“Before we get out of the truck,” Pate said, “let’s take a bird’s-eye view of the area, shall we? What do you see, Jay?”
What Jay saw was simple-a cut between mountains that provided access for all things human, all things that the natural countryside rejected. Cars, trains, electricity.
“Speak,” Pate said.
“I see transmission lines. And mountains.” The mountains were so massive that they threw off distance assessment. They seemed much closer than they were.
“Come on, Jay. You’ve got to see more than that.”
“Prairie. Trees. Train tracks.”
“Have you heard of Jason Woodring?” Pate asked.
Jay shook his head.
“He’s in prison now. A lone wolf, and an unsuccessful one. But what he did was quite fascinating. He looked at the intrusions on the land and decided to use one to help destroy the other.”
Jay saw it then and was surprised he hadn’t recognized it earlier-the human path west had been hard earned, ripped from rugged lands, and the various stages of progress followed the same path. First the rock had been removed for train tracks, then roads had been paved. Then power lines erected. Then cell towers. In inhospitable country, everyone tried to make use of the same access points.
“You want to use a train,” he said.
Pate laughed. “Very good! But I don’t want to use just any train. I want to use a coal train. The very one that feeds the plant that feeds those lines. I doubt anyone will appreciate the wit in that, but, nevertheless, I try.”
He leaned forward, holding the gun in his left hand while he pointed with his right.
“There are four reels of aircraft cable hidden in those trees. Stainless-steel cable that will hold at least ten thousand pounds, and there’s several hundred feet of it. Anchor rings are bored into the trunks. The cables need to run from those anchor points up to the towers. They can’t make contact with the tracks themselves; that will trigger an alarm. You will secure them to the towers. Do you follow?”
Jay did. He also knew it wouldn’t work. Pate had underestimated the strength of the towers. They would not come down. The cables would snap long before the towers moved.
Pate said, “Now I’m going to make a confession, Jay. These cables were a contingency, not the prime option. Your original task was to climb up there and install plastic explosives on the insulators. The towers never needed to come down. It was, if I do say so myself, a far superior vision, more sophisticated. But not all things today have gone according to plan. You know how that feels, don’t you? The way you can open the door and find unanticipated trouble? That’s where I am. So we come to the contingency, and to a critical juncture for your bride. This approach with the cables is not one in which I have a high degree of confidence, but for Sabrina to see tomorrow’s sunrise, it will need to work.”
“No,” Jay said. “No, that’s not fair, because it won’t work. I can’t fix that.”
“Not fair? Come on. You’re past issues of fairness. It’s time to think of solutions. Why won’t it work?”
“The towers are too strong. They’re not going to come down.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret. Do you know how that steel is held together?”
“By bolts.”
“Exactly! I was delighted with that discovery. They reminded me of an Erector set I stole when I was a boy. Such clean and classic work. I learned from models, Jay. I still do. But back to the point-these are strong towers because the steel is joined by the bolts. However, when you get closer, you’re going to notice something. Many of those bolts are missing. My goodness, they do not come out easily! But it can be done. And it already has been done.”
Jay’s throat constricted. All of his confidence that the cables would snap and the train would carry on was gone now. Yes, they would snap, but first, they would tug. And if the structures were already primed to tumble…
It might work.
“I don’t travel without a backup plan,” Pate said cheerfully. “So my thought is, if you get high enough, Jay, it’s a different scenario, don’t you think?”
It certainly was.
“You’re going to need to get very high,” Pate said. “Otherwise the leverage won’t be enough, and those towers will stand firm when the train goes by. That was Jason Woodring’s problem. He ran just one cable, and it was too weak, and he only went about twenty-five feet up the tower. Now he sits in prison, and the tower never came down. But if he’d gotten higher and worked with better equipment and more cables? Different story. As I say, it’s worked with my models. Many tests. Simple yet effective.”
Jay saw his brother-in-law’s face again. Tim had been a jovial guy, usually smiling, his eyes always seeming to laugh at a joke that hadn’t been told yet. At the end, though, he’d had no eyes at all.
“If I climb too high, I’ll carry those cables into the flash zone,” he said. “That’s the problem. If I get too high, I’ll die because the air itself is electrified up there.”
“I understand. It’s a dangerous world up there. Why do you think we stopped with the bolts below? It requires a high level of education and skill to maneuver around a half a million volts. That’s where you come in. Others have tried to take these towers down, and they’re all in prison cells. Why? Because they thought like men with boots on the ground. They needed to think like birds. Birds can sit on a live wire and survive. You know who else can do that?” Pate smiled and pointed at him. “You can.”
“I don’t climb anymore,” Jay said. He could remember that smoke rising from Tim’s open mouth, as if a cigarette were burning somewhere inside him. His insides were gone, boiled away by his own blood. That had been on a sixty-nine kV line. A fraction of the power Jay was staring at now.
“That’s going to cause some trouble for Sabrina.”
The highest Jay had made it up a tower after Tim was killed was seventy feet. He’d frozen there, then finally climbed back down while his crew found other places to look, either down at their boots or off into the horizon. Later, there was no ridicule, no taunting. Just soft-spoken, kind remarks, pats on the shoulder, nobody making eye contact. It was only three weeks after Tim’s funeral, and everyone said it was natural, bound to happen, he just needed a little more time. But they all knew he was done, knew it probably before he’d admitted it to himself. Certainly before he’d told Sabrina that he was looking at the foreman’s job in Red Lodge because he didn’t want to put her through the stress of worrying about him.
You coward.
Of all the sins he’d committed in his life, that was the worst. Claiming her as the reason, unable to admit his own weakness, his own terror. She would have let him continue the work for as long as he’d wished. She was stronger than him.
“The options at this point are very few, I’m afraid,” Eli Pate said.
Jay said, “It’s not possible.”
“It’s that sort of thinking that ails the world. I’m not interested in notions of impossibility. You climb or Sabrina dies. Now, as you are well aware, you could climb and die. But she’s not involved then. It’s your choice, Jay. Do you put her life at risk today or not?”
Jay said, “I can do it.” He wasn’t speaking to Pate. He was speaking to himself. And he knew he was lying.
58
It was well into the afternoon before anyone returned to the cabin, and when someone did, it was Violet, and she was alone. She carried the small solar lantern, which cast a dim glow. Sabrina waited for her to begin preparing food or ask if they needed to use the outhouse. Instead, she brought the lantern directly to Lynn and stopped a few feet away from her, staring down.