“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.
60
Putting 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.