C Box: Below Zero

“I’ll call on one condition,” Joe said. “That the two of you swear that you’ll confine your actions to apprehending the Stensons and nothing beyond that.”

“I knew it,” Portenson said, breaking in. “You’ve got Nate Romanowski down there.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Who the hell else would it be?” Portenson spat.

Coon and Joe exchanged looks. Joe could tell Coon would make the deal. Portenson was the wild card.

“He’s a fugitive,” Portenson said. “And he pisses me off.”

Joe didn’t push. He waited. He ran the scenario through his mind.

Finally, he saw Portenson fire a punch through the air and heard him say, “Okay, damn you. We’ll confine our operations to the Stensons only. We won’t even think about who is down there with your cell phone.”

“You’ve burned me before,” Joe said. “You better not dream of doing it again. Remember when you told me, ‘Never trust a fed’?”

“In a moment of triumph,” Portenson conceded. “I used to have them. They’ve pretty much gone away since I met Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski.”

Joe chuckled at that. “So it’s a deal? I have your word?”

Coon said, “Yes.”

Portenson sighed and said, “Yes.”

Joe said, “I’ll make the call. Show me how to do it on this headset.”

Coon switched the channel again and gestured toward a keypad. Joe punched in the numbers. He heard the phone ring. As it did, he looked up and saw that Portenson had switched to the same channel so he could listen in. Joe reached up and snatched the headphones off Portenson’s head and shook them at Coon to warn him against trying the same thing.

Nate said, “Speak.”

“It’s Joe. I’m in the FBI chopper on the way to Rangeland. Do you have the Stensons in sight?” He turned his head so Portenson couldn’t read his lips. The agent was furious.

Nate hesitated.

“It’s okay,” Joe said. “I have a deal with Portenson not to arrest you.”

He heard Nate snort. Then: “I’ve got the Stensons under surveillance. They’ve got an old rancher with them, too. They stole his truck, made him drive. I followed them all the way.”

“Great work. What are they doing now?”

“They’re parked outside a bar. The old rancher and Stenko are still in the truck. Robert went inside.”

“What’s he doing?”

“How should I know?”

“Nate, the girl isn’t April. We don’t know who she is or if April’s alive. Stenko is the only man who could shed some light on it, so we need to keep him in one piece.”

“Gotcha.”

“Look,” Joe said, speaking very slowly and deliberately. He suspected someone might be listening in, perhaps at FBI headquarters. He chose his words carefully. “The feds have locked in on my cell phone. They know exactly where you are. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

A beat. “Yes.”

“We’re thirty minutes away.”

Nate said, “I’ll be ready.”

Joe hoped so.

He killed the connection and handed Portenson’s headphones back to him. Portenson angrily jammed them on his head, switched to the internal channel, and mouthed, “That was a rotten thing to do.”

Joe didn’t hear it because he hadn’t switched back to channel A.

AFEW MINUTES LATER, Joe could see that Portenson was in an animated conversation with someone. The way the agent nodded and gesticulated, it was obvious he was excited. Even over the engine noise, he heard Portenson say, “That’s what I’m talking about,” and again pump his fist in the air.

Joe looked to Coon, who indicated that Joe should switch back to channel A.

“What’s he so cranked up about?” Joe asked. “Did they locate the Stensons?”

“Not yet.”

“Then what’s the deal?”

Coon’s expression was noncommittal. “Our analysts suggest that the Stensons might have picked Rangeland for a reason, that their stopping there might not be random.”

“Yes?”

“If your theory holds up, that the Stensons are picking targets with large carbon footprints-with the exception of Rawlins and the ranch, where the reason was drugs and money-then Rangeland has quite a big prize.”

“It does?” Then it came to him. North of Rangeland was Esterbrook River Station-a power plant with three cooling towers that emerged from the sprawling high-grass prairie. “The power plant?”

Coon nodded his head and shot a glance toward Portenson to make sure his boss didn’t see them talking.

“I’ve been listening in on the calls,” Coon said, consulting his legal pad where he’d been jotting down notes. “Our guys and gals have been working hard. According to them, the Esterbrook River Station is a 1,650-megawatt power plant fueled by 135 coal cars per day. The coal is from Gillette and it’s shipped down here 24/7. The plant burns 135 train cars of coal-that’s 24,000 tons- a day.”

Joe had seen the coal trains for years parallel to I-25. He’d been oblivious to the fact that they all had a single destination.

Coon said, “The plant provides power to two million people in Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa and feeds two of the three national power grids. But this is what may interest Robert: ERS emits approximately thirteen million metric tons of CO 2per year.”

Joe stared at him.

“Yeah, I said thirteen million metric tons per year. That’s a lot. And that doesn’t include the carbon produced by the coal trains or the coal mines.”

Joe looked out the window. The lights of Rangeland were a creamy wash on the southern horizon. But out across the dark terrain as far as he could see were individual ranch and farmhouses, single pole lights, outbuildings with lights on. If something happened to the power plant, everything would go dark. “So what’s Portenson so happy about?” Joe asked.

Coon waited a few seconds to speak, as if choosing his words carefully. “If the Stensons are going after that plant, it’s domestic terrorism. That’s what the FBI is supposed to be doing these days. It’s Job One. If Portenson can turn around the debacle this morning into stopping a massive act of domestic terrorism-”

Joe finished Coon’s thought: “He can write his ticket out of here to anyplace he wants to go.”

“Right.”

“What if Stenko and Robert just stopped to get gas?”

“Please don’t mention that possibility to my boss right now.”

Joe had been to Rangeland several times. It was a small agricultural town of not quite 4,000 people. It was low in elevation compared to most of the state, which was why there were farms instead of ranches. The terrain was flat and fertile all the way east to the Nebraska border.

As they roared south, Joe again looked down at what made Portenson so energized. The power plant was isolated but lit up like a Christmas display against the dark prairie. The three towers reached high into the sky and were illuminated in the darkness. He could see a train filled with coal heading toward it, and another train just behind the first. This is where it began, he thought. Coal was burned to superheat boilers, which turned river water into steam. The steam turned giant turbines that generated electricity and sent it screaming through transmission lines toward end users in eight states. Most of those users-like Joe-rarely thought about how the electricity got to his home or how it came about. All they-and he-knew was that when they flipped a switch, the light came on. The power came from somewhere, and he was looking at it.

Except when it didn’t.

Joe frowned to himself, said to Coon, “How in the hell could two guys from Chicago sabotage a power plant?”

Coon shrugged, said, “We don’t know. But we’re going to stop them before they do.”