One Mile Under (19 page)

“Yeah, I guess it’s not exactly good optics to be sinking drills in the ground uselessly,” Hauck said.

“Or a good use of money. But today, we don’t quite do that. And when I used the word
environment
I was actually speaking far more broadly. First, for us, we have to identify the deposit. There’s a lot of new science that enables us to pinpoint that much more accurately than in years past. Soil testing. Three-D imaging. Then we have to extract it, in both a cost-effective and environmentally friendly way. Not just for the money or the
optics
… as you say”—Moss focused on Hauck’s choice of word coolly—“but for our own charter as well. We take our connection to the community very seriously here, Mr. Hauck, I can assure you of that.”

“Yes, I saw the video downstairs.”

“Then you get the picture. There are several advancements in drilling technology going on today you may have heard of. Horizontal drilling. Dynamic fragmentation …”

“Fracking?” Hauck volunteered.

“Yes, as it’s more widely referred to. These techniques allow us to tap into deposits that were heretofore unreachable, drill multiple arms off each well site, which makes it cleaner and more community friendly. So it’s important to work in concert with the local population—the town, the government—to make sure our goals are all aligned. Alpha assists us with this. Tries to show them that our gain is their gain too. Not only in terms of drilling leases, which can be lucrative, of course. Far more so than all the potatoes and corn seed they can grow in a lifetime. But for the community as well. In our trade, there is a certain winning of the local hearts and minds that becomes necessary.”

O
ne day some bad actor stirring up trouble just disappears during the night from their bed …
Hauck recalled Brooke saying.
Black PsyOps.

Hauck wondered if Moss was speaking of Chuck Watkins.

“We’re not just some big, bad oil and gas company trying to take away their way of life, Mr. Hauck.” Moss smiled. “Way too many regulations. It’s just not done that way anymore.”

“By winning the local hearts and minds,” Hauck said, “I assume you mean the fancy new football field, the parks and new police station …”

“And the schools and the medical centers … Anyway, all that’s only the short answer to your question. The long one would probably take all day and …” Moss glanced at his watch.

“I appreciate your time.”

“Look, Mr. Hauck, let me lay my cards on the table. I know who you are and what you’ve done … RMM is a firm that appreciates one’s service for their country. Perhaps you’d like to see that firsthand.”

Hauck chuckled. “I think I may already have.”

“Sorry …” the oilman said.

“RMM’s appreciation. Yesterday I was run off the road by a couple of your big rigs. On my way back from my visit with Alpha.”

“
Our
tankers …?” Moss acted surprised.

Hauck shrugged. “Big, bright letters on the sides.
RMM.
Impossible to miss. Then the police chief drove up and kind of convinced me Templeton wouldn’t be the best place for me to put down roots.”

Moss gritted his jaw and grabbed a pen. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear about that. I’ll make a point of looking into it.”

“Not to worry. No harm, no foul.”

“But at the least, not a very nice way to repay your interest in their company, was it?” Moss smiled circumspectly, giving Hauck the impression he didn’t for a second believe the reason for Hauck’s visit here.

“The same occurred to me.”

“Anyway, what I was referring to,” the RMM executive said, “was to drive you out myself and have you meet Hannah.”

“Hannah?”

“Hannah One. She’s the biggest-grossing well in the entire Wattenberg field. Over five hundred barrels a day. There’s also a Hannah Two and a Three. C’mon, you can come with me.” He stood up. “I’ll drive you out, if you’re free.”

Hauck stood up as well. “Perfectly free.”

The Wattenberg field was as “oil dense” as any in the country, Moss explained on the ride out. Two to four times more so than the larger and much more well-known Bakken field in North Dakota.

They took Moss’s BMW 535i, which was parked in an underground garage. Along the same row of cars, Hauck spotted two sleek, black Yukon SUVs, identical to the ones he saw watching him in Templeton yesterday.

“Feel free to move the seat back and crack the window if you want.” Moss put a pair of sunglasses on that he had in the driver’s console. “Hope you don’t mind if I smoke?”

Hauck shrugged. “Your car.”

“Trying to give it up. For the kids. But old habits are hard to kick. Picked it up in flight school.”

“The service?” Hauck detected a military demeanor in him as well.

