Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Poor fish,” I said. Roxanne scrunched her nose at me.
“Transnational Coal isn’t a West Virginia company. The profits don’t flow to this state. There are only 15,000 miners left in West Virginia. Big business came and stripped the land and when they’re done they’ll leave, but the land won’t ever be the same. This is why I’m here.” Roxanne delivered her words like a political stump speech, but the power of the view in front of me was undeniable.
“The scale is...unbelievable.”
“This is one of the biggest mountaintop removal sites in the state, but there are over a hundred others that are large enough to see from outer space. Five hundred mountains are gone forever.”
I nodded, still looking down at the chalk-white stain on the landscape. I was perhaps a thousand feet above the mine site, which seemed to stretch on for miles. Dump trucks whose wheels must have been twice my height looked like toys.
“I dragged you up here to see this because you’ll never see it from down there.” Roxanne pointed back to the highways. “The site is designed so that the hills block the view unless you’re inside the site. There are children playing a few hundred yards from the edges of the mine who’ve never seen it.”
“This is not what I imagined,” I conceded. “The scale is so...vast. I’m not saying I’m ready to lay down in front of an earthmover, but...it’s disturbing. But you know I’m here for a different reason, so why would you take the time to show this to me?”
“Because you’ve got enough of a head on your shoulders to understand what you’re seeing. Some don’t. I also wanted you to understand the impact of this single mine will still endure after everyone living now is long gone,” she said.
“So it’s high stakes poker?”
“But they’re playing with the future. It can’t be undone.” She paused, surveying the scene for what I imagined was the hundredth time. “You said you had something to show me?”
“Yes I do.” Unzipping my jacket, I withdrew the photo of Anton Harmon from an inside pocket. “Do you recognize him?”
Her face clouded. “That’s Anton.”
“Did you know he was a registered sex offender?”
Roxanne shook her head. “I’m not sure that surprises me, but no.”
“Or that he was living in the National Front compound earlier this year?”
That did surprise her. “What? The neo-Nazis? Really?”
“Yes. And I don’t know why a supremacist sex offender would suddenly decide to defend the planet. It’s more likely that someone planted him to keep tabs on you.”
“For Pete’s sake, why on earth would anyone do that? I can’t imagine why those people would care about us.”
“Do you think Anton could be connected to the incident on Wednesday?”
“How could he? Anton left weeks ago.”
“I don’t know. But I do know that he had no conceivable reason to join Reclaim unless he was sent to you. And I know that half your group was dragged off a bus and beaten three nights ago. That seems like too much of a coincidence.”
“You don’t have to look past the mine for that. They had plenty of reason to want to scare us.”
“Maybe, but attacking a bunch of defenseless kids was guaranteed to backfire. How many special reports on mountaintop removal have there been in the past couple of days? How many reporters are flying helicopters over the mine now?” I didn’t know the answer to either question but I could see that Roxanne did.
“It’s hurt them,” Roxanne admitted.
“The other theory was that some of the miners beat up your people on their own. But miners haven’t been hurt by the work interruptions, so they wouldn’t have much of a reason to care, would they?”
“Folks around here are touchy about outsiders,” Roxanne countered, crossing her arms in front of her.
“They should be! But miners didn’t assault your people on their own. If four or five guys beat up a few of your kids in a bar, I’d say it was miners. But a fake detour? Twenty armed, hooded men? I don’t buy that, not unless Hobart management was involved, which would make no sense.”
“Unless they didn’t figure on the reaction.”
“I’ll judge that when I meet Jason Paul, but you told me he’s no fool. Which leaves us with a white supremacist undercover in your group to explain.”
Roxanne didn’t have any more thoughts on that, so we stood there silently, looking at the mine and thinking our own thoughts. Then we started back down the trail.
“You grew up in the Catskills?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“There’s some nice hiking there. But my favorite is the restaurant that serves those enormous pancakes.”
“I know the one. My town’s a ways from there, not so much in the tourist zone.”
“Do you get back home often?”
“I didn’t for a long time, but I actually came here from there,” I admitted.
“Apple picking?”
