Blowout

Baytown, Texas

ExxonMobil Baytown Oil Refinery

THE PROBLEM IS that once you teach a man how to fight, and then place him in harm’s way on the battlefield, he just might get a taste for killing that’s so deeply embedded in his soul that he can’t simply walk away. It happens to one extent or another in every conflict, but escalated after the first Iraqi war, which saw an increase in post-traumatic stress syndrome casualties and the start of a serious number of GIs committing suicide. It was crazy.

They were volunteers, actually financial conscripts with nowhere else to turn for jobs, from the poorer sections of Chicago and New York, the barrios of Los Angeles, and places like Michigan City, Philly, Duluth, and Waterloo, and remote spots in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, and sometimes from the Yoopers, as they are called in the backwoods of Upper Peninsula Michigan. Lots of them drifting toward fringe and radical groups like the Posse Comitatus, Armed Forces of National Liberation, Aryan Nations, the Covenant, the Christian Patriots Defense League, the United Underground, and a host of others.

Warren Kowalski, about to turn fifty-five tomorrow and under five-five with narrow features and the small man’s chip on his shoulder, lay on his belly in a ditch twenty feet from the back maintenance gate of the ExxonMobil fuel refinery—the sixth-largest port in the world—sprawling across thirty-four-hundred acres along the Houston Ship Channel, the air stinking of gasoline and a dozen other chemicals. Employing four thousand people, the facility was vital not only to Southeast Texas, but to the entire U.S. economy. Without its six hundred thousand barrels of oil per day the engines of the entire nation would be seriously hurt; gasoline price at the pump would spike.

But Baytown was more than a facility to refine oil into diesel fuel and gasoline, it was also the largest petrochemical facility in the world, producing olefins used for making a wide variety of plastics; aromatics used for solvents and mostly as additives to gasoline to raise its octane rating; synthetic rubber for tires; polyethylene, the most widely used plastic in the world; and polypropylene, used for everything from medical equipment, clothing, and even the plastic tops on soda and water bottles; along with a host of other oil-based compounds absolutely vital to modern life and commerce.

And Kowalski and his assault force of five men—all of them veterans from the Iraq-Kuwait wars, all of them highly decorated, all of them Posse Comitatus, men with deep-seated hatreds and angers—were here to destroy the place.

It was late, after two in the morning, the sky overcast, no moon, a very light drizzle—all factors, except for the rain, that Kowalski, the sarge, had planned for.

Hit them when they least expect it, he’d told his people; Higgins and Marachek who’d come over from Montana out of the Brotherhood, Laffin and Ziegler from the Upper Peninsula, and Dick Webber, who had connections at Fort Hood, which got them the M-16s and Colt 1911A1 .45 pistols.

Good men all of them, Kowalski, thought, preparing to give the signal.

He’d been born and raised in Michigan City, his father, brothers, uncle, and several cousins all working at the steel mills, from which he had escaped by joining the army two years before Iraq started to go bad.

He’d just been a grunt, corporal a couple of times, but then got busted because he couldn’t take orders, and he liked his beer and pot combo a little too much, yet the guys had taken to calling him Sarge from the beginning because this was his plan, and he saw no need to correct them, as long as they followed orders. Nor had he known any of them before three weeks ago, when he’d posted a notice on the Posse Comitatus news board on the Net and on-site in Billings and Sault Sainte Marie for an op to, in his words: Gain payback for the bastards who kept extending us no matter what it did to our gourds. It was the fat cats who made obscene profits off the backs of the grunts with their noses in the mud and shit, who back in the world owned steel plants, coal mines, oil wells, and power stations. Millionaires with their noses up the Pentagon’s ass.

And just like in Kuwait and Iraq during the first dustup with the burning wells spewing black shit into the air which fucked us up royally, they’re doing the same thing with their refineries—fucking up the air so we can’t even breathe it.

The guys either didn’t give a shit about his message or didn’t understand—or both; they were just interested in getting back into it. They wanted to shoot someone, blow up some shit. The air pollution thing didn’t matter, most of them were heavy smokers, especially Kowalski with his two and a half packs of Camel unfiltereds.