“First Gulf War.” They got back on Route 34 in the direction of Templeton. Moss put the window down and blew a plume of smoke out the window. “I told you, a lot of us in this industry are veterans.”

On the trip, the conversation shifted to the land out here. The dry, arid shelf on what was known as the Niobrara shale field, which until ten years ago no one even suspected was a jackpot for oil. “It took state-of-the-art seismic imaging to even get a sense of what was down here. Now it’s one of the largest oil and gas deposits we have.” Moss chuckled. “The damn Apaches are probably kicking themselves, right …?”

“Question?” Hauck turned to him. They drove along the river in the direction of Templeton.

Moss flicked an ash out the window. “If I can.”

“Are you familiar with someone at Alpha named Robertson? First name John.”

“
Robertson …?
” Moss shook his head. “Can’t say I am. He works out here?”

“Far as I can tell.” Hauck took whatever Moss said with a grain of salt. The RMM man knew why he was here, and he knew what Moss was trying to get out of him. “I thought maybe he worked on the RMM account.”

“Lots of people do. What’s his job?”

“Senior coordinator of field activities.”

Moss nodded. “In this business, ‘field activities’ is a pretty broad job description, Mr. Hauck. It could mean most anything. Rig work. Site management. At Alpha, they tend to focus on the population side, not the sites. So he could be the point person for what they do.”

“This guy’s skill set back in Afghanistan seemed a bit more extensive than standing up in front of a town meeting.”

“What do you mean?”

“PsyOps. Special Forces training …”

Moss look a last drag, stamped his cigarette out in the ashtray, then lowered his window again and flicked out the butt. “You know, I’m beginning to get the impression you’re not so interested in the Alpha Group for your company at all as you are in this guy.”

They drove along the same stretch of road where Moss’s truckers had forced him off the road. “Anyway, your police chief seem to know him.”

“My police chief?”

“Riddick. After your guys ran me off the road. It was just up here …” Hauck was expecting Moss to slow down at the road from the river where he had seen the line of trucks come out the day before, but he didn’t. He kept on going. “Even he brought his name up.”

“Riddick?”

Hauck nodded.

Moss just shrugged. “Well, I don’t know him.” He accelerated past the turnoff.

“What about someone named Watkins?” Hauck decided to ask.

“Watkins. Is he at Alpha, too?”

“He’s a farmer. In Templeton.”

“What’s your beef with him? He try to run you off the road, too?”

“No.” Hauck smiled, meeting Moss’s eyes through his shades. “His son died. It’s why we’re here.”

“Oh. I didn’t mean to be so glib. That’s too bad.”

“Apparently Watkins was interfering in some way against the oil development in town, so I thought his name might have come up. He seems to have made a lot of the local townspeople upset.”

“Sorry, I don’t get the chance to meet many of the local townspeople. But many of them are resistant to what we do at first. It’s natural they feel threatened; they think we’re going to leave their town like some barren landscape out of a Mad Max movie after we suck out whatever we came for. But soon they start to realize that neither is true. Every once in a while there’s an outlier, but they usually all come around. They usually figure out on their own they can make more in a month with us than they can in a decade growing sugar beets. Of course, it’s part of our job to persuade them of that.”

“Field work,” Hauck said. He thought he was getting the picture.

“Anyway, we’re here …” Moss put his turn signal on to make a right. There was a dirt road that cut right through someone’s crop field. Hauck saw a gate about fifty yards up the road, a guard in the security hut. Moss slowed and waved familiarly at the him, the guard waving him through. “Mr. Moss …”

“Sam.”

A white sign read,
PRIVATE. RMM OIL AND DEVELOPMENT COMPANY VEHICLES ONLY. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. THEN ANOTHER SIGN FARTHER UP THAT READ, LOTS AB-42. ORDINANCE A-6. TOWN OF TEMPLETON, WELD COUNTY. TOM FLACK, COUNTY SUPERVISOR
.

Hauck asked, “What’s all that?”

“RMM gobbledygook. ‘Hannah’ sounds a little easier. Nice and natural, right? You wouldn’t even know it’s here.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“Still, you wouldn’t believe what’s going on over a mile under us.”

Ahead, Hauck saw something glint in the sun. His first thought was that maybe it was the well, but as they got closer, he saw that whatever it was was moving.

And coming toward them.

