Rise the Dark (27 page)

T
he territory where Larry drove them was a rugged stretch along the southern face of the Bighorns, not far from the Cloud Peak range, not all that far from Medicine Wheel.

They'd climbed steadily on the rural roads outside of Greybull, and the prairies and plateaus of Lovell and Byron were forgotten—this was mountain country, and it hadn't heard any rumors of spring yet. Splashes of scattered snow gradually turned into snowbanks lining the road. They were deep in the woods and the country was just as desolate as Larry had promised, but it was also not empty. They had seen countless tracks on their way in. ATVs, mostly. One set of truck tires.

Eventually, Larry left the road entirely, putting the truck in four-wheel drive and navigating a boulder-strewn path that had Mark's back aching and his teeth clacking. They followed this for a mile that felt like fifty, and then Larry almost hung up the truck. He put it into four-low and the tires roared ruts into the snow, the truck leaning at a precarious angle before it finally found purchase and kicked them loose. From there, the ride was too rough for talking. The only words spoken came from Larry after they had clipped one snow-covered rock with enough force to bounce them both into the air: “Glad the fella we stole this from had a skid plate.”

Larry stopped when the boulder-strewn path turned to sheer slope and they saw the white Silverado in front of them.

“Well, now,” Larry said softly. “You got some special instincts, Markus.”

His gun was already in his hand.

They got out of the truck quickly and quietly, staying low as they advanced to the Silverado. It was empty, and when Mark touched the hood, it was cold against his palm. The woods were silent except for the soft sounds of a stream a hundred yards away. The steep slope ahead of them was laced with even more tracks.

“A lot of traffic going up there today,” Mark said.

Larry squinted at the summit. “Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or are those telephone poles?”

Mark shaded his eyes and stared for a few seconds before he said, “Those sure as hell look like poles.”

“If anybody up there has a scope…”

“Yeah. Let's get into the trees in a hurry.”

There weren't many trees to speak of. The closest was a cluster of three dead lodgepole pines that had lost their branches and pointed upslope like waiting missiles.

Mark returned to the truck for Larry's rifle and then ran in a crouch into the trees, where Larry had already taken up position at the base of a towering fir. Mark sighted on the summit. The telephone poles came into stark relief immediately—they were outfitted with transformers and insulators, but no lines.

“This would be the place,” Mark said.

“Pass it here and let me look.”

Mark lowered the rifle and extended it to Larry reluctantly. Without the scope, he felt clueless as to what was going on up above, and exposed.

Here on the side of the slope, sheltered only by the fir and a small rise that had a higher snowbank than the surrounding ground, they would be easy targets for someone firing on them from above, and going in any direction required side-hilling, moving across the steep grade and over the snow. The change in altitude created a remarkable change in environment; the hot dusty road and glaring sun where Mark had traded fire with Garland Webb seemed as far away as Cassadaga now. The snow also meant that they'd be leaving obvious tracks.

It was quiet on the hillside, the sounds of the stream farther away, but everything seemed intensified somehow, from those soft water noises to the feel of the breeze and the smell of the snow. Mark's hands were cold and numb, and even the tingle in his flesh felt stronger than it should have. All of his senses seemed unusually sensitive, sharp.

“We could work up that gulch,” he said, blowing on his hands. “Getting there, we'd be pretty exposed, but once we're in it, we'll have protection. Looks like it leads all the way up, almost.”

Larry had just returned his attention to the scope when a scream came from up above. It wasn't loud; it was so faint, in fact, that both of them looked at each other with a question, as if needing confirmation. Then another came, and while it was still soft, there was no mistaking it.

“We're either too late,” Larry said, “or just in time.”

He returned the rifle to his shoulder and lowered his eye to the scope. Mark ached for it, their only set of eyes here.

After a few seconds of silence, Larry said, “There's a woman up there, and she's running like hell.”

“Anyone behind her?”

“Not that I see, but the way she's moving, she expects there is.”

“Which way is she headed?”

“Toward the gulch. Maybe two hundred yards away. Shit, she just fell.”

“I need to see her,” Mark said, crawling closer. “I need to see if I know her.”

Larry didn't want to turn over their only pair of eyes any more than Mark had, but he gave up the rifle. Mark put his eye to the scope but couldn't find the woman.

“Two hundred yards to our left?”

“About. There's a swale in the trees. She's trying to work her way down it.”

Mark found the swale and panned up and down it but saw nothing and was about to ask for more guidance when he caught a flash of motion. He moved the scope back toward it and caught the woman in the crosshairs.

It was Lynn Deschaine, and up on the summit, two men had emerged in pursuit of her.

P
utting on the Faraday suit had once felt like putting on a knight's armor. Now it felt like putting his head in a noose.

Jay had climbed towers more times than he could count. Even his worst nightmares about what could go wrong on them hadn't involved a train pulling them down with live lines sparking the whole way, but now it was his job to make that happen.

