Hunting Season (9 page)

The retorts he’d bought from a lab that had gone out of business. He’d obtained the small gas pump, as well as the larger one that would be required later to pressurize the truck fully, from a refrigeration and air-conditioning catalog. The small diesel generator, which putted away inside one of the two steam generators out in the boiler hall, was a WalMart special. The rest of the hydrogen setup was conventional plumbing and catalog instrumentation, built into the existing piping of the power plant’s boiler-water treatment and testing lab.

Jared had stolen the propane truck, with Browne’s help. They’d hit a West Virginia propane company’s lot one rainy night. While Browne kept watch, Jared hot-wired the truck and drove it away. They’d taken it to the arsenal and parked it out of sight down a fire lane close to the front gates.

The next time the security truck came in, Jared had been waiting. The guards were in the habit of leaving the front gate unchained while they did their tour, which allowed Jared to drive the truck in once they were down in the industrial area. He’d hidden it in an empty warehouse

until the security people had finished, and then he and Browne had maneuvered it into the power plant maintenance bay. They’d let the propane in the truck boil off to the outside air through its delivery hose for a week before sealing up the maintenance bay again and cleaning the truck tank and putting in new seals.

The pump came on, making a small racket in the room. Browne worried about the noise, and he knew the bigger pump would be even louder.

He walked over to the interior control room door, which had a window in the upper half, and peered out into the cavernous steam-generation hall.

The plant was about one-third the size of a commercial power station, but the two boilers were still forty feet high. He was pretty sure that the pump noise could not penetrate to the outside of the power station building, but he made frequent checks. His concern was that one day he would find a couple of deer hunters or college kids standing out there, poking around to see what that noise was. Just like the ones who had drowned in the creek.

Browne alone ran the hydrogen generator, working at night and on weekends. Jared, his older grandson, provided security. Jared had done his job well. Of his two grandsons, Jared was the one who looked most like his father, William. He was of medium height but strongly built. He worked as a telephone repairmen for the local telephone company, and he had been helping Browne with the bomb-building project right from the beginning. Browne knew that Jared held no great affection for his long gone father, but, like his grandfather, Jared was sympathetic to the beliefs of the Christian Identity. He hated the government and all its works.

William’s death during the Mount Carmel incident had just about shattered Browne. He had loved that boy in spite of everything that had happened—his disastrous teenage marriage, his slut of a wife running off like that, leaving William, and ultimately Browne, to raise the two kids.

Jared had been a handful, no doubt about that, but Kenny, Jared’s younger brother, had been born mildly retarded, and that had been really difficult.

Although he had been angry at the time, he later came to sympathize with his son when he finally bailed out of Blacksburg. A high school education, two squalling kids, the cancer that rose up right about then and claimed Browne’s wife, Holly—well, William never had a chance. Browne had had such high hopes. William had been bright enough to go on to college, maybe even Virginia Tech, right there in Blacksburg. With Browne’s connections at the arsenal, William would have been a

shoo-in for a high paying job, except, of course, that the goddamned government had seen fit to close the arsenal, hadn’t it? Damn near wiped out the town.

Jared had survived, which just about described it. He had been a dutiful, if resentful, child after both his mother and father left home. Raised in the orbit of his increasingly embittered grandfather, Jared had been a plodder. He had never talked to Browne about how he felt about being deserted by his parents, and Browne, with troubles of his own, had never raised the issue. He did often wonder how it might have all turned out if William had had a better shot at life. He had been such a great kid, full of life, friendly, easygoing, always trailing a clutch of giggling females, smart enough not to have to work very hard in school, and the apple of Browne’s eye. Jared wasn’t much like his father, except in one respect: He went through life seemingly obsessed with women. But Jared liked to live dangerously—he only fooled around with married women. Browne thought that this was probably Jared’s way of guaranteeing that he would never repeat his own father’s sorry family history.

