Authors: David Vinjamuri
“If he’s in the registry, you must have an address for him, right?”
“Yes, and that’s where it gets tricky. His residence since 2009 has been in a compound outside of Fayetteville in Fayette County. That’s not too far from Beckley.” Beckley—where Heather had her mail forwarded after leaving CC Farm.
“A compound? He’s from another commune?”
Collins shook his head. “No, different story. This compound is the headquarters of the National Front. It’s a white supremacist group.”
“What? Are you sure this is the same guy?”
“No, I’m not. We only had the name to work with. But it’s not a common surname locally, so I wouldn’t bet that it’s wrong, either.” Collins scratched his chin. “It would explain why the Feds are involved. The National Front has been linked to hate crimes, illegal guns and drugs. They’re dangerous people and if this girl you’re looking for is with them, I’ll tell you that you’re out of luck. There’s no way they’d let anyone in there without a warrant and a SWAT team.” Collins handed me both photos and the envelope as he spoke.
My head was spinning. How could a girl who came to West Virginia to protest mining and moved to a commune end up with white supremacists? More importantly, why would a white supremacist join an environmental group?
* * *
“Are you certain, Orion?” Alpha asked, using my old call sign. I phoned him after changing motels. When Sheriff Casto and Deputy Collins finally left the parking lot in front of my motel room in Hamlin, I grabbed my bag and checked out, then left town. I drove the kind of route you use when you need to see if someone is following you, but nobody was. Then I headed north, got on the interstate and drove a few miles east before exiting to a chain motel just off the highway. I paid cash and parked around back, wedging my GTO between two SUVs where it would be harder to spot if much easier to dent. Not that a door ding was going to compare to the work I’d need to do on the rear quarter-panel since Little Boy Wright’s pickup spun it around.
“Sir, you’d recognize the signature,” I said in response to Alpha’s question about the explosive device in my motel room. “Whoever built that device was definitely trained in the community. I got a good look at it. There was a tilt fuse with a mercury switch, triggered by a tension wire attached to the doorknob. It was double-primed. The explosive wasn’t mil-spec but the signature was clear. Whoever planted it came pretty close to getting me, too.” In fact, if I’d had one ounce less fieldcraft pounded into me in the Activity, I would have yanked the door to my motel room open without checking the telltales.
“Unfortunately, this fits with some other information we’ve gathered,” Alpha said. “It appears you may have crossed paths with a group called the National Front. Anton Harmon is a member.”
“The Sheriff’s office traced the name on this end as well, but I haven’t confirmed it’s the same Anton Harmon. It’s hard to imagine a neo-Nazi suddenly joining an environmental group. It’s even harder to imagine one dating a girl named ‘Hernandez.’ I got a picture of him, though, so I’ll run it by someone who knew him on this end,” I replied. I remembered the girl at CC Farms mentioning the tattoo of the swastika she’d seen on Harmon and my skepticism weakened.
“Please do, but you should know we’ve established a second connection to this group. We were able to get the details on the phone conversation you overheard,” Alpha continued, obliquely referring to the call I’d intercepted on the listening device I’d planted on Little Boy Wright. “The call was made to the voicemail box of a prepaid phone. This particular phone falls under a monitoring warrant being run by another agency. The phone in question is one of a lot that was bulk-purchased at a warehouse club by a member of the National Front.”
“Oh,” I said, frowning. “That complicates things.”
“There’s more. Harmon has a military background. He was with the 26
th
Infantry Regiment of the Big Red One during the first Gulf War. After his discharge, he completed a degree in civil engineering, then reenlisted after 9/11. He went in under the X-ray program and served with the Third Special Forces Group as an engineer sergeant. He was DD in 2008. That file was sealed, though we’re trying to get a copy of it.”
“He’s an explosives specialist?”
“Yes.”
“So he could be the one hiring these men to keep me from finding Heather?”
“It’s possible,” Alpha conceded. “At the very least, it suggests that Miss Hernandez may be in some real danger. And that someone doesn’t want you to connect the dots.”
I cleared my throat gently and took a breath.
