Three Minutes to Midnight

by A. J Tata

  Throckmorton had chosen him as a business partner for two reasons. First, he was adept at processing Immigrant Petition by Alien Entrepreneur applications for the EB-5 program. Second, his construction company could easily pivot to the fracking business. Gunther had drilled some vertical wells in Lee County.

  For the EB-5 program, all Throckmorton had had to do was send Jim and Ted around the world with a tin cup, touting the fracking project. It was an easy sell. A New York Times bestselling book had just been released on the new billionaires in energy, and everyone wanted in on the action. Instead of American companies looking overseas for energy deposits, foreign investments were seeking to ride the new wave of energy in America.

  Ted and Jim were a natural sales team. Both tall and handsome, Ted was the more refined executive, while Jim gave the appearance of a knowledgeable hands-on journeyman. Throckmorton had rehearsed them on their shtick, Ted as the marketer and Jim as the drilling expert. They had recruited talent from Russia, Serbia, Afghanistan, China, Japan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

  Throckmorton had taken three years to put his plan in place. He had collected the money, purchased some extra land for access to the railroad, and obtained for the “alien entrepreneurs” their EB-5 investor green cards. While the purpose of the EB-5 program was to create U.S. jobs, Gunther had been using illegal immigrant labor for so long that he was solely focused on importing healthy men to work the rig and do the necessary construction.

  Throckmorton had decided that healthy young females might also prove useful. His son and Gunther’s were agreeable, also; however, Ted had weakened. What Throckmorton didn’t know now was if Ted was out of the picture altogether or just in one of his melancholy moods. He knew his son ranged from adrenaline seeker in the ocean during the day to author and poet by night. He had fallen for a woman who would not provide an agreeable bloodline for a family with their prominence. Unaccepting of Grace Kagami as a potential daughter-in-law, Brand Throckmorton was not opposed to her presence in general. She added to the ambiance of his soirees, not unlike the Balkan girls from the swingers’ party the other night.

  As if reading his mind, James Gunther Sr. asked, “You ever get out from underneath Griffyn and those dick wads?”

  “They’re scrambling all over the mansion, but I think I’ve got them under control. It’s Ted I’m worried about.”

  “The Shred will be okay, Brand. Just let me work on him a bit,” Jim said.

  “The Shred,” Throckmorton said as if he’d smelled dog shit, “is not focused. Banging that slope and writing poetry. He should be like you, working with his hands. Going to Afghanistan and vesting himself fully in this operation. You want to be part of a billion-dollar enterprise, you gotta put in some sweat equity.”

  “About right,” James Gunther said. The elder Gunther ran a rough-hewn hand across his weathered face. His gray hair was cut close in an old-fashioned butch cut. He wore ten-year-old dungarees with oil, tar, and mud stains on them that wouldn’t wash out. He filled out his flannel shirt, and at the V in the neck, a white crew-neck T-shirt was poking out. James Gunther Sr. was old school.

  “I got this, Dad.”

  “Son, I have to agree with Throck here. He knows of what he speaks. Just like I would know if you was a damn pussy. So something needs to be done about him. He thinks he’s in for an easy one-quarter cut of this thing. But he ain’t contributing. Sumbitch needs to contribute.” He said the last word as three distinct syllables: con-tri-bute, with an emphasis on the long u.

  Jim fought back in an unusual display of opposition to his father. “He was always the one who was going to connect us from a logistics standpoint. The railroad pipeline and the trucks. He’s working all that, to the best of my knowledge. And he helped get all the EB-Five guys. He was out there, all over the damn world, shaking down these guys.”

  “Damn fool is surfing today. He ain’t working anything,” Throckmorton said. “Ted the Shred my ass.”

  The elder Gunther stood, picked up his shotgun, and said, “I’ve had my share of fun. I’m going to check on them crazies down there by the rig and make sure they’re behaving. Son, you need to get back down there and make sure that psycho does her job. We need all that basin fracked and flowing our way. To hell with a bunch of mineral rights.” He spat tobacco from the cut of a new cigar into the fireplace, emphasizing his distaste for the law and anything that might get in his way.

  “I got her,” Jim said. “She’s drilling.”

