Blowout
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To Kim, for thirty years and many, many more …
—BYRON L. DORGAN
For Laurie, as always
—DAVID HAGBERG
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My heartfelt thanks to Mel Berger at William Morris Endeavor (WME) for his role in helping make this project a reality. No author could have a better or more knowledgeable advocate in the book business than I have had with Mel Berger. He’s the best!
This book owes its existence to an idea from Tom Doherty at Tor Books, who has an abiding interest in a clean and renewable energy future. Tom believes that new and interesting ideas can awaken the public consciousness through books of fiction. I agree!
The ideas and guidance by Bob Gleason at Tor Books have also played a major role in the completion of this book. Thanks to both of them for the inspiration and encouragement. And a special thanks to Katharine Critchlow at Tor Books for keeping us on schedule and handling the myriad of details needed to get a book ready for publication.
And finally my admiration and gratitude go to my coauthor, David Hagberg. Pairing me to work with an unbelievably talented fiction writer like David has been a burden for him, I’m sure. When the two of us conspired on a plot that would represent a leap ahead in thinking about energy policy in the future, I learned about David’s facile mind and creative imagination. It’s clear why he has been such a successful fiction writer over so many years. It has been a treat to work with him on this book and to brainstorm with him about our energy future. Thanks, David!
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dorgan’s Dedication
Hagberg’s Dedication
Acknowledgments
Authors’ Note
Map of Dakota District Research Center
Baytown, Texas—ExxonMobil Baytown Oil Refinery
Des Moines, Iowa—The Trent Building—Three Years Later
Part One: Opening Gambit
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Part Two: Early Game
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Part Three: Mid-Game
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Part Four: Checkmate
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Epilogue
By David Hagberg / By Byron L. Dorgan
About the Authors
Copyright
AUTHORS’ NOTE
We may have already reached the carbon dioxide tipping point, which in effect means that even if the planet reduced its carbon emission to zero, it may take a thousand years for Earth to heal itself. As dramatic as this might sound, the situation is closer to reality than even Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was.
Of course, doing nothing is not an option. We have to act now, to at least mitigate the effects of the poisons we are pumping into the air.
One possibility is a proposal called the Dakota District Initative, which is to our environment what the Manhattan District Project (to develop the atomic bomb) was to ending World War II.
Carbon dioxide emissions into our atmosphere will kill us. Like the nuclear clock of the sixties, the carbon dioxide death zone clock is at one minute before midnight. Added to that is the threat to our survival as a nation from the dependence on foreign oil.
Our entire planet is being held hostage, and there is no guarantee unless something is done soon—something drastic—that the ransom will be paid and the victim rescued.
Baytown, Texas
ExxonMobil Baytown Oil Refinery
THE PROBLEM IS that once you teach a man how to fight, and then place him in harm’s way on the battlefield, he just might get a taste for killing that’s so deeply embedded in his soul that he can’t simply walk away. It happens to one extent or another in every conflict, but escalated after the first Iraqi war, which saw an increase in post-traumatic stress syndrome casualties and the start of a serious number of GIs committing suicide. It was crazy.
They were volunteers, actually financial conscripts with nowhere else to turn for jobs, from the poorer sections of Chicago and New York, the barrios of Los Angeles, and places like Michigan City, Philly, Duluth, and Waterloo, and remote spots in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and sometimes from the Yoopers, as they are called in the backwoods of Upper Peninsula Michigan. Lots of them drifting toward fringe and radical groups like the Posse Comitatus, Armed Forces of National Liberation, Aryan Nations, the Covenant, the Christian Patriots Defense League, the United Underground, and a host of others.
Warren Kowalski, about to turn fifty-five tomorrow and under five-five with narrow features and the small man’s chip on his shoulder, lay on his belly in a ditch twenty feet from the back maintenance gate of the ExxonMobil fuel refinery—the sixth-largest port in the world—sprawling across thirty-four-hundred acres along the Houston Ship Channel, the air stinking of gasoline and a dozen other chemicals. Employing four thousand people, the facility was vital not only to Southeast Texas, but to the entire U.S. economy. Without its six hundred thousand barrels of oil per day the engines of the entire nation would be seriously hurt; gasoline price at the pump would spike.
But Baytown was more than a facility to refine oil into diesel fuel and gasoline, it was also the largest petrochemical facility in the world, producing olefins used for making a wide variety of plastics; aromatics used for solvents and mostly as additives to gasoline to raise its octane rating; synthetic rubber for tires; polyethylene, the most widely used plastic in the world; and polypropylene, used for everything from medical equipment, clothing, and even the plas
tic tops on soda and water bottles; along with a host of other oil-based compounds absolutely vital to modern life and commerce.
