“Have you tracked his cell phone?” I asked.
Levisay nodded. “It’s inside. Wait here and we’ll bring you in when we clear the house. Special Agent Nichols, please continue to accompany Mr. Herne.” Levisay did not even glance in Nichols’s direction as he spoke.
Nichols kept cool but I saw a tendon ripple in her jaw.
“You just know that man is constipated,” I said when Levisay was out of earshot. Nichols coughed to avoid laughing.
We watched as the helmeted FBI assault team approached the house. Levisay had a vest on under his FBI windbreaker, but his bald dome was exposed to the elements. It was drizzling, and a bit colder on the hilltop than down in the city.
“There’s something that still doesn’t make sense to me,” Nichols said as we watched Agent Levisay ring the doorbell, then pound on the door.
“What’s that?” I asked, distracted.
“Why did Jason Paul blackmail Roxanne?”
“To get her to cooperate.”
“But what did he actually need from her? A bus route? There’s nothing she gave him he couldn’t have done for himself. He could have found a simpler way to keep her off the bus. Why would he risk involving her?”
Nichols had a point. It was a loose thread in the narrative.
“You’re right—it doesn’t make sense. And I still don’t understand why the National Front sent Anton Harmon to infiltrate Reclaim.”
Nobody had come to the door and Agent Levisay was still pounding. He sent someone to retrieve an electronic bullhorn from his Suburban.
“Exactly. What would it buy them?”
“Why did you guys send an FBI agent into Reclaim?”
“I called someone about that this morning. A friend who talked to me off the record. We sent our guy in because we knew the National Front had put someone undercover at Reclaim and nobody understood why.”
“So your guy was in there because the National Front showed an interest?”
“Right.”
“But your guy was still there six weeks after Harmon left.”
“That’s true—so?”
“He must have discovered something that made it worth staying undercover.”
“Okay.”
“But that leaves us about the same place where we started. We don’t know why the National Front put Harmon in.”
“Unless...” Nichols said.
“Yes?”
“Harmon was an ordnance expert in the military—he was the guy who knew about bombs, right?”
“In Special Forces you train in a specialty. That was his.”
“What if he’s the one who persuaded the two Reclaim leaders to sabotage the dragline? And rigged the charge himself. It makes more sense than two environmental activists successfully sabotaging a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. Do you know how big that rig is? You could put four Suburbans in the bucket.”
At the door, Levisay was getting impatient. He held up one finger and then pointed at the entry specialist, who was carrying a sledgehammer that looked like it could take the door down with one stroke.
“But why would the National Front want to risk involving Reclaim?” I asked.
“Let’s say that the National Front isn’t actually sabotaging Antelope Valley and Big Thunder. Those are strip mines that use tons of explosives ever year as a matter of course. How on earth would you slow them down? If you could only stop Hobart and Gilroy, how would that work? Instead of cutting off 20% of the coal supply, they would only be affecting 2%. So how do you move the price if you’re only stopping 2% of the supply? You do it like Sadam Hussein did when he invaded Kuwait. You convince everyone else that the first 2% is just the beginning.”
“How would you do that?”
“What if the National Front convinced everyone that environmental terrorists were targeting coal mines? If they did something really newsworthy? Then they wouldn’t have to hit so many mines to have the same effect. Not if it was terrorism.”
“Leaking a bunch of documents wouldn’t do that,” I agreed.
“What if the terrorists exposed the documents like a WikiLeaks thing? And then bombed a second mine. Gilroy, for instance? That’s underground, so it would be more vulnerable. Then the trail would eventually lead back to Reclaim—and there would be video proof that they had already used explosives at Hobart.”
“But how does this help if Paul is in custody? Wouldn’t he talk to keep himself out of jail?” I asked. “He doesn’t strike me as the type to sacrifice himself for the team.”
A helmeted FBI SWAT agent had his face pressed against mirrored glass, peering into one of the picture windows on the east wing of the house. Then he turned toward the main entrance, cupping his hands around his mouth. “There’s a man tied to a chair in here. He’s facing away from the window, but it could be our guy,” he yelled. Suddenly, the pieces in my head snapped into place.
I saw Agent Levisay motion to the breach specialist, who raised the sledgehammer parallel to his waist and behind him, like a baseball batter with a low swing.
“Wait! Stop! Stop,” I yelled as the man swung at the door. I was too far away. If Levisay or the breacher heard me, they took no notice. The sledgehammer hit the door just above the lock and started to swing open. I tackled Nichols and we hit the ground just as a fireball exploded from the house, sending a wave of heat and force that leveled everything in its path.
31
The helicopter carried us swiftly northwards under cloud cover. Special Agent Nichols sat next to me, her face still a shade paler than it had been in the morning. We both wore headsets but neither of us had said a word since the helicopter lifted from its launch pad near the end of the runway at Chuck Yeager airport.