“No.” I hesitated, realizing that I’d stumbled into a topic I’d have preferred to avoid. I decided honesty would make it easier to lie when I needed to. “My mother had a stroke.”
Roxanne stopped so suddenly that I almost ran into her.
“That’s awful! When did it happen?”
“Last weekend.”
“And you still came here to help Heather’s parents? It seems like you’d have your hands full at home.”
“That’s probably true.”
“So why would you leave your poor mother?” I was beginning to understand that Roxanne wasn’t prone to subtlety. But it was a good question.
“I spent most of my life being trained to do one thing. What I’m doing right now feels a lot more useful than what I was doing at home. When I was at home, it was more like...like being in everybody’s way all the time.”
“I remember the feeling. I may be as old as these hills, but I had a family once, too.”
Roxanne lost herself in reflection for a moment, so I changed the subject. “Did you know Heather was diabetic?”
Roxanne nodded. “We always had to have ice for the cooler she stored her injections in.”
“She sent a note to her mother on Wednesday saying that she was going to run out of insulin on Monday and that she didn’t have access to more.”
“Why couldn’t she find insulin? She got her insulin with no skip-de-doo in Hamlin when she was with us.”
“That’s the question. Before I got here, I imagined the mine site might be so remote that she’d somehow gotten cut off from civilization...”
“It’s West Virginia, not the Gobi Desert.” Roxanne snorted.
“Right. So that suggests she’s being denied access to the outside. Which makes more sense when I think of her having wandered into a compound of white supremacists without knowing what she’d gotten herself into.”
“Do you think she’s with them? The National Front?”
I shrugged. “It’s the best lead I have, so I’ll have to run it down.”
* * *
I stopped abruptly before we crested the last ridge. We were still a good twenty minutes from the trailhead, about to start switch-backing down. We’d walked in silence as my thoughts flitted between Reclaim, the National Front and my mother. I called softly to Roxanne, who was still hiking up the hill.
“Hold up, Roxanne.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked, reluctant to surrender her upward momentum.
“Trouble ahead,” I said. I wasn’t going to say more, but her body language told me that she wasn’t going to stop without a good reason. “You were followed from your camp by two men. I need to make sure it’s not a problem. Wait here, keep this turned on and I’ll call you when it’s safe to come down,” I said, withdrawing a small Motorola walkie-talkie from the side pouch on my pack. I switched it on and adjusted the channel, then handed it to her.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Yesterday someone tried to run me off the road. Then later, more men attacked me in the parking lot of my motel.”
“Good grief! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want to worry you, but I made it to the parking area at the trailhead before you left your campsite so I could watch you drive here to see if you were followed.”
“How could you possibly see me driving from down there? It’s in the middle of a holler.”
“I used a drone. It’s like a model airplane with a camera on it. I controlled it with the little computer I was working on when you drove up.”
Roxanne ground the heel of her palm against the side of her forehead. “Sometimes I feel so old. I didn’t even know such a thing existed. But why on earth did you think someone would follow me?”
“The first time I was tailed, I was leaving your campsite. The second time was after we met for dinner.”
“And you think these folks who followed me are dangerous?”
“I don’t know. But wait here and I’ll make sure things are okay before we go back to our cars, okay?”
She nodded abruptly, still in disbelief. But she stayed put.
I walked off the path, parallel to the ridge, and didn’t stop for a quarter mile, well out of earshot. Then I pulled an earpiece out from under the collar of my shell, pushed it into my ear and fixed a microphone to my cheekbone. It would transmit my voice clearly at a whisper. I slipped my hand into another pocket and pushed a button on a satellite phone. The call went through immediately and after a brief identification ritual, I was passed through to the tactical operations center at the Activity. A young Indian-American specialist whose call sign was Mongoose answered. I’d met him once, just before I left the Activity for college, but I’d never worked with him. He had come to us from MIT, Cal-Tech and the Jet Propulsion Labs. He was the newest boy genius at the TOC when I left.
“Mongoose, thanks for the help. Did I manage the handoff correctly?”
“Roger, Orion, we have your bird under control.”
“Did you see what I saw?”
