Blowout (24 page)

“Sorry, ma'am, he's not here this evening,” the guard said. He looked up from the photograph on the license, then handed it back. “Turn around please, and drive back the way you came. Make no stops until you're well clear of this installation, and do not attempt to approach the fence.”

“That's the sheriff's car,” she said. I need to talk to him for just one minute.”

“Ma'am, please turn around.”

“Goddamnit,” Ashley said, and she started to open her door, but the guard unslung his assault rifle.

“Okay,” she said, closing the door. “I get your point, but first I need to make a phone call, and then I'll scoot.”

“Please leave now.”

“I'm having car troubles, and I want to leave word with a friend. I don't want to get stuck out here,” Ashley said, and she speed dialed Osborne's cell phone.

The guard said something into a lapel mike, and then he backed down and lowered his weapon.

Osborne picked up on the second ring. “Yes!” he shouted, a terrific noise of some machinery in the background.

“Nate, it's Ashley, where are you?”

“None of your business. Are you in Bismarck already?”

“I'm at the Donna Marie back gate, about fifteen feet from your car. Can you get me in? I just want to talk for a minute.”

“No,” Osborne said. “I want you to turn around and get the hell out of there. Jim says that they'll arrest you if you don't. And after what's happened they're serious.”

“I just want to tell you something.”

“Not now. Go home and do your thing, I'll be back by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Back from where?” Ashley shouted, but Osborne had broken the connection, and she closed her phone.

The guard was close enough to have heard her side of the conversation. “Ma'am,” he prompted.

“Yeah,” Ashley said absently. She tossed the phone on the passenger seat, closed her window, turned around, and drove off, the helicopter rising up again and trailing her just a few yards until she was back up on U.S. 85 and heading north to the interstate.

Despite what the guard said, Nate was there at the power station. She'd seen his car with her own eyes. And on the phone she'd heard the machinery noise. But he'd said that he would be back by tomorrow afternoon. But back from where? She turned that thought over and it dawned on her that the background noise wasn't the same as the turbine whine, it was more like that of a helicopter.

She got on her phone again and phoned the Bismarck airport control tower, and got a supervisor named Lawson.

“Ashley Borden,
Bismarck Tribune
. Have you had any incoming VIP flights from Washington this evening? I'm trying to run down a lead.”

“No, ma'am, but one's standing by at Dickinson.”

“Spending the night?”

“I don't believe so. Hold on.”

She knew damned well the aircraft would be heading to Washington tonight, before the storm hit, and that Nate and probably Dr. Lipton would be aboard. It was the call Nate had taken at dinner. Something big was going down, and her father had probably given the order to keep her away.

Lawson came back. “No, ma'am. In fact she's already in the air, IFR Andrews Air Force Base.”

“Thanks, you've been a big help,” Ashley said, and she broke the connection.

*   *   *

At Belfield, the streets lit up for Christmas, shoppers downtown for the last-minute sales, Ashley was suddenly more depressed than she'd ever remembered. She felt excluded, as if she had no family who loved her, and mostly she didn't want to be alone tonight in a strange hotel room.

At the entrance to the interstate she took the west ramp, the sign reading:
MEDORA 10
.

 

35

OSBORNE HAD BEEN
to the White House, under a different president, to receive his Medal of Honor, but not at three in the morning local, and as he was ushered into the Situation Room down the hall from the Oval Office along with Whitney and Jim Cameron, it felt as if he were back in Afghanistan on the front line. This was the big leagues, the biggest of all. The president had called them here at this hour to discuss who was coming after the Initiative and why.

General Forester, in civilian clothes, had met them at Andrews with a navy helicopter and had brought them over. He introduced them to the four men seated around the long conference table: Nicholas Fenniger, the president's adviser on national security affairs; Edwin Rogers, director of the FBI; Walter Page, director of the CIA; and Air Force Major General Hollis Reed, director of the National Security Agency.

“The president will be with us momentarily,” Fenniger said as Osborne and the others sat across the table.

On the way over, Forester had briefed both Osborne and Cameron. “The president will ask some tough questions, and he'll expect some tough answers. If you don't know, don't guess. And if he doesn't like your answers—and he'll let you know—don't back down if what you're telling him is your best opinion.”

“That's all well and good, General, but what the hell am I doing here?” Osborne asked.

“Because he asked for you by name,” Forester said. “I understand that my daughter called you from outside the Donna Marie gate while you were in the helicopter on the way over to Dickinson.”

“She did,” Osborne said. He had a feeling what was coming next.

“What did she want?”

“To talk to me.”

“About what?”

“She didn't say.”

Forester had nodded. “She's a willful girl, always has been. What's your interest in her, Sheriff?”

“The name is Nate, sir. And that is none of your business at the moment.”

Forester bridled, but Osborne went on.

“Mostly because I don't know the answer myself. But I'll let you know when I have it figured out. Right now we have a bigger problem to deal with.”

“That we do,” Forester said.

Everyone suddenly got to their feet, and Osborne stood up as President Thompson, tie loose, shirtsleeves rolled up, no jacket, strode in and sat down directly across from Osborne.

“Glad you could join us on such short notice, Sheriff,” the president said as everyone else sat down.

“Thank you, Mr. President, but I don't know what I'm doing here.”

“I'm told that you own Billings County, you have a steady hand, you have a proven track record under fire, and until I find someone better you're my point man on the ground out there.”

“I'm just a small-town sheriff.”

Thompson laughed. “Tell it to the navy, Major.”

Osborne had to grin. “That line has never worked, sir.”

Thompson nodded to Forester.

“How much do you know about what we're trying to do at the Initiative?” Forester asked.

“It's not an ELF station. From what I can piece together Dr. Lipton has figured out a way to convert coal to methane that can be pumped out of the seam through a wellhead and then burned to heat water to turn turbines to generate electricity.”

