Chris swallowed hard at the sight. “Thanks, I gotta go,” he said, jogging toward his Jeep.
Chapter Fifty
Chris flew northward in the helo, an older Black Hawk UH-60 on loan from DEA, which was being piloted by a Tony Arroyo, an African-American subcontractor who’d served two tours in Iraq. A dizzying array of dials, levers, and controls filled the dashboard in the all-glass cockpit, glowing an array of colors in the darkness, and though the big rotors whirred noisily over head, the helo barely shuddered in Tony’s experienced hands.
Chris kept his head to the window, his thoughts racing. The bomb plot was being rushed and that was when criminals started taking bigger risks—which made them even more dangerous. If the Shanks had killed Doug, they hadn’t bothered to disguise the murder as a suicide or a home invasion. They could be setting Evan up as the fall guy. They had left Evan’s car in the driveway, and the switching of the license plates would point to Evan’s guilt. Maybe the scenario they were trying to sell was that Evan had killed Courtney’s husband in a jealous rage.
Chris tried the theory on for size, and it worked. Reasoning backwards, that meant that the stolen vehicle, presumably a van, had probably come from the Central Valley area, because it would be a location to which Evan had access, not the Shanks.
Chris mulled it over as he looked at the land below. They were flying roughly along Route 81 to 476. The sky was dark, and they passed Allentown and were coming up on Hazleton, due north. The terrain below turned wooded, then rural, signified by vast dark spaces with only intermittent houses, towns, or signs of civilization. The moon shone brightly on the left side of the sky, and Chris found himself checking it as they flew farther north, knowing that its incremental sinking meant it was getting later. Soon the sun would rise, and it would be Monday morning.
Chris shuddered to imagine people going to work with their cups of coffee, phones, and newspapers, boarding trains and buses to get themselves to a city, to a building, and finally to a desk to start the workday. They wouldn’t know that their lives and the lives of everyone around them were about to end in a violent death.
Chris thought back to the Oklahoma City bombing, the WTC bombing on 9/11, and a string of other deadly bombings that made him want justice for the victims and their families. It was his job to never let it happen again.
He clenched his jaw as the helo zoomed north, heading toward the Shank farmstead in Susquehanna County, and ten minutes later, he could see the change in the terrain. Bright white lights twinkled below in a regular grid pattern, like a box of connect-the-dots in the dark night.
“What’s that, over there?” Chris asked Tony, speaking into the microphone in his headset.
“Drilling wells for natural gas. We’re coming up on the Marcellus Shale.”
“Tell me about it, would you?” Chris should know, but didn’t.
“The Marcellus Shale runs under the Appalachian basin and includes seven states, like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey.” Tony pointed left. “Over there, that’s the fairway, where the shale’s deep enough to extract.”
“What’s shale exactly?”
“Sedimentary rock that traps oil and gas in the layers. In the old days, they tried to locate where the gas was and drill for it, but now they frack for it.” Tony pointed again. “I fly over this all the time, doing VIP pickups. It changes every year. More well pads and more drills.”
Chris absorbed the information without judgment. He knew fracking was a political hot button, but he’d always been apolitical. His job was to save lives, and he couldn’t be distracted or people died.
“Ten minutes to landing,” Tony said, and Chris checked his watch. It was 4:32 A.M.
Dawn would be here before he knew it, and the first order of business was to find the target. ATF and the other federal agencies couldn’t shut down every highway, bridge, and tunnel in the Northeast. They couldn’t issue a warning to all federal buildings and state buildings. They had to learn where the disaster was going to strike, so they could avert it.
The helo began to descend in the night sky, tipping forward.
Chris felt like a guard dog straining against a leash. He couldn’t wait until they touched down, setting him loose.
Chapter Fifty-one
Chris hustled from the helo toward the staging area, a white tent that had been erected on the front lawn of the Shanks’ farmstead. Bright klieglights flooded the area, illuminating folding tables, chairs, and laptops that had been set up. Federal agents hustled back and forth in blue windbreakers labeled JTTF, FBI, and ATF. The local uniformed police stood at the perimeter around their squad cars.
Chris looked beyond the staging area to the farm, a compound that struck him as a poor man’s version of Skinny Lane Farm. Its layout was almost identical, with a stone farmhouse behind a pasture, an old barn, and several outbuildings, albeit in disrepair. Faded blue shutters hung askew on the windows, and its clapboard was peeling in patches. The roofs sagged, and the barn had faded to a dried-blood color. The pastures had been overrun by tangled overgrowth of scrubby weeds, and the fences missed boards everywhere. Farm equipment, a truck, and an old car sat rusting on cinder blocks.
Chris spotted the Rabbi running from the farmhouse to meet him. “Hey, you got anything new?”
The Rabbi reached him out of breath. “The joint is jumping, and the gang’s all here. Let me brief you before we get inside. We’re on top of each other in there.”
“Okay.” Chris hated that, too. Neither of them played well with others.
“Let me show you my phone. I got two videos. Check this out.” The Rabbi held up his phone and pressed PLAY. “We ran the tag you gave us, and it belongs to a pickup, 2014 black Dodge dually, reported stolen from a used car lot outside of Central Valley. The locals sent us a traffic cam video.”
“Good.” Chris watched the video, in which a dark Ford Ranger pickup pulled up in front of a used-car lot and someone got out of the passenger seat wearing a black ski mask, black sweatshirt, and black pants. Unfortunately, the license plate wasn’t in the frame.
“Now here’s the video from the used-car lot.” The Rabbi began thumbing through his videos, stopping at another one. He pressed PLAY, and the video showed the ski-masked figure breaking into the dually, with its characteristic double tires in the rear for bigger payloads. An old black cap covered its bed. The figure climbed inside and presumably hot-wired the dually, because he drove it out of the used-car lot.