Excerpt from Pegasus Rising
Chapter 1
Randolph
Nixon French pressed the power button on his laptop. As he waited for it to warm up, he took a
long sip from his strawberry milkshake and then chuckled. Having an office next to the company
cafeteria definitely had benefits.
Why
do strawberry milkshakes smell as good as they taste?
When
the computer had fully warmed up, Nixon selected his e-mail inbox and clicked
to open one special e-mail. The e-mail
had been received while Nixon was the Chief of Police of Sanctuary City, Idaho. It contained a fifteen-picture
slideshow. Nixon pressed start.
The
first image, taken from a long distance away, showed an unknown person hanging
in handcuffs from a rope thrown over a tree limb. Pictures two through seven zoomed in on the
person until he could be recognized as Dennis West, the brother of Sandi
West-French, Nixon’s former wife.
Pictures eight through fourteen showed Dennis being lowered into a
bubbling, steaming mud pot. Nixon could
almost hear Dennis screaming. Picture
fifteen showed a frayed rope dangling perhaps a foot above the mud pot.
Nixon’s
ritual every morning for the past three years consisted of a strawberry
milkshake and a slide show. He liked
strawberry milkshakes but hated the slide show.
He planned to repeat the slideshow until his former brother-in-law was
confirmed dead, a difficult proposition if Dennis had actually been lowered
into a mud pot. The only item remaining
would be the stainless steel handcuffs.
Moreover, the only location Nixon was aware had mud pots was Yellowstone
National Park.
As soon as he had received the
pictures, Nixon passed them on to Doug Farnsworth, the top Internet engineer
for Pendergast Holdings. Doug inspected
the pictures and the e-mail for any identifying information. Everything was clean except for one photo
with an embedded date tag which corresponded to when Dennis had
disappeared.
The
picture of the mud pots had been sent to the Park Service at Yellowstone. After searching the park for several months,
they thought they had found a similar mud pot.
However, there was no indication that Dennis had been lowered into that
particular mud pit and no tree limbs were discovered within two hundred yards
of any mud pot. Trees simply do not grow
next to mud pots.
OK, according to the fifteen minutes of
Yellowstone history I remember, any mud pot in Yellowstone National Park would
eliminate any evidence dropped into it.
Nixon frowned. His ninth grade U.S. Geography teacher had
somehow gotten her hands on a black and white U.S. Park Service informational
film from before World War II. In the
film, a turkey leg on a steel wire was lowered into a Yellowstone mud pot. When the wire was removed ten minutes later,
even the bone had disappeared. All of
the girls in the class were horrified while the boys had a select group they
were willing to sacrifice to the mud pots.
Nixon
stared at his laptop for several minutes and then rotated his office chair to
stare out of his office windows. His
corner office overlooked the employee parking lot. Beyond the parking lot was a large field that
seemed to extend forever. In the center
of the field, perhaps a mile away, Nixon could see the tops of a grove of trees
and the flicker of sunlight bouncing off the waves of a small lake. Nixon smiled.
He had been spending every snow-free weekend at the lake since
Pegasus-Northwoods Energy had hired him.
Pegasus-Northwoods Energy recruited
Nixon French three months after Sandi took her life. Although she did not hold Nixon directly
responsible for the loss of her brother Dennis, she could not deal with his
death. She began to resent the fact that
Nixon was a Police Chief but had not brought her brother’s killers to
justice. As she lost touch with reality,
she actually began to accuse Nixon of not wanting to find the killers. She even suggested that he knew who they
were. Sandi’s final act was to connect a
flexible hose to the exhaust pipe of her Mercedes and feed it in through a rear
window. Nixon still had nightmares about
the call he had received from one of his officers.
Nixon was hired to run the facility
security department of PNE, a department with a less than stellar history of
competence. He had totally reorganized
security in five of the seven remote facilities for which he was responsible. The final two locations would be revamped
later in the year.
Nixon spun in his chair to look at
his laptop once more. He had come to two
conclusions about the PNE facilities.
First, they were remote. The
nearest city with a population greater than twenty-five thousand inhabitants
was two hundred miles away. The roads
were mostly gravel and almost impassible for three weeks after the spring thaw
or two weeks after the first winter snowfall.
If a terrorist wanted to disrupt any of the facilities, he or she would
require special travel arrangements.
Second, the winter in northern Alberta consumed six months of the
year. Was anyone willing to cross
hundreds of miles of drifting snow and freezing temperatures to blow up an oil
refinery? However, it was now early
summer. Northern Alberta was thawing
from the long, cold winter. Nixon was happy about the higher temperatures and
the melting snow, but did not like the flies that were hatched by the warming
weather.
Nixon
frowned. He was over two thousand miles
from his home. The highlight of his day
was sitting on the beach of a small lake, trying to forget the photos on his
laptop. Sandi had attempted to run away
from her memories. Was he running away
from his own? He was no closer to
finding Dennis’s killers today than when he pulled out of his driveway more
than thirty-six months ago.
