Blowout (6 page)

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.

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 they 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.