Redemption Mountain (11 page)

The deputy gazed off into the distance, a new toothpick bobbing between his teeth. “Well, Nat, I can't personally vouch for anything, but, you know, cops hear lots of stuff; some true, some ain't.” He looked back at Natty. “So, maybe there's nothin' to it at all.”

Natty gave Lester a brief nod of understanding. She turned the Honda around in the tall weeds in front of the house and drove past the white police cruiser, feeling as alone as she had in a long time.

She ran out of gas a mile from Oakes Hollow. Natty sighed, then had to laugh at what was such a fitting end to the day. She pulled off her white nursing shoes and knee-high nylons, tossed them into the backseat, stuffed her purse under the front seat, and sprinted home barefoot, finally allowing the tears to flow freely for her friend Birdie Merkely.

*   *   *

J
UST AFTER MIDNIGHT,
a dark-blue Crown Victoria with a spotlight mounted on the driver's side door made the sharp turn onto Redemption Mountain Road. A half mile from the DeWitt farm, the big car pulled off the road into the well-hidden driveway of a cabin that had long ago been destroyed by fire. The driver turned off the ignition and looked at his watch.

“We wait,” he said quietly to his passenger.

“Tell me again why we gotta do this tonight, with a full moon?” the passenger asked.

“Gotta be able to see what we're looking for. And I want to do this quick. We find what we're looking for, then get out with nobody knowin' we were here.”

At one-thirty, the men left the car and walked up Redemption Mountain Road toward the DeWitt farm. They were dressed entirely in black and had smeared their faces and hands with black camouflage cream. The driver wore a black lightweight nylon jacket, zipped to cover his shoulder holster and .45 automatic. Both men carried small bamboo rakes.

They split up as they entered the cornfield. The passenger went quickly to the end of the field and searched in a back-and-forth pattern as he made his way back toward the driver, who did the same from the other end of the field. They would meet somewhere around the middle. Each moved methodically between the towering cornstalks, dragging the small rakes behind them to obliterate their tracks. If they found nothing, evidence of their tracks wouldn't matter. If their search was successful, it would be imperative that they left no trace.

Near the center of the field, the driver heard a soft
pssst
a few yards away. He reached inside his jacket for the .45 and pushed through the corn. His partner was squatting amid a distinctly different-looking section of the field, which was covered with dozens of shorter, weedier-looking plants. He looked up with a wide grin shining through his black-smeared face, as he broke off a branch of a marijuana plant to take with them. “Bingo,” he whispered.

 

CHAPTER 8

 

T
he door to Lucien Mackey's corner office was open, but Charlie Burden knocked as he walked in. The senior partner was hunched over a large conference table that dominated one end of the massive office. “We fucked this up pretty good, Charlie,” he said, peering at a set of blueprints. He frowned. This was going to be a bad day for someone at Dietrich Delahunt & Mackey.

Moving closer to the table, Charlie recognized the layout of the OntAmex plant in West Virginia. “What's the problem down there?”

“The goddamn pond is in the wrong spot. Can you believe that? After all this time? We've been building this thing for over two years, with Paxton and a battalion of contractors, surveyors, and engineers crawling all over it, and nobody notices that the cooling pond is situated on a hundred feet of solid bedrock that a fucking nuclear bomb couldn't blast through!” Lucien took a deep breath to control his anger. He tossed down his pencil and offered Charlie his hand. “Good morning, Charlie. Thanks for coming in early.”

Mackey gestured toward the black leather couch. “Sit down. We need to talk, and we don't have a lot of time.” Charlie sank uncomfortably into the center of the couch, as Mackey took one of the chairs. “Terry Summers will be along in a few minutes, and we need to come to an agreement before he gets here.”

Charlie had known his boss long enough to know when he was having trouble getting to the point. “Lucien, what do you want me to do? We always agree on what you want.”

