Blowout (5 page)

So what the hell was a leading microbe biologist on assignment for the president, a woman who knew her father who was a Pentagon general working for the newly formed ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, doing at the Dakota District ELF facility?

“Well, call her and tell her that I'm here,” Ashley told the AP a little more sharply than she meant to. It was cold with the window down, it was late, and she would have to stay in Medora or maybe Dickinson for the night.

“Sorry—”

“She knows me, goddamnit. Just pick up your phone and tell her that I'm General Forester's daughter. We met at my dad's house a couple of years ago and I just saw her at the Bismarck Airport a few days ago.”

The AP smiled tightly. “Ma'am, you need to turn around now and leave or I will have to place you under arrest.”

“Good!” Ashley practically shouted. “We're making progress. Call someone and get them out here with the cuffs before I freeze my ass off.”

“May I have your driver's license?”

Ashley handed it over, and the AP went back to the gatehouse. She could see him on the phone, looking at her through the window, and looking at her ID. After several minutes, he put the phone down and came out.

“Ma'am, it'll be about ten minutes. Our Public Affairs officer Lieutenant Magliano is coming out to escort you to Donna Marie.”

“Who's that?”

“It's our power station. You'll be met there.”

“By Dr. Lipton?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am, but no one by that name works here.”

 

3

THE ONLY THING
Gordy Widell really hated about himself was his acne, which no matter what solution or cream he tried would not disappear. His mom told him that he ate too much chocolate and his dad, before he'd hung himself in the garage after getting laid off at the GM assembly plant, told him to stop being a pussy and live with it.

But by then Gordy was already a geek who no one understood and he'd taken off when he was fifteen and came under the care of a couple of gay guys from Rockford who moved out to Bozeman where he moved in with a computer geek even smarter and crazier that he was, and so his real education had begun.

It was fully dark when he'd powered up his equipment, and began delicately sampling the electronic spectrum on just about every band—AM, FM, and microwave—he could think of, searching for every emission from the Dakota District's main research campus and especially from Donna Marie, the experimental electrical-generating facility, where within twenty-four to seventy-two hours the first test run of the gadget would take place.

“Could kill us all,” Barry had told them. Not a cheery thought, but Gordy didn't really believe it. He'd been hired to make it possible for the others to stop the test.

“Piece of cake,” he muttered under his breath as he studied the three main monitors.

Brenda was sitting behind him, a finger twining in the curls at the back of his neck. She did it to make her girlfriend jealous, even though it never worked. “What'd you say, sweetheart?”

“Fuck off.”

She laughed loud enough for everyone in the motor home to hear. “Do it right, Gooordyyy.”

The problem, as Gordy had figured it, was twofold.

First, electronic traffic coming into the facility—that included landline, cell, and satellite phones, plus computers and all the other satellite and microwave links as well as quantum-effect encrypted burst transmissions of top secret material—had to be intercepted and mined for information that was pertinent to this operation. Were Air Force security units from Rapid City en route for an unannounced exercise as happened several times each year? Were some VIPs from Washington going to show up sometime tonight? Maybe CDC or even NOAA scientists arriving for the experiment? Extra bodies that would have to be dealt with. Or had the FBI somehow gotten wind of what was about to happen, and were sending warnings: Help is on the way, batten down the hatches.

Second, and most important, was electronic traffic leaving the facility. All of it had to be intercepted and washed of any hint of trouble. The delay of a few milliseconds between the time a signal was sent and actually received at the other end—mostly in Washington—because it had been picked up by Gordy's computer, cleansed, and resent, would not be noticeable, at least not in the short run. It especially had to include alarm signals between Donna Marie and the main campus.

All they really needed was ninety minutes—time enough for them to get in, neutralize the personnel, especially security so that Dr. Kemal could inject his cocktail of bacteria into the seam through the wellhead, and then get out.

That last part was the most problematic in Gordy's mind. But like his old man had said: stop being a pussy.

Besides the normal cell phone services just about everything coming in or leaving the facility was relayed through the WGSS, Wideband Global Satellite System communication network, or the updated Milstar, which was the Military Strategic and Tactical Relay system.

Egan came back. “How's it going?”

Gordy ignored the question for just a few seconds, then hit
ENTER
, and looked up. “We're in, Sarge.”

“Good man,” Egan said, and patted Gordy on the shoulder.

 

4

BOB FORESTER'S DAUGHTER
showing up here was the last thing Whitney Lipton wanted or expected. Today of all days. In the morning they were injecting the bacteria-talker into the test bore, and seventy-two hours afterward, they would know if the gadget was a success. In which case everyone would probably get drunk and stay that way for a week, or a failure, in which case everyone would probably get drunk but stay that way only for a day until they got back to work to find out where the science or technology had gone wrong.

If they were still alive after the initial test.

Forester was in conference at his ARPA-E office on Independence Avenue in Washington and could not be disturbed; at any rate he once admitted that since Ashley was about thirteen he'd just about lost any realistic control over her behavior.

Whitney, Doc or the boss to her science team, and Doctor, which she'd always thought sounded a little pretentious, to just about all the government overseers on the project, was thirty-three, nearly six feet, with a pleasant face, high cheekbones, sleek black hair, and a slender, almost bony, frame that some of her friends said made her look something like the movie actor Lara Flynn Boyle. She grabbed her parka and on her way out of her office phoned Jim Cameron, chief of security at Donna Marie.

“Pete Magliano is bringing Forester's daughter out to look around,” she said.

“Right now?” Cameron demanded. “You can't be serious.”

“She showed up at post one and said she was here to interview me, I didn't know what the hell else to do with her. There's no way I wanted her here tonight, not in the state my people are in.”

