Blowout (2 page)

They had comms units with earbuds and vox-operated mikes attached to the lapels of their night fighter black camos that they'd each paid for out of their own pockets. Kowalski keyed his: “Go in ten,” he whispered. The units were low power, so there was little chance their traffic would be intercepted even if anyone was listening, which was doubtful. Attacks like this had hardly ever happened since the antiwar riots of the late sixties and early seventies.

“Roger one,” Higgins came back. Followed by the other four.

“This is a supercritical refinery,” Kowalski had explained at one of their initial briefings in Kalispell before they'd begun field training prior to moving south.

“Who gives a damn, Sarge,” Marachek had asked. He was angrier than the others. His twin brother had died in his arms in the middle of a firefight across the border with Pakistan. Officially his death had been listed as an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Thirteen of them.

“You all need to give a damn, because what I'm trying to tell you is that just about everything inside the plant is sensitive to gunfire and especially to C4.”

“So we take out the gate guard, go in, blow up some shit, waste a few dudes, and get the fuck out,” Laffin—JP to the squad—had said. He wasn't angry, he was simply the craziest of the lot. He lived with his wife and their two daughters in a dilapidated mobile home parked in the woods outside of Bergland in the Upper Peninsula's Ottawa National Forest.

“Do that and you just might get all of us killed,” Kowalski had answered, tamping down his own anger. He wanted to tell them about the point he was trying to make, but he gave it up as a lost cause because sometimes even he didn't know exactly what his point was.

“All right, we're listening, Sarge,” Ziegler had said.

“We're after shutting them down for a long time. Make 'em think about the shit they're doing. About the crap they're doing to us. So we're going to maximize our strike, by setting so many fires that nobody will be able to put them out for a very long time. First off we set C4 charges at the base of each cracking tower, and then we take over the computer center from where we can open every fuel-routing valve in the entire complex so that when the C4 blows, the entire place will go up in a wall of flames. With any luck the fire will spread to the two main chemical plants, plus the polymers center and the olefins plant. All that shit will go up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July.”

“Let's get it on,” Ziegler had said. He was a small kid from somewhere in Southern California who thought he was good-looking enough to be in movies. No one else thought the same, and he was in a permanent state of surprise.

“Pop any of this stuff at the wrong time, and we're all broiled meat. Happen so goddamn fast you wouldn't know what hit you. One second you're a swinging dick, the next you're on the menu.”

“We're listening,” Webber had said. He was the steadiest of them all. In Iraq he'd been in a bomb disposal unit. Called for steady nerves and zero day-before shakes.

“Soon as we hit the back gate the clock starts, and the cops will come a runnin'. We need to get in, set our charges, get out, and beat feat.”

Houston was only twenty miles to the west where Kowalski had a born-again sister who'd agreed to put them up. She thought she could help her brother and save a few souls in the bargain.

“What about the plant personnel?” Webber had asked, even though he and the others already knew the answer.

And Kowalski didn't even have to think about it. Payback time. “We waste them.”

He looked at his wristwatch. “Now, now, now,” he said into his lapel mike, and he got to his feet, scrambled up onto the blacktop, and zigzagged through the darkness into the lights over the gate.

He was point man, peripherally aware that his people were on his tail right and left, his main concentration on the gatehouse where a lone guard was supposed to be stationed. But the gatehouse was empty, and that struck him as more than odd, unless the guy was taking a nap on the floor, or had gone somewhere to take a piss.

Webber passed him on the right, molded two small lumps of C4 on the gate's hinges, and tied them together with one timer. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted, and he ran a few yards to the left.

A few seconds later a pair of impressive bangs cut the night air and the gate fell to the ground with a clatter.

Kowalski hesitated for just a moment. No sirens. And the silence bothered him. He'd been told that the gates were wired to alarms. Open one without the proper procedure and all hell would break loose. But nothing. And stepping over the downed gate he glanced inside the guard shack—the muzzle of his M16 moving left to right—but no one was inside, taking a nap or otherwise. No one.

They'd come from Lake Charles, Louisiana, on I-10 through Beaumont across the Texas border, past Baytown itself then down State Road 146 to La Porte just across the ship canal from the refinery where a friend of the Posse had a shrimp boat waiting for them; disenfranchised men, wanting to strike out at some unknown force that was holding them back from what they felt was rightfully theirs even though none of them, Kowalski included, could say what that might be.

Shit or get off the pot, his daddy who'd come through 'Nam and who used to beat him regularly was fond of saying. It worked.

The off-loading docks where the oil tankers dropped their cargoes were just below the main atmospheric distillation towers, from which gas and light naphtha was released from the top end, followed below by heavy naphtha, jet fuel, kerosene, and diesel oil—and it was to this five-story-tall complex that Kowalski directed his fighters.

Friends, actually, because in the manner of most military units the men you slept and ate with, the ones you trained beside, and the ones who went into battle with you to possibly die, became friends practically the instant you all came together. And Kowalski felt damned good. He—they—were on a mission.

Thirty yards from the tower from which a maze of pipes carrying highly volatile fuels and gases spread in every direction, strong lights suddenly illuminated the entire refinery complex, and Kowalski pulled up short as a pair of APCs came around from both sides of the massive distillation unit, and at least fifty armed men he immediately recognized as Texas Army National Guard showed up in flanking positions.

“Lay your weapons on the ground.” An amplified voice rose above the noise from the complex.

They had the fatigues and the weapons, but in Kowalski's estimation most of them were probably nothing more than weekend warriors who'd never seen combat.

“Do it now,” the voice, probably some rat-ass lieutenant, ordered.

“Pussies,” Kowalski muttered.

But the sons of bitches had the firepower, and the position.

