He got up, went to the window, and looked outside. The truck was still there but the rental car was gone, the contract driver taking it back to the airport in the Twin Cities. His back trail was clean.
Within a half hour he was dressed in jeans, a well-worn sweater, denim jacket, and scuffed work boots, and was heading west, no clouds in the star-filled sky and only the occasional semi or farm truck on the interstate.
No one had been in the hotel’s parking lot last night or this morning, and other than the desk clerk and the waitress at the truck stop he’d not come face-to-face with anyone else.
He switched on the radio and tuned it to a country-and-western station and let the music, which reminded him in many ways of the Russian folk tunes he’d grown up with, muffle the road noise from the knobby tires. The lyrics were just about the same—troubles and woe, sometimes with a comic punch line at the end, and simple, rhythmic melodies.
Early in one of his Spetsnaz training evolutions, he had managed to get the drop on the hand-to-hand combat instructor with a lucky move, knocking the veteran to his knees. A few of the dumber trainees watching had actually cheered, which had angered the sergeant who jumped up and decked Makarov with a simple roundhouse punch to the jaw.
“Yours was luck,” the sergeant had said. “Mine was calculated. Now get your arse out of the dirt.”
It would have ended there, except that Makarov got slowly to his feet and turned as if to go back in line with the others, but the sergeant had reached out to stop him. It was a mistake. The veteran had underestimated the student.
“I’m not done with you,” the sergeant said.
Makarov turned back, grabbed the instructor’s arm, clamping it under his left armpit while holding the man’s wrist with his right, and he swiveled sharply to the right. The muscles and ligaments in the sergeant’s shoulder were ripped away from the bones and Makarov released his hold and stepped away as the much bulkier man dropped to the ground.
None of the trainees were grinning now. But the sergeant gave no indication that he was in excruciating pain as he got to his feet and looked Makarov up and down. But he nodded.
“On the other hand that wasn’t a bit of luck,” he said. “That was balls.”
Makarov said nothing. He’d made his point.
“I’m going to the dispensary. I want you to teach your fellow trainees that move until I send a replacement instructor.”
It had been the beginning of Makarov’s special treatment, an intensified training regimen, no holds barred, in which he’d suffered a slight concussion, many sprains and bruises, and several cracked ribs, but never anything as serious as what he had done to the sergeant—who by the halfway point of the initial two years of training wanted to be friends. But Makarov had been a loner then, as he was to this day. And that attribute had saved his life more than once.
* * *
AN HOUR before dawn Makarov took the Dickinson exit off the interstate and followed State Highway 22 south, through the town of about sixteen thousand, passing the regional airport five minutes later.
A few farm vehicles and delivery vans and trucks plus a few cars were on the road now, and a small Great Lakes Airlines passenger jet was parked at the terminal for its six o’clock flight to Denver—the only destination by a commercial airline from Dickinson. The next flight out was at nine forty, on which Makarov’s people had booked him a seat.
Two miles south of town the highway was deserted and remained that way four miles farther south where the 230 kv high-power lines that led from Donna Marie crossed the highway just above the meandering Antelope Creek.
Makarov parked at the crest of a hill and got the Barrett rifle out and quickly assembled and loaded the weapon.
The nearest steel pylon shaped more or less like a giant spidery inverted V was at the bottom of the hill about six hundred yards away. Three lines which dropped in graceful catenary curves carried the power from one twenty-five-meter pylon to the next to where it reached the nearest Eastern Interconnect transfer point somewhere near Bismarck. The energized lines were held clear from each other and from coming in contact with the grounded tower by cap and pin modular insulators consisting of fifteen glass disks, about ten inches in diameter and seven feet long. An easy target even in the dark.
Makarov climbed up on the lowered tailgate and propped the loaded rifle on its extended bipod on the roof. Nothing was coming in either direction and it took him just a couple of seconds to get a decent sight picture of the outside insulator hanging from one of the pylon’s arms. When the line dropped it would short out, causing an immediate power failure.
He racked a shell into the firing chamber, steadied himself, and squeezed off one shot, the noise like a runaway train right on top of him.
Almost instantly a large section of the insulator exploded and a second later the line began to drop. A blinding flash lit up a section of the tower, sparks flying everywhere. Slowly the high-tension line drooped to within a few feet of the ground.
Makarov brought the rifle down from the roof, unloaded it, disassembled it, and stuffed all the parts back into the duffle bag.
Within eight minutes of parking at the side of the road, he had made a U-turn and was headed back to the busy truck stop he’d passed on the interstate at the Dickinson exit, the first and least risky part of the mission completed.
* * *
“MERELY SHOOTING out an insulator and interrupting the flow of power will not be enough,” Colonel Delgado had explained. “You must make certain that there will be a fatality.”
“Why?” Makarov had asked. He couldn’t see the necessity of it, especially against the risk that the authorities would come to the site to investigate. And he said as much.
“We understand what you may be faced with, and señor, it is why you were selected. You never fail.”
“It will be expensive.”
“No doubt,” the colonel had said.
