Blowout Page 5

  He got on his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the crest of the hill where he glassed the brightly lit compound through his mil specs Steiner binoculars. Except for the lights the place could have been deserted; there was no movement he could detect. A large building that housed the generating chain; starting with the borehole into the coal seam that would be tapped in the morning, the furnace that would burn the methane, the boilers that would produce the superheated steam that would turn the small three-stage turbine generating nearly one megawatt that would then be sent to the transformer and distribution yard, rose up from the prairie a couple of hundred yards away from a cluster of mobile homes housing the barracks, dining hall, and rec center—a safe enough distance if there was an accident.

  The power generated led to an impressive-looking array of transmission towers that supposedly would send messages to any military unit anywhere on the planet, even to submarines a thousand or more feet beneath the surface. Donna Marie would guarantee that in case of an all-out war vital communications—especially data transfers to military units—would not be interrupted even if our satellites were knocked out.

  In actuality Donna Marie was nothing more than a methane-powered electrical-generating station. No big deal in Egan’s estimation. But he’d studied the blueprints, and he’d been given the list of the nine personnel—four engineers, including Tim Snow who was in overall charge here, plus five tool pushers, and each person’s probable location at any given moment, and even though he didn’t fully understand the importance of the mission, he did understand the fabulous money he and his people would be paid, and their need to strike back at the fat cats getting rich on the back of the working man.

  Moose crawled up beside him. “How’s it look, boss?”

  “Nobody knows we’re here,” Barry said without lowering the binoculars. Someone had just come out of the main turbine building. “Base one,” he spoke softly into his comms unit.

  “One, base,” Gordy responded.

  “We’re in position. Are we secure?”

  “We own the place. Ninety-minute window.”

  Ninety minutes, it’s all Barry had asked for. After an hour and a half Gordy’s system would begin to deteriorate, primarily because of overload—the computers in the motor home could only hold a finite amount of data. Sooner or later information flowing to and from the facility to ARPA-E and a half-dozen other governmental facilities, including NOAA, NASA, the CIA, NSA and, of course, Homeland Security, would have to be dumped. Links would be broken. Questions would be asked.

  But in ninety minutes the entire operation would be mounted and conducted, leaving a good margin for an orderly retreat when they could again become ordinary elk hunters.

  So long as there were no witnesses—electronic or human.

  “The clock starts now,” he radioed.

  “The operation is at plus one, eighty-nine remaining,” Gordy said.

  The man in white coveralls, who’d come out of the turbine building, drove a golf cart across to the trailers, and there was no further activity that Barry could see and he started to lower the binoculars when Moose nudged him.

  “Forty-five right.”

  Barry scanned right along Donna Marie’s west inner fence and around the corner to the front gate on the south side as two vehicles, one of them a gray Hummer with government plates, followed by a blue pickup, approached the unmanned gate as it slowly swung inward. The logo on the side of the pickup was for the Bismarck Tribune.

  When the gate was fully opened, the two vehicles went into the power station yard and directly over to the turbine building, where a man in civilian clothes got out of the Hummer and a young woman with short hair got out of the pickup before they went inside.

  “Trouble?” Moose asked.

  Barry lowered his binoculars. “Two extra bodies in the turbine building,” he said. “But no trouble.” And his mind was suddenly abuzz. He liked the press—the power of the media. And he started spinning out scenarios of how the death of a Bismarck Tribune reporter—if that’s what she was—could advance the cause. His cause.

  “Are we a go, boss?” Moose asked.

  Barry couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, we’re a go,” he said.

  He and Moose crawled backwards from the crest of the hill until they could get to their feet and rejoin the others.

  “We’re good to go,” Barry said.

  “Know the mission plan, follow the mission plan,” Brenda said.

  It was the very same thing that Bob Kast had told him at the training base outside Greenville. “That comes first. Everything else is secondary. Are you with me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Barry had replied. They were in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains and from their perch at an observation post he could see the puffs of explosions in the distance, and seconds later hear the explosions. A lot of them. Some big and decisive, others short, sharp, angry. Gunfire came from several of the shooting ranges, including one urban setting. People were jumping out of airplanes, practicing precision nighttime HALO—High Altitude Low Opening—insertions. Hand-to-hand combat instructors, one at a time, followed heavily armed men in groups of four, taking them down completely by surprise, even though the men knew they would be subjected to a simulated attack.

  Barry had loved every second of it, all the more because what he was witnessing was simulated. He’d been hired to do the real thing.

  “Your mission, your plan, your people, your responsibility,” Kast had stressed. “Succeed and you’ll be a wealthy man. Fuck it up and you’ll end up dead. Because we will find you. I know some very good people.”

  “What if we’re arrested: what’s to stop us from copping a plea bargain?” Barry had asked, thinking how smart he was to bargain like that. In his mind, seeing the Command Systems spread, his risk ought to be worth more than he’d been offered.