“Well, it's no better over here.”

“Right,” Whitney said, chuckling. Actually she and Jim Cameron had hit it off nearly four years ago. She'd had a predisposition not to like military types, especially security people with their sometimes unreasonable lockstep SOPs, and she'd been mildly surprised at first by his laid-back nature. He was reasonably good-looking, he was bright and well read and well rounded, something her ex was not, and he made her laugh. At thirty-two he was only one year younger than her.

“What do you want me to do with her?”

“Show her around the place. Looks like a power plant.”

“No coal cars.”

“We're going to burn methane.”

“The girl's not stupid. There're a lot of storage tanks and processing equipment and piping more like you'd see at a refinery. From what I've heard she's bright, and maybe her father let something slip. Maybe she's put two and two together, which is going to bump up against our security provisions.”

Whitney was a little vexed, had been from the beginning, by the supersecrecy the White House had placed on her work. But the president had explained to her that if they announced the project—which would eventually cost taxpayers upwards of $750 billion—and it failed, heads would roll. His head would roll. In a democracy the electorate ruled, whether anybody liked it or not.

The bigger problem, as it had been explained to her, was potentially very large trouble in the run-up to any revolution. The fact was that within U.S. borders there were enough coal deposits to satisfy its energy needs for four or five centuries—even adding in demands that were expected to rise exponentially if cheap electricity could be produced to run the increasingly electric economy—including all electrically heated and cooled homes, electric ships, electric trains, even electric airplanes and, of course, electric cars.

But coal was dirty. Every coal-powered electrical-generating plant pumped thousands of tons of poisonous carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Even stations that sequestered stack gases by a dozen different processes, including olivine capture in which the gas would be converted to the stable magnesium iron silicate, which was one of the most benign and common materials on earth, or used the carbon dioxide to make a zinc-based aliphatic polycarbonate plastic that could be used in hundreds of applications—a plastic that was totally biodegradable—or even the more expensive chilled ammonia carbon capture in which supersonic shock waves compressed the carbon for storage deep underground, were polluters.

And the biggest problem of all, the reason the president had explained to her and the others on the original committee he had called together at the White House for the intensely secret initial briefing, was big oil and the managers of the oil derivative funds who would squeeze our economy to the breaking point if they got so much as a whiff of the possibility that coal-produced electricity would be the motive power that drove the cars and trucks, putting them out of business. It would be all-out war—for survival.

“Anyway I'm on my way over so you won't have to deal with her on your own,” Whitney said. “But I'll probably be a half hour behind.”

“Thank you for small favors.”

“Give me a break.”

“You know what I mean,” Cameron said. “I can explain to her everything we're doing here in four sentences. We're going to inject three classes of microbes directly into the coal seam Donna Marie is sitting atop. One breaks down the long hydrocarbons in the deposit. The second converts those into organic acids and alcohols. And the third—methanogens—feed on the first two and convert them to methane that we pump to the surface and burn as fuel to power our turbines. The problem is what do I tell her after that spiel? That there's a real possibility we'll have a methane blowout that would be a million times worse in terms of atmospheric damage than a large coal-burning generating plant produces? That some of our bacteria produces a lot of oxygen that could ignite the entire coal seam, which would involve probably a fourth of the entire state? Suffocate all the cattle? Really piss off the tourists?”

“You could quit and go back to Washington.”

“And miss all this fun?” Cameron said. “Just get over here as quickly as you can. You know this woman.”

“I know her dad, and I only bumped into her once, briefly,” Whitney said. “I need to talk to my crew and I'll be right over. In the meantime use your Irish charm. Works on me.”

She hung up before he could reply.

Her secretary Marney Morgan was gone for the evening, back in housing across the mall, where most of them lived most of the time, or at this hour possibly in Henry's, which was a Upper West Side, Manhattan, transplant bar and a really good restaurant, or at the army dining hall—which had been dubbed Grunt City or Vomit Valley—but certainly not on her way into Medora. Everyone who was on base this evening was staying there. The gadget that contained the equipment to “talk” to the cocktail of microbes would be lowered into the deep injection borehole at six in the morning. And then what?

Whitney held up in the second-floor corridor of the main administration and research-and-development building, quiet just now because just about all of her techs and postdocs were downstairs in the main control center getting ready for the event, as the injection was being called, leaving mostly the roustabouts and power plant engineers over at Donna Marie, and gave a brief thought to how she'd gotten to this point.

It was crazy, even she could admit it to herself at the odd moment. But eight years ago she'd come up with the notion that microbes—bacteria—could communicate with each other. She'd not been the only scientist to come up with the idea, of course, Princeton's Bonnie Bassler being the most brilliant and well known of the others, but she'd figured out how to talk back to them and in an efficient, no-fail way. Train them like Pavlov did with his dogs. Ring the dinner bell and her babies would begin to eat—just about anything she engineered them to eat, coal included. That had been the tough part, the coal and what her bacterial cocktail produced—methane—and how it produced it and the speed at which it produced the gas, and the other by-products.

But the really tough parts were understanding the exact language of each bacteria colony, the fact that in general bacteria were multilingual, and finally learning a universal language that
Smithsonian
magazine had dubbed “microbial Esperanto.”

And then, of course, the design of the gadget, which when lowered into the borehole could translate her instructions into microbial Esperanto and transmit them.

It worked on a very small scale in the lab. But the real test would come first thing in the morning. And if she were being honest with herself, she would admit that she was damned scared, not only because of the possible side effects—primarily a methane runaway or a coal-seam fire—but of the effects that a failure would have on the initiative and on her career.