Blowout (14 page)

“That doesn't make any sense,” Mann had been moved to say. More than that, it was outrageous.

“He's just raised the bus fare by fifty percent, which has caused rioting all across Caracas, the same as in the late eighties and for the same reason.”

Venezuela was the fourth-largest importer of crude oil and petroleum to the U.S. just behind Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia, and raising the cost per barrel would be intolerable. People couldn't afford it. Gas lines would become commonplace because most of the other importers were already operating nearly at capacity. That, as well as the increasing pressure from China and India for oil, would put an impossibly difficult strain on the U.S. economy that was just now showing feeble signs of recovery. Wars had been started for a lot less, and the president said exactly that.

“Find out what they want, but more important for all of us, what they'll accept.”

“I'll do my best, Mr. President.”

“I know you will.”

Off the elevator the young woman led him down a plushly carpeted corridor with fabric-covered walls in beige, photographs of PDV operations around the country hung at tasteful intervals, to a well-decorated conference room. Two men were seated at the head of a long table and they both looked up with neutral smiles.

Gabriela introduced them: Araque, short, with a thick middle and balding gray hair; Luzardo, strongly built with a square face and deep-set emotionless eyes that made Mann think of a shark just before it attacked.

“Please, Señor Mann, have a seat,” Araque said.

Mann sat to their left, and Gabriella sat next to him. “I'll act as an interpreter if needed,” she said, her smile as dead as Luzardo's and he thought of the remora that attached themselves to sharks.

“As you wish,” Mann said.

“I hope that you had no difficulty from the airport,” Araque said.

“Not at all. In any event I've been in areas of civil unrest.”

“Arrogant bastard,” Luzardo said in Spanish half under his breath. But Mann caught it.

“Mr. Luzardo said that your reputation precedes you,” Gabriela translated.

“Actually he seems to think that I'm an arrogant bastard,” Mann said in Spanish.

Luzardo shrugged, and he motioned for the young woman to leave the room. She was no longer needed as an interpreter. When she was gone he came directly to the point. “Why are you here, Señor Mann?”

“President Thompson has asked that I open a dialogue so that we can reach some agreement that might be beneficial to both our countries,” Mann began. He sounded pompous to his own ear, but these kinds of discussions usually followed a general pattern. Diplomacy happened when neither side knew what to say or how far to push things.

“We're raising our price per barrel to you by twenty-three percent. Do you perceive an ambiguity?”

“But you're not raising your prices for China or India.”

“No,” Luzardo said.

“Why?”

“Because we can.”

“It will create an unnecessary hardship for our citizens.”

“Yes,” Luzardo said.

“There may be serious repercussions,” Mann said, already knowing that his trip here had been useless. “Can there be no negotiations?”

“With the United States?” Araque demanded.

“Yes, Venezuela is still one of our major and most trusted trade partners. In the aftermath of Katrina your government held out a hand of friendship, offering help.”

“Which your President Bush arrogantly refused, while at the same time planning for Operation Balboa to invade our country.”

“There were never any invasion plans, but that was a different time, a different president.”

“Then there was Obama, who said that we helped Colombian guerrillas. He had the same stench as Bush.”

“Your President Chávez made that statement, but at the Summit of the Americas in April oh-nine he said that he wanted to become friends with President Obama.”

Araque waved it off. “Can you tell me that there are no plans to assassinate our president?”

“You have my word.”

Luzardo was sitting back, the same unreadable expression in his dead eyes. “You understand that sovereign nations need to protect themselves.”

“As I said, sir, there are no plans to invade your country or assassinate your president.”

“Perhaps or perhaps not, but you are presently busy at work trying to ruin our economy.”

“That's simply not true.”

“Oil is Venezuela's lifeblood. Without it our people would be driven to starvation.”

“As would happen to my people without it,” Mann said, no idea where this was going. But he had an ominous feeling that he was walking into a diplomatic trap.

“Do you know about the Dakota Initiative?”