  Kast had given him a hard look. “The Bureau’s Witness Security Program leaks like a sieve, so it wouldn’t help you, and even if they stuck you someplace like Leavenworth, we’d still get to you.” And the man had grinned, making him look like a wolf about to strike. “But that would never be a problem, would it, Barry? Because you and your people are nutcases, lunatics. Fringe. Certifiable. No one would believe you.”

  Posse Comitatus, indeed, Barry had thought then and now. But Kast had been right about the craziness.

  “Saddle up,” he told Brenda and the others, and on his lead, lights out, they headed northwest, not turning back toward the west fence until they were a couple of ridges over from the front gate and safe from detection by anyone inside the power plant or the trailers.

  This far inside the Initiative’s main reservation, and in such a remote spot, and with continuous satellite surveillance overhead and infrared sensors and motion detectors and lo-lux closed-circuit television cameras mounted just about everywhere—systems that Gordy was now in control of—everyone on the project felt safe.

  They were about to be taught a lesson, Barry thought, and he stopped himself from laughing out loud, braying actually.

  6

  THE PROJECT’S PUBLIC Affairs officer, Army Lieutenant Peter Magliano, tall, dark, and handsome, looked like an Italian movie star from the thirties, but Ashley was unimpressed. Or at least she wanted to be unimpressed, but he was smooth without being overly smarmy, reasonably bright, familiar with her bylines, and knew who her father was.

  “I took my mother’s last name when I turned eighteen,” she’d explained though she had absolutely no idea why.

  “Rebellion, maybe,” he’d suggested.

  “Maybe,” she’d replied noncommittally, thinking he might be playing with her.

  They were in the main turbine gallery of the power plant, a huge space more than two hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and soaring more than five stories to the domed ceiling, white operating-room clean tile everywhere because dust was a turbine’s worst enemy, no operating personnel in sight, and as the lieutenant had explained before the
y walked through the double doors, like airlocks on a spaceship, he wanted her to experience the big picture from the get-go. A maze of pipes and heavy bundles of electrical cables and other incomprehensible equipment were all attached at the front and the back of the main turbine, an immense tubular machine shaped more or less like a sausage that was dented in the middle.

  “How much power are you producing right now?” she shouted.

  “Actually none,” Magliano told her. “We’re electrically running the turbines to check balance, bearing tolerances, stuff like that. Keep the shafts from sagging out of true.”

  “I only noticed the one smokestack. Not much of a rig for a coal-burning plant. And where are the storage yards and pulverizing plants? I didn’t see any conveyor belts or mining equipment for that matter.”

  In fact when she’d followed Magliano in the Hummer her first impression was that this place was some sort of a scam, some sort of a government boondoggle, what some of the contractors over in Iraq and Afghanistan had been playing at, sucking billions of dollars from the public trough while returning little or no service of any value. Like the Alaskan bridge to nowhere.

  “This project is not about burning coal to produce electricity to run the communications system.”

  “You’re on top of a coal seam.”

  “We’ve injected a series of microbes into the seam, and we think that we’ll be able to produce enough methane to run the turbines.”

  “I’ve heard of that work. Still produces carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere.”

  “Not the sort of methane we’re going to produce.”

  “Methane is methane. I know my basic chemistry.”

  “Ours has a bacteria attached to it,” Magliano said.

  Ashley was startled. “Are you talking about sequestration before the smokestack?”

  “In the smokestack, actually,” he said. “But I’m no scientist, so I’m at the limit of my knowledge here. Dr. Lipton can explain it better than I can.”

  Ashley walked over to the huge, science-fictiony turbine supported by four concrete cradles that raised the bottom of the thick steel cover six feet off the tiled floor and reached up and brushed the case with her fingertips.

  The thing was alive, incredibly smooth, nearly vibrationless, and yet she could feel its heartbeat, or actually the currents or something along its nerves, almost as if the machine were communicating with her. Almost ESP.

  She turned and looked at Magliano who was smiling patiently, and she wanted to think that he was an ass, but she decided on the spot that his smile was anything but disingenuous. “How many people are here right now?”

  “Here in the turbine building, just Tim Snow, who’s our chief project engineer, and Mike Ridder, who runs the control board upstairs. Plus you and I, and I think Jim Cameron our chief of security, might be running around here someplace, unless he went back to the party. We’re conducting our first test in the morning. And the others are probably over at the rec center, too.”

  “What about Dr. Lipton?”

  “She’s on her way, but usually she and her techs and scientists spend most of their time over at the R and D Center. No need for them to be here, just about everything is mostly controlled by computers.”

  None of this was really adding up for her. Like Magliano she was no scientist, but she knew enough basic science from high school and from college where Chemistry 101 was the lesser of two evils when matched against Physics 101 that took a lot more math.

  “Why the secrecy about the power plant?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The AP at the gate said there was no one by the name of Dr. Lipton working here. This place has all but been off-limits to the press—and when we were out here a couple of years ago you gave us a lot of stuff about a long-range communications system, almost none of which made much sense. I can tell a snow job when I see one because my father’s had to lie all of his career with military intel and I’m used to it.”