  “Make sure you ain’t drilling that stuff until she’s done. Got it? You need to bust a nut, plenty of Throck’s green-card sluts are available. And when she is done, I got first dibs, you hear? Might get my machinery working again.”

  Jim nodded and grimaced. “Understood.”

  As Gunther started walking toward the door he stopped and said, “Hell’s he doing here?” Then spat, “And with that other troll.”

  Throckmorton and Jim turned their heads and looked through the large bay windows. They saw a tall Asian man walking briskly to the front door, hands stuffed into the pockets of a black Windbreaker. Dark jeans covered lanky legs. Black hair fell across the man’s forehead like a stringy mop. Behind him was a stocky man. They reminded Throckmorton of the old film Skinny and Fatty, except these two were Chinese, not Japanese, not that he cared. The heavyset man followed the taller man with short, squat steps that pushed outward, in contrast to the long forward strides of his companion.

  “He knows better than to come up here without asking,” Throckmorton said. “Especially to bring Chun with him.”

  Jim was up and moving toward the front door when it opened.

  “Hey, man. Hold on now,” Jim said, holding up a hand.

  “We have serious problem,” Johnny Ting said. Ting stood in the doorway. Chun stood behind him, hands stuffed in his pockets, like he didn’t want to be there.

  “You’re damn right we do,” Gunther said, leveling the shotgun at Ting.

  “You no shoot me. I control twenty workers and ten women. We missing two workers, and four come back beat up. I bring Chun because he do the math, numbers guy. He did drill-path software. Now he do calculus on workers and schedules.”

  “Beat up? They get in a bar fight? Trying to go after some white snatch?” Gunther asked.

  “Yes. Fight at bar. Irish bar, they say.”

  “Well, there you go. Four got their asses kicked, and two are hungover somewhere.”

  “We find empty truck on road. Everything missing. Two Russians nowhere to be found. Two Serbs and two Turks got ass kicked. All four, everything missing. I send them after woman, like you tell me,” Ting said, looking at Throckmorton.

  “So a woman kicked their ass? Kagami? I just wanted them to scare her so she did what Griffyn told her to do,” Throckmorton said.

  “Two missing. Four hurt bad. Down to fourteen. With drilling starting, we are not good.”

  When Ting spoke in his thick Chinese accent, Throckmorton could see his triangular tattoo jump above the neckline of his jacket. He wasn’t sure what the symbol stood for, but he generally dismissed all tattoos as random mistakes that the owner wished he or she could erase.

  “Can any of the women help out?” Jim asked.

  Throckmorton coughed. “Let’s not get crazy here, Jim. We have certain requirements.”

  Gunther spoke. “Take two of the women. Leaves eight for you, Throck. One a day, plus a backup. Like baseball. A designated hitter.”

  Ting’s voice got excited. “Missing big picture. Someone hurting my men. My biggest, strongest men are gone. Chun has work schedule.” Ting turned toward Chun, who nodded sheepishly.

  “Work schedule not good without twenty men. Can get by with sixteen, but not fourteen. And Petrov is hurt,” Chun mumbled. He spoke softly, almost in a whisper. The wind carried his voice inside the room, the words circling like a whispered warning.

  “Give it twenty-four hours, Ting. Then we’ll get worried. For now, nobody knows jack about what we’re doing.
Kagami was probably hanging with some dude, and your guys got stupid,” Throckmorton said.

  “My guys not stupid! Something going on! We follow phones to location in Apex, just up the road!” Ting pointed his finger at the ground. “Operation will stop if we don’t stop it. Chun has numbers!”

  Throckmorton sighed. “We don’t need the drama right now, Ting. We’ll look into your problem. We got them all green cards. They have phones and guns and GPS devices.”

  “And cash,” Gunther added.

  “And cash. That’s right. We’re paying them well.”

  “What I’m saying . . . everything gone. Even with the Russian. Petrov. Everything gone.”

  Throckmorton saw Gunther lower the shotgun. Behind Ting and Chun, he watched the sun dip into the hills west of Jordan Lake. “So you’re saying you’re missing two men. Four have been badly injured. And then Petrov. So that makes seven.”

