Blowout Page 3

  PART ONE

  OPENING GAMBIT

  Present Day

  Early December

  1

  FIFTEEN MILES SOUTH of Medora in the North Dakota Badlands the panorama was nothing short of stunning, otherworldly, ancient, atavistic in a way in its appeal. The late afternoon was cold, near zero, a light wind blowing down from the Montana high plains when the forty-five-foot Newell Motorcoach, towing an open trailer with three rugged ATVs, topped a rise and pulled off to the side of the narrow gravel road.

  Barry Egan stepped out, walked a few yards farther up a gentle slope, and raised a pair of Steiner mil specs binoculars to scope out the broad valley that ran roughly north and south through the middle of the Badlands’ Little Missouri National Grassland. In the far distance he followed the tall, razor-wire-topped fence marked U.S. GOVERNMENT RESERVATION: VISTORS BY PERMIT ONLY to a group of buildings low on the horizon to the east.

  Another man got out of the coach, dressed like Egan in an elk hunter’s camouflage Carhartts, boots, and stocking cap, and took up a west flanking position down the road. For now he was armed with a .338 Winchester Magnum big game hunting rifle, with three-hundred-grain cartridges that had enough stopping power to put down a grizzly, or even a polar bear.

  Egan, a man in his late twenties, was good-looking in a narrow-faced but sincere way; his dark eyes and the thin line of his mouth sometimes showed happiness, and when it happened everyone within shouting distance seemed to relax. All the conflict went out of the air, and people felt good, even confident.

  But it was mostly an act, because Egan had been angry for as long as he could remember; at first because his stepfather had come back from the first Iraq war a changed, angry man, who beat on his wife, and then when life seemed to be getting at least tolerable, the old bastard had gotten himself shot to death inside a refinery in Texas, leaving his wife and son to fend for themselves in what was a tough old world.

  Like father like son, Egan thought as he lowered the binoculars and turned back to his outriders and grinned. “After all this trouble, doesn’t look like much after all, does it?”

  Craig “Moose” Swain, by far the largest of the five operators Egan had brought with him, laughed out loud. He was a former Delta Force corporal who’d gone a little overboard during what was supposed to be a preliminary recon mission in a mountain valley near Asmar on the Afghan-Pakistan border, killing a family of eight, including the father and five brothers, none of them armed. He’d been given an other-than-honorable discharge and had wandered around the Soldier of Fortune, American Firster, and Super Patriot organizations before finally winding up in Bozeman, Montana, where he’d appeared in Egan’s radar, moving in and around the New Silver Shirts, Christian Identity, and Sovereign Citizen movements. A player. A soldier for God.

  “Tonight?” he asked.

  “Supper time,” Egan said. “Eighteen hundred hours. It’ll be dark by then.”

  Moose, who’d loved every minute he spent in Afghanistan, had been scoping a narrow plume of smoke rising in the southwest, lowered his rifle. “That it, Sarge?” he asked.

  Egan turned his binoculars to where Moose, with what Egan called his Strike Force Alpha team thousand-yard stare, was pointing, and studied the dark smudge being shredded by the wind, and shook his head.

  “Campfire, maybe a cabin fireplace, or something from the Badlands Roundup Lodge,” he said. “Shouldn’t be no smoke from Donna Marie, unless they screwed up.”

  “We’d go anyway?”

  Like the others he liked blowing up things and killing people. He didn’t know why, none of them could articulate their passion with any degree of clarity, not even Egan, who except for Gordy Widell, their seventeen-year-old computer hacker, and Dr. Kemal, their microbiologist, was the brightest of the lot. But a lot of the people Egan knew growing up in Upper Peninsula Michigan were crazies who hated the government—any government from Washington to the mayor and his cops in Marquette—and knew that it wouldn’t be long before the anarchy that was coming any day would finally arrive and their only way out would be when Adolf Hitler’s grandson came back to lead the resistance.

