Blowout Read online

  He never felt the shot that killed him. One moment he was alive and the next he was dead. But he’d always figured that sooner or later he’d end up in a better place.

  The Baytown attack, as it came to be known in places like Montana and the Upper Peninsula, rose to a cult-level status among ecoterrorists. Brave men who’d been willing to give their lives in a fight to save the planet!

  And so the struggle began.

  Des Moines, Iowa

  The Trent Building

  Three Years Later

  THE TROUBLE WITH making a lot of money is that after a while many people can’t stop. So after the usual real estate and stock market investments, which can be reduced to a sort of science, and after the IPOs for innovative start-up companies, and even for some bright, ears-to-the-ground entrepreneurs who invested hundreds of millions in micro-loans mostly in the Far East, some kind of an end comes in sight. All too soon.

  So the exotics were invented; flash trading in which computers bought and sold stocks in microseconds, making profits in the tenths and hundredths of points that over a period, say a year, amounted to a billion or so.

  Or naked credit default swaps that was a type of insurance—though it was never called that lest it be regulated—in which the investor bet that the company he was backing would fail so he could collect a payout. Insure your neighbor’s house for two hundred thousand, pay the premiums, and if it burned down you collected on the policy. More of a high-stakes wager than anything else. And that had come from the brain of Robert B. Muskett, the boy genius over at U.S. National Trust.

  Or derivatives, which was another sort of insurance policy, or hedge funds, in which you bet on futures you didn’t own. It got to the point that the oil derivatives alone were worth eight or ten times the total amount of all the oil in the ground everywhere on the earth.

  When these investments were leveraged for ten cents on the dollar, and the markets began to rumble, a lot of very rich people began to get nervous. A ten-billion-dollar position that lost only one billion was gone, bankrupt, because the owners of the exotic were left with a bill of nine billion to make up the difference; what in the old days had been termed a margin call.

  Which was exactly the barrel of the gun Donald Stearns Wood, D. S. to his associates, was looking down, and he was getting more than desperate.

  On an early Friday evening in the middle of a January Iowa snowstorm his salvation came to him in the form of a courier-delivered message his secretary handed to him as he was about to leave his twelfth-floor office across Walnut Avenue from the Capitol Building.

  “This just came for you,” she said.

  It was a FedEx envelope with a security seal, warning of federal penalties for unauthorized use. The return address was simply Command Systems, and D. S.’s hand wanted to shake, but he smiled pleasantly. “You’d best be leaving now, Mrs. Cordell, less you get stuck here for the weekend.”

  “I was on my way out the door when this came in,” he said. She’d been his secretary for fifteen years, including two bust times when Trent Holdings was in serious trouble. And during that time the sixty-year-old woman, who was dignified in looks and deeds, had learned when not to question her boss too closely about things she did not understand. Like a message with no clear return address.

  “Take care now,” he told her. She lived out in Windsor Heights, and one of her perks was a company car and driver who picked her up for work and dropped her off at home. On a night like this it was just as well, because the buses had almost stopped running, but one of the company’s Hummers would get through.

  D. S. went back into his office, laid the envelope on the desk, and went to the floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the slanting flow of windblown snow and the flashing lights of the snowplows below on the streets, long enough for him to catch his breath.

  At forty-eight, D. S. had all of his hair though it was snow white, but his face had sagged over the years so that he now looked, and sometimes acted, more like a bulldog with old-fashioned white muttonchops than the director of Trent Holdings, one of the wealthiest hedge funds anywhere on the planet, which invested in derivatives and credit default swaps with total on-paper assets approaching one trillion dollars. Almost all of it leveraged, of course. So leveraged that the company was cash poor. Except for a pension fund spin-off the firm was privately owned. It had never sold stocks; the public had no stake nor was it a corporation so the government regulators did not have access to its books. Its cash-poor position—cash poor almost to the point of insolvency—was a secret so far.

  Staring out the window he remembered a Wall Street Journal senior editor right here in this room eight or ten years ago, who was writing an article on D. S’s remarkable success story, and who called him the most savvy investor ever—his results were even more reliable and spectacular than Warren Buffet’s.

  “Warren is good at playing the trends, and Bill Gates is even better at inventing things and cornering the market,” D. S. had told the editor. “But I make my money the old-fashioned way; by convincing people, by whatever means, to do things my way.”

  “You’ve been accused of stretching ethical boundaries.”

  D. S. clearly remembered the sly accusation, and he’d laughed in the man’s face. “Profits have never been about ethics. It’s the American way.”

  “But federal regulations—”

  “Have never done a single thing to stop or even soften the boom-to-bust natural order of the markets.”

  “What you’re saying, in effect, is for the government to do whatever it wants to appease the voters, while you do whatever you think is necessary.”

  “Exactly. What you’ve just stated, in a nutshell, is Harvard MBA one-oh-one.”

  “That’s cold,” the senior editor had said, who over a twenty-five-year career had reported on the titans of finance and industry in the U.S. and abroad.