But for Kowalski the message was everything—or at least that’s what he’d convinced himself was the truth—though if he was being honest with himself in a rare moment, too rare his ex-wife would have said, he was really just like the others. A disaffected grunt who hadn’t gotten enough; he wanted more, message or not. Knock the entire bastard country back to the horse-and-buggy days. Simpler times, when men were men and no one fucked with them.

They had comms units with earbuds and vox-operated mikes attached to the lapels of their night fighter black camos that they’d each paid for out of their own pockets. Kowalski keyed his: Go in ten, he whispered. The units were low power, so there was little chance their traffic would be intercepted even if anyone was listening, which was doubtful. Attacks like this had hardly ever happened since the antiwar riots of the late sixties and early seventies.

Roger one, Higgins came back. Followed by the other four.

This is a supercritical refinery, Kowalski had explained at one of their initial briefings in Kalispell before they’d begun field training prior to moving south.

Who gives a damn, Sarge, Marachek had asked. He was angrier than the others. His twin brother had died in his arms in the middle of a firefight across the border with Pakistan. Officially his death had been listed as an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Thirteen of them.

You all need to give a damn, because what I’m trying to tell you is that just about everything inside the plant is sensitive to gunfire and especially to C4.

So we take out the gate guard, go in, blow up some shit, waste a few dudes, and get the fuck out, Laffin—JP to the squad—had said. He wasn’t angry, he was simply the craziest of the lot. He lived with his wife and their two daughters in a dilapidated mobile home parked in the woods outside of Bergland in the Upper Peninsula’s Ottawa National Forest.

Do that and you just might get all of us killed, Kowalski had answered, tamping down his own anger. He wanted to tell them about the point he was trying to make, but he gave it up as a lost cause because sometimes even he didn’t know exactly what his point was.

All right, we’re listening, Sarge, Ziegler had said.

We’re after shutting them down for a long time. Make ’em think about the shit they’re doing. About the crap they’re doing to us. So we’re going to maximize our strike, by setting so many fires that nobody will be able to put them out for a very long time. First off we set C4 charges at the base of each cracking tower, and then we take over the computer center from where we can open every fuel-routing valve in the entire complex so that when the C4 blows, the entire place will go up in a wall of flames. With any luck the fire will spread to the two main chemical plants, plus the polymers center and the olefins plant. All that shit will go up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July.

Let’s get it on, Ziegler had said. He was a small kid from somewhere in Southern California who thought he was good-looking enough to be in movies. No one else thought the same, and he was in a permanent state of surprise.

Pop any of this stuff at the wrong time, and we’re all broiled meat. Happen so goddamn fast you wouldn’t know what hit you. One second you’re a swinging dick, the next you’re on the menu.

We’re listening, Webber had said. He was the steadiest of them all. In Iraq he’d been in a bomb disposal unit. Called for steady nerves and zero day-before shakes.

Soon as we hit the back gate the clock starts, and the cops will come a runnin’. We need to get in, set our charges, get out, and beat feat.

Houston was only twenty miles to the west where Kowalski had a born-again sister who’d agreed to put them up. She thought she could help her brother and save a few souls in the bargain.

What about the plant personnel? Webber had asked, even though he and the others already knew the answer.

And Kowalski didn’t even have to think about it. Payback time. We waste them.

He looked at his wristwatch. Now, now, now, he said into his lapel mike, and he got to his feet, scrambled up onto the blacktop, and zigzagged through the darkness into the lights over the gate.

He was point man, peripherally aware that his people were on his tail right and left, his main concentration on the gatehouse where a lone guard was supposed to be stationed. But the gatehouse was empty, and that struck him as more than odd, unless the guy was taking a nap on the floor, or had gone somewhere to take a piss.

Webber passed him on the right, molded two small lumps of C4 on the gate’s hinges, and tied them together with one timer. Fire in the hole! he shouted, and he ran a few yards to the left.

A few seconds later a pair of impressive bangs cut the night air and the gate fell to the ground with a clatter.

Kowalski hesitated for just a moment. No sirens. And the silence bothered him. He’d been told that the gates were wired to alarms. Open one without the proper procedure and all hell would break loose. But nothing. And stepping over the downed gate he glanced inside the guard shack—the muzzle of his M16 moving left to right—but no one was inside, taking a nap or otherwise. No one.