Lucien smiled. “Charlie, about this China thing … You're a valuable asset here. You've brought in a lot of business with OntAmex, a
hell
of a lot of business, and we want to accommodate you. Hopefully we'll be able to.” Lucien took a sip of green tea. “But right now we've got a problem in West Virginia. And with OntAmex. This pond thing is a very expensive problem for them, even though they okayed all the plans. Torkelson's on the warpath. So what we need to—”

Suddenly it all came to Charlie as if a brilliant spotlight had been snapped on.
Wow, how dense can you be? Lucien's call. Paxton's death. Torkelson and Tuthill in town. Terry Summers. Even Brand going after his Giants tickets. Lucien wanted him to go to West Virginia, not China! He wasn't going to be working on one of the engineering marvels of the millennium. They wanted him to babysit a half-built coal burner in the backwoods of Appalachia.

“You want me to take over the West Virginia project, is that it, Lucien?” Charlie interrupted.

“That's it, Charlie. OntAmex wants a senior-level person down there to straighten this mess out.” Without looking at Charlie, Lucien continued. “And Torkelson wants that person to be you. It was just a coincidence that you happened to mention getting out into the field, so it's good timing. This would be good for you, Charlie.”

Charlie rolled his eyes. “Lucien, come on. It's West Virginia. The plant's half built. I need to create something new.”

“A year, Charlie, maybe less.” There was a pleading quality in Lucien's voice. “You go down there, help Tuthill with the local politics, fix the pond problem, and get the turbines in place. They're scheduled to arrive in the spring. Then we'll let Summers mop up and we'll see about China.”

“Just fix the pond problem and get the turbines in,” Charlie said, thinking out loud.

Lucien hesitated. “There's one other issue that Torkelson will brief you on, something they're really concerned about, because they think it could have some impact on this takeover of Continental.”

Charlie's radar lit up at the mention of Continental. Mergers that went bad were expensive, litigious, career-ending occurrences. Once you made the announcement, billions of dollars were at stake—the kind of money that made individuals, companies, politicians, and regulators do curious things. If whatever was happening in West Virginia could have an impact on the takeover of CES, it was a lot more serious than a site plan with a cooling pond in the wrong place.

“Okay, Lucien, let me have it. I want the straight dope before I listen to Torkelson's version.”

Lucien got up and closed the door. “Fair enough, Charlie. Here's where we stand. Torkelson's ass is hanging out a mile here; Tuthill's, too. They've been in charge of the West Virginia project from the beginning. They've done nothing illegal, mind you, but they got a little too
inside
on this deal, did a little too much conniving, simply because it's their nature, I think. They can't just do things straight up, like McCord and Red Landon used to. Anyway, almost three years ago, Torkelson made a deal with Ackerly Coal, which is owned by CES, to supply all the coal for the new plant. At the same time, they're negotiating with the governor's economic-development people about the taxes and acquiring land adjacent to the property and all that business, holding out that billion-dollar carrot your friend Duncan loves to beat small towns over the head with.” Lucien paused for another sip of tea.

“Then, someone in the governor's office came up with a condition that all the fuel for the plant should come from mines in McDowell County, a real depressed area. But the Ackerly guys tell Torkelson that isn't a problem at all. In fact, it presents a good opportunity to lower OntAmex's fuel costs for quite some time. Seems that Ackerly owns the rights to a huge seam of good coal down there, enough to supply the plant for fifteen years. And it's only about ten, twelve miles or so from the plant. An easy trucking operation. Eliminates the need and the expense of putting in a new railroad spur.”

“What's Ackerly's problem with the mine?” prompted Charlie, anxious to get to the heart of the matter.

“The problem is that the coal isn't down in a mine; it's halfway up a mountain. And the best way to get the coal out, the most economical way, which of course is what Ackerly and OntAmex are both acutely interested in, is through a surface-mining operation.”

“So they need some permits.”

“More than just permits.” Lucien frowned as he thought about the situation he was about to describe. “Charlie, are you familiar with term
mountaintop-removal mining
?”

“Sure. It's a surface-mining technique. But I thought it had been outlawed in most places.”

