Blowout Read online

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s our power station. You’ll be met there.”

  “By Dr. Lipton?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but no one by that name works here.”

  3

  THE ONLY THING Gordy Widell really hated about himself was his acne, which no matter what solution or cream he tried would not disappear. His mom told him that he ate too much chocolate and his dad, before he’d hung himself in the garage after getting laid off at the GM assembly plant, told him to stop being a pussy and live with it.

  But by then Gordy was already a geek who no one understood and he’d taken off when he was fifteen and came under the care of a couple of gay guys from Rockford who moved out to Bozeman where he moved in with a computer geek even smarter and crazier that he was, and so his real education had begun.

  It was fully dark when he’d powered up his equipment, and began delicately sampling the electronic spectrum on just about every band—AM, FM, and microwave—he could think of, searching for every emission from the Dakota District’s main research campus and especially from Donna Marie, the experimental electrical-generating facility, where within twenty-four to seventy-two hours the first test run of the gadget would take place.

  “Could kill us all,” Barry had told them. Not a cheery thought, but Gordy didn’t really believe it. He’d been hired to make it possible for the others to stop the test.

  “Piece of cake,” he muttered under his breath as he studied the three main monitors.

  Brenda was sitting behind him, a finger twining in the curls at the back of his neck. She did it to make her girlfriend jealous, even though it never worked. “What’d you say, sweetheart?”

  “Fuck off.”

  She laughed loud enough for everyone in the motor home to hear. “Do it right, Gooordyyy.”

  The problem, as Gordy had figured it, was twofold.

  First, electronic traffic coming into the facility—that included landline, cell, and satellite phones, plus computers and all the other satellite and microwave links as well as quantum-effect encrypted burst transmissions of top secret material—had to be intercepted and mined for information that was pertinent to this operation. Were Air Force security units from Rapid City en route for an unannounced exercise as happened several times each year? Were some VIPs from Washington going to show up sometime tonight? Maybe CDC or even NOAA scientists arriving for the experiment? Extra bodies that would have to be dealt with. Or had the FBI somehow gotten wind of what was about to happen, and were sending warnings: Help is on the way, batten down the hatches.

  Second, and most important, was electronic traffic leaving the facility. All of it had to be intercepted and washed of any hint of trouble. The delay of a few milliseconds between the time a signal was sent and actually received at the other end—mostly in Washington—because it had been picked up by Gordy’s computer, cleansed, and resent, would not be noticeable, at least not in the short run. It especially had to include alarm signals between Donna Marie and the main campus.

  All they really needed was ninety minutes—time enough for them to get in, neutralize the personnel, especially security so that Dr. Kemal could inject his cocktail of bacteria into the seam through the wellhead, and then get out.

  That last part was the most problematic in Gordy’s mind. But like his old man had said: stop being a pussy.

  Besides the normal cell phone services just about everything coming in or leaving the facility was relayed through the WGSS, Wideband Global Satellite System communication network, or the updated Milstar, which was the Military Strategic and Tactical Relay system.

  Egan came back. “How’s it going?”

  Gordy ignored the question for just a few seconds, then hit ENTER, and looked up. “We’re in, Sarge.”

  “Good man,” Egan said, and patted Gordy on the shoulder.

  4

  BOB FORESTER’S DAUGHTER showing up here was the last thing Whitney Lipton wanted or expected. Today of all days. In the morning they were injecting the bacteria-talker into the test bore, and seventy-two hours afterward, they would know if the gadget was a success. In which case everyone would probably get drunk and stay that way for a week, or a failure, in which case everyone would probably get drunk but stay that way only for a day until they got back to work to find out where the science or technology had gone wrong.

  If they were still alive after the initial test.

  Forester was in conference at his ARPA-E office on Independence Avenue in Washington and could not be disturbed; at any rate he once admitted that since Ashley was about thirteen he’d just about lost any realistic control over her behavior.

  Whitney, Doc or the boss to her science team, and Doctor, which she’d always thought sounded a little pretentious, to just about all the government overseers on the project, was thirty-three, nearly six feet, with a pleasant face, high cheekbones, sleek black hair, and a slender, almost bony, frame that some of her friends said made her look something like the movie actor Lara Flynn Boyle. She grabbed her parka and on her way out of her office phoned Jim Cameron, chief of security at Donna Marie.

  “Pete Magliano is bringing Forester’s daughter out to look around,” she said.

  “Right now?” Cameron demanded. “You can’t be serious.”

  “She showed up at post one and said she was here to interview me, I didn’t know what the hell else to do with her. There’s no way I wanted her here tonight, not in the state my people are in.”

  “Well, it’s no better over here.”

  “Right,” Whitney said, chuckling. Actually she and Jim Cameron had hit it off nearly four years ago. She’d had a predisposition not to like military types, especially security people with their sometimes unreasonable lockstep SOPs, and she’d been mildly surprised at first by his laid-back nature. He was reasonably good-looking, he was bright and well read and well rounded, something her ex was not, and he made her laugh. At thirty-two he was only one year younger than her.

  “What do you want me to do with her?”