  “That’s what I say. Almost half have been hurt,” Ting said.

  “Tell you what,” Gunther said to Ting. “Have Petrov go find those Mexicans that helped him.” Turning to Jim, he said, “I told you we didn’t need the Mexicans, that we shoulda just used the green cards for the cell.”

  “Too much work to do, getting the rig ready, Dad. Plus, Petrov was the only one we felt we could bring in on that aspect of the project. You know that. The Mexicans were easy.”

  “Ain’t nothing easy about nearly half our labor hurt, son.”

  Throckmorton felt waves of fear begin to rise in his stomach. Everything had been smooth sailing so far. Not a hitch. The hard part was over. Now he was losing his green-card workforce?

  “Get the Mexicans,” Throckmorton said. “All three of them.”

  “Only two Mexican,” Ting replied. “Petrov said one was giant. White but not white.”

  “What the hell does that mean? Giant. White but not white?” Throckmorton countered.

  “How he tell it,” Ting said.

  “Well, go find all three. Bring them in. Maybe they’re the problem,” Throckmorton replied.

  “All three. I will go with Petrov. He scared.” Ting turned on his heel and walked briskly toward the rig site a half-mile down the hill. Chun followed as best he could with his short steps.

  Throckmorton thought about Petrov, who was big and powerful. The man had the flat eyes of a rabid dog. They had vetted him. He was former Spetsnaz, Russian Special Forces, and had also been an Olympic middleweight boxer for his country. After he’d earned a bronze medal, the Russian president had awarded him a small energy pipeline business guaranteed to provide him financial security. Petrov had grown that business in the face of competition from the monopolistic titans of Russian oil, until he woke up one day and found his financial security revoked. The president had given, and he had taken. Still, Petrov had received a green card from a blind-trust donor in Russia. Throckmorton figured it was one last favor for the mighty Russian boxer and Special Forces hero. Regardless, he was their go-to guy. He knew the energy business, he knew security, and he knew wet work.

  Petrov scared? How could that be? Who could scare Petrov? Throckmorton looked at the two Gunther men. They didn’t look concerned, so he tried not to show his fear. But this time his ascot could not conceal his emotions.

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Throck. We’ll take care of this.”

  Throckmorton nodded. He certainly hoped so.

  CHAPTER 16

  “WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” GRACE ASKED. THEY WERE SITTING on Mahegan’s bed, staring at her MacBook Pro. She was leaning her shoulder into his arm to maintain her balance while she typed across the keyboard.

  Mahegan was keenly aware of her scent, light and citrusy, like fresh air.

  “I just got about ten texts from my group, telling me the rig is up and drilling is going on at the Throckmorton property,” Grace said, looking at the screen of her iPhone.

  “You have spies?”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “What? You think you’re the only one who can frigging pull off a combat mission? We’ve got people, most from the Chatham County side, who are looking at this thing. These are my girls. And before you ask, yes, I dated one of them. Anyway, they saw the rig stand up and are hearing drilling sounds. It’s happening.”

  Mahegan liked the feel of Grace against him. Processing the intelligence he was receiving from her environmental group conflicted with desiring to wrap his arms around her. As always, though, the mission took precedence. Maeve Cassidy was being held captive, possibly to run a drill on Throckmorton’s property. The left-behind nametape proved that she was there. She had drilled for a year in Afghanistan. Why else would they need her? What did the nuclear plants have to do with the entire affair? Why was the watch frozen at three minutes to midnight? And where was Piper Cassidy?

  “How do these things connect?” Mahegan asked, nodding at the screen.

  The monitor was showing three Google Earth latitude and longitude locations, indicating the three nuclear power plants. The McGuire Nuclear Station was just outside of Charlotte, which two million people called home; the Brunswick Nuclear Plant was just outside of the Wilmington area, where one million people called home; and the Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant was a mere fifteen miles south of North Carolina’s famed Triangle Region of Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, where another two million people resided.

  Five million people—that was half the state of North Carolina.

