Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

All of his movements were slow and precise. Even with a de-energized high-voltage line, the mere act of going up in a double-boomed bucket was in itself dangerous. He’d seen trucks tip over, buckets come apart sixty feet or more off the ground, and he’d even heard of incidents where linemen had reached too far and ended up falling out of a bucket when it capsized.

  He’d take some heat from his last supervisor who insisted even on simple jobs like these when the lines were not hot, that a crew ride along. But Bartlett was a senior lineman with a lot of experience and fifteen accident-free years under his belt. In effect, whatever Bartlett wanted, Bartlett got.

  But it had never made him smug. Right now he was outdoors doing exactly the kind of job he loved doing. Only thing better was hunting and fishing.

  He pulled on a pair of heavy rubber gloves, his hard hat and goggles, then powered the bucket up from the cab’s roof, swiveled it away from the truck, and slowly angled it to the downed line and made contact. Static electricity sparked then flowed from the bucket, down the arms, and showed up on the meter as ten amperes of current that quickly bled off.

  He powered the bucket away from the line and set it on the gravel. Next he put in a grounding stick and a block and tackle which he would use to lower the insulator so that he could disassemble it, replace the broken disks, reassemble it, and then haul it back up to the cross arm. From that point he would attach a rope to the downed line and haul it back up to the insulator. Only grunt work.

  He attached the bottom end of the block and tackle’s nylon braided rope to a tow ring on the back of the truck with a bowline knot finished with a pair of half hitches.

  Once he had his tool kit secured inside the bucket, he walked down the power line and carefully checked a five-foot-long streak of charred metal. But it was superficial.

  He walked back to the bucket, humming a Randy Travis tune, climbed aboard, and slowly began raising it straight up at first and then angling a few feet to the right of the damaged insulator, paying out the rope as he rose.

  The attachment point that held the high-voltage line in place had been destroyed, causing the line to fall, brushing the side of the pylon on the way down. Whoever had done it had taken a hell of a chance that the line could have fallen on them. In his opinion it would have served the bastards right. Maybe cut down a little on this sort of bullshit work—though the time-and-a-half looked pretty good in his paycheck at the end of the month.

  He was of the same stripe as just about every other lineman he knew who figured their job was to maintain power to their customers no matter what. But they counted on fighting Mother Nature, not some liquored-up hunter or rancher with a grudge that power lines ran across his land.

  He phoned Wyman at the Sioux Falls Control Center. “I’m up the tower at the insulator. It’s worse than I figured.”

  “Repairable, or does it have to be replaced?”

  “I can fix it, but it might take a little longer than I thought. I’ll let you know when I get it down.”

  “What about the line itself?”

  “Looks good. But I’ll stick around for a power test. Let you know when.”

  “You wearing your Barehands?” Barehand conductive suits were made of fireproof Nomex material that was embedded with microscopic stainless steel fibers that allowed the lineman to work bare-handed on energized high-tension lines up to 765 kilovolts.

  Bartlett had to laugh. He’d worked with Wyman for the past eight or ten years, and although it wasn’t part of a control center dispatcher’s job description to ask about a lineman’s safety procedures, Stu was sometimes an old mother hen.

  “No need.”

  “I think you guys have to be nuts,” Wyman said.

  “It helps,” Bartlett said and he broke the connection and pocketed his cell phone.

  For just a moment or two he stood in the bucket, attached to it by a safety harness and looked out along the river, decent weather for trout fishing not all that far away.

  He angled the bucket a couple of feet out to clear the insulator and powered the rest of the way up to the cross arm, where he secured the big three-sheaved pulley with a U-bolt, and clipped the carabiner on the end of the line to the ring at the top of the insulator.

  A slight breeze had picked up as often happened out here with the dawn, but it was no bother. Bartlett had lost count of the jobs he had worked in blinding snowstorms, or even heavy rain. This, as he’d told Wyman, was a piece of cake.