  “Show her around the place. Looks like a power plant.”

  “No coal cars.”

  “We’re going to burn methane.”

  “The girl’s not stupid. There’re a lot of storage tanks and processing equipment and piping more like you’d see at a refinery. From what I’ve heard she’s bright, and maybe her father let something slip. Maybe she’s put two and two together, which is going to bump up against our security provisions.”

  Whitney was a little vexed, had been from the beginning, by the supersecrecy the White House had placed on her work. But the president had explained to her that if they announced the project—which would eventually cost taxpayers upwards of $750 billion—and it failed, heads would roll. His head would roll. In a democracy the electorate ruled, whether anybody liked it or not.

  The bigger problem, as it had been explained to her, was potentially very large trouble in the run-up to any revolution. The fact was that within U.S. borders there were enough coal deposits to satisfy its energy needs for four or five centuries—even adding in demands that were expected to rise exponentially if cheap electricity could be produced to run the increasingly electric economy—including all electrically heated and cooled homes, electric ships, electric trains, even electric airplanes and, of course, electric cars.

  But coal was dirty. Every coal-powered electrical-generating plant pumped thousands of tons of poisonous carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Even stations that sequestered stack gases by a dozen different processes, including olivine capture in which the gas would be converted to the stable magnesium iron silicate, which was one of the most benign and common materials on earth, or used the carbon dioxide to make a zinc-based aliphatic polycarbonate plastic that could be used in hundreds of applications—a plastic that was totally biodegradable—or even the more expensive chilled ammonia carbon capture in which supersonic shock waves compressed the carbon for storage deep underground, were polluter
s.

  And the biggest problem of all, the reason the president had explained to her and the others on the original committee he had called together at the White House for the intensely secret initial briefing, was big oil and the managers of the oil derivative funds who would squeeze our economy to the breaking point if they got so much as a whiff of the possibility that coal-produced electricity would be the motive power that drove the cars and trucks, putting them out of business. It would be all-out war—for survival.

  “Anyway I’m on my way over so you won’t have to deal with her on your own,” Whitney said. “But I’ll probably be a half hour behind.”

  “Thank you for small favors.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “You know what I mean,” Cameron said. “I can explain to her everything we’re doing here in four sentences. We’re going to inject three classes of microbes directly into the coal seam Donna Marie is sitting atop. One breaks down the long hydrocarbons in the deposit. The second converts those into organic acids and alcohols. And the third—methanogens—feed on the first two and convert them to methane that we pump to the surface and burn as fuel to power our turbines. The problem is what do I tell her after that spiel? That there’s a real possibility we’ll have a methane blowout that would be a million times worse in terms of atmospheric damage than a large coal-burning generating plant produces? That some of our bacteria produces a lot of oxygen that could ignite the entire coal seam, which would involve probably a fourth of the entire state? Suffocate all the cattle? Really piss off the tourists?”

  “You could quit and go back to Washington.”

  “And miss all this fun?” Cameron said. “Just get over here as quickly as you can. You know this woman.”

  “I know her dad, and I only bumped into her once, briefly,” Whitney said. “I need to talk to my crew and I’ll be right over. In the meantime use your Irish charm. Works on me.”

  She hung up before he could reply.

  Her secretary Marney Morgan was gone for the evening, back in housing across the mall, where most of them lived most of the time, or at this hour possibly in Henry’s, which was a Upper West Side, Manhattan, transplant bar and a really good restaurant, or at the army dining hall—which had been dubbed Grunt City or Vomit Valley—but certainly not on her way into Medora. Everyone who was on base this evening was staying there. The gadget that contained the equipment to “talk” to the cocktail of microbes would be lowered into the deep injection borehole at six in the morning. And then what?

  Whitney held up in the second-floor corridor of the main administration and research-and-development building, quiet just now because just about all of her techs and postdocs were downstairs in the main control center getting ready for the event, as the injection was being called, leaving mostly the roustabouts and power plant engineers over at Donna Marie, and gave a brief thought to how she’d gotten to this point.

  It was crazy, even she could admit it to herself at the odd moment. But eight years ago she’d come up with the notion that microbes—bacteria—could communicate with each other. She’d not been the only scientist to come up with the idea, of course, Princeton’s Bonnie Bassler being the most brilliant and well known of the others, but she’d figured out how to talk back to them and in an efficient, no-fail way. Train them like Pavlov did with his dogs. Ring the dinner bell and her babies would begin to eat—just about anything she engineered them to eat, coal included. That had been the tough part, the coal and what her bacterial cocktail produced—methane—and how it produced it and the speed at which it produced the gas, and the other by-products.

  But the really tough parts were understanding the exact language of each bacteria colony, the fact that in general bacteria were multilingual, and finally learning a universal language that Smithsonian magazine had dubbed “microbial Esperanto.”

  And then, of course, the design of the gadget, which when lowered into the borehole could translate her instructions into microbial Esperanto and transmit them.

  It worked on a very small scale in the lab. But the real test would come first thing in the morning. And if she were being honest with herself, she would admit that she was damned scared, not only because of the possible side effects—primarily a methane runaway or a coal-seam fire—but of the effects that a failure would have on the initiative and on her career.