I didn’t blame her. We’d both served in combat, but her experience at 10,000 feet had been less intimate than mine. I would have bet she’d never seen an IED cut through a convoy, or the aftermath of a suicide bomber in a crowded marketplace. She’d probably never had to look at the lifeless eyes of the children that terrorists had used as human shields. Still, seeing carnage on home soil shook me up, too. We were almost a hundred yards from the house when the bomb triggered, and it felt like we were copper beaten against a hot anvil. It would take days to make sense of everything in and around the house. And most of the FBI field agents in West Virginia were either hospitalized or dead.
Minutes after the blast, television news stations and print journalists received e-mails claiming responsibility for the explosion along with a link to a series of documents that tied Transnational Coal to a large number of environmental offenses. Many of them had Jason Paul’s name on them. The group behind the blast called itself Coal-Free Dawn. I didn’t doubt that the e-mails would somehow trace back to Roxanne and Reclaim.
In the chaos following the blast, we got caught up giving first aid to the FBI agents and State Police officers who’d survived the detonation. There was already an ambulance on site, but the injuries overwhelmed the two EMTs. It was a gruesome business; all the pieces of the house, from the glass picture windows to the cement foundation, had become shrapnel. We ended up helping the EMTs by tying tourniquets and dressing wounds. It took over an hour for enough medical personnel to arrive to allow us to leave the scene. By the time we boarded the FBI helicopter, the morning was almost done. I only hoped we weren’t already too late.
“I have a call for you from Washington, sir. I can transfer it through to your headset.” The pilot’s voice startled me, pulling me away from my thoughts. I wasn’t used to hearing anyone call me ‘sir.’
“You’re headed to the Gilroy mine?” It was Alpha.
“It’s not far from the Ohio and Pennsylvania borders, but we’ll be there in under an hour. We have two men from the state police bomb squad with us,” I said, eyeing the men in jump seats facing me. There was also a Malinois, a remarkably calm Belgian Shepherd strapped between them, looking about with an intelligent expression. “Sir, what can you tell us about the mine?”
> “There are almost eight hundred men working at Gilroy mine, most of them underground. They’re evacuating the mine right now and local police are sealing off the three entry portals.”
“Have you figured out how they could disable the mine? If we don’t have a good idea...” I trailed off. The mine was small on the surface but enormous underground—the mirror opposite of Hobart.
“Coal mining releases pockets of methane gas and a great deal of coal dust. Both are highly flammable,” said the analyst who’d spoken earlier. “Even a modestly-sized explosive device set off anywhere in an underground coal mine would be catastrophic. The worst mine accident in history happened in Monongah, West Virginia in 1907. Workers mishandled a small amount of dynamite and 500 miners died. So really, any explosive charge set off inside the mine near the coal seams could be devastating. If you wanted to be sure to maximize the damage, however, you’d want to set it up near a seam where methane gas is being released.”
“You said they’re evacuating the mine?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Do they have anyone checking the miners? We need to know if there are any outsiders there—replacement workers, inspectors, journalists, anyone.”
“We asked the foreman not to let anyone leave. The county sheriff is at the mine with four deputies. They’re holding the miners on the site for now. The State Police should be arriving about an hour after you. They’ll process the miners.”
“How deep is this mine?” Nichols asked.
“Nearly three thousand feet.”
“Is there any way we can get down to the active coal seams without using the elevator?” I asked.
“No. This is a shaft mine with a central elevator, so even after you drive in, there’s only one way to get down and back up.”
“Great,” I said. “That’s just great.”
32
“You folks aren’t planning on carrying firearms into the mine, are ya?” Earl Jones, the mine superintendent, asked the moment he stepped into his office. He eyed the .45 caliber automatic I was strapping to my leg as he spoke. Jones was a small, wiry man with thick, wavy gray hair and a voice like crushed gravel.
Nichols, the two bomb squad agents, Cody the Malinois and I had been gearing up in Jones’s office as we waited for him to arrive from one of the mine portals. The four of us exchanged a look.
He pulled a map down in front of the white board behind his desk. “You pull the trigger once down there and you could collapse the whole mine without help from any damn terrorists.”
“We won’t use weapons underground. We understand the risks,” I assured Mr. Jones.
“So why carry ’em?” he asked bluntly. He saw he wasn’t getting anywhere and moved on. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but we’re doing a headcount as our workers surface. We initiated an emergency recall for all of our underground personnel when we got word of the terrorist threat, but it takes some of our miners two hours to get topside.” He glanced at the four of us. “I have to say, I was expecting a few more people. Four of you won’t be able to cover much territory down below.”
“In two hours you’ll have more help than you know what to do with,” I said. “But we can’t wait that long. We have a credible threat of sabotage against your mine. We believe the attack is planned for tomorrow, but we have no idea when. If the terrorists are using explosives, they may have already placed them.”
Jones looked skeptical but didn’t argue. I judged him as a man with a good deal of common sense. A brunette in a blue suit with her hair in a tight bun stepped into the room and handed Jones a folder.
“You wanted to know who’s been in the mine in the last few days? Other than employees?”
