“His father. We stayed friendly, which doesn’t happen often, and we kept in touch after I transferred out of Texas. For a while there, Jerod and his sister used to call me Uncle Hal. Go figure, eh?”
“Why not?”
Hal shrugged. “Anyway, the day after Jerod went down, I got a call from his sister, Adlene. She’s a Ranger now herself. Jerod had phoned her to arrange a meeting with a G-man, ultraurgent. Spoke about secession and catastrophe, gave up some names but wouldn’t cover any details on the phone. Jerod had a face-to-face lined up the next morning with sis’s trusted number one guy, but Jerod never made it. Next thing Adlene knows, she’s making an I.D. for the Lubbock County coroner.”
“And then she called you.”
“Right. Not much to offer in the way of evidence, but when I got the gist of it and heard the names...well, something clicked. It’s worth a closer look, I think.”
“How are the parents taking it?” asked Bolan.
“Cancer took the mother, Jeannie, back in ’95. Lou bought it in a single-car collision two years later.”
“Rough,” Bolan said.
“So, anyhow, I said I’d see what I could do. What we could do.”
“Except she thinks that ‘we’ would be the Bureau?”
“Hmm.”
“Why not the Rangers, since she’s one of them?”
“There could be problems with security.”
“The FBI? Homeland Security?”
“Both say the information is too vague, one of the names too prominent. Plus this is Texas. They’re still having nightmares over Waco.”
“When you say ‘too prominent,’ who are we looking at?” Bolan asked.
“Have you heard of L. E. Ridgway?”
“Rings a distant bell,” Bolan said, “but I can’t place him offhand.”
“No great surprise. The ‘L. E.’ stands for Lamar Emerson. He’s the founder, president and CEO of Lone Star Petroleum and Aerospace Technology.”
“That’s not a common merger, is it?”
“Not at all. In fact,” Hal said, “from what I gather, it’s unique. Lamar made his first couple billion from the East Texas Oil Field, pumping crude and natural gas in the fifties. Today he’s got rigs all over the state and offshore. The aerospace deal fell into his lap when NASA started cutting back on some of its programs. He started out making components for their rockets and space shuttles, then got the bright idea of privatizing outer space.”
“Say what?”
“You heard me right,” Hal said. “Lone Star is planning junkets to the moon aboard their own space craft, beginning sometime in the next couple years. They’re catering primarily to governments, with a projected round-trip price tag of one-point-five billion dollars, but private parties who can foot the bill are also welcome.”
“So, if you’re Bill Gates and you want to take the flight of a lifetime, they’ll send you?”
“Just imagine,” Hal said. “The Koch brothers can take off and really look down on us earthlings.”
“Well, it’s odd, I grant you.”
“Here’s the kicker. For as long as he’s been filthy rich, Ridgway has been a top contributor to far-right causes. Started with the Birch Society and veered off toward the fringe from there. Militias, neo-Nazis, Klans, Army of God—”
“The clinic bombers?”
“Yep. With friends like those, you know he has to be pro-life. But lately he’s been concentrating on a home-grown bunch of mixed nuts calling themselves the New Texas Republic.”
“And we’re back to secession,” said Bolan.
“In spades. They started out running maneuvers, getting ready to defend us from some kind of weird Red Dawn scenario, plus armed patrols along the border for illegals. Now they claim the country can’t be saved. It’s too far gone with socialism, communism, fascism, Sharia law—they aren’t exactly scholars, if you get my drift.”
“And Ridgway’s keeping them afloat?”
“In high style,” said Brognola.
“Maybe he could send them to the moon.”
“Funny you’d mention that. About those rockets...”
Bolan felt a chill, although the morning sun was warm.
“In that last call from Jerod to his sister, there was mention of fissile material.”
The stuff that caused chain reactions in nuclear fission. The modern Big Bang.
“And Homeland still won’t touch it?”
“Not until we have a better case,” Brognola said.
“Okay. Let’s hear the rest.”
The rest—or most of it—was in files on a CD Brognola gave to Bolan for more leisurely perusal, while he waited for his flight to Texas. Adlene Granger was expecting him—expecting someone—for a meet in San Antonio at midnight. Why she’d picked the Alamo was anybody’s guess. As good a choice as any, if it worked; as bad as any other, if it didn’t.
At Dulles, Bolan found a corner seat near his departure gate, back to the wall, and used earbuds to keep anyone nearby from eavesdropping. The files, as usual, included still photos, video clips and facsimiles of documents.
First up was a biography of L. E. Ridgway, from his humble roots in Oklahoma through his first East Texas oil strike, the remarkable bad luck that haunted his competitors—fires and explosions, vandalism to their rigs and vehicles, some disappearances—and his advance to the top of the Fortune 500 list.
While his business and his wealth grew, the FBI began to notice his increased financing of far-right extremist groups—all dedicated to the proposition that America was under siege by enemies within; as well as standard adversaries like the Russians, North Koreans and Chinese. Ridgway and his compatriots apparently believed that every U.S. president since Herbert Hoover was a communist, a fascist or some whacky, nonsensical combination of the two.
These extremists hated government, minorities, the very concept of diversity and fumed nonstop about ephemeral conspiracies to persecute white Christian men. As for the ladies, the members thought they should just stay home, cook dinner, tend to the kids—and, if required, help clean the guns.
Not all of the yahoos were just talk, of course. Several groups that Ridgway had supported over time were linked to acts of domestic terrorism. Everybody knew about the Klan’s shenanigans—cross burnings, bombings, drunken drive-by shootings.
But Ridgway had also been connected to a handful of so-called militia groups that had stockpiled illegal weapons, threatened government officials and conspired on various occasions to attack public facilities: federal buildings, natural gas pipelines—never Ridgway’s—and power plants.
One “Aryan” gang wanted to poison a midsized city’s water supply in Arkansas, but state police foiled their plan. None of the indictments from those cases ever touched Ridgway or Lone Star Petroleum, but Ridgway lurked in the background like a fat old spider spinning its web.
The move into privatized aerospace technology had been a break from Ridgway’s normal style. He was literally going where no man had gone before, hiring personnel laid off by NASA, planning to conquer space and turn a tidy profit in the process. With billions to spend, he had acquired a decommissioned space shuttle, set his team to work improving it and pronounced it ready to soar.
Media reports claimed Lone Star Aerospace was near completion of the solid rocket