Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “No. Is he in trouble? ’Cause it’s not very likely. He’s a very careful man.”

  “God no, it was just a real minor problem. Someone shot out one of the insulators down there, and we shut off the power to make it easier for him to get the line up and ready to go.”

  Juliette was quiet for a moment, and Wyman could hear the television or radio in the background.

  “Mrs. Bartlett?”

  “Don’t lie to me, goddamnit. I’ve two kids to raise here, and I’ve worried about Tony night and day since he took the job. I never liked thinking about him up there in the air fooling around with all that electricity. It just isn’t safe. At the very least it’s bound to give you cancer.”

  “Trust me, everything is just fine.”

  “Then why’d you call here and scare me?”

  “I need to talk to Tony to see how the job went, is all,” Wyman said, not knowing what else he could tell her. Certainly not how gut-wrenchingly worried he was about it.

  “You find my husband, and when you do send him home!”

  The connection was broken and Wyman hung up. Carl and the other five guys were looking at him. He tried Bartlett’s cell phone again with the same results, and then only reluctantly, looked up the telephone number for the Stark County Sheriff’s office at Dickinson.

  A woman answered. “Clark County Sheriff’s Department dispatch, how may I help you?”

  “I’m Stuart Wyman, area supervisor at the MAPP Control Center in Sioux Falls. I dispatched a lineman a couple hours ago to repair a break in a power line just south of you where it crosses Highway Twenty-two. I talked to him when he arrived on site, but now I can’t reach him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Anita Yardley said. “Could you stand by for just a second?”

  Wyman stubbed out his cigarette in his half-full coffee cup and immediately lit another. The guys were still looking at him, and he gestured for them to get back to work, which they did.

  A full minute later a man who identified himself as Deputy Don Christen came on. “Can you tell me what caused the outage?”

  “Looked as if a rancher or hunter shot out an insulator holding the high-tension line from shorting out. It happens from time to time.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I sent one of Basin Electric’s linemen—Tony Bartlett—out to take a look and repair it.”

  “Was he working alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you usually send a team out on something like this?”

  “Sheriff, I don’t have time for this. I’d like you to send someone down there to take a look. I’m worried about Tony. He’s a senior man, knows what he’s doing, and this is just not like him.”

  “I’m on my cell phone at my squad car, I’m going to head down there to personally find out what’s going on,” Christen said. “Sheriff Kasmir called earlier this morning, said he was on his way to investigate. And now we can’t raise him.”

  “You might want to call for backup.”

  “What are you telling me, Mr. Wyman?”

  “That line carries power from Donna Marie, the experimental generating station south of Medora. It was the subject of at least two attacks a few months ago.”

  “Yes, we know that.”

  “Could be nothing, but you might watch yourself.”

  “I hear you,” the deputy said, and he broke the connection, leaving Wyman nothing to do except worry.

  15

  OSBORNE, ASHLEY, AND Whitney were standing at the base of a narrow, shallow ravine that snaked its way from the road down to where the Little Missouri turned sharply west, away from them. The breeze this morning had been light, from the west, but in the ravine it had picked up sharply.

  “Why they call this place Wind Canyon,” he told them. “Funnels between the bluffs and accelerates.”

  “Ever get rough?” Whitney asked.

  “You wouldn’t want to be here in a blizzard, something from the northwest.”

  Ashley was looking at the river where it curved away, finally lost in the distance across a combination of scrub brush at the water’s edge, grasslands farther in, and all of it framed by buttes and low bluffs carved by wind and water from the living rock, and she shivered.

  Osborne touched her shoulder, breaking her out of her thoughts and she turned to him.

  “Just got cold there for a minute,” she told them.

  “It’s spring now,” he said.

  Just after Christmas she had been kidnapped in a bid to force her father, General Forester, who administered the Initiative, to delay the start-up. He’d refused, of course, because the attackers had no intention of keeping her alive. Barry Egan, a nutcase Posse Comitatus radical, had kidnapped her from where she’d been staying at the Rough Riders Hotel in Medora while Nate was in Washington meeting with the president. He’d taken her down to the Initiative, where he’d wire-tied her spread eagle to the back fence, her parka hood off, coat unzipped in a blinding blizzard, leaving her to freeze to death.

  But Osborne had returned early, had somehow found her, cut her down, and managed to get her to safety.

  She was remembering that night right now, and she shivered again.

  Whitney hadn’t been out at the fence line, she’d been inside the Research and Development section of the Initiative when Osborne had brought Ashley in, both of them half-frozen and all but unconscious. “How you guys ever made it was beyond any of us.”

  “I had some help from FORECON,” Ashley said. “Hoo-rah.” And she laughed.

  The horn on Osborne’s Saturn SUV cruiser began beeping. It was a signal that his office was trying to reach him by radio.

  He walked back twenty-five yards where he was parked at the side of the road and keyed the mic. “Osborne.”

  It was Rachel, and she sounded excited. “Am I ever glad I finally reached you. Tried your cell phone first.”

  “I turned it off. What’s up?”

