Incendiary Dispatch. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ changed. But there were other places you could go to watch the change of season. There were only a few safe spots where you could go digging up the Portland-Montreal pipeline.

      This spot was ideal. Twenty miles from any sizable towns. Unincorporated land meant little likelihood of state or federal rangers nosing around. Chances of being spotted were slim to none.

      He’d come to this spot months ago with his ATV and yanked the warning signs out of the ground. If he’d been arrested then it would have been simple vandalism.

      Nobody had noticed or bothered to replace the signs. If somebody caught him digging here now, they couldn’t exactly claim he was doing anything dangerous, because there were no markers visible in either direction to tell him that there was a crude oil pipeline not three feet below where he was standing.

      So his ass was well covered in case he got caught. And he wasn’t going to get caught anyway.

      He waited awhile, chomping a protein bar, which helped reinforce the image he was going for: casual hiker. He was in his North Face boots—cost him a cool $170—with a water bottle on his belt and a bright yellow Garmin geocaching GPS unit hung around his neck. Hell, the Garmin GPS had been cheaper than the damned boots.

      If anybody caught him, he’d claim he was looking for the “Lewis’s Ninth” cache. The geocaching website gave it a Terrain Rating of 2 stars out of 5 and a Difficulty Rating of 5 out of 5. In other words, a reasonably easy hike to the spot, but once you got there you’d have a hell of a time actually finding the cache itself. And the coordinates led right here. And there was evidence of something being buried in this spot. That’s why he was digging here, Officer.

      Abe Clay had come up with the strategy before he’d even started this project. It sounded reasonable. He’d posted the fake entries to the geocaching websites himself. And after several digs, he had never once had to use the excuse, because he had never once been caught.

      After waiting a suitable interval, and hearing and seeing no signs of anyone in the vicinity, he checked his watch and got to work. He unfolded his shovel, scraped off the thin layer of vegetation, and dug into the rich earth. Eighteen inches down, he hit metal.

      Another reason this spot was ideal: uncharacteristically aggressive erosion in this vicinity in the past few years had brought the pipeline much closer to the surface than it was supposed to be. Thank you, Hurricane Irene. Clay found it pretty easy to get the erosion reports from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. Overlay those with the publically available reports of the exact routes of the Portland-Montreal pipeline, look for population densities and scout the sites months in advance, including pulling up the warning signs that have been hastily staked after Irene washed away most of the original.

      The same process had worked in Maine.

      This was his final placement. He cleared the earth around the first pipe, the eighteen-inch pipe, and as he moved the dirt he found the bigger, twenty-four-inch pipe. He took a quick look around, found he was still in the clear and snatched the charges from his backpack. They were in small black plastic bags.

      Inside was a device that was no bigger than his fist and looked like some sort of computer accessory. Black plastic, with a curved profile and a USB port inside. Clay flipped the switch on the device.

      This was the only time he got nervous. He didn’t understand exactly how these things were engineered, but he did understand that the ignition power source was inside the device itself. What if there was a problem inside the device and powering it up caused premature ignition?

      But, like all the times before, the device’s only response to the powerup was the glow of a yellow LED.

      Next Clay turned on the cell phone. It was one of those prepaid cell phones. Not many bells and whistles. You couldn’t play Angry Birds on the thing. But one feature it did have was exceptional battery life—the longest standby-mode rating in its class.

      Finally he attached the cell phone to the device with a short USB cable. To tell the truth, this part made him nervous, too. The phone was supposed to get the call, and that call would somehow send a signal through the USB cable telling the device to do its thing. What if the act of plugging in the cable somehow gave some sort of signal to the device that it should do its thing now?

      But the only thing that happened was that the LED on the device changed from yellow to green. All systems go. He placed the phone and pushed the device with some force against the metal shell of the twenty-four-inch pipe, and poured on water.

      After a few seconds he released his hold on the device. The foamy stuff on the bottom of the device reacted with the water and made it into a strong adhesive. The device wasn’t going to come off unless you cut it off.

      He repeated the process with a second device. The phone powered up, the LED turned green, the device was adhered to the eighteen-inch pipe. Clay carefully filled in earth all around the plastic devices, not quite burying them completely. He jumped to his feet and looked at his watch.

      Three minutes, fifty-eight seconds! His personal best. And now he was done. Devices buried in eight different locations along a hundred-mile stretch of the pipeline in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

      He’d seen some really pretty scenery, too. And somehow, knowing he’d be one of the last people to see it in its pristine state for a long, long time, made him appreciate it that much more.

      Maybe he would take up hiking for real.

      After all, he had invested in these kick-ass hiking boots.

      And with all the money he’d just earned for himself, he’d have lots of free time.

      London

      THOMAS HAMMIL WAS TAKING a risk and he knew it. But if he pulled it off, the payoff would be huge. And he’d be out of this stinking job and out of stinking London and they could all go to hell.

      He’d given them a lot of his life and got nothing back.

      He’d given to his country. He’d served in the Royal navy, but they’d tossed him out like he was garbage—no money and no rank.

      His mates, the boys he’d known since his school days, looked down their noses at him ever since he’d come home from his military stint. They said they believed his version of the story, but they’d been cool toward him. Every once in a while they’d been into their pints and one of them would say something sort of snidelike, and then Hammil would know they really didn’t believe his side of the story at all.

      Clara? He couldn’t even remember why he’d married her. She was a shrew, that one. He’d spent seventeen years living in the same disgusting little row house with that woman and he couldn’t take another day of it.

      He hated them. The lot of them. He hated bloody England and he hated this bloody company. Been with this bloody company eighteen years and him doing the same job today as when he’d started. Hammil was bossed around by a bunch of little turds ten years younger than him. And just lately somebody had been passing around a printout of one of the little turd’s pay stubs. The little turd—his direct supervisor—was making twice what Hammil did.

      BirnBari Expediting Services should have been paying Hammil that kind of money. Hammil should have been getting a check from the Royal Navy all these years. Hammil should have had a wife who wasn’t a sow and a home that wasn’t a pigsty and mates who didn’t call him Hammy to his face—and worse things behind his back.

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