Browne sighed as he thought about William and what might have been. All of Browne’s hopes for the future seemed to have dissolved at the same time, right along with the arsenal. Jared was willing to help with Browne’s revenge, not because he loved and missed his father, but because he heartily approved of the idea of the bomb, its target, and especially the timing of it, in the year 2000. Jared’s other interest was what Browne called “the lunatic fringe,” the militias and some of the more apocalyptic religious groups. One of Browne’s continuing worries was that Jared would run his mouth to some of his dumbass militia friends over in West Virginia, but so far, security seemed to be intact. Jared was out there now, somewhere nearby, watching for the security people to begin their windshield tour.

The pump shut off to await the next pressure buildup of hydrogen.

Browne crossed the control room and went into the maintenance bay via the connecting door. The power station was the one building on the installation where the government had not stripped out all the equipment.

Two four-story-high steam boilers and all their auxiliary equipment still filled the open hall on the other side of the control room, and two locomotive-sized turbo electric generators crouched silently in the generating hall, beyond the boiler hall. Two twenty-four-inch cooling mains, now empty, used to bring water up from a reservoir back in the bunker farm to cool the main steam condensers. But it was all quiet

now, quiet and secure, which made it the perfect place for what he was doing, especially since he knew the place like the back of his hand. Browne had been chief chemical engineer of the entire facility up until they shut it down two decades ago.

He opened the main pressure gauge sensing line and saw that the pressure in the truck tank was unchanged from yesterday’s reading. He prayed there wasn’t a leak somewhere, then reassured himself that any leak would have emptied the tank long before now. No, it was just going to take time to fill that huge volume. Browne nodded to himself. The mills of God were grinding away here, but they would indeed grind exceedingly fine when the time came. He went back into the control room. It was almost time for the security people to make their tour. When this cycle was done, he would shut off the electric generator until Jared came to tell him they had come and gone.

Edwin Kreiss moved through the woods like a shadow, gliding silently from tree to tree and cover to cover, using the warning cries of birds as his cue to stop and listen. He blended perfectly with all the vertical shadows among the trees. His rubber boots made no sound in the pine needles carpeting the ground. He was staying fifty feet inside the tree line on the south side of the creek, which was getting narrower as he followed it west back across the arsenal. He had crossed two fire lanes and two gravel roads so far, but he had seen no evidence that there had been any persons or vehicles on any of them in some time. He was warm in the jumpsuit, but not overly so, and he was handling with ease the gentle rise in elevation as he moved westward. It was nearly 11:00 A.M.” and the sun was bright, creating pinwheels of light down through the pines.

So far, he had seen several deer, a raccoon, dozens of squirrels, and one rattlesnake sunning itself on a log. The creek was bordered on his side by a wide expanse of tall green grass, which was littered with branches and other debris, indicating that there had been at least one flash flood in the past month. The north bank, slightly higher and undercut about four feet, showed a tangle of roots and burrows against a face of red clay. Where the terrain allowed, he crept out of the forest and down to the creek bank to examine the watercourse for the signs of human life that seemed to litter every creek and river in America: plastic bottles, polystyrene hamburger wrappers, and aluminum cans. But this creek was pristine by comparison.

The water was cold and clear, with waves of moss undulating on the stony bottom.

The only time he had to break cover was to cross a ravine that joined the creek from the south. It contained a tiny feeder brook, small enough to hop over. He crept down through the grass to the creek, stood up to jump it, and dropped back down into the grass. As he was scrambling up the other side, he thought he heard a vehicle off to his right. He dropped flat into the grass and made like a lizard, crawling carefully on all fours into the tree line at the top of the ravine, where he subsided into the pine needles to listen. He remembered doing this on the Agency training farm down near Warrenton: head down, face down, the smell of the dirt accentuating his other senses.