  “Don Christen called a few minutes ago. They’ve run into some trouble over there.” She wanted to swallow her words.

  “Slow down,” Osborne said. It was the power outage he’d talked to Kasmir about, and the hair on the back of his head was standing on end. The Marines called it the pucker factor. When you knew damn well that something big was coming your way your sphincter tended to pucker up.

  “Don’s down on twenty-two where a power outage was reported. The lineman was electrocuted. Kas drove down to investigate, and he was shot to death, along with another couple.”

  Osborne was waving for Ash and Whitney to come back. “How did Don find out? Somebody call it in?”

  “A power company dispatcher tried to get ahold of his lineman, and when he couldn’t get through he called the sheriff’s office.”

  “Call Don and tell him that I’m on my way, and make sure that the BCI sends someone down there right away.”

  “Okay, Nate. Do you want any other backup?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Something going on?” Ashley asked when she and Whitney reached him.

  “I’ll explain on the way,” Osborne said, and he got behind the wheel.

  As soon as the girls were in, he flipped on his siren and headed the way they had come, which was the shortest way back to Medora and the interstate.

  Whitney in the backseat was white faced. “Does this have anything to do with the downed power line?” she asked.

  “The lineman working on it was apparently electrocuted.”

  “That’s impossible. Our relays would have tripped.”

  “I called Gerry Kasmir, he’s the sheriff over there, and gave him the heads-up. He drove down and was shot to death, along with a couple who’d probably stumbled into the middle of the situation.”

  “It’s started again,” Whitney said, and she got on her cell phone.

  “She’s right,” Ashley said, reaching for her cell phone. “I have to call Tom.” Tom Smekar was her editor at the Bismarck Tribune.

  “Let’s ge
t over there first and see what happened.”

  “I just want to give them the heads-up. Have a rewrite man standing by.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Goddamnit, Nate,” she said, her temper flaring. “What about my dad?”

  “Go ahead, I want to talk to him when you’re finished,” Osborne said.

  Whitney had reached Kohl at Donna Marie. “Are you sure it wasn’t us? Absolutely certain?”

  The paved road was narrow with gravel shoulders and Osborne had to pay attention to his driving, especially around the curves, the beautiful scenery with its first spring greens meaningless for him, as he kept going back to the way Kas had sounded this morning. Grace, who’d always worried about him, would be devastated. They had a couple of grown children, one of them teaching school over in Fargo, he thought.

  But he couldn’t beat himself up over it. He’d called this morning purely out of professional curiosity. Had the tables been reversed he would have expected Kas to call him.

  “My dad’s in conference, but someone is getting a message for him to call me right back,” Ashley said.

  Whitney finished her call. “Roger is one hundred percent certain that our relays tripped. Whatever power was on the line definitely did not come from us. But he told me that he talked to the transmission control center dispatcher in Sioux Falls who said that his computer showed that the line was and still is isolated from the rest of the system.”

  “But the lineman was electrocuted,” Osborne said.

  A couple of minutes later they slowed a little through the gate, Parks standing at the side of the road, but Osborne didn’t stop, and when they reached Pacific Avenue which was the I-94 bypass, he turned east and sped up again, the few cars on the road pulling to the side.

  Dickinson was about twenty miles east, and Osborne figured they’d make that in fifteen minutes give or take, with another fifteen to make it to what he was already thinking of as the site of the latest incursion.

  As soon as he was on the interstate and steady at ninety miles per hour, he radioed his dispatcher.

  “Have whoever is dispatching in Dickinson let Don know I’m en route. Should be there in about thirty minutes.”

  “Just heard you pass by. I’ll let them know you’re coming.”

  “Check to see if a BCI team is on the way.”

  “They are.”

  “Good. Anything else, no matter what, comes our way, let me know soon as.”

  “Will do, Nate,” Rachel said. “Watch yourself.”

  Ashley’s phone rang. It was her father. She handed it to Osborne. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “What’s going on, Nate?” General Forester demanded. He had been an Army brigadier general, who’d done work for DARPA, the DoD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, before the president had asked him to head up the Dakota Initiative which was eventually administered by the ARPA-E—the new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

  “Looks like someone is coming after us again.”

  “Son of a bitch. Has Ellsworth been notified?”

  A Rapid Response team stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base outside of Rapid City provided the primary security for the project in the event of a major attack—like those that had occurred just before and after Christmas.

  “No need yet. Whoever it was hit a power line about twenty miles east of Donna Marie.”

  “Tell me,” Forester said. He’d not forgotten his field command days during which it was expected that questions, answers, and orders be quick and concise. He’d raised his only daughter that way and he expected everyone around him to follow his example.

  Osborne outlined the extent of his information, including his hunch that something was about to happen, and his heads-up to Sheriff Kasmir.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m on the interstate, should be on scene in under thirty minutes.”

  “Out of your jurisdiction.”

  “Yes,” Osborne said.

  “Keep me posted, Nate.”

  “Will do,” Osborne said and he handed the phone to Ashley.

  “I want to call my newspaper,” she said. “If this is the start of another attack it needs to get out there. Didn’t do us any good last time to hold off.”