“You're right. A federal judge handed down an injunction barring the EPA from issuing any permits in West Virginia, where, as you might expect, it was doing the most damage.” Lucien hesitated, reluctant to put his company and himself at odds with an important client. “It's an insidious practice, Charlie. It's an environmental crime that for years was rationalized in the name of jobs and local economics. The mining companies would say, in effect, if you want us to continue mining operations here, and you want the jobs and the tax revenue, then you have to let us destroy your mountain and fill in your valleys and streambeds. And, down there, the mining industry and the EPA and the Corps of Engineers have been embedded with one another for so long, it's hard to tell who's regulating who. The environmental requirements placed on strip miners simply say that, after you've exhausted a surface mine, you're required to return the land to its approximate original contour—”

Charlie interrupted Lucien. “But in Montana and Wyoming, they were basically digging a big shallow hole. When you fill it, the contour of the land is just reshaped a bit.”

“Right, but in Appalachia it's not that easy,” Lucien continued. “Because of the way the seams run in Kentucky and in the big Pocahontas Coal Field in West Virginia and Kentucky.” Lucien ran his hand in an up-and-down pattern to demonstrate. “There's a lot of coal up in some of the mountains, usually right around the midpoint of the elevation. Back in the seventies, the coal companies said, since we've got all this huge land-moving equipment, like those monstrous draglines, let's do surface mines, like we did out west. But the whole thing is a ruse, Charlie, it's semantics. These mountain sites can't possibly be returned to their original contour, so the variance basically says, do your best and return the land to a condition that's
in
harmony with the natural habitat
.” Lucien grimaced. It didn't surprise Charlie that his boss had strong feelings about the subject. Lucien was a consummate environmentalist.

“So they go up in the mountains and they blast away, on a huge scale. Charlie, there are mountaintop sites down there where they used more explosives than both sides used in the Civil War. Two hundred, three hundred feet or more of overburden, covering an area as large as ten square miles. And they push everything—trees, vegetation, animal habitats—down into the valleys, covering the streams and the meadows with rock and sand and mineral deposits to expose the coal seam.”

A knock at the door curtailed Lucien's tirade. He took a deep breath and smiled at Charlie. “That would be Summers.”

Lucien opened the door and welcomed Terry Summers. The young engineer wore a chic light-gray summer suit with a black shirt and a dark gray tie. He had a wide, classically handsome face, with dimpled cheeks and brilliant white teeth, which he revealed often with a practiced smile that he flashed on and off as a kind of visual emphasis to his words.

Lucien gestured toward the couch. “You remember Charlie Burden, of course.”

Summers turned and took Charlie's outstretched hand. “How are you, Charlie? Congratulations. It's great, you'll be taking over in West Virginia.”

So Summers had already been told
. Charlie wondered if Summers's comment was another subtle show of arrogance.
Or did he actually think that the West Virginia post would be a promotion? No, he'd have figured out that Charlie had been chosen as Jack Torkelson's sacrificial lamb in case the situation in West Virginia led to the blowup of the Continental merger. And he'd have figured out with whom he would align himself in order to come out of West Virginia in an advantageous position.

“Hello, Terry. Nice to see you again.” Charlie smiled as Summers sat down.

Lucien continued the discussion. “Of course, not everyone agrees with my position on mountaintop removal,” he said, an obvious invitation for Summers to join in.

Summers unbuttoned his jacket and sat back. “If you took a poll today of McDowell County, you'd have a tough time finding anyone who would oppose a surface-mining permit. The county needs the three hundred good mining jobs and millions of dollars of tax revenue. It would be crazy to take all that away from those people just to save an otherwise worthless mountain.”

“And
that
, Charlie,” said Lucien, “is our official position on the matter. We support our client OntAmex Energy, and the Ackerly Coal Company, in their efforts to get a surface-mining permit in West Virginia.” Lucien added, “No matter how distasteful that prospect is to some of us.” Lucien looked drained. He'd obviously had a contentious meeting with Torkelson and Tuthill the night before.

It occurred to Charlie that he hadn't officially accepted the job in Red Bone. That's what Lucien had wanted to settle before Summers arrived, but he'd gotten sidetracked. Lucien would be in a fix if Charlie turned the job down, which, as a partner, he could very well do. But he could never refuse his boss, his great friend, though Lucien must be agonizing over his decision.