“We should also look at employees you hired in the past six months as well as any who used to work for Transnational Coal. But the visitor log is a good start.”
“We’ve only had three outside groups visit in the past two weeks. Some inspectors, a class from WV State and a PBS film crew.”
“Did you know any of the visitors personally?”
“No, but the inspectors were from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. That’s a federal agency and it was a scheduled inspection.”
“What about the other groups. When were they here?”
“The students were here on Wednesday. The film crew was here on Friday.”
“Where did they go?”
“The students went through the Epply portal. I don’t know where they went from there but the man who guided them is topside now so I can ask him. The film crew...let me see...they used the Foley Portal because they wanted to see a longwall setup with robotic equipment. And their guide—oh, that’s odd.” Four heads jerked up.
“They were taken down by a relatively new supervisor. Jeb McFarland. He called in sick today.”
“How long has McFarland been with you?”
“Three, maybe four months. I’ll pull his file.”
“Is it normal for a new miner to give a tour?”
“It’s not. It’s usually my deputy or me. I’ll have to find out what happened.”
“It makes the film crew a good candidate for us. Would anyone else here have seen them before they went down?”
“Yes.”
“Give me your fax number and I’ll have some photos faxed over. If we can match anyone we’ll have a better idea where to look.” Earl gave me the number and walked out of the office to tell his secretary to bring in the fax. I stepped outside and pulled out the satphone to call the operations center for the Activity to have the photos sent over. I would have had them e-mailed but Earl’s computer didn’t look like it was capable of displaying a photograph. Earl was back in five minutes. He handed me one of the faxed pages.
“Your boys sent over six shots. I haven’t talked to my deputy yet but the Foley Creek foreman rode down on the lift with the film people and he thinks he remembers this one—one of the cameramen. Hard to be sure, though.” The photo was grainy, and it was a surveillance photo, not a mug shot. But the man in the picture had a sickle shaped scar under his right eye that would be hard to miss. A marking in the corner of the photo told me that it was one of the men the Activity had identified in South Africa. I realized I should have asked for the photos earlier.
“I recognize him,” I said. I’d seen the man the previous afternoon in the National Front’s employee parking lot. He’d been shooting at me. He was a good shot, and I killed him while I was escaping.
Nichols grabbed the photo from Jones and turned to me. “Can your boss connect this man to an act of terrorism?”
“For the FISA court?”
“Yes.”
“I think so.”
“Mr. Jones, I’m going to need to take a statement from your foreman right now. Then I need a phone and a fax.” Walters motioned to his assistant, who was perched in the doorway, and asked her to help Nichols; the two women disappeared. If Nichols could get an eyewitness statement confirming that a known terrorist was inside the Gilroy mine, she might be able to get a FISA warrant to give the FBI legal access to the e-mails from the National Front that the Activity had already accessed with PRISM. That in turn could give us enough evidence to get a warrant to search the National Front compound. I was ready to go back there and knock down every door until I found Heather Hernandez.
“I asked my deputy why McFarland gave the tour. Apparently they asked for him by name. They said he’d taken them around at Stony Creek, the last mine he worked. Plus he had ten years as a foreman there before he was laid off, so he was qualified.”
“Who owns the Stony Creek mine?”
“Transnational.”
“Do you have security cameras here?”
“Yessir.”
“Would you have footage of this film crew?”
“There’s a camera on each elevator. I think we keep about a week’s worth of video on a DVR in the security office.”
“Let’s take a look.”
* * *
; Six of us jammed into the security trailer around a thirteen-inch black and white screen as the guard zipped through hours of footage of miners coming and going down the platform of the mine shaft elevator. The tension was palpable and I had the strong sense of time slipping away from us. But given the size of the mine, we had no choice. We could wander around for days underground without finding anything unless we were sure about where we were heading.
The security guy finally found what we were looking for. The PBS film crew was made up of six men, mostly big guys. I recognized the one from the National Front parking lot. I turned to Tim Quigley, the sergeant from the West Virginia State Police bomb squad.
“What do you think?” I asked as we watched the video. We watched the men enter and exit the elevator, after skipping through most of the footage of them standing in place in between.
“They’re avoiding the camera,” he observed—and he was right. The men had their heads down, turned away from the camera.
“Look at their gear. Can you guess how many devices they might be carrying with them?”
Quigley shrugged and ran a hand over his close-shaved head. “Hard to say. Looks like they have two camera bags plus the cameras. They could be hiding something in the cameras. If not, and depending on the explosives they’re using and the design of the devices, they could easily have three or four complete devices. Less if they had to conceal the devices within the bags.”
We both looked over to Jones. “We always check bags to see what visitors are bringing down into the mine. Can’t tell you how many lighters we’ve confiscated.”
“Maybe two or three devices, then. But don’t hold me to that.”
* * *
Back in his office, Jones turned to the map he’d rolled down from the wall. It was a cutaway view of the mine, showing different layers of activity.
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