They’d come from Lake Charles, Louisiana, on I-10 through Beaumont across the Texas border, past Baytown itself then down State Road 146 to La Porte just across the ship canal from the refinery where a friend of the Posse had a shrimp boat waiting for them; disenfranchised men, wanting to strike out at some unknown force that was holding them back from what they felt was rightfully theirs even though none of them, Kowalski included, could say what that might be.

Shit or get off the pot, his daddy who’d come through ’Nam and who used to beat him regularly was fond of saying. It worked.

The off-loading docks where the oil tankers dropped their cargoes were just below the main atmospheric distillation towers, from which gas and light naphtha was released from the top end, followed below by heavy naphtha, jet fuel, kerosene, and diesel oil—and it was to this five-story-tall complex that Kowalski directed his fighters.

Friends, actually, because in the manner of most military units the men you slept and ate with, the ones you trained beside, and the ones who went into battle with you to possibly die, became friends practically the instant you all came together. And Kowalski felt damned good. He—they—were on a mission.

Thirty yards from the tower from which a maze of pipes carrying highly volatile fuels and gases spread in every direction, strong lights suddenly illuminated the entire refinery complex, and Kowalski pulled up short as a pair of APCs came around from both sides of the massive distillation unit, and at least fifty armed men he immediately recognized as Texas Army National Guard showed up in flanking positions.

Lay your weapons on the ground. An amplified voice rose above the noise from the complex.

They had the fatigues and the weapons, but in Kowalski’s estimation most of them were probably nothing more than weekend warriors who’d never seen combat.

Do it now, the voice, probably some rat-ass lieutenant, ordered.

Pussies, Kowalski muttered.

But the sons of bitches had the firepower, and the position.

Kowalski would have liked to see his ex-wife’s son Barry come back from Afghanistan—the kid was supposed to be tough. He was twenty or thirty or something like that—Kowalski tended to forget that kind of shit—and he’d been hard on the boy and his mother, but it was a tough old world out there. And getting tougher by the day. So maybe he’d done them a favor.

Lay down your weapons!

Kowalski glanced over at Marachek who was grinning like a madman.

Fuck it, Sarge, Marachek said, and Kowalski agreed.

And he raised his M-16 and started running toward the tower as he began firing, his men right behind him, firing as they ran.

He never felt the shot that killed him. One moment he was alive and the next he was dead. But he’d always figured that sooner or later he’d end up in a better place.

The Baytown attack, as it came to be known in places like Montana and the Upper Peninsula, rose to a cult-level status among ecoterrorists. Brave men who’d been willing to give their lives in a fight to save the planet!

And so the struggle began.

Des Moines, Iowa

The Trent Building

Three Years Later

THE TROUBLE WITH making a lot of money is that after a while many people can’t stop. So after the usual real estate and stock market investments, which can be reduced to a sort of science, and after the IPOs for innovative start-up companies, and even for some bright, ears-to-the-ground entrepreneurs who invested hundreds of millions in micro-loans mostly in the Far East, some kind of an end comes in sight. All too soon.

So the exotics were invented; flash trading in which computers bought and sold stocks in microseconds, making profits in the tenths and hundredths of points that over a period, say a year, amounted to a billion or so.

Or naked credit default swaps that was a type of insurance—though it was never called that lest it be regulated—in which the investor bet that the company he was backing would fail so he could collect a payout. Insure your neighbor’s house for two hundred thousand, pay the premiums, and if it burned down you collected on the policy. More of a high-stakes wager than anything else. And that had come from the brain of Robert B. Muskett, the boy genius over at U.S. National Trust.

Or derivatives, which was another sort of insurance policy, or hedge funds, in which you bet on futures you didn’t own. It got to the point that the oil derivatives alone were worth eight or ten times the total amount of all the oil in the ground everywhere on the earth.

When these investments were leveraged for ten cents on the dollar, and the markets began to rumble, a lot of very rich people began to get nervous. A ten-billion-dollar position that lost only one billion was gone, bankrupt, because the owners of the exotic were left with a bill of nine billion to make up the difference; what in the old days had been termed a margin call.

Which was exactly the barrel of the gun Donald Stearns Wood, D. S. to his associates, was looking down, and he was getting more than desperate.

