds were their boots, breath, and the occasional caw of a far-off raven.

  “It’s very controversial,” Cutler said, swinging a thermister in a case next to his leg as he walked. “I’m surprised you haven’t heard or read about these projects.”

  Joe confessed he’d been isolated the last few months, working on a ranch near Saddlestring.

  “Lucky you,” Demming said. He could tell by her demeanor that she felt strongly about the topic.

  “I know I keep telling you how unique the Yellowstone caldera is,” Cutler said, “but up here, wonders never cease, so what can I say? Over the last twenty years, biologists have discovered thermofiles—microbes—that are absolutely unique to anywhere else on earth. I’m no expert, but the reason they find them here is a kind of biological perfect storm—the combination of the hot water, the minerals, and the ecological isolation of the area—that’s produced all these rare species. Only real recently have companies discovered there are, um . . . properties . . . in some of the microbes that can be used for other purposes.”

  “What kinds of properties?” Joe asked.

  “Well, one particular microbe has been found that radically assists bioengineers perform DNA typing. From what I understand, it’s really advanced science in that area. Another microbe can apparently speed up the aging process in some mammals tenfold, or so they think. That’s a scary one, if you ask me. And there are all kinds of rumors that I can’t back up, like thermophiles that can help unlock a cure for cancer, to other microbes that can be weaponized. The government, legitimate companies, and bio-pirates are afoot up here these days.”

  “Bio-pirates?”

  Demming moaned. “Yes, Joe. There have been reports of freelancers up here scooping up growth and plant species in the hot water runoff and trying to sell it to companies or other governments. No one’s actually been caught at it yet, but every once in a while there’s a report. As if we don’t have enough to worry about up here, you know.”

  Joe felt a growing sense of discovery and excitement as Cutler and Demming talked. This was new. There was nothing in the “Zone of Death” file about bio-mining, or McCann’s connection to it.

  Ahead, he could see the trees parting and feel—if not yet see—their destination. It was a huge opening in the timber, walled on four sides by dead and dying trees. The odor of sulfur and something sickly sweet hung low to the ground.

  “This is Sunburst Hot Springs,” Cutler explained. “It’s called that because, from the air, the runoff vents come off of it like spikes in all directions. It looks like how a little kid draws the sun in art class, with spikes coming out of the circumference.”

  Joe could feel the heat twenty feet away and hear and feel a low rumbling, gurgling water sound somewhere beneath his feet. Sunburst was gorgeous, he thought, in a dangerous and oddly enticing way. The steaming surface of the water was nearly fifty feet across, held in place by a thin white mineral rim that looked more like porcelain than earth. The water inside was every shade of blue from aquamarine near the surface to indigo as it deepened. It was hard to see clearly into the open mouth of the spring because of scalloped ripples of steam on the surface, which dissipated into the air. Inside the spring the sun illuminated outcroppings, bronzing them against the blue, and Joe could clearly see a sunken litter of thick, stout barbell-shaped buffalo bones that had been caught on shelves along the interior walls. Again, he felt the pull of the water but not as strongly. The placid blue water seemed to beckon to him in the way that a warm bath or a Jacuzzi pulls a frozen skier at the end of the day. Beyond Sunburst Hot Springs was a smaller pool rimmed with dark blue and green, meaning much cooler water.

  Cutler saw him looking at it, said, “That’s Sunburst Hot Pot. It’s much, much cooler than the hot springs, and it’s a really nice pool to lounge in”—he grinned slyly at Demming—“if one were so inclined.”

  Joe checked out the hot pot. If God designed a natural Jacuzzi, he thought, this would be it. It was waist deep, clear, and someone had fitted flat wooden planks into the walls to sit on. Obviously, the pool had been used for illegal hot-potting. Joe visualized Hoening sitting on one of the planks with a Minnesota female he had just lured out from L.A., and smiled.

  “Nice place for a date,” he said.

