Blowout Read Online Free Page B

he asked.
    Egan turned his binoculars to where Moose, with what Egan called his Strike Force Alpha team thousand-yard stare, was pointing, and studied the dark smudge being shredded by the wind, and shook his head.
    â€œCampfire, maybe a cabin fireplace, or something from the Badlands Roundup Lodge,” he said. “Shouldn’t be no smoke from Donna Marie, unless they screwed up.”
    â€œWe’d go anyway?”
    Like the others he liked blowing up things and killing people. He didn’t know why, none of them could articulate their passion with any degree of clarity, not even Egan, who except for Gordy Widell, their seventeen-year-old computer hacker, and Dr. Kemal, their microbiologist, was the brightest of the lot. But a lot of the people Egan knew growing up in Upper Peninsula Michigan were crazies who hated the government—any government from Washington to the mayor and his cops in Marquette—and knew that it wouldn’t be long before the anarchy that was coming any day would finally arrive and their only way out would be when Adolf Hitler’s grandson came back to lead the resistance.
    He’d fit in up there, with the groups in Wyoming and the Posse Comitatus in Montana, in his estimation all of them Jesus-crazy out of their skulls, and with his Team Alpha who he’d recruited and trained over the past ten months and eighteen days.
    But the one thing the old man had taught him before he’d gone off to Texas was to be practical. “It sure as shit ain’t easy out there, kid. So if you got any talent don’t give it away. Sell it. A man’s gotta make his way in the world. There’s no free lunch. Remember it.” And he’d cuffed his stepson, already a grown man, so hard on the left ear that to this day Barry was partially deaf, so he always had to turn his good ear toward whoever was trying to tell him something. It was a nuisance, but he remembered the old bastard’s words. And the Iraqis he’d guarded and sometimes tortured at Abu Ghraib thought when he cocked his head like that he was listening to some hidden earpiece, getting his orders from some general back in Washington.
    â€œThey didn’t screw up,” Egan said. “We’re going in at nightfall.”
    He scanned the horizon out toward what the government called the Dakota District Initiative where supposedly the world’s most secret and most powerful extremely low frequency, or ELF, radio station ever to be built had been under construction for several years. When it was finished, sometime this month, actually this week before Christmas, radio messages could be sent to anyone anywhere in the world, atop or inside mountains, in the deepest gold mines or at the bottom of any ocean where only deep-sea bathyspheres could go.
    Supposedly. But Egan knew better, and he was being paid what for he and the others was a fabulous sum of money to destroy the place and everyone in it; to stop, he was told, the poisoning of the entire atmosphere. In reality, the money was only secondary to him. Blowing up shit and killing people was the game. Payback.
    Nothing moved for as far as he could see. This was the end of North Dakota’s special elk hunting season to cull the overpopulated herds on government lands, and in the eight days they’d been wandering around out here they’d seen almost no one else. A few other hunters, and one morning a rancher who’d come up to take a look at their license.
    Egan had shown the man their permit and the rancher was not happy—he’d never much cared for out-of-staters, hunting permits had always been issued mostly to locals—but he was convinced, and he’d left, not realizing just how close he’d come to dying.
    Satisfied that nothing was coming their way in the waning afternoon, Egan and his outriders went back into the motor home that had been custom-designed and outfitted for them down in South Carolina, no expense