Nixon completed his morning ritual
and then began calling his security teams.
For several weeks, he had been conducting security breach
exercises. Each of his security teams
had been informed a breach was eminent, but they were never given a specific
time or date. How could he tell his
teams when terrorists might shut down one or more of the PNE facilities when he
didn’t know when they might strike?
Pegasus-Northwoods
Energy had seven high-tech and very expensive oil sands recovery facilities in
addition to a large technical headquarters.
Four of the recovery facilities were operating at full capacity. Nixon’s biggest nightmare was a combined
assault on all four of the producing facilities. The resulting destruction would certainly
cripple production. The required cleanup
would take several years.
Each morning, Nixon awoke with a
fervent hope he could prevent the possibility of a large-scale breach of the
facilities because of the weaknesses of his security teams. He asked a good friend, Oliver Pendergast II,
to help. Generally referred to as O2, he
was a former SEAL and the assistant district commander of the Pendergast
District of the Idaho State Police.
O2 enlisted in the U.S. Navy three
days after he turned eighteen with a goal of transferring into the SEALs. After boot camp in San Diego, he hiked to the
Naval Amphibious Base, in Coronado, California, and camped out at the main gate
of the Naval Special Warfare Center until someone gave him an application for
the SEALs. Three weeks later, he was
enrolled in the Basic Underwater Demolition/Seal (BUD/S) classes. Twenty-four years later, he retired from the
Navy as a Commander and returned to Seattle, where he joined the Washington
State Patrol.
O2 had been the precinct commander
of the Airport North Precinct of the Idaho State Police when Nixon lived in
Sanctuary City. O2 and Nixon had
conducted several combined training exercises to gauge the response of the
local police organizations during terrorist threats. Besides becoming friends, O2 and Nixon had
gained a good idea of how city and state police forces could work
together. And, a good idea of what not
to do. The things he had learned while
working with O2 in Idaho had convinced Nixon that the probability of a security
breach at one or more PNE facility was real.
His single purpose was to make the changes needed to prevent his
facilities going up in smoke.
Nixon
heard buzzing, flipped up the LCD monitor on the office intercom, saw it was
his secretary, and pressed the answer button.
“What can I do for you, Polly?”
Polly
widened the camera field, which brought O2 into the display. O2 waved.
“You
have a visitor, Mr. French.”
Nixon
laughed and told Polly to send in his visitor.
While he waited for O2 to walk the fifty feet from Polly’s desk to his
office, he counted the number of times he had told Polly not to call him
Mister. Had it been twenty, or was it
now thirty?
I
guess it doesn’t really matter. I only
see Polly when she calls me on the video intercom.
When the facility was built, PNE
had embraced technology. All facilities
were Wi-Fi hotspots, and every office was connected by audio and video. And there were more Ethernet receptacles than
Nixon could count in a year. Nixon smiled.
Even Doug Farnsworth might like this place.
O2 walked through the office door
and placed several strips of red caution tape on Nixon’s desk.
Nixon looked up and said, “I didn’t
know you were visiting.”
O2 laughed and looked toward the grove
of trees. “I needed another shot at that
lake.”
He turned back to Nixon and pointed
at the caution tape. “We got seven
flags.”
The security test devised by O2 and
Nixon was their version of the game capture the flag. Each flag consisted of a two-foot long red
plastic caution strip which Nixon placed in two or three different areas of a
facility and then called O2. Nixon was
never informed when O2 was coming to capture the flags. This set of flags had been placed at two
sites that were over two hundred miles apart.
They were also furthest from Nixon’s office. Nixon had hoped that the distance would
create problems. Distance for O2 was not
a factor.
O2 sat down. “You made two of the flags a little harder
than usual, but it only slowed my team down a little. Nix, I think you still have a very large
problem.”
This was the third test performed
by O2 at the PNE facilities. So far,
none of O2’s people had been discovered.
The security teams for each facility had been doubled after the first
test and had been increased by 50% after the second perimeter breach.
Nixon thought for a moment and then
looked over at O2. “How many people did
you bring with you?”
O2 held up five fingers.
Nixon grimaced and pursed his
lips. “How did they get in this time?”
O2 sat back in his chair. “We were a little more prepared this time for
the added security. But, your company
store is really insecure. We were able
to walk right in and buy the security team coveralls without any questions
asked. A strip of white tape with a blue
marker created a nametag that was good beyond twenty feet. I brought Ramona with me this time. She fills a coverall very nicely. She was a very good distraction at the main
gate.”
Nixon smiled, gazed toward the
lake, and then turned back to O2. “If
you have everyone waiting in the cafeteria, let’s go find a fish.”
Nixon stood, walked around his
desk, and walked to the door.
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