  As he circled the hot pot he felt an odd sensation of someone blowing air up his pant leg. He stopped and turned, studied the ground. It took a moment before he saw the series of quarter-sized holes in the ground, each emitting a light stream. He squatted and held his palm out to one of them, feeling it on his skin. No doubt, he thought, the superheated earth under the surface had to release something, like a natural pressure cooker. He’d heard about visitors (and, more likely, Zephyr employees) burying chickens in the ground in secret places to bake them. He thought he could probably do that here. The idea intrigued him.

  The ground in the little tree-lined basin was nearly white, as if it had been baked. The consistency of the dirt was crumbly. Joe noted a long dark line in the earth that extended from deep in the trees and topped an almost imperceptible rise. The dark streak ran past the side of the hot springs and out the other side.

  “What’s that?” Joe asked.

  “Like I mentioned,” Cutler said, “the cool thing about the park is that all of the insides are pushed out in places. That’s a seam of underground coal. It’s not very big, and it’s hard to say how far down it extends. It’s one of the few places in the whole park where there’s any coal.”

  Joe had learned earlier not to wander away from the path established by Cutler for fear of breaking through and falling in, so he stuck close to him, as did Demming. He watched as the geologist went downhill from the spring itself along one of the troughs of runoff that came from the hot springs, where he pushed aside some ancient pitch wood stumps and revealed a thermister and a half-submerged wood-sided box of some kind in the water. He called Joe and Demming over, and they squatted near him.

  With a small laptop computer, Cutler plugged into the thermister and downloaded the last two weeks of temperature readings. Joe noticed both the instrument and the wooden box were covered with what looked like long pink hair that wafted in the soft current of the warm water.

  “I call this ‘million-dollar slime,’” Cutler said, pointing at the pink microbe growth. “This is the stuff used for genetic typing I told you about. I don’t know how it works, of course, but the company that harvests it can’t replicate it in a lab. They need to get it right here at Sunburst, and as far as they know, this is the only place on earth it can be found.”

  “Kind of pretty, but not very impressive,” Demming said.

  Cutler agreed. He told Joe that the bioengineering firm sent a truck into the park every month or so with a heated incubator in the back to harvest the microbes that had grown inside the box. The thermophiles were transported to Jackson or Bozeman and flown to the company laboratory in Europe.

  “Okay,” Cutler said, once again arranging the driftwood over the equipment so it couldn’t be seen from the trail, “we’re done here.”

  As they trudged back toward the pickup, Joe’s mind raced with new possibilities. Demming eyed him suspiciously.

  Joe said to Cutler, “You said Hoening and the others sometimes came along with you w
hen you did your work. Did they ever come here?”

  “Sure, a couple of times.”

  “Did they know about the million-dollar slime?”

  “Definitely. It’s no secret. The contracts are public record, even though more than a few people have a problem with the idea.”

  “Like me,” Demming said.

  “Rick Hoening did too,” Cutler said. “Me, I keep my mouth shut and my head down. I don’t want anyone mad at me enough to take away the opportunity to spend my time out here, doing the good work.”

  Joe could tell Cutler said it for Demming’s benefit.

  “What’s the issue, anyway?” he asked.

  “Think about it, Joe,” Demming said. “It’s illegal to take a twig out of the park. We don’t allow oil or energy companies in here to drill, or lumber companies to come in and cut down the trees. This is a national park! But for some reason, we allow bioengineering firms to come in here and take the microbes. We’re talking about thermophiles that have made millions and millions of dollars for the companies that use them. And who knows what other uses are being made of the species here? It’s a damned crime. Hypocrisy too.”

  “Hoening got worked up for the same reason,” Cutler said. “He talked to me about it several times. He thought it was outrageous that a big company could come in here and take resources from the public and profit from it. He was kind of a Commie at times, I thought.”

  Joe hadn’t thought of it that way. “Who lets them?” he asked.

  Demming and Cutler exchanged a look. “The Park Service,” Demming said. “They negotiate contracts with them, two or three years’ exclusive use of the microbes obtained from certain hot springs. The companies pay a few hundred thousand dollars for the rights.”

  “Does the Park Service or the government get a royalty on what’s found?”

  “Of course not,” Demming said.

  “Then why do they do it?”