On an early Friday evening in the middle of a January Iowa snowstorm his salvation came to him in the form of a courier-delivered message his secretary handed to him as he was about to leave his twelfth-floor office across Walnut Avenue from the Capitol Building.

This just came for you, she said.

It was a FedEx envelope with a security seal, warning of federal penalties for unauthorized use. The return address was simply Command Systems, and D. S.’s hand wanted to shake, but he smiled pleasantly. You’d best be leaving now, Mrs. Cordell, less you get stuck here for the weekend.

I was on my way out the door when this came in, he said. She’d been his secretary for fifteen years, including two bust times when Trent Holdings was in serious trouble. And during that time the sixty-year-old woman, who was dignified in looks and deeds, had learned when not to question her boss too closely about things she did not understand. Like a message with no clear return address.

Take care now, he told her. She lived out in Windsor Heights, and one of her perks was a company car and driver who picked her up for work and dropped her off at home. On a night like this it was just as well, because the buses had almost stopped running, but one of the company’s Hummers would get through.

D. S. went back into his office, laid the envelope on the desk, and went to the floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the slanting flow of windblown snow and the flashing lights of the snowplows below on the streets, long enough for him to catch his breath.

At forty-eight, D. S. had all of his hair though it was snow white, but his face had sagged over the years so that he now looked, and sometimes acted, more like a bulldog with old-fashioned white muttonchops than the director of Trent Holdings, one of the wealthiest hedge funds anywhere on the planet, which invested in derivatives and credit default swaps with total on-paper assets approaching one trillion dollars. Almost all of it leveraged, of course. So leveraged that the company was cash poor. Except for a pension fund spin-off the firm was privately owned. It had never sold stocks; the public had no stake nor was it a corporation so the government regulators did not have access to its books. Its cash-poor position—cash poor almost to the point of insolvency—was a secret so far.

Staring out the window he remembered a Wall Street Journal senior editor right here in this room eight or ten years ago, who was writing an article on D. S’s remarkable success story, and who called him the most savvy investor ever—his results were even more reliable and spectacular than Warren Buffet’s.

Warren is good at playing the trends, and Bill Gates is even better at inventing things and cornering the market, D. S. had told the editor. But I make my money the old-fashioned way; by convincing people, by whatever means, to do things my way.

You’ve been accused of stretching ethical boundaries.

D. S. clearly remembered the sly accusation, and he’d laughed in the man’s face. Profits have never been about ethics. It’s the American way.

But federal regulations—

Have never done a single thing to stop or even soften the boom-to-bust natural order of the markets.

What you’re saying, in effect, is for the government to do whatever it wants to appease the voters, while you do whatever you think is necessary.

Exactly. What you’ve just stated, in a nutshell, is Harvard MBA one-oh-one.

That’s cold, the senior editor had said, who over a twenty-five-year career had reported on the titans of finance and industry in the U.S. and abroad.

And D. S. had smiled. Haven’t you learned by now that there’s nothing cold about making money? And before the editor could say anything else, D. S. added: Ask the holders of the pension funds I manage if they think my method of making money is cold.

And the editor had politely said his thanks. A week later a story appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the upshot of which was: hate him or love him, D. S. Wood knows how to make money at least as well as the robber barons at the turn of the century—the century before last, that is. The article had tweaked his vanity.

Tonight he and his wife were hosting a dinner party for Iowa Senator Justin Holmes, who was beginning to put out campaign feelers for a run at the presidency in four years, and depending on what the man had to say, D. S. would support him at least for the short term.

Keep your options open, he told his people. It was the golden rule at Trent, and let everyone else figure it out themselves at their own peril.

God, he loved this. Or had until the last couple of years. If it all went bust he would be facing a lot of years in a federal penitentiary somewhere—the rest of his life, actually. Because he’d cut a lot of corners making Russian and Chinese deals for oil fields in Iran and Iraq and mineral deposits in Afghanistan, most of them strictly against U.S. law. He’d possibly end up as roommates with guys like Bernie Madoff. But he wouldn’t allow it to happen to him. No power on earth would make him submit to something like that.

He poured a small snifter of a respectable Napoleon brandy at the sideboard and sat down at his desk, opened the envelope, and read the one-line memo.

After a moment he telephoned his wife. I’ll be a little late, please give the senator my apologies.