  And D. S. had smiled. “Haven’t you learned by now that there’s nothing cold about making money?” And before the editor could say anything else, D. S. added: “Ask the holders of the pension funds I manage if they think my method of making money is cold.”

  And the editor had politely said his thanks. A week later a story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the upshot of which was: hate him or love him, D. S. Wood knows how to make money at least as well as the robber barons at the turn of the century—the century before last, that is. The article had tweaked his vanity.

  Tonight he and his wife were hosting a dinner party for Iowa Senator Justin Holmes, who was beginning to put out campaign feelers for a run at the presidency in four years, and depending on what the man had to say, D. S. would support him at least for the short term.

  “Keep your options open,” he told his people. It was the golden rule at Trent, and let everyone else figure it out themselves at their own peril.

  God, he loved this. Or had until the last couple of years. If it all went bust he would be facing a lot of years in a federal penitentiary somewhere—the rest of his life, actually. Because he’d cut a lot of corners making Russian and Chinese deals for oil fields in Iran and Iraq and mineral deposits in Afghanistan, most of them strictly against U.S. law. He’d possibly end up as roommates with guys like Bernie Madoff. But he wouldn’t allow it to happen to him. No power on earth would make him submit to something like that.

  He poured a small snifter of a respectable Napoleon brandy at the sideboard and sat down at his desk, opened the envelope, and read the one-line memo.

  After a moment he telephoned his wife. “I’ll be a little late, please give the senator my apologies.”

  “A problem, Donnie?” she asked. They’d been married for twenty-three years, and she was the only one who called him by that name.

  “Nothing earth-shattering, sweetheart, but it’s just something I have to deal with tonight.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Take care.”

  “You, too,” he said tenderly, and he hung up and read the memo a second time.
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  When he was finished he shredded the thing, and sat back with his brandy to think things out before he called Bob Kast, president of Command Systems, which was a shell company for the contractor service Venture Plus, headquartered in South Carolina. Bob had made his chops in Iraq, getting his foot in the door after Blackwater’s stumble from grace. He was a man who got things done.

  “Basically you can’t keep doing business as usual, is that what you’re telling me?” Bob had asked at their first meeting at Venture’s sprawling training base in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Greenville.

  “Not if it pits me against Washington,” D. S. had said, still not in full panic mode.

  “And you think that’s a possibility. One that you want me to find out for you. Pitting me against Washington.”

  “Exactly what I want.”

  “It’ll cost.”

  “Money is no object, Bob,” D. S. had promised. “Time is important to me, so don’t dawdle.”

  The problem was carbon dioxide and other global warming gases being spewed into the atmosphere. It was not the fact that our increasing dependence on foreign oil was bankrupting us, but that the financial problem was only secondary to the fact that most scientists were coming to the consensus that the U.S. was on the verge of reaching some tipping point where no matter what it did to save itself it would be too late.

  Carbon dioxide was putting the entire planet into a death zone of unbreathable air, with drastically rising temperatures and sea levels and no place for people to run. No place to hide.

  The burning of fossil fuel was the culprit, and the majority of Trent Holdings’ derivative stake was in oil. They had gotten hold of a dinosaur’s tail and were being dragged to death, but they couldn’t let go lest the beast turn around and devour them on the spot. And the issue had become one of the major security problems facing the U.S. Not only was the civilian population being held hostage by OPEC, but except for nuclear-powered naval vessels and a few green-fueled ships, our military was totally dependent upon fossil fuels. Interrupt the supply and our ability to defend the country would suffer.

  It had taken Kast’s people only two months to come up with the answers, and D. S. had flown in secret down to South Carolina last November where over a credible filet and a very good red, he’d been told for sure something that he’d been guessing at for nearly three years.

  In the forties when the outcome of the war in Europe and the Pacific was anything but certain for the U.S., and when military intelligence uncovered evidence that the Nazis were feverishly working on a new wonder weapon—a bomb so powerful that it could wipe out an entire city—Albert Einstein wrote a letter to F.D.R. urging that the U.S. develop such a weapon first to ensure the survival of the free world.

  The top secret Manhattan District Project was created, its main research and development facility located in a remote mountain location north of Albuquerque called Los Alamos. Working with the brightest minds in universities and industrial corporations across the country, the charter was to design, develop, and test an atomic bomb. Despite war shortages, the project was given top priority; it got whatever money and materials—no matter how restricted—it needed. The goal was to drop bombs on Germany and Japan to end the war.

  “We’re in the same situation now,” Kast had reported. “It’s called the Dakota District Initiative, and just like Los Alamos, the main research-and-development center is in a really remote part of the country. In this case the North Dakota Badlands not too far from the Montana border.”

  “It’s because of the Baytown near miss,” D. S. said, amazed at how simple—and dangerous to him personally—this might be. “Tell me.”