“Sir, if we step back for a second, you’d have to agree that this trip has taken a serious turn down the rabbit hole, wouldn’t you? Last night I started asking questions about a girl who was protesting with an environmental group. In the span of twenty-four hours I’ve been sideswiped, attacked and nearly bombed.”
“You’d like to withdraw?”
“Not at all, sir. But if I keep playing by the same rules, I won’t make it through another day. Which makes me wonder...”
“Yes, Orion?”
“While I was driving here I wondered why you would send me on a job that a real private investigator could finish in half a day. Unless you already knew more than you shared with me.”
The line was silent for a few seconds.
“When Miss Hernandez’s mother forwarded her note, I made some inquiries. I got a strong reaction from my federal sources. The FBI was very interested in the attack on the protestors, but their motives were unclear. Given that, I wasn’t confident a private detective would be able to operate effectively.”
“Sir, why didn’t you just tell me this yesterday morning?”
“If I’d told you there was an FBI investigation, where would you have gone first?”
“To the FBI,” I said, thinking about the next call I wanted to make.
“Exactly. And had you approached them first, they might have gone all the way to the National Security Council to force me to recall you.”
“I very nearly got myself killed, sir.”
“Perhaps not so nearly, Orion. And now you’ve gained the FBI’s attention by getting the National Front to make an overt move against you. This opens a door to cooperate with them.”
“Cooperate?”
“As you said, we need a different approach. Groups like this mistrust outsiders in general and the government in particular. The National Front may be worse. It’s a very serious criminal organization.”
“What do you have in mind, sir?”
“We’re looking for a way to get you inside the compound.”
“Infiltration?”
“No, something more circumspect. We think we have a viable approach, but we need to do some work overnight. I’ll have more information for you later. In the meantime, call the TOC and give them your current location and any other information they request. We’ll bring you under operational control in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” I responded crisply as the call ended. I realized that I’d been pacing back and forth in front of the two full-size beds in my Spartan roadside motel room for over an hour. Suddenly exhausted, I sat down. As I’d told Alpha, I didn’t like the direction things were headed. More to the point, I didn’t like the way he’d used me as bait to tease out the FBI’s interest in the Reclaim killings. Now he wanted to put me inside the National Front compound. That would be a real trick, as I would be in the midst of the same people who’d tried very hard to kill me. All for the daughter of my ex-boss’s friend.
Don’t get me wrong—I understand loyalty. It’s what brought me to West Virginia. But it surprised me that Alpha would devote government resources to a private project. A single misstep could end his career. It seemed like a big risk to take to find a missing girl. I decided I needed to know more about the girl’s father and Alpha’s connection to him. Some of the things I’d heard about Heather suggested the man might not have been the best parent, and I couldn’t let that lie, either.
As I pulled another phone from my bag and dialed the number for the tactical operations center at the Activity, I wondered how I managed to get myself into another mess. But I knew the answer. When you’re a hammer, they always find you a nail.
13
Saturday
“Another hundred yards and you can stop bitching,” Roxanne said as we trudged up a muddy trail.
“I wasn’t complaining. I was pointing out that it’s polite to tell someone when you invite them for coffee that they’ll be climbing a mountain to get to it.”
“I’m not sure I see the difference,” Roxanne replied without looking back at me. “Besides, you’re barely sweating!”
“I’m at least six months younger than you. And I grew up in the mountains.”
“I’d peg it closer to a quarter century. And the Catskills aren’t mountains, they’re foothills—just like the hill we’re on right now. Maine has mountains.”
“That’s probably why you’re not puffing too much, either.”
Roxanne snorted. I’d sent her a note before I collapsed into bed the previous night, asking her to meet me in the morning if she was available. When I awoke at 5:30 there was a reply waiting for me, suggesting that we meet at 8 for coffee with a view. Attached were driving directions that had me navigating a narrow dirt road winding through the Big Ugly Wildlife Management Area.