  Or the long-term alternatives; that because of the increasing amount of carbon dioxide being relentlessly pumped into the atmosphere by cars and trucks and buses, by coal- and oil-burning electrical plants, by factories and by the deforestation of large sections of South America—trees that consumed carbon dioxide and converted it to oxygen, which was a nifty bit of natural sequestration—people were literally killing the planet. Sooner or later, unless something were done—something drastic because it was nearly at the point of no return—Earth would be unfit for human life. It could even become another Venus with runaway heating; rivers of molten lead, a world where just about all biologic life was extinct.

  Scientists had been sending the message for years but no one had really listened until the near miss in Texas, and the White House had suddenly sat up and taken notice that the U.S. was vulnerable.

  Too late, Whitney thought as she took the stairs down and heard the raucous party going on in the control center. She wanted to be angry with them for their levity at a time like this. But they were kids, some of them, and just as nervous as she was, just as frightened as were the scientists, techs, and engineers at Trinity in the New Mexico desert the night before the gadget—the first atomic bomb—was to be test-fired, and they were letting off steam.

  Music with a very heavy bass thump, but almost no tune, some sort of country and western, fairly vibrated the corridor walls and rattled the door to the control center and when she came around the corner someone in the room burst out laughing.

  She had six people at this end—Bernhardt Stein, her lab coordinator who’d come over from ARPA-E on Forester’s orders; Harvard’s Alex Melin, her assistant microbiologist and one of the brightest people she’d ever known; plus her postdocs, Jeff Roemer, Donald Unzen, Susan Watts (the class clown), and serious Frank Neubert from a small town somewhere in Iowa who was their prophet of doom. All of them really serious people. Really bright. Really dedicated.

  And really in trouble, Whitney wanted to say when she walked in, but she couldn’t and she almost burst out laughing.

  As soon as she was noticed, someone cut the music, everyone stopped talking and laughing, and everyone turned toward her; like lemmings, she thought, facing the cliff.

  Everyone was dressed in pajamas over which they wore lab coats and fuzzy bunny slippers, and all of them had donned gas masks.

  Susan, only recognizable because she was the smallest of them and because of her blond hair, walked over and handed Whitney a glass of champagne. “Boolean algebra gone bad,” she said solemnly.

  “Divide by zero,” someone else said.

  “If you can’t normalize the equation, invent a constant.”

  Whitney got it, and she raised her glass. “Gas masks won’t save you from carbon dioxide.”

  Everyone raised their gas masks and glasses. “Illogic,” Roemer said. “It’s what brought us all here in the first place, right?”

  And she loved them all at that moment. The camaraderie, the friendship, the trust, the good and gentle humor, and even the naïveté. She’d gotten the real beginning of her science at the Centers for Disease Control labs in Atlanta where she’d come up with the notion of not only listening to bacteria, but talking to them. Instructing whole colonies of them, through a mechanism called quorum sensing in which groups like the six hundred different bacteria that made up dental plaque, each of them speaking a different chemical language, could understand a lingua franca that allowed them to work toward a common purpose. In that case the purpose was a bad one. But she began to think of ways in which to speak to bacterial colonies, give them a quorum-sensing mechanism that would direct
them to do something beneficial.

  Maybe unlock the secret of curing viral disease.

  “Maybe a Nobel,” her boss over at the CDC had suggested.

  And the White House had called, and she’d dropped everything and run here to North Dakota to be with these people, and even now, basking in their goodwill and cheery bonhomie she couldn’t answer why. Except that it was good to be here. It felt right.

  She toasted them, and put her glass aside. “Make it an early night, we have a big seventy-two hours starting first thing in the morning.”

  They all laughed, and someone put on the rap music and Susan handed her another glass of champagne and everyone else ignored her.

  “Party time, Doc?” Susan asked over the noise.

  “I have to get over to Donna Marie.”

  “Get some sleep. Oh six hundred comes awfully early.”

  5

  BARRY EGAN, ALONE on the first of the three Honda ATVs, approached the ridge above Donna Marie at about two miles per hour. The highly muffled engine, designed for wildlife photographers who wanted to sneak up on their prey, especially polar bears in the Arctic, was scarcely more than a whisper within ten feet.

  He held up his hand for them to stop, and behind him Ada and Brenda on one machine, and Dr. Kemal riding tandem on Moose’s, pulled up behind him. They wore white coveralls and Bluetooth earpieces connected to encrypted sat phones with which they could communicate with one another as well as with Gordy, who was monitoring and controlling all electronic emissions from the research facility back at the motor home. But he’d cautioned them all at the beginning that anything electronic could be intercepted.

  “Nothing but nothing beats a well-orchestrated plan in which everyone knows exactly what needs to be done.” Barry had drummed it into their heads. “Know the mission plan, follow the mission plan. Hand signals when possible. No need to tell the sons of bitches what we’re up to.”

  It had become their mantra, and whenever he spoke the last part out loud he would laugh, bray actually, so hard that even Brenda and Ada knew he was bugshit crazy.