At first, he could hear nothing but the sound of a slight breeze soughing through the pines, but then he heard it again: the sound of a vehicle moving in low gear, far off to the right, beyond the pines lining the opposite bank. He lifted himself enough to see over his cover and was just able to catch a glimpse of a single chimney stack about a quarter of a mile or so to the northwest of his position. It looked like the concrete stack of a power plant, although only the very top was showing above the trees. I must be nearing the industrial area, he thought. He closed his eyes and concentrated, again detecting the far-off sound, a sound that came and went, as if the vehicle was changing direction constantly. Assuming it wasn’t a trick of sound carrying across empty countryside, he figured there was definitely someone else on the reservation. The good news was that they were not getting any closer. The bad news was that he was not alone.

He shifted farther into the trees and the sound faded. He checked his wrist compass and then worked his way west through the woods for another fifteen minutes. He turned north to check on the creek and found that it was veering away from him toward a hard dogleg turn to the north.

He moved back to his right in the woods until he came to the edge of the trees. He crouched behind a holly bush and examined his situation.

Between him and the creek were fifty yards of waist-high bright green grass. He probed the ground with the rod—it was soft. The bright green meant that it was growing in totally saturated ground; he would have to be careful of quicksand and bogs.

At that moment, he felt the hair on the back of his neck lift. He flattened down onto the ground, the fabric of his face hood catching on the sharp spines of some holly leaves.

He was being watched. He was certain of it.

He kept perfectly still and reviewed his movements of the past fifteen

minutes. The only open ground he had crossed was that ravine. Had he been spotted then? The woods noises remained normal; there was no sudden shrieking of jays or chatter of squirrels to announce that someone or something was behind him. Which meant that the watcher was probably on the other side of the creek. He waited for fifteen more minutes, listening carefully, and then began to crawl backward, flat on his belly, deeper into the woods. If there were someone watching from the other side, his movement back into the forest should be invisible.

He had seen something else when he tested the green grass area. Right at the elbow of the creek’s turn, there was a massive twenty-foot-high pile of debris: whole tree trunks, shattered limbs, mud-balled roots, large rocks, and desiccated bushes, all caught up on the remains of a giant hardwood that had come down across the creek a long time ago. The huge logjam extended into the woods on his side for a hundred feet or so. On the north side, it had dammed the creek, which was now leaking through the tumbled mess in several small waterfalls.

He thought about that pile and wondered if he should cross to the north bank—there were bound to be snakes in that mess, and he needed to stay in visual contact with the creek. But there was no cover out there;

he would have to crawl through that tall grass to the creek, and if someone was watching, they’d see the grass moving. He lay still for a few minutes, but the background noises did not change. He moved again, forward this time, but at a slight angle to the way he had come. He was aiming for the root ball of a downed pine tree that was fifty feet west of his original position, the place where he had sensed a possible watcher. He moved slowly, still making like a lizard, placing one hand and foot on the soft ground before moving the other one, inching back to the edge of the tree line. He had heard nothing and seen nothing specific that would indicate surveillance, but he had learned years ago to trust this particular instinct absolutely.

When he got to the root ball, he flattened himself down into the hole and then probed the roots with his rod. Sure enough, a copperhead lifted its diminutive triangular head three feet in front of him and tested the air with its tongue. He put the hooked end of the rod right in front of the snake’s head and it froze. He tapped the snake’s body with the rod and it coiled instantly, its delicate black tongue flickering in and out rapidly as it searched for a target. He angled the rod to line up with the snake’s line of strike and waited. The snake also waited, its head making small angular displacements as it

tried to form a heat image of whatever was in front of it. He moved the rod down to the ground and tapped it. The snake reset its coil and aimed in the direction of the rod. He raised the rod and jabbed at the snake, which struck at the rod straight on. He jammed the hooked end into the snake’s maw and pushed hard, pinning the reptile against a thick root. It thrashed briefly and then stopped fighting, its jaws unlocked and wide open around the metal shaft that was stuck down its gullet. With his other hand, he pulled the knife from his right boot and cut down just behind the snake’s head, killing it. He extended the rod and ejected the snake’s body to his right.