  “Then you know when not to push,” the lieutenant said, his smile a little forced. “You’re your father’s daughter and all, but you wouldn’t have been let through the front gate if we’d been able to reach him. You’re here because I was ordered to try to calm you down, maybe put a lid on whatever you think you know, and whatever else it is that you want to find out. What we’re doing here, how we’re doing, and why we’re doing it, is top secret. A matter of national security.”

  “Come off it, Lieutenant,” Ashley said. “You’re converting coal to methane to make electricity to supposedly power another ELF system like over in Wisconsin. What’s so earth-shattering about that?”

  “I’ll leave that one up to Dr. Lipton. She’s the boss lady. I was just told to bring you out here and hold your hand.”

  Which also made no sense to Ashley. Why put a CDC microbiologist, practically a Nobel Prize laureate, in charge of a power plant to supply a communications center?

  She turned and walked beneath the turbine, trailing her fingers on the case, the vibration going completely through her body. Melodrama, she thought, and she looked back at Magliano to tell him just that, when the side of his head erupted in a geyser of blood and he was flung backwards off his feet.

  7

  BARRY, CARRYING A Knight PDW 6x35mm compact automatic carbine, appeared at the doorway to the power plant primary control room three stories above the turbine floor as one man was grabbing for a telephone and the other, a look of fear and anger on his face, was turning away from the large plate glass window.

  “What do you want?” the man at the window, who Barry identified as Mike Ridder, the system’s board operator, shouted.

  “You know,” Barry said, and he shot the man, driving him against the window, then switched aim and fired a two-round burst at Tim Snow, whom he also recognized from photographs he’d studied, one of the rounds catching the chief engineer in the side of the head, driving him to the floor.

  “The male down by the turbine,” Moose’s voice came over Barry’s earpiece.

  “Two down up here. What about the woman?” Barry radioed.

  “No sign.”

  “Take her alive if possible. And get the doctor started. I’m on my way to beta.”

  “Roger.”

  “Team two, copy?” Barry radioed as he turned and raced down the corridor and took the stairs to the main floor.

  Brenda came back. “They’re all in the rec center. North double-wide. Looks like party time.”

  “Give me a head count.”

  “Six.”

  “One missing,” Barry radioed. “Stand by, I’m en route.”

  “Wilco.”

  Two loose ends, Barry thought as he reached the back door on the main floor, went outside, and took his Honda across to the cluster of mobile homes all lit up. Even from a quarter of a mile he could hear the music from the party in the main trailer. The first was the head count at the rec center, and the other was the newspaper reporter somewhere inside the power station. It wasn’t likely that she was armed, so she wouldn’t interfere with Dr. Kemal’s work—the primary reason for this operation—but he’d thought of a number of interesting possibilities for her. Maybe as a bargaining chip with Kast for even more money.

  Mission one was securing the power plant. Which had been accomplished. Mission two was taking down the remainder of the personnel, which was going to happen within the next four or five minutes—except for the one missing warm body. Mission three was introducing Dr. Kemal’s counterbacterial strain into the borehole. And mission four was setting enough charges to take out the furnace and boiler, the turbine and generator, and the wellhead that was secured top and bottom by a series of blowout preventers, just like on an oil rig. Only these preventers were controllable. They could be opened and closed in any sequence. Presumably to allow the introduction of Dr. Lipton’s coal-eating bacteria.

  Mission five—the bonus—was to take out the good doctor if she was on site. They were not to tak
e a chance of trying to reach the main research center two miles away, so Dr. Lipton’s presence here would have to be a piece of good luck.

  Brenda and Ada were hunched up flat against the back of the double-wide trailer when Barry pulled up, dismounted, and joined them. Even over the loud country and western music they could hear people laughing and singing at the tops of their lungs. The stupid bastards were having a party instead of taking care of business as they should have been.

  “Base, one,” he radioed.

  “One, base,” Gordy came back. “Plus fifteen, seventy-five remaining.”

  “Are we clear?”

  “Roger.”

  “Do it now,” Barry told the women. “I’ll check the other trailers,” he said, and he got to his feet and headed in a dead run to the first of the three single-wides.

  The two women stepped around the corner of the double-wide and began firing, walking the rounds about chest height from left to right, the bullets easily slicing through the thin aluminum skin, insulation, and inside wall board.

  The techs and roustabouts inside screamed in pain and desperation, someone shouted someone’s name, and the music abruptly stopped.

  Reloading, the two women fired another sixty rounds into the side of the double-wide and the screaming stopped.

  Barry turned back for just a moment to see the girls jumping up and down. Didn’t matter who they killed as long as they got to kill someone. He’d chosen well. “Team two, I want a body count in three.”

  “Wilco,” Brenda radioed. She and Ada would enter the double-wide to search for and deal with survivors.

  “Rendezvous at alpha.”

  “Roger.”

  Barry burst into the side door of one of the trailers, which served as living quarters for the crew, and swept through the four bedroom layout. But no one was at home, as he expected would be the case. It was the night before the experiment and everyone was partying.

  Except for the one missing man.