Kowalski would have liked to see his ex-wife's son Barry come back from Afghanistan—the kid was supposed to be tough. He was twenty or thirty or something like that—Kowalski tended to forget that kind of shit—and he'd been hard on the boy and his mother, but it was a tough old world out there. And getting tougher by the day. So maybe he'd done them a favor.

“Lay down your weapons!”

Kowalski glanced over at Marachek who was grinning like a madman.

“Fuck it, Sarge,” Marachek said, and Kowalski agreed.

And he raised his M-16 and started running toward the tower as he began firing, his men right behind him, firing as they ran.

He never felt the shot that killed him. One moment he was alive and the next he was dead. But he'd always figured that sooner or later he'd end up in a better place.

The Baytown attack, as it came to be known in places like Montana and the Upper Peninsula, rose to a cult-level status among ecoterrorists. Brave men who'd been willing to give their lives in a fight to save the planet!

And so the struggle began.

 

Des Moines, Iowa
The Trent Building
Three Years Later

THE TROUBLE WITH
making a lot of money is that after a while many people can't stop. So after the usual real estate and stock market investments, which can be reduced to a sort of science, and after the IPOs for innovative start-up companies, and even for some bright, ears-to-the-ground entrepreneurs who invested hundreds of millions in micro-loans mostly in the Far East, some kind of an end comes in sight. All too soon.

So the exotics were invented; flash trading in which computers bought and sold stocks in microseconds, making profits in the tenths and hundredths of points that over a period, say a year, amounted to a billion or so.

Or naked credit default swaps that was a type of insurance—though it was never called that lest it be regulated—in which the investor bet that the company he was backing would fail so he could collect a payout. Insure your neighbor's house for two hundred thousand, pay the premiums, and if it burned down you collected on the policy. More of a high-stakes wager than anything else. And that had come from the brain of Robert B. Muskett, the boy genius over at U.S. National Trust.

Or derivatives, which was another sort of insurance policy, or hedge funds, in which you bet on futures you didn't own. It got to the point that the oil derivatives alone were worth eight or ten times the total amount of all the oil in the ground everywhere on the earth.

When these investments were leveraged for ten cents on the dollar, and the markets began to rumble, a lot of very rich people began to get nervous. A ten-billion-dollar position that lost only one billion was gone, bankrupt, because the owners of the exotic were left with a bill of nine billion to make up the difference; what in the old days had been termed a margin call.

Which was exactly the barrel of the gun Donald Stearns Wood, D. S. to his associates, was looking down, and he was getting more than desperate.

On an early Friday evening in the middle of a January Iowa snowstorm his salvation came to him in the form of a courier-delivered message his secretary handed to him as he was about to leave his twelfth-floor office across Walnut Avenue from the Capitol Building.

“This just came for you,” she said.

It was a FedEx envelope with a security seal, warning of federal penalties for unauthorized use. The return address was simply Command Systems, and D. S.'s hand wanted to shake, but he smiled pleasantly. “You'd best be leaving now, Mrs. Cordell, less you get stuck here for the weekend.”

“I was on my way out the door when this came in,” he said. She'd been his secretary for fifteen years, including two bust times when Trent Holdings was in serious trouble. And during that time the sixty-year-old woman, who was dignified in looks and deeds, had learned when not to question her boss too closely about things she did not understand. Like a message with no clear return address.

“Take care now,” he told her. She lived out in Windsor Heights, and one of her perks was a company car and driver who picked her up for work and dropped her off at home. On a night like this it was just as well, because the buses had almost stopped running, but one of the company's Hummers would get through.

D. S. went back into his office, laid the envelope on the desk, and went to the floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the slanting flow of windblown snow and the flashing lights of the snowplows below on the streets, long enough for him to catch his breath.

At forty-eight, D. S. had all of his hair though it was snow white, but his face had sagged over the years so that he now looked, and sometimes acted, more like a bulldog with old-fashioned white muttonchops than the director of Trent Holdings, one of the wealthiest hedge funds anywhere on the planet, which invested in derivatives and credit default swaps with total on-paper assets approaching one trillion dollars. Almost all of it leveraged, of course. So leveraged that the company was cash poor. Except for a pension fund spin-off the firm was privately owned. It had never sold stocks; the public had no stake nor was it a corporation so the government regulators did not have access to its books. Its cash-poor position—cash poor almost to the point of insolvency—was a secret so far.

Staring out the window he remembered a
Wall Street Journal
senior editor right here in this room eight or ten years ago, who was writing an article on D. S's remarkable success story, and who called him the most savvy investor ever—his results were even more reliable and spectacular than Warren Buffet's.

“Warren is good at playing the trends, and Bill Gates is even better at inventing things and cornering the market,” D. S. had told the editor. “But I make my money the old-fashioned way; by convincing people, by whatever means, to do things my way.”

“You've been accused of stretching ethical boundaries.”

D. S. clearly remembered the sly accusation, and he'd laughed in the man's face. “Profits have never been about ethics. It's the American way.”

“But federal regulations—”

“Have never done a single thing to stop or even soften the boom-to-bust natural order of the markets.”

“What you're saying, in effect, is for the government to do whatever it wants to appease the voters, while you do whatever you think is necessary.”

“Exactly. What you've just stated, in a nutshell, is Harvard MBA one-oh-one.”

“That's cold,” the senior editor had said, who over a twenty-five-year career had reported on the titans of finance and industry in the U.S. and abroad.

And D. S. had smiled. “Haven't you learned by now that there's nothing cold about making money?” And before the editor could say anything else, D. S. added: “Ask the holders of the pension funds I manage if they think my method of making money is cold.”

And the editor had politely said his thanks. A week later a story appeared in the
Wall Street Journal,
the upshot of which was: hate him or love him, D. S. Wood knows how to make money at least as well as the robber barons at the turn of the century—the century before last, that is. The article had tweaked his vanity.