“Have you ever considered how fascinating electricity's desire is?” Pate asked as Jay dressed. “We force it up on those lines, but what does
it
want to do? What
will
it do if given an instant's chance? Go to ground. Return to the land.”

Jay didn't answer. He was fastening the grounding strap that connected his pants to his jacket to prevent any separation of the suit. Even something that small could be the difference between coming down alive or smoking.

Pate handed Jay a radio. “You'll be operating on my frequency now.” Then he pulled a pair of canvas gloves from his hip pocket, put them on, and grabbed the free end of one of the spools of stainless-steel cable.

“Time to climb, Jay. Be safe up there. There's a lot riding on it.”

With Pate paying out the cable behind him, Jay walked to the base of the massive steel tower.

One hundred and ten volts could kill a man if he made a mistake. The lines above Jay carried more than four thousand times that much electricity. He would never have free-climbed in a situation like this—there'd be a bucket truck, extra safety equipment, a full team. Sometimes there'd even be a helicopter. At the very least, there'd be a rope system.

Today, he free-climbed, pulling the aircraft cable behind him. He'd fastened the end of it to his hot stick and used a piece of hot rope to fashion a sort of sling so the hot stick rode against his back and allowed him to have both hands free. Almost immediately, not even ten feet off the ground, his legs began to shake and his pores opened, his skin slick with sweat against the Faraday suit.

At least it was steel. Tim had died on a pole, not a tower, and the tower felt more stable, certainly. The latticed steel towers were built in a way that made climbing both simple and dangerously inviting. Early in his career, he'd responded to a call-out on a steel tower. A kid had climbed up to the first arm to sit and drink beer. They'd found several empties resting peacefully, and the kid's charred corpse blown eighty feet away. The prevailing theory was that he'd sat in safety for long enough that he grew comfortable and his bladder grew full, and then he'd gone to take a leak, unaware that he was near the flash zone. He'd been electrocuted with his own piss.

That was on a solid tower. As Jay climbed this one, dragging behind him the cable that was to be used as a snare wire for a train, he could see where the enormous bolts had been removed. Eli Pate was right—it was clean and classic technology, and it was also simple technology. Over the years, security experts had become increasingly concerned about possible cyber attacks on the grid. Jay was aware of high-dollar and high-tech efforts to enhance the computer security on every level.

He doubted that any of those security experts had ever looked at the towers, studied the individual bolts, and considered a child's Erector set.

The idea that it would be such antiquated and simple thinking that brought down a system of ever increasing sophistication suited Pate's cruel amusement perfectly. While the grid experts rushed to write new code and produce dazzling layers of encryption and firewalls, Eli Pate had picked up a wrench.

There was a horrifying genius to thinking small.

This explains his boots,
Jay realized. Pate wore those battered but expensive boots that didn't contain a trace of metal, and Jay hadn't understood why before, but now he did—Pate had gone up on the towers at least far enough to weaken them, and he'd been cautious, as he was about everything. Pragmatic. He had worn the right gear and he had not gone up high enough to risk encountering the current.

For that, he'd selected Jay.

Initially, Jay tried to count the number of missing bolts and analyze their leverage points as he climbed. That soon increased his fear, though, so he stopped. Even under the circumstances, he still felt the stomach-clenching sense of awe that the towers provided. He'd always thought it was different in Montana, where the big sky was so damn vast that the transmission structures seemed almost laughable, the notion that they powered this territory nearly impossible to believe because they looked so flimsy, almost foolish, set against the Rocky Mountains. In cities where skyscrapers dominated the landscape, maybe a lineman could feel like he really ran the show. In the Rockies, though, Jay always had the sense that he was just part of the team that kept a long con game in play. Whenever nature wanted to bring things to a stop, she did so swiftly.

On the day he'd made his last climb, he'd stopped at seventy feet. Today, the first panic attack hit him at forty.

As his pulse accelerated and his lungs clenched, he made the worst choice possible and tried to hurry, as if speed were the answer to overcoming panic. The clumsy suit was not built for hurrying, and he missed the handhold he was reaching for by an inch, not even making contact, his body swinging toward open air.

He didn't fall, didn't even come close. Even though he was well balanced, the anticipation of solid contact that was met by nothing but the wind made the world reel, and he threw his arms around the angled upright brace and clung to it like a drunk slow-dancing.

He was facing east, and the late-day sun reflected off the steel and seemed to give the towers added depth, turning them from latticed interruptions of the horizon into a long, shimmering gray tunnel. He closed his eyes, hissing in short, fast breaths as the horizon swam around him. Certain that he was going to faint, he sat awkwardly on the crossbar—fell, really, landing on it with enough impact to jar his spine.

Memory overrode emotion. Enough experience was still trapped in his brain to shout instructions at him, and as the world whirled from gray toward black, he wrapped his legs around the crossbar and circled his elbow tight around the end of a bolt that Pate hadn't removed. He was now as close to self-arrested as he could be without a rope or harness. Then he leaned forward, the way his grandfather had taught him, a lesson from the days when these towers had been going up and before the Faraday suit was in use. His grandfather always advised placing your forehead against the steel, convinced that having the cold stability of it so close to the brain made a difference. Today, Jay couldn't feel it against his skin, but still it saved him. He was aware first of the solid metal against his head, then of the size of the bolt under his elbow, and then, slowly, the overall balance of it all. He was not falling, was not even sliding. He opened his eyes.