A problem, Donnie? she asked. They’d been married for twenty-three years, and she was the only one who called him by that name.

Nothing earth-shattering, sweetheart, but it’s just something I have to deal with tonight.

I understand, she said. Take care.

You, too, he said tenderly, and he hung up and read the memo a second time.

When he was finished he shredded the thing, and sat back with his brandy to think things out before he called Bob Kast, president of Command Systems, which was a shell company for the contractor service Venture Plus, headquartered in South Carolina. Bob had made his chops in Iraq, getting his foot in the door after Blackwater’s stumble from grace. He was a man who got things done.

Basically you can’t keep doing business as usual, is that what you’re telling me? Bob had asked at their first meeting at Venture’s sprawling training base in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Greenville.

Not if it pits me against Washington, D. S. had said, still not in full panic mode.

And you think that’s a possibility. One that you want me to find out for you. Pitting me against Washington.

Exactly what I want.

It’ll cost.

Money is no object, Bob, D. S. had promised. Time is important to me, so don’t dawdle.

The problem was carbon dioxide and other global warming gases being spewed into the atmosphere. It was not the fact that our increasing dependence on foreign oil was bankrupting us, but that the financial problem was only secondary to the fact that most scientists were coming to the consensus that the U.S. was on the verge of reaching some tipping point where no matter what it did to save itself it would be too late.

Carbon dioxide was putting the entire planet into a death zone of unbreathable air, with drastically rising temperatures and sea levels and no place for people to run. No place to hide.

The burning of fossil fuel was the culprit, and the majority of Trent Holdings’ derivative stake was in oil. They had gotten hold of a dinosaur’s tail and were being dragged to death, but they couldn’t let go lest the beast turn around and devour them on the spot. And the issue had become one of the major security problems facing the U.S. Not only was the civilian population being held hostage by OPEC, but except for nuclear-powered naval vessels and a few green-fueled ships, our military was totally dependent upon fossil fuels. Interrupt the supply and our ability to defend the country would suffer.

It had taken Kast’s people only two months to come up with the answers, and D. S. had flown in secret down to South Carolina last November where over a credible filet and a very good red, he’d been told for sure something that he’d been guessing at for nearly three years.

In the forties when the outcome of the war in Europe and the Pacific was anything but certain for the U.S., and when military intelligence uncovered evidence that the Nazis were feverishly working on a new wonder weapon—a bomb so powerful that it could wipe out an entire city—Albert Einstein wrote a letter to F.D.R. urging that the U.S. develop such a weapon first to ensure the survival of the free world.

The top secret Manhattan District Project was created, its main research and development facility located in a remote mountain location north of Albuquerque called Los Alamos. Working with the brightest minds in universities and industrial corporations across the country, the charter was to design, develop, and test an atomic bomb. Despite war shortages, the project was given top priority; it got whatever money and materials—no matter how restricted—it needed. The goal was to drop bombs on Germany and Japan to end the war.

We’re in the same situation now, Kast had reported. It’s called the Dakota District Initiative, and just like Los Alamos, the main research-and-development center is in a really remote part of the country. In this case the North Dakota Badlands not too far from the Montana border.

It’s because of the Baytown near miss, D. S. said, amazed at how simple—and dangerous to him personally—this might be. Tell me.

You’re exactly right. If that had succeeded and the refinery destroyed it would have driven gasoline to twenty, and some experts thought fifty dollars per gallon. Two months later the president put together a bipartisan coalition of congressmen, plus high-ranking representatives from Homeland Security, NOAA, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, a few cabinet members including Treasury and Interior, the FBI, and the Pentagon—mostly for site security—plus representatives from the Energy Security Leadership Council and the organization SAFE—Securing America’s Future Energy—along with the top minds at a dozen universities and as many corporations, including Microsoft, IBM, Westinghouse, and GE. Their preliminary black budget was five hundred billion dollars that was buried in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and then supplemented in the bank and mortgage bailout package. It was either that or bankrupt the nation. No choice, really. It was sink or swim on the largest scale possible since the Second World War.

D. S. remembered that the entire concept had come crashing down around his head and shoulders like some Mount Rushmore that had fallen to pieces. The initiative had something to do with coal, which was the most abundant fuel source the U.S. had within its borders—enough by most conservative estimates to easily take care of all our projected energy needs for at least the next five hundred years. Half a millennium.