Roxanne found me sitting on the hood of my GTO, playing with a ruggedized tablet computer. I’d arrived almost forty-five minutes before she pulled off the road in her twenty-year-old Land Rover Defender exactly at our scheduled meeting time. The small dirt parking lot off the side of the road looked like it was primarily used as an offloading point for an ATV trail, and the satellite maps I’d scanned of the Big Ugly showed a pretty extensive network lacing the mountains—or rather, foothills. Roxanne stepped out of the Defender as I snapped the case to the tablet shut and slid it into a sage-colored backpack. Roxanne was wearing ancient gray hiking boots, thick wool socks with green wool pants blousing out from them and a sturdy wool coat over a cable-knit sweater. It was in the forties, a full thirty degrees colder than it had been the same time on Friday. I’d grown up thinking that Hudson Valley weather was unpredictable. Apparently it wasn’t alone.
Roxanne greeted me with a smile and a wave. “Early bird?”
“You bet.”
“Well let’s go,” she said, pulling an embroidered Norwegian cross-country ski hat with a small black pompom down over her ears. I donned a pair of gloves and slung the pack over my shoulders as she grabbed a pair of hiking poles and led the way.
In the Catskills, the mountains are low enough to lie completely below the tree line, so you sometimes don’t see anything but woods until you reach a vista, like the top of a ridge. It was the same on this trail, as we switch-backed up the hill to a ridgeline and then followed it along a narrow, muddy path for two miles before briefly heading downhill and then ascending again. The woods were old growth, a dense mixture of deciduous varieties from white oak to holly, clinging to their leaves weeks past the time they’d have dropped them up north. The crunch, crunch, crunch of Roxanne’s thick, practical leather hiking boots brought back weekends trailing behind my sister Amelia and her friends as we went to gather blackberries in the springtime in a field up on the side of a mountain just outside Conestoga. Amelia wore hand-me-down oversized leather boots that year that seemed destined to snap her skinny ankles.
We reached the end of the trail. “Well, here you go,” Roxanne said. “Here’s something I guarantee you’ve never seen before.” Then she pulled back a tree branch and we stepped out into a clearing on a ridge in the middle of the Big Ugly. Up at that level, all you see of southern West Virginia is hilltops—the houses and towns in the hollers recede from sight. It was a pristine view.
“Gorgeous,” I said.
“You’re looking the wrong way,” Roxanne said sharply. Gently grasping my shoulders, she turned me ninety degrees to the east. The Hobart Mine site spread out below us, a raw wound on the face of the earth. It looked like someone had erased a complete ridge of mountaintop—just rubbed it out with an eraser. The entire site was chalk white and it seemed to go on for miles. The hills were gone and so were the valleys. In their place were broad, flat plains of dust studded with geometrically unnatural plateaus and a great deal of heavy equipment.
It should not have come as a surprise. I knew Roxanne was planning to show me the Hobart site. It was the obvious destination. I’d checked the geological survey map before we started the climb and she’d picked the highest hill overlooking the site that was still on state land. I’d been ready for it as we snaked our way up the trail. But some time during the hike I had succumbed to the rhythm of the walk and forgotten her purpose for bringing me up the hill. So the view took me as unsuspectingly as if I’d been someone navigating the network of roads around the mine for years without ever catching site of the entirety of it.
“This area is part of the Appalachian Plateau. These ridges and valleys were formed nearly 500 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period.” Roxanne pointed in the direction I’d looked first, where the hills were packed so closely that they seemed to squeeze the hollers between them. “The mineable coal in this region was deposited at least 300 million years ago, during the Pennsylvanian period. So you can say that the view here didn’t change for about 300 million years, give or take.” She held up three fingers as though she was lecturing to an audience and not just to me.
“Then in the nineteen seventies, American Coal started strip-mining the plateau. They’re the ones who sold Hobart to Transnational. The Hobart site is nearly ten miles across. To get a single ton of coal, they have to remove sixteen tons of soil. To work the seam, they blast the top off a mountain and deposit the overfill in valleys.” That explained why the site looked so flat. I’d assumed the mine was just the product of digging. It hadn’t occurred to me that all the dirt had to go somewhere. “Mines like this cover 1200 miles of Appalachian headwater streams. Two years ago a team of researchers from Duke University came here and collected 15,000 water samples. They published their data last year. They found significant water pollution, high concentrations of selenium and mutations in the fish.”