The first time Jay had experienced nerves on a tower, Tim had been with him. Jay thought he was faking his way along well enough, determined that nobody would smell his fear, when Tim said, “The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around. Stop squeezing her so tight.”

He tried to remember that now.
The tower holds you up, bud, not the other way around.
Slowly, he relaxed his muscles. He forced himself to concentrate on nothing but the steel, to think of how strong it was, how sturdy, all the conditions it weathered easily and without fail.

To not think about all those missing bolts at the key leverage points.

When his breathing slowed, he willed himself to conjure an image to replace Tim's face. He thought of Sabrina on the video, Sabrina with the cuff on her wrist. That was why he had to climb. It would be better to die here than not to climb.

Once you get in motion, stay in motion,
he instructed himself.
If you're moving, you can't lock up. The longer you stay still, the harder it becomes to get going again.
He reached up, grasped the next bar of steel with his right hand, and took a step. His whole body shook, and he wondered if Pate could tell how he was struggling, if he understood yet that he'd picked the wrong man for the job.

Keep climbing.

Sixty feet, seventy, eighty, sure the whole time that he was going to faint and fall. Even continuing the climb offered little reassurance—the real danger waited not below but above, the corona effect crackling like laughter as the lines watched him climb.

Tim had no eyes, no face. Just those curled black ribbons of flesh, like charcoal shavings…

He climbed on. Inside the suit he was soaked with a thin cold sweat. Above him the lines hissed and spit with their distinct, menacing sound, the air alive with current that would sweep through his suit. The sensation was like a thousand ants crawling over his skin, a swarm of strange tingling. He gritted his teeth. The Faraday suit kept you alive in the current, but it didn't make you comfortable. All that voltage crawled over your skin, a feeling that was both unpleasant and exhausting.

At the top of the arm, the insulators hung pointed toward the earth. They were made of a series of porcelain disks, each disk designed to support a designated voltage, the sum of the parts great enough to handle the massive voltage load of the transmission lines. He stopped fifteen feet below them, thought,
I made it,
and then made the mistake of looking up and out, following the path of the lines into the distance. The lines spread out over the landscape like fine black threads, every bit as intricate and delicate as a spiderweb, except that these threads were actually the veins of a nation.

And you're about to pull them down.

This time he nearly
did
faint. The immovable mountains seemed to slide closer to him and then fall away, and he was aware of how radiantly blue the sky was as it spun over him and then swam into a gray haze as his muscles went liquid and he shut his eyes and regripped the steel, no longer believing it would hold him up.

Then the radio came to life.

“Is that high enough for our task, Jay?”

Jay opened his eyes, taking care to look only at his hands and not the open expanse around him. He held tight to the tower with his right hand while he removed the radio from his pocket with his left. The simple performance of a minor physical task made the dizziness dissipate.

“Any higher and you risk turning this cable into an energized conductor,” Jay said. “That would be worse for you than me.”

It would, in fact, kill Pate instantly. As appealing as that idea was, one of Jay's priorities had to be keeping Pate alive. Whoever else was listening on this radio, waiting on his command, knew where Sabrina was and knew the arrangement—if the power died, she lived. To kill Pate would be to kill Sabrina.

“I appreciate your concern, but that would be very bad for your bride as well,” Pate said, confirming Jay's thoughts. “I think our leverage point is fine. Secure the cable and come down for the next. You'll need to start climbing faster.”

Jay pocketed the radio, swung the hot stick from over his shoulder, and wrapped the cable three times around the steel arm. He kept his focus tight on his hands, tried not to think about the sky or the mountains or the broad sweep of the lines across the land. Looking at the horizon was a mistake he couldn't make again, and looking up at the crackling lines might be even worse.

The hot stick, which could telescope up to ten feet but was collapsed to five, was outfitted with a crimping head, one of the dozens of tools you could attach to it. Once the cable was looped around the steel, Jay twisted the free end around the line that led back down to the fir trees and used the crimper to bind them tight. The result was a taut, secured cable between the top of the tower on the north side of the tracks and the trees on the south side. It crossed the railroad tracks at chest-level. Even if the engineer saw the cables in the darkness, he wouldn't be able to stop before he made contact with them. With that much power dragging them forward, the cables wouldn't need to hold long either. They'd just need to tug. Mass and momentum would handle the rest.

“One line set,” Pate said. “Five to go.”

Five more climbs.

Jay closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and started back down.

Pate's voice came over the radio again, but this time he wasn't speaking to Jay. It was a message for the unknown parties who waited out in the mountains, chain saws in hand.

“Stand at the ready,” he said. “We are under way at ground zero.”

He'd never sounded happier.