“Yes, we were streaming your video feed from launch. We observed two vehicles driving from the campsite you identified last night. From your description, we identified the first vehicle as Queen Bee’s. The second vehicle was parked off the road a few hundred yards from the entrance to the campsite and followed at a distance of one klick. It pulled off of the road before Queen Bee did—and out of visual sight. This suggests that the driver knew her destination.”
I wondered how Roxanne would react if she knew the operations center for one of the U.S. government’s most clandestine military agencies had nicknamed her Queen Bee. “I think there’s a good chance someone has hacked Queen Bee’s e-mail,” I said. That would also explain how they knew I’d be out of my room last night.
“Two men exited the second vehicle and ascended the hill just west of your location. They are in place about ten meters from the ridgeline and have a good line of sight over the road and your parking area.”
“You were able to track them under the tree cover?”
“We have them on infrared. Based on their movements I would say that there’s a good chance you’re looking at a two-man shooter-spotter team. They’ve picked a good spot for sniping.”
“I didn’t know the little drones had infrared,” I said. I’d launched the four-foot unmanned aerial vehicle like a paper plane, tossing it from my hands more than a half-hour before Roxanne arrived. Using a joystick rigged inside the case to the ruggedized tablet computer, I’d guided the mini-drone to Roxanne’s camp less than five miles from the trailhead as the crow flies, though much farther by road. When she left, I locked the drone on her Defender and it guided itself. The ops center took over before Roxanne arrived.
“Your discharge was four years ago, correct?”
“Four and a half.”
“You’re probably more familiar with the Puma AE. The model you launched this morning is three generations newer. In addition to very robust infrared, it has a five-hour flight window, can lock on targets and follow them autonomously, and has a satellite uplink, which is how we can control it from this end.”
“You mean it’s not on a wireless data plan?”
“Luddite.”
“Why don’t you guys just switch over to a satellite now, anyway?”
“And how many geosynchronous satellites do you imagine the Department of Defense has tasked on West Virginia?”
“Ah, good point. Can you give me coordinates on these guys?”
“We can do better if you open your tablet.”
“Gotcha,” I said. Taking a knee, I slid off my pack and withdrew the tablet. When I opened it, the screen showed an aerial infrared view of the holler with lots of shades of blue between the two ridges where the cars were parked. As I watched, it zoomed out to include both ridges.
“I’ll mark your position in green, your vehicle in blue and the sniper team in red,” Mongoose said, and like Chris Collinsworth on Sunday Night Football, he did just that.
“Can I zoom in on them?”
“Yes, with two fingers, like an iPad. You
have
used an iPad?”
“Yes, thank you, I recently experimented with a microwave oven, too. Did you know you can make popcorn in there?” Using two fingers I manipulated the view and zoomed in on the shooters. They were little blobs of orange on the side of the hill in the infrared-enhanced view. “Can you turn the infrared off on my screen but keep their position marked so I can see the terrain?”
“Roger, there you go,” Mongoose said. Suddenly I was looking at a Google Earth-type map again.
“Did they take this trail just to the south of their position up toward the ridge and step off it or did they bushwhack?”
“They hiked up the trail, Orion.”
“They’re not using any infrared shielding, either, right?” There are several ways to block your heat signature from drones or handheld infrared scanners. But I’d easily spotted the two men on the infrared view, and that suggested they weren’t under a thermal blanket or wearing thermal-blocking gilly suits.
“Roger that.”
“Did they scout exfil before they hunkered down?”
“Negative.”
Together, these little pieces of data painted a clearer picture. These guys were laying in wait, but they were expecting the man they’d seen yesterday: the ex-special ops veteran who could still drive a car, take down a few locals in a brawl and avoid walking into a room rigged with an IED. That guy might notice if someone was following him but he wouldn’t be expecting a trained sniper team under cover on a hillside. So they had deployed as hunters rather than snipers. There’s an important difference. When you’re a hunter, you’re not expecting the game to fight back. In combat, though, snipers are prime targets. So they stay off trails, plan emergency escape routes and generally go to great lengths to remain undetected after they shoot. This ambush was set up without those precautions. They only needed one clean shot.