  The two bolts holding the insulator had frozen tight, and he had to squirt the double nuts on each with penetrating oil and then wait for it to do its job.

  Nothing or no one moved in any direction for as far as he could see. He glanced at the highway where it topped the rise, and considered the sight line. If he’d wanted to shoot out an insulator, up there would be a good place. With the right rifle and a really good scope it’d be a hell of a shot, but makeable.

  He turned back to the insulator and studied the damage. Six of the disks had disintegrated, plus the attachment points for the power line had been destroyed. One shot maybe? But definitely it would have to have been something a lot heavier than a deer or elk gun.

  This had not been done by an ordinary hunter.

  Bartlett glanced at the crest of the hill, and the first hints that something else had happened here than simple vandalism began to form in his head.

  8

  STARK COUNTY SHERIFF Gerald Kasmir had a raging cold, with a fever of 102, and although he’d never missed a day of work growing up on a ranch or during his twenty years as a cop in the Army and the last twelve years here as the sheriff, today he was making an exception.

  Every bone in his slender frame ached, and a knee injury he’d got during boot camp had flared up so for the past two days he’d been hobbling around like a cripple.

  His wife, Grace, poked her head in the bedroom to see if he was awake. “How you feeling, sweetheart?”

  “I think you’re right, maybe I’ll stay home for the weekend.”

  She came to his bedside and gave him two aspirins and a glass of water. When he was finished she held a hand to his forehead. “This doesn’t get any better by this afternoon, we’re going to see the doctor. In the meantime I’ll call Don and tell him I’m keeping you in bed.” Donald Christen was Kasmir’s number one deputy and longtime friend.

  “I’m not an invalid.”

  “No, but you’re a fifty-year-old man with a serious cold that could easily turn into pneumonia.”

  “Nag,” Kasmir, said and he coughed all the way from the bottom of his lungs.

  “That’s right.”

  “There was a call a little while ago, who was it?”

  His wife eyed him critically. “It was Nate over at Medora, wanted to talk to you about something. Nothing earth shattering, he said, just wanted to give you a heads-up.”

  Kasmir sat up, his head momentarily swimming. He’d been in bed asleep since just after dinner last night and besides his fever and aches, he was logy. “About what?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Kasmir reached for the phone.

  “I’m sure that it can hold till Monday.”

  “Is there any coffee made?”

  His wife nodded. “Forget the phone and I’ll bring you a cup.”

  Kasmir picked up the phone. “Since I’m not going into the office today you can put a bit of brandy in it.”

  She turned and huffed out, muttering something under her breath and he could just guess what it was. They’d been married now nearly thirty years.

  Kasmir glanced at the clock. It was coming up on seven as Osborne answered.

  “Grace tells me that you’ve got a bad cold or the flu; you okay?”

  “I’ve felt better. What’s on your mind this morning?”

  “Someone apparently shot out an insulator or something on the high-power lines that cross twenty-two just south of you.”

  Kasmir’s gut suddenly bunched up. A few months ago there’d been trouble over at th
e Initiative, in Nate’s county, that had spilled over to Belfield just inside Stark. A rancher and his wife had been brutally murdered in their own home. It had shaken up people even in Dickinson. Stuff like that almost never happened here.

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Dr. Lipton is spending the weekend with Ashley and me. Roger Kohl, the chief engineer at Donna Marie, called this morning to tell her about it.”

  Kasmir had half expected something like this to happen. “Some of the ranchers down there aren’t exactly tickled to have a power line cross their property. It rankles, mostly because they had no choice.”

  “Maybe,” Osborne said. “But I thought I’d just give you the heads-up. Considering all that happened a few months ago.”

  Kasmir held the phone away and coughed again.

  “You sound like hell. I hope Grace is keeping you home.”

  “She’s wants to. But what are you trying to tell me, Nate?”