And Kowalski and his assault force of five men—all of them veterans from the Iraq-Kuwait wars, all of them highly decorated, all of them Posse Comitatus, men with deep-seated hatreds and angers—were here to destroy the place.
It was late, after two in the morning, the sky overcast, no moon, a very light drizzle—all factors, except for the rain, that Kowalski, the sarge, had planned for.
“Hit them when they least expect it,” he’d told his people; Higgins and Marachek who’d come over from Montana out of the Brotherhood, Laffin and Ziegler from the Upper Peninsula, and Dick Webber, who had connections at Fort Hood, which got them the M-16s and Colt 1911A1 .45 pistols.
Good men all of them, Kowalski, thought, preparing to give the signal.
He’d been born and raised in Michigan City, his father, brothers, uncle, and several cousins all working at the steel mills, from which he had escaped by joining the army two years before Iraq started to go bad.
He’d just been a grunt, corporal a couple of times, but then got busted because he couldn’t take orders, and he liked his beer and pot combo a little too much, yet the guys had taken to calling him “Sarge” from the beginning because this was his plan, and he saw no need to correct them, as long as they followed orders. Nor had he known any of them before three weeks ago, when he’d posted a notice on the Posse Comitatus news board on the Net and on-site in Billings and Sault Sainte Marie for an op to, in his words: “Gain payback for the bastards who kept extending us no matter what it did to our gourds.” It was the fat cats who made obscene profits off the backs of the grunts with their noses in the mud and shit, who back in the world owned steel plants, coal mines, oil wells, and power stations. Millionaires with their noses up the Pentagon’s ass.
“And just like in Kuwait and Iraq during the first dustup with the burning wells spewing black shit into the air which fucked us up royally, they’re doing the same thing with their refineries—fucking up the air so we can’t even breathe it.”
The guys either didn’t give a shit about his message or didn’t understand—or both; they were just interested in getting back into it. They wanted to shoot someone, blow up some shit. The air pollution thing didn’t matter, most of them were heavy smokers, especially Kowalski with his two and a half packs of Camel unfiltereds.
But for Kowalski the message was everything—or at least that’s what he’d convinced himself was the truth—though if he was being honest with himself in a rare moment, too rare his ex-wife would have said, he was really just like the others. A disaffected grunt who hadn’t gotten enough; he wanted more, message or not. Knock the entire bastard country back to the horse-and-buggy days. Simpler times, when men were men and no one fucked with them.
They had comms units with earbuds and vox-operated mikes attached to the lapels of their night fighter black camos that they’d each paid for out of their own pockets. Kowalski keyed his: “Go in ten,” he whispered. The units were low power, so there was little chance their traffic would be intercepted even if anyone was listening, which was doubtful. Attacks like this had hardly ever happened since the antiwar riots of the late sixties and early seventies.
“Roger one,” Higgins came back. Followed by the other four.
“This is a supercritical refinery,” Kowalski had explained at one of their initial briefings in Kalispell before they’d begun field training prior to moving south.
“Who gives a damn, Sarge,” Marachek had asked. He was angrier than the others. His twin brother had died in his arms in the middle of a firefight across the border with Pakistan. Officially his death had been listed as an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Thirteen of them.
“You all need to give a damn, because what I’m trying to tell you is that just about everything inside the plant is sensitive to gunfire and especially to C4.”
“So we take out the gate guard, go in, blow up some shit, waste a few dudes, and get the fuck out,” Laffin—JP to the squad—had said. He wasn’t angry, he was simply the craziest of the lot. He lived with his wife and their two daughters in a dilapidated mobile home parked in the woods outside of Bergland in the Upper Peninsula’s Ottawa National Forest.
“Do that and you just might get all of us killed,” Kowalski had answered, tamping down his own anger. He wanted to tell them about the point he was trying to make, but he gave it up as a lost cause because sometimes even he didn’t know exactly what his point was.
“All right, we’re listening, Sarge,” Ziegler had said.
“We’re after shutting them down for a long time. Make ’em think about the shit they’re doing. About the crap they’re doing to us. So we’re going to maximize our strike, by setting so many fires that nobody will be able to put them out for a very long time. First off we set C4 charges at the base of each cracking tower, and then we take over the computer center from where we can open every fuel-routing valve in the entire complex so that when the C4 blows, the entire place will go up in a wall of flames. With any luck the fire will spread to the two main chemical plants, plus the polymers center and the olefins plant. All that shit will go up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July.”