  He’d fit in up there, with the groups in Wyoming and the Posse Comitatus in Montana, in his estimation all of them Jesus-crazy out of their skulls, and with his Team Alpha who he’d recruited and trained over the past ten months and eighteen days.

  But the one thing the old man had taught him before he’d gone off to Texas was to be practical. “It sure as shit ain’t easy out there, kid. So if you got any talent don’t give it away. Sell it. A man’s gotta make his way in the world. There’s no free lunch. Remember it.” And he’d cuffed his stepson, already a grown man, so hard on the left ear that to this day Barry was partially deaf, so he always had to turn his good ear toward whoever was trying to tell him something. It was a nuisance, but he remembered the old bastard’s words. And the Iraqis he’d guarded and sometimes tortured at Abu Ghraib thought when he cocked his head like that he was listening to some hidden earpiece, getting his orders from some general back in Washington.

  “They didn’t screw up,” Egan said. “We’re going in at nightfall.”

  He scanned the horizon out toward what the government called the Dakota District Initiative where supposedly the world’s most secret and most powerful extremely low frequency, or ELF, radio station ever to be built had been under construction for several years. When it was finished, sometime this month, actually this week before Christmas, radio messages could be sent to anyone anywhere in the world, atop or inside mountains, in the deepest gold mines or at the bottom of any ocean where only deep-sea bathyspheres could go.

  Supposedly. But Egan knew better, and he was being paid what for he and the others was a fabulous sum of money to destroy the place and everyone in it; to stop, he was told, the poisoning of the entire atmosphere. In reality, the money was only secondary to him. Blowing up shit and killing people was the game. Payback.

  Nothing moved for as far as he could see. This was the end of North Dakota’s special elk hunting season to cull the overpopulated herds on government lands, and in the eight days they’d been wandering around out here they’d seen almost no one else. A few other hunters, and one morning a rancher who’d come up to take a look at their license.

  Egan had shown the man their permit and the rancher was not happy—he’d never much cared for out-of-staters, hunting permits had always been issued mostly to locals—but he was convinced, and he’d left, not realizing just how close he’d come to dying.

  Satisfied that nothing was coming their way in the waning afternoon, Egan and his outriders went back into the motor home that had been custom-designed and outfitted for them down in South Carolina, no expense spared, and shipped to a rental agency up in Billings that sometimes did business with the Posse.

  In its original C2 configuration the Newell had three major spaces starting at the front in the salon with seating and dining space for ten people just aft of the driver’s position, with its state-of-the-art GPS receiver, and collision avoidance radar automatically linked to the braking system, as was the FLIR system, or Forward Looking Infrared detector. Behind that was the galley and head plus another small lounge. And at the rear what in the original model was called the Special Villa Section was a large space of pull-down bunks and a long conference table.

  All of the interior was done up in marble and thick carpets and stainless steel appliances and expensive leather upholstery with Tempur-Pedic mattresses and wide-screen HD plasma TVs, everything top-shelf. And everything apparently legitimate for seven well-heeled elk hunters.

  Egan, Moose, Widell, Dr. Mohammed al-Kassem Kemal, the Sudanese-born Pakastani who was on just about every terrorist watch list in the world, and the two girls, just as batshit crazy as the rest of them.

  Brenda Ackerman, short, dumpy-looking, except for her oval face with wide-open, innocent-looking brown eyes, who’d served on a small-town Mississippi police force until she was eased out when
it was suspected but never proven that she had organized an old-fashioned KKK lynching of an elderly black farmer. For a time afterward she had worked as a truck driver and then a roustabout on Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay oil fields, until she’d killed a man who’d called her a dyke in a bar fight and ran to Upper Peninsula Michigan to be with Ada Norman whom she’d met on the Internet.

  Ada was a raging skinhead neo-Nazi who believed that Hitler’s grandson was alive and ready to rise up for the cause. At forty-two she was almost eight years older than Brenda, but she’d been trained well by her militia group and could put a respectable pattern on a pistol range target at two hundred fifty inches, firing a Glock 17 at better than one round per second. She was Brenda’s backup driver.