  The line was silent for a beat. “I don’t know, Kas. Just a feeling.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The last attacks were almost certainly directed by the Venezuelan intelligence service.”

  “I read the papers. Chavez denied it.”

  “But we attacked five of their air bases anyway, and there’s still hell to pay in the U.N.,” Osborne said. “We’re the bad guys again.”

  “If you’re thinking that this could be a retaliation, I’d say it was pretty weak. I suspect a power crew is down there right now fixing the problem. Maybe cause a couple hours’ of outage, if that.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  Grace brought in the coffee with a scowl, set it on the nightstand, and left.

  “How’s everything out your way?” Kasmir asked.

  “I’m taking the girls up to the park, we’re going to make a day of it.”

  Kasmir chuckled. “You’re taking the weekend off, so you called to put a bee in my bonnet? That it?”

  Osborne laughed, too. “Go back to bed and let Grace take care of you. Sorry I called.”

  “Me, too,” Kasmir said and he hung up.

  He threw back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. The coffee was good and especially with the brandy hit the spot. Like his dad who’d had a shot of brandy every morning of his life, but never any other alcohol ever, Kasmir had his own ways.

  “Been doing it since my Army days, and it hasn’t become a habit yet,” he liked to tell his friends.

  The right thing to do now was finish the coffee and go back to sleep. Grace would have chicken soup or something for him around lunchtime, and if he felt up to it he might watch a little golf on TV here in the bedroom.

  He phoned Anita Yardley, the dispatcher at the office. “I need you to look up a phone number for me.”

  “You don’t sound so good, Sheriff. Your wife called a couple of minutes ago and left a message for Don. You’re not coming in?”

  “I don’t think so. But I need the phone number for the MAPP dispatcher at the Sioux Falls Control Center.”

  “There a problem?”

  “Looks like some idiot shot out an insulator on one of the towers down around Antelope Creek.”

  “Do you want me to send someone down to take a look?”

  “The repair crew is already down there,” Kasmir said. “You got that number?”

  She gave it to him, and he made the call.

  “Gerry Kasmir, I’m the Stark County sheriff up in Dickinson, heard you’re having a bit of a problem with one of our power lines.”

  “Good morning, Sheriff, nothing big,” Wyman said. “We’ve got a lineman on scene working on it. Should be back in business in a couple of hours.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone apparently shot out an insulator and dropped the line. One of your ranchers probably.”

  “I’ll check it out, but I expect you’re right.”

  Kasmir hung up and sat drinking his coffee. Nate Osborne was not a hothead in anyone’s book. The man was about as steady as they came. And there was that Medal of Honor he won over in Afghanistan. He was definitely a local hero, and more importantly a man of action, who once told him that he always followed his hunches.

  “Kept me alive over there,” he’d said. “Just learned to listen to my inner voice.”

  “Pretty good inner voice, if you ask me,” Kasmir had told him.

  Osborne had smiled shyly. “Didn’t save my leg, but that could have been a lot worse.”

  The man was modest, and it was another thing that Kasmir admired about him.

  He finished his coffee then got out of bed to dress in his uniform. If Osborne had a hunch, in Kasmir’s estimation it was worth a drive down Highway 22 to take a look.

  The biggest problem he would have to face this morning was getting past Grace.

  9

  MAKAROV HAD DAWDLED over his coffee after breakfast, reading the Dickinson Press newspaper, a steady stream of truckers coming and going, the lot outside filled with big rigs, while he monitored the telephone traffic from the MAPP Control Center in Sioux Falls.

  He’d wanted to make sure that a lineman, and probably a crew, were on site and working to repair the damage he had caused before he headed back down to finish the job.

  A few minutes ago the Dickinson sheriff had talked to the dispatcher to ask about the outage, and Makarov had waited to make sure that he wasn’t sending a deputy. It would complicate the issue, though not impossibly so. At least not yet. He’d faced worse odds before, but each time he’d known what he might be running into.