Makarov pulled into the truck stop, parked out of sight from the front entrance, and once inside ordered a cup of coffee and the standard American breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast—a meal which he had learned to detest after only one year in Stockholm where breakfast was salmon, toast, and tea.
He was seated alone in a booth near the windows. Business was starting to pick up, but no one paid him any attention. By his clothes he was obviously blue-collar, a worker somewhere, maybe an oil field roustabout on his way north. Guys like him passing through were commonplace here.
While he waited for his food to come he powered up the iPad that had been left for him with the clothes. A FOX network morning news broadcast was displayed on the screen, but via the Bluetooth earbud he was connected to the nearest Mid-Continent Power Pool control center in an anonymous bunker outside of Sioux Falls about three hundred miles to the southeast where the outage had been detected.
One of the dispatchers was talking to someone by the name of Tony Bartlett, who apparently was the Basin Electric Power Co-op lineman on call from one of the company’s service centers just off the interstate about five miles east of Dickinson.
“Goddamned hunters using our insulators for target practice,” Bartlett groused.
“Looks like it on my board,” the dispatcher said.
Makarov heard a woman say something in the background. “I’ve got a call,” Bartlett said. “Maybe one of these days some fool will get too close and fry his ass.”
“Donna Marie was automatically taken down so the line is deenergized, but check in before you climb.”
“Naturally,” the lineman said. Two hundred fifty thousand volts got everybody’s attention and respect.
“Give me an ETA.”
“Twenty minutes, half hour tops.”
“At least it’s not snowing or blowing,” the dispatcher said.
“Piece of cake,” Bartlett replied.
Makarov removed the earbud.
6
OSBORNE STOOD ON the front porch of his house with a cup of co
ffee as he watched the sky to the east get progressively lighter. It was chilly, in the low to mid forties, but after the long, cold winter he was just fine in a pair of jeans, a battered old HOO RAH sweatshirt, and unlined Indian moccasins.
Ever since Marine FORECON in the mountains of Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan he’d been a very light sleeper, never making it all the way through an entire night. The possibility of a Taliban incursion into your post at any second day or night had a tendency to make a man a little jumpy. He had come to appreciate the dawn because it meant that he’d survived another night.
Ashley had understood when he’d warned her before she began spending weekends with him; she’d said that her dad had told her the same thing. A great-uncle of hers came back from Korea, and got married a month later. The first morning after their honeymoon his wife went upstairs to wake him for breakfast and to get ready for work.
“All she did was touch his shoulder and he instantly jumped up, hit her in the face, and broke her jaw. He’d spent two years in a foxhole and to him she was an enemy soldier standing over him.”
“Did they stay married?” Osborne had asked.
“Oh, yeah. But after that she’d stand at the door and call his name.”
Osborne had grinned. “I’m not that bad anymore, except I tend to get up a few times in the middle of night to make the rounds.”
“No wonder, after all you went through,” Ashley told him. “Even a lot of the reporters embedded over there say that they couldn’t get the real feel for it. Except for the ones who got shot up or seriously hurt by an IED like Bob Woodruff.”
Osborne had lost his left leg saving his platoon from an attack—an action he couldn’t clearly remember—not until it was explained to him at the White House when the president clasped the ribbon holding the Medal of Honor around his neck. And he’d been embarrassed because what he’d done, though probably brave, was in his mind stupid. Necessary at the time, but dumb anyway.
His wife, Caroline, had thought it was stupid, too, but the worst part for her was sleeping with a one-legged man. Looking at his stump sometimes made her physically ill. That and the isolation out here in western North Dakota had finally driven her away.
With Ashley it was different. He was a hero. “My hero,” she called him.
He did remember how he felt the day of the Taliban ambush, and the attacks on the Initiative around Christmas. He’d been spooked. The same feeling you got in the summer when the sky to the southwest went pitch-black, the wind died to nothing, and the air turned green. Storms were coming.
And he’d been feeling the same thing now for the past month. More trouble was coming their way. There were no shelters for this kind of a storm, and even if there was one he didn’t think he’d be running down the stairs to hide.
Whitney came out of the house, her jacket over her shoulders. She’d got a cup of coffee from the kitchen.
“You’re up early,” Osborne said. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Roger called me, said Donna Marie went off-line, about twenty minutes ago.” Roger Kohl was the power plant’s chief operating engineer. He was a steady, no-nonsense man who’d been around coal-fired plants all of his life, working his way through college at one of them out east somewhere.
“More trouble with the science?”
“It wasn’t us this time. Looks like a problem with one of the transmission lines just east of here. Most likely some rancher shot out an insulator.”
“Doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen.”
“Why?” Whitney asked. She was a scientist, which meant she thought like one and could never understand mindless acts of violence or in this case simple vandalism.
“They probably fell asleep in the sixth grade because their teacher was a bore, and they never woke up.”
“Plain stupidity?”
“And boredom,” Osborne said. “And it’s everywhere, not just here, or Montana or Wyoming.” But something niggled at the back of his head, the hair on the nape of his neck wanting to stand on end.