  “We go at eighteen hundred,” Egan told them.

  The girls at the front of the rig looked up as did Widell from his computer. Dr. Kemal, who hated everything Western because the CIA had killed his parents who’d fought alongside Uncle Osama, had come from the back with a book in his hand and he blinked rapidly behind his spectacles. Like the rest of them he was a very good shot, especially with the Kalashnikov, the rifle he’d been raised with.

  “Are we quite alone, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Egan said. “Everyone check your weapons and munitions, and get something to eat, could be a long night.”

  Widell went back into the galley and released a number of latches that moved the built-in refrigerator, range, and dishwasher aside, revealing banks of computers, radars, satellite receivers, and radio signal detectors that covered everything from high frequency to VHF, UHF, and above into the C and Ku bands used for uplinks. The compact microwave and satellite dishes were concealed in the air-conditioning units on the roof, and everything else was disguised as normal AM/FM broadcast, Sirius radio service, CB, or television dish antennas.

  The equipment on board could not only detect signals to and from the Dakota District Initiative headquarters and the Donna Marie experimental coal-seam electrical-generating station, but security alerts from within that would bring help within minutes.

  Standing there, Egan thought about his stepbrother Peter who’d been born eight months after the old man had been shot to death in Texas. He’d been the only one of them who’d had the possibility of a normal life. And just shy of his second birthday he’d wandered out of the trailer and had fallen into the creek at the bottom of the hill and drowned. Dead for nearly four hours before anyone realized he wasn’t asleep in his bedroom.

  It was a tough old world.

  2

  ASHLEY BORDEN HATED the runaround she figured she’d been getting ever since she was a kid and had discovered that boys and girls were different. It wasn’t just the differences in how they went to the bathroom; she’d figured that out when she was five and had taken down her pants behind the garage at home in Fargo to show Harold Thompson hers, and he’d done the same, and when she’d laughed at him he’d knocked her down and ran off. But it was in school a couple of years later when kickball or baseball or football teams were called up, and only the boys were picked.

  It wasn’t fair, because she knew that she was just as fast and as strong as they were. Only it got worse in high school when boys were supposedly naturally better at math and science, and even worse in college at the University of Missouri in Columbia, which was ranked the number one school of journalism in the U.S. Girls as good-looking as Ashley were supposed to be working toward jobs as broadcast news readers and/or husbands heading to law school, not as print journalists.

  Pulling up just before six at the Dakota District south gate in her dusty Toyota Tacoma pickup after a very late start, the Bismarck Tribune magnetic logo on both doors, she was just about ready for a fight. At twenty-seven she was five-seven, slender, with light brown hair worn short, and wide dark eyes, still a little too tomboyish to be considered a beauty, with the cocky, sometimes even brash attitude of a service brat—the daughter of a two-star army general who’d raised her as a single father after her mother had died when she was seven. This afternoon she was dressed in jeans, a turtleneck fisherman’s sweater, and a dark blue parka, hood back.

  An air force cop, wearing winter BDUs, a sidearm on his hip, an M4 carbine slung over his shoulder, came out of the guardhouse and walked over as Ashley rolled down her window.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am, may I help you?” he asked. He was young, in his very early twenties, built like a linebacker. His name tape read: ANDERSON.

  Ashley held out her press pass. “I’ve come out to interview Dr. Lipton.”

  “No one by that name here, ma’am,” the MP said.

  Whitney Lipton was one of the leading minds on microbe biology and the genetic manipulation of bacteria. She’d worked at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta until four years ago when the president had tapped her to lead the Clean Coal Research team for the Department of Energy. And she had disappeared from view.