  He wanted the same information now, the first piece of which was that only one lineman was doing the work. The man had no crew with him. It was a piece of good luck.

  Paying his bill, Makarov went outside to the pickup, but before he headed out, he switched his iPad to the Sheriff’s Department dispatch frequency, and sat for a while listening. It was a quiet morning in the county. Nothing concerning the problem with the power line was being discussed. No units had been dispatched.

  Power outages happened all the time. And from what he’d learned from his preliminary research, shooting insulators was just about a regional sport out here.

  He drove over to one of the gas pumps to top off his tank, even though he didn’t need any fuel. But he wanted to waste a little more time to find out if the sheriff was heading down 22 or if he was sending someone. He didn’t want to get caught parked at the top of the hill. That could get messy and a little complicated.

  Just as he finished the sheriff called the dispatcher.

  “Anita, this is Kas.”

  “Grace let you out of the house?”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t easy. Listen, I’m in my unit on the way down to check out the mischief with the power line.”

  “You coming back to the office afterward?”

  “Not unless I find something interesting, which I doubt. Anyway I promised Grace I’d come straight home soon as I was done.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “About two blocks from the office.”

  “Roger that,” the woman said.

  Makarov took his receipt and headed through town on Third Street which was Highway 22. Traffic had picked up, but once he’d cleared the city limits only the occasional pickup truck was on the road.

  Which would complicate things a little, but not impossibly so. It would mean that he couldn’t set up on the hill to take his shot for fear someone would come along at the wrong moment.

  No one seemed to be in a hurry, and Makarov took his time, driving well under the speed limit, as he split the screen on his iPad and brought up another program which connected him to a totally untraceable number in Amsterdam.

  It was answered on the first ring by a young man speaking Dutch. “Ja.”

  “In English,” Makarov said. “Do you know who this is?”

  “Of course I do, what do you think I am, stupid?”

  * * *

  ACTUALLY MAKAROV thought
exactly that. Although he’d never met the twenty-five-year-old computer hacker who went by the username of swiftlightning, he knew quite a bit about him from Vasili Sumskoy, one of his resources in Moscow inside the Federal Security Bureau, which was the renamed KGB.

  They’d met at a bar in the Radisson Blu Royal Hotel in Helsinki’s city center ten days ago. Sumskoy, a bear of a man who’d served in the Spetsnaz with Makarov, jumped up and they’d embraced like long lost brothers, though Makarov had never been able to feel much of anything more than toleration for anyone.

  “You’re looking fit,” Sumskoy said.

  Makarov patted the man on the belly. “And you’ve been sitting behind a desk for too long,” he said in Russian.

  They sat down across from each other at a small table in a corner of the soaring atrium lounge, but waited until their waitress brought Sumskoy a vodka and Makarov a sparkling mineral water on the rocks with a twist.

  Sumskoy nodded to Makarov’s drink. “So you are on a job, my friend, and you’ve come to me for information.”

  “Da.”

  “Same rate?”

  “Depends on what you can tell me,” Makarov said. They’d almost always agreed on twenty thousand dollars U.S.

  Sumskoy nodded. “Where is it you said that you’re calling home these days? Paris again?”

  “I need to know about a computer expert who goes by the username of switftlightning.”

  The smiled faded from Sumskoy’s broad features, and he took a long time before he said anything. “Where did you hear this name?”

  “He’s to be my contact on a job I’m currently involved with,” Makarov said. He showed no emotion.

  Sumskoy was deputy chief of the FSB’s First Chief Directorate, which was responsible for all clandestine activities outside of Russia—except those mounted by the GRU, which was the military espionage service, or by special operations run by Putin’s personal intelligence unit. He was a man behind a desk who knew things.

  “I need to know the job and who it was who hired you.”

  “No.”

  Sumskoy thought about it for another long beat, his vodka untouched in front of him. “I’ll need double our usual rate.”