She sipped her coffee and stared at the sun just edging above the horizon. “I guess you’re right. I’ve seen some really bright kids—some of them grad students—pull some dumb stunts.” She shrugged and looked at him. “Even scientists aren’t immune. Hell, Carl Sagan supposedly did some of his best work while smoking pot. Talk about killing brain cells.”
“He probably had plenty to spare,” Osborne said absently.
Whitney nodded. “I guess.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“Nothing I could do about it. The problem belongs to Basin Electric.”
“What problem’s that?” Ashley asked, coming outside with a cup of coffee. She was wearing a sweater and jeans, sneakers on her feet.
“Donna Marie had to be shut down a little while ago. Some sort of trouble with the transmission lines over by Dickinson,” Whitney said.
“Looks like someone might have shot out an insulator,” Osborne said.
Ashley’s eyes narrowed as they always did whenever she was skeptical about something that she was being told. It was one of the traits about her that Osborne found a little irritating, and yet taken together with her entire personality made her unique and interesting to him.
“No one is taking a shot at us again,” Whitney said. “No damage done. We’re just off-line until the problem is fixed.”
“Are you going back this morning?” Ashley asked.
“There’s no need.” Whitney managed a little smile. “Anyway this is my first weekend off in I can’t remember how long, and I mean to play tourist and enjoy myself, if the offer to go up to the park still stands.”
Osborne nodded, but just for a moment he was far away, back at the Initiative around Christmas and back to his forward position in Afghanistan. One of Murphy’s laws in FORECON was: “If everything is going right, you’re surely walking into a trap.” And another was: “Incoming rounds have the right of way.”
The point was that he had learned to listen to his inner voice.
“Nate?” Ashley prompted, a look of concern in her eyes.
“I made dinner last night, so it’s up to you to organize breakfast. And I’m hungry.”
“Are you going to call someone?”
“It happened down around Dickinson, so I thought I’d give Kas the heads-up,” Osborne said.
“Do you want to drive down?” Ashley said.
“No need,” Osborne said. “I want eggs and pancakes.”
“Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir.”
Whitney laughed, but it was clear from her expression that she had picked up on Osborne’s mood.
7
ON THE RISE above the Antelope Creek, Tony Bartlett saw the problem at once, and he drove down to the valley floor, eased his truck off the highway to within fifty feet from the base of the pylon, and got out. He was a stocky man with a thick neck, broad chest, but narrow hips, and a perpetual grin.
Pieces of insulator disks were scattered all over the place, and the air still smelled of ozone from where the line had sparked before the relays at Donna Marie had been tripped.
But it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. The insulator’s caps and pin looked to be in decent shape, as studying the damage with binoculars he counted only five disks missing. It had been enough to make one of the three phase lines droop far enough to just brush the pylon’s metal framework and nearly reach the ground.
Whatever happened here, though, hadn’t been done by only one shot from a hunting rifle. Bartlett had repaired enough of these problems over the past fifteen years that he knew what sort of damage could be caused by a deer or elk rifle, even an H&H .375 he’d seen once. This time the bastard or bastards had probably used up half a box of ammunition.
Bartlett phoned Stuart Wyman, the Area Desk dispatcher in Sioux Falls. “Looks like hunters or somebody shot the shit out of one of the insulators.”
“How long do you figure before it’s back up?”
/>
“Probably two hours, maybe three tops.”
“Do you want me to call for backup?”
“Not unless the line is energized, Stu, which you say it isn’t.”
“I’m showing no back feed. That’s an isolated circuit from Donna Marie.”
“I’ll check, but from here it doesn’t look as bad as it could be. Looks like the caps and pin are still intact, so all it needs is replacing five of the disks, and raising the line so it can be reattached.”
“Any burn through?”
“I can’t see any from here. Looks like we caught a break.”
“Give me a minute,” Wyman said.
Bartlett leaned back against the truck and lit a cigarette, his fourth already for the morning. He had hunted this area a few years ago, and when Tad, his only son who had just turned five, got a little older he planned on taking him down to the Antelope for a little fly casting.
Juliette already had big plans for their daughter, Taffy, who would be ten in June, entering her in beauty contests since she was four, most of which she had won or placed. In a few years Juliette wanted to begin training their daughter for the big leagues—Miss Teen North Dakota, Miss Teen USA, and then Miss America, even Miss World.
And in Bartlett’s mind, his daughter was just that pretty.
Wyman came back. “The line is still de-energized, and Donna Marie’s relays are tripped. You’re good to go. Keep me informed.”
“Right,” Bartlett said.
He flicked the cigarette away and got back in the truck and maneuvered it so that it was on the gravel right of way beneath the tower and just ten feet to one side of the damaged insulator.
He got a cup of coffee from the thermos Juliette had sent with him, and with one hand on the controls lowered first the forward outrigger jacks on the left and right side of the truck, and then the rear outriggers.
When he was certain that the truck was stable, he finished the rest of his coffee then climbed up to release the safeties holding the bucket in its fixed position above the cab.
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