“Let’s get it on,” Ziegler had said. He was a small kid from somewhere in Southern California who thought he was good-looking enough to be in movies. No one else thought the same, and he was in a permanent state of surprise.
“Pop any of this stuff at the wrong time, and we’re all broiled meat. Happen so goddamn fast you wouldn’t know what hit you. One second you’re a swinging dick, the next you’re on the menu.”
“We’re listening,” Webber had said. He was the steadiest of them all. In Iraq he’d been in a bomb disposal unit. Called for steady nerves and zero day-before shakes.
“Soon as we hit the back gate the clock starts, and the cops will come a runnin’. We need to get in, set our charges, get out, and beat feat.”
Houston was only twenty miles to the west where Kowalski had a born-again sister who’d agreed to put them up. She thought she could help her brother and save a few souls in the bargain.
“What about the plant personnel?” Webber had asked, even though he and the others already knew the answer.
And Kowalski didn’t even have to think about it. Payback time. “We waste them.”
He looked at his wristwatch. “Now, now, now,” he said into his lapel mike, and he got to his feet, scrambled up onto the blacktop, and zigzagged through the darkness into the lights over the gate.
He was point man, peripherally aware that his people were on his tail right and left, his main concentration on the gatehouse where a lone guard was supposed to be stationed. But the gatehouse was empty, and that struck him as more than odd, unless the guy was taking a nap on the floor, or had gone somewhere to take a piss.
Webber passed him on the right, molded two small lumps of C4 on the gate’s hinges, and tied them together with one timer. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted, and he ran a few yards to the left.
A few seconds later a pair of impressive bangs cut the night air and the gate fell to the ground with a clatter.
Kowalski hesitated for just a moment. No sirens. And the silence bothered him. He’d been told that the gates were wired to alarms. Open one without the proper procedure and all hell would break loose. But nothing. And stepping over the downed gate he glanced inside the guard shack—the muzzle of his M16 moving left to right—but no one was inside, taking a nap or otherwise. No one.
They’d come from Lake Charles, Louisiana, on I-10 through Beaumont across the Texas border, past Baytown itself then down State Road 146 to La Porte just across the ship canal from the refinery where a friend of the Posse had a shrimp boat waiting for them; disenfranchised men, wanting to strike out at some unknown force that was holding them back from what they felt was rightfully theirs even though none of them, Kowalski included, could say what that might be.<
br />
Shit or get off the pot, his daddy who’d come through ’Nam and who used to beat him regularly was fond of saying. It worked.
The off-loading docks where the oil tankers dropped their cargoes were just below the main atmospheric distillation towers, from which gas and light naphtha was released from the top end, followed below by heavy naphtha, jet fuel, kerosene, and diesel oil—and it was to this five-story-tall complex that Kowalski directed his fighters.
Friends, actually, because in the manner of most military units the men you slept and ate with, the ones you trained beside, and the ones who went into battle with you to possibly die, became friends practically the instant you all came together. And Kowalski felt damned good. He—they—were on a mission.
Thirty yards from the tower from which a maze of pipes carrying highly volatile fuels and gases spread in every direction, strong lights suddenly illuminated the entire refinery complex, and Kowalski pulled up short as a pair of APCs came around from both sides of the massive distillation unit, and at least fifty armed men he immediately recognized as Texas Army National Guard showed up in flanking positions.
“Lay your weapons on the ground.” An amplified voice rose above the noise from the complex.
They had the fatigues and the weapons, but in Kowalski’s estimation most of them were probably nothing more than weekend warriors who’d never seen combat.
“Do it now,” the voice, probably some rat-ass lieutenant, ordered.
“Pussies,” Kowalski muttered.
But the sons of bitches had the firepower, and the position.
Kowalski would have liked to see his ex-wife’s son Barry come back from Afghanistan—the kid was supposed to be tough. He was twenty or thirty or something like that—Kowalski tended to forget that kind of shit—and he’d been hard on the boy and his mother, but it was a tough old world out there. And getting tougher by the day. So maybe he’d done them a favor.
“Lay down your weapons!”
Kowalski glanced over at Marachek who was grinning like a madman.
“Fuck it, Sarge,” Marachek said, and Kowalski agreed.
And he raised his M-16 and started running toward the tower as he began firing, his men right behind him, firing as they ran.