  “You’re exactly right. If that had succeeded and the refinery destroyed it would have driven gasoline to twenty, and some experts thought fifty dollars per gallon. Two months later the president put together a bipartisan coalition of congressmen, plus high-ranking representatives from Homeland Security, NOAA, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, a few cabinet members including Treasury and Interior, the FBI, and the Pentagon—mostly for site security—plus representatives from the Energy Security Leadership Council and the organization SAFE—Securing America’s Future Energy—along with the top minds at a dozen universities and as many corporations, including Microsoft, IBM, Westinghouse, and GE. Their preliminary black budget was five hundred billion dollars that was buried in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and then supplemented in the bank and mortgage bailout package. It was either that or bankrupt the nation. No choice, really. It was sink or swim on the largest scale possible since the Second World War.”

  D. S. remembered that the entire concept had come crashing down around his head and shoulders like some Mount Rushmore that had fallen to pieces. The initiative had something to do with coal, which was the most abundant fuel source the U.S. had within its borders—enough by most conservative estimates to easily take care of all our projected energy needs for at least the next five hundred years. Half a millennium.

  The problem was, of course, that burning coal to produce steam from water to drive turbines that in turn drove generators to produce electricity was just about the dirtiest way to do it. Wind power engineering was coming along, and so was solar. And while the country would get more energy in the future from both sources it will not solve the energy supply problem. Nuclear power stations produced material that would be dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and the plants were prohibitively expensive.

  Hydroelectric was projected to begin to fail in the near term because global warming was not only reducing snowfall and glaciers from which the rivers to produce the power were fed, but rainfall patterns were changing, and not beneficially. Along with the dozens of other devices and schemes for producing power, coal, and to a much lesser extent natural gas and oil, were the only reliable means. But coal was dirty. It would kill the environment.

  It had always been his goal to fight the nukes replacing them with oil—but just for the short term.

  The fact was he probably had thirty years or so left to live, and he meant to live those years in comfort, making money until the day he died.

  “Coal,” D. S. had said again, aware that Kast was looking at him like a biologist looking through a microscope at a bug he wasn’t familiar with. “Are you telling me that they’ve found a way to use coal to make electricity without pumping out carbon dioxide? Something cheaper than sequestration? Something usable? Something practical?”

  “I don’t have all the answers,” Kast had admitted. “Just the location of the facility, south of Medora, and the possibility that whatever they’re about to try has something to do with microbiology.”

  “How did you come up with that?”

  “The chief scientist on the project is Dr. Whitney Lipton, who until six years ago was the leading microbiologist at the CDC when she suddenly retired. At age twenty-seven.”

  The idea of injecting a coal-eating bacteria into pulverized coal in a sealed environment, producing methane that could be burned instead of the coal, and with a significant drop in CO2, had been bandied about by environmentalists over the past decade or so. But no one could make it work on a practical basis; the decrease in CO2, though significant, wasn’t worth the trouble and there was the risk of methane escaping into the atmosphere—which would cause a lot more damage to the ozone layer.

  Not nearly enough information. “What else?” D. S. demanded.

  “We don’t have all of the details, except that the buzz on the Hill is that they’re trying some big experiment in thirteen months. In mid-December next year, just before Christmas. And it’s supposed to be significant. They’re talking about the ‘gadget.’”

  D. S. spread his hands.

  “That’s what they called the first atomic bomb,” Kast said.

  And D. S. had come up with his decision practically at the speed of light. His survival was at stake. “We need to stop it. Sabotage the thing. Derail it. Push it back for a year, maybe more.
”

  Kast had been adamant. “I won’t fire a gun on U.S. soil, I don’t care how much money you’re offering. And what’ll a year buy you?”

  “Just that,” D. S. had said. “It’ll buy me time.”

  They’d gone out to the long veranda along the south side of the main house that looked over a mountain valley, the view in the full moonlight nothing less than spectacular.

  “I need help, Bob,” D. S. had said.

  “I know.”

  “There could be consequences.”

  Kast had looked at him like he was a madman. “Consequences indeed,” he had said angrily. “Try Leavenworth.”

  “I meant from the experiment. We can take the position that if the experiment fails, and if enough methane is produced it could trigger a catastrophic release directly into the atmosphere that could in theory wipe out all life on the planet in less than five years.”

  “I did my homework,” Kast had shot back. “Enrico Fermi thought it was possible that if a nuclear device were set off, it could cause a runaway ignition of all the oxygen in the atmosphere—everywhere on the earth. But it didn’t happen.”

  “No,” D. S. had admitted. “But not every long shot is a bust.”

  Kast had finished his wine, and then looked at his expensive crystal glass and suddenly tossed it over the railing. Both men watched it sparkling, catching the rays of the moon, as it seemed to fall forever into the valley.

  “I’ll find someone for you,” he had said without turning to look at D. S.

  And tonight the memo.

  THE SOLUTION IS IN HAND. GO OR NO GO?

  D. S. telephoned Kast’s encrypted Nokia and the contractor answered on the first ring. “Yes?” Music played in the background, and a lot of people were talking and laughing. It sounded like a party.

  “Go,” D. S. said. “The down payment will be credited to your Command System’s Cayman account within the hour.

  “Very well,” Kast said, and the connection was broken.