Blowout by Byron L. Dorgan Read Free Book Online Page A

all of them had donned gas masks.
    Susan, only recognizable because she was the smallest of them and because of her blond hair, walked over and handed Whitney a glass of champagne. “Boolean algebra gone bad,” she said solemnly.
    â€œDivide by zero,” someone else said.
    â€œIf you can’t normalize the equation, invent a constant.”
    Whitney got it, and she raised her glass. “Gas masks won’t save you from carbon dioxide.”
    Everyone raised their gas masks and glasses. “Illogic,” Roemer said. “It’s what brought us all here in the first place, right?”
    And she loved them all at that moment. The camaraderie, the friendship, the trust, the good and gentle humor, and even the naïveté. She’d gotten the real beginning of her science at the Centers for Disease Control labs in Atlanta where she’d come up with the notion of not only listening to bacteria, but talking to them. Instructing whole colonies of them, through a mechanism called quorum sensing in which groups like the six hundred different bacteria that made up dental plaque, each of them speaking a different chemical language, could understand a lingua franca that allowed them to work toward a common purpose. In that case the purpose was a bad one. But she began to think of ways in which to speak to bacterial colonies, give them a quorum-sensing mechanism that would direct them to do something beneficial.
    Maybe unlock the secret of curing viral disease.
    â€œMaybe a Nobel,” her boss over at the CDC had suggested.
    And the White House had called, and she’d dropped everything and run here to North Dakota to be with these people, and even now, basking in their goodwill and cheery bonhomie she couldn’t answer why. Except that it was good to be here. It felt right.
    She toasted them, and put her glass aside. “Make it an early night, we have a big seventy-two hours starting first thing in the morning.”
    They all laughed, and someone put on the rap music and Susan handed her another glass of champagne and everyone else ignored her.
    â€œParty time, Doc?” Susan asked over the noise.
    â€œI have to get over to Donna Marie.”
    â€œGet some sleep. Oh six hundred comes awfully early.”

 
    5
    BARRY EGAN, ALONE on the first of the three Honda ATVs, approached the ridge above Donna Marie at about two miles per hour. The highly muffled engine, designed for wildlife photographers who wanted to sneak up on their prey, especially polar bears in the Arctic, was scarcely more than a whisper within ten feet.
    He held up his hand for them to stop, and behind him Ada and Brenda on one machine, and Dr. Kemal riding tandem on Moose’s, pulled up behind him. They wore white coveralls and Bluetooth earpieces connected to encrypted sat phones with which they could communicate with one another as well as with Gordy, who was monitoring and controlling all electronic emissions from the research facility back at the motor home. But he’d cautioned them all at the beginning that anything electronic could be intercepted.
    â€œNothing but nothing beats a well-orchestrated plan in which everyone knows exactly what needs to be done.” Barry had drummed it into their heads. “Know the mission plan, follow the mission plan. Hand signals when possible. No need to tell the sons of bitches what we’re up to.”
    It had become their mantra, and whenever he spoke the last part out loud he would laugh, bray actually, so hard that even Brenda and Ada knew he was bugshit crazy.
    He got on his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way to the crest of the hill where he glassed the brightly lit compound through his mil specs Steiner binoculars. Except for the lights the place could have been deserted; there was no movement he could detect. A large building that housed the generating chain; starting with the borehole into the coal seam that would be tapped in the