The problem was, of course, that burning coal to produce steam from water to drive turbines that in turn drove generators to produce electricity was just about the dirtiest way to do it. Wind power engineering was coming along, and so was solar. And while the country would get more energy in the future from both sources it will not solve the energy supply problem. Nuclear power stations produced material that would be dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years, and the plants were prohibitively expensive.

Hydroelectric was projected to begin to fail in the near term because global warming was not only reducing snowfall and glaciers from which the rivers to produce the power were fed, but rainfall patterns were changing, and not beneficially. Along with the dozens of other devices and schemes for producing power, coal, and to a much lesser extent natural gas and oil, were the only reliable means. But coal was dirty. It would kill the environment.

It had always been his goal to fight the nukes replacing them with oil—but just for the short term.

The fact was he probably had thirty years or so left to live, and he meant to live those years in comfort, making money until the day he died.

Coal, D. S. had said again, aware that Kast was looking at him like a biologist looking through a microscope at a bug he wasn’t familiar with. Are you telling me that they’ve found a way to use coal to make electricity without pumping out carbon dioxide? Something cheaper than sequestration? Something usable? Something practical?

I don’t have all the answers, Kast had admitted. Just the location of the facility, south of Medora, and the possibility that whatever they’re about to try has something to do with microbiology.

How did you come up with that?

The chief scientist on the project is Dr. Whitney Lipton, who until six years ago was the leading microbiologist at the CDC when she suddenly retired. At age twenty-seven.

The idea of injecting a coal-eating bacteria into pulverized coal in a sealed environment, producing methane that could be burned instead of the coal, and with a significant drop in CO2, had been bandied about by environmentalists over the past decade or so. But no one could make it work on a practical basis; the decrease in CO2, though significant, wasn’t worth the trouble and there was the risk of methane escaping into the atmosphere—which would cause a lot more damage to the ozone layer.

Not nearly enough information. What else? D. S. demanded.

"We don’t have all of the details, except that the buzz on the Hill is that they’re trying some big experiment in thirteen months. In mid-December next year, just before Christmas. And it’s supposed to be significant. They’re talking about the ‘gadget.’"

D. S. spread his hands.

That’s what they called the first atomic bomb, Kast said.

And D. S. had come up with his decision practically at the speed of light. His survival was at stake. We need to stop it. Sabotage the thing. Derail it. Push it back for a year, maybe more.

Kast had been adamant. I won’t fire a gun on U.S. soil, I don’t care how much money you’re offering. And what’ll a year buy you?

Just that, D. S. had said. It’ll buy me time.

They’d gone out to the long veranda along the south side of the main house that looked over a mountain valley, the view in the full moonlight nothing less than spectacular.

I need help, Bob, D. S. had said.

I know.

There could be consequences.

Kast had looked at him like he was a madman. Consequences indeed, he had said angrily. Try Leavenworth.

I meant from the experiment. We can take the position that if the experiment fails, and if enough methane is produced it could trigger a catastrophic release directly into the atmosphere that could in theory wipe out all life on the planet in less than five years.

I did my homework, Kast had shot back. Enrico Fermi thought it was possible that if a nuclear device were set off, it could cause a runaway ignition of all the oxygen in the atmosphere—everywhere on the earth. But it didn’t happen.

No, D. S. had admitted. But not every long shot is a bust.

Kast had finished his wine, and then looked at his expensive crystal glass and suddenly tossed it over the railing. Both men watched it sparkling, catching the rays of the moon, as it seemed to fall forever into the valley.

I’ll find someone for you, he had said without turning to look at D. S.

And tonight the memo.

THE SOLUTION IS IN HAND. GO OR NO GO?

D. S. telephoned Kast’s encrypted Nokia and the contractor answered on the first ring. Yes? Music played in the background, and a lot of people were talking and laughing. It sounded like a party.

Go, D. S. said. "The down payment will be credited to your Command System’s Cayman account within the hour.

Very well, Kast said, and the connection was broken.

PART ONE

OPENING GAMBIT

Present Day

Early December

1

FIFTEEN MILES SOUTH of Medora in the North Dakota Badlands the panorama was nothing short of stunning, otherworldly, ancient, atavistic in a way in its appeal. The late