  It was Washington politics and the name wouldn’t have meant anything to Ashley who’d come to Bismarck right out of J school and had never managed to leave because she’d had a life of moving and she was sick of it, but her dad was stationed at the Pentagon and whenever she could she’d pop out to visit him. Three years ago she’d flown to D.C. without calling first, meaning to surprise him for his birthday. As she was getting out of the cab in front of her father’s Fort McNair house, a fit-looking woman was just getting into the back of a plain Chevrolet Impala with government plates and their eyes met. The woman nodded and she was gone.

  Her father hadn’t been surprised that his daughter had shown up out of the blue; nothing about her surprised him. She gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “Hi, Poppy,” she had said. “Who’s the lady I just met outside?”

  He’d laughed. “Is that a daughter’s or a reporter’s question?”

  Something had not quite set right with her. “Both.”

  “Sorry, no romance there. She’s Whitney Lipton, an egghead over at the CDC. Could be doing something for us, and that’s all you’re going to get out of me.”

  “So, happy birthday.”

  Ashley had been curious and she’d Googled the woman, finding out that she was a hell of a lot more than a CDC egghead; in fact she was one of the leading minds on microbe biology and the genetic manipulation of bacteria, and yet there was almost nothing in any of the search engines that Ashley used that connected Dr. Lipton with the president’s Clean Coal Research initiative her dad was working on, or any hint that she was doing work for the Pentagon.

  And that might have been the end of it, except that Ashley had started a file on the Dakota District ELF project that she and a number of journalists had been allowed to visit three years ago, because a lot of things out there didn’t make sense to her. For starters she was just about 100 percent certain that most of the people were military, yet none of them wore uniforms. None of the construction crews working on the power-generating station—which they were not allowed to tour because of the danger—thirty-six hundred yards away from the headquarters compound were local. And they’d been asked to not concentrate their stories on what was happening out there, because the actual details were a military secret.

  “We don’t want to start a panic like what happened with the ELF station up in Wisconsin when people thought they were all going to die of radiation poisoning,” the Army Public Information officer had told them. “But if you’re going to write about us, we’d be happy to fact-check you.”

  “Yeah, right,” one of the reporters said.

  “I said fact-check, not censor.”

  A few stories had been published, but the project was in North Dakota—out in the boonies—and even the locals didn’t much care and interest quickly died.

  Except for Ashley, who by happenstance was at the Bismarck Airport three days ago to interview North Dakota’s junior senator William Frey, a decorated war hero just returning from an ABC Good Morning America segment. But standing on the tarmac next to the senator�
�s car and driver the first person off the plane was Dr. Lipton, who was met by her own car and driver that took off across the airport to the general aviation terminal.

  A few minutes later as the senator was finally getting off the plane, Ashley watched the doctor get out of her car and board a helicopter, which immediately took off and headed to the west.

  It had taken her two days to find out that no flight plan had been filed for the helicopter that had, according to the dispatcher, taken a pair of elk hunters on a tour around the Teddy Roosevelt Elkhorn Ranch. An outright lie.

  So what the hell was a leading microbe biologist on assignment for the president, a woman who knew her father who was a Pentagon general working for the newly formed ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, doing at the Dakota District ELF facility?

  “Well, call her and tell her that I’m here,” Ashley told the AP a little more sharply than she meant to. It was cold with the window down, it was late, and she would have to stay in Medora or maybe Dickinson for the night.

  “Sorry—”

  “She knows me, goddamnit. Just pick up your phone and tell her that I’m General Forester’s daughter. We met at my dad’s house a couple of years ago and I just saw her at the Bismarck Airport a few days ago.”

  The AP smiled tightly. “Ma’am, you need to turn around now and leave or I will have to place you under arrest.”

  “Good!” Ashley practically shouted. “We’re making progress. Call someone and get them out here with the cuffs before I freeze my ass off.”

  “May I have your driver’s license?”

  Ashley handed it over, and the AP went back to the gatehouse. She could see him on the phone, looking at her through the window, and looking at her ID. After several minutes, he put the phone down and came out.

  “Ma’am, it’ll be about ten minutes. Our Public Affairs officer Lieutenant Magliano is coming out to escort you to Donna Marie.”