  “My friends in the DFT-Two group think Throckmorton wants to provide more energy than the three nuclear plants combined. Look here.” Grace pulled up a Web page that showed the oblong shape of the Durham sub-basin of the Triassic Rift that slashed diagonally across North Carolina’s Piedmont. The entire rift ran over a hundred miles from Granville County in the north, along the boundary between Wake and Chatham Counties in the middle, to Moore County, north of the golfing town of Pinehurst. “This is the entire Durham shale sub-basin. If you can get the gas from this, you will be a rich man. Billions. Just like the Barnett Shale in Texas. Almost the same size as the natural gas section of the Barnett, as they call it in Texas.”

  Mahegan was not a student of energy production but had studied fracking to prepare for his day laborer job two days ago.

  “Maybe Throckmorton sees the nuclear plants as competition that must be defeated,” Grace continued.

  Another gear caught in Mahegan’s mind. Competition was something he understood, but his view had more to do with market forces.

  “You make money from drilling for gas, retrieving it, storing it, and getting it to a refinery, or whatever they call it, for someone to buy, right?” he said.

  “Essentially. Those are the basics. Yes.”

  Grace looked at him, her face inches from his. He saw the soft flutter of her eyelashes as she blinked. Her skin was perfectly smooth. Thick black hair fell in waves around her face. She smiled.

  “What?” Mahegan was unusually distracted, but she was an unusually distracting woman. “Let’s just try to finish this case up as quickly as possible,” he said.

  “That’s it? No ‘Your eyes are like shimmering moonlit ponds?’ ”

  “No. More like the gateway to hell. Now, let’s think this through.”

  She playfully shoved him with her shoulder, its firmness catching Mahegan on the defective ripped deltoid of his left arm. She noticed his wince.

  “Did I hurt the big, strong man?”

  “No. War injury. That’s all.” Mahegan refocused on the computer.

  Grace rolled up his shirtsleeve, and he saw her stare at the eight-inch lazy Z scar left by Sergeant Colgate’s vehicle blast. Above that was his black and gold Ranger tattoo.

  Her hand came to her mouth. “Jeez. I’m such a screwup. Challenge your name, ‘Hawthorne,’ and then make fun of a no kidding war injury,” she said. Her finger traced the marbled skin where the doctor had removed the metal from his shoulder. The Z cut into the deltoid, the biceps, and the triceps. He had been swimming to keep the shoulder in shape, but
he knew it would never be 100 percent. It was just something he would have to deal with for the rest of his life.

  At least he was alive, Mahegan thought. Grace’s focus on his scar took him back to a place he didn’t want to go: the hunt for the American Taliban, the capture of a bomb maker named Commander Hoxha, and the roadside bomb that had killed Wesley Colgate, his best friend.

  “You’re not going to tell me about that picture of your father, are you?” she whispered.

  “No. Not right now, anyway.”

  He felt her lips on his arm, full and moist. She kissed the bottom of the scar, then the middle, and then the top. She ran her tongue along the arc of the Ranger tab tattoo.

  “And we should concentrate,” Mahegan said without much conviction.

  “Yes, we should,” she whispered. Her lips moved to his neck, and he felt her hand closing the MacBook and sliding somewhere behind them. Artfully, she slid her left leg over his pelvis and straddled him, now kissing him fully on the lips. “I’ll convince you to one way or the other,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  He reached his hands behind her and pulled her body into his so that he could feel her heat on his abdomen. She worked her lips and tongue into his mouth in a slow, sensual manner. She was like art, Mahegan thought. Every sense came alive: the feel of her soft lips against his, the sweet taste of her tongue, the clean scent of her hair, the rapid sound of her breaths and moans, and the stimulating sight of her hands quickly removing their clothes. Every dimension and sense collided. While Mahegan knew he didn’t have time for a romantic interlude, he gave in to the seductive pull of the moment.

  Afterward, they were both breathing heavily and sighing from the release of the sexual tensions that had been building. Lying in bed, staring at Grace’s face as she rested on his chest like a small animal warming on a river rock, Mahegan said, “Nuke power and gas don’t really compete. One provides electricity, and the other provides heat. Your gas bill in the winter is higher than your electric bill. Conversely, your electric bill is much higher in the summer from pushing your air conditioner. Natural gas only indirectly competes with nuclear power.”