What he was certain of was the mining company had killed a lot of the men and women who’d been standing in the open at the edge of the lake. The rocks had struck anyone unlucky enough to be in their path. Looking down, he saw about half the people on the ground, and the other half warily crouched or kneeling next to their fallen friends.
“This is a war crime,” Butch said with rising anger. “We have to tell someone.”
Haley pulled out her phone, perhaps hoping to record what she could, but her face said otherwise. “It got wet. I think it’s toast.”
Selfishly, Ezra thought about how he wouldn’t be able to call Grace. A few seconds later, after hearing people cry three floors down, he got his head back in the moment. “We saw it. Those people saw it. We can back them up when it comes time to take those miners to the woodshed.”
“So, what do we do now?” Haley asked.
Without hesitation, Butch replied. “I say we blow up something of theirs. Preferably with a lot of their men standing around. In Iraq—”
Ezra interrupted before he got too far into it. “Right now, we have to get out of here. I wish we could help those people, but look at us. We have nothing. The only thing I can think about right now is getting to Grace. The people we’re dealing with, this TKM outfit, are not people to be trifled with. She warned me not to trust them. Boy was she right. But she’s tangled up with them, too. She’s going to one of the dig sites in Wyoming.”
Butch huffed. “Well, as long as I get to blow up their stuff at some point, I’m still with you, E-Z. You know that.”
“Me too,” Haley added. “I’m with your daughter. I don’t trust anyone working with TKM now.”
He sighed, knowing what he was asking of them. “All right. We’ll go down the steps and slip out the other side of the building. We’ll walk to the west and hope we can find an abandoned vehicle. Without my boat, we’re stuck depending on other transportation.”
The wailing from outside became louder.
“Now. We’ve got to move.” He hunched over and got away from the windows.
The others followed.
He desperately wanted to hear Grace’s voice.
Denver, CO
Each passing hour of the morning brought worse news for Petteri. When he received a call from his Kansas City team, he knew what was coming.
“Yes?” he said into the handset.
“Hello, sir. This is Clay Frontman with the Kansas City recovery team.”
“I know who you are. Tell me the news.”
The man hesitated. “Well, sir, we were attacked by tens of thousands of armed terrorists. They lined both sides of the river for miles around. They tried to send boats after us. We shot back, as you instructed, and I’m sure we put a dent in them, but there were too many.”
“How much of the rock did you get?” The Kansas City operation was one of his favorites. The rock had bounced in from a spot in nearby Kansas, settling into the mud of the Missouri River. Its impact created the lake, which was a stroke of luck as far as he was concerned. No other mining company had the resources to buy up shipping and dredging equipment and mine on the water. He figured they’d get the whole rock before anyone even knew what he was doing. But here he was, listening to another failure.
The man didn’t sound happy. “We got about thirty percent.”
It was more than he’d expected. Secretly, he was pleased at the efforts of the KC team, but he wasn’t going to say it. “And have you made plans for the other seventy percent?”
“That’s just it, sir. We’ve had to abandon it. The people came and tried to take it over.”
He sighed in disgust. It was happening everywhere. The PR efforts and charitable donations had only gone so far. As the nation became fixated on what his company was doing at those dig sites, it was harder to convince them he was doing anything but fleecing them. It was an eventuality he always assumed would arrive. But he’d convinced himself it would take a lot longer.
“Sir, there is, uh, one other thing.”
“Go ahead,” he said flatly.
“Some of the men took it personally when the threat of an attack became apparent. They wanted to show the Kansas City terrorists they would not be chased away without taking a toll on them.”
He wasn’t in the mood. “What did they do?”
“They used up all the mining charges in one big blast. We saw it. The explosion chopped off the top half of the rock and shotgunned it out into the crowds.”
“You killed them?” he said with shock. It wasn’t an act he necessarily disavowed. Deep inside, he was pleased his men took it to heart when the TKM brand was attacked. But in this instance, with all the other pieces of rock in similar degrees of jeopardy, he couldn’t condone the team’s action. Rather than yell or scream, he hung up the phone.
Shooting picked up outside his window.
He got up to take a look.
“This is not going to end well.” While he’d been distracted with other things, the war in the streets of Denver raged on. He admitted, after the fact, the sound of gunfire was a monotonous bore. It was only when he truly listened that he appreciated