And all of a sudden Mann knew that the trap had been sprung. “I have no idea what you're talking about,” he said.

“That's too bad because you are lying, of course.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Luzardo said coldly, no inflection in his baritone voice. “If Venezuela loses its U.S. oil market it would be devastating to our economy. Even as we speak we've had to raise our bus fares, and you've already seen what that small measure has done to our people.”

“Your administration—every administration beginning with your first Bush—has been arrogant,” Araque said angrily. “No other people matter more than yours. You rape the planet, and when you have depleted everyone's resources you move on, leaving the rest of us in your garbage heaps.”

“Twenty-three percent is just the beginning, Mr. Envoy,” Luzardo said. “Tell your president that if he plays with fire to be careful he does not burn himself with its unintended consequences.”

“I cannot bring him that message.”

“As you wish,” Luzardo said. He picked up the phone. “Come.”

Gabriella appeared at the door. “If you will come with me, Señor Mann,” she said brightly.

“Can there be no further discussion? No negotiation?”

Neither Luzardo nor Araque answered, they simply looked at him as if he were some disagreeable object better served out of sight.

Mann got to his feet. “Craziness,” he muttered, but he followed the girl to the elevator and back to the main floor.

“Have a pleasant journey home, sir,” she said and walked away, her hips swaying and her heels tapping on the marble tile.

The receptionist at the front desk, another pretty girl, looked up and smiled as he passed and went outside. The chanting crowd that had all but filled the broad Avenida Bolivar had spilled out to the side streets, hundreds of them streaming by.

The government-supplied limousine that had brought him in from the airport was gone, and when he reached the curb he began to get the first glimmer that something was wrong.

A battered windowless Mercedes Sprinter van pulled up, and before Mann could react two men jumped out and hustled him into the backseat, and then a third man behind the wheel took off, easing his way through the crowd to the next corner where he turned south and accelerated.

“What's the meaning of this?” Mann sputtered, but he felt real fear, the first since a mission had gone wrong in Somalia three years ago.

“We're taking you back to the airport, señor, so that you can bring a message to your president from our president,” one of the men who had grabbed him said.

Mann could only see forward out the windshield, but after a few blocks he realized that they weren't heading for the airport, and he said as much.

“That highway has been closed, we have to use an alternate route.”

Mann began to panic. “Take me back to PDV.”

“It's too late for that,” the one man said. He had a cruel, narrow face, and his sweatshirt and jeans were dirty, stained with what might have been oil or grease.

Five minutes later they came to what looked like an industrial district of abandoned buildings, and rusted-out factories with rutted streets, a collapsed smokestack, and bricks reducing the road to a narrow lane.

“I'm an envoy from the president of the United States.”

“You should have listened with respect,” the narrow-faced man told him matter-of-factly.

The van turned down another lane, and pulled into the cavernous hall of a huge factory building, all the machinery gone, and stopped in front of a workbench standing alone in the middle of the space.

Mann's captors pulled him out of the van, as three men dressed in white coveralls, white booties, and gloves came out of the shadows. Two of them were almost as large as sumo wrestlers, while the third, much smaller man, carried a chain saw, and Mann's legs turned to water.

“You can't be serious!” he shouted, but his voice was lost in the large space.

The two wrestlers hauled him to the workbench and roughly slammed him facedown, bent over at the hips. A moment later the chain saw whined to life.

“No!” Mann shouted. “Please, I beg you!”

But the chain saw was right there, right on top of him. It revved up and he nearly managed to pull away when an intensely sharp pain bit into the back of his neck, blood flying everywhere in his peripheral vision, and suddenly the pain was gone and he was floating toward blackness, no last thoughts except horror for what was happening to him.

 

20

OSBORNE FIGURED THAT
the terrorists had only two ways in or out last night. The first was north of the power station toward the Teddy Roosevelt National Park where a gravel road wound up connecting with the interstate highway nine miles west of Medora. From there they would have had clear driving into Montana. The second was to the south along the Little Missouri River, toward Amidon on U.S. 85, where a lot of out-of-state elk hunters came up from Rapid City.