  Traffic was light, and when Osborne got past a semi, he reached over to the glove compartment and took out his 9mm SIG-Sauer P226 and holster and propped it beside him between the seat and center console.

  “Okay, Daddy. But this time it’s different, besides the sheriff there are at least three civilian deaths. I don’t run with it, KDIX in Dickinson sure the hell will.” Ashley broke the connection and pocketed her phone. “My father said it’s your call.”

  “Let’s get down there and take a look first, okay?”

  Ashley nodded, but said nothing.

  16

  STARK COUNTY SHERIFF’S Senior Deputy Don Christen could not keep from looking back at Kasmir’s body lying on the side of the road. A pair of Dickinson County ambulances had been the first on the scene, and one of the EMTs had covered the body.

  At thirty, Christen, who’d played college football at North Dakota State in Fargo and still maintained his quarterback lean-and-mean physique and dark good looks, had worked for the sheriff’s department for eight years. He wasn’t married, though he never had trouble finding a date, and Kas and Grace had become almost like parents to him.

  Nothing like this had ever happened in Stark County until around the holidays when all hell had broken loose over at the project in Billings County. And certainly he’d never expected in his wildest imaginings that he would become the lead investigator on what was shaping up to be at least a triple homicide.

  A pair of highway patrol cruisers had set up roadblocks, one by the bridge, and the other at the top of the hill, stopping every car and checking IDs before the officers would let anyone through, warning them to drive with care but not to stop.

  Basin Electric had sent out another cherry picker and three-man crew who were standing by their bucket in the lowered position. Two men would go up to retrieve Bartlett’s body. They were waiting on word to go ahead. The third, a supervisor named Underhill, walked up to where Christen was standing by his patrol car.

  “What’s the word, Sheriff? We can’t leave him up there.”

  “We’re waiting for the BCI from Bismarck. Should be another twenty minutes.”

  “Come on, for Christ’s sake. Tony doesn’t deserve this.”

  “No,” Christen said looking the man in the eye. “Neither did Sheriff Kasmir or the good people in the pickup truck.”

  The EMTs from the second ambulance were standing by waiting to remove the bodies from the truck where it had landed in the ditch across the highway. Christen had put crime scene tape around Kas’s body, around the pickup truck, and around Bartlett’s truck with strict orders that no one for any reason was to cross the lines.

  Bob Olsen, the coroner from St. Joseph’s in Dickinson, had shown up in his Chevy SUV and was waiting to examine the bodies.

  “This is a crime scene, and I’m going to preserve the evidence,” Christen told Underhill.

  “Tony wasn’t murdered, it was an accident.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Christen asked, holding his temper in check. He had the reputation of always being in total control: calm, cool, and collected, Kas liked to say. And some of the other deputies had taken it up, and had started calling him Cool Hand Luke, or just Luke.

  But no one knew or even suspected that at times of high stress it took everything within his power not to lash out; tell the stupid son of a bitch to back off, or he’d end up in cuffs in the backseat of the patrol car.

  “I know what you guys are going through, losing one of your own,” he said. He glanced over at Kas’s body. “It’s the same for us. And if it means keeping their bodies here all day until we can figure exactly what happened, it’s the way it’ll be. I want to catch the bastards who did this.”

  Underhi
ll nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just a little tough to see Tony hanging up there like that.” He walked back down the hill to his waiting lineman.

  Eddie Fritch, one of the younger Stark County deputies, who’d been parked at the top of the hill, drove down, pulled off the road behind Christen’s unit, and walked over. “Just talked to Anita. Says the BCI team passed through town, should be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “That’s fast.”

  “Her friend over in Bismarck said they got a call from the FBI in Minneapolis who told them to light a fire,” Fritch said. He looked over at Kasmir’s covered body, then up at the badly burned body of the lineman hanging from his bucket. “That’s electric power from the project. I just hope to hell we’re not going to have a repeat performance of what went down over the holidays, with the Bureau and military all over the place.”

  “Could be,” Christen said. They all had the same fear, as did everyone in the small town of Belfield, just on the Billings County border where a rancher and his wife had been murdered by the same guy who’d hit the project. “Go back to the office, you’re on standby.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fritch said and he made a Y-turn and drove off.

  People all across western North Dakota were uptight, figuring that none of this would have happened if the federal government hadn’t put the project out here. Life would have gone on normally, nothing really big ever happening. They liked it that way.

  And now this. But Christen couldn’t make himself believe that the downing of the power line and the cold-blooded murders of at least Kas and the young couple in the pickup truck was done by someone from the county. Some disgruntled rancher who was angry that a high-tension line was strung across their land over their objections.

  “Gives you cancer,” was the generally held sentiment. “God only knows what the radiation will do to our cattle and horses—or our kids.”

  The BCI panel truck topped the rise and came down the hill, parking just above where the two Basin Electric trucks were set up below the pylon. Christen walked down as two investigators, one of them a slightly built woman, the other a tall, rangy man with a narrow chin and beak of a nose, both of them in blue BCI windbreakers and ball caps, got out and he introduced himself.