“Almost zero carbon dioxide,” Forester said. “No mercury or other pollutants, and no waste, no coal ash to contend with. All the wastes stay underground. And the seam in western North and South Dakota and eastern Wyoming should last a hundred years or more.”

“Why the secrecy?”

“You can answer that one yourself, Sheriff. Clean electricity, without having to mine, process, or ship coal. No need for nuclear energy. No need for foreign oil—eventually most of our ground transportation will run electrically. We're working on electrically driven aircraft—prop jobs at first—but there are some good-looking technologies on the drawing boards that could break down water into hydrogen and oxygen in sufficient quantities to power rocket engines or ramjets. Homes heated electrically—no need for heating oil.”

Osborne had heard some of the arguments before, but so far nothing was feasible at the scale Forester was talking about. “Assuming it works, a lot of people are going to be out of a job. Most of them ordinary working folks.”

“It's worse than that,” the president said. “The national economies of places like Saudi Arabia and some of the other OPEC countries will take a serious hit. Along with the Initiative—if it works, and there's still no guarantee that it will—I'm proposing a global realignment of priorities. In the short term, while we still have oil in the ground, I'll push for a ten-year program to develop new, non-energy uses for oil far beyond pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, plastics, carpets, clothes, sneakers, and dish soap. Did you know that aspirin is made from petrochemicals?”

“No, sir.”

“Better than burning it to power a billion cars, trucks, buses, ships, and airplanes.”

No response was needed. But Osborne didn't think that he'd been called to the White House to talk about making aspirin out of oil.

“How soon will you be able to resume your work?” the president asked Whitney.

“Ten days tops, if nothing else happens,” she said.

“And how sure are you that it will work?”

Whitney looked as if she hadn't slept in a week, and Osborne felt sorry for her.

“If you'd asked me that question last week, Mr. President, I would have told you one hundred percent. But now I'm not sure. The models all look good, and we've run a hyperbaric test on an actual piece of coal seam cut from a mine in West Virginia. Within minutes after we'd injected a small sample of our microbial mix and introduced a miniature quorum talker, we were getting methane. We ran the experiment three times with the same results.”

“Where's the problem?”

“The scale. Leaks in the seam that could allow an escape of methane directly into the atmosphere. An underground fire or explosion. Or a dozen other possibilities that we haven't thought of.”

“Including another attack,” the president said. He turned to his FBI director. “No possibility that your people have made a mistake? Missed something?”

“No, sir,” Edwin Rogers said. He was pleasant-looking man dressed this morning in a dark suit, white shirt, and plain tie. He could have been a banker or CEO of a corporation, not the nation's top cop. “Definitely Posse Comitatus, except for Dr. Kemal. We're working on the sixth person who presumably killed the two in the motor home then hid it in a box canyon south of the Initiative, but we're coming up with only five sets of prints, matching the five bodies left behind.”

“Sheriff?” the president prompted.

“He planned it that way,” Osborne said. “Nothing or no one left behind.”

“He?”

“The Posse uses women for some of its operations, but almost always it's a man who gives the orders.”

“Any progress tracing the money?” the president asked Rogers.

“The motor home itself was custom-built, at a cost of somewhere near half a million. The electronic gear was worth another two hundred thousand, possibly even more—most of it Chinese-made, but some Russian stuff, and at least one of the computer programs they used was based on the version of the Stuxnet worm the Israelis used to interfere with Iran's nuclear program. Sophisticated stuff. We're thinking that they had an international connection.”

“A lot of it points back to SEBIN,” Walter Page, the CIA director, said. “Unfortunately most of what we've come up with is circumstantial, but it's pretty tight. We're also thinking that's where the money came from, though we're shaky on that part. We haven't made any sort of a clear trace yet.”

Osborne glanced at Cameron who'd apparently just had the same thought. “Excuse me, sir. You're talking about SEBIN—Venezuela's intelligence service—being involved with the attack?”

Page nodded. “At this point that's exactly what it's beginning to look like.”

“The Posse is a strictly homegrown terrorist organization. They'd never take orders from outsiders, so if the Venezuelans are footing the bill they have to be doing it through someone in the U.S.”

“Any ideas?” Page asked.

“A contractor company,” Cameron said. “Someone with field experience.”

“We had the same thought,” Rogers said. “But so far we've come up with nothing solid.”

“Pardon me, but Chávez can't be crazy enough to try something like this,” Osborne said. “It would be an act of war.”

The president nodded. “Wouldn't be the first.”

“We sent a special envoy down to Caracas,” Nicholas Fenniger said. He had curly gray hair and a serious demeanor reminiscent of Rahm Emanuel, who'd been President Obama's chief of staff. “Wanted to talk some sense into their ministry of oil people, try to make a deal with the bastards. They were raising the price of crude by twenty-three percent—to us and no one else.”

Osborne had seen something on the news. “He was killed in some kind of an accident.”

“He was beheaded with a chain saw,” Fenniger said. “Chávez blamed it on terrorists.”

“Message sent and received,” the president said. He was suddenly very angry.

“Sorry, Mr. President, but this is way out of my league,” Osborne said. “I may own Billings County, as you say, but our population is probably smaller than the number of people working for you right here and in the Executive Office Building.”

“I understand you, Sheriff, but understand me. Because of the size of your county already far too much attention is being paid to what we're trying to do. The story that it's nothing more than an ELF facility and that it was nothing but an accident won't hold much longer unless we begin to withdraw the bulk of the armed Air Force personnel as soon as possible.”

This took Osborne's breath away. “It has to be kept secret at all costs for as long as possible?”

“Something like that.”

“If SEBIN knows, won't the rest of OPEC know?”