It was eight in the morning, the air crisp enough to see your breath, when Tommy Seagram headed his Bell Jet Ranger south, along the river, from where he'd picked up Osborne at Chimney Park just outside of town. Far to the west the Sentinel Butte rose from the horizon while to the southeast was the Kinley Plateau.

Within a few minutes they picked up the smudge of a lingering fire at the Initiative rising into the clear sky.

“Trouble out here last night?” Seagram asked.

They wore headsets that made it possible to talk to each other without shouting. “Some,” Osborne said.

“Unidentified aircraft on a course of two zero five eight miles south-southwest of Medora, you are entering a restricted airspace. Please turn to one eight zero. Acknowledge.”

Seagram banked the chopper slightly to the left so that they would pass a couple of miles to the east of the facility, and got on the guard frequency. “Roger,” he said, and he gave his tail number. “We see smoke, do you require assistance?”

There was no answer and despite himself Osborne had to laugh. Seagram had been born and raised down in Rapid City and had moved up to Bismarck to, as he said, get away from the madding crowds, and “anything that smacks of authority.” It was a common trait among a lot of North Dakotans, locals as well as imports.

“Goddamn bureaucrats,” the chopper pilot said.

The Little Missouri River, which came down from the Missouri Creek above the Teddy Roosevelt Elkhorn Ranch, meandered all over the place like a drunken sailor. In many stretches it was just a trickle, sandbars everywhere, in some places there were grasslands and stands of ponderosa pine, in others stunted growth brush right down to the high-water mark. A million years of flow carved little canyons that were framed by rolling brown and green hills, cellular lava outflows, and in the distance like sentinels over a wasteland, rocky outcroppings and buttes and other fantastical, even alien rocky formations. These were the Badlands and Little Missouri Grasslands, home to Osborne and to Seagram and a lot of other people—not just ranchers—who loved the openness and stark beauty of it.

“Okay, so you got me out here, Nate, what do you have in mind?” Seagram asked as he glanced over. “Anything to do with the Initiative?”

“The place was attacked last night. Maybe as many as a half-dozen terrorists. Probably Posse.”

“Not surprising. Any casualties?”

“Yeah. Maybe eight or nine, plus at least two, maybe three, of the bad guys.”

“Holy shit. You think they might have come this way?”

“Either that or up to I Ninety-four, in which case they're long gone.”

“Hell, put out an APB, give it to the Highway Patrol.”

“An APB for what?” Osborne said. “They came up to the Initiative on ATVs, but how they got in and out is still unknown. But I think they probably posed as elk hunters.”

“Well, you can get the list of out-of-state registrants, see if any of them are Posse.”

“They probably used false IDs.”

Seagram grinned. “That's why I herd these things, and you're the cop. So what are we doing out here? There's no way they're still hanging around.”

They were a few miles past the Initiative now, two ranges of low hills between them. Osborne had Seagram drop down to fifty feet off the deck and swing back to the west toward the river and the gravel road. They were right on the Slope county line, where the road branched, one continuing south but heading away from the river toward the Badlands Roundup Lodge, which had been in existence since the 1880s, while the other jogged straight east just south of the Initiative before it swung north and connected with U.S. 85.

“Not a good idea if we get too close,” Seagram said.

“No.”

“What are we looking for?” Seagram asked, but then they both saw the ATV and a disconnected trailer abandoned just in the lee of a rounded hill south of the Initiative.

“Set us down about twenty yards north,” Osborne said.

Seagram put the Bell Ranger practically on the deck, giving the trailer and the ATV a wide berth before he set down on the road in a flurry of dust.

“Stay here,” Osborne said. He jumped out of the helicopter and ducking below the still-rotating blades headed back up the road, keeping to one side as he scanned the gravel surface for any signs of a recent disturbance.