Coming into focus, it turned out to be another convoy of trucks. The same metal tankers he had seen coming out on the road from the river and that had tried to run him off the road the day before. Polished and shiny. Heading toward the main road.

As they approached, Hauck felt a strange tension inside, thinking for a second if this had all been some kind of elaborate scheme by the RMM man to get him out here alone to drive home yesterday’s point. He looked at Moss, who had a vague look of amusement. “Look familiar?”

Hauck nodded. “Yes. They do.”

Moss smiled. “You seem worried, Mr. Hauck.”

“Not at all.” But he was. He was out here alone. Who knew if they were armed.

Moss pulled over to the side.

Six gleaming stainless steel tankers.
RMM
plastered on the sides.

Moss waved to the first driver as they went by.

Hauck felt a wave of relief inside. He said to Moss, “Looks like Hannah’s doing pretty well.”

“Five hundred barrels a day. Twenty-four/seven. All of which, five years back, would have been completely unobtainable. Wouldn’t have even known it was here. But anyway …” Moss pulled his car back on the dirt road. “Those aren’t for oil …”

“Not for oil …?” Hauck glanced in the side-view mirror and saw the last one rumble away. “What’s in them then?”

Hauck caught his own stare reflected in the RMM man’s sunglasses. “Those are for water, Mr. Hauck.”

“Water …?
” The answer took Hauck by surprise. He looked at the RMM man, confused.

“A well like this uses upwards of a hundred thousand gallons of water a month,” Moss explained, “along with a mixture of sand and a few chemicals we call proppant. It’s part of the hydraulic fragmentation process. What you’re seeing there is the by-product of what has been pumped back out.”

“And where’s it going?” Hauck turned back around. Six tankers. That had to be thousands and thousands of gallons. Of by-product.

Moss shrugged. “It gets recirculated through a treatment plant that’s down by the river.”

So that’s where they were coming from.
The trucks were carrying water from the river. Up to the wells. Then they headed back with the contaminated liquid. He and Dani had had it all wrong. “And then what?”

“And then it gets put back.” Moss turned his BMW through another wire gate, this one open. “So here we are …”

He pulled into the fenced-off well pad area, filled with several large prefab-looking structures: military-beige cylinders with tubes running to and from them that looked like they held pumps; a couple of Quonset huts; several large earthmoving tractors; and a built-up platform with a massive trestle rising from it.

There was virtually no sound other than a steady, hissing pumping:
Ka-chung. Ka-chung.

Moss parked next to some other cars. They got out. Hauck stared at the impressive setup. Moss took two helmets from a storage bin. “C’mon, I’ll give you the five-dollar tour.”

He pointed out the water storage tanks, the drab, beige cylinders that were indeed pumping stations, as Hauck had surmised. How the water was fed into the well opening through flexible copper tubing and pumped down. Moss pointed out the blowout preventer, which, he explained, controlled the well pressure and protected against any blowback and surface release.

“C’mon up here.” He went ahead of Hauck, up to the platform where Hauck could peer into the well opening and the casings, which were around six feet in diameter and went miles down. Moss waved hello to a couple of the workers. “We put in seven levels of protection inside the well. Copper, steel, concrete, reinforced steel. Not a chance in hell any of this leaches into the surrounding soil.”

“How deep?” Hauck asked, peering into the black opening.

“Seven, seventy-five hundred feet. What we’re doing now is fragmentation on Hannah Three, which runs over in that direction.” Moss pointed. “I’ll show you when we go inside. You can see that the water is mixed with the proppant mixture over there, mostly sand, to make something that bites when it’s heated up and blasted into the shales down there. It’s superheated over here”—he pointed to one of the domed, enclosed structures—“then fed down into the well, until it branches off from the main well hole and goes out horizontally. So instead of having to drill twenty, thirty vertical wells like this off one site”—Moss put his hands one above the other about an inch apart—“in horizontal drilling, the capturing tubes stay in contact with the shale deposits that run horizontally under the ground. The drill tube is perforated, and when you blast these incisions at various points with the superheated mixture, it creates fissures in the shale, from which the oil or gas flows more readily. Back up here, it’s separated through these valves from the water-chemical mixture. That’s how we get oil today.” He shouted over the steady